BOSTON — The way some of the media report it, one would believe the Church is overrun with pedophile priests, and bishops are protecting the abusers rather than the victims. No priest is to be trusted alone with children. It's not safe for a kid to go to confession or to become an altar boy.
Several assumptions need to be called into question here. Is the clergy full of pedophiles? Has the Church covered up heinous acts and not done enough to root out the problem? And are celibacy and an all-male priesthood holdovers from the Dark Ages that fan the flames of lust?
Scandal in the Church Part One:The Myths
Next week: Church Actions
To begin with, it took a non-Catholic to point out that the term “pedophile priest” is largely a misnomer when applied to all cases of sexual impropriety. Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, wrote Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis in 1996. Yes, some priests have engaged in pedophilia —-exploitation of children below the age of puberty — but their number is very small. By and large, the scandals have involved sexual relations between priests and adolescents — mostly boys — which suggests that homosexuality is involved in most cases.
After a sex scandal in the early 1990s, the Archdiocese of Chicago opened records of the 2,252 priests who had served there over a period of 40 years. Less than 2% had been accused of sexual misconduct with a minor, and only one was alleged to be a pedophile.
Jenkins said there is no evidence that the rate of pedophilia among Catholic priests is higher than it is among clergy of religions that do not have a rule of celibacy — or in other professions. Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist who founded the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University and has been called on for advice by many denominations dealing with the subject, agrees.
Berlin, a member of Cardinal Bernard Law's Commission for the Protection of Children, pointed out that the problem of pedophilia and child sexual abuse has also plagued the Boy Scouts and Big Brothers organizations. In most abuse cases, the culprit is a close family member or acquaintance, he said.
This suggests that the typical media approach, which starts out describing the abuse of an individual (in this case, ex-priest John Geoghan) and then broadens that to a diocesan and national trend, is either ignorant of the difference between pedophiles and homosexuals, or is deliberately distorting the characterization of the abuse, for ideological reasons.
Secular media with an agenda to discredit the Church tar it by pretending that the abuse is pedophilia rather than homosexuality, which they have less difficulty with. Many Catholic leaders and institutions are still in denial that homosexual seminarians and priests are the problem, so they collude in fudging the issue.
The Register spoke with Philip Jenkins, whose research sheds important light on the scandals.
What do you mean when you say there is no “pedophile priest” crisis in the Catholic Church today? The headlines seem to suggest otherwise.
I think there is indeed a crisis in the sense of the upsurge of attacks on the Church and its clergy, and the enormous pressure to change Church practice, not to mention the loss of confidence among ordinary believers. The Church also faces enormous financial risks.
But what is it about?
It certainly is not about pedophiles, who represent only a tiny minority of priests, perhaps one out of every 2- or 3000. While there are serious problems with abuse and sexual misconduct, they have nothing to do with pedophilia.
I sometimes say that “pedophile priests are neither.” What I mean is that many clergy who offend with minors are not priests — i.e. not Catholic priests — and most offending priests are not pedophiles. I don't want to understate the crisis, the loss of faith caused by the abuse of trust. But let's not use words that are simply inaccurate. But put another way, 97 or 98% of priests are not involved with minors, which makes the issue sound rather different. The glass is 97% full.
What is ephebophilia and why is it the more accurate term?
I tend not to use this word any more, though it has some value. It arises from the idea that most misconduct cases with minors involve young people of 14-18. There is a technical term here, ephebophilia, meaning sexual interest in those around the age of puberty, or older.
It seems silly to me, since in most societies, this is a normal age for marriage, so why can we call it a psychiatric disturbance?
Also, if the word carries no meaning for most people, best not to use it. But the word does carry the important message that most “pedophile” cases involve no such behavior — they involve young people of 16, not 6. The proper word for a man who has sex with a boy of 16 or 17 is homosexuality.
You have written that the numbers of Catholic priests accused are no higher, proportionally, than other denominations and other services professionals. Does that still ring true, even with the latest revelations out of Boston and so many other places?
Always remember that there are a lot of Catholic clergy compared to those of other denominations, and if we are counting cases that go back to the 1960s, any numbers we use have to take account of everyone who was a priest or religious in the United States in the last 40 years or so — what is that, perhaps 200,000 individuals?
If we assume that 2 or 2.5% of clergy are involved with minors — which seems likely — that suggests an offending population around 4-or 5000. That number is well in keeping with all the cases that have come to light in the last 20 years or so.
Don't forget, many of the cases arising now involve acts from the 1970s and before. Also, don't assume that every charge against a priest is automatically justified. Even when the Church settles a case, that does not necessarily involve an admission of guilt. In civil cases, it is often cleverer to cut your losses and settle out of court.
Is the Catholic Church getting an unfair rap in the media because the media fundamentally misunderstand all this?
I think so, both in the exclusive focus on the Catholic side of things, and the exaggeration of what they are supposed to have done (“pedophiles”). I am also shocked by the disingenuous neglect of the legal factors involved in all these cases, and the suggestion that the lawyers representing the victims are always crusaders for truth and justice. A lot are sharks, pure and simple, who shamelessly exploit the media to promote anti-clerical stereotypes.
They are also misusing it to make the issue celibacy, aren't they? This isn't about men who are frustrated because they've taken a vow of chastity, is it?
I would point to the many cases of offending clergy in denominations that allow marriage. If someone produces statistics suggesting a higher offense rate among celibate clergy, I will be happy to accept those figures, to admit defeat, and to change my argument. But I'm still waiting for a worthwhile study on those lines
Why is it then that there are so many homosexuals, it seems, in the priesthood and seminaries?
I do believe that the rate of gay clergy is far higher than in the population at large. Partly, this is because gay subcultures developed during the 1970s, partly because the exodus of other clergy in this time meant that bishops had to accept the situation or be left with no priests. Of course, a man with homosexual tendencies might make a magnificent priest — as I understand it, Catholic teaching asserts that the tendency itself is not sinful.
Do you see this all getting worse before better?
The main danger presently is financial — litigation in the next few years could be disastrously expensive, and it will be hard to find impartial juries in New England especially. Perhaps the only change could come if a flagrantly false accusation was made. This is after all what defused the panic in 1993, when [Chicago] Cardinal [Joseph] Bernardin was wrongly accused.
What would you suggest in terms of solutions for the Catholic bishops in the United States?
Think much harder about presenting the case for the Church and its priests; don't accept media definitions of the crisis; don't be afraid to counterattack. Make it clear that mistakes have been made, victims have been hurt, and huge reparation is owed to them; also that wrongdoers will be purged — but that having said all this, the American Church is not going out of business on this matter.
I would also ask liberal critics of the Church to think very, very seriously about what they are doing — do they really, really want to turn this whole affair into an attack on homosexual men who have sex with teen-agers? What would that idea do to other issues in which gay activism is deeply involved, e.g. concerning gay adoptions, gays in the Scout movement etc? Many gays may dislike the Church hierarchy, but do they really want to see an anti-gay panic stemming from this affair?
How did you come to study sexual issues in the context of religion?
The topic brought together two of my major interests. I have published on the history of sexual abuse and molestation, in books like Moral Panic (1998); and I am interested in bigotry and racist movements in American history [Hoods and Shirts, 1997]. This topic brought the themes together perfectly, since I was able to recognize the power of the visceral anti-Catholic imagery that was pervading coverage of the clergy-abuse issue when it surfaced in the late 1980s.
In your next book you write about global Christianity. In the context of the whole “Catholic world,” how big of a role does the United States and this mess play?
Americans and Europeans often forget what a small proportion of the Catholic world they represent — and that share is declining steadily. Consequently, they ignore the fact that the Vatican has to take account of global matters, and won't jump to the voices coming out of Boston or Chicago. Of course the Vatican is so conservative on social and sexual matters — they have seen the population projections, and they can count! This current crisis might actually reduce U.S. influence in the Catholic world, especially if vocations fall any further. Personally, I note that the American Church was missionary territory until 1908 — I wonder if it might regain that status by 2008 or so?
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online and an associate editor of National Review.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger and Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Holy Week With the Suffering Pope DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Il Papa sofferente. The suffering Pope.
During a Holy Week charged with the compelling image of a determined Pope John Paul II hobbled by pain, John Paul became known simply as the suffering pope.
“Il Papa sofferente” was how he was referred to in newspapers and on television. And while his increasing incapacity did set off a new round of chatter regarding the possibility of a papal resignation, the overwhelming reaction was one of compassion and respect for a man so clearly walking his own way of the cross.
Arthritis in his right knee has made walking and prolonged standing extremely painful for the Holy Father and, combined with an increasing unsteadiness on his feet in recent months, rendered him incapable of presiding over the Holy Week liturgies in his usual way.
Front-page stories in the Italian press on Easter Sunday reported that the Pope would have knee surgery in the near future, though they were unconfirmed by the Vatican press office.
On Palm Sunday, he was unable to join the procession of the palms, even in his popemobile, and while he presided over the blessing of the palms and the Liturgy of the Word, he did not go to the altar for the Liturgy of the Eucharist. He remained kneeling and received Communion with the faithful.
On Holy Thursday, he was not able to ascend the steps to the papal altar, so remained at his chair on the floor, from which he led the Eucharistic Prayer. He was also unable to perform the Washing of the Feet. At the Good Friday Way of the Cross at the Colosseum, he did not follow the procession from station to station, but remained seated in his chair throughout.
It appeared that his days as principal celebrant at Mass might be over, as it seemed impossible for him to get to the altar.
A solution was found, though, for the Easter Vigil. Another altar was built for John Paul on the floor of St. Peter's Basilica, with just one step to mount. He was able to celebrate the three-hour Easter Vigil, presiding over the Blessing of the Fire and the procession of the Paschal Candle from the moving platform which he has used since December 1999.
On Easter Sunday morning, John Paul was able to celebrate Mass in St. Peter's Square, being dropped off and picked up at the altar in the white jeep used for ceremonies in the square. Another innovation was the introduction of a podium brought before the Holy Father when he must stand — he uses it to balance and support himself.
The physical frailty of the Holy Father has elicited sympathy from around the world. Responding to speculation that the Pope might have to use a wheelchair, the Vatican press office reported that he had already received 15 wheelchairs as gifts from the faithful, and over 100 walking canes.
The suffering of the Holy Father was not only physical.
Not Just Physical Pain
On Holy Thursday it was announced the Archbishop of Poznan, Poland, Juliusz Paetz, had resigned after being accused of making repeated homosexual advances to seminarians in his archdiocese. Archbishop Paetz, who announced his resignation at the Chrism Mass in Poznan, continued to maintain his innocence, but his resignation comes after the Holy Father appointed a commission to investigate. While the commission did not report publicly, it is clear that John Paul forced Archbishop Paetz to resign — a particularly painful episode, as Archbishop Paetz worked in the papal household of Paul VI and John Paul in the 1970s and early 1980s.
“We pray for those of our brothers who have abandoned the duties which they assumed at their priestly ordination or who are going through a period of difficulty or crisis,” said John Paul is his own Chrism Mass homily. It is a customary phrase, always included, but it was particularly poignant this year.
The Pope's suffering was most clear at the nighttime Via Crucis celebrated on Good Friday at the Colosseum. One longtime Vatican observer likened the image of the Holy Father, literally bent around the cross at the 14th station, holding it in a shaking right hand, while his left hand balanced himself on a nearby railing, as seeming “like a Michelangelo figure of torment and prayer.”
“One way [that Christ draws all to himself] is human suffering,” said Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household, who, according to tradition, gave the Good Friday homily in St. Peter's. “Once Christ has taken it upon himself and redeemed it, suffering becomes, in its own special way, a universal sacrament of salvation. Universal, because it knows no distinctions, whether between the First and Third World, Northern Hemisphere or Southern; we find suffering at every spot of the globe.”
After the conclusion of the Via Crucis, John Paul addressed the crowd extemporaneously in Italian and Latin, leaving aside his prepared text. Speaking as if leading a meditation, with long pauses, it was one of his most dramatic recent addresses.
“Today the Church sings, Ecce lignum crucis in quo salus mundi pependit. Venite adoramus. Adoramus te, Christe. (Behold the wood of the cross on which hung the Savior of the world. Come let us adore. We adore you, O Christ),” he said. “Per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum … redemisti mundum (By your holy cross you have redeemed the world … you have redeemed the world).”
Redemisti mundum … redemisti mundum. In the long pause in between the repetitions of the key text of Good Friday, the immense crowd was silent, beholding a man deep in prayer, quoting from his memory and his heart the liturgy of Holy Week.
“Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando: dux vitae mortuus, regnat vivus,” he repeated twice, recalling the Sequence sung before the Gospel on Easter Sunday (Death and life have battled in a stupendous combat, The Lord of life is dead; yet living he reigns).
During the week, many commentators and senior prelates were questioned about the future of the pontificate. One cardinal, Jorge Medina, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, said in an interview that he already had John Paul's response.
“Not long ago, someone asked [the Pope] why, in view of his declining health, he continued in his mission, and the Pope responded, ‘Because Jesus did not come down from the cross,’” said Medina.
Plans are still proceeding for papal trips to Bulgaria in May, Toronto, Mexico and Guatemala in July for charity, and Poland in August, though obviously new measures will have to be adopted to facilitate the Pope's movements.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Divine Mercy: God's Gift for the Third Millennium DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:TAMPA, Fla. — Divine mercy has transformed Bryan Thatcher's life.
Ten years ago, with his life in turmoil, the Tampa, Fla., physician underwent a conversion inspired by a quote from the diary of Sister Faustina, the Polish nun who instituted the Divine Mercy devotion in the 1930s following a private revelation. “The greater the misery of a soul, the greater its right to my mercy,” Jesus told Sister Faustina.
Moved to faith by the limitless promise of those words, Thatcher experienced God's divine mercy in his own conversion, in the subsequent healing of his marriage, and again in 1995 when his 15-month-old son, John Paul, was left on the brink of death after a drowning accident.
As Thatcher raced home that night, the words, “I trust in you,” flooded into his mind. He told God that he would give John Paul back to him if that was his will.
Instead, the infant had a complete and almost miraculous recovery in a matter of 36 hours.
“Trusting in Jesus is accepting whatever he gives you,” Thatcher said. “You can't have anxiety and fear and have trust, they're incompatible. So as we walk in the valley every day, we have to keep dying to self and trusting in God. The Lord told Sister Faustina, Mankind will not have peace until it turns to my mercy, we're all so broken and I think the healing will come with greater understanding of the divine mercy.”
In 1996, Thatcher dedicated his life to helping others in need to learn of God's mercy. He left his practice and started the Eucharistic Apostles of Divine Mercy in 1996, a ministry devoted to spreading Sister Faustina's message and to promoting the great gift of the Eucharist. Eucharistic Apostles travel around the country and help start Divine Mercy cenacles, small prayer groups that focus on the divine mercy as a way of life, not just another devotion.
“We're obviously living in a time of great turmoil. People are carrying so much hatred and anger, and then there's the inner turmoil within the Church itself,” said Thatcher. “Our whole thing is helping lay people let the Divine Mercy transform their hearts so that they can better be Jesus in the home and in the workplace. You have to take it from the brain and bring it down to the heart.”
Pilgrims
Sister Faustina, to whom the Divine Mercy devotion was revealed to in the 1930s, is quickly becoming known as “the saint for the third millennium.” She was canonized in April 2000 as St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, and the Second Sunday of Easter was designated later that year as Divine Mercy Sunday.
On this year's feast day on April 7, approximately 17,000 pilgrims were expected at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass. As in churches all over the world, the Stockbridge pilgrims celebrate the feast with Mass, confession, exposition and adoration, and recitation of the Chaplet of Mercy.
Father Dan Papineau, rector of the national shrine, said the message of Divine Mercy is particularly important at a time when peace is threatened. He cited the reading for April 7 in the Order of Prayer booklet for priests that listing the offices and feasts for the liturgical year. “Throughout the world, the second Sunday of Easter will receive the name Divine Mercy Sunday, a perennial invitation to the Christian world to face with confidence in divine benevolence the difficulties and trials that humankind will experience in the years to come,” the booklet states.
Said Father Papineau, “There is a sense of preparation in that statement so I believe that God is aware of the difficulty of the times that we're living in. He put in place this beautiful feast to celebrate the wonders of his mercy, to implore for the world that we'll focus on his compassion and desire to heal us individually and corporately.”
The sacraments of mercy — Eucharist and reconciliation — are at the heart of the feast, he continued. Jesus promised Sister Faustina that on the feast day, the soul that goes to confession and receives holy Communion will obtain complete forgiveness of sins and punishment. “Now that's quite a statement,” said Father Papineau. “The Lord doesn't make it very complicated for us.”
Father Papineau explained that the sacraments heal, purify and provide wisdom about how to serve God's people. “To bring the face of Christ into the world, we must first receive the heart of Christ through the outpouring of his mercy,” he said. “The world needs to be healed, the Church needs to be healed, and we need to be healed. It all begins with recourse to God's mercy.”
The Jewel of Mercy
“I treasure this devotion like a timely, precious and powerful jewel,” said Purisima Narvaez of Glendale, Calif. “If you look at the world, it is being engulfed by violence, hatred and greed. Even in our own families there is so much resentment, and so much pressure on young people from the media, the pornography, the Internet. [The devotion] is God's gift for our era.”
The Philippine native said it transformed her life and her 30-year marriage to her husband, Dario. Praying the Chaplet of Mercy has built up her trust in Jesus and brought her closer to the sacraments. And today, she and Dario are more closely united in their values and in the practice of daily Mass, prayer and Scripture reading.
“The Catholic Church is calling us to center our lives on the Eucharist, and nothing could bring us more centering than the Divine Mercy,” said Narvaez.
After pondering the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the recent rise of Islamic terrorism in her native Philippines, Narvaez believes that God is allowing the struggles to happen in order to manifest his glory.
Said Narvaez, “God is calling our attention to run to his mercy — and not to delay.”
Barb Ernster writes from
Fridley, Minnesota.
How to Pray the Chaplet
The Chaplet of the Divine Mercy is said on regular rosary beads. It is prayed in the following order.
1. Our Father
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.
2. Hail Mary
Hail Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
3. Apostle's Creed
I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.
4. On large bead before each decade
Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of your dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the world.
5. Once on each of the 10 small beads
For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
6. Concluding doxology
After five decades repeat three times:
Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and the whole world.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barb Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: From Bob Jones Grad to Oxford Don DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:He and his family converted to the Catholic faith in 1995.
A Bob Jones University graduate and former evangelical Protestant, Dwight Longenecker grew up in the United States before moving to England to be ordained into the Anglican ministry. He currently lives in England and is the district organizer for the St. Barnabas Society — which helps Protestant ministers considering conversion to Catechism. He is the author of a book of British conversion stories called The Path to Rome, a commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict for parents, Listen My Son, and Challenging Catholics. He spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake about his recent book.
Tell me a bit about your background.
Our ancestry was Mennonite. The first American Longeneckers were a couple of Swiss brothers who came to Pennsylvania for religious freedom. My grandfather left the Mennonite church and we were brought up in an independent Bible church.
There were five of us kids. Dad owned a men's clothing store and was a deacon at the church. Like many Evangelicals we were in church twice on Sundays and on Wednesday nights for Prayer Meeting. Our home life was devout, prayerful and spiritual in a quiet way. I don't remember our family being particularly anti-Catholic, but if pushed we probably would have said that Catholics needed to “get saved.”
How does a Bob Jones graduate become a Catholic?
We went to Bob Jones because my Dad and Mother both attended. My grandfather was on the board of directors so it was sort of assumed that's where we would attend. If our own family faith in Pennsylvania was quiet and devout, Bob Jones was the noisiest sort of hellfire and brimstone Southern Protestant religion.
I remember it as an oppressive, angry and suspicious place. But in saying that, of course there were some good and kind Christian people there. While I was there I was introduced to the Anglican church through a kind and eccentric music professor. In the town of Greenville I also met a very holy Catholic woman who took an interest in my spiritual progress and me. My interest in the Anglican church was part of a deeper desire to be part of the ancient Church — the Church that stretched back to the Apostles. This is eventually what led me “home to Rome.”
What took you to England?
I had a serious case of that disease known as Anglophilia or the love of England. I had been reading C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot and the major English writers. I had visited England a couple of times and I fell in love with the English countryside as well as the reserved and wry English people.
After I left Bob Jones I knew I wanted to study theology and thought it would be great to do so in England. So I wrote to the evangelical Anglican theologian J.I. Packer and asked if he could recommend any seminaries. He recommended a couple and I applied. I was thrilled when I was accepted to study theology at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. For a C.S. Lewis fan to be able to study at Oxford for three years was a dream come true.
Once I was there I met a Church of England bishop who sponsored me for ordination and so I was ordained and settled in England. I finally wound up as a country parson looking after two ancient churches on the Isle of Wight — a little island just off the south coast of England. While I was there I struggled with the call to become a Catholic and eventually made the step.
Your first book was about Catholic converts. In the United States there appears to be an increase among ordained clergy converting. Do you find the same to be true in England? Why do you think that is?
Here in Britain we are usually five or 10 years behind the trends in the U.S.A. We see signs of the same wave of evangelical converts, but at the moment it is just a trickle. I believe there are two reasons for this surge of baby boomer conversions.
The first is education. Generally speaking we belong to a generation who have been better educated than our parents and grandparents. It's difficult to hold on to the extreme forms of Protestant fundamentalism as you learn more about the Church, culture, history and theology. As a result many of us have migrated towards the mainstream Protestant churches with a liturgical tradition.
That brings me to the second reason. Once we get there we find these churches are too liberal and wishywashy. We are looking for what C.S. Lewis termed “mere Christianity” but we don't find it in the main-stream Protestant churches. We therefore start looking for the only historical, liturgical, apostolic Church which still teaches the old time religion and Christian morals — and that is the Catholic Church. I believe this trend is going to continue and grow, and that it is a real Spirit-led movement that fulfills both our ecumenical desires and our longing for the Catholic Church to be renewed from within.
Your most recent book consists of a dialogue between yourself and an evangelical Anglican. Where do the two have the most glaring differences?
Challenging Catholics is an unusual book. My co-author, John Martin, is an Anglican evangelical. As I came to England 20 years ago from an evangelical background in the U.S.A., John came to England about the same time from a very similar background in Australia.
As a result we both speak with the bluntness of colonial types, but we also speak with a British reserve and politeness that we've picked up from living here. I feel much of the apologetic work in the U.S.A. tends to be confrontational and aggressive. “Challenging Catholics” takes a different tone. Despite this, the sparks do fly between us. There are the most fireworks in our chapters on the papacy and the Virgin Mary.
And where do evangelical Protestants and Catholics agree?
I can't speak for all Catholics and evangelicals, but John and I agreed pretty much on the question of justification. We also agreed a lot on the relationship between Scripture and the Church and on the role of the saints. But John is an Anglican evangelical. He's already far more sympathetic to the Catholic Church than the more extreme varieties of evangelical.
In other areas there have been some real strides forward between evangelicals and Catholics. Father Richard Neuhaus and Chuck Colson have launched an initiative called “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” This group has issued a couple of documents outlining how evangelicals and Catholics can work together in the social arena and in mission. They also discuss the areas of agreement theologically. I think its true that there is more that unites us than divides. We need to focus on where we agree, and then continue to discuss where we disagree.
What do you have planned next?
I have two books coming out this year. “St. Benedict and St. Thérèse — The Little Rule and the Little Way” is launched this month. In autumn my book “More Christianity” will be published. This is a book that takes people one step further from “Mere Christianity” to the fullness of the Catholic faith.
I've just started another dialogue book. This one is being written with an old Bob Jones friend and is about the Virgin Mary. Imagine — two Bob Jones graduates writing a book about Our Lady!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dwight Longenecker ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Boston Catholic Charities Director Accused of Abortion Ties DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:BOSTON — The director of counseling at Catholic Charities here spends his Saturdays making sure young women get inside a Planned Parenthood clinic where abortions are performed, pro-life activists charge.
Howard M. Brown has been a volunteer escort at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Boston for 10 years, first at the Brookline facility and, since 1997, at a new clinic in the Allston section of Boston, the activists say. Brown previously served at clinics in Washington, D.C., and upstate New York.
Officials at Catholic Charities have not denied that their director of counseling is escorting women into the Planned Parenthood facility. But one pro-life activist said he went to Catholic Charities' Dorchester office to see for himself.
“Without a doubt, he's the same man,” said Bob Mayo, who accompanied a reporter from Massachusetts News, the newspaper that first reported on the situation Feb. 20.
Mayo has seen Brown at the Allston clinic, near Boston University, for several years and said he is a supervisor for escorts. He said that about a year ago, a sidewalk counselor overheard Brown say his name and a month ago he told someone he worked for Catholic Charities.
Brown came into the waiting room at Catholic Charities Dorchester office as Mayo and Ed Oliver, the Massachusetts News reporter, were seated there. “He refused to speak with us,” Mayo said. “He showed us the door. A couple of co-workers came over. One was very intimidating and asked us to leave.”
Mayo said he saw Brown at the abortion clinic the next day, wearing his blue “Planned Parenthood Escort” vest and the radio headset he uses to communicate with security personnel inside. About 30 people escort at the clinic, he said, trying to block pro-life signs from the view of clients and cover cameras being used by pro-lifers.
Aggressive Escort
Sheryl Fitzpatrick, who has been doing sidewalk counseling with abortion-bound women for 10 years, said Brown interfered with her last July when she was already being attacked by another clinic escort as she tried to persuade a client to save her baby.
Fitzpatrick said that as she approached the woman's truck, the escort, Toby Daly-Engel, grabbed her umbrella and pushed her away.
“I put my hand up to her in response,” Fitzpatrick said, “and told her to keep her hands off me, and when I put my hand up in a defensive motion I made contact with her body. She claimed I ran up to the truck and just punched her in the back.”
Brown then came over, pushed her and grabbed her umbrella, Fitzpatrick said.
Daly-Engel filed a formal complaint that Fitzpatrick punched her, and the pro-life woman was charged with assault and battery. When she learned that Brown was to testify against her she began to do some research. She found an old notice on Catholic Charities' Web site that a Howard Brown had been appointed director of counseling at the Greater Boston Community Service Center in Dorchester.
In a letter Jan. 3 to Joseph Doolin, president of Boston's Catholic Charities, Fitzpatrick asked if his employee was the same man as the clinic escort. She sent along photographs of Brown taken at the clinic. Doolin did not respond to the letter.
At Fitzpatrick's trial, which took place Jan. 23, Brown on cross-examination refused to answer questions about his occupation. That heightened suspicions among pro-lifers in the courtroom.
Fitzpatrick was found not guilty, in part because a videotape of part of the incident, recorded by a friend, disputed the escorts' testimony.
Disheartening
The case is disheartening to pro-life advocates in Boston who are already demoralized by the priestly sexual abuse scandal.
William Cotter, president of Operation Rescue Boston, noted that in the wake of that scandal, the arch diocese has instituted a “zero tolerance policy” requiring priests who have been alleged to have engaged in misdeeds 30 or 40 years ago to go on administrative leave until the allegations are resolved.
“According to Church teaching, children who are unborn have the same rights as children who are born,” said Cotter. “Here's a man [Brown] who is helping in the process of abortion — now, not 30 or 40 years ago.”
Calls to the Archdiocese of Boston and its Respect Life Office seeking comment were unanswered or referred to Catholic Charities.
Father Bryan Hehir, president of Catholic Charities USA, declined to comment on the Brown case because of insufficient knowledge. “I'm sure Boston is handling it,” he said. “I'd support Boston in implementation of its policies. They're very well known and effective.”
Calls to Doolin seeking comment were unanswered, but Boston Catholic Charities issued a statement saying it respects employees' “confidentiality and right to privacy.” It did not deny that Brown works for Planned Parenthood.
Although the statement said that employees “acknowledge, upon hiring, their requirement to adhere to ethical guidelines which are based on Catholic social teaching,” a spokes-woman, Maureen March, said that a list to which the agency refers employees “basically speaks to work hours.”
“Employees of Catholic Charities are hired on the basis of their skills and relevant experience and evaluated based on their job performance,” the statement continued. “Because Catholic Charities adheres to non-discriminatory hiring practices as required by law or any corporation, we do not discriminate based on age, race, sexual orientation or religion.”
Father Hehir, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and former head of Harvard Divinity School, said that Catholic Charities is “working in a complicated social setting where we're trying to implement Catholic social teaching and its wider moral teaching, which includes absolute opposition to abortion.” He said that the organization is putting “a lot of effort” into the question of its Catholic identity. “We're trying to constantly stress what it means to uphold Catholic social teaching as tied to moral teaching.”
When employees act in ways that contradict Church teachings, “you have to deal with it in the context of the Church's moral teaching, the Church's own institutional policy, and civil law,” Father Hehir said.
“The problem may be that Catholic Charities gets the bulk of its funding from the government,” said Terrence Scanlon, president of the Capital Research Center, which studies nonprofit organizations. “When they do, they probably have to abide by local laws, and that's what hurts faith-based charities. I hope Father Hehir exercises some leadership and steps in and discusses it with the Boston hierarchy.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Protestants Finding Benefits of ‘Confession’
Confessing faults to God each day makes it hard for “comfortable sins” such as jealousy, gossip and anger to take hold and become habits, said Becky Tirabassi, author of Change Your Life, a Christian self-help book. That sounds like Catholic advice to practice frequent confession, even for venial sins.
In an article chronicling Protestants discovering confession, the Morning News described a Methodist woman on a visit to a large Catholic church. She was so impressed with a very distraught man who asked where he could go to confession that she wondered what her own church offered to those burdened with sin.
But the article focuses on the human benefits of confession and only hints at its real, higher purpose — forgiveness of sins by God and reconciliation of a soul to him.
Racketeering Law Used Against Bishops in Abuse Suit
RICO was written to combat the Mafia, but it contains a provision for civil cases when someone is harmed by a “pattern” of illegal activity, Anderson said. While the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests welcomed its use, Catholic League president William Donohue called it “the wrong remedy for an admittedly outrageous crime.”
“To sue the three dioceses where O'Connell worked is wrong,” Donohue said. “The men and women who work there should not pay for the sins of their former priest.”
Virginia Woman Fights Schools' Homosexual Agenda
AGAPE PRESS, March 24 — While the Church is being accused of harboring abusers, some activists are encountering obstacles to their efforts to protect children from moral corruption in schools, the Christian news service reported.
A bill introduced in the Virginia legislature to prevent public school presentations, classroom discussions and delivery of information regarding homosexuality and other “crimes against nature” stalled in the Senate's Education Committee. Virginia law considers homosexual acts crimes against nature.
But Linda Wall, a former lesbian who has been lobbying in her home state on family issues, vowed to work for the bill's passage next year. She and colleagues are gathering evidence to show a need for the bill and said she has already heard about cases where children, without parental consent, were introduced to homosexuality as a normal and acceptable lifestyle, the Christian news agency said.
In one case, a 16-year-old girl who was questioning her sexual identity was referred by her school counselor to the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays organization.
Wall said there are at least eight other state bills that constitute attacks on the traditional family, including one that would give same-sex partners health insurance benefits.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Parents Control Sex Education, Vancouver Archdiocese Affirms DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Controversy here surrounding the introduction of new sexuality education resources for Catholic children has been nipped in the bud. One parent says the credit goes to the archdiocese for recognizing parents' primary role in their children's education.
The solution came in part from a Vatican document on human sexuality that recognizes the involvement of parents as “part of the universal call to holiness,” said Kathleen Higgins, a mother of seven.
Meanwhile, thank you letters have begun flowing in for Archbishop Adam Exner of Vancouver, and Higgins said she knows of many more parents planning to express their appreciation for his support of them and the 1995 Vatican document, “The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality.”
“Truth and Meaning” outlines how the biological aspects of sexuality are to be presented to students at the elementary level, so when Catholic parents became concerned that explicit sex education programs were to be introduced to their children, they turned to the Pontifical Council for the Family document to keep such material out of the classroom.
By the time the controversy was over, however, Archbishop Exner was quoting the same document and stressing that the archdiocese did not intend for explicit sexual teaching to be taught in its schools.
Archbishop Exner said misunderstanding has surrounded the issue. In a letter to pastors, principals and catechists, he said he received a “great number of letters” about the proposed use of resources in the archdiocese. As a result of parents' concerns, Archbishop Exner reiterated that the right of “parents as the first educators is recognized and affirmed.”
Many parents, and some pastors, had been alarmed over reports that the controversial Fully Alive program was going to be introduced at the elementary level for all Catholic school and catechism students.
They were similarly concerned about Growing in Love, a new program that contains explicit references to sexual activity in parent resource books.
But Archbishop Exner said he only wanted the materials to be used as suggested resource materials, not to be mandated for elementary school use. What's more, any explicit content was to be restricted to parental use.
Now, he assures parents, they won't even be recommended as resource materials.
A pro-life news service distributed a report March 25 suggesting that the archdiocese had been planning to require the use of Fully Alive and Growing in Love for all Catholic classrooms and catechism students.
Lifesite News said the archdiocesan Office of Religious Education had “rebuffed parents' requests” for a meeting and that parents objecting to the programs had then petitioned priests and the archbishop. Several priests were believed to have been upset at what they thought the archdiocese was doing.
In actuality, the original proposal had consisted of two options: the use of Fully Alive, with the controversial elements taught by parents in the home; or the use of Growing in Love, in which biological aspects of sexuality education were available only in the resource book used by parents.
Under the new policy, the archdiocese will not recommend specific resource materials for sexual education. Because “it appears impossible to find a resource acceptable to all parents,” said the archbishop, parents and pastors will be free to find and recommend resource materials on their own.
The archbishop's vicar for education, Msgr. Stephen Jensen, said that the Archdiocese of Vancouver's position “has always been, and remains, in keeping with the 1995 Vatican document, Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality, that the more intimate, biological aspects of sexuality education should always be taught by parents to their children in the home.”
He said the arch-diocese's guidelines for sexuality and education, introduced in 1999, summarize the Church's moral theology and lay down principles for how the archdiocese should promote education in this area, especially “by supporting parents and offering supplementary help.”
Controversial Material
A handful of parishes have been using Fully Alive on a pilot basis with the controversial material taught at home. Msgr. Jensen said despite that modification, many in the archdiocese felt the use of those materials, which predate Rome's 1995 directives, was not in conformity with the Vatican guidelines. Explicit material, for example, remained in the children's texts.
After Office of Religious Education director Chuck Luttrell began investigating other programs, the archdiocese concluded that Growing in Love could be adapted, since its format allowed it to be used in a number of ways, including instruction given solely by parents at home.
The archdiocese decided to approve the two programs as resource materials, in each case with parents teaching the biology.
But under the revised policy, the only sexuality education material in mandated use will be Love and Life, a program for Grade 7 students that has been used in the archdiocese for the past 15 years. Parents who don't want their children to use Love and Life will continue to have the right to opt out.
Msgr. Jensen said it's unfortunate that parents “assumed there would be no choice,” which was not the case, he said.
Parent Kathleen Higgins said the discussion remained constructive and congenial throughout. “It wasn't a fight,” she stressed. “I think it was a joint effort of people working together to study and follow the Church's recent teaching in this important area.”
Her children range from kindergarten to university age, and she is particularly pleased that the revised policy calls for every parish to hold two evening meetings dedicated to helping to assist parents in giving sexuality education to their own children.
Higgins said she knows “a lot of parents who are really looking forward to the evening sessions when they'll have a chance to brainstorm with each other,” something explicitly recommended in “Truth and Sexuality.” She said many younger parents could benefit from the experience of older couples.
‘Imperative’
In his letter to parents, Archbishop Exner reaffirmed his commitment to helping them carry out their responsibility to teach their children. Said the archbishop, “Good sexuality education is all the more imperative in our present-day world in which all, including our children, are constantly bombarded with glamorized sexual attitudes, behaviors, standards and lifestyles that are completely immoral and destructive of genuine humanity.”
Added Archbishop Exner, “More than ever, good sexuality education is needed today. The survival of true humanity depends on it. We cannot afford to be found wanting.”
Paul Schratz is editor of
The B.C. Catholic.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Schratz ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: New Roman Missal Means Mass Changes DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Added Eucharistic Prayers, Recent Saints, New Creed Options and More
VATICAN CITY — The Church's most important liturgical book just got an update, meaning that Catholics will notice a few changes at Mass.
After 10 years of preparation — including almost two full years at the printer alone — the third typical edition of the Missale Romanum was shipped around the world on March 22. The Roman Missal is the Church's official liturgical book for the celebration of Mass, containing all the prayers for Mass as well as the rules regulating how the Mass is to be celebrated.
“It is not a surprise that throughout history various popes have taken particular care in the publishing of different editions of the Missale Romanum,” said Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, which is responsible for liturgical matters. “Their concern to safeguard the fidelity, the accuracy and the nobility of the liturgical language used is an evident sign of the special importance which the Eucharist holds in the life of the Church.”
The third edition of the Missal is the first since 1975 and introduces some changes in how Mass is to be celebrated (see sidebar), as well adding new prayers and feast days of some saints canonized in the past quarter century.
Part of the reason for the delay in printing was the substantial addition of more musical notation to the missal, encouraging the priest to chant the more solemn parts of the Mass. Weighing in at a hefty 1,318 pages, the missal is expected to be the norm for the celebration of Mass for several decades.
A “typical edition” means the standard and authoritative edition, published in Latin, from which all translations have to be made (see side-bar). The release of the missal — which was officially approved by Pope John Paul in April 2000 and promulgated on Holy Thursday of the same year — means that it is now the official book for all Masses in the official language of the Church, Latin.
Creed Changes
The new missal introduces some changes immediately in Latin that will eventually be seen throughout the Church as translations are prepared. Perhaps most notable to American Catholics will be the option of using the Apostles' Creed instead of the Nicene Creed for Masses during the Lent and Easter seasons.
“The possibility of choosing this formula of the profession of faith introduces into the missal a venerable Western Creed … [which] recovers a genuine Roman tradition,” said Archbishop Francesco Tamburrino, Cardinal Medina's deputy.
In the missal itself, the Apostles' Creed is referred to as the “baptismal creed of the Roman Church,” which indicates that is suited for Lent and Easter, the seasons in which catechu-mens are prepared for baptism and welcomed into the Church.
Another Lenten novelty is the optional “prayers over the people” for each day in Lent, to be said before the dismissal as the conclusion of Mass. The prayers themselves are taken from various ancient missals.
Priests who use the new missal will also be surprised to see 10 Eucharistic Prayers. The four usual prayers are included, along with two for Masses in which reconciliation is a principal theme, as well as four other Eucharistic Prayers for various needs and intentions. All were approved for use many years ago, but are collected in one place for the first time. Vatican officials stress that the preferred option for Sunday Mass remains Eucharistic Prayer I or III.
Feast Days Ranked
The new missal also modifies the universal calendar of the Church — the list of feast days that, depending on their rank, must be or can be celebrated throughout the entire Church. The vast majority of canonized saints are not in the universal calendar, yet the more important are included for universal commemoration.
With this edition, 11 new optional feast days were introduced, and none eliminated. Among them are the Holy Name of Jesus (Jan. 3) and the Holy Name of Mary (Sept. 12), older feasts that were eliminated after the Second Vatican Council and are now back. The Blessed Virgin Mary is now honored in the calendar under the TITLE of Our Lady of Fatima (May 13) — putting Fatima on par with Lourdes and Mount Carmel. Other saints added to the universal calendar include the Sudanese ex-slave Josephine Bakhita (Feb. 8), the Mexican martyrs (May 21), the Italian nun Rita of Cascia (May 22), the China martyrs (July 9), Sarbelus Makhluf (July 24), and the German philosopher and convert from Judaism, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, known as Edith Stein (Aug. 9).
The missal also includes saints who have been added since the 1975 missal but have appeared only in special appendices. They include well-known saints such Adalbert, Louis de Montfort, Lorenzo Ruiz, Maximillian Kolbe and the martyrs of Korea and Vietnam.
St. Faustina Kowalska was not inserted into the universal calendar, but her influence is there. The Mass for the Second Sunday of Easter (this year celebrated April 7) is now officially listed with the alternative TITLE, Divine Mercy Sunday, and a new votive Mass has been introduced TITLEd “On the Mercy of God.”
Votive Masses can be celebrated on days with no assigned feast day, in honor of a particular saint or aspect of the mystery of redemption — for example, there have long been votive Masses in honor of the Holy Cross, the Precious Blood, the Sacred Heart, the angels, and the principal saints, including St. Joseph and Sts. Peter and Paul. The new Missal includes a more ample collection of Marian votive Masses, honoring the Blessed Virgin Mary under various TITLEs.
Illustrations Chosen
The illustrations chosen for the new missal add another Marian touch, as they are adaptations of the acclaimed mosaics in the new Redemptoris Mater Chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the site of the papal spiritual exercises. The illustrations are not entirely successful at capturing the vivid imagery of the chapel, and have met with mixed reviews, being likened by one longtime Vatican journalist to “bad computer clip-art.”
“The first thing the Holy Father said when he saw the missal was that the illustrations were very modern,” said Cardinal Medina, who insisted that the Pope intended it as a compliment.
When to Stand, When to Kneel, When to Genuflect, Ministers
With the release of the third edition of the Missal, the new regulations contained in the “General Instruction” — which is part of the Missal — come into effect immediately, even before an official English translation is approved. An unofficial translation was released 18 months ago to help priests prepare for the changes, which include:
v Priest facing people. A clarification that the desirable manner of celebrating Mass is facing the people, as is the common practice today. The priest is not, however, forbidden from celebrating Mass “facing east,” which involves him having his back to the congregation.
v Tabernacle placement. A clarification that the decision on the placement of the tabernacle is to be left to the diocesan bishop, with both options given equal weight: The tabernacle in the sanctuary or in a separate, but conspicuous, chapel. The previous edition of the Missal was often understood to favor a separate chapel. The tabernacle is not, the new instruction makes clear, to be on the same altar where Mass is offered.
v Eucharistic ministers. Stricter rules about the use of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist which maintain clearer distinctions between priests and the laity. Extraordinary ministers are not to participate in breaking the consecrated Hosts, nor administer Communion to themselves. They are always to receive Communion from another, and are to receive the ciborium itself from the priest or deacon. It is now forbidden for extraordinary ministers — unless they are formally instituted as colytes — to purify the vessels after Communion.
v Processional books. The Book of the Gospels may be carried in procession, but never the Lectionary, which contains the first and second readings. The Book of the Gospels should not be carried out in the recessional.
v Genuflection. When entering and leaving the sanctuary at the beginning and end of Mass, the priest and other ministers should genuflect to the tabernacle, but not during Mass itself.
v Realistic crucifixes. The processional cross, as well as other crosses near the altar, should have the figure of Christ crucified — simple crosses or stylized images are now prohibited.
v Priest at sign of peace. The priest should not leave the sanctuary during the sign of peace.
v Hymns. Other hymns may not be substituted for the parts of the Mass, such as the Gloria, Sanctus or Angus Dei.
v Silence in Church. Silence is encouraged to foster a meditative spirit, especially silent recollection before Mass begins, and moments of silence after the readings and after the homily.
v Kneeling at consecration. Kneeling is expected at the consecration, though in the United States, the bishops have already indicated that they will maintain the tradition of the congregation kneeling for the entire Eucharistic Prayer.
— Raymond J. de Souza
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: English Translations Controversy Will Mass in America Change? English Translations Controversy DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:The publication of the new missal, even after 10 years of work, is just the beginning. While it can be used immediately for celebration of Mass languages until official translations are prepared and approved by the national bishops' conferences and the Holy See.
Last year, the Congregation for Divine Worship published a new instruction on the principles for translation, Liturgiam Authenticam (Authentic Liturgy). The new instruction calls for greater fidelity to the original Latin texts, and prohibits the creation of new prayers by translation bodies.
Cardinal Medina raised the possibility of different countries adopting different translations of the missal in English, observing that there were five different Spanish translations approved for use.
“The English-speaking countries are accustomed to having only one translation,” said Medina. “But this is not the only model. The congregation is ready to approve different translations, should one country wish to submit a different translation.”
Since the Second Vatican Council, English translations have been prepared by the International Commission for English in the Liturgy (ICEL), a group that has been severely criticized by Cardinal Medina for taking too creative an approach in rendering the Latin into English.
While the procedures for the translation of the new Missal have not yet been set, if Medina is encouraging different translations of the Missal into English, it would severely reduce, if not eliminate, ICEL's role.
— Raymond J. de Souza
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Rome and Lefebvrists Still Not Reconciled
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 22 — A Vatican cardinal said that the Mass is still a point of contention with followers of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and that reconciliation does not appear to be coming any time soon, the wire service reported.
Although Rome has been holding talks with the Society of St. Pius X, which Archbishop Lefebvre founded, a similar traditionalist group in Brazil was reconciled with Rome recently, the Mass of Paul VI is still keeping Lefebvrists in a state of schism. “The most rigid of Lefebvre's followers contend that a Mass celebrated with the missal now in use in the Church is a sacrilegious and invalid rite,” said Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments. “And frankly this seems a bit too much … you'd have to ask if it is possible that the Holy Spirit has abandoned the whole Church.”
‘Pope John Paul Urges Right to Die’
In fact, the Vatican radio broadcast, a transcript of which was published by British Broadcasting Corp., related Pope John Paul II's advice that doctors help people accept death when a cure is impossible.
In today's atmosphere, when the “right to die” is taken to mean a right to assisted suicide, BBC headline writers should be more careful.
The Pope said there are limits that man and technology cannot overcome, and in those cases it is necessary to accept with serenity one's human condition.
Taiwanese Official Extends Invitation to Pope
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 24 — A papal visit to Taiwan could highlight the island nation as a “lighthouse of hope” to Catholics in mainland China, said Annette Lu, vice president of the Republic of China.
Lu invited Pope John Paul II to visit Taiwan on his way to the World Meeting of Families in the Philippines next January. She presented the idea to Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican's foreign minister, on a stopover in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Journalist Struggled to Write for Pope's Stations of the Cross DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Marie Czernin, 29, correspondent of the German Catholic periodical Die Tagespost , is one of 14 journalists who wrote the meditations for one of the most moving events of Holy Week in Rome.
Here, Marie Czernin tells Zenit how she received the proposal and how she wrote the meditation for the 14th Station.
How did you learn that you had been chosen to write the Via Crucis for the Pope?
It was a total surprise. We were called to the Vatican Press Office to be told that we had an appointment with Bishop Piero Marini, master of papal celebrations, who wished to speak with us.
Given the private and totally extraordinary nature of the call, we thought he would talk to us about something very important, such as the Pope's health. However, Bishop Marini explained to us that this year the Pope had chosen journalists [to write the meditations]. Alexej Bukalov, correspondent of Itar-Tass, spoke spontaneously to express our gratitude and to acknowledge that it was a great honor for us.
Then you returned home with one question: “And now, what should I write?”
Yes, it was really difficult to concentrate, especially in a city like Rome, full of noise, where it is impossible to find a minute of silence. The life of a journalist is very frenetic and I thought I would not be able to find the silence to write a meditation.
I did not want it to be something that came simply from my reflection, but that it be inspired by prayer, by the Holy Spirit. We were supposed to hand in the text on Monday, Feb. 25, and the week before I had still not written a thing.
That week, the Pope was in Spiritual Exercises and for us, journalists, it was calmer. I went on retreat for three days to Umbria, to Gubbio where St. Francis tamed the wolf, the most remote place in the world. I go there when I need peace and silence, to the convent of the Sisters of Bethlehem and of the Assumption of the Virgin, a new monastic community that arose in France.
They know me well and when I go, they give me a cell. I told the nuns what I had to do, and they supported me intensely with prayer. They gave me some texts on the topic that might inspire my meditation.
Why did you choose the 14th Station, “Jesus is placed in the sepulcher”?
In part, it was accidental. Bishop Marini suggested that the women journalists choose stations where women appear. The other women journalists chose those more directly related [to women]. I would have chosen Veronica's, but it was not among the 14 Stations. As no one was choosing the last one, I decided to choose it. But Bishop Marini told me that women are extremely present in that station: Mary and the other women help to place Jesus' body in the sepulcher.
I then realized that in reality, ever since I was little, Holy Saturday has always fascinated me. It is a day that is suspended between life and death, between death and resurrection — a day of silence. Little by little I kept remembering Easter in my home, a very special day. In Byzantine spirituality, the cross never appears alone, but always projected toward the resurrection, the glorious cross.
However, all that had to be put on paper.
The first day of retreat that I dedicated to the Via Crucis in Gubbio was a Friday, I was sick, and very tired. I read the texts the nuns had given me but I was falling asleep. The sisters were afraid that I might not be able to do anything, as I had to hand the text in on Monday.
On Saturday the situation did not improve. One of the sisters asked me how I was doing. I answered that I was still “going up to Calvary.” Then we began to invoke the Holy Spirit. In fact, I did the whole Via Crucis, so as not to remain just with the 14th Station.
By living the Via Crucis, I could understand better its final point. I also prayed for the journalists who had to write the stations. I felt the communion of the sisters who were praying for me. On Saturday I did nothing, and I had only one day left.
I woke up suddenly at 5 o'clock on Sunday morning, without an alarm clock, and ideas came very forcefully to my mind, like flashes. I started to write exactly as they came to me, at great speed. The silence of the morning is my best time to write. This is also true with my articles.
Which was the strongest flash you had?
To see the dynamic between death and resurrection: the time of the tomb is not the time of nothingness. It was the time in which Christ acted powerfully although in a hidden manner. This idea has always made an impression on me. The idea of the grain of wheat came to me — “if it does not fall on the ground and die it does not give fruit.”
It was the moment of total humiliation, of absolute “kenosis.” St. Epiphanius relives that moment recreating a dialogue between Adam and Christ. “What are you doing among the dead?” the first astonished man asks his Savior.
And, as a woman, how do you identify with those women who in the morning took balm and ointment to cleanse the massacred body of Christ?
In my personal life it has always impressed me how those women went to the sepulcher believing that he was dead. Sometimes I also had the vision of a dead Jesus: He was not a living Jesus, who speaks to us and inspires us. It was an image made up of prejudices.
He himself has made me understand, in the passage of Sunday morning when the women took the ointments, the answer to a question: “Why do I weep for a dead Jesus, when he is among the living?
Why did the Pope asked journalists to write the Via Crucis?
The Pope has always appreciated the work of journalists. With a sort of pedagogic gesture, he has entrusted this task to us to remind us of our responsibility. There are those who might criticize him, thinking that a journalist should not be involved in something that the Vatican proposes, so as not to lose his liberty and objectivity.
Personally, I see no contradiction: A journalist can be a believer and be a good journalist. He does not lose his objectivity because of it. I write for a Catholic periodical and, if we need to criticize something, we do so, as we must follow the principle of truth.
What is this Via Crucis of journalists like? What has been your specific contribution?
This year we have lived through tragic events which have shocked us and changed history. When I read the newspapers I feel I am faced with a living Via Crucis. Bishop Marini told us that there is a theme in the 14 Stations we have written: we must reflect on these daily, tragic events in the light of Christ's passion.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Man of Sorrows, Lord of Joy DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Addressing thousands of pilgrims gathered for his general audience on March 27, Pope John Paul II urged the faithful to relive the Easter Triduum intensely.
“During the Easter Triduum, we will gaze more intensely on Christ's face, a face full of agony and suffering,” the Holy Father said. He noted that this will help us better understand the suffering that afflicts so many men, women and children throughout the world today. However, Christ's face, “resplendent with life, open up our lives to renewed hope,” the Holy Father said.
----- EXCERPT: Register Summary ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Man of Sorrows, Lord of Joy DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:During the Easter Triduum beginning tomorrow, we will relive the central event of our salvation. This will be a time of intense prayer and meditation during which we will reflect — with the help of the beautiful liturgies of Holy Week — on the passion, death and resurrection of Christ.
We find the meaning and fulfillment of human history in the Paschal mystery. “Therefore,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church emphasizes, “Easter is not simply one feast among others, but the ‘Feast of feasts,’ the ‘Solemnity of solemnities,’ just as the Eucharist is the ‘Sacrament of sacraments…’ St. Athanasius calls Easter ‘the Great Sunday’ and the Eastern Churches call Holy Week ‘the Great Week.’ The mystery of the Resurrection, in which Christ crushed death, permeates with its powerful energy our old time, until all is subjected to him” (No. 1169).
Food for Our Salvation
Tomorrow, on Holy Thursday, we will contemplate Christ, who, in the Upper Room on the eve of his passion, gave himself to the Church, instituted the ministry of priesthood, and left a new commandment for his disciples—the commandment of love. Through the sacrament of the Eucharist, he desired to remain with us by becoming the food for our salvation. Following the very moving Liturgy of the Lord's Supper, we will keep a vigil of adoration with the Lord, obedient to the wish that he expressed to the apostles in the Garden of Olives: “Remain here and keep watch with me” (Matthew 26:38).
On Good Friday, we will relive the tragic events of the passion of our Redeemer, up to his crucifixion on Golgotha. Adoration of the cross will help us understand more deeply the infinite mercy of God. Consciously exp e r i e n c i n g such immense sorrow, the only-begotten Son of the Father became the definitive proclamation of salvation for humanity. Undoubtedly, the journey of the cross is difficult. Yet, it is only there that we discover the mystery of death that gives life. Then, in the climate of recollection and silence of Holy Saturday, we will have the opportunity to wait in prayer with Mary for the glory of the Resurrection, already experiencing a foretaste of that deep joy.
The Glory of the Resurrection
While singing the “Gloria” during the Easter Vigil, the splendor of our destiny will be revealed: to constitute a new humanity, redeemed by Christ, who died and rose for us. As people from all ends of the earth sing, on Easter Sunday, “Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus,” “the Lord of life was dead; but now, alive, he triumphs” (Sequence), we will be able to fully understand and love the Cross of Christ: from the cross, Christ vanquished sin and death forever!
During the Easter Triduum we will gaze more intensely on Christ's face. His face full of suffering and agony will help us to understand better the dramatic nature of the events and situations that afflict humanity even today. His face resplendent with light opens up our lives to renewed hope.
In my Apostolic Letter, Novo Millennio Ineunte, I wrote: “Two thousand years after these events, the Church relives them as if they had happened today. Gazing on the face of Christ, the Bride contemplates her treasure and her joy. ‘Dulcis Iesus memoria, dans vera cordis gaudia’: how sweet is the memory of Jesus, the source of the heart's true joy!” (No. 28).
Sharing Others' Burdens
In Gethsemane we will feel singularly in tune with those who are weighed down with anguish and loneliness. Meditating on the Jesus' trial, we will remember all those who are persecuted for their faith and for the sake of justice.
Accompanying Christ to Golgotha, on the Via Dolorosa, we will confidently lift up those who are burdened in body and spirit by evil and sin.
In the supreme hour of the sacrifice of the Son of God, we will confidently place at the foot of the cross the longing we all have in our hearts: our desire for peace!
After having contemplated together with her the suffering face of Christ, Mary Most Holy, who faithfully followed her Son all the way to the cross, will lead us on to enjoy the light and joy that emanate from the splendor of the face of the Risen Christ.
My wish for you is that this Triduum may truly be holy so that you may experience an Easter full of happiness and consolation!
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Long-Term Effects of Pope's Cuba Visit Debated
Though the U.S. State Department reports that the Cuban government continues to restrict religious freedom, a Cuban official cited the growth in so-called mission houses — informal churches operated from people's homes — that have sprung up in the country since the Pope's visit. There are 870 in the country now, compared to 560 a month before the papal visit.
Carlos Samper of the Communist Party's Office of Religious Affairs also said that public religious processions are now permitted, and the government has responded to the Pope's call for Cuba to open up to the outside world. The island nation now has diplomatic ties with 172 countries.
But Father Patrick Sullivan, who in 1994 was the only American priest allowed to work on the island since the early 1960s, said that although the government gave churches “extraordinary leeway” around the time of the Pope's visit, it began restricting religious freedom again soon after the Pope's plane left the tarmac.
The Church has only been able to open one new church in Havana since 1959. It cannot construct or operate its own schools, has virtually no access to Cuba's state-run media and still has trouble getting visas for new priests. Before the communist revolution, there were 700 priests for 6 million Cubans; today there are 281 priests amid a population of 11.2 million, while more than 300 priests and nuns are on a waiting list for visas.
But the Pope's visit had a profound effect for Andres Sotolongo, the Morning News reported. Before, he was an atheist. Now he spends his Sunday mornings teaching religion in a mission house.
Chinese Bishop, Faithful to Rome, Arrested
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 25 — The Cardinal Kung Foundation has reported the arrest of a Chinese bishop loyal to Rome, but police told the wire service they know nothing of his whereabouts.
Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo, 67, was picked up March 20 from his home in Zhengding, about 150 miles southwest of Beijing, the Stamford, Conn.-based Cardinal Kung Foundation said. Police in Zhengding and nearby Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province, said they were not aware of the bishop's detention. Later reports said he had been freed.
Ordained a bishop in 1980, Bishop Jia has had trouble with authorities in the past for running an orphanage for mentally and physically handicapped children, many abandoned by their parents, Associated Press reported, quoting the Vatican's missionary news service Fides.
Philippine Bishops Discourage Crucifixions
DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, March 24 — As Holy Week began, Filipinos were being discouraged from continuing a tradition of flagellation and crucifixion, the German news agency reported.
Msgr. Hernando Coronel, secretary-general of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, said the practices do not constitute penitence and are a “misrepresentation of our Catholic faith.”
Hundreds of Filipinos flog themselves with bamboo sticks tied to ropes and fitted with broken glass or nails during Holy Week. Some have themselves nailed to wooden crosses in the northern province of Pampanga. Msgr. Coronel said the Church frowns on the practices, which are often done to attract tourists.
If those who engage in the practices really want to repent for their sins, they should go to confession, Msgr. Coronel said, “change their way of life and be reformed.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: An Easter Cry for Peace DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul II made an urgent appeal for peace in his Easter message Urbi et Orbi (To the City and to the World), which took as its theme the greeting addressed by the Risen Lord to the disciples on the first Easter evening.
“His message can be summarized in two words: Pax vobis – Peace be with you!” said the Holy Father. “His peace is the fruit of the victory over sin and death which he gained at a high price.”
“The peace which is the gift of the Risen Christ is deep and complete, and reconciles man with God, with himself and with creation,” he continued. “Many religions proclaim that peace is a gift from God. We saw this again at the recent meeting in Assisi. May all the world's believers join their efforts to build a more just and fraternal humanity; may they work tirelessly to ensure that religious convictions may never be the cause of division and hatred, but only and always a source of brotherhood, harmony and love.”
Turning then to the situation in the Holy Land, which exploded in violence during Holy Week, the Pope declared, his voice rising: “It seems that war has been declared on peace!”
“But nothing is resolved by war, it only brings greater suffering and death,” he said. “No one can remain silent and inactive; no political or religious leader! Denunciation must be followed by practical acts of solidarity that will help everyone to rediscover mutual respect and to return to frank negotiation.”
At the Easter Vigil, the Holy Father had spoken about another explosion.
“An explosion of light, which God's word brought forth from nothing, rent asunder the first night, the night of Creation,” he said in his homily. “Another night constitutes the fundamental event of the history of Israel: It is the wondrous Exodus from Egypt, the story of which is read each year at the solemn Easter Vigil … This is the second night, the night of the Exodus.”
“On this most holy night, when Christ rose from the dead, you too will experience a spiritual ‘exodus,’” the Holy Father said, addressing the nine people he was about to baptize. “Leave behind your former life and enter the ‘land of the living.’ This is the third night, the night of the Resurrection.”
The two sentiments are not unrelated.
To look at the situation of the world in merely human terms is to see aggressors at each other's throats and to see war as the only possible answer. But from a supernatural vantage point, war isn't the answer — it's a large part of the problem.
The Pope's peace proscription is this: “No peace without justice, no justice without forgiveness.” A call to forgiveness in a world exploding in war sounds naive and too easy.
It is, in fact, eminently realistic — and extremely difficult. Peace will not be possible without forgiveness, after all. And what will be more difficult for Catholics to promote than that?
It is providential that the Feast of Divine Mercy has become an official part of the Church's calendar. The whole Church will be looking to the one place possible to find the extraordinary power that is necessary to forgiveness: The heart of the risen Christ.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Death Penalty Dialogue DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding “Death Penalty Symposium” (March 24-30):
I just finished reading Justice Scalia's rebuttal, and the comments from Cardinal Dulles and Father Rutler regarding the Church's teaching on the death penalty. I am thoroughly enjoying this back-and-forth discussion by these noted scholars and would like to encourage the Register to engage more Catholic intellectuals in this manner.
I can't think of a more effective way for me, and others, to broaden their understanding of key issues and doctrine than to hear from important people like Justice Scalia. Perhaps Senators Leahy, Kennedy and many other Catholic politicians would offer up their understanding and beliefs of abortion, as such.
DANIEL F. HAGGERTY
Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Sources of Scalia's Fear DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding “Death Penalty Symposium” (March 24-30):
Why are Antonin Scalia and others of the bench and bar defensive in regard to executing criminals? Does it matter whether they are Catholic or not? Are they to follow the judicial administrative opinion of the Vicar of Christ if common law dictates otherwise? Or is there fear and thus a cause to be defensive of their or other's past judgments? The most fearful of all questions to pose is: “Do you have jurisdiction?”
I believe Justice Scalia is a God-fearing man — yet also a man-fearing man.
PATRICK CHENAL
Frederic, Wisconsin
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Where's Brendan? DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:I read “Patrick, First of a Great Cloud of Witnesses” (March 17-23) and was unhappy to see that you left out St. Brendan. St. Brendan was born in 484. He was a pupil of St. Ita, who was his foster mother. He became a priest early in life and founded many monasteries.
The Irish believe that it was St. Brendan who founded America and not Columbus. In fact, according to “Navigatio Brendani,” he called it The Greater Ireland.
St. Brendan is known as the patron saint of sailors. When he returned to Ireland, he became the bishop of Clonfert. St. Brendan died in 577 at the age of 87.
BRENDAN JOHNSON
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Scourged by the Scandals DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:As painful as the revelations concerning the Catholic abuse and cover-up scandals are, I think it is important for us to ask ourselves: Who are we coming to church for, the priests or God? (“Strong Words: Pope Again Condemns Clergy Abuse,” March 31-April 6.)
If it is God then you still go to church despite what is going on, draw ever more closer to God to get through whatever the situation. Don't get me wrong; I was quite distressed when I heard about the massive abuses that had been taking place and covered up. Then I thought of two Scripture verses that said it all for me and put me somewhat at ease.
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:1-2).
God will never let Satan overcome the Church, so he is taking out the branches that will not change and grow, and pruning the rest. As hard as it is to live through this, we should rejoice that it is happening. We should rejoice not for the despicable things that the so-called men of God did, but rejoice that this problem is finally being dealt with and brought to light. In this way, God is reminding us who is in charge. The priests are not in charge; neither are the bishops and, as much as I love and admire him, not even the Pope.
God is ultimately in charge and everyone needs to be reminded of that. I support the clergy and religious in our Church and I think that they have an awesome and wonderful calling. We, as the congregation, must do whatever we can to help them and support them. And when they fall — and they will fall, because they are human — we should support their repentance and pray for them and the people they may have hurt along the way not to abandon God's Church to Satan. Those who do, I think, expose that they may not truly understand the role of the clergy or their role in God's Church. I was listening to a woman talking one night and she made the most incredible point. In the early Church, after the betrayal of Judas, the other 11 focused on building the Church and not on the betrayal. If they had, Jesus Christ would have never been preached.
Some have said that maybe the Church should “change with the times” and, for one thing, allow priests to marry. Let's not forget that this Church is not the world's church, but God's Church. God will make these decisions through the pope by allowing the Holy Spirit to guide him in leading us. The Church does not change with the world because the world does not own the Church. The same things that were true in Christ's time are true now. God is timeless.
“The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). Sin comes from our heart, not our circumstances. That's why we pray for God to change our hearts to what is good in his eyes.
Marriage is not the fix to this problem, God is. But, as James 2:17 says, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” Our bishops must play a role in strengthening our clergy. Stricter standards for our priests in those dioceses that are having these problems, along with allowing the police to get involved early on, are solutions that must be implemented. But, as a congregation, we must support God's Church and the many clergy who are still here and faithful. By doing this, we can all learn from this and, as a Church, grow in number and closer to God.
SHARON MARSHALL
Greenbelt, Maryland
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Why Does the World Hate Us? DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:I was just about to suggest that you do a review of Christianity On Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry by Vincent Carroll and David C. Shiflett when I saw the “Weekly Book Pick” by Kathryn Jean Lopez (“Bang the Gavel Slowly,” March 24-30).
Any Christian, Catholic or otherwise, who has succumbed to excessive hand-wringing over his or her spiritual ancestors should read and re-read this book. The work was probably inspired by a mounting suspicion that there was something deeply unjust about all the attacks and accusations leveled against Christianity lately. The two authors do some research, working with facts, not with their emotions or prejudices and, lo and behold, the attacks are unjust — at least for the most part.
So how does one explain the hostility of anti-Christians: from brilliant Nietzsche to not-so-brilliant Kevin Smith (writer/director of Dogma)? Clearly they have little interest in fairness and truth. Are they scandalized “little ones”? Do they resent the guilt feelings Christian morality sometimes inspires? Are they insane? Possessed?
And finally, do they realize how perfectly they serve to fulfill Christ's words to the first Christians? — ”If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18,19).
JOHN LORANGER
Sparks, Nevada
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Umbert's Birthday DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:This is Kevin writing to you from Kentucky. Every time my mom gets out the Catholic newspaper I read Umbert the Unborn. When is Umbert going to be born? I really like Umbert and I hope he will be born soon. I think it is time he got out of his mommy's tummy.
KEVIN MARDELL, age 7,
Home schooler and Register Reader
Paris, Kentucky
Gary Cangemi Replies: Thank you so much for your letter and kind words about Umbert. Your concern for Umbert touched my heart and put a smile on my face. I have never had a 7-year-old leave me so speechless with a single question, but I shall try to answer it as best I can.
With a stroke of my pen, I could very easily have Umbert be born but then, he would no longer be Umbert the Unborn and the comic strip would be over. What makes Umbert so different from other cartoon characters is that he is the only one who hasn't been born yet and that makes him (or her) very special. That is why I created Umbert, so that I could show grown-ups and children alike that unborn babies are special people too, that they are alive and that God has a lifetime planned for each and every one of them.
This is an important message, Kevin, and I want everybody to meet Umbert and love him as much as you do. If enough do, maybe all babies will have a chance to be born healthy, happy and loved.
You see, Kevin, the wonderful thing about a comic strip is that you can take a moment in time and make it last as long as you want. That's why Chuckie from the Rugrats is still a baby, Charlie Brown is still a kid and Beetle Bailey is still in the Army after all these years. People love these characters and don't want to see them grow up or change. And that is why Umbert can stay in his mother's tummy for as long as we want him to. Now, do you really want Umbert to leave his mommy's tummy just yet or would you like to keep reading Umbert in the paper?
I will promise you this, Kevin. The day when every unborn child in America is safe in his mother's womb and has the right to be born … that day will be Umbert's birthday.
Thank you for writing to Umbert and me. I think you are a fine young man and I'm sure your parents are very proud of you. God bless you and your family.
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: The Bomb That Went Psssst DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:The “Population Bomb” went pssssssst.
It did not explode. It just ended. And not with a bang, not even with a whimper. More like the sound coming from an old stretchy balloon. According the United Nations experts, the population explosion is officially over, and this from the meddling institution that helped get the whole thing going in the first place.
The U.N. Population Division, official statisticians for the U.N., hosted an expert meeting at U.N. headquarters a few weeks ago and announced their projections for population growth have been wrong. Population-control alarmists have been predicting since I was in the first grade that the world would soon run out of everything — food, natural resources, even space. College dorm posters from 25 years ago showed a planet so full that some were forced to live on overcrowded beaches.
This population scare was the engine that drove aggressive population-control programs in the poor brown, black and yellow nations. The population bomb also drove the push for radical acceptance of abortion and environmental extremism. Even the United Nations now accepts that this scenario wasn't true — not all of the United Nations, but one very influential branch.
What U.N. population experts are now saying is that the fertility rate in a number of countries is substantially lower than thought. So low, in fact, that the United Nations is now projecting the world will see a billion fewer people by the year 2050 than previously expected. We're currently at 6 billion. They had projected we would swell to 10 billion; now they are down to 9 billion.
The Population Division first sounded this alarm at a meeting in 1997, when it was reported that more than 60 countries were no longer replacing themselves. Most of these countries are in the developing world. Subsequent reports put the below-replacement group much higher, heading north of 80 countries, and including countries both rich and poor.
Dr. Joseph Chamie, head of the U.N. Population Division, is an unbiased statistician. I do not know what his position on abortion is. I suspect he is in favor of it. In any case, Chamie is alarmed about the impending fertility downturn. In fact, he is in something of a rolling debate with other U.N. agencies that love abortion, support it and pay for it, those who believe the world is awash in a dangerous contagion: people.
Chamie sees things differently. He issued a report last summer that flatly contradicted the dominant anti-natal ethos of the United Nations. His “World Population Monitoring Report 2001” asserts that, even though population has grown, food production and natural resource extraction have kept ahead of it. He also says that population growth may affect the environment, but that environmental degradation is more complicated than a single factor. He even said declining populations harm the environment.
I see a remarkably empty that we could use a few planet and know more friends.
It is on fertility rates and demography that Chamie raises an alarm and raises the hackles of population controllers. Chamie says the crisis is not impending. He reports that Russia shrank by 800,000 people last year. He says the crisis is here. Two years ago he hosted a meeting that looked at the crisis of aging populations, including the prospect of intergenerational competition for financial resources. Now he fears something more. What happens when populations begin not just to age, but also to fall?
So alarmed at this development, the Population Division held an expert meeting last year to consider solutions to the huge demographic and economic dislocation occurring because of an aging and dying population. Their single solution was massive immigration to the developed world from the developing world, something that most countries view as unacceptable. And new numbers show even the poor south is now experiencing below-replacement fertility.
The larger question is this: Once the ethos of small families is bred into us, how is that changed? We know that having children shows a remarkable generosity. This kind of generosity was once commonplace. It seems to have been replaced with a desire for European vacations, single-malt scotch and SUVs. They told us to have just enough children to replace ourselves, and no more.
In order to get there, a kind of greed had to be instilled. Once the greed for things is instilled in the human heart, how is it changed? Why have only two children? Why not one? Why not none? What policy-makers have discovered is they do not know how to get couples to put the brakes on fertility decline. They do not know how to stop couples from stopping having children. A few years ago Sweden, yes Sweden, offered tax incentives for increased family size. It worked only briefly.
I am frequently asked how many people the world can hold. What a crazy question. How in the world can I know? How can anyone know? It is really not our business anyway. All I know is that when I fly anywhere in the world and I look down from on high, I see a remarkably empty planet and know that we could use a few more friends.
Now, it seems, even the United Nations is catching on to this.
Austin Ruse, president of U.N. watchdog C-FAM (Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute), welcomes comments at austinruse@c-fam.org.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Austin Ruse ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Will Intelligent Design Survive Scientific Scrutiny? DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, many in academia considered me a walking contradiction: I was both an aspiring biologist and a practicing Catholic. As I was told quite bluntly by one of my zoology professors, “Evolution has demonstrated that there is no God!” I was not convinced. Today I find that I have lots of company.
In recent years, the supposed Darwinian argument for the absence of God has been turned upside down as evidence mounts pointing to the existence of an “intelligent design” behind the creation of the known universe. If there is an intelligent design, of course, there must be an intelligent designer.
Intelligent-design theory has been generating increasing interest on campuses across North America, as documented in a report in the Dec. 21 Chronicle of Higher Education TITLEd “Darwinism Under Attack.” Deeply skeptical science professors are scrambling to discourage their open-minded students from even entertaining intelligent design as a valid scientific theorem. But, while they've been succeeding in keeping intelligent design out most science departments, they can't do much about the full classrooms that turn out when the theory is seriously engaged in philosophy and theology courses.
Mark of the Mousetrap
The biological argument in favor of intelligent design was originally outlined by the biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University in his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, in which he argued that some biological systems are “irreducibly complex”. Behe distinguishes between two types of complexity — reducible and irreducible. Reducible complexity is that which is observed in the communication system of a modern city, which can be reduced to an accumulation of simple systems: Keep removing portions of it, and it still works. Irreducible complexity is the simplest level that a system can be reduced to and still function. Behe's example is a mousetrap: Take away just one part and it is useless.
Behe insists that the precision of biological processes at the molecular level, such as are associated with sight and blood clotting, are examples of irreducible complexity in nature. Behe, a Catholic, is not anti-Darwinian, as some critics have charged. He accepts the idea of common descent for living organisms, and that Darwinian or natural selection can explain much of what is seen in biological systems. Where Behe draws the line, and the wrath of his most vocal opponents, is in his skepticism toward a Darwinian origin for the complex interactions between the most fundamental building blocks of life.
An important distinction is that intelligent-design theory does not require that God is the designer of irreducibly complex entities. It simply posits that some biological processes cannot be explained by chance alone, but give evidence of design that is intelligent. The nature of the design agent — the “who's behind it all?” part of the investigation — is not addressed by the theory. Rather, intelligent design is an attempt to identify the point beyond which Darwinian explanations are no longer possible.
Regarding the mystery of how irreducibly complex systems originated, a critic of intelligent design would point to the great gains of knowledge made in the past, and confidently assert that the remaining mystery will fall to a Darwinian explanation at some point in the future.
Science can and should ask how — but what business does it have asking why?
Intelligent-design theory would counter that a complete resolution of the question is unattainable, however close one can get, and however great the strides of the past have been.
Scientists from both sides must adopt a practical materialism in order to proceed along scientific lines. There is no use in undertaking an experimental study of a phenomenon unless there is a reason to expect a natural explanation. Indeed, this is both the limit and the great strength of science, and why it has been so successful in explaining nature: It methodologically refuses, and rightly so, to allow for the action of any agent outside of material causes. If scientists tell you they have found evidence for angels, they are mistaken — and no friends of religion.
This attitude of practical materialism is carefully guarded, as it should be: Every pseudo-scientist from the amazing-discovery nutrition “expert” to the gadget-happy ghost-chaser tries to cash in on science's credibility. Thus the insistence of a materialist explanation for every aspect of biology.
The most common mistake made by critics of intelligent design is presuming that proponents of the theory are trying to gin up a “God-of-the-gaps” biology, or trying to connect the dots between Genesis and what science has discovered. Thus, most critics of intelligent design have been content to label the theory a new form of creationism and dismiss it.
They are mistaken. Intelligent design is not focused on a “biology of the Bible,” but on identifying the practical limits of biology — asking what can and cannot be understood under the current Darwinian paradigm. The theory does not detract from the predictive and constructive components of Darwinism so much as insist on the insufficiency of Darwinism to entirely explain the complexity of creation.
Stuff for the Studying
Where does all this leave us as Catholics? It is tempting to want to link our lot with the intelligent-design school, but this would be a mistake. Intelligent design must ultimately succeed or fail on scientific terms — that is, on its ability to make testable predictions based on its hypotheses, and on the veracity of those predictions. As Catholics, we may take personal solace in the apparent mounting evidence for intelligent design in the natural world, but this is not the basis of our faith.
Here's how Etienne Gilson put it in 1952: “Religious wisdom tells us that in the beginning God created heaven and earth, but it does not pretend to give us any scientific account of the progressive formulation of the world. … Science deals with nature qua nature, religious wisdom deals with nature qua work of God.”
Scientific evidence that supports chance against intelligent design does not compromise faith. W.R. Thompson, one of the fathers of modern population biology, said, in 1937, “The fact that a process is apprehended by us as fortuitous simply means that we cannot detect, by the methods available to science, any nature preordained to its effect.” And, as Cardinal Newman pointed out, a phenomenon that appears accidental is “accidental to us, not to God.”
What we do know as Catholics is that natural reason can come to a realization that there is a God: “The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason” (Catechism, No. 286). This need not be through scientific reasoning; it can be ascertained through the application of philosophical logic. In fact, it is difficult to see how scientific reasoning can possibly satisfy the above assertion, given science's materialist limits.
We know that God is the first cause of existence. “With creation, God does not abandon his creatures to themselves. He not only gives them being and existence, but also, and at every moment, upholds and sustains them in being, enables them to act and brings them to their final end” (Catechism, No. 301). Existence itself comes from God, without which science is impossible — stuff has to be there for science to study it.
Can intelligent design and the concept of irreducible complexity in molecular systems survive scientific scrutiny? That remains to be seen. Perhaps more fascinating — and more encouraging — is the theory's attraction to many students across North America. Surely their keen interest owes as much to the theory's potential support for their lives having purpose and meaning as it does to the theory's scientific merits.
Science, they intuitively discern, can ask how — how does a thing function, come to be, or respond to changing conditions? But it's fundamentally unqualified to even ask the more pressing question: Why? That's an important distinction to bear in mind as educational institutions battle it out over what to do with the intelligent-design theory.
David Beresford, a biologist, writes from Lakefield, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Beresford ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: New-Evangelization Enlightenment from the 'Unchurched' DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Two decades into the new evangelization, most of the harvest of souls remains in the field.
How can our efforts to evangelize bear more abundant fruit for the harvest-master?
We could do worse than to take a cue from Thom Rainer, dean of a Southern Baptist seminary, who surveyed more than 2,000 “effective evangelistic churches” — and published their storiesin Surprising Insights from the Unchurched and Proven Ways to Reach Them (Zondervan, 2001). These congregations convert at least one “unchurched” person a year for every 20 members. Rainer asked formerly unchurched people what moved them to make a profession of faith.
Fewer than 15% of respondents were drawn to church by the music, the style of worship, or groups and special ministries. Nor, in the majority of cases, was personal friendship or witness decisive. Rather, 90% of new Christians whom Rainer surveyed had been attracted by the quality of the pastor and his preaching; 88% cited good doctrine as a magnet that drew them to worship.
Rainer's results indicate that adult faith formation programs, especially Sunday School and Bible study, were important in retaining new members. But preaching and doctrine, far more than any group or ministry, caused people to seek Christ in the first place.
Pastors of Rainer's “effective churches” spent an astonishing 22 hours per week, on average, in sermon preparation. Ministers in a control group of congregations with slower growth devoted only four hours a week to their preaching. These pastors were too preoccupied with meetings, marriage preparation, and even opening and closing the church building, to spend much time “in the Word.”
Rainer's “effective pastors,” on the other hand, typically delegated these tasks to lay ministers. This freed them to devote 22 hours a week to Scripture reading, research, meditation, translation, daydreaming, prayer and writing.
The idea of a Catholic priest taking 22 hours to prepare a Sunday homily seems absurd on the face of it, until we translate the book's Protestant vocabulary into Catholic terms. Rainer does not mean that his effective pastors used up 22 hours per week scribbling drafts of sermons. Instead, they spent most of this time “in the Word.” For a Catholic, living “in the Word” could mean adoring the Blessed Sacrament, meditating on Scripture, praying the rosary or reflecting on the lives of the saints.
In short, Rainer is saying that pastors must have an interior life. This is exactly what the best Catholic spiritual writers have pointed out for centuries. Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard's great book The Soul of the Apostolate pleads for all priests to develop an interior life before attempting any active works. Unfortunately, most of our priests, like the pastors of Rainer's control group, are so overwhelmed with routine duties that their interior life becomes a vague resolution or a distant memory.
Chautard vividly describes the pathological state of constant pastoral activity without inner spiritual nourishment. The busy priest disdains prayer “because it is the only remedy to his morbid state. Rather than live a life of prayer, he will do his best to stupefy himself under an ever-increasing avalanche of badly managed enterprises.”
The Apostles had a similar problem, and the sixth chapter of Acts tells what they did about it. Asked to start a new ministry for widows in the Greek community of Jerusalem, the Apostles responded: “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.” They appointed seven laymen to the diaconate to carry out such activities. “We will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word,” the Apostles proclaimed.
What happens in modern parishes is frequently the opposite. The priest is so overwhelmed with various commitments that he delegates his liturgical duties to lay people. Instead of a Mass officiated by a priest, parishioners get a Communion service led by a layperson. Confession is “by appointment only.” Benediction is out of the question.
When lay people preside at liturgical functions, priesthood comes to seem increasingly irrelevant. Vocations then decline, creating a vicious cycle.
The apostolic solution is to delegate nearly all routine tasks to lay people or deacons so that the priest is free to celebrate Mass daily, to meditate, to hear Confessions, to have an interior life.
There are two dangers to this approach in the modern setting. First, the priest may become a sort of liturgical functionary without real authority in a parish dominated by lay people. Second, the tasks delegated will include spiritually significant actions such as catechesis or marriage preparation. If the pastor relinquishes control of these fields to lay people, the parish may spin off into unorthodoxy.
But take heart. If these objections are potent now, they posed far more serious problems in the early Church. From Judaizers to neo-Platonists, orthodoxy had as many challengers then as now. The orthodox position on such fundamental matters as the nature of Christ had not even been fully defined, and the priesthood itself was still developing. Yet the Apostles were willing to take the risk of delegating their authority over routine matters to lay people.
The point is not to create a parish government by committee. Instead, the pastor must actively direct the affairs of the parish through chosen assistants who are thoroughly formed in good doctrine and can be counted on to teach the truth. Chautard calls this core group the “shock troops” of a parish. He quotes Pope St. Pius X, who said that to save society “the most necessary thing of all … is for every parish to possess a group of laymen who will be at the same time virtuous, enlightened, resolute and truly apostolic.”
Rainer's study argues persuasively that pastors who live “in the Word” are spiritually strengthened to govern their congregations with authority. They do so primarily from the pulpit, and then through a network of trusted helpers whom they actively supervise. This is the apostolic method. The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church would do well to learn from it, adapting it to present conditions.
Whatever we may call it — living “in the Word,” true devotion, spiritual exercise, Eucharistic adoration — the interior life of our priests can no longer be disregarded. Those who minister at the altar deserve the “better portion,” but we have too often deprived them of it. For this we are ultimately the poorer.
Scott McDermott writes from
Nashville, Tennessee.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Scott McDermott ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Mary, Abraham, the Annunciation and You DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:On April 8, the Church celebrates the Annunciation, remembering the angel Gabriel's message to Mary. In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II delivered a homily at the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth on March 25, when the feast is held when that date doesn't fall in Holy Week. A portion of his homily is excerpted here.
Our Jubilee Pilgrimage has been a journey in spirit, which began in the footsteps of Abraham, “our father in faith” (Roman Canon; cf. Romans 4:11-12). That journey has brought us today to Nazareth, where we meet Mary, the truest daughter of Abraham. It is Mary above all others who can teach us what it means to live the faith of “our father”. In many ways, Mary is clearly different from Abraham; but in deeper ways “the friend of God” (cf. Isaiah 41:8) and the young woman of Nazareth are very alike.
Both Abraham and Mary receive a wonderful promise from God. Abraham was to be the father of a son, from whom there would come a great nation. Mary is to be the Mother of a Son who would be the Messiah, the Anointed One. “Listen!”, Gabriel says, “You are to conceive and bear a son. … The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David … and his reign will have no end” (Luke 1:31-33).
For both Abraham and Mary, the divine promise comes as something completely unexpected. God disrupts the daily course of their lives, overturning its settled rhythms and conventional expectations. For both Abraham and Mary, the promise seems impossible. Abraham's wife Sarah was barren, and Mary is not yet married: “How can this come about”, she asks, “since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34).
Like Abraham, Mary is asked to say yes to something that has never happened before. Sarah is the first in the line of barren wives in the Bible who conceive by God's power, just as Elizabeth will be the last. Gabriel speaks of Elizabeth to reassure Mary: “Know this too: your kins-woman Elizabeth has, in her old age, herself conceived a son” (Luke 1:36).
Like Abraham, Mary must walk through darkness, in which she must simply trust the One who called her. Yet even her question — “How can this come about?” — suggests that Mary is ready to say yes, despite her fears and uncertainties. Mary asks not whether the promise is possible, but only how it will be fulfilled. It comes as no surprise, therefore, when finally she utters her fiat: “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me” (Luke 1:38). With these words, Mary shows herself the true daughter of Abraham, and she becomes the Mother of Christ and Mother of all believers.
In order to penetrate further into the mystery, let us look back to the moment of Abraham's journey when he received the promise. It was when he welcomed to his home three mysterious guests (cf. Genesis 18:1-15), and offered them the adoration due to God: tres vidit et unum adoravit. That mysterious encounter foreshadows the Annunciation, when Mary is powerfully drawn into communion with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Through the fiat that Mary uttered in Nazareth, the Incarnation became the wondrous fulfillment of Abraham's encounter with God. So, following in the footsteps of Abraham, we have come to Nazareth to sing the praises of the woman “through whom the light rose over the earth” (hymn Ave Regina Caelorum).
But we have also come to plead with her. What do we, pilgrims on our way into the Third Christian Millennium, ask of the Mother of God? Here in the town which Pope Paul VI, when he visited Nazareth, called “the school of the Gospel”, where “we learn to look at and to listen to, to ponder and to penetrate the deep and mysterious meaning of the very simple, very humble and very beautiful appearing of the Son of God” (Address in Nazareth, Jan. 5 1964), I pray, first, for a great renewal of faith in all the children of the Church. A deep renewal of faith: not just as a general attitude of life, but as a conscious and courageous profession of the Creed: “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est.”
In Nazareth, where Jesus “grew in wisdom and age and grace before God and men” (Luke 2:52), I ask the Holy Family to inspire all Christians to defend the family against so many present-day threats to its nature, its stability and its mission. To the Holy Family I entrust the efforts of Christians and of all people of good will to defend life and to promote respect for the dignity of every human being.
To Mary, the Theotókos, the great Mother of God, I consecrate the families of the Holy Land, the families of the world.
In Nazareth where Jesus began his public ministry, I ask Mary to help the Church everywhere to preach the “good news” to the poor, as he did (cf. Luke 4:18). In this “year of the Lord's favour,” I ask her to teach us the way of humble and joyful obedience to the Gospel in the service of our brothers and sisters, without preferences and without prejudices.
“O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy hear and answer me. Amen” (Memorare).
(Vatican translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Pope John Paul II ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Boys and Girls' Saints DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Ah! Easter is here at last. Or here again …
April 7 is Easter Sunday, too. The priest at Mass all week says “on this Easter Day” before the eucharistic prayer, and this Sunday is Easter Sunday 2. Give your family a second Easter celebration! A nice meal, some more candy … See page one for the other feast celebrated today: Divine Mercy Sunday.
This is also a great month for saints who model specific virtues to your boys and girls. Here's a sampling:
April 8, St. Julie Billart. Girls: apostolic zeal. As a young girl, this Belgian peasant learned to read and write, even while she earned money on a farm. She learned so that she could teach catechism to other poor girls who were unschooled. She continued to pray and teach others even when she was completely paralyzed as an adult for 22 years. During that time, the paralyzed woman so impressed others with her service that an order of nuns formed around her.
April 9, St. Waldetrudis. Teenage girls: being faithful even when it's unpopular. As a young woman (she was married at a young age), Waldetrudis had a very holy family: Her husband and children all are saints also. As often happens, people thought she was silly to have such an active faith. They said her piety was just a mask to hide her secret sins. The young woman didn't defend herself, but kept to her religious practices and suffered for God. Today, girls should keep to their faith, even if it some people criticize them.
April 12, St. Joseph Moscati, Teen-age boys: organizing your time. The Italian doctor was able to do many things, including daily Mass, prayer and spiritual reading, while excelling in his studies. Later, he became renowned for his medical research, correctly diagnosing difficult cases and helping many patients, both physically and spiritually, often without payment. Boys might enjoy Regina Martyrum's audio tape dramatizing his life (800-565-3123). It also features his courageous service in World War I.
April 19, Blessed James Duckett, Boys: respect for priests and books. James Duckett wasn't Catholic (the Church was persecuted in England when he was alive, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I) until he happened to read a book that changed his life. He stopped going to his Protestant church and was thrown into prison twice for it. He began helping to hide priests, and to print Catholic books. He was martyred for doing so.
Other saints for boys: St. George, April 23, who fearlessly fought evil in the form of a dragon (little boys can imitate him by fighting selfishness!) St. Mark the Evangelist, April 25, is mentioned by St. Paul as having abandoned the missionary work he started out on. Even pre-teen or teen-age boys who have fallen away a little can learn from this Gospel writer, that they can always come back with a vengeance.
For girls, there are also some better-known saints who are good role models: St. Zita, April 27, patroness of domestic workers, patiently and diligently performed her duties amidst peer ridicule. When she defended her chastity from a fellow worker, she was rewarded greatly by her employers and eventually became a model for other workers, showing that “work is beautiful when it is done with Christian love.” St. Catherine Siena, April 29, can inspire girls to defend the pope and to be a diligent about following God's will. She's a doctor of the Church because she boldly used her learning and her love for God to intervene at a time of crisis in the Church. She spent her 33 years on earth transforming all kinds of hearts with her delicate but forthright dedication to Christ and his Church.
April Hoopes writes from
Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: April Hoopes ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Simple Parish Church, Rock Solid Witness DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Most Holy Trinity Church, Wallingford, Conn.
Being a Catholic travel writer, I like to be surprised by ordinary parish churches that have some special attractiveness, history or beauty.
Sometimes those kinds of discoveries are even more exhilarating than the thrill I get walking into a grand cathedral or basilica for the first time.
Most Holy Trinity Church in Wallingford, Conn., not more than 10 minutes from the offices of the National Catholic Register in North Haven, is a good example. For all the times I've driven through the small town on my way to “bigger game” elsewhere, I never realized there was a dynamo of a church minutes from the highway. Now I'm grateful to a friend who told me about it.
This mother parish of the town (pop. 41,800) occupies prime downtown land on Route 5, a busy New England two-lane that rambles through cities and towns from New Haven all the way to the Canadian border. Consequently, many work-aday travelers get to admire at least the magnetic exterior of this substantial, 125-year-old brick edifice.
I stopped in recently to learn that the church was dedicated on Thanksgiving Day, 1887. Since the entire brick exterior was cleaned and restored recently, I picture the church now looking to us much like it did on that dedication day. Even the tall, broad granite steps carved from Leetes Island granite (the quarry is just off the Connecticut shoreline) have gotten the restoration treatment. As I climbed the steep stairs, I looked up to see a gold cross high overhead, proclaiming Christ from atop the church's 190-foot spire. Then I looked down and noticed that the millions of footsteps over the stone steps all these years had barely begun to wear down this hardy gray granite.
Strength in Stone
This was one sturdy edifice for the hefty numbers of Irish immigrants who made up the bulk of the parish in its earliest days. (They were soon followed by waves of transplants from Germany and Hungary; today the parish is a study in diversity.) It was Father Hugh Mallon, one of the parish's first pastors, who saw to the sanctuary's size and strength. Less than a decade after he arrived in 1867, he broke ground, personally designing the cruciform Gothic building after his hometown parish church in Clougher, Ireland.
Initially Father Mallon planned to construct the church out of sandstone. In fact, he bought an entire quarry nearby to ensure consistency. But, after constructing the foundation and noting the considerable strain the ambitious height might place on the lower structure, he decided to switch to brick. The pastor rolled up his sleeves and pitched right in with parishioners in laying the bricks. It helped that, as a young man, he had worked his way through seminary by laboring as a stonemason.
After I learned this part of Most Holy Trinity's story, I went to look again at the memorial stone affixed to the front of the foundation next to the wide center stairway, and to admire the pastor's feat. The memorial identifies him as “founder and builder of this church” and also acts as his tombstone. He died here in 1898 after tending his flock for 30 years and was buried right by the main door of his beloved church.
Most of today's interior is surely different from what would have been familiar to Father Mallon. The spire itself had to be replaced after a lighting bolt and fire destroyed the original after the turn of the 20th century. Then came a series of renovations over the years. Yet, for all its changes from the original design, the interior has a balanced blend of older and newer elements.
The wide nave and transepts, high Gothic ceiling, and light color scheme give the church an open feeling that is grounded at the same time in many reverential details. These include brilliant stained-glass windows and a regal mural of the Holy Trinity high in the apse. At first sight, this oval mural appears like an intricate medieval tapestry realized in muted blues, reds and golds. It appears deeply, yet simply, symbolic. God the Father stands in royal posture with the sun, moon and stars in the background. His garments drape like vestments from his outstretched arms. With his wide-open arms, he presents to us his Crucified Son. In the same gesture, God the Father also seems to want to bless and enfold us.
The outstretched arms of Jesus on the Cross parallel those of his Father's, telling us that he does everything according to the Father's will. He and the Father are one. From above, the Holy Spirit in the form of a gold dove looks to the Father and the Son to complete the Trinity.
Salvation History Lesson
On blue ribs that lead like rays from the mural, stylized angels stand in honor and prayer. Two more angels, St. Michael and St. Gabriel, each fill one of the three stained-glass windows that are framed in triple arches below the mural. The center window depicts a regal Christ the King in glory.
Many other stained-glass windows, mostly paired in tall double lancets, date to the 1940s, but they're filled with brilliant blues, crimson reds and scores of details that recall some of the grandest and oldest cathedrals in the world. A quartet in one transept pictures the four major Old Testament prophets. The quartet facing them from the opposite transept presents the New Testament Evangelists. The placement encourages us to think about their respective places and messages in salvation history.
More exceptional windows in both transepts are dedicated to the Blessed Mother. We're drawn to contemplate Mary in multiple scenes, like miniatures considering the size of the church itself; they depict the Virgin from the Visitation to her being crowned and hailed as Queen of Angels. In them, the artist has captured and emphasized Mary's humility. The scenes are decorated with stylized roses scattered delicately.
These gorgeous windows, with their brilliant hues and bold characters, are set in walls that look like recently restored stonework. But, on closer inspection, this faux stone is the product of different shades of sand-toned paint applied to simulate the light stone. The effect brings a warm, traditional feeling to the nave to complement the late 20th-century sanctuary — rail-less, sweeping and open — with its highly polished wood floor.
The cream-colored faux-stone walls also work to emphasize the reverential and riveting polychrome Stations of the Cross that circle the nave. This traditional bas-relief Way is another way Most Holy Trinity Church, a surprise for ambling pilgrims off the usual path, raises hearts and minds to God — and in the ordinary, day-to-day kind of way that only a historic and humble parish church can.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Hot on the Heels of St. Peter DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:‘Keeper of the Keys’ is a virtual missionary journey
Where Peter goes, there goes the Church. And where Peter went, there went Steve Ray. Literally.
In “Peter: Keeper of the Keys,” the first in a planned 10-part video series to be distributed by Ignatius Press called The Footprints of God: The Story of Salvation from Abraham to Augustine, the popular Catholic apologist begins an appealing, informative re-tracing of salvation history — through the actual sites in which key events transpired.
Why begin toward the tail end of the story arc rather than right at the beginning? That's not made clear, but it's evident the producers, St. Joseph Productions, are onto something. This is one engaging and inviting virtual tour of Christian history and doctrine.
In Ray, a convert to the Catholic faith from evangelical Protestantism, this excursion has an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide. Outfitted, by turns, in canvas hat, vest, binoculars, sunglasses and sandals, he comes across as equal parts catechist, archaeologist and day-tripper.
Recounting the first pope's missionary adventures from the Holy Land to Rome, Ray draws heavily from Scripture to show how St. Peter's activities then are relevant to Catholics' lives now. He does a good job of moving things along at a brisk pace.
And he manages to keep things fun. Trudging up Mt. Tabor, he remarks: “Boy, these disciples must have been some tough guys.”
Given Ray's successful work as an apologist — he's the author of Crossing the Tiber: Evangelical Protestants Discover the Historic Church and Upon This Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church — you'd expect this production to have a strong defending-the-faith angle. And you'd be right. “Keeper of the Keys” underscores the scriptural and historic basis of such Petrine principles as papal authority, infallibility and the succession of the Chair of Peter.
The video begins in Bethsaida, the ancient city north of the Sea of Galilee where Peter grew up. Ray explores the topography and takes a look at such details as an ancient fishing boat, bronze fishing hooks and the basalt used to build homes in first-century Palestine. These touches help give a sense of what life must have been like for Peter prior to his life-changing encounter with the teacher from Nazareth.
Ray then takes us to Capernaum, where he introduces a modern-day commercial fisherman who describes the challenges he faces — and which Peter must have faced — while making a living on the Sea of Galilee. Until, of course, the day Jesus called to Peter and his brother, Andrew: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
“Why would Jesus choose Peter, a rugged man who smelled of fish and not of books?” Ray asks, inviting us to ponder the question for ourselves.
Then it's on to Cesarea Philippi, where Ray scales a rock 100 feet high and 500 feet long. This is the spot, he explains, on which Christ asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” And here is where Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God” — prompting Jesus to respond, “You are Kepha, and on this Kepha I will build my Church.” In other words, we're looking at the very spot on which the Church was born.
Next stop is Mt. Tabor, site of the Transfiguration, and then the Mensa Christi, or table of Christ, where, after the first Easter, Jesus astonished the Apostles by showing up for breakfast by the sea. Here Ray reads the passage from John 22 describing the scene as he sits by an open fire, roasting fish.
From there it's on to Jerusalem, where we are shown the Upper Room, then to Joppa and Caserea by the Sea, where Peter baptized the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household. Ray points out that, although it would be St. Paul who would become the missionary to the Gentiles, Peter was the first to open baptism, and therefore salvation, to the Gentiles. In so doing, he explains, St. Peter laid the groundwork for papal authority and the fact that his decisions were binding upon the whole Church.
Finally, in the final segment, we are whisked 2,000 miles away, to — where else? — St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Ray describes how the magnificent church was built over the Circus of Nero, on the very spot where Peter was crucified. He points out that the bones of St. Peter sit directly beneath the basilica's main altar and Michelangelo's dome.
Throughout, the video makes good use of music, artwork and maps — and opens up meditations of Scripture and the Catechism that could only be coaxed with such vibrant and evocative sights and sounds. I watched “Keeper of the Keys” with my family, and was impressed by its ability to raise questions in my children's minds. My 6-year-old son wanted to know, for example, why St. Peter was crucified upside down.
I was also heartened to see that the video bears an imprimatur from Bishop Carl F. Mengeling, of Lansing, Mich., ensuring that its content is free from doctrinal error.
Indeed, the only criticism I can come up with is that I wish we didn't have to wait so long for the rest of the series. Ignatius plans to release the second installment, “Mary: The Mother of God” this summer, and to begin production on the third, “Moses: Signs, Sacraments & Salvation” in the fall. Then will follow videos on Abraham, David and Solomon, Elijah and Elisha, Paul, the Apostolic Fathers, and the Doctors of the Church.
Bring them on.
Bring them all on.
Tim Drake writes from
St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Information
“Peter: Keeper of the Keys”
Ignatius Press, 2002
70 minutes, $24.95
To order: (800) 651-1531
or www.ignatius.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Balto II: Wolf Quest (2002)
An individual's search for his or her true identity is a classic theme of movies and literature. Balto II: Wolf Quest, the entertaining sequel to the 1995 animated hit, explores this subject with sensitivity and depth. Balto (voice of David Carradine), the half-wolf, half-dog of the original, is raising a litter of pups he has fathered in civilization. His daughter, Aleu (Lacy Chabert), grows up feeling like an outsider among other dogs because she looks more like a wolf than her father. She decides she must learn what kind of “music sings inside her.” Balto joins his daughter on her quest back into the Northern wilderness from which their ancestors came.
Balto must defeat a mean wolf for leadership of a wolf pack, and he and Aleu must face down a ferocious bear. But their greatest challenge is surviving in the rugged, natural terrain. Their adventures are inspired in part by traditional Native American songs and chants. Although the movie is primarily for kids, adults will find it compelling as well.
Close-Up (1990)
Even in Third World countries, moviemaking is a glamorous profession that tempts weaker souls to violate their moral codes to become part of it. CloseUp, written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami (Life and Nothing More), is an intelligent exploration of these conflicts set in contemporary Iran. Based on an actual incident, the filmmaker uses the real-life people involved to play themselves in cleverly staged re-enactments. Sabzian, an impoverished printer's assistant, is riding a bus, reading a book called The Cyclist by noted Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar). When the book catches the attention of the wealthy Mrs. Ahankhah, seated nearby, Sabzian pretends to be Makhmalbaf.
Sabzian gets himself invited into the luxurious Ahankhah household by promising to use the premises as a location for his next film. The woman's husband and son become suspicious when Sabzian borrows money.
His hoax is exposed, and he's falsely accused of planning a robbery. Kiarostami uses the situation to make subtle comments on class differences and the disparities between rich and poor in Iran.
Register Ratings
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Register Ratings
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V violence
P profanity
N nudity
S sexual content
0 none
4 justifiable
–1 questionable
–2 objectionable
–3 reprehensible
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, APR. 7
Feast of Divine Mercy:
Solemn Mass and Celebration
EWTN, 12:30 p.m. Live
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,” Jesus tells us in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:7). Similarly, he told St. Maria Faustina (and hence all of us), “I demand from you deeds of mercy, which are to arise out of love for Me.” The annual Divine Mercy Mass from Stockbridge, Mass., begins at 1 p.m., with a preview at 12:30 p.m.
SUNDAY, APR. 7
TV Road Trip
Travel Channel, 9 p.m.
Have you ever wondered where your favorite TV shows were filmed? This two-hour special, hosted by John Ritter, visits familiar locations of some new shows and old favorites such as “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Bonanza” and “The Waltons.” Entrepreneurs have preserved many of the sites as tourist attractions.
SUN.-MON., APR. 7-8
Shackleton, Parts I and II
A & E, 8 p.m. Sun. and 9 p.m. Mon.
Grab some hot chocolate, if not your parka, to watch this exciting, four-hour, two-part survival drama about the desperate 20-month Antarctic expedition of explorer Ernest Shackleton, his 27 men and their 69 dogs in 1914-1915. They fell 85 miles short of their goal — and, after their ship sank, they undertook an epic lifeboat voyage to safety.
TUESDAY, APR. 9
Star City
History Channel, 10 p.m.
In this new documentary about Russia's space program, cosmonauts use simulators of Soyuz rockets and the Mir space station.
WEDNESDAY, APR. 10
Tales from Bledlow Ridge:
The Intruder
EWTN, 4 p.m.
As this new adventure series set in England opens, the Bartons, an ideal Christian family, find themselves tested when a cousin moves in.
THURSDAY, APR. 11
SportsCentury:
Sparky Anderson
ESPN, 1 p.m.
George “Sparky” Anderson lasted just one season (1959) as an infielder in the big leagues, but he went on to manage some of baseball's greatest teams: The Cincinnati Reds' “Big Red Machine” of the 1970s and the Detroit Tigers of the 1980s. Anderson is a longtime member of St. Paschal Baylon Parish in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
FRIDAY, APR. 12
Florida Keys: Unlocking the Mysteries
Travel Channel, 8 p.m.
Explore the exotic Florida Keys and their colorful flora and fauna.
SATURDAY, APR. 13
The Human Edge
National Geographic Channel, 8 p.m.
Archaeologists decipher writing from 2000 B.C., scientists design survival suits for all conditions and we learn about the unusual abilities of the Global Hawk and the Seascan, new-technology aircraft.
Dan Engler writes from
Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Birth of a Nation Under God DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:ON TWO WINGS: HUMBLE FAITH AND COMMON SENSE AT THE AMERICAN FOUNDING
by Michael Novak
Encounter Books, 2001
235 pages, $23.95
To order: (800) 786-3839
www.encounterbooks.com
For years there has been a running debate in academic, religious and cultural circles about the founding of the United States of America. Did the nation originate from Judeo-Christian roots or from Enlightenment principles? To what degree was the American founding “Christian”? If it was Christian, how compatible are its Protestant premises with Catholic social and political teaching? Such questions are important, of course, since they inform how Catholics should view the American political process and how they are to be involved in it.
Sadly, many Americans, especially high-school and college students, know little to nothing about the American founders and the role religion played in their lives. Michael Novak's On Two Wings addresses the topic with clarity, balance and abundant documentation.
Novak has been writing about politics, economics and the Catholic faith for nearly 40 years. Perhaps best known for The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, he is also the co-founder of the influential periodicals First Things and Crisis. His latest book was clearly a labor of love. Novak candidly writes in the preface that “I have wanted to write this book for some forty years, [but] my ignorance stood in the way.” He lays out his thesis in the opening paragraph:
“In one key respect, the way the story of the United States has been told for the past one hundred years is wrong. It has cut off one of the two wings by which the American eagle flies, her compact with the God of the Jews –- the God of Israel championed by the nation's first Protestants –– the God Who prefers the humble and weak things of this world, the small tribe of Israel being one of them. … Believe that there is such a God or not –- the founding generation did, and relied upon this belief. Their faith is an indispensable part of the story.”
Concerned by the secularist presentation of the American founders as nominal Christians who relied on Enlightenment-era philosophy, Novak demonstrates that they were mostly devout Protestant Christians who had a keen, if not always perfect, appreciation for natural law and divine revelation. Since the founders came from different Protestant denominations, they largely avoided specific theological language, instead referring to God as Lawgiver, Creator, Judge, and Providence. On a practical level, they were given to regular public prayer, absolute moral standards and a belief in God's divine guidance. Novak's compilation of quotes and anecdotes is impressive, making it difficult to disregard the central role of Judeo-Christian thought and belief in the birth of the nation.
Novak readily admits that weaknesses existed in the founding and that many problems in American history are the result of the founders' limitations. Foremost is the matter of slavery; there was also an “excessive emphasis on the utility of religion, and insufficient intellectual clarity about the nature of religion, Judaism and Christianity in particular …”
Two Wings highlights the uniqueness of America while also warning of the need for constant vigilance and robust morality in a republic. The founders agreed that the United States would remain strong only if the moral habits of its citizens were virtuous. Some of the most poignant quotes are in this regard. Novak quotes George Washington, who wrote: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.”
Provocative, educational, and cautionary, Two Wings will open many eyes to an often ignored and misunderstood chapter of history.
Carl Olson is editor of Envoy magazine (www.envoymagazine.com).
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl E. Olson ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Wired to the Hilt
Father Nicholas Rashford, St. Joe's president, has championed the effort at the Jesuit university, which has staked much of its future and some $30 million, on “smart classrooms” that are housed in Mandeville Hall, a neo-Gothic building stocked with technologically enhanced classrooms.
A ‘Cooked’ Poll
The question, first asked in the mid-1970s, and which garnered a positive response from more than 50% of respondents, explained that vouchers allot a certain amount of money for each child's education and allow parents to “send [their] child to any … school they choose. Would you like to see such an idea adopted in this country?”
By adding such phrases as “private school” and “at public expense,” support dipped to as low as 24% as Phi Delta Kappa portrayed vouchers “as a special-interest program for an exclusive group of private school parents,” says Moe.
Prof Migration
Long Island's associate provost, Dr. Sylvia Blake is a former dean of Manhattanville's School of Education. Carol Messar, the director of admissions and marketing, was a director of recruitment at Manhattanville. Two faculty members have also made the move from Manhattanville, which was founded by Sacred Heart Nuns.
Father Tony
GONZAGA UNIVERSITY, March 20 — Jesuit Father Anthony Lehmann, 73, Gonzaga University's alumni chaplain and a fixture for 20 years on the bench of the men's basketball team, died March 8 from complications of leukemia just as the surprising Gonzaga Bulldogs were about to begin play in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
The players' jerseys bore “Father Tony” patches sewn on especially for the tournament, and a chair was left empty at the end of the bench as a memorial.
A funeral for Father Lehmann was delayed until March 18 to give the team and university staff a chance to return from the tournament appearance, which resulted in a first-round defeat.
New Programs
Mount Aloysius is run by the Sisters of Mercy.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:Debt Counselors
The tension from high debts is killing our marriage. While we want to get on a budget, our credit card debt of $20,000 makes it impossible to develop one that allows us to meet our needs. I've heard of organizations that can work with creditors to consolidate loans, and maybe even reduce interest rates. Should we use the services of one of these firms?
Remember that burying your head in the sand and hoping the problem will go away is the worst thing you can do. When a family's credit card debt reaches such a level that they can't even manage the minimum payments required by the creditors, one solution is to seek help from a credit counseling service.
Whether or not you use a credit counseling service, make sure you communicate with your lender. In most cases, they'll be much more willing to work with you if you are open with your problem.
You'll want to use caution in locating the right service for you, and do your homework before using a program. If you open the yellow pages under “credit,” you'll find a multitude of credit counseling services. Some of these will be for-profit organizations, while others have nonprofit status. Some will “cherry pick” the loans they will assist you with.
You'll want to find an organization that will deal with all of your consumer credit. Many local agencies are affiliated with the National Foundation for Consumer Credit, which was founded in 1951. These agencies have a good reputation and would be a good place to start.
If you go to an agency affiliated with National Foundation for Consumer Credit, you can expect them to offer free budget and credit counseling. They also offer debt management plans. For a relatively modest fee, they will set up a consolidation loan. This results in you making one payment to them. They then make disbursements to your creditors based on a negotiated schedule.
Because they have established relationships with lenders, they will frequently be able to negotiate favorable repayment terms, such as a reduction in the interest rate. You can expect the repayment plan to take anywhere from one to five years.
Many couples make a mistake when consolidating their debt by using the hard-earned equity in their home. Not only does this turn short-term debt into long-term debt, but couples often find themselves back in debt within a year because they failed to deal with the root cause of the problem.
Remember that a key to solving the problem once and for all is to get on a budget and to consistently track your expenses in relation to the budget, so you'll know you're living within your means. God love you!
Phil Lenahan is executive director of Catholic Answers.
Reach Family Matters at:
FamilyMatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: She Blooms Where She's Planted DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:There are many sorts of gardens. There are water gardens, rock gardens, flower gardens, Japanese gardens, and a host of others. However, there is one distinctly Catholic garden: a Mary Garden. If you want one ready by May, you'd better start now.
Just as stain glass windows taught the faith in an age of illiteracy, flowers and herbs are staging a comeback as items of reflection.
John Stoke, of MaryGardens.org has spent the last 50 years discovering the legend and lore behind the use of flowers in meditating on the sacred mysteries of our faith. When his research began in the 1950s, he was pleasantly surprised to find various pre-Reformation era books that listed hundreds of flowers and herbs bearing Our Lady's name: Lady's Bud (calendula), Mary's Star (aster), Rosary Beads (canna lily), Mary's Crown (bachelor button) Virgin's Bower (clematis) and Our Lady's Pincushion (thrift), were once the commonly used names of garden-variety plants around the world.
According to Vincenzina Krymow, author of Mary's Flowers, (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1999), rural Catholics learned of Mary in the 12th century partly “through [knowing] her flower symbols growing around them and their associated legends, as taught by itinerant preachers and wandering minstrels.”
Research reveals hundreds of legends and inspirations that have sprouted from the plant world. Columbine, or “Our Lady's Slipper,” is said to have sprung from beneath Our Lady's gentle step. The Assumption lily has long been known as Mary's flower, as memorialized by the angel holding forth a lily in many paintings of the Annunciation. Red poppies are one of the flowers said to have sprung up at the food of the cross from Jesus' redemptive drops of blood. The florets of Mary's Crown (cornflower) bloom in a crown-like ring as a reminder of Mary's coronation as Queen of Heaven and Earth.
Combine these legends and inspirations with soil, water, and seed; add an image or statue of Our Lady — and you have just planted a Mary Garden!
Whether it is in private homes, parish gardens or wayside chapels, The Mary Garden concept is growing in popularity. Moreover, their reflections are as varied as the souls who tend them. Some gardens might be planted entirely in white, to reflect her purity — every bud and blossom springing forth the unstained white bloom of her life. Focus only on three-petaled flora, and a garden can be a continual reflection on the mysteries of the Trinity. A garden intended to reflect our Lady's seven sorrows might be sown with the tear-shaped flower petals of the Virginia Spiderwort, Ladies mantle (bearing the stain of water drops from rain); Lily of the Valley, Quaking Grass (having tearlike seed clumps), and Job's tears, to name just a few.
Another colorful work of nature may give rise to meditations on the many virtues of Mary. The beauty of the hidden violet reminds us of Mary's humility. Monkshood, also called “Our Lady's Slipper,” is a visitation symbol of Mary's grace filled visit to her cousin. The periwinkle's blue (the Virgin Flower) recalls to us her fullness of grace. Even the strawberry holds divine revelation of Jesus' Mother. Once known as the “Fruitful Virgin,” it is in flower and fruit at the same time.
The possibilities are unlimited.
According to author Krymow, most people do not plant with a particular reflection in mind. They just plant what Marian flowers they find locally, and are pleasantly surprised by the results. “Wherever I give talks, people are very excited to find that the flowers they already love are associated with Mary. The Mary Garden is so easy to create, and it really does become a prayer in itself. People tell me often that once they learn the legends and names of the plants, they do find themselves thinking about Mary. The flowers and herbs in the garden come to have a special meaning, and they find themselves meditating on the virtues and times of Our Lady. And these aren't just Catholics. Episcopalians and some Lutherans are getting into the act as well. They have a sense that it's more than just gardening.”
A Mary garden can be as large or as simple as you like. It might be a reflection on the Way of the Cross, or just a collection of herbs that bring to mind Our Lady and a prayer. Whether it is a parish project, a space next to your house, or a simple dish garden for a sick friend, there are only two requirements: the flowers or herbs, and an image of Our Lady.
The key is to recognize it as a prayer. As one gardener put it, you need to be able “to see the act of placing a flower before Mary's statue as lighting a candle before her in the Church.”
How to Start
New Mary Gardeners are likely to be met with blank stares if they ask for “Our Lady's Milk” at the local garden center. Although most of the thousand of flowers and herbs are commonly available, the best seed catalogs and garden centers in our time are unlikely to have them listed by their pre-Reformation names.
One group of women, not knowing where to find the Catholic names of their favorite flowers, simply renamed them themselves. “I didn't know if they could do that,” said Krymow. “But I guess it's the prayer — not the name — that really counts.”
Before taking this approach, take advantage of the information others have already compiled. The www.mgardens.org Internet site has hundreds of lists, articles, and inspiration to draw on. Garden plans, plant lists, photos, and 50 years worth of Stokes articles and documentation are joined by an e-mail chat feature and monthly flower calendars.
If turning the pages of a book holds greater inspiration for you, you may be intrigued by the legends, meditations, and color sketches of Krymow's book, Mary's Flowers. The University of Dayton also has an impressive amount of data available, some of which is listed on their site: www. Udayton.edu/Mary. Additional inspiration might be found by pilgrimage to one of Our Ladies gardens at the shrines of Knock, Ireland, and Akita, Japan. The first public Mary Garden of the United States is at the Angelus Tower of St. Joseph's Church, Woods Hole, Cape Cod, Mass. Other beautifully maintained Mary Gardens are at St. Mary's Parish, Annapolis, Md., St. Catherine of Siena Parish, Portage, Maine, and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
Stokes recommends the planting of Mary Gardens as “as a prayerful, religious work of stewardship for God's flower, riches, and artistry with devotion, praise, thanksgiving, meditation, and commitment.” It's the kind of prayer that can draw in the elderly, give holy rest to the minds of the busy, and teach even the simple mind of a child. Leave it to Mary to use something so beautiful, and so earthy, as yet another means of planting the seed of Christ in the fertile soil of our souls.
Caroline Schermerhorn writes from Newark, Ohio.
Information
Mary's Flowers by
Vincenzina Krymow
(St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1999)
www.mgardens.org
www. Udayton.edu/Mary
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Caroline Schermerhorn ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Family Advocates Lose One of their Own DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Family advocates lost one of their own with the death of David Orgon Coolidge on March 10.
Coolidge, who founded the Marriage Law Project at Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law, died after a battle with brain cancer. On March 15, Coolidge's family, colleagues and friends gathered in St. John's Catholic Church in McLean, Va. to say farewell to a man who had dedicated his life to defending the Church's teachings on the sanctity of marriage.
Coolidge's colleague, Robert Destro, of the Columbus School of Law told the Register that Coolidge was instrumental in bringing the Marriage Law Project to the law school.
Destro said that the idea for the program came about after they saw the movement toward same-sex marriage gaining ground, and Coolidge “put together the first team.” The Marriage Law Project had added to the corpus of legal writings on the subject of marriage. Destro said that prior to the inception of the project, there was a lack of legal literature regarding the nature of marriage.
Under Coolidge's direction, the program played a pivotal role in defeating Vermont's attempt to legalize same-sex marriage — though the “civil unions” compromise, Coolidge pointed out, was nearly as bad.
According to Wendy Herdlein, a staff attorney with the Marriage Law Project, Coolidge played a major role in the battle over same-sex marriage in Vermont. Herdlein said that the Vermont Supreme Court's decision “was a direct challenge to Vermont's marriage laws.” Coolidge drafted one of the amicus briefs that were filed by the Diocese of Burlington, which urged the court to defend traditional marriage. Although in its final decision, the court “did not strike the marriage statutes” according to Herdlein, the court did say, “it was unconstitutional to only give marital benefits to only male-female couples”.
Coolidge spent several months in Vermont working with local groups who sought to defend traditional marriage. By all accounts, the Marriage Law Project was not merely an intellectual exercise for Coolidge but a vocation. He not only defended the traditional family, he sought to live it out in his own life.
“One thing he did the last year before he got sick was he started to work from home two days a week in order to spend time with his kids. It showed a great commitment to his family,” Herdlein said. “He and Joanie had a very deep and sweet marriage. It made his legal arguments more authentic because he lived it out everyday. It was not just a legal project, it was very personal mission. The Marriage Law Project was very much his calling.”
Bob Laird, the director of the Family Life office for the Diocese of Arlington in Virginia worked closely with Coolidge when the County of Arlington decided to enact a domestic partnership ordinance in 1997. Laird recounted Coolidge and his Marriage Law Project colleague, Bill Duncan. “God bless them, they spent their Thanksgiving weekend working on this. Dave was absolutely incredible on this,” Laird told the Register.
Laird said that Coolidge did not go around “putting out little bonfires, he was going around the world putting out major forest fires” regarding marriage. “There were major attacks on the family.”
Laird recalled Coolidge's work for the U.S. Catholic Conference. “He fought the big one in Hawaii,” Laird said referring to the amicus brief that Coolidge drafted for the diocese of Honolulu. “His passing really causes a void in this area of law.”
Other voices have added to the chorus of people who praise Coolidge's work. “David Coolidge was a gifted Christian attorney who made immense contributions to the legal battle to protect marriage and the traditional family,” said Jan LaRue, senior director of Legal Studies at the Family Research Council. “David's intelligent advocacy was always seasoned with love, grace and humility. We will all miss him very much. Our prayers are with his family.”
Un-Eulogy
At the funeral, Catholic author George Weigel delivered what he called the “un-eulogy”. “We don't give eulogies in the Catholic Church,” he told the Register.
In his remarks during Coolidge's Mass of Christian Burial, Weigel said, “David Coolidge's life is a model of witness. David was a faithful witness, whose faith in Christ, through the grace of Christ, made him the man who lives in Christ today. David was a witness to the power of love to transform lives and to bring new life into being. He was a witness to hope, who lived his professional life as a vocation, not merely a career. He was a witness to truth — to the truth about the dignity and value of every human life.”
Weigel pointed out how Coolidge embodied the Catholic notion of striving to affect the world for good. “David could and did speak the truth in ways that invited others into conversation. In doing that, David embodied in a rare and precious way the Catholic conviction that our commitment to the truth does not close us off from the world; rather, it opens us up to genuine dialogue with others.”
At the end of his life, in spite of being wracked with tremendous pain, Coolidge and his wife continued to provide a warm and loving home for their young children. Herdlein said that the last six months were very difficult for the family.
“He was diagnosed with brain cancer in early August of last year,” Herdlein recalled. “At first, he started to have speech problems. He then had two surgeries to shrink the tumor. After the second surgery, it was downhill from there. During the last month, it was difficult for him to speak. Throughout all of this, he was always mentally there. It was very frustrating for him that people could only speak to him and he could not respond. He was a great talker.”
Herdlein said that the end for Coolidge came quickly and calmly. “The morning they realized that he was going to die, the family and some close friends gathered around his bed.
Joanie Coolidge told her children “it was time for Daddy to go to heaven now.” The children then starting signing Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Your Peace). His breath was labored, then it stopped.
“He died,” said Herdlein, “while his kids were singing to him.”
Maria Elena Kennedy writes from Covina, California.
----- EXCERPT: ProLife ProFile ----- EXTENDED BODY: Maria Elena Kennedy ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Glasgow Pro-Life Center Opens DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:ZENIT, March 7 — Glasgow Arch bishop Mario Conti opened a new pro-life education center named after his predecessor, Cardinal Thomas Winning.
The Cardinal Winning Pro-Life Center will be the base for the Pro-Life Initiative that he launched five years ago. The program has since been adopted by the bishops' conference of Scotland, and 431 babies have been born after their mothers approached the project for help.
----- EXCERPT: Life Notes ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: House Passes Born Alive Act DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 12 — The U.S. House of Representatives voted to define an unborn child that has been born and is fully outside a woman's body as having been “born alive.”
The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act would amend the legal definitions of “person,” “human being,” “child” and “individual” to include an unborn child that is either breathing or has a heartbeat once out of the womb.
The goal of pro-life legislators supporting the bill is to protect unborn children who have survived abortion attempts.
”It's long overdue that this become law,” said pro-life U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, who wrote the legislation. “It just seems like common sense that when a baby is born, no matter what the circumstances of the birth may have been, even if it was a botched abortion, that the child be treated with basic human dignity.” An identical bill sponsored by pro-life U.s. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., is pending in the Senate.
----- EXCERPT: Life Notes ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Kansas Court to Define Life DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 21 — The Kansas House voted 70-50 to direct the attorney general's office to file a lawsuit asking the Kansas Supreme Court to make the declaration that life begins at conception.
Pro-lifers hope the court will rule that an unborn child is enTITLEd to protections provided by the Kansas Constitution, including the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“This is a direct attack on Roe v. Wade,” said Rep. Rick Rehorn, a pro-abortion Democrat.
Under state law, the attorney general must raise questions of constitutional law with the court when ordered to do so by either chamber of the Legislature. The Senate doesn't have to vote on the issue.
----- EXCERPT: Life Notes ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Catholic Teacher Sues Union DATE: 04/07/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 7-13, 2002 ----- BODY:ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 19 — A Catholic teacher is suing local, state and national teachers unions for requiring him to pay fees he says support abortion and birth control policies.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Gerard O'Brien says the family planning positions taken by the unions go against his religious beliefs.
O'Brien, who teaches gym to students with physical disabilities, says abortion is wrong and he should not be forced to give money to groups advocating abortion or condom distribution.
He's not a union member, but he's required to pay an agency fee of about $500 a year, his lawyer said.
----- EXCERPT: Life Notes ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Bethlehem's Battle: War Where Peace Was Born DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM — Israel's incursion into Palestinian areas and its standoff with armed Palestinian militants in the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem have sharply divided Holy Land Christians.
Local Christian leaders, as well as Vatican representatives in the Holy Land, have said that Israel is primarily to blame for the standoff at the Basilica, which began April 2 after Palestinian Muslim gunmen took refuge there. But other Christians have accused the armed Muslims of deliberately using the holy site as a base for firing on Israeli soldiers.
In late March Israeli troops re-entered Bethlehem and several other Palestinian towns and cities that it had handed over to the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s, under the terms of the Oslo Peace treaty.
Since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, more than 1,000 Palestinians and Israelis have died in ongoing violence. Israel's latest military assault came in the wake of numerous Palestinian terror attacks, which in March claimed the lives of 110 Israeli civilians.
Some 200 Palestinians, both civilians and combatants, have been killed in the recent Israeli offensive.
Members of the indigenous Christian population — who identify themselves as Palestinians — have dubbed the Israeli military operation a crime against humanity, and the armed gunmen holed up in the church “freedom fighters.”
Many non-Palestinian Christians, on the other hand, believe that Israel has a right to protect its citizens by rooting out terrorists, some of whom are directly affiliated with Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat. One of the militants reportedly killed by Israeli soldiers during their West Bank campaign was Kais Adwan, the man who masterminded a Passover-eve suicide bombing that left 27 mostly elderly Israelis dead.
Israel Blamed
While condemning violence of any sort, the Palestinian Christians deny that their armed brethren, virtually all of them Muslim, are terrorists, and insist that any means employed to end the “occupation” are justified.
“The Arab Palestinian Christians are part and parcel of the Palestinian people and the Palestinians' suffering is the suffering of the Arab Christians,” says Anglican Bishop Riah Abu El Assal. “The hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian people are also our hopes and aspirations.”
The bishop said that the Holy Land churches must be a safe haven for all, even those who are armed.
“There are conflicting reports on whether the men inside the church are armed. We ourselves are not involved in the smuggling of arms or anything of that sort,” Bishop Abu El Assal stressed.
Even if the militants are armed, he added, “the churches have always been places of refuge for those who sought it. It was true for the Jewish people in the 1940s. Why should it not be true for the Palestininans who consider the Church of the Nativity their own?”
Bishop Abu El Assal noted that local Christians, all of them civilians, have been wounded and killed in recent days. Like the Muslim residents of Bethlehem and other areas under Israeli siege, they have been subjected to crippling curfews, severe shortages of food, water and medicine, and house-to-house searches by Israeli soldiers seeking militants.
Referring to the young bell-ringer at the Church of the Nativity who was shot to death last week just outside the church, the bishop said, “The bullets don't differentiate between Christians and Muslims. Look at the fellow who rang the bell in the church. Both Christians and Muslims are under siege.”
Like many other Palestinians, the bishop blamed Israel for all of the problems.
“All of the pain and suffering stems from the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. If we want to end the pain and suffering, Israel must withdraw. That's the only way forward. As long as there is an occupation,” he said, the Palestinians “will resist.”
In an address to the faithful this week, Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, strongly condemned “the siege of the Basilica and the psychological war waged by the Israeli soldiers around it.”
The patriarch, the highest ranking official of the local Catholic Church and a vocal supporter of Palestinian nationhood, accused the Israelis of spreading “false news and rumors … to the effect that the Franciscan brothers” trapped in the Basilica “are being held hostage inside the convent by the Palestinians. We declare that this is false.”
Israel insists that the clergy became hostages after armed Palestinians sought refuge in the church compound April 2, something the Palestinian Authority denies.
The Holy Land Trust, a Palestinian Christian organization, declared in a statement that “the silence of the United States govern ment and the governments of the world to the Israeli atrocities taking place against the Palestinian civilians in the West Bank cities continues to be the green light needed for the Israeli government to terrorize, destroy and kill the Palestinian people.”
When, the statement asked, “will Israel be pressured to abide with U.N. resolutions recently passed — with the support of the U.S. — demanding Israel's immediate withdrawal from the West Bank cities?”
Monastery Death
On April 8, after a Palestinian policeman died was killed in the Franciscan monastery adjacent to the Basilica during an exchange of gunfire and grenades, Franciscan Father David Jaeger told the Vatican news agency Fides that Israel had broken its pledge to refrain from launching a military strike against the holy site.
“This is a horrible act of barbarity, which will have unimaginable consequences,” said Father Yeager, who is a spokesman for the Holy Land Custody, which oversees Catholic interests in the region.
Other Christians, however, were quick to blame the Palestinian Authority for the continuing cycle of violence.
Writing in his organization's electronic newsletter, Rev. Malcolm Hedding, executive director of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, a Jerusalem-based evangelical organization, strongly condemned “the deliberate and provocative exploitation by armed Palestinian elements of the landmark Church of the Nativity and other religious sites in Bethlehem as a safe haven, along with their use of innocent civilians as human shields.”
Hedding termed the Bethlehem standoff “a premeditated offense by militant outlaws who know it is a place central to our faith and thus would provide them unquestioned refuge.” Christians everywhere “should be outraged by this action and join in condemning it,” he said.
The newsletter asserted that the Palestinian Authority has actively encouraged armed gunmen to use the Manger Square area and its Christian places as a shelter and base for terrorist operations in recent months.
“Such tactics are shocking but not surprising, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, “since the PLO [the Palestine Liberation Organization, forerunner to the Palestinian Authority] systematically defiled and destroyed churches and other Christian properties in Lebanon after sparking that nation's long civil war.”
As war raged on between Israelis and Palestinians, Christian observers outside the Holy Land simply called for peace, without allotting blame, at least officially, to either side.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, president of the Catholic Conference of Bishops in England, stated that “it is imperative that the international community redouble its efforts to assist in this search for a just peace.” He added that such a peace should recognize “the rights of the Palestinians to live in a state of their own, free from domination and military repression, and the right of Israel to peace and security.”
Divine Mercy
And on Divine Mercy Sunday, April 7, Pope John Paul II asked Catholics around the world to pray for peace.
“It seems that war has been declared on peace,” the Holy Father said in his Sunday address to pilgrims in St Peter's Square. “But nothing is resolved by war, it only brings greater suffering and death. Nothing is resolved through reprisal and retaliation.”
The Pope assured the Franciscans, Greek-Orthodox and Orthodox Armenians who remained trapped in the Basilica of the Nativity of his continued prayers, and said that only God “can give the energies that are necessary to be freed from hatred and the thirst for vengeance and undertake the way of negotiation for peace.”
Added John Paul II, “How is it possible to forget that, following Abraham's example, Israelis and Palestinians believe in the one God? To him, whom Jesus revealed as the merciful Father, is raised the joint prayer of Christians who repeat with St. Francis of Assisi: ‘Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.’”
Michele Chabin writes from Jerusalem.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: How Priests, Parents and Baseball Gave Three Major League Faith DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:CHICAGO — Easter Sunday this year not only celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it also marked the beginning of the 2002 Major League Baseball season. As the religious faithful flocked to their parishes, thousands of baseball faithful filled the seats at stadiums around the country.
In light of the start of baseball season, the Register recently spoke with four associated with the sport: Tom Kelly, the former manager of the Minnesota Twins who retired after last season; Mario Impemba, the former play-by-play announcer for the Anaheim Angels and now a broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers; Ed Farmer, a former Chicago White Sox pitcher, All-Star and now an announcer for the team; and John Rooney, a 14-year broadcast veteran and Farmer's partner in the booth.
They show what good priests, strong families — and plenty of baseball — can do to form character.
Before his retirement, Tom Kelly, 51, held the record for the longest tenure with one team among Major League Baseball managers today. He is commonly acknowledged in the baseball world as a gentleman with high principles and a strong work ethic. He credits his Catholic faith.
He remembered his high school, St. Mary's in South Amboy, N.J., where he had the positive influence of his varsity basketball coach and health teacher, Luke Lenehan.
“He always had something useful to say. He told me to take my time and make the shot, because someday it may be important,” he said. “He instilled self-confidence.” He also learned good values from the Sisters of Mercy nuns who taught him, he said.
Although it is common within baseball to move from one organization to another — for coaches as well as players — Kelly opted to stay in Minnesota for the better part of his career. For the sake of his family he turned down more lucrative offers to stay in the Twin Cities area.
“I believe that sports, viewed in the proper perspective, in a positive way, can help bring families together and share values of fairness and application,” said Kelly.
Ed Farmer pitched for the White Sox in the early 1980s. He was an all-star on the team and even was named to a hall of fame — not the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. — but nonetheless a locally significant one: the Chicago Catholic League Hall of Fame.
“I guess they ran out of people and they just added my name,” he said jokingly. “To tell you the truth … I played basketball and baseball at St. Rita High School, so they thought enough of me to put me in the hall of fame at St. Rita and the Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame.”
As a product of the Chicago Catholic school system, Farmer, 52, recalled the influence of the Dominican sisters at St. Thomas More grade school and St. Rita high school on the city's South Side, taught by Augustinian fathers.
“The Augustinians are wonderful teachers and had a great impact on me,” he said. “I know that the Jesuits are great teachers, and the Augustinians are right there with them.”
One of Farmer's schoolmates, Father Bernie Danber, is also a member of the Augustinian order is still in close contact with Farmer and his broadcast partner, John Rooney.
The two not only share the ESPN Radio broadcast booth, but they also share their Catholic faith. On the road they attend Mass together and during games the pair is known for reminding audience members of upcoming religious holidays or Catholic holy days of obligation.
Rooney, who grew up about an hour outside Kansas City in Richmond, Mo., recalled the nuns who taught at his “terrific school,” Immaculate Conception in Lexington, Mo., about 10 miles away from his hometown.
“Among the priests in the parish I especially remember Father Burke,” he said. “He had this big belt and nobody messed around with Father Burke. He was one of the nicest people around, though.” Another priest, Father Boland, was “big on family,” he remembered.
If Mario Impemba ever gets weary of the travel schedule he keeps as an announcer for the Detroit Tigers, all he has to do is think of the Pope's.
“I am in awe of the travel schedule he keeps!” Impemba said.
“The Pope has always been someone I've admired, with his ability to communicate to so many people in so many languages around the world,” Impemba said, “and his being someone everyone looks to in times of crisis such as we have had recently.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christina Kirsh and G.E. Devine ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Clergy Abuse: Cases Few, Response Significant DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Although the damage done by sexual abuse has been “immeasurable,” the number of priests involved in such activity have been few, Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belville, Ill., president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in February.
At least 232 priests have been removed over the past 20 years because of sexual misconduct with minors, according to a survey of 178 dioceses conducted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Compared to the more than 40,000 priests in the United States, the number is small though tragic.
The statistics from individual dioceses also put the problem in perspective. In Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law is said to have turned over to Massachusetts authorities the names of 60 to 70 priests who had been accused of abusing minors (nearly all of them abused teen-agers), but that figure covers the past 40 years. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia recently found “credible evidence” that 35 of the 2,154 diocesan priests who have been in service since 1950 sexually abused minors. That's about 1.6%.
Although the Church has been accused of doing too little too late to respond to sexual abuse, Bishop John F. Kinney of St. Cloud, Minn., said the bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse, which he headed from 1993 to 2000, found that “Catholic dioceses have been as quick as most other religious and professional groups in developing guidelines and taking action to deal with sexual abuse.”
The Church in the United States was one of the earliest organizations to recognize that pedophilia existed and to send people for help, said Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist who serves on the U.S. bishops Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse. Church concerns set up centers for priests with addictive problems, including alcoholism and sexual abuse.
At least 80% of the dioceses responding to the Post-Dispatch survey said they rely on lay committees, not just the hierarchy, to assess allegations of sex abuse.
Following is a summary of actions taken and statements issued over the years by the Holy See and the United States bishops:
The case of Gilbert Gauthe, a Louisiana priest suspended in 1983 for molesting small boys and sentenced to 20 years in prison, marked the start of a national effort by the U.S. bishops to prevent and respond to sexual abuse of children, especially within the Church. The bishops held discussion sessions with experts at national meetings. In the late 1980s, discussions began with the Vatican about streamlining the canonical process for laicization of abusers among the clergy.
Many dioceses in the 1980s produced the first written policies on the issue. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1992 adopted five core principles as the framework for all such policies, after which many dioceses revised their policies and procedures to make them more effective.
The five principles are:
E Respond promptly to all allegations of abuse where there is reasonable belief that abuse has occurred.
E If such an allegation is supported by sufficient evidence, relieve the alleged offender promptly of his ministerial duties and refer him for appropriate medical evaluation and intervention.
E Comply with the obligations of civil law as regards reporting of the incident and cooperating with the investigation.
E Reach out to the victims and their families and communicate sincere commitment to their spiritual and emotional well-being.
E Within the confines of respect for privacy of the individuals involved, deal as openly as possible with the members of the community.
Unfortunately, some diocese failed to remove even acknowledged offenders from ministerial duties, and have done so only recently, under legal pressure and in the glare of media attention. Also, some dioceses failed to comply with the obligations of civil law even when the abuser acknowledged his crimes.
In 1993, the bishops formed an Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse. Over the next four years the committee developed and discussed with the bishops extensive resources for all dioceses. They cover everything from assisting victims and families therapeutically and pastorally to abuse prevention programs, from initial handling and investigation of allegations to removal, evaluation and treatment of priests found to have engaged in misconduct.
The committee covered issues of insurance and civil and Church law, psychological testing and screening of priesthood candidates, screening and training of Church employees and volunteers. It recommended model outlines for comprehensive diocesan policies and procedures, with guidance on issues to address in adapting them to local circumstances, such as different levels of expertise and personnel between a small, rural diocese and a large, urban archdiocese.
Also that year, Pope John Paul II addresses the issue with U.S. bishops at the Vatican.
In 1994, when the Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse asked dioceses to submit their existing policies, 178 of the 188 dioceses responded. Of those, 157 submitted policies, 13 said they did not have a written policy and eight said they were working on one. Many of the policies submitted were revisions of policies originally developed in the 1980s.
Mark Chopko, general counsel for the bishops conference, said he is not aware of a single diocese that does not now have a written policy in place. Today, a person who presents an allegation to Church authorities “will be listened to, appreciated and responded to by skilled people,” Chopko said. “The complaint will be evaluated; if something needs to be reported it will be reported; the proper authorities will be contacted, and the whole pastoral outreach to that person, to the parish, to the community will be undertaken by the diocese.”
In 1995, the bishops published “Walk in the Light: A Pastoral Response to Child Sexual Abuse.”
In 2001, Pope John Paul made sexual activity with a minor an ecclesiastical crime that falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The Pope, in his Holy Thursday letter to priests this year, said perpetrators of sexual abuse have betrayed the priesthood and cast a “shadow of suspicion” over the many good priests in the world. He also said this year that a seminarian who has continuing difficulties with chastity should not be considered an appropriate candidate for priestly ordination.
Cardinal Law announced this year that from now on no priest of the Archdiocese of Boston who was ever found guilty of abusing a minor will be allowed to remain in active ministry. Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said that any priest involved in the sexual abuse of a minor, whether or not he is clinically diagnosed as a pedophile, will not receive an assignment in the archdiocese.
Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belville, Ill., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, expressed “profound sorrow that some of our priests were responsible” for abuse “under our watch.” He said that bishops have developed procedures whereby priests moving from one diocese to another must have certification of their good standing. They have also revised seminary screening and mandated in-service programs for priests, teachers, parish ministers and volunteers “to emphasize their responsibility to protect the innocent and vulnerable” from abuse, he said.
The bishops conference's Administrative Committee instructed the Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse to make recommendations for further action and determine whether additional principles other than those from 1992 should be formulated. A comprehensive response at the national level is on the agenda for the semi-annual meeting of the U.S. Bishops in June.
(CNS contributed to this report)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: World Health Organization: Pill Use Triples A Cancer Risk DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:LONDON — Women who use the oral contraceptive pill for more than five years could triple or quadruple their risk of developing cervical cancer, a major World Health Organization study has found.
About 13,000 American women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer this year, and it will kill about 4,100. Worldwide, approximately 200,000 women die of cervical cancer, the most common cancer killer in large parts of the developing world. But despite the new findings from the WHO, the American Cancer Society and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not think women ought to reconsider or adjust their pill consumption.
The WHO study, published March 27 online in the British medical journal The Lancet, examined the history of 3,769 women in eight countries who had the human papilloma virus (HPV) — a widespread sexually transmitted infection believed to be a necessary precursor for developing cervical cancer.
Since most women who have HPV do not go on to develop cervical cancer, scientists believe there must be co-factors encouraging the virus to cause cancer. The contraceptive pill has long been a prime suspect: Previous studies had always revealed a connection but left the question of whether women on the pill were simply more vulnerable to the virus because of their sexual activity.
Researchers at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, pooled data in eight control studies to compare 1,853 women with HPV and cervical cancer to 1,916 with HPV but no cancer, and asked them about their birth control practices. They found women with HPV who take the pill for less than five years do not significantly increase their risk of developing cervical cancer, but those on it for longer than five years are nearly three times as likely to develop the disease. Those who take it for more than 10 years quadruple their risk.
Moreover, the increased danger persisted for more than 15 years, even if a woman stopped taking the pill.
American Cancer Society
After the WHO study was published, the American Cancer Society's Web page on cervical cancer ranked the oral contraceptive risk beneath smoking (which possibly doubles a woman's risk of the disease) and “diet” (low in fruit and vegetables). The Web page said “no definite evidence exists linking the use of oral contraceptives with cervical cancer,” but did acknowledge that “Some research suggests a relationship between OC [oral contraceptive] use for five or more years and a slight increase in risk of cervical cancer. Research is underway to resolve this issue.”
The site added: “In the meantime the American Cancer Society believes that a woman and her health care provider should consider whether the benefits of using OCs [oral contraceptives] outweigh this very slight potential risk.”
Debbie Saslow, the American Cancer Society's director of breast and gynecologic cancers who edited the society's Web page, defended this minimization of the pill-cervical cancer linkage. “Well, the increased risk is pretty small,“ Saslow said. “It's nothing that women should stop taking OCPs [oral contraceptive pills] for. It's a small increased risk of a small risk to begin with.”
About 1% of women will develop cervical cancer. Long-term pill use raises the odds to 3% or 4%, according to the WHO findings.
Saslow argued that the increase risk of cervical cancer is offset by the beneficial effect that the pill has on endometrial, uterine and ovarian cancer, and in giving women “contraceptive choices.” Some studies have shown that using the pill for one year decreases the risk of endometrial cancer by 50%, Saslow said. “For cervical cancer we can screen,” she noted, adding that most physicians will not prescribe the pill without annually testing patients for cervical cancer as well. “And it's treatable so there's a much higher survival rate. The other cancers are far more lethal, so you have to put it in perspective.”
Saslow added that the American Cancer Society's position would apply to American women and not to Third World women, who do not have adequate medical treatment and who constitute 80% of the world's deaths from cervical cancer.
Dr. Herschel Lawson, a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Cancer Prevention and Control, said the WHO data was collected from countries where there may not be active screening for cervical cancer (Thailand, Philippines, Morocco, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Colombia and Spain), even though the study reported that it had controlled for screening.
“I'm not sure the findings can be generalized to the United States where we have such a high proportion of women being opportunistically screened on an ongoing basis, and the incidence and mortality of true invasive cancer is so low,” said Herschel. “Our message is that women need to have a Pap test at least once every three years after they have had three consecutive annual tests that are negative, until they are either 65 or have had a hysterectomy for disease unrelated to cervical cancer or its precursors.”
Informed Consent
But Dr. Chris Kahlenborn, an internist in Altoona, Pa., and author of Breast Cancer: Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill, said that it is too early to definitively weigh the cancer benefits and risks of the birth control pill. Such an assessment may not be possible for years, until those women who have been taking them earlier and longer than previous generations become older.
Given that uncertainty, Kahlenborn said, all of the pill's potential hazards should be clearly explained to women considering its use.
“It's not that the pill is completely bad medically,” said Kahlenborn. “The issue is informed consent.”
Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, makes Ortho-Tricyclen, a popular American brand of birth control. The company's current ads emphasize cosmetic benefits associated with the pill (“clinically proven to make your skin look better”) and advertise studies finding a positive effect in combating other reproductive cancers.
By contrast, the package insert of prescribing information, published online on the company's Web site, acknowledges the risk of cervical cancer associated with the pill's use as a “controversy.” Ortho-McNeil failed to reply to a request from the Register to comment on the WHO study.
“With this study, the onus is definitely on ob/gyns to warn their patients,” said Kahlenborn, who warned that birth control manufacturers, cancer awareness groups and even insurance companies could be liable for failing to fully inform women about the known body of evidence on the pill.
But the American Cancer Society's Saslow said she didn't think informing women about the new scientific findings regarding cervical cancer was necessary. “I'm in favor of drug companies giving women information but personally, I'm not comfortable with warning them,” Saslow said. “You don't make policy based on one study.”
Asked if the 4,000 women who die of cervical cancer this year might not think they have a right to know about the study findings, she replied, “I don't feel qualified to answer that.”
However, after being interviewed, Saslow sent the Register's correspondent an e-mail saying the American Cancer Society Web site would be “updated” to reflect the study findings and the pages pertaining to cervical cancer were temporarily removed from the site.
Kahlenborn sees the American Cancer Society and the CDC as “extremely politicized” on the issue, comparing it with their unwillingness to notify women of the documented breast cancer risks associated with the pill and with abortion.
“As more information comes out, it's going to be increasingly difficult to suppress,” said Kahlenborn. “There' a growing sense that it's really just a matter of time before the lid blows on this thing. I think by the year 2010, we will start to see a new attitude towards the pill, and it will be fuelled by lawsuits.”
Celeste McGovern writes from Portland, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Celeste Mcgovern ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Amazing Grace DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Born with cerebral palsy, Grace MacKinnon has had to overcome many obstacles to get where she is today.
She currently serves as Instructor of Catholic Doctrine with the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas. In addition, she is a syndicated columnist. Her Catholic Q&A column, “Dear Grace,” appears in several secular newspapers in south Texas, as well as Catholic publications in other parts of the country. She recently spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake from her home in Texas.
You were a Brownsville girl.
Yes. I was born and grew up in Brownsville, Texas, located on the Mexican border of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. My parents had eight children — all girls. I was the only one born with a physical disability. When my father walked out on us, we were all still quite young and my mother was faced with raising her eight daughters alone.
In spite of having only an eighth-grade education, she did a wonderful job. She was a very courageous woman who was dedicated to her children always. Even though we were financially poor, all nine of us living in a two-room house, we were happy because we had each other.
At the age of 6, your mother sent you to a special school in Galveston, Texas for a year. What was it like being away from home and what was that year like for you?
It was an enormously difficult and challenging year. I felt abandoned and lost without my mother and sisters. The reason I was sent to Galveston was so that I could be physically rehabilitated and learn to walk with leg braces and crutches and thus be able to take care of myself.
The loneliness I experienced there is almost beyond words, but God saw me through it all. I learned to walk, feed myself, dress myself, and all the other tasks of daily life. Deep inside, though, was a nagging thought that maybe my mother would never come back for me. As a young child of 6, I simply did not understand why it was all happening to me.
What was it like when you were reunited a year later?
That day was one of the most memorable of my whole life.
I will never forget the look on my mother's face when she saw me walk for the first time on crutches. I was so happy to see her! And I realized how difficult it had all been for her too in letting me go for that year.
But she had done it for me, so that I would have a chance in life. I think that I grew up a lot that year. Before that, I had lived in a very protected world where everything was done for me. After that year, I had a new strength and a fighting spirit. I was determined to make it in life and I had a tremendous hunger for knowledge.
You went on to pursue a university degree and later a master's in theology. What obstacles were you forced to overcome along the way and how did you surmount them?
Obtaining a normal education was never easy for me. There were always architectural and attitudinal barriers.
In the 1950s, schools were not geared for handicapped children, so fighting for access was a constant challenge. Initially I was enrolled in an institutional school for crippled children, but thanks to my mother's determination, I eventually attended public school and became an honor student. I had to walk to school with leg braces and crutches, though, because my family had no car. Many times I fell and suffered broken bones and concussions, but I refused to quit. Over the years, there were always people who thought I could not do it, but God sent others who thought I could. I was blessed with some excellent teachers who played a very important role in my life.
The day that I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, I felt on top of the world! My elementary school principal who had given my start in public school was there to share it with me. Nineteen years later, I returned to college to study theology. Four years later, I was holding the MA in theological studies. God really had a plan.
Eventually, you reached a point where you accepted your particular cross. When was that?
It happened one lonely night while I was a student at UT in Austin. Basically, I decided to stop running from suffering and accept whatever God had chosen or allowed in my life. I knew from that day forward that, if I were willing, he would use my suffering for a great good. And he has.
How have you come to understand suffering?
I believe today that the mystery of suffering is that it is a sign of love. Jesus, who was God himself, suffered willingly, and he did it for love. Every time we gaze at the cross, we should be reminded that it took a great love to do that, to suffer and die for us. If we meditate on it, the cross should transform us and lead us to love. I believe that is precisely why he did it in that way. He accomplished our salvation by way of suffering. So, to me, when a person suffers in a visible way, it is a very particular share in the suffering of Christ because he too suffered visibly. My hope is that if people see me suffering with joy, they will be led to love more, to appreciate and value every human person, and to see the moments of grace in their lives.
You currently teach adult education for the Diocese of Brownsville. Do you have any favorite stories that have resulted from your teaching?
Shortly after receiving the MA in theology, and returning to my home-town, I began my work for the Church when the bishop of Brownsville, the Most Reverend Raymundo J. Peña, graciously allowed me to offer a class for adults on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I titled “Come Fall In Love With Jesus Christ.”
Hundreds of people have taken this course in the last five years. Some of them have come forward in tears to express their gratitude for opening up the beauty of the truth found in the Catholic faith. One woman said she returned to confession for the first time in thirty-two years. Several couples that were only married legally decided to do the right thing and be married in the Church.
I was even honored by being asked to be a sponsor at one of these marriages! Young men and women have shared that they discovered the true meaning of sexuality. Adult Catholics truly do have a hunger to learn their faith better, but we need many more good teachers in order to do this.
Your “Dear Grace” column attracted the attention of secular newspapers before the Catholic press caught on, isn't that correct?
Yes, it started because of all the questions I was always asked everywhere I taught. There never seemed enough time to answer them all! One day, my sister said, “Why don't you write a column in the newspaper?” That sounded like a great idea, but would a secular paper ever agree to run a definitely Catholic column? I thought to myself, “For God, I will do anything!” So, I went to see the editor of the Brownsville Herald, the city newspaper, and convinced him to try it! It has been a huge success and now appears in seven secular newspapers in the Rio Grande Valley, in addition to other Catholic diocesan newspapers in other parts of the country.
Catholics as well as non-Catholics want straight answers. They do not want someone's opinion.
They are tired of hearing opinions. They want to hear what the Church teaches. Each week, before it goes to press, my column is reviewed by my bishop's censor librorum, which means that people can rest assured it will always be free of doctrinal error.
NOW President Promotes Pro-Abortion Agenda on Loyola Campus
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Grace MacKinnon ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----- TITLE: NOW President Promotes Pro-Abortion Agenda on Loyola Campus DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:‘Kim Gandy's beliefs are contrary to the clear and unambiguous teachings of the Catholic Church.’
— Archbishop Alfred Hughes of New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS — Loyola University invited abortion activist Kim Gandy to speak on campus last month despite the repeated objections of Archbishop Alfred Hughes, who warned that the school's identity as a Catholic institution would now be under discussion.
Loyola is a Jesuit-operated institution that is located in the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
“I have voiced my serious concerns directly to the university's president, Bernard P. Knoth, S.J., and will continue the conversation about the meaning of Loyola's claim to a Catholic identity and mission,” Archbishop Hughes said in a public statement released before Gandy's appearance in late March.
“In her public statements, the president of NOW has made it clear that she and her organization, under the guise of protecting women's rights, opposes efforts to limit or restrict abortion,” said the archbishop. “Her beliefs are contrary to the clear and unambiguous teachings of the Catholic Church.”
Gandy, a 1978 graduate of Loyola's law school, spoke at Loyola on March 20 and received an award from the university's Gills Long Poverty Law Center to “recognize her efforts to eliminate gender bias.”
During her 55-minute talk, Gandy did mention abortion, specifically criticizing the Bush administration's efforts to put what she called “ultraconservative” pro-life judges in the courts.
“I'm scared to death, and I can't figure out how to make this into a sound bite,” said Gandy.
Peter Finney, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said Archbishop Hughes wouldn't elaborate on his comments until he met with Father Knoth.
“They have a meeting after Easter and I'm sure all these issues will come up,” Finney said. The archbishop also wrote about the Loyola's decision for an upcoming issue of the Clarion Herald, the newspaper of the archdiocese.
Said Finney, “The archbishop is trying to keep the dialogue open and he's using the Clarion Herald column to get his opinions known.”
No Explanation
Kristine David, director of public affairs at Loyola, said that the university president was refusing all interview requests.
“We do not have a response,” David said. “They have a luncheon scheduled for April. That's where we are. We don't have a response from the president. We have no comment.”
Gandy accused Archbishop Hughes of conjuring controversy over her visit in order to deflect criticism arising from the sex scandals affecting the Catholic Church nationwide.
“The archbishop of New Orleans is urging my law school to do away with traditional academic freedom of speech and replace the free exchange of ideas with religious doctrine,” Gandy said.
She added, “I imagine that Archbishop Hughes finds this flame-throwing a welcome relief from the heat of Church cover-ups of pedophilia.”
Finney dismissed Gandy's comments, especially the accusation of interfering with academic freedom, which has become a hot topic on many Catholic campuses since the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops last year approved norms for implementing Ex Corde Ecclesiae (Born From the Heart of the Church), Pope John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution for Catholic higher education.
Opponents of the implementation of Ex Corde have argued that it will interfere with academic freedom. However, the papal document repeatedly affirms the principle of academic freedom, balanced by the requirement that Catholic universities also uphold the fundamental principles of the Church.
In its opening paragraph on the “Identity and Mission” of Catholic universities, Ex Corde states, “[The Catholic university] possesses that institutional autonomy necessary to perform its functions effectively and guarantees its members academic freedom, so long as the rights of the individual person and of the community are preserved within the confines of the truth and the common good.”
“We've heard that this is a case of academic freedom,” said Finney. “But she wasn't on a panel discussion. She was actually given an honor.”
Catholic Identity
Loyola is not the only Jesuit university to face criticism for an alleged failure to adhere to Church teachings. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, superior general of the Society of Jesus, commented in 1997 that secularization is rampant in Jesuit universities. “For some [Jesuit] universities,” he told Father Richard John Neuhaus during the Special Assembly for America of the Synod of Bishops in Rome, “it is probably too late to restore their Catholic character.”
Connie Marshner, chairman of the Cardinal Newman Society, said that Loyola is clearly failing to live up to its responsibilities.
“If Catholic identity means anything, it means that a national spokeswoman for the culture of death should not be given a free ride on a Catholic university campus,” said Marshner, whose group promotes orthodoxy at Catholic universities. “Few people in the country are on a more direct collision course with Catholic morality than Kim Gandy.”
Marshner especially objected to Loyola's law school giving Gandy an award.
“If the views she presented were balanced by another speaker, or were part of a debate in which students could explore the play of ideas, it might not be so outrageous,” she said.
Added Marshner, “It seems as if Archbishop Hughes understands the implications of this for Loyola's future Catholic identity. Good for him.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:New York Cardinal Halts Church Renovation
But the parish wants to enlarge the church's sanctuary in order to accommodate the many lay people who assist the priest today — lectors, extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, servers, cantors, commentators. Furthermore, the parish feels, the altar should be brought closer to the congregation, to help people have a sense of participation. That would involve significant renovations, including demolition of the Communion rail.
Although officials of the Archdiocese of New York approved the $3 million project, the Times reported that Cardinal Edward Egan put a stop to it in a letter to Jesuit Father Walter Modrys, the pastor. The cardinal seemed to be trying to preserve an architectural gem, and a New York City landmark, by appealing to a sense of history.
“The Communion rail may be seen as a barrier by some at this moment in history,” he wrote. But that does not justify removing it from St. Ignatius, “a beloved testimony to an era of Catholicism that is still highly esteemed.”
Andy Rooney Lambastes Church on Teachings
In a commentary riddled with inaccuracies, Rooney stated that the problem of sexual abuse “exists almost everywhere there are Catholic churches” and that “church choirs were a hunting ground for pedophile priests.”
Then, suggesting that humans lack the ability to sublimate their physical urges to a higher spiritual purpose, he claimed that sex “isn't something a person can decide not to have or promise not to have and then never have it.”
Rooney, who ended his Easter Sunday commentary by calling for an end to celibacy and the male-only priesthood, claimed that religions have long been concerned with sex in “strange ways” and that the Catholic Church has never accepted the idea that “sex was OK to have just for pleasure.” He might gain a more balanced understanding by reading Love and Responsibility, written by Bishop Karol Wojtyla, in which the future Pope John Paul II makes clear the Christian attitude toward love and sexuality: that a person, worthy of respect, should not be used as an object of pleasure.
Scandal Doesn't Affect Catholic School Enrollment
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 29 — The sex abuse scandal does not seem to have affected Catholic school enrollment, the wire service reported.
There are more than 2.6 million children in some 8,000 Catholic schools nationwide; enrollment has risen by about 2.5% during the last decade. Some schools even report waiting lists.
The National Catholic Education Association assured parents this week that Catholic schools work hard to make sure no child is abused, carefully screening employees.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Catholics Flock to Hear 'Stigmatic' Croatian Priest During U.S. Visit DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:STONY POINT, N.Y. — On a pre-spring weeknight in Stony Point, not too far outside New York City, about 2,000 people were waiting in an overflowing bare-bones retreat-center church. Those who arrived after 5:30 for the 7 p.m. main event found themselves standing in the cold, watching from outside the church's sliding glass walls or way beyond its entrance, listening through barely audible speakers.
The reason for the overflow turnout: the presence of Father Zlatko Sudac, a Croatian priest who claims to have the stigmata — bodily marks that resemble Christ's wounds.
The hope-filled, the desperate, and the just plain curious stood on their tip-toes, hoping to glimpse the priest they had heard about from friends or read about in an often-photocopied issue of a small-circulation Chicago publication called Medjugorje Magazine, containing one of the few English-language articles written about Father Sudac.
Medjugorje is the town in Croatia where many believe the Virgin Mary has been appearing monthly to a group of young locals since 1981. As a young boy, Zlatko, who was born in 1971, was among the pilgrims there. At 27, he was ordained a priest in the Croatian diocese of Krk. He has a special devotion to Mary.
Not Recognized
The Vatican has not recognized the authenticity of the claims of Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, and the bishop of Mostar, the diocese in which Medjugorje is located, has repeatedly instructed that all pilgrimages there must be entirely private and must not imply any official Church sanction of the claimed apparitions.
Sent to the United States by his bishop to learn English, Father Sudac moved into his temporary New Jersey home last September. By invitation, he has been touring churches mostly in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, but with the occasional trip elsewhere, to say Mass, to lead Eucharistic Adoration and to preach. His schedule in the area extends at least through May.
Up close, a cross appears to have been cut into Father Sudac's forehead, leaving a scar that just won't completely close. He has said it bleeds on the first Friday of every month.
The Vatican has not taken an official position on Father Sudac's stigmata, or his claims of speaking in tongues, bilocation, prophecy and ability to heal — the same gifts attributed to many Church-recognized mystics, from the 12th century St. Francis of Assisi to the soon-to-be-canonized 20th-century Padre Pio.
Father Sudac isn't talking much either. “I would like to wait until a certain time passes,” he said in his 1999 interview with Larry and Mary Sue Eck for Medjugorje Magazine. ”I am in cooperation with some experts — the top experts in the world. I would like the whole thing, from their side, to be well observed. And until the official Church makes an announcement regarding these certain phenomena, in my heart I am not sure whether it is good to speak about these things.”
In the interview, Father Sudac stressed the same humility that is on display during his “events.” He said, “I want to draw attention to Jesus Christ and I am afraid that with these things, I may be drawing attention to myself. I am a sinful man. Since the stigmatization, I have had a tremendous need for the sacrament of confession. For me, it is the same as for everyone else who walks this earth: to be little and in that way I will belong to God.”
The Archdiocese of New York has not officially taken a position on Father Sudac's tour, leaving it to the discretion of individual pastors whether to invite him to their parishes, according to a spokesman. The diocese of Patterson, N.J., has not issued a statement on Sudac, but it has sponsored him at the diocesan cathedral, in an action that might be considered a sign of approval.
The Policlinico Gemelli, known to the world as the “Vatican hospital,” confirmed to the Register that Father Sudac has spent time there recently, though the medical institution would not elaborate further on whether his stigmata were being scientifically investigated. That, along with confirmation that he is an arch-diocesan priest of the diocese of Krk in Croatia currently in the United States to learn English with the blessing of his bishop, is as close to an official Church statement as one can get about Sudac.
God's Love
Appearing at the Marian shrine in Stony Point, N.Y., Sudac refrained almost entirely from talking about himself or his stigmata, alluding to the subject only briefly after extensive preaching about God's gift of love. “I'm talking to people who came here out of curiosity,” he said. “Why did you come here when what you need is the holy consecrated host that is in every Catholic church, virtually on every street in big cities?”
To those seeking “magic,” he added, “there shall be no other sign to this generation” than the “love of God” already accessible in Scripture and in the sacrifice of the Mass.
Still, it was clear that many in the audience were hoping for a supernatural act that would ease their sufferings: A woman whose husband looked as though he could go at any moment, dying of cancer; young people, including children, with fatal illnesses; the lonely, the widowed and those mired in sin — all were hoping that this Croatian priest would have answers for them.
Two young suburban mothers, talking long after the service with a young boy crawling between and around them, called the night a “spiritual pick-me-up,” unlike anything they typically get from their parish priests. Said one, “His sermon was simple and honest about the Gospel, and that's what made it so important.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Pope's Easter Focuses on Peace in Middle East and Around the World DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:In his traditional easter blessing “urbi et orbi” (to the city of Rome and to the world) Pope John Paul spoke with profound sadness of the situation the world finds itself in, particularly in the Middle East.
“The tragedy is truly great,” the Holy Father said March 31 before imparting a special Easter blessing “urbi et orbi” (to the city and the world).
“It seems that war has been declared on peace,” the Pope said.
After pain from arthrosis in his right knee forced him to preside over the Holy Thursday liturgies from a chair off to the side of the altar, Pope John Paul returned to his role as principal celebrant for the March 30 Easter Vigil in St. Peter's Basilica and the Easter morning Mass in St. Peter's Square.
At the end of the 90-minute Easter morning Mass and the “urbi et orbi” address, the Pope rode through the crowds in St. Peter's Square standing in the back of an open jeep.
“Venit Jesus … et dixit eis: ‘Pax vobis!’” “Jesus came … and said to them, ‘Peace be with you’” (John 20:19). Christ's blessing resounds today, on this most solemn day: Peace be with you! Peace to all the men and women of the world! Christ is truly risen and brings peace to all! This is the “good news” of Easter. Today is the new day, “made by the Lord” (Psalm 117:24), which, in the glorious body of the Risen One, restores to the world, wounded by sin, its original beauty, radiant with new splendor.
“Death with life contended; combat strangely ended!” After the terrible battle Christ returns victorious and advances upon the stage of history announcing the Good News: “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25), “I am the light of the world” (John 9:5). His message can be summarized in one word: “Pax vobis — Peace be with you!” His peace is the fruit of the victory over sin and death which he gained at a high price. 3. “I leave you peace, I give you my peace. Not as the world gives it do I give it to you” (John 14:27). Peace “in the manner of the world” — the experience of every age shows it — is often a precarious balance of powers, that sooner or later turn against one another once more. The peace which is the gift of the risen Christ is deep and complete and can reconcile man with God, with himself and with creation. Many religions proclaim that peace is a gift from God. We saw this again at the recent meeting at Assisi. May all the world's believers join their efforts to build a more just and fraternal humanity; may they work tirelessly to ensure that religious convictions may never be the cause of division and hatred, but only and always a source of brotherhood, harmony, love.
Christian communities on every continent, with trepidation and hope I ask you to proclaim that Jesus is truly risen, and to work so that his peace may bring an end to the tragic sequence of atrocities and killings that bloody the Holy Land, plunged again in these very days into horror and despair. It seems that war has been declared on peace! But nothing is resolved by war, it only brings greater suffering and death, nothing is resolved through reprisal and retaliation. This is a truly great tragedy: No one can remain silent and inactive, no political or religious leader! Denunciation must be followed by practical acts of solidarity that will help everyone to rediscover mutual respect and return to frank negotiation. In that land Christ died and rose from the dead and left the empty tomb as a silent but eloquent attestation. By breaking down in himself the hostility, the dividing wall between people, he has reconciled all through the Cross (see Eph 2:14-16), and now he commits us, his disciples, to remove every reason for hatred and revenge.
How many members of the human family are still subject to misery and violence! In how many corners of the world do we hear the cry of those who implore help, because they are suffering and dying: from Afghanistan, terribly afflicted in recent months and now stricken by a disastrous earthquake, to so many other countries of the world where social imbalances and rival ambitions still torment countless numbers of our brothers and sisters. Men and women of the third millennium! Let me repeat to you: open your hearts to Christ, crucified and risen, who comes with the offer of peace! Wherever the risen Christ enters, he brings with him true peace! May that peace enter, first of all, every human heart, the unsoundable depth, not easy to heal (see Jer 17:9). May it permeate relations between all sectors of society, between different peoples, tongues and mentalities, bringing everywhere the leaven of solidarity and love.
And you, risen Lord, who have overcome tribulation and death, grant us your peace! We know that peace will be fully revealed at the end of time, when you come in glory. Nevertheless, wherever you are present peace is already at work in the world. This is our conviction, founded on you, who today have risen from the dead, the Lamb sacrificed for our salvation! You ask us to keep alive in the world the flame of hope. On this radiant day, the church sings with faith and joy: “Christ, my hope, has risen!” Yes, Christ is risen, and with him has risen our hope!
Alleluia!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope's Visits to Azerbaijan and Bulgaria Confirmed
ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 3 — The Vatican for the first time has confirmed that Pope John Paul II will visit Asia and Eastern Europe in May. The Pope, who turns 82 May 18, will travel to Azerbaijan and Bulgaria four days later.
The wire service noted that the trip has long been in the planning and comes as the Pope's health seems to be getting worse.
But it is being made as part of his efforts to improve relations with non-Catholics, the report said. Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic in the Caucasus Mountains, is heavily Muslim, while Bulgaria is predominantly Orthodox.
No Knee Surgery for Pope, Spokesman Says
ANTARA, April 3 — In spite of having to sit out some Holy Week ceremonies for the first time in his 23-year pontificate, in part due to an arthritic right knee, Pope John Paul will not be having knee surgery, said Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls.
The Indonesian news agency said that the Pope's surgeon told Agence France Presse on Easter Sunday that an operation was being considered. And the Italian press carried reports that the Pope had sought treatment at a clinic near the Vatican. Navarro-Valls denied those reports.
Alfredo Carfagni, a surgeon at San Carlo Hospital in Rome, was quoted as saying the hospital is ready to perform an operation as soon as the Vatican gives the go-ahead. He said the Pope is “very robust, much more solid than you would think.”
Patriarch Says Orthodox are Ready for Dialogue
BBC, April 2 — Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow and All Russia said the Russian Orthodox Church has never refused to hold a dialogue with the Holy See and is ready for one.
But the patriarch criticized the Catholic Church's recent decision to raise the status of four apostolic administrative regions in Russia to the level of diocese. The patriarch said the Russian Orthodox Church perceived the move as “an unfriendly act that will hinder the negotiation process.”
Man Sues Vatican Over Priestly Sexual Abuse
Previous lawsuits against the Vatican have failed because it has the protected status of a sovereign nation, but the lawyer, Jeffrey Anderson, said he has evidence to establish a pattern of intentional obstruction of justice.
One lawsuit said a Salesian brother who allegedly molested an 11-year-old boy at a Catholic boarding school in Tampa, Fla., in 1987 was transferred to New Jersey just after the police showed up at the school to investigate.
A Salesian official said that all personnel problems and files are kept within the order and would not be reported to Rome. And the general counsel for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said the Vatican routinely leaves decisions on handling such matters to local bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: An Easter Psalm DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Over 95,000 people attended Pope John Paul II's general audience on April 3, which was held in St. Peter's Square. Most of the people were in Rome for Easter week, and the crowd included large pilgrimages from 14 countries.
In his talk, the Holy Father continued his catechesis on the psalms and canticles from the Liturgy of the Hours. Meditating on Psalm 97, he characterized this psalm as an “Easter” psalm because it celebrates God's king-ship and the manifestation of his divine glory upon the earth. The psalmist describes the triumph of God's justice over every form of evil and idolatry. The advent of God's kingdom is a source of liberation for the oppressed and joy to the upright of heart.
God's faithful ones “walk in the ways of justice, are honest in their hearts, rejoice in God's works and praise his holy name,” the Holy Father noted. “Let us pray to the Lord that these same spiritual traits will also shine on our faces!”
The light, joy and peace that filled the community of Christ's disciples on Easter permeates our gathering, which takes place in the intense climate of the octave of Easter. During this time we celebrate Christ's triumph over evil and death. Through his death and resurrection, the kingdom of justice and love that God so desired has been finally established.
Today's catechesis, which is devoted to a meditation on Psalm 97, refers to this very theme of God's kingdom. Psalm 97 opens with a solemn proclamation, “The Lord is king, let the earth rejoice; let the many islands be glad,” and is a unique celebration of the Divine King, the Lord of the cosmos and of history. We could say, therefore, that this an “Easter” psalm.
We know that proclaiming God's kingdom played an important role in Jesus' preaching ministry. It is not only the recognition that creatures are dependent on their Creator; it is also the conviction that God has included within history the projects and plans that he desires, throughout which harmony and happiness are woven. All of this was accomplished at Easter through Jesus' death and resurrection.
The Great King
Now let us look at the text of the psalm that the Liturgy of the Hour proposes for our Morning Prayer. Immediately after the acclamation that the Lord is king, which resounds like the blast of a trumpet, a magnificent epiphany of God appears before the psalmist's eyes. Alluding to and quoting other passages from the psalms and from the prophets, especially Isaiah, the psalmist describes the Great King's grand entrance on the world scene, where he is surrounded by groups of cosmic ministers and aides: clouds, darkness, fire and lightning.
Besides these, other groups of ministers personify his action in history: justice, right and glory. Their entrance on the scene makes all of creation tremble. Everywhere the earth rejoices, including the islands, which were considered to be the most remote regions of the earth (see Psalm 97:1). The entire world is illuminated by flashes of light and shaken by earthquakes (see verse 4). Mountains, which are the incarnation of the oldest and most solid realities according to biblical cosmology, melt like wax (see verse 5), as the prophet Micah already heralded: “For see, the Lord comes forth from his place … the mountains melt under him and the valleys split open, like wax before the fire” (Micah 1:3-4). Angelic hymns that extol justice — the work of salvation that the Lord has done for the just — resound through the heavens. Finally, all of humanity contemplates the revelation of God's glory, the mysterious reality of God (see Psalm 97:6), while his “foes,” the wicked and the unjust, bow before the irresistible force of the Lord's judgment (see verse 3).
The Just and the Unjust
After the theophany of the Lord of the universe, the psalm describes two reactions to the Great King and his entrance into history. On one hand, idolaters and their idols fall to the ground in confusion and are vanquished. On the other hand, the faithful, who have gathered together in Zion for a liturgical celebration in the Lord's honor, joyfully intone a hymn of praise. The scene with “all who serve idols” (see verses 7-9) is of essence: Their idols bow down before the one God and their followers are put to shame. The just will exultingly watch God's judgment as it wipes out lies and false piety, which are sources of moral misery and slavery. They profess in song their shining faith: “You, Lord, are the Most High over all the earth, exalted far above all gods” (verse 9).
This image of victory over idols and their idolaters is in contrast with what we could call the glorious day of the faithful (see verses 10-12). In fact, reference is made to the light that dawns for the just (see verse 11). It is like a dawn of joy, feasting and hope, because, as it has been noted, light is a symbol of God (see 1 John 1:5).
The prophet Malachi declared: “But for you who fear my name, there will arise the sun of justice with its healing rays” (Malachi 3:20). Happiness is associated with light: “ … gladness, for the honest of heart. Rejoice in the Lord, you just, and praise his holy name” (Psalm 97:11-12).
The Reign of Justice
The kingdom of God is the spring of peace and serenity that wipes out the rule of darkness. A Judaic community that existed in Jesus'time used to sing, “Ungodliness retreats in the face of justice, like darkness retreats in the face of light; ungodliness will vanish forever and justice, like the sun, will be the beginning of order in the world” (The Book of Mysteries of Qumran: IQ 27, I, 5-7).
Before parting with Psalm 97, it is important that we discover in it not only the Lord's face but also the face of the faithful person. This person is described as having seven characteristics, which is a sign of perfection and fullness. Those who await the coming of the Great Divine King and who hate evil and love the Lord are known as the hasidim, or the faithful ones (see verse 10). They walk in the ways of justice, are honest in their hearts (see verse 11), rejoice in God's works and praise the Lord's holy name (see verse 12). Let us pray to the Lord that these same spiritual traits will also shine on our faces!
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Catholic School Brings New Hope to Romania's Gypsies DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:VALEA LUI STAN, Romania — On April 8 of this year, the world's communities of Roma — better known as Gypsies to most people — celebrate Roma International Day. In most locales, celebrations consist of memorials of past injustices and new calls for human rights to be extended for a people who have been reviled and discriminated against for centuries in Europe, but for the Roma children of the little Romanian village of Valea Lui Stan it was back to school as usual.
Until Catholic Charities of Brezoi stepped in and built a school in 1996, there were no educational facilities for the Roma kids. Their families were too poor to afford the three-mile transport to the town's public school, and instead of education the children spent their days chopping wood, gathering berries or selling hand-woven baskets by the roadside.
The school, with its five classrooms and gymnasium, offers an education for 146 children between kindergarten and seventh grade, who otherwise would have grown up illiterate and with few jobs prospects.
“At the beginning there was a little problem getting the kindergarten started because the parents worried that we would take their children and sell them,” said Marius Hodea, director of Catholic Charities Brezoi, “but after that we were very quickly accepted.”
The Catholic community of Brezoi in south-central Romania is a relatively new implant in this predominantly Orthodox country, having arrived around the turn of the last century amongst a wave of Italian immigrants. Though the majority of the Italo-Romanians departed before Communism took hold following World War II, they instilled a strong community ethic of helping others.
Today, though Catholics make up just 2% of Brezoi's 7,700 residents, they deliver about 90% of non-governmental assistance. With the financial backing of European Catholic Charities groups they have set up pre-schools, kindergartens, a meals program for children with troubled families, a health care center, and a new sponsorship program through which donations from abroad go directly towards assisting families with their children's education.
The little Valea Lui Stan school, set in a valley clearing enshrined by spectacular mountains, is located about a half mile from the Roma village.
“We didn't build the school inside the village because we knew that if a mother needed her child she would just holler out for him and he would come running and disrupt everything,” said Hodea. “We used to have a small school in the village and this had been a big problem.”
Each classroom contains about 15 colorfully dressed students of various ages, especially in the older classes where 17- and 18-year-olds can be learning the sixth or seventh grade.
Cultural Barriers
When the door opens at one classroom, the students immediately stand and greet their visitors in unison with a boisterous “good afternoon!”
They weren't also so cordial. “It was very difficult at the beginning because the children were used to talking back and we had to first teach them respect and how to speak nice before starting the educational lessons,” recalled school math teacher Sina Marcu.
“But as you can see we still have a problem with dirty hands, “ added school principal Valeria Sandru. She asked the class to show their hands and sure enough the majority are still blackened from their morning chores. “At the beginning we had to teach them hygiene — to wash your hands, your face, wash here, there, use a tissue when you need it, not your shirt.”
Now, though, just like any other young Romanian boys and girls, the Roma children of Valea Lui Stan dream of becoming lawyers, doctors and teachers. Fourth-grader Ramona wants to become mayor in order to help poor people. “But not just those in Valea Lui Stan,” she stressed, “but all the people.” Twelve-year-old Pamela, meanwhile, said she would like to become a teacher.
But away from the children, Sandru explained that such dreams are still out of their grasp, as most will never reach high school. “Pamela lives in a room with her mother, aunt and brother,” she said. “Within two years she will probably be married. It's a sure thing because her mother can't afford to keep the family together and she must find another place. … They haven't a chance.”
Indeed, for the girls of Valea Lui Stan marriage at age 13 or 14 is a normal practice. 13-year-old Alexandra in the sixth grade has not only been married, but also divorced — her husband left her for another woman.
Changing Attitudes
About 6 million Roma live in Europe, with the largest concentrations in Eastern Europe. The ethnic group emigrated from the Indian subcontinent around 1,000 years ago, for unknown reasons, and has been subject to intense discrimination for centuries. And like Europe's Jews, they were the targets of Nazi genocide; close to 500,000 Roma from 16 different countries died in Hitler's death camps.
Today, deep prejudices persist in many European countries against the Roma, who continue to suffer from a lack of education and from high unemployment rates.
Speaking on Roma International Day in April 2000, Pope John Paul II appealed for integration and social acceptance of the Roma. Said the Pope, “I hope that this day will serve to promote full respect for the human dignity of these brothers and sisters of ours, favoring their adequate integration in society.”
Catholic Charities' Marius Hodea suggested that it will be a long-term struggle to overcome the handicaps the local Roma face in Valea Lui Stan.
“In my opinion the project is just beginning,” he said. “Building the school is easy but now we have to work towards changing the mentality. But we are moving in the right direction. For example after just a couple months at school, one little girl asked her father for her own little bed. They are used to sleeping with eight or 10 in the same bed.”
But did she get one? Replied Hodea, “Yes, she got it.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Chuck Todaro ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Nepal Legalizes Abortion, Following U.N. Urging
LIFESITE NEWS, March 15 — Nepal, is a Central Asian country with a traditional culture being subjected to international anti-natalist pressure, the pro-life Internet news service reported. As the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is pushing abortion and contraception in post-Taliban Afghanistan, a U.N. committee has gotten its way in Nepal, which has just legalized abortion.
Though the law bans child marriage and polygamy and gives women the right to inherit parental property, it also allows abortion on demand of unborn children up to twelve weeks gestation, provided it is done with the husband's consent and by government authorized abortionists. The bill also allows abortion up to 18 weeks in cases of rape or incest.
Although the United Nations claims it does not promote abortions in countries where the practice is illegal, the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on Aug. 31, 2001, urged Nepal to “take remedial action to address the problems of clandestine abortions, unwanted pregnancies and the high rate of maternal mortality” and to allow abortion “when pregnancies are life-threatening or a result of rape or incest.”
Warmongers Have No Sympathy for the Sabbath
Discussing various religions' approach to the question, Johnson noted that Christianity has attempted to keep sacred days free of belligerence. The Council of Elne in 1027 forbade warfare between Saturday night and Monday morning, a restriction that was observed as recently as 1916 when the Easter Rising by Irish nationalists was delayed until the morning of Monday, April 24.
But largely, the proscription has been ignored. During the American Civil War, Sunday was “just another killing day,” for example. And among non-Christians, the Sabbath seems to have been an especially good day to attack. “Hitler's most audacious moves usually took place over the weekend, especially on Sunday,” Johnson said. And the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning.
“We are still shocked when men, women and children are murdered by religious fanatics on the Sabbath or a feast day,” Johnson wrote. “We are right to be shocked. It shows we have not yet become totally hardened to the brutal logic of terrorism.”
Papal Rosary Ring Gift from Ecuadorian to Korean
The gift was made during Noboa's visit to Korea. After the men discovered that they share the Catholic faith, Noboa offered the ring to Kim, saying it was “the most precious belonging in my life as I received it from the Pope,” the Seoul daily reported.
Kim said he could not accept such a valuable gift, but Noboa insisted, putting the ring on Kim's finger and finding that it fit perfectly.
Said Noboa, “It is better for a person in his or her declining years to cast off precious things one by one.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: EDITORIAL DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:At precisely a time when Americans are in a warlike frame of mind, reminders come from the Middle East about how violence makes big problems bigger.
It's also an opportunity to evaluate another war on terrorism, and let it shed some light on our own.
The recent escalation of violence began when Israel suffered a series of suicide bombings that, diabolically, aimed at the very heart of the country's culture. One terrorist attack targeted Israelis celebrating Passover. In response, Israel struck back at Palestinian areas that harbor the terrorists. The result has been escalating carnage.
This series of events is eerily reminiscent of Sept. 11. In America, the attack on the World Trade Center as the business day opened was also an attempt to target our culture at its heart. In response, we, too, have waged a war on the country that harbored the terrorists — a war that, like Israel's, has seen many civilians killed.
Watching what happened in Palestine could give us insights into the unintended but very real consequences of our own war on terror.
A Palestinian teacher sent out an e-mail message describing the situation as Israeli soldiers attacked it to root out terrorist nests: “People trapped in their homes without enough food, water, medicine, fuel. People shot on sight for venturing out. Journalists expelled so the world can't see what's happening. Ambulances attacked and medical help denied. People buried in a mass grave in a parking lot. Soldiers going house-to-house rounding up all men, and tearing up homes as they searched them. Executions. Our e-mail was overflowing with messages sharing the latest developments and desperately calling for intervention.”
Catholics were particularly dismayed to read about the situation at the Church of the Nativity, where Palestinian fighters took refuge from Israeli soldiers. The Church was certainly misused, apparently by both sides in the conflict.
But, as Father Raed Abusahlia, chancellor of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, said: “Our concern is not the Church of the Nativity, which is holy, but every human being — Christian, Jewish and Muslim — who are also holy. Human life here has become like nothing. There has been brutality on both sides. Unless we have the value of forgiveness, we will remain in this cycle of violence.”
He's right. The solution has no easy answers, only one that is deceptively simple but difficult to do: forgive. Does that sound simplistic and unrealistic? One thing is more simplistic: to believe that indiscriminate violence will solve the problem. And one thing is more unrealistic: to believe that the current course will produce a positive result.
The Vatican has spelled out what this forgiveness entails, in more detail: Real opposition to terrorism on both sides. Also, a commitment by Israel to alleviate the conditions of injustice and humiliation imposed on the Palestinian people. From both, defense tactics must be proportional to the original harm, in order to curb the cycle of retaliation and revenge, which only increases the sense of frustration and hatred there. The United Nations must be respected
But our role as rank-in-file Catholics is different. Christ once encountered a demon that could only be expelled through prayer and fasting. We should pray — and fast — for the demon of hatred to be driven out of the Middle East.
God is the Lord of the universe, and the only one capable of making the impossible happen in the Middle East, the only one capable of giving the two sides the grace of forgiveness.
It's a grace we need to ask for ourselves, too.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: DEATH-PENALTY DISCOURSE DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:We've received quite a stack of letters referring to our symposium on Pope John Paul II's teaching that, today, the death penalty should rarely, if ever, be used.
In our symposium, the Register, Cardinal Avery Dulles and Notre Dame law professor Charles Rice defended the Holy Father's position. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia weighed in by means of a letter to the editor, in which he responded to the Register's specific criticisms of his position. Father George Rutler agreed with Scalia.
Since many readers' letters make closely similar points, we've condensed them into a series of summary statements and answered these with what we think is the most Catholic response to each.
— EDITOR
Congratulations, Register — you are truly pro-life. Since you condemn abortion, you also condemn the death penalty. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ applies to both, after all!
We never made this argument, and neither has the Pope. Yes, we think pro-life people should be against the death penalty, but not for the same reasons that they are against abortion. There are cases in which the death penalty is just and necessary; there are no cases in which direct abortion is just or necessary. Confusing these two issues helps neither the anti-death penalty movement nor the anti-abortion movement.
Register, you are wrong. John Paul hasn't taught
Let's see … If ex cathedra is your test for what doctrines we must adopt, then show us the ex cathedra statement for the death penalty.
You're right, Register: It's not only
The Pope teaches that the situations in which the death penalty must be used today to protect society are “rare, if not practically nonexistent.” This doesn't cause any problems with past teaching. It also very appropriately applies a principle that has been held “always and in all places” by Catholics: Man must not kill unless he has to.
Aren't there people who deserve to be criticized in the pages of the Register more than Justice Scalia does?
No argument here. We regret that a man of his record became the target of much negative attention at our hand. We respect him a great deal.
Haven't you gone overboard on this whole question? Why are you on this odd crusade?
This remark is often accompanied by the accusation that the Register is “liberal,” a criticism we receive often, almost as often as we are accused of being “too conservative.”
But, the truth is, we aren't interested in defending liberalism, conservatism or any other ideology. We are interested in defending the Pope.
And, no, to answer other comments we have received, we aren't “in favor of the Pope even above truth itself.” We are in favor of the Pope because Christ made him the rock on which he built his Church, against which the gates of hell will not prevail. We want to see the death penalty used far less often, because the Holy Father has practically begged for this: in public statements, in an encyclical and in the Catechism.
It is sometimes difficult to follow where the Holy Father leads; that is to be expected. But Christ needs Catholics who will follow him wherever he leads, and not just when he leads in the direction they were already going without him.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Condemnation as a Compliment
The Holy Father recently stressed that there can be no peace without justice and no justice without forgiveness. Justice demands that we pray daily for him, for all bishops, and all our priests.
In our former parish, in the 1970s, four assistant pastors left their vocation to marry, and my immediate reactions were anger and sorrow until I realized that, had I and my fellow parishioners been praying daily for their fidelity, things could have been and probably would have been far different.
Regarding forgiveness, I suggest that we forgive those who are delighting in and loudly condemning the Church for the behavior of a small number of priests.
We might even want to thank them. After all, their outrage is rather a compliment. They expect us to be perfect, as indeed Our Lord told us to struggle to be. We don't find them scandalized at the Ivy League “ethicist” suggesting that it's OK to “do it with a goat.” Nor are they scandalized at other religions that readily accept the destruction of embryos, same-sex marriages, and on and on.
Were we not only [recently, on Good Friday] contemplating the Seven Last Words of Christ, the first of which was “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”?
GEORGE HERMAN Deerfield, Illinois
In Praise of Father Fessio
I am edified and inspired the comments and attitude of Father Joseph Fessio in the wake of his reassignment, which certainly seems unfair and less than good-willed (“Father Fessio Barred at San Francisco College,”
March 24-30). That last quotation of his — regarding his “chance” to do something he does not want to do, and how pleasing it will be to God — should have been at the beginning of the article.
He obviously learned more than theology from his mentor Cardinal DeLubac, who also was unfairly silenced by the Church and obeyed with grace and dignity. While Father Fessio's great public service to the Church has until now been a strong testament to his intelligence and teaching skills, I'd say this new moment in his life and ministry is a great demonstration of his holiness.
I thank him for his witness.
BARRY MICHAELS Blairsville, PA
Thank You for Priestly Perspective
I wanted to commend you on your recent article “One Priest's Answer to The Scandal” (March 17-23). It was beyond refreshing and inspiring to read this homily by Father Landry in the midst of the secular reporting on the subject!
At Good Friday services, among the several priests in attendance, there was a holy priest who has faithfully served God and His Church for close to 60 years.
It nearly brought tears to my eyes as I thought of the secular media's portrayal of this man's vocation and the thousands of other holy priests who so selflessly serve God's people. All I could think of was that we'll never hear about this priest, or any other selfless, holy priest in the secular media.
I cut out your article and sent it to our local newspaper, which has been extremely “thorough” in covering this subject, with the challenge to read and possibly reprint parts of the article.
I highly doubt that they will even respond but at least they will get a glimpse of the other side of the story from a holy perspective.
God bless you for your service to Catholics around the country.
KAREN KENNEDY Wadsworth, Ohio
Advertising Anti-Catholicism?
I am deeply troubled by the advertising of the movie Joshua in the Register. I was introduced to the book Joshua several years ago and was appalled by the anti-Catholic and heretical themes throughout the book.
If you haven't read the book, Mr. Girzone creates this fictitious character, Joshua, who is portrayed as Jesus, but with an antagonistic attitude toward the Church, its teachings and hierarchy. After mostly dissenting comments toward the Church or the magisterium, the fictitious Jesus either heals someone or performs some miracle as a proof of his credibility. It is an impressive mind game Girzone plays and this makes the book of grave concern to me.
I did very limited research and it appeared Girzone was an ex-priest. He also apparently has a grudge with the Church and would like it to be run his way. His book has allowed him to play God and unfortunately he has several followers.
I hope you will consider not promoting this anti-Catholic material.
I haven't seen the movie; however, the book is as noted above. I have enjoyed your newspaper and have found it to be very orthodox. This ad surprised me, since it was in the Register.
I hope you will thoughtfully consider removal of the Joshua advertisement.
THOMAS SCHMITZ Bel Aire, Kansas
Editor's note: Thank you and others who sent in letters, and sorry for letting this one slip by. We have pulled the ad.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: A Seminarian's Eye View Of the Scandals DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:It's a scary time to choose priesthood.
I am a seminarian in second-year theology, just two years away from ordination. Sexual misconduct among priests has been painful for clergy and laity alike. But, as a future priest, I feel a bit like those draftees must have felt during boot camp, circa 1968, knowing that Vietnam was only a 16-hour plane ride away. In the '80s and '90s, society was indifferent toward priests. Today we are under fire.
Clearly, anyone who molests children is most likely suffering from a grave psychological disorder. His acts are criminal and also dangerous, and he should be locked up where he can do no more harm. Period.
But there are other victims besides the children and teen-agers. The reputations of all good priests and seminarians have been tarnished, too. This newspaper quite appropriately called this the “collateral damage” of priestly sexual misconduct.
The Romans also used to persecute priests. Ignatius of Antioch was fed to the lions and Polycarp was burned alive. Nowadays, there's no need for such drastic measures. A rumor here, an accusation there, an anonymous declaration to the local press about Father Soand-So. It doesn't matter whether or not the claims are true. Either way, the priest's reputation is ruined forever.
If a priest is wrongly accused, he is guilty even if proven innocent. People will never look at him the same way again. Eyes will lower during his homilies. Parents will forbid their sons from serving as altar boys at his Masses. No school will have him as chaplain. Even among the people who remain friendly and supportive, outwardly trusting in his innocence, there will always be that little something held back — that nagging doubt: What if what we've heard is true?
Ordination used to mean being nailed to the cross. Now it can also mean putting your head on the chopping block. What is a future priest to do?
The way I see it, I have two choices. I could adopt a “that-could-never-happen-to-me” kind of attitude. Or I could make a firm commitment, right here and now, to live a prayerful, zealous, disciplined, careful priestly life — in short, a life of holiness and prudence.
Addressing this very subject last month, Pope John Paul II said in his “Letter to Priests”: “We must beg God in his Providence to prompt a whole-hearted reawakening of those ideals of total self-giving to Christ which are the very foundation of the priestly ministry.”
“Therefore, take up the armor of God,” advised St. Paul (Ephesians 6:13). If this means that, as a future priest, I will have to lay down some pretty strict rules and stick to them, so be it. Holiness isn't just lived on your knees. It could mean installing glass doors in the rectory so that everyone can see what is going on inside my office. It could also mean wearing my Roman collar even if I'm going out to lunch with my sister. It definitely means never going into the sacristy alone with a child.
Has there ever been a worse time to be ordained? To the contray: It is a great time to choose priesthood.
Lay people also have a role to play. First, we need your holiness. Holy priests come from holy Christian families. We need you to speak positively about the priesthood and priestly vocations. Second, we need your direct engagement as chaperons, drivers and mentors in the parish. Father cannot and should not have to do it all himself. Third, we seminarians and priests count on your moral support. And, if you ever hear someone spreading unsubstantiated rumors about a priest, don't let the cat get your tongue. Make it perfectly clear, right then and there, that you will not allow a man's reputation to be unjustly ruined for life.
It is a scary time to choose priesthood. But wait a minute! This is no time to throw in the towel. The Church needs priests. Badly. The people of God need priests. Holy priests! Who will celebrate the Eucharist if there are no vocations? How will they believe if there is no one to preach (Romans 10:14)?
Dante remarked that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in a time of great moral crisis. Ignatius and Polycarp didn't shrink from their calling. They knew full well the consequences of their vocation. The Reformation was also a time of decadence. And it took saints the likes of Ignatius of Loyola, Theresa of Avila and Thomas More — clergy, religious and laity — to renew the Church from within.
“For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil” (Ephesians 6:12). When St. Paul speaks about “authorities” and “powers,” he is referring to the Evil One. Who else could it be?
Who will “fight the good fight” against this formidable foe? Who will “overcome evil by doing good” (Romans 12:21)?
“Here I am, Lord,” uttered a confident Isaiah. And, by the way, if you are one of those young men thinking about giving your Yes to God, don't hesitate for a minute. It's a great time to choose priesthood.
Legionary of Christ Brother Raymond Cleaveland writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond Cleaveland, Lc ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Prisons Are Golden Opportunities for the Gospel DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:In the Fall of 2000, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops took a good, hard look at America's criminal-justice system. In their statement Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice, the bishops spoke very directly about what Catholics can and should do about America's prisons — and its prisoners.
The bishops pointed out that there are currently more than two million people incarcerated in the United States, and that more than $35 billion is spent annually on corrections.
These figures represent a significant increase over previous years. From the early 1930s until the 1980s, the prison population remained at about 115 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents. By 1980, the prison population rose to 138 inmates per 100,000 residents. The figure hit 297 per 100,000 in 1990 and, in 2000, reached a staggering 478 inmates per 100,000 residents.
The explosion in America's prison population is often attributed to the growth in prison space. There has indeed been a steady upward trend in prison construction since the 1960s. “If you build it, they will come” — does the saying ring as true for criminals as it did for the ghosts of dead baseball players in the movie Field of Dreams?
It certainly seems reasonable to assume that judges and juries will be more inclined to send criminals to jail when they know there's a jail to send them to. But a closer look at what kinds of criminals are coming into the corrections system will throw even more light onto the question.
In their statement, the bishops pointed out some basic facts about today's inmates. Approximately 24% are incarcerated solely for drug offenses and no other crime, while nearly half were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time they committed their crimes. The bishops also showed that nearly three-quarters are high-school dropouts, more than 200,000 suffer from some type of mental illness and an unknown number are victims of past abuse. The bishops also stated that, contrary to popular perceptions, most inmates are in for petty crimes.
But perhaps the most important point the bishops made was that nearly all of the nation's present inmates will, at some point, be released back into society: The average sentence is a little less than four years. And, once they're released, the majority will or recidivate — commit more crimes. Most will return, sooner or later, to jail.
What can we do about that?
Reduced Recidivism
“I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:36). The Catechism builds on our Lord's explicit reference to incarcerated criminals, explaining that visiting the imprisoned is a work of mercy — a “charitable action by which we come to the aid of our neighbor in his spiritual and body necessities” (No. 2447). The bishops elaborated on this theme in their statement: “[A] community has a right to establish and enforce laws to protect people and to advance the common good, [but] at the same time, a Catholic approach does not give up on those who violate these laws.”
The bishops see the potential salvation of inmates through the sacraments of the Eucharist and Reconciliation. Giving oneself up to God and coming closer to Jesus through the Eucharist is, according to the bishops, the quickest way to physical, behavioral and emotional healing that will have a lasting effect. And, through the sacrament of Penance, sinners can learn how to show contrition, how to take responsibility for their own actions, how to restore justice and how to rejoin the community.
The Catholic response to prisoners should, then, reflect Pope John Paul II's words in his message on the Jubilee of Prisons, delivered July 9, 2000: “Assuring the men and women who are in prison throughout the world that I am close to them in spirit, I embrace them all as brothers and sisters in the human family.” As the Holy Father has frequently articulated throughout his pontificate, what is needed is the evangelization of all our brothers and sisters — including those in prison.
Russell L. Ford, an inmate in Alabama, convert to the Catholic faith and author of The Missionary's Catechism, highlights the fact that one of the only sure ways to prevent recidivism among inmates is for them to fully embrace a life in Christ. The key, Ford insists, is the moral formation of the inmate that can only be truly achieved through a life in Christ. If this is achieved, he wrote in the January 1996 edition of Homiletic and Pastoral Review, “the recidivism rate for converts to genuine Catholicism is zero.”
Recent scientific research in criminal justice supports Ford's assertions. Studies have shown that inmates who commit to in some form of Christian prayer or Bible-study group while in prison are likely to continue with those activities upon release. This involvement, in turn, appears to make them less likely, as a group, to commit post-release crimes. Meanwhile, inmates who do not participate in religious activities while incarcerated, or those who participate only sporadically, tend to recidivate within the first year of release.
Candidates for Conversion
A number of organizations have sprung up over the past few decades to bring Christ to the incarcerated. Charles “Chuck” Colson, a former White House aide who served prison time for his role in the Watergate scandal, started Prison Fellowship Ministries in 1976; today it is the largest prison-outreach and criminal-reform organization in the world, operating in all 50 states and in other countries. Russell L. Ford also started a ministry for Catholic conversion of inmates called First Century Christian Ministries. In addition, many dioceses have, through their social-justice offices, created prison ministries. The bishops, in their statement, called for the creation of parish-outreach programs for those parishes located near jails.
Clearly, evangelization, catechesis and works of mercy are the most merciful and faithful Catholic responses to the problem of fast-rising prison populations. As Pope John Paul II stated in his Jubilee of Prisons message: “The Good Shepherd is always going in search of the lost sheep, and when he finds them he puts them on his shoulders and brings them back to the flock. Christ is in search of every human being, whatever the situation.”
Willard M. Oliver is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Radford (Viginia) University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Willard M. Oliver ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: 'Even the Least of Them' DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:“But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him; and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and he will put the sheep on his right, and the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. ‘For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you, or thirsty, and give you something to drink? And when did we see you a stranger, and invite you in, or naked, and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?’
“The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25: 31-40)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Order, Unity, Harmony: Too Much to Ask This Palindrome Year? DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:We should take this opportunity to reflect on and appreciate its significance, for not until the year 2112 will the next such year occur.
A palindrome is a word, verse, sentence or number that reads the same backwards and forwards. The term derives from the Greek words palin (again) and dromos (running). A palindrome is a recurrence and, as such, takes on a peculiar, metaphorical significance. It is a kind of verbal echo that suggests life and order.
Christ asked his followers to call him “Abba” (an Aramaic and Hebrew word for “father”). And he told us that he is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. This notion of a palindrome as a circle presents an image of both perfection and eternity. Some baptismal fonts in Greece, Turkey and England bear the circular 25-letter inscription in Greek that means “wash (my) sins not only (my) face”: NIØON ANOMHMATA MH MONANOØIN.Baptism is the beginning of one's spiritual life; eternity with God is its end.
Palindromes parallel religious significance insofar as they represent order, harmony, unity, eternity and perfection. Of themselves, of course, they are mere words.
The world's first female, Eve, sported a palindromic name. Plausibly, assuming she spoke English, her husband's first words to her and her retort were in perfect palindromic form: “Madam, I'm Adam”; “Name no one man.” Whether one reads from left to right (as in English) or right to left (as in Hebrew), the result is the same. One of American history's most popular palindromic expressions centers around President Teddy Roosevelt and the digging of the Panama Canal: “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!”
In 1932, Gerald Strang produced Mirrorrim, a musical composition that is the same whether the notes are played backwards or forwards. Mozart also experimented with musical palindromes
Like human beings, palindromes have bilateral symmetry. 2002 can fan out so that it can be read as an expanded palindrome: 1001 + 1001 (the sum of two palindromic numbers). It is most unusual for one palindrome to contain another. Here we have a pair of palindromes peering out at us in perspective.
Another reason that palindromes are objects of special respect is their rarity. The more rare something is, according to lore and the law of supply and demand, the more precious it becomes. Consider the palindromic minute that occurs on February 20, 2002, which may be written as 20:02, 20-02; 2002 (two minutes past 8pm, 20th of February, 2002). Then consider this fleeting minute in the context of the number of minutes in a year (525,600). There are just five such palindromic minutes in our current palindromic year: Jan. 10 (20:02, 10-01; 2002); March 30 (20:02, 30-03; 2002); Nov. 11 (20:02, 11-11; 2002); and Dec. 21 (20:02, 21-12; 2002). And what name would be appropriate for a child privileged to be born during one of these palindromic minutes, when the universe is in such splendid numerical order? Otto or Bob for a boy, Anna or Hannah for a girl.
Major League baseball has produced no more than four players whose last names are palindromes: Toby Harrah, Truck Hannah, Eddie Kazak and Dave Otto. We find just three in the history of philosophy who are so distinguished: Ammonias Saccas, Raymond Llull and Rudolph Otto. The words “evitative,” “redivider,” and “Malayalam” are the longest palindromic words in the English language. The longest palindromic word in any language is said to be “saippuakivikauppias” (the Finnish word for a “dealer in lye”). And the longest coherent palindromic sentence in English may be the following: “Doc, note, I dissent, a fast never prevents a fatness, I diet on cod.” Perhaps the most moralistic is, “Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel.”
Lawrence Lewin, in 1986, pushing the palindrome to a preposterous extreme, wrote the world's longest palindromic novel. His verbally symmetric creation contains a staggering 31,594 words. It is entitled Dr Awkward and Olson in Oslo. It may not qualify as literature, but it does accomplish what its author set out to achieve.
Perhaps never to be outdone in the palindrome Olympics is the dubious and no doubt exceedingly time-consuming effort of Edward Benbow of Bewdley, Hereford & Worcs, published in September of 1988. His unique, though tedious, composition contains 80,000 words, beginning with “Al, sign it ‘Lover’! … ” and predictably ending with the words, “revolting, Isla”.
Part of our fascination with palindromes is the recognition that they represent a remarkable coincidence between the arbitrariness of human expression and the symmetry and design of nature. We love symmetry and balance. A palindromic expression, like the ebb and flow of the tide, offers us an image of assurance, of recurrence, of bilateral harmony.
For the most part, palindromes are innocent fun, verbal challenges for the creative thinker who is fascinated by what can be symbolized in a string of words that repeat its message backwards and forwards, like the love that passes from the creator to the creature and back to the creator.
Don DeMarco is a philosophy professor at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: 2002 is a palindrome year. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Don DeMarco ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Spirit & Life DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Women and the Church
I know of a truly romantic book that devout Catholics will appreciate and feminists will abhor.
In it, Monica Migliorino Miller tells the story of a groom who gives everything for his bride, including his life. In response, the bride gives everything for her beloved. In their mutual sacrifice, both achieve their end, their fulfillment, their joy.
But you won't find a picture of a raven-haired beauty in a low-cut gown on the cover. There is no over-muscled, steely-eyed hero threatening to sweep his love away.
This is a book about a more authentic love, that of Christ and his Church. And the story has much to do with gender and the vital roles of male and female.
It isn't your typical love story, and so it doesn't have a typical love story name. It's The Authority of Women in the Catholic Church (Crisis Books, 1997).
Much has been said and written over the past 2000 years about the role of women in the Church. Most of what has been said the past 20 years has been rather bitter, with feminists arguing that women must achieve equality by attaining the same roles as men in the church.
Miller would argue that the debate has been misplaced. Feminists argue that if men and women play different roles in the Church the result is inequality; only in sameness is there justice.
But Miller transcends such mundane discussion to demonstrate that men and women have different roles that must be respected for Christianity to work.
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul (bane of radical feminists everywhere) recalls the words about marriage from Genesis: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cling to his wife, and the two shall be made into one.” But Paul continues, “This is a great mystery; I mean that it refers to Christ and the church.”
Miller explains: “Man and woman are the original sacraments of the New Covenant, their conjugal love a prophecy for Christ and the Church. If man and woman are the original sacraments, this means that their roles cannot be blurred, cannot overlap or be exchanged.”
And, of course, that means that the priesthood is reserved to men, who must act in place of Christ, who is male, in the role of groom. While women cannot be priests, feminine authority exists in that women, not men, are the authentic sign of the Church in the world and as such have real sacramental authority.
Miller's book is more about the love of bride and groom, Christ and Church. It's about how much women can do, not what they can't.
“The Church today could benefit greatly by returning to the insights of the Church Fathers regarding the symbolic role of women,” she writes. “It is thought, even among those who cannot identify with the feminist point of view, that priestly authority is the only authority, priestly office the only office. It is mistakenly believed that, unless women become priests, they are doomed by ‘patriarchy’ to remain invisible. How wrong this is! Such a conclusion about women in the Church is the fruit of a monist philosophy about power. The Fathers of the Church … escaped this deadly perspective.
“Authority is exercised maritally. The authority of man and woman, if it is real, shares in and makes present the authority of the one-flesh love of Christ and the Church. If we keep this in mind, we will come to understand that the authority of the male priest, because it is first Eucharistic, is authority put to the service of the female Church — the Body of Christ whose only true and appropriate sign is woman.”
Jim Fair writes From Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Fair ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: Franciscan Sanctity on the South Shore DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:As I was driving through the South Shore section of metropolitan Boston, the Portiuncula Chapel took me by surprise.
From my northerly approach, there was no advance warning that the chapel was just ahead. It sits on a high knoll in the town of Hanover, and a background of trees hides it until you're right upon it.
As I happened upon it, the brilliant rays of the late-morning sun reflected off the small structure's stone walls, illuminating the facade's tile painting so that it looked like a very well-preserved Venetian mosaic.
Something else helped make the sight rather surprising. I knew that St. Francis built the original Portiuncula Chapel (whose name mean “little portion”), dedicating it to St. Mary of the Angels, more than 700 years ago in Assisi, Italy. Yet here it seemed to be, in Massachusetts, USA — a glimmering vision in pastel pink and white stones against a cloudless canvas of cerulean sky.
Assisi came to Massachusetts in 1953, thanks to Cardinal Richard Cushing. As the Archbishop of Boston, he directed that this chapel be constructed as an exact replica of the original. He made sure that every stone, every tile, every inch of the material for the chapel came from the area of Assisi.
The pink and white stones, for example, were cut from the quarry in Carrara. Even the symbolic painting done on ceramic tiles above the arched Roman entry traveled from Assisi to Hanover.
This scene, which blends heaven and earth so beautifully, is a sight to treasure from close up or from the bottom of the 33 steps that rise to the chapel. Each step represents a year in the life of Jesus. (There's also an easy, stair-less path that makes the chapel accessible to the wheelchair-bound.)
In the exterior artwork, heavenly choirs of angels in ecstatic song surround Jesus, at once royal yet simple, and Mary, in prayerful humility. Enrapt Franciscans on earth gaze at them. Between heaven and earth there stands an altar inscribed: Hic est Porta Vitae Aeternae — “Here is the Doorway to Eternal Life.”
Franciscan Flavor
Inside, the little chapel is so quiet that it seems supernaturally peaceful. Below the barrel ceiling, covered with a plain gold mosaic, there are small pews where visitors can pray and contemplate the simplicity of St. Francis' history-changing faith. Maybe even learn a fact or two about why the chapel was built and think a bit about its connection to the school it's a part of, the Cardinal Cushing School and Training Center.
The interior is composed of very soft, almost pale, shades of pinks, golds and light-green marble. Simple Stations of the Cross sculpted in monochrome line the side walls.
The altar stands on four modest Corinthian pillars. Framing it is a large Roman arch that telescopes toward the small apse patterned in different shades of gold mosaic and acting as a background for the white images of five Franciscans.
Head bowed and hands crossed, St. Francis stands humbly in the center while symmetrical pairs of hooded friars, in profile, turn with him toward the tabernacle.
From here, if you make a half-turn and look back above the main entrance door, you'll see a bas-relief that is unique to the Massachusetts Portiuncula and that tells much about its construction.
Done in a simple monochrome, as if it were part of the chapel from the beginning, the relief, set within a series of arches, depicts a happy Cardinal Cushing reaching out to joyful children who surround him. They represent children from this school, which the good cardinal founded in 1947. Back then, it was the first school in the northeast for the education of children with developmental disabilities. The cardinal enlisted the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi of Milwaukee, Wisc., who were at the forefront of special education for the educationally and mentally challenged, to come to Hanover. The order still sponsors the school.
At the chapel's dedication, Cardinal Cushing said he “placed this chapel in the midst of little children … exceptional children” because, he explained, “there could be no better place for this for the message of St. Francis.” He went on to found a companion school up the road in Braintree.
A Cardinal's Favorite Place
Cardinal Cushing, a Boston native who led the archdiocese for more than a quarter of a century, was not only an influential churchman, but also a civic leader of national renown. He presided at John F. Kennedy's wedding and funeral, and has several historic sites named in his memory, including a park in Boston. Yet those who knew him personally speak of a deeply humble man who simply lived to serve God.
Proof of this can be found at the foot of the altar. From the time the chapel was built until much later in the cardinal's life, he kept a secret. He had always planned to be buried in the Portiuncula Chapel. “Of all the places that I could select in this archdiocese for my burial place,” he later said, “I have selected a site within the reach and the prayers of the exceptional children whom I have cared for.”
Cardinal Cushing died in 1970 and lies before the altar beneath three mosaics in the floor — one of the Lamb of God, the next of his coat of arms, and the third of a pelican. As a member of the Third Order or St. Francis, he was buried in a plain brown robe.
In keeping with the distinctly Franciscan chapel, the exterior — joyful, beautiful and reverent, yet with a sort of folk-art flavor — also has a Pieta and a Way of the Cross that wends among the adjacent pine grove. In keeping with the cardinal's ecumenical spirit, the special-education school has 150 students of all faiths, with 115 living on campus. (Because of today's state funding, the chapel exists on donations only, including for some necessary refurbishing; local craftsmen recently remade the front doors in red oak panels.)
After praying in the chapel, and reflecting on its heartwarming story, visitors will want to shop at the school's stores — the Potting Shed, the Bakery (offering coffee and pastries), and the Thrift Store — all of which are resources for the students' vocational training. If they do, they can be sure Cardinal Cushing will have no little portion of a smile for them and for his beloved children.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Portiuncula Chapel, Hanover, Mass. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: Selflessness and Sacrifice in the '60s DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Vietnam is the war that Hollywood loves to hate.
For more than 30 years, Americans have been bombarded with a series of highly acclaimed movies that both question the conflict's aims and the character of many of the men who fought there (Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, etc.)
We Were Soldiers is one of the few films that try to treat these misunderstood warriors sympathetically, and its protagonists' moral purpose and sense of honor are a quantum leap forward from the usually dark presentation of the combatants' motives.
The Vietnam conflict had three components: the military confrontations, most of which we won; the political struggle, which we lost; and the culture war at home, which has not yet been resolved. We Were Soldiers dramatizes the military and cultural aspects of our engagement with clarity and passion. The political issues are only hinted at.
The real-life story is based on a book by Lt. Gen. Harold Moore and photojournalist Joseph Galloway. The action begins in 1965, when the overwhelming majority of the American people still support the war. The U.S. Army realizes that it needs a new kind of soldier to fight on the inhospitable Vietnamese terrain. Harvard-educated Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) is chosen to head up an air-cavalry unit that will use helicopters to ferry its soldiers in and out of combat “hot zones.”
The opening sequences cover familiar Hollywood ground, the selection and training of an elite fighting unit. Moore chooses a gung-ho pilot, Maj. Bruce Crandall (Greg Kinnear), to lead his helicopters into the dangerous locations where “the metal meets the meat” and, in a novel twist, the training of both the officers and the enlisted men is placed under the supervision of a battle-hardened sergeant, Basil Plumley (Sam Elliott).
First-time writer-director Randall Wallace, author of the Pearl Harbor and Braveheart scripts, devotes considerable screen time to his lead characters' home lives, recreating the army-base culture of that period. By most contemporary pop-culture standards, it would appear to be retro. Moore has five kids and cares as much about raising them with a firm sense of values as he does about his career. He teaches them how to pray before they go to bed and patiently explains the difference between his own Catholic beliefs and his wife's (Madeline Stowe) Methodist ones.
To many present-day filmmakers, this lifestyle would be too “Ozzie and Harriet,” and they would present it with ironic condescension. Wallace realizes that those religious, pro-family values were an integral part of that era's military ethos. Moore's ability to be a good father makes him a better commander for his men. When one of his young officers, 2nd Lt. Jack Geoghan (Chris Klein), wonders what is “God's plan” for him, Moore prays with him in the chapel for divine blessing and guidance.
The movie's set piece is the three-day battle that begins on Nov. 14, 1965, in Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley. Moore and 450 men from the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry are helicoptered into a wild, highland area where they are soon surrounded by 2,000 enemy troops. We learn that the 7th Cavalry is the same regiment as Gen. George Custer's, and the film-maker makes us fear that the upcoming fight will have the same outcome as the Battle of Little Big Horn. References to a massacre of French troops on the same ground 11 years earlier heighten the sense of doom.
The violence that follows is grisly and graphic, but never gratuitous. The filmmaker gives us a clear sense of the tactical choices that confront Moore, and we experience the battle as both a military chess game and as a brutal, unglamorous loss of good men's lives.
The 7th Cavalry's situation is similar to the plight of the fighting men in the recent hit Black Hawk Down. In both movies, we watch a foolish command post send a vastly outnumbered unit of brave men into harm's way. Their intelligence is inaccurate and the logistical support insufficient. The entrapped soldiers must fight their way out against impossible odds, and their officers pledge to leave no man behind, either dead or alive.
The heroism displayed in these two films makes us proud to be Americans, and it is clear that the men in both battles are “fighting for each other” as much as for any cause. But Soldiers digs deeper than Black Hawk into its troops' motivations.
Wallace dramatizes the effectiveness of Moore's paternal love for his men. When Moore's superiors order him to be airlifted to a safe area, he refuses to abandon his troops. This inspires his soldiers to keep fighting even though all looks lost.
The filmmaker also treats our Vietnamese enemies with equal respect. They are shown to feel fear and to long for their families just as the Americans do. This makes the carnage that follows doubly poignant.
The movie's positive view of our military's conduct in Vietnam could also be the harbinger of a change in our culture's understanding of the war, because, like it or not, most people nowadays get their history from Hollywood, and filmmakers, rather than scholars, have become the most influential interpreters of the way we view the past.
As we continue to face up to the challenges posed by the events of Sept. 11, it is important to realize that we can be inspired by our soldiers' performance in Vietnam rather than ashamed. We can also hope that the cultural values the movie champions will someday be restored to a central place in our society.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: We Were Soldiers recalls valor in Vietnam ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:In the Mood for Love (2000)
This is a romantic drama of melancholy and regret. Director Wong Kar-wai uses lush visuals to highlight a potentially adulterous liaison that's never consummated. A journalist (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and an executive secretary (Maggie Cheung Man-yuh) live in adjoining apartments in a cramped Hong Kong building in 1962. When they discover that their respective spouses are having affairs, they lean on each other for comfort and support. A mutual attraction blossoms, but they don't give into it. This denial causes them great pain, yet they're able to get on with their lives without self-destructing.
Anne of Avonlea (1987)
TV sequels are usually inferior to the originals. Anne of Avonlea, directed by Kevin Sullivan, is a glorious exception. Based on Lucy Maud Mont-gomery's Anne of Green Gables series of novels, this PBS follow-up to the 1934 feature and its 1985 remake continues the saga of Anne Shirley (Megan Follows), an intelligent but sometimes stubborn orphan in rural Canada about 100 years ago. After graduating from college, she decides to strike out on her own as a writer and a teacher.
The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
Wars are usually won by the quiet perseverance of weary foot soldiers as much as by brilliant tactics or individual heroism. This film is based on the real-life adventures of celebrated World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith). Director William Wellman (Battleground) mixes documentary footage from the North African and Italian campaigns with a brutally realistic re-creation of the day-to-day experiences of an infantry platoon. The brave spirit of these very ordinary men still inspires.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Advice for the Aisle-Bound DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:THE BOOK OF MARRIAGE: THE WISEST ANSWERS TO THE TOUGHEST QUESTIONS
Edited by Dana Mack and David Blankenhorn
Eerdmans, 2001
620 pages, $30
To order: (800) 253-7521 or www.eerdmans.com
Today's soon-to-be-marrieds, bombarded with “right-to-privacy” propaganda that deems “marriage” whatever two people call it, are largely unaware of what the Judeo-Christian and Western traditions say about marriage. This book tries to remedy that ignorance.
Editors Mack and Blankenhorn are both distinguished pro-family scholars. Their book is divided into ten sections, each addressing a major question about marriage. (Examples: “Why Get Married at All?” “What Are We Promising?” “Can Love Last a Lifetime?”) Six readings accompany each question.
The diversity of sources quoted suggests that the editors wanted to reach a wide audience (and get their book into schools). Key biblical passages on marriage appear. Protestant, Jewish and Islamic texts appear, too. Theological reflection is also added, from St. Augustine on the good of marriage to St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Bucer on divorce. The editors also include selections from Oriental religious traditions. Still, Christian and Jewish thought is allowed to predominate. Considering how much Christian and Jewish thinking has formed our culture, both in terms of influence as well as in sheer numbers of believers, that choice makes sense.
The classics are represented, too. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Tolstoy and Chaucer talk about fidelity, finances, progeny and household leadership. Here, too, the selections are universal, with tales from Japan and China supplementing Occidental sources. Philosophers also get their two cents in, from John Locke on divorce to Erasmus on the content of marriage.
The inclusion of social-science research is particularly useful. The two pieces by Judith Wallerstein, an expert on the trans-generational impact of divorce, should be eye-openers for a generation reared on the myth that divorce either doesn't matter to, or is good for, children.
Some selections may not pass the test of time: Half a century from now, people will still be reading Martin Luther — but will they be reading Bill Cosby? Other selections may not have made this reviewer's own editorial cuts: I never thought much of Betrand Russell as a philosopher. But every anthology grapples with including the passing and the permanent.
The catholicity of selections here assures the book access to the broader mass market, including college classes on marriage and family life. Young people taking those classes need these readings. Mack and Blankenhorn are no relativists; they regularly refocus readers on the broadly Christian (not explicitly Catholic) perspective on marital questions.
Perhaps one day a Catholic publisher will come along with an explicitly Catholic collection of readings on these same questions. Augustine, Thomas, Trent, Vatican II, Pius XI, Paul VI and John Paul II all have important things to say about them. Even if such a tome appears, however, it would not detract from the usefulness of this fine anthology.
John M. Grondelski writes from Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Alternative Media
While still in its infancy, the Catholic Campus Media Network has recruited Catholic writers, including columnist Peggy Noonan, to its advisory board, and plans to offer students training, mentoring, fund-raising assistance and a wire service. Georgetown University, Boston College, Villanova University and the University of Dallas are the only Catholic campuses where alternative papers with a Catholic emphasis are currently published, says the Chronicle.
Florida Backup
AVE MARIA COLLEGE, March 27 — Naples, Fla., is among the potential backup sites under consideration should for Ave Maria not be permitted to expand in Ann Arbor, Mich., according to a press release from college founder and Catholic philanthropist Tom Monaghan.
The Naples site is under consideration, along with others, in case the township of Ann Arbor rejects a zoning change that would allow for building the college on Domino's Farms, an office park set up by Monaghan for many of his businesses and not-for-profit organizations. “To date, the township board has been against rezoning … and is not expected to pass the rezoning request,” said the release.
Ave Maria, a four-year liberal arts institution begun in 1998, also plans to become a university.
Religion & Culture
Beauchamp, in Utah to take part in a conference on religion at Weber State University, said: “If we leave religion out of the multi-cultural discussion, we're in trouble. It's the basis of many cultural attitudes and beliefs. If we're going to teach about what Hindus or Buddhists believe, why not what Christians believe? It's interesting how open public school teachers are to teaching about religions they know little about.”
Cardinal Honored
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY,March 28 — Cardinal Avery Dulles is the first recipient of the university's new Founder's Award. Cardinal Dulles taught at Fordham in the 1950s as a Jesuit scholastic and was ordained there.
He returned to its theology faculty in 1988 and was made a cardinal last year.
Founder's Awards also were presented to Wellington T. Mara, a 1937 Fordham graduate and president of the New York Giants, and to William Walsh, a 1951 graduate and current trustee.
Drinking Schools
TIME, March 25 — Women college students, especially those attending colleges just for women, are drinking more alcohol and doing so more often, according to a report by The Journal of American College Health that was extensively covered by the weekly news magazine.
Between 1993 Between 1993 and 2001, all women colleges saw an alarming 125% increase in binge drinking — defined as four or more drinks in a row three or more times a week.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Top 10 Book Recommendations For Your Young Catholic Readers DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:So many books, so little space. This introductory list features books that Catholic homeschooling parents found helpful.
E For the Children: Words of Love and Inspiration from His Holiness Pope John Paul II by Pope John Paul II
E The Harp and Laurel Wreath by Laura Berquist
E The Holy Bible
E The Lady of Guadalupe by Tomie De Paola
E Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
E The Miracle of Saint Nicholas by Gloria Whelan
E Once Upon a Time Saints by Ethel Pochocki
E Outlaws of Ravenhurst by Sister M. Imelda Wallace
E The Princess and the Kiss: A Story of God's Gift of Purity by Jennie Bishop
E St. Therese and the Roses by Helen Walker Homan
There are also many Web sites that feature book lists for parents. They include:
Favorite Resources for Catholic Homeschoolers
www.love2learn.net/literature/booklist.htm
Suggested Reading List compiled by Seton Home Study School www.ewtn.com/library/HOME-SCHL/READLIST.TXT
Romens Family Favorite Curriculum Materials www.geocities.com/Heartland/ Lake/3732/curricula.html#books
— Tim Drake
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:‘He Doesn't Listen’
Q My husband and I have an ongoing communication problem: He gets upset when I spring things on him, wondering why I never told him before, while I insist that I did tell him; he just wasn't listening. I feel like he isn't interested in what I'm saying.
A tom:
In the story of creation in Genesis, after God creates the first woman, he says “that is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.” Alas, if he had only added “and one mind,” the ship that is married life would probably sail much more smoothly.
The male mind and the female mind usually operate on entirely different wavelengths. Daily miscommunications, while trivial in themselves, can accumulate over time and breed resentment if a couple does not recognize and account for the innate differences in the way their brains work.
Being a typical married man, it is quite normal for me to have no recollection of things my wife tells me. Now, my early, inexperienced, just-got-married response used to be, “You never told me that!” That, I learned, was never true. She had told me about (fill-in-the-blank), and I had even acknowledged it at the time.
It took about seven years of marriage for me to finally realize that she (being a happy early morning bird) was telling me these things first thing in the morning — the worst possible time for me! There is no way my brain would retain any information that early. My body would be nodding “yes,” but my mind would be thinking “Zzzzz.”
Caroline:
Men typically have a one-track mind, in the sense that they prefer to focus on one thing at a time. In contrast, women, especially mothers, are quite capable of doing seven things at once. So, when you are trying to tell your husband something important, make sure you have his undivided attention.
If he is just waking up, or if he's engrossed in his favorite team on TV, or his head is buried in the newspaper, it is likely he won't remember a thing you tell him. Make sure the distractions are gone, he is looking you in the eye, and he verbally acknowledges what you're saying.
You'll be amazed at how much more interested he'll appear when you have his full attention. Tom and I moved our important conversations to a time later in the day, and the difference was immediate.
It is true that man and wife are, like Genesis tells us, one flesh, but that flesh can be weak. Each acknowledging and adjusting to the weak flesh of our spouse will go a long way toward strengthening our bond.
Tom and Caroline McDonald are the Co-Directors of the Family Life Office for the Archdiocese of Mobile, Ala.
Reach Family Matters at: FamilyMatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom And Caroline Mcdonald ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:MANY GENERATIO NS
Families of three or more generations living under the same roof are found in nearly 4 million American homes, making up 4% of the country's 105.5 million households. Among the states with the highest proportion of homes with multigenerational families are Hawaii and California. Researchers are not surprised by the data, citing that those two states have higher concentrations of Asian and Pacific Islanders and immigrant families.
Hawaii
8%
California
6%
Nationwide
4%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: Getting Them to Read DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:CHICO, Calif. — In an age when it's so easy for kids to plop themselves down in front of a computer screen or hunker over a hand-held video game, how can parents encourage their children to curl up with a good book instead?
The library is an excellent place to start.
“I started taking my two children to story hour at the library when they were toddlers,” said Carol Hallock, 43, of Seminole, Fla. “I knew how important reading was, because I wasn't a good reader when I was young — things were hard for me in school. I knew it would make their school work a lot easier if they were good readers.”
“All of my friends really like to read,” said Jen Zablotny, 14, of Fairport, N.Y., whose mother Cindy also introduced her to story hours as a toddler. “Reading gives us more ideas — a broader range of thoughts — and a lot to talk about. We all share our books.”
According to Heather Tovey, children's librarian at the Chico, Calif. branch of Butte County Library, “It's the love of reading that we're after. We want people to feel welcome at the library, and want to come back.
“For some people, there's a little fear of the library,” Tovey continued. “If someone grew up with the feeling that a library has a rigid atmosphere where all they hear is, ‘Shhhh,’ they may not want to come. Certainly a library is not a playground — a peaceful atmosphere needs to be respected — but we want people to enjoy their visit.”
Above all, Tovey emphasized that library employees are there to be of assistance. “There still exists a stereotype that a librarian is stuffy and a little pinched, with a pencil behind her ear and a bun at the back of her head. We're trying to break that image.
“We're here to help,” Tovey stressed. “If you don't know your way around the library, tell us, ‘I want a little tour.’ We want to show you how to access the information you're looking for. That's what we're here for.”
Home Schooler's Paradise
“I remember the look on the librarians' faces when my sister and I would come in carrying two big wicker baskets full of books to turn in,” said Michele Rioux, 17, a freshman at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., and the oldest of seven home-schooled children.
“My family checked out between 100 and 150 books at a time,” Rioux continued. “The librarians gave us a look of delight because we were reading so much, mixed with exhaustion because they couldn't believe they'd have to check in all those books,” of which, she added, the children never lost a single one.
“It all seemed so normal to me. My parents always gave me lots of good books to read, and tried to point me toward a lot of the classics — anything that was clean, with good writing, that I enjoyed. Our family tradition was that, after we read a book, we would come to the dinner table and take turns discussing it — which characters we liked best, the plot, and why we liked the book. We didn't realize it, but our parents were teaching us to be good at picking out and remembering details.”
The love of books also gives children an expansive vocabulary.
“One of the most amazing things about all the reading is how it's helping me out in college,” Rioux added. “I had a Renaissance literature class where we had to read the sonnets. I could see everyone else flipping through their dictionaries. Being able to just read those and understand them was wonderful.”
Reading in Hiding
“I was raised to be a reader,” said Rene Sedor, 43, of Bethel Park, Pa., a mother of three young children. “My family went to the library, and we always had a ton of books in the house. I have vivid memories of climbing up into the tree house in our back yard with a book and a crunchy apple, and staying there for hours reading. Also, my parents read to my three sisters and me every night. Now my husband and I do that with our children.”
“Reading aloud to children is of primary importance if you want them to learn to love to read,” said Sheila Cerjanec, media specialist at Our Lady of Mercy School in Madison, Conn. “It doesn't matter how old they get. People ask me, ‘You mean I should still be reading to my fifth grader?’ and I say, ‘Yes!’”
Cerjanec also stressed the value of working with a child's teachers to instill the love of reading. “If children are encouraged to read in the classroom, and parents support what teachers do, it's great,” she said. “When particular titles have been recommended to them, it encourages children to go to the library. I also encourage parents to use the Internet to help find specific books and reading lists for their children.” (See side-bar.)
“I was not raised to be a reader,” said Shawn Carrico-Phillips, 35 of Chico, Calif. “When I was a teenager, my aunt gave me a couple of good books that grabbed my interest, and that's when I really started to enjoy reading.”
Today, Carrico-Phillips takes regular trips to the library with her two home schooled daughters and stocks up on 35 titles at a time. Like Hallock and Sedor, Carrico-Phillips introduced her children to the library through story time and craft hours. And like the Rioux family, a big wicker basket plays a central role in helping her children develop the love of reading.
“My daughters really increased their reading time when I started leaving the books in the basket on the floor, instead of putting them up on a shelf,” said Carrico-Phillips. “Now if they get bored or have a few free minutes, they just grab a book out of the basket, sit on the living room floor and read.”
For seven-year-old David Thomas of Chico, Calif., settling in with a good book is like taking a trip. “What I like about reading,” he said, “is that it takes you places that you can't really go.”
As comedian Groucho Marx once quipped, “I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.”
Today, the love of reading is still as simple as giving a child as a library card.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Mildebrath ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: From the Bottles of Babes... DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:FRESNO, Calif. — Who says baby bottles are only for babies? Not the students at St. Anthony's Catholic School in Fresno, Calif. As part of Respect Life month, last October, the 670 students, ranging from kindergarten through eighth grade, used baby bottles to collect change for women and men hurt by the trauma of a past-abortion.
The effort, called “Changing Lives,” far exceeded the coordinator's expectation. In the end, the students had collected $3,985.00 in coins, cash, and checks that they donated to their Respect Life office for the purpose of Project Rachel. “I was simply blown away by the amount collected,” admitted Jennifer Butcher, coordinator of the effort.
The idea, said Butcher, came to her from the efforts of a crisis pregnancy center that conducted a similar effort through local churches. “There wasn't a great deal of pro-life education being done and I wanted to try to do something that would reinforce the message that families were hearing at Mass on Respect Life Sunday,” said Butcher.
Through the generous contributions of a donor, Butcher was able to obtain 1,000 multicolored, plastic baby bottles through her local Target department store. The week after Respect Life Sunday, the bottles were distributed to all of the classrooms at St. Anthony's along with information about Project Rachel. Each bottle also contained a “precious feet” sticker that shows the feet of a 10-week-old baby.
“We received the bottles on a Tuesday,” explained Carly Cameron, a sixth grade student at the school. “Our teacher told us about Project Rachel … that there are women and men who felt bad after abortions, are depressed, and need help. We were told that the money we raised would go to help them.”
For the following two weeks, students resorted to a variety of ways to fill their bottles. Carly, age 12, and her sister, Christy, 11, and brother, Jimmy, 8, set their purple and blue bottles atop the family microwave. Their mother, Fran, put stickers with the children's names on the bottles so that they could tell them apart.
“Whenever we passed by the bottles, if we had change in our pockets we would put that into the bottles,” said Carly. “Instead of getting a soda, which Jimmy likes to do, he would put the money in the bottle. We also used the money we might normally use for ice cream.”
Family members joined the effort as well. “My mom and dad would pitch in,” said Carly. She also explained that when grandparents and aunts and uncles came to visit they would ask about the bottles and contribute to the effort as well. After two weeks, the Camerons had raised approximately $20 between the three bottles.
Perhaps even more impressive, is that the students were raising the money for the good of the cause, not for an incentive such as a pizza party for the class that raised the most money. “We wanted individual students to do this out of the goodness of their heart,” stressed Butcher.
According to Butcher, the stories of self-sacrifice are common. “I was told that one student donated the entire contents of his piggy bank. Another student had been saving money for something special, decided to donate it instead,” explained Butcher, whose four children also participated in the campaign.
When students gathered at the school social hall to count the money, they never anticipated the results. “Our school does a lot of fundraising to keep tuition down. We estimated that we might raise about $1,500,” said Butcher.
Jimmy skipped sodas — and put his coins in the bottle.
“We had to keep getting more and more cloth bags to hold all of the coins,” said Carly, who helped count the money.
Finding a bank willing to accept so much change turned out to be a challenge. Eventually, an employee of the parish said that her credit union would be willing to count it and deposit it into her account.
Butcher said that the Bishop hopes to create an annual second collection on Respect Life Sunday specifically for Project Rachel. “We decided to donate the “Changing Lives” money to Project Rachel, because that was our diocese's focus this year,” said Butcher. “Next year the money may go toward a crisis pregnancy center or another organization in need.”
“I look forward to doing it again next year,” said Carly. “Many of the teacher's totaled the amount that they earned. Next year they plan to tell the students how much each class earned to see if they might be able to beat that amount.”
“In total, more than $15,000 has been raised between the parishes, the Knights of Columbus, and the schools,” explained Sister Clara Ann Budenz, director of ministries for the Diocese of Fresno. That money will be used to implement a Project Rachel ministry to serve the diocese's eight counties. The diocese is currently working to set up a Rachel's Vineyard Retreat later this year.
A trained team puts on the retreats with the assistance of a priest. Typically 14-16 men and women attend.
Sister Budenz has seen the powerful healing effect that God's love can have on those experiencing the trauma of a past-abortion. “I am aware of a woman, in her 60s, that is very upbeat,” explained Sr. Budenz. “She told me recently that she had ‘been there’ [experienced abortion], and that through the help of two priests she came to know how intimately God loves her, despite the awfulness of that experience. ‘Therefore, I never let anything shake me,’ she said.”
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minn.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 04/14/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 14-20, 2002 ----- BODY:Montana: Free Speech Upheld
THOMAS MORE LAW CENTER, March 28 — A Montana federal judge signed an order upholding the First Amendment right of pro-life demonstrators to carry signs of aborted babies.
Robert Muise, the attorney handling this case, said, “Abortion supporters want these signs taken out of the public square, and too often the police and city attorneys are willing accomplices.”
Last August a group of pro-lifers were picketing on a public sidewalk outside of a Planned Parenthood facility in Great Falls, Montana, with signs displaying images of aborted babies.
According to an assistant city attorney, the signs were a “public nuisance.” Rather than risk arrest and have their signs confiscated, the pro-lifers left the area. The Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan, argued the case.
Bishop Defends Abortion Display
Rabbi Daniel Fink of Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel in Boise said the display trivializes the suffering of blacks and Jews and contributes to an environment of terror.
In his reply Bishop Driscoll said, “I have not come to the conclusion that the exhibit is ‘hateful, bigoted and unjust.’”
Kansas Approves Cloning Ban
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 27 — The Kansas state House approved bills banning human cloning and making it a crime to destroy human embryos for research purposes.
The votes were 90-32 on the cloning measure and 78-44 on the embryo research legislation, sending the measures to the Senate.
The cloning bill would make it a felony to knowingly attempt, participate or perform human cloning, or to ship or knowingly receive the product of human cloning for any purpose. Violators could be fined $100,000 to $250,000.
Neb.: Abortion at Record Lows
The last time that happened was in 1976 when there were 3,977 abortions reported in Nebraska. Last year, 3,982 were reported.
Julie Schmit-Albin, executive director of Nebraska Right to Life said, “My personal feeling is that after 29 years and over 40 million abortions, we're talking about a lot of people who have been hurt by abortions.”
That accumulated experience, she believes, is teaching young people abortion isn't the answer. The largest drop in abortions last year was among teen-agers at 7.1% followed by women over age 30 at 6.9%. Women in their 20s had the smallest decline in abortions, averaging about 3%.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Bush Holds the Line on Cloning in Senate Fight DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Whether cloning in the United States will remain science fiction or become a legal and scientific reality — and a potential moral quagmire — is the question currently facing the U.S. Senate.
The House passed a measure banning all forms of human cloning last July, and now a similar bill introduced by Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback and cosponsored by Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu is coming up for a vote. If it passes, all types of cloning would be made illegal in the United States.
But two competing Senate bills would open the door to so-called therapeutic cloning, in which human clones are created then killed as embryos in order to harvest their stem cells and other tissues for medical research and treatment.
President Bush added his full support to the total ban in an April 10 speech. “I strongly support a comprehensive law against all human cloning,” Bush said. “And I endorse the bill — wholeheartedly endorse the bill — sponsored by Sen. Brownback and Sen. Mary Landrieu.”
The upcoming vote has taken on an added sense of urgency since Italian doctor Severino Antinori announced in a vague statement at a conference in the United Arab Emirates early this month that he had successfully impregnated a woman with a cloned child two months before. Doctors and scientists remain skeptical of Antinori's cryptic and unsubstantiated claim, but his statement helped to highlight the fact that such a scenario could be close at hand.
Competing in the Senate with the Brownback bill are two alternative bills that would allow “therapeutic cloning” but would prohibit “reproductive cloning” that permits a cloned human being to continue to develop and be born. Both of the alternative bills are now being combined as an alternative to the comprehensive ban, said Jim Hock, press secretary for California Sen. Diane Feinstein, the author of one of the competing bills. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, is the author of the other one.
The Catholic Church is unambiguously opposed to any cloning of human beings. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that reproductive techniques which “infringe the child's right to be born of a mother and a father known to him and bound to each other in marriage” are gravely immoral (no. 2376).
And in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II specified that the killing of embryos for the purpose of medical research is as morally abhorrent as abortion. Said the Pope, “This moral condemnation also regards procedures that exploit living human embryos and fetuses — sometimes specifically “produced” for this purpose by in vitro fertilization — either to be used as ‘biological material’ or as providers of organs or tissue for transplant in the treatment of certain diseases. The killing of innocent human creatures, even if carried out to help others, constitutes an absolutely unacceptable act” (No. 63).
In August 2000, John Paul reinforced that teaching in the context of cloning. “Methods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided,” he said. “I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view to obtaining organs for transplants.”
President Bush is taking the same position by insisting that Brownback's anti-cloning bill is the only morally acceptable alternative before the Senate. “Research cloning would contradict the most fundamental principle of medical ethics, that no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another,” Bush said in his April 10th speech.
Doug Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, agrees with the president's assessment. “[The partial bans] don't prevent human cloning,” Johnson said. “In fact, they require the killing of the clone.”
Because of this, Johnson added, the Harkin and Feinstein proposals are “worse than no legislation at all.”
Ian Spurgeon, Brownback's press secretary, agreed that the alternative Senate bills would do more harm than good because a partial ban would “doom all cloned embryos to death.”
Johnson also worried that the mainstream media is trying to confuse the public on the issue, by mis-representing legislation that permits “therapeutic cloning” as a “ban” on cloning. If such legislation were passed into law, he said, “The federal government would ensure that every human clone dies. That's what the media is calling a ban on human cloning.” But in fact, Johnson added, these bills would do nothing except “prevent the birth of a human clone.”
The cloning legislation is heavily embroiled in partisan politics. With the House having overwhelming passed its bill banning all cloning, and with bipartisan support also evident in the Senate, many observers predict Brownback's bill will pass. But despite the bipartisan support, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., has delayed voting. “Senator Daschle promised to bring this bill up [months ago],” said Spurgeon.
As of April 15 Daschle still had not set a firm date for the vote, but Spurgeon predicts it will take place in late April or early May.
Other Problems
In addition to the fact that all the embryos created would be doomed to die under the so-called “research cloning” bills, such laws would create other ethical problems. Spurgeon said that “there is a fear of the com-modification of human life. Clones would be “marketed for their DNA,” he predicted, with buyers trying to obtain stem cells and other tissues from clones of people regarded as having a superior genetic make-up.
In addition, Spurgeon suggested, such laws would result in the “taking advantage of poor women in the harvesting of eggs to make [human] ‘egg farms.’”
National Right to Life's Johnson highlighted another foreboding possibility. Since a therapeutic cloning bill would legally require the killing of any cloned unborn child prior to birth, “if somebody called [the government] and said a woman has a cloned pregnancy” she would be subject to “a forced abortion,” Johnson said.
Sen. Harkin's office did not return the Register's calls seeking to discuss the matter. Hock said he could not address the issues raised by Spurgeon and Johnson without first talking to Feinstein, but he commented earlier that Feinstein was supporting only a partial ban because she believes in the “need for research” in the area of “therapeutic cloning.” Many other cloning supporters echo the same argument that stem cells obtained from embryos will lead to new disease cures and other medical breakthroughs.
Spurgeon countered that Brownback is just as committed to scientific research as Feinstein, and “is very much a supporter of adult stem cell research.” In a statement, Brownback noted that “So-called ‘therapeutic’ cloning has not seen any successful treatment results in humans and is taking valuable resources away from an area where many positive results are happening.”
In fact, adult stem cells harvested from an individual's own body have been used successfully in cancer treatments for several years. And more recent research has found that such cells have the same capacity to transform themselves other tissues every type of tissue as do like stem cells harvested from embryos.
Johnson accused the pro-cloning senators of having a monetary motive. “The real purpose [of a partial ban] would be to provide political cover for senators to do the bidding of the bio-tech industry,” he said. “There is a hidden agenda here. It is not just stem cells that they want — they want to patent certain human types.”
With the Senate vote on the issue looming, Johnson said it is imperative that people get involved the debate.
Said Johnson, “Public pressure is essential; it's the only thing that can make [a total ban] happen. If the senators realize that people know what's going on, we can prevail.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: 'What Is Going On in the U.S.?' DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — When U.S. bishops had a working lunch with Pope John Paul II on April 9, they were surprised that upon entering the room, the Holy Father, not waiting for formal introductions, got right to the point: “Tell me what is going on in the United States.” The Holy Father plans a meeting with all U.S. cardinals April 22-25 in Rome to discuss just that.
The Register, in a series of articles on the clergy abuse scandals, has been answering the same question. First, the series reported that pedophilia wasn't as pervasive as it has been portrayed; second, that the U.S. bishops (with notorious exceptions) by and large haven't been ignoring the problem as has been suggested. Now, the series takes a look at the real source and solution of the problem of clergy abusers: seminaries.
In interviews with the Register, priests, seminarians, seminary rectors and vocation directors past and present described seminaries where homosexuality has been tolerated among their ranks and dissent from Church teaching fostered. But they also spoke about reform measures in place and a younger, more orthodox breed of seminarians studying for the priesthood.
Many point out that the sex scandals involve priests who went through the seminary decades ago and suggest that a number of factors may have been at play, allowing potential problem-candidates to get through: screening was not as good, officials were somewhat naive and some candidates may have entered the seminary to avoid the military draft.
And when the cultural revolution of the 1960s permeated all facets of American life, a looser atmosphere in seminaries and a rejection of traditional Church teaching left the door open to sexual experimentation. Faithful seminarians expressing concern about potential abuse were warned not to jump to conclusions.
One former vocations director, who asked not to be identified, felt that those in authority who feared a vocations shortage lowered the standards for seminary candidates.
Today, although most dioceses and seminaries screen candidates thoroughly, some observers question the value of the psychological tests given and caution that psychologists used by the Church do not all share the Church's understanding of human nature and sexuality.
In addition, although more seminarians tend to be orthodox today, many professors still teaching in seminaries are not, seminarians and younger priests said.
Some observers said that many seminaries continue to use moral theology textbooks that question traditional sexual ethics. A new book, Goodbye! Good Men, by Michael Rose, says that many seminaries and diocesan vocations teams have been hijacked by a homosexual subculture that has discouraged scores of men with vocations and a desire to serve Christ faithfully from continuing or even starting studies for the priesthood.
Oblate of St. Francis de Sales Father John Harvey, founding director of Courage, the Church's ministry to people with same-sex attractions, agreed that poor seminary formation has contributed to the sex abuse problem. In one seminary, which he declined to name, professors refer to Church teaching as “the opinion of the magisterium,” which gives the impression that the opinions of dissident theologians are as valid as Church teaching. If a moral theology professor teaches that it can be morally good for a Christian to have a homosexual relationship as long as he or she is monogamous, a student may very well apply that opinion to himself and feel free to act out on his inclinations, he said. “The way homosexuality is taught needs to be cleaned up.”
One New York pastor charged “Good men have been malformed” in seminaries, and many “walked away in disgust,” said Father Joseph Wilson of Queens.
Father Wilson studied at Holy Trinity Seminary in Dallas, where, in the mid-1980s, he remembers suffering through a guest lecture on homosexuality, part of a workshop for priests ministering to homosexuals. Seminarians were asked to attend the workshop as well. It was a “completely immoral discussion” that had the effect of undermining the Church's teaching on homosexuality, he felt. The lecturer, a priest, said that “homosexuals are not welcomed in our churches because gay couples can't go up to Communion holding hands.”
The speaker, Father Wilson said, was Father Paul Shanley, the man who has since left the Archdiocese of Boston and the priesthood. He had been called into Cardinal Humberto Madeiros’ office repeatedly because of his reported advocacy of doctrine contrary to Church teaching on homosexuality. Father Shanley, who is now accused of rape, reportedly spoke in favor of sex between men and boys at a 1979 meeting that apparently led to the founding of the North American Man Boy Love Association.
Efforts to Reform
A random survey of dioceses revealed a variety of approaches to screening and attitudes toward the homosexual candidate. In the Archdiocese of New York, psychological testing begins even before the application process. “I talk to [men who are interested] about having a good prayer life, about the importance of talking to God and being close to him,” said Father Joseph Tierney, vocations director. “That's how your vocation will come.”
As part of the application process, most dioceses require a battery of psychological tests; an extensive biographical sketch, including family background; and interviews with various boards. After acceptance, many candidates have to undergo a criminal background check to gain entrance to a seminary.
“Dunwoodie always looks for the man who sincerely wants to serve the Church,” Father Tierney said, using the nickname for St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., the major seminary of the Archdiocese of New York.
When it comes to homosexuality, the rectors of seminaries in the archdioceses of Chicago and New York said they would not take a candidate who has been involved in a homosexual lifestyle.
“I wouldn't accept someone known to be involved in homosexuality,” said Msgr. Peter Finn, rector of St. Joseph's Seminary. He said he would “not be inclined” to accept a candidate even if he was a homosexual who has not acted on his same-sex attractions.
For Father John Canary, rector of the University of St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, outside Chicago, homosexual “orientation” does not necessarily exclude a candidate. But Father John Folda, rector of St. Gregory the Great Seminary of the Diocese of Lincoln, Neb., said simply, “We don't take homosexual candidates.” The reason, he said, is the same as that given by the Holy See. “Because of the way of life a priest lives, there would be a great deal of temptation for someone like that,” he said. “You'd be calling a man to something unsuitable for his circumstances.”
Also, if a student population becomes predominantly homosexual, heterosexual candidates would be reluctant to study there, Father Folda said.
In addition to testing, all candidates for the Diocese of Lincoln are required to “spend time in close proximity to the vocations director,” he said.
That's the way it is in the Diocese of Providence, R.I., where prospective candidates live in a house of formation with the vocations director and the rector of the major seminary. “The best screening is seeing them interact for a year of two,” said Father Marcel Taillon, the vocations recruiter. “In some dioceses, you apply, and they send you away to their seminary.” A candidate, he said, should be known to the Church.
Once accepted, a candidate is usually under constant scrutiny as he studies, participates in the semi-nary's prayer life and community life, and undertakes pastoral assignments. At St. Mary of the Lake, each seminarian must pass a yearly vote of confidence by at least 80% of faculty members and 80% of fellow seminarians. Father Canary encourages anyone who knows of issues that may indicate a problem to let him know. Seminarians also undergo evaluations in their pastoral assignments on how they relate to people both professionally and ministerially, particularly how they relate to women.
“So much of a priest's working relationship is with women,” Father Canary said. Officials look for a “level of maturity and an ability to maintain professional boundaries with women.”
He said that pedophilia, strictly speaking, is “very hard to determine,” but that a study done 10 years ago found only one pedophile priest among all those who had served in the Archdiocese of Chicago over the previous 40 years. The rest were homosexual abusers of teens.
“We were told that they get stuck at a [certain] age, emotionally,” he said. “Some of that you can see in a person, in the level of maturity in a person's work. “They can't handle relationships in mature ways,” with the staff of a parish, for example, or with women. “Then you dig deeper, and maybe you send him for assessment.”
There also seems to be a concern for addressing human problems that future priests might have. Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., is perhaps typical in holding workshops for seminarians on issues such as celibacy and anger. And at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, N.Y., the issue of intimacy was “repeatedly addressed, for example, in friendships and relationships with fellow priests, parishioners and lay staff,” said Father Douglas Arcoleo, a priest of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y., who was ordained four years ago.
Psychologists on staff at St. Joseph's Seminary in New York help students develop interpersonal relationships, and students have the help of faculty mentors and spiritual advisers.
“As dean, I had constant conversations with the men on their relationships,” said Father Joseph Tierney, the vocations director. He added that discipline was important: If someone missed morning prayer, he would have to report to Father Tierney. As a faculty adviser, he tried to help students form good habits of a prayer life and maintain a healthy balance between academic work, a social life and exercise.
Rome Has Spoken
After meeting with the Holy Father in early April, Bishop Wilton Gregory — head of the U.S. bishops’ conference — said the Church does need to re-examine homosexual priests and ask “what kind of men we want to be our priests, and importantly, to be the priests who care for the next generation of Catholics.”
He said the issue of homosexuality in the priesthood deserves discussion, in terms of how it affects a priest's ability to keep his promise of living a chaste life. But while it would be helpful to examine this question, Catholic News Service reported that he said it should not necessarily be linked to the sex abuse issue.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls linked the two when he addressed the issue of homosexuality and the priesthood in March, saying that men with homosexual inclinations “just cannot be ordained.”
“That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality,” he said. “But you cannot be in this field.”
His comments echoed Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who told Catholic News Service last year that persons with a homosexual inclination should not be admitted to the seminary.
The two men's remarks might make it seem like the Vatican is just waking up to the problem, but Rome has been speaking out for some time. The question is whether dioceses and seminaries in the United States have been implementing its directives.
A 1961 Vatican document recommended that any person with serious unresolved sexual problems be screened out, saying that the chastity and celibacy required by religious and priestly life would constitute for them a “continuous heroic act and a painful martyrdom.”
Even further back, Pope Pius XI, in a 1935 encyclical on the priest-hood, said that those in charge of the clergy must not only foster and strengthen vocations but also “discourage unsuitable candidates, and in good time send them away from a path not meant for them.”
“Such are all youths who show a lack of necessary fitness, and who are, therefore, unlikely to persevere in the priestly ministry both worthily and becomingly,” Pope Pius wrote in Ad Catholici Sacerdotii. “In these matters hesitation and delay is a serious mistake and may do serious harm. It is far better to dismiss an unfit student in the early stages” to prevent him from being a “stumbling block to himself and to others with peril of eternal ruin.”
Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist who has served on the U.S. bishops’ ad hoc committee on sexual abuse, said that just as many girls are abused as are boys. As far as sexual abuse is concerned, there is no evidence that a homosexual is more of a risk to a boy than a heterosexual is to a girl, he said. Berlin's claim seems to be starkly contradicted by the facts now being reported ad nauseam by the media, but it represents the advice bishops are getting.
Berlin did suggest that there may be more cases of priestly sexual abuse of boys because, in the past, a priest chaperoning a group of boys on a trip, for example, did not raise a red flag, while a priest accompanying a group of girls would have.
Father Harvey of Courage, which seeks to help persons with same-sex attraction live chaste lives, said the homosexual candidate is not the only problematic seminarian. “A heterosexual in the seminary who is constantly masturbating shouldn't be in the seminary” either, he said.
But Richard Fitzgibbons, a psychiatrist who runs Comprehensive Counseling Services in West Conshohocken, Pa., said that virtually every priest he's treated who has sexually abused children had previously been involved in homosexual relationships with other adults.
One vocations director who asked not to be identified said that the problem calls for dismissal of all homosexual candidates, but he added that the problem is not just a sexual one but also a doctrinal one.
“Bishops are making the judgment that [homosexual and heterosexual] libido drives are equal,” said the priest. In reality, the sex drives of homosexuals is stronger, and the Church is getting a ‘$2 billion lesson’ because it ignored that fact, he said. The Church must reiterate that “homosexuality is still a psychological disorder,” he added.
Psychologist Richard Cross noted that up to one-third of all homosexuals have tendencies toward pederasty.
This suggests that the clergy abuse problem will not be fixed as long as seminaries continue to accept homosexuals.
Two priests in vocation work now report hopeful signs in spite of the poor play the Church is getting in the media. Since the scandals in Boston broke in January, Father Tierney said he has actually been getting more inquiries than usual. “They're saying, ‘I see the Church is being lambasted in the press. I've been interested in the priesthood for some time now, and I feel even more strongly about serving the Church.’”
“We're still getting candidates,” Providence diocesan vocations recruiter Father Taillon said. “It's very genuine. Christ is calling them.”
----- EXCERPT: Seminarians have shocking answers to the Pope's question ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Youthful Order Growing Fast In New York DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Firefighters, police and priests were heroes in New York.
So were the Sisters of Life.
“They make me happy just looking at them, said Helen Alvare, professor at The Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law and formerly the Catholic bishops’ spokeswoman on pro-life issues. “And that joy is always a sign of heaven to me, like children's happiness over the least little thing.”
“They also reflect the charism of their founder,” Alvare said of the order of sisters established by the late Cardinal John O'Connor in 1990. “They are just a real gift of the cardinal and themselves to New York!”
That's exactly how Cardinal O'Connor envisioned them. And it is a gift that they have proven themselves to be — long before and since Sept. 11.
When the news broke that the World Trade Center had been attacked, those who are trained nurses were taken by ambulance from the Bronx, where their main convent is located, to St. Claire's Hospital, a Catholic hospital in downtown Manhattan. They would be available to be part of surgical teams. Unfortunately, as we know, they were not needed for surgery, as there were few survivors from the World Trade Center wreckage.
They were, however, angels for the regular staff nurses who they were available to relieve.
But that wasn't the best work they did. “Our greatest response,” said Mother Agnes Mary Donovan, mother superior of the order, “is prayer.”
And from sisters one probably expects prayer. But how about from the down-and-out pregnant women who are staying with the Sisters of Life during their pregnancies?
These women also did their part.
“Their desire to be with God,” said Mother Agnes, “was the same as ours.” Sisters went to the streets with their prayers as part of a worldwide candlelight vigil — attracting dozens of others, processing in prayer in the Bronx streets, ending up in front of the Blessed Sacrament. “It was beautiful and gave witness to the hope that God will somehow bring good out of this.”
The events of Sept. 11, said Mother Agnes, are close to the hearts of the sisters. The sisters’ mission is to place children with families, and the adoptive father of the first child they ever placed was killed in the attacks.
The Heart of New York
The Sisters of Life minister in five locations — including a main convent, a retreat house, their home for women in midtown Manhattan and a world-renowned pro-life research library in the Bronx.
There are currently seven pregnant women living with the sisters full time. But that doesn't even begin to reflect the extent of their ministry — of counseling, of giving adoption resources to women, of following “a philosophy of non-abandonment.” A woman who needs the sisters has them for as long as they need and want.
One woman they never abandoned received their first “John Cardinal O'Connor Award” two summers ago at their 10th anniversary celebration.
Jennifer Pipp found herself “unexpectedly and unwillingly pregnant” five years ago. The sisters took her in for the duration of her pregnancy. “The sisters loved me for what I was at the time. It was an unconditional love. And they gave me a foundation for prayer that was more than I had prior to that.”
She gave that child over to an adoptive family, went to college, and married David Pipp. Mr. and Mrs. Pipp now have two sons, one named John, for the sisters’ founder.
The sisters’ second annual dinner will be in New York this May 22.
The devastation of the Sept. 11 attacks has in some tragic ways brought more attention to the work of people like the sisters. “It's awakened all of us to the preciousness of human life,” said Mother Agnes. And it's through prayer, Mother Agnes said, that “the world will be changed.” That, she said, is their “first work.”
Young and Growing
According to Sister Mary Loretta, the vocation director of Sisters of Life, they are seeing their prayers being answered. The young congregation — the median age of women in the congregation is about 33 — has queries from all over the world. Sisters are from the Philippines, Korea and Canada, and queries come from everywhere from women of all ages.
Since Sept. 11, Sister Mary Loretta has seen a marked difference in the women who have come to her discerning a vocation with the sisters. For a weekend retreat in November, Sister Mary Loretta had 20 women make the trip to the Bronx convent. Flying and driving didn't matter to them. Usually, she said, “there are obstacles.”
Since Sept. 11, instead of fright, “I have seen more of a determination to know God's will,” she said. “‘Do not be afraid’ seems to be the scripture they are living by.”
The small, young order, currently has 45 sisters, eight postulants, eight novices, 29 professed. There are about 200 active inquires — all this with no recruitment ads.
“Women hear about us in the most unusual ways,” said Mother Agnes. Mostly, it's from priests steering women in the direction of the bright, cheerful, devoted young order. Catholic hospitals, of course, but also crisis-pregnancy centers, evangelical ones, especially, might send pregnant women their way.
“We do little ourselves,” said Mother Agnes. Most of the advertising and fund raising that happens to aid the sisters in their ministry of service to pregnant women in need and their children are raised by a lay board of friends. Three years old, the Friends of the Sisters of Life Committee was put together largely by Franciscan Friar of the Renewal Father Benedict Groeschel and is chaired by Robert Monahan, a retired stockbroker.
Mary Barnes, a recent addition to the board, said of the committee, “The Friends seek to magnify the sisters’ mission of promoting a greater awareness and appreciation of the sacredness of all human life, from conception to natural death, and to assist the sisters financially. Their witness to life is particularly compelling in light of Sept. 11.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Woman of the Century DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Formerly associate director of Chicago's Big Shoulders Fund and director of the Archdiocese of Chicago's Respect Life Office, Cardinal Francis George asked her to become Vice chancellor for the archdiocese in 1999. She spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
Did you grow up in Chicago?
Yes, I'm the oldest girl in a family of five. We were a Scottish Catholic family among largely Irish and Italian families — many with six to 12 children — in Chicago's Austin neighborhood. Everyone's father was either a policeman, a fireman, or they worked for county government, as did my father. My parents emigrated from Scotland in the 1960s. My mother says that they come from “the people that never lost the faith.”
How did you first get involved in pro-life work?
I remember first being horrified by the injustice of abortion in seventh grade, and I wrote a letter to the president. When I got to law school and began reading the abortion cases and studying the law, I was again struck by the injustice and felt called to do something about it.
It was after reading a magazine article about former Pro-life secretariat Helen Alvare, however, that I read about her work at the Bishop's conference and said, “That's what I want to do!” I didn't know that such jobs existed.
You also spent several years helping inner-city Chicago Catholic schools. Tell me about that.
I'm the product of 12 years of Jesuit education, so I know the value of a Catholic education. The Catholic schools never pulled out of Chicago's neighborhoods, even when some of them became 90% non-Catholic. Once labeled the worst public schools in the nation, many corporations saw it in their interest to support Catholic schools so that they could find an educated workforce.
One CEO told me that he could not find someone qualified enough to take down a phone message without spelling errors. He discovered he could find students that read and wrote well if he recruited in the Catholic schools.
I understand that you went through a very difficult pregnancy yourself?
In October of 2000, when I was six weeks pregnant, my husband Kevin and I made a Jubilee pilgrimage to Rome. After only a day of sightseeing, I was rushed to Rome's Gemelli Hospital, writhing in pain. The remainder of our eight-day pilgrimage was spent in the hospital as doctors tried to determine what was wrong.
The first evening I was there Dr. Giuseppe Noia came into the room. “His English wasn't the best, but he asked, ‘Have you heard of Padre Pio?’”
“Yes,” my husband explained. We had been planning to visit San Giovanni Rotondo. “You should consecrate this pregnancy to Padre Pio,” the doctor told me twice. With that, the doctor walked down a dark hallway and we never saw him again. It was like something out of a movie. I figured God was telling us something. So, I asked a priest friend who was stationed in Rome, Fr. Bob Geisinger, the procurator general for the Society of Jesus, to bring me some sort of Padre Pio icon. He came to the hospital the next day with a little plastic desktop thing with Padre Pio's face on it. And we consecrated the baby to Padre Pio, and I kept that souvenir by my bedside throughout the pregnancy.
How did that impact your pro-life views?
As it turned out, I had a 2.5-pound fibroid tumor blocking my birth canal. When I asked what my treatment options were, the first thing the doctor told me was that I could ‘interrupt’ the pregnancy, as if the baby had a ‘pause’ button. My face went ashen. After explaining to the doctor that abortion was not possible under any circumstance, we were presented with other options.
The pregnancy made me much more aware of what women face when they undergo a complicated pregnancy. My employer was very understanding, I have good insurance, I had no other children to care for, and I had a supportive husband and family. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a woman facing something like that alone.
You are one among only a handful of women to hold such a position. Tell me about your role as Vice Chancellor.
There had never been a lay person or a woman in this position before, so it was quite a momentous step for the archdiocese. It's largely administrative and record-keeping. I process the Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat requests, lift prohibitions on previously annulled marriage cases, and serve as liaison to the archdiocese's many lay ecclesial movements.
I also spend much time answering questions regarding the sacraments. The question I'm most often asked is parents wondering whether they can change the godparents for their child when they've had a falling out with them. We get that question 2-3 times per week. The answer is “No.” You can no more change godparents than you can change who was the maid of honor at your wedding.”
How has your position altered your views regarding the role of women in the Church?
I am very supportive of the Church's teaching against women's ordination. My work has allowed people to experience the way that lay people, and women, can work in the Church — as directors of religious education, administrators, principals — in positions that do not require an ordained priest.
It's not as though women do not have influence in the Church. I have a position of authority. I've been given a lot of responsibility. I answer media questions. I have a budget. I don't feel that I am being stifled.
And how did you turn out with your pregnancy?
After six weeks of bed rest and some hospitalization, I went into early labor at 35 weeks. Our daughter, Gemma Therese, was born via emergency C-section on April 27, 2001.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Hallan FioRito ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----- TITLE: Catholic Congressman Seeks to Protect Churches Against IRS DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — If the government won't let your priest tell you that Al Gore supports legal abortion, then what does freedom of religion mean?
That's the question Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, is asking.
“I want these churches and synagogues to have the right to say, ‘George Bush is this, Al Gore is this,’” said Rep. Jones. “Based on the [tax] code, that could be a violation.” Jones converted to Catholicism as an adult.
The provision of the tax code Jones was referring to was changed in 1954 by then Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Initially intended to curtail the political activity of non-profit organizations, the law had a chilling effect on free speech for religious leaders, Jones said.
“I'm really upset that one man could have so much power,” Jones said of Johnson. “To me, it's a violation of our priests’, pastors’ and rabbis’ free speech rights.”
So Rep. Jones has introduced The Houses of Worship Political Speech Protection Act, which would exempt churches from IRS regulations on non-profit organizations.
If the new bill were to become law, Jones said, religious ministers would be free to speak about political candidates and issues without fear that they would lose their tax-exempt status.
Jay Sekulow, general counsel for the Virginia-based American Center for Law and Justice, said the current law is a “disaster.”
“The IRS is selective in its enforcement — often ignoring political involvement from liberals, but targeting conservative churches and ministers like the Church at Pierce Creek in New York that had its tax-exempt status revoked after the pastor placed newspaper advertisements in 1992 calling attention to then-Presidential candidate Bill Clinton's position on critical moral issues like abortion and sexual abstinence outside of marriage,” said Sekulow.
He said that the Founding Fathers were wise to insure the independence of churches from government control, and said that independence should not be subject to IRS oversight.
Asked Sekulow, “Why have we put the IRS — which is designed to collect revenue for the general treasure — in the position of being the speech police?”
But opponents say the bill would actually weaken the wall of separation between church and state.
“Despite the rhetoric of the religious right, there is no clamoring in America for church intervention in political campaigns,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “When we separate partisan politics from the pulpit, we maintain the integrity of our houses of worship as well as the political process.”
Lynn cited a Pew Foundation Poll that found that 70% of respondents said churches should not endorse political candidates, while only 22% backed church involvement in campaigns.
“The American people don't want the law changed, America's religious leaders don't need the law changed and the integrity of America's democratic process requires that the law not be changed,” Lynn said.
But free speech rights aren't about poll numbers, Rep. Jones countered.
“Why would you want the state to have any power over what a pastor can say? We're not saying you have to say ‘George Bush is pro-life.’ But you may say George Bush is pro-life,” said Jones. “If you don't want to talk about candidates, you don't have to.”
Jones speculates that if the law gets changed that some churches will become active in educating their congregations about political candidates and issues — and that others would opt not to discuss it.
“That's what pastors and priests did prior to 1954,” said Jones. “It just returns the freedom, if they want to.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Book Notes Emptiness of Childless Career Women
Hewlett found that 25% of childless high-achieving women 41 to 55 still would like a child. Overall, only 11%-14% of those without children preferred it that way.
But USA Today says that the common wisdom among women does not counsel younger women to return to a traditional life of motherhood instead of pursuing high-powered careers. Rather, they should “Get a plan. Envision your life at 45, and if you want that life to include a child, think now about how you will make it happen.”
The assumption, then, is that such women are the only ones running the show when it comes to motherhood. Nowhere to be found is the notion of “God sending us a child.”
Also apparent in the discussion is the divorce between marriage and childbearing. USA Today cites experts who say a number of factors might explain the childless career women phenomenon, including intervening career ambitions, difficulties obtaining promotions when a boss senses “baby hunger” and the fact that “most single women still do not want to conceive or adopt a child on their own.”
The article tells us about Carrie Olson, for example. The 43-year-old director of marketing for a luxury hotel company could have “arranged to have a child” in the six years before her second marriage, but was put off by the prospect of being a single, working mother.
She and her first husband had discussed having children “on and off,” the paper says. “We kept saying, ‘Next year we will think about it.’ We were both caught up in our work and our marriage …”
Well, if you really were “caught up” in your marriage, shouldn't that include at least being open to having children? What is a marriage about, if not having children?
New York Mayor Defends Abortion Training Plan
The president of the city's Health and Hospitals Corp., Dr. Benjamin Chu, announced he was moving forward with the program — a campaign promise the mayor had made last year — and looking for donors to fund it.
The training has until now been elective for the 150 ob-gyn residents who rotate in the 11 public hospitals. Under Bloomberg's plan, it would be mandatory, except for those with moral or religious objections.
Kelli Conlin, director of the Manhattan office of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, said her group presented the plan to Bloomberg last year because it was concerned that so many abortion providers were retiring without being replaced. According to a recent NARAL study, city hospitals use “outdated and even dangerous” abortion procedures, and many women seeking abortions there have experienced delays in obtaining them.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: State Legislatures Debate Question of 'What is Marriage?' DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:BOSTON — It's politics at its most unusual these days in Massachusetts.
As a proposed state constitutional amendment defending marriage moves forward, same-sex unions have become a major issue in the gubernatorial race, homosexual couples seeking marriage licenses have gone to court in Boston, and some people whose names appear on petitions for the marriage amendment say they thought they were signing up to protect horses from human consumption
Amid the controversies the marriage proposal is faring well in the public forum, despite some adverse media attention. Promoters of the constitutional amendment gained more than enough signatures statewide to bring the issue to the Legislature, which must vote the measure with 25% approval for two straight years for it to be placed on the ballot in November 2004. The process went forward April 10 with a sometimes raucous hearing before a joint committee of the Legislature.
The Protection of Marriage Amendment, defining marriage as an exclusive relationship between one man and one woman and affording specific benefits only to this heterosexual bond, was drafted by Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage, which was formed after Vermont provided homosexual unions the same legal and economic benefits as marriage in July 2000.
A move to define marriage as it has been understood since Adam and Eve does not sound earth shaking, yet the stance of each candidate for governor on the amendment has been sifted by the media. When it was found that the wife and children of Republican candidate Mitt Romney had signed the petition, Romney was quick to term the proposal extreme.
Tom Birmingham, a Democratic candidate and president of the state Senate, trumpets his support of “equality and sexual orientation.” He promises to press domestic partnership benefits for homosexual couples in state and local governments “until it becomes law and that inequity is erased.”
The Massachusetts Catholic Conference, speaking for the state's bishops, supports the marriage amendment, arguing that it is not only a religious issue but also a matter of the common good.
“There is a tremendous and unique reason for the state's interest in protecting traditional marriage, and that is the creation of new life, which is necessary for the state itself to exist,” said Daniel Avila, the Catholic Conference's associate director of policy and research.
Connecticut Victory
Catholics in New England saw success on the issue in late March when a Connecticut bill approving same-sex unions was defeated in the judiciary committee of the Legislature after strong lobbying by the Connecticut Catholic Conference. It was the second year that such a bill was tabled.
“This was accomplished by the hundreds of faithful who made phone calls,” said Dr. Marie Hilliard, executive director of the Connecticut conference. “On Friday [the week before the committee vote], it seemed that proponents of same-sex unions had the votes. I know for a fact that votes were achieved for our position by such calls.”
Though Vermont is the only state to place same-sex unions on a legal par with marriage, homosexual activists are pressing other states to do the same. An “equity” bill was defeated in Hawaii two years ago, and Californians recently staved off a stealth measure in the state Legislature.
Two years ago 61% of California voters approved an amendment intended to ban legal recognition of homosexual unions. But a loophole in the law left room last year for a “civil unions bill” that sought to rewrite California's legal code by adding “or spouse in legal union” wherever the word “spouse” appears.
The measure was withdrawn in January after pressure from conservative groups.
On the national level, a federal marriage amendment was launched last July by the Alliance for Marriage. At a press conference in support of the amendment, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, a civil and canon lawyer, stated that the traditional definition of marriage is “non-negotiable and irrevocable.” Quoting the Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Bevilacqua urged rejection of same-sex unions because they are “contrary to the common good and the truth about man and thus truly unjust.”
Long Struggle Ahead
The road to a similar amendment in Massachusetts will take another two years. In the first step of the process, the marriage group gained 130,000 signatures last fall, 76,000 of which were certified by the state. The amount well exceeded the 57,100 names needed. Underlining the grass-roots popularity of the proposal, the marriage group reported that signatures were gained in 347 of the state's 351 municipalities.
But there were problems. Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage filed complaints that its petition gatherers were harassed by radical homosexual groups. More recently, a group called Save Our Horses claimed that signatures were stolen from its petition and placed on the marriage proposal. The same company was hired by both the horse advocates and the marriage group to gain signatures, and stories in The Boston Globe and The New York Times carried quotes from people who claimed they wanted to sign the horse petition but found their names on the marriage one.
James Lafferty, spokesman for the marriage group, said that with definite evidence lacking to substantiate those charges, “our assumption is that this is just another ruse to undermine our petition.”
The Campaign for Equality of Boston, a coalition formed to quash the amendment, lists the petition signers on its Web site to allow people to see if their names are being used falsely. The group says that the amendment “will permanently deny gay and lesbian couples and their children the rights, protections and responsibilities every family needs.”
As well, seven homosexual couples have filed suit after being denied marriage licenses in Boston and four nearby cities. Their lawyer argued in court last month, “The right to marry is pretty meaningless if it doesn't include the right to marry the person you fall in love with.”
A statement by the state's Catholic Conference called the suit “as radical an attack on the institution of marriage as one could imagine” that would force the state “to issue marriage licenses to anyone who professes love to anyone, or any two or three for that matter …”
If marriage is redefined his way, the conference warned, “then we have lost a treasure.”
Brian Caulfield writes from New Haven, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:United Nations Publishes Anti-Catholic Report
LIFESITE, March 28 — In anticipation of a recent U.N. Commission on Population and Development meeting in New York, the U.N. Economic and Social Council published a document in which a group that calls itself “Catholics for a Free Choice” (though it has been repudiated by the bishops) claims that Church teaching against contraception and abortion “condemn” people to death. It claims that a majority of Catholics support contraception and abortion and that the Church prohibition of the practices is not subject to papal infallibility.
The Economic and Social Council said that the secretary-general had received the statement and circulated it, apparently giving his imprimatur. But U.N. delegates should have no problem getting the facts straight on Church teaching. Archbishop Renato Martino, the Holy See's representative to the world body, repeats it often. One would think that educated diplomats can tell the difference between getting it from the horse's mouth and the skewed interpretations by angry pro-abortion “Catholics.”
Chinese President Restates Demands on Vatican
The Vatican also must stop interfering in China's “internal affairs,” Jiang said. “Such an interference is absolutely unacceptable even under the pretext of religion.”
Cardinal Arinze Links Terrorism With Culture of Death
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, April 9 — Cardinal Francis Arinze has suggested a link between the terrorist attacks on the United States and the growing tolerance of abortion, euthanasia and genetic experiments on human beings, the French news service reported.
In a letter to Buddhists celebrating the anniversary of the birth of Buddha, the Vatican's chief ecumenist called it a paradox that humans’ right to life is threatened by society's “highly advanced technology.” That paradox has “reached the extent of creating a culture of death, in which abortion, euthanasia and genetic experiments on human life itself have already obtained, or are on the way to obtaining, legal recognition.
“How can we not make a correlation between this culture of death — in which the most innocent, defenseless and critically ill human lives are threatened with death — and terrorist attacks such as those of September 11, in which thousands of innocent people were slaughtered?” he asked. “We must say that both of these are built on contempt for human life.”
The cardinal suggested that restoring a culture of life begin with the proper education of young people. He also invited Buddhists to work with Catholics to protect human life and reject the culture of death.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Rome's Popular Piety Directory: Green Light and Guidelines DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Passion plays. Marian processions. Advent wreaths. Blessing of the throats. Holy water, kissing crucifixes, enthroning statues — how important are all these traditions? Isn't it enough to go to Mass?
A new “Directory of Popular Piety and the Liturgy: Principles and Guidelines” released on April 9 by the Vatican highlights the importance of such manifestations of “popular piety” for Catholic life, and also teaches that such devotions ought to be in harmony with the liturgy, not opposed to it.
Devotions must be “in accordance with the Sacred Liturgy, and derive from it in some way, and lead the people toward it,” said Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of Sacraments, which published the directory. He said the directory testified to the “the importance of knowing the value of popular devotions, of protecting their genuine substance, purifying where necessary, illuminating with the light of Sacred Scripture, orienting them to the Sacred Liturgy, without setting one against the other.”
The 300-page directory, published only in Italian thus far, begins with three chapters that explain the theological and social significance of popular devotions. Three chapters follow that list various devotions in accord with the liturgical year, Marian devotions, and devotions to the angels and saints. Two concluding chapters address devotions and prayers for the dead, as well the role of shrines and pilgrimages.
“The directory is a document of pastoral character. ... It is not a complete catalogue of the manifestations of popular devotions of different countries but rather it offers the basic outline,” said Archbishop Pio Tamburrino, Medina's deputy. “Bishops are responsible to establish norms and practical guidelines, keeping in mind the local traditions and the particular expressions of religiosity and popular piety existing in their dioceses.”
Inculturation
The 1999 postsynodal apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America (The Church in America) stresses that making the Gospel message resonate in specific cultures — inculturation — is particularly important in North America.
The directory says that, “Popular religiosity is the first and fundamental form of ‘inculturation’ of the faith, which must continuously be oriented and guided by the directions of the Liturgy.”
The directory is aimed at bishops, religious superiors, priests and deacons, especially those responsible for shrines. In fact, the directory can serve as a convenient compilation of ideas for pastors who wish to augment the devotional life of their parishes without taking away from the Mass. The directory suggests that such devotional life is an important element of the common priesthood of all the baptized, namely the responsibility of every Christian to take part in the priestly tasks of offering praise and sacrifice to God.
“The faithful exercise [that common] priesthood… not only in liturgical action… but also in other expressions of Christian life, amongst which are popular devotions,” the directory says. “On this priestly foundation, popular piety helps the faithful to persevere in prayer and in praise to God.”
With the Liturgy
While the liturgy is presided over by the ordained priesthood, the directory illustrates how popular devotions — an aspect of the common priest-hood — can be prayed in harmony with the liturgy.
One example offered was the recitation of the rosary, which most Catholics pray according to a rotation of days: joyful mysteries on Mondays and Thursdays, sorrowful mysteries on Tuesdays and Fridays, etc… But if Christmas or the Visitation fall on a Friday, it would be better to pray the joyful mysteries, to better make the connection with the Church's liturgical cycle.
The directory encourages Catholics to adopt a sense of what might be called “liturgical time,” which gives a deeper meaning to mere chronological time. Devotional life lived according to the changing feasts and seasons of the liturgical year can sanctify time — elevate it above simply the living of one moment after another.
For example, the directory suggests that the feast of the Holy Family (Sunday within the octave of Christmas) is an opportune time for the renewal of wedding vows, which form the foundation of a Christian family. Similarly, the feast of the Presentation (Feb. 2) is a good time to bless children, and encourage them to devote themselves to the Lord's service.
During Holy Week, there are many well known manifestations of popular piety, from visiting the altars of repose on Holy Thursday to passion plays on Good Friday.
These need to be purified, the directory states, advising that altars of repose ought not to be symbols of Jesus in the tomb, but rather places to give thanks for the gift of the Eucharist.
Passion plays, too, should not involve excessive bodily mortification, as is seen in some countries. The directory also proposes various Marian devotions to accompany Lent and Holy Week, including the via Matris (Way of the Mother) which is analogous to the via Crucis, and the “Hour of the Mother,” a set of prayers for Holy Saturday, when the Church lives only in the heart of Mary, whose faith does not fail.
The directory brings to the attention of pastors devotions from other countries and from the past that may have been forgotten.
For example, in German countries there is the custom of blessing fragrant herbs on the Assumption (Aug. 15) as a sign of faith in eternal life — the herbs being an ancient pagan symbol of healing power.
The directory also lists various devotions to the Precious Blood, among which are meditations on the “seven effusions of blood” recorded in the Gospels: the circumcision of Jesus, the sweating of blood in Gethsemane, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the ascent of Calvary, the crucifixion and the pouring forth of blood and water from the wounded side.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: God Will Restore His People DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
During his general audience on April 10, Pope John Paul II continued his teaching on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours, focusing on Psalm 80, which is recited during Morning Prayer in Week II of the Liturgy of the Hours.
Psalm 80 refers to God as a shepherd who is called upon to save his people, who are his flock. The psalmist uses the imagery of a vine that is planted by the Lord and cultivated by man, which flourishes and grows to produce abundant fruit until the vineyard is overrun by wild beasts, the symbol of sin and evil. “This psalm recalls the principal stages of Jewish history,” the Holy Father pointed out. But Israel's prosperity was shattered. “God's vine was ravaged by turmoil: Israel was harshly tested and a terrible invasion devastated the Promised Land,” he said.
But God is neither asleep nor indifferent. “Psalm 80 is a song intensely marked by suffering, but also by unshakable trust. God is always ready to ‘return’ to his people, but his people need to ‘return’ to him in faithfulness,” the Holy Father noted.
The psalm we just heard has the tone of a lament and a plea of all the people of Israel. The first part makes use of a well-known biblical symbol, the symbol of the shepherd. The Lord is called the “Shepherd of Israel,” who is the “guide of the flock of Joseph” (Psalm 80:2). From the top of the Ark of the Covenant, where he is enthroned upon the cherubim, the Lord leads his flock—his people— and protects them from danger.
This is what he did when they were crossing the desert. Now, however, he seems absent, almost asleep or indifferent. He offers his flock, which he was to lead and nourish (see Psalm 23), only the bread of tears (see Psalm 80:6). Enemies laugh at his people, who have been humiliated and insulted. Yet God does not seem to be moved or “stirred up” (verse 3), nor does he reveal his power, which is poised to defend the victims of violence and oppression. The repetition of the cry in the antiphon (see verses 4 and 8) seems to be an attempt to shake God from his indifference so that he will once again shepherd and defend his people.
Israel's Prosperity
In the second part of the prayer, which is full of tension as well as trust, we find another symbol that is dear to the Bible: the image of the vine. This image is easy to understand, because it is part of the landscape of the Promised Land and a sign of fruitfulness and joy.
As the prophet Isaiah points out in one of his more highly poetic passages (see Isaiah 5:1-7), the vine represents Israel. It illustrates two fundamental dimensions. On one hand, the vine represents the gift, the grace and the love of God because God has planted it (see Isaiah 5:2; Psalm 80:9-10). On the other, it requires the farmer's care in order to produce grapes to make wine. This, then, represents the human response—personal commitment and the fruit of good works.
Through the imagery of the vine, this psalm recalls the principal stages of Jewish history: its roots, the experience of the exodus from Egypt, and the entry into the Promised Land. The vine reached its greatest expanse over the entire region of Palestine and even beyond during Solomon's reign. It actually extended from the northern mountains of Lebanon with their cedars, to the Mediterranean Sea, and almost to the great Euphrates River (see verses 11-12).
Israel's Trial
However, the splendor of this prosperity was shattered. This psalm reminds us that God's vine was ravaged by turmoil. Israel was harshly tested and a terrible invasion devastated the Promised Land. Like an invader, God himself demolished the wall surrounding the vine, leaving it to be plundered by robbers, who are represented by the wild boar, a violent and impure animal according to ancient tradition. All wild beasts join with the power of the boar, and symbolize a hostile horde that devastates everything in its path (see verses 13-14).
Then, the psalmist makes an urgent appeal to God to break his silence and prepare once again to defend the victims: “Turn again, Lord of hosts; look down from heaven and see; attend to this vine” (verse 15). God will again protect the vital stock of this vine that has been subjected to such a violent storm, and drive out all those who tried to uproot and burn it (see verses 16-17).
At this point, the psalm takes on a tone of messianic hope: In verse 18, the psalmist prays, “May your help be with the man at your right hand, with the one whom you once made strong.” The immediate reference is, perhaps, to the Davidic king who will lead an uprising for freedom with the Lord's support. Nevertheless, the Psalmist's trust is implicitly directed to the future Messiah, to that “son of man” of whom the prophet Daniel will sing (see Daniel 7:13-14), and that Jesus will take as a favorite TITLE to describe his work and his Messianic nature. Furthermore, the Fathers of the Church will be unanimous is pointing to the vine in this psalm as prophetically prefiguring both Christ, “the true vine” (John 15:1) and the Church.
God's Faithfulness
Of course, for the Lord's face to shine again, Israel needs to be converted in faithfulness and in prayer to God the Savior. This is what the psalmist affirms when he says, “Then we will not withdraw from you” (verse19).
Thus, Psalm 80 is a song intensely marked by suffering, but also by unshakable trust. God is always ready to “return” to his people, but his people need to “return” to him in faithfulness. If we repent from our sin, the Lord will “repent” from his intention to punish us. This is what the psalmist believes and it echoes in our hearts, too, opening them to hope.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Pro-Lifers Decry British Approval of 'Therapeutic' Cloning DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:LONDON — The British once prided themselves that they were at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution and it is with the same pride that its political leaders regard its role in the “Biotech Revolution.”
But according to pro-lifers it's a pride that is leading the nation into a “sub-human direction.”
Before the United Kingdom's Parliament broke for Easter its Upper Chamber, the House of Lords, had given the final go-ahead for “limited therapeutic cloning.” The term refers to allowing clones to be created and then destroyed as embryos in order to harvest their stem cells for medical research and treatment.
As a consequence of the parliamentary approval, the country that gave the world Dolly the cloned sheep and that has been congratulated by Antonio Severiani, the Italian doctor who wants to create a cloned baby, has gone far beyond the rest of its neighbors in the Western world on cloning research. By contrast, President Bush has publicly expressed his opposition to all human cloning, and pro-lifers are currently campaigning in Congress for a complete ban (see front page story).
Said Peter Garrett, Research Director of Life, a major British pro-life group, “We are way out of line with the rest of the world.”
Prime Minister Tony Blair, an Anglican who attends Mass with his Catholic wife, has pledged his government's opposition to so-called “reproductive cloning,” in which a cloned human embryo is allowed to develop and be born.
Asked to justify Blair's position an unnamed spokesman in his office told the Register, “The U.K. government has made its total opposition to human reproductive cloning clear. The Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001 was passed by the U.K. Parliament in December 2001. This made human reproductive cloning a specific criminal offense, punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment.”
Added the spokesman, “What we are not against is research — under strict regulation — on embryonic stem cells that has the potential to transform the treatment of diseases such as cancer, spinal injury, diabetes and Parkinson's disease. Research on embryos up to 14 days old is permitted, subject to very strict safeguards under the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act 1990. Any unlicensed research is a criminal offense.”
This distinction, between “reproductive” and “therapeutic” cloning, is dismissed as spurious by Garrett and others.
“The technology is identical,” Garrett said. “Blair is being disingenuous when he talks of therapeutic cloning.”
The Money Trail
As Garrett delivers lectures and talks on the issue around the United Kingdom and Ireland, he highlights the links between the biotech industry and Blair's Labor Government.
“Several leading figures in the biotech industry are donors to the Labor Party and some have also received state honors such as knighthoods and peerages as a result,” Garrett said. “We have plunged into the sewer of biotechnology and there are plenty of rats getting rich out of it.”
Pro-lifers have cried foul since 2000, when the Blair government decided to push through cloning without passing new legislation. Instead it used a procedural device, which included a limited Parliamentary debate, to alter an existing 1990 law that legalized human embryo research.
At the time, the government promised the final go-ahead would not be given until a committee of the House of the Lords examined the issue. But as pro-lifers predicted, dissenting voices were not allowed on the committee
“It has been a whitewash,” Garrett said. “The Select Committee Report is almost identical to the Donaldson Report — the Report of the U.K. Chief Medical Officer which recommended so-called therapeutic cloning in January 2000.”
In the week before the Lords’ decision former Superman actor Christopher Reeve said he would come to Britain for treatment if it legalized therapeutic cloning.
The actor, who was paralysed by a riding accident in 1995, told the British Broadcasting Corporation, “I applaud the House of Lords’ select committee decision. While politically complicated, the medical moral and scientific case for this decision is overwhelming.”
Announcing the findings of the House of Lords report, the commit-tee's chairman, Richard Harries, the Anglican bishop of Oxford, said: “Research on early human embryos raises difficult moral and scientific issues, on which there are strong and sincerely held views.
“After looking at all the issues very carefully, the Committee was not persuaded that it would be right to prohibit all research on early embryos, which has been permitted since 1990 and regulated effectively by the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority since then.”
Catholic Opposition
The comments of the actor and the bishop contrasted sharply with the views of Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick, Ireland, chairman of the Joint Bioethics Committee of the Catholic Bishops of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales.
“There are a number of moral dangers in these developments,” said Bishop Murray. “The first thing is that we reduce human being itself to an object and we lose a sense of the awe, wonder and gratitude for the gift of life.
“The concept of creating a human being for a purpose and being the same as another human being I cannot see how that can be reconciled with a sense of one's own dignity and worth,” he said.
Bishop Murray noted that alternatives exist to embryonic research. “Adult stem cells [are] far more suitable for research [and] they do not have the undesirable effects,” he said.
Calling the House of Lords decision a “Pandora's Box,” Bishop Murray predicted it would give rise to a range of problematic scenarios. Said the bishop, “It raises problems of manipulation and control. One wonders if the technology will be manipulated to get rid of certain characteristics of people.”
Pro-lifer Garrett echoed that concern.
“It could mean in the future that you are going to be seen as socially irresponsible if you give birth to a child with a defect,” he said. “Britain is going in a sub-human direction.”
Paul Burnell writes from Manchester, England.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Burnell ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Australia Moving Closer to Destructive Research
Howard bent under the threat of biotechnology companies setting up shop elsewhere, but he would still ban research on embryos created after April 4.
He is banking on the hope that the source of the stem cells will not create too much controversy; they are, after all, “surplus” embryos that would normally “go to waste” after IVF procedures.
While the Catholic head of an Australian state where biotechnology institutes are located lobbied for even more liberal laws, the Church, trying to be faithful to its mission of teaching the truth, was widely represented as the bad guy interfering with compassionate science's quest for cures for diseases like Alzheimer's. Premier Steve Bracks of Victoria pushed for a system allowing the use of stem cells from future IVF embryos, the Melbourne daily reported.
The Age, which commented that it “took courage” for Howard to “stand firm against powerful Church opposition,” erroneously reported that the research is “vital” for finding cures.
Australian medical ethicist Amin Abboud, quoted by the Cybercast News Service Web site, a division of the Media Research Center, noted that while applications of research with adult stem cells are already being used in medical treatments, embryonic stem cells have not yet helped a single patient.
And the editor of the journal Stem Cells, Curt Civin, has said that scientists have “exaggerated the immediacy of the prospects of clinical therapies using stem cells.” Though he advocates use of embryonic stem cells, Civin admitted that gains from the research will take “years, perhaps decades.”
Countries Consider Euthanasia as Dutch Legalize
BRITISH BROADCASTING CORP., April 1 — Look what compromise has done in the Netherlands: Holland's legalization of assisted suicide took effect April 1, with hardly more than a yawn in the media. The country, after all, has been tolerating doctors who assist suicides for some time now.
The legislation allows patients experiencing unbearable suffering to request euthanasia, and doctors who carry out such a killing to be free from the threat of prosecution, provided they have followed strict procedures, the British news service reported. But it's already been shown that “strict procedures” don't mean much in Holland, where, as suicide prevention expert Herbert Hendin has shown, death has become too easily sought and given by doctors.
Already, “right to die” activists elsewhere are lobbying for similar laws. In Belgium, senators voted in October in favor of a euthanasia bill, and France's health minister, Bernard Kouchner, a doctor, has said he will use the Dutch decision to press for French legislation.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Vatican II Calling DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:In this issue, the Register continues a series of articles that are meant to be a kind of a backgrounder on the scandals that have been rocking the Church. But it might do to take a further step back and see a larger picture: These scandals would have been prevented if the Second Vatican Council had been more faithfully and vigorously implemented.
And one happy outcome of these miserable events is that, now, Vatican II may make a vibrant new debut.
The Second Vatican Council came with some very clear messages. The Celebration of the Eucharist was the “source and summit” of Christian life — but not the sum total of Catholic existence. The priests’ mission was spelled out as “evangelization and sacramental life,” while the laity was let loose to “renew the temporal order.” Special emphasis was made on the seminary, which was expected to have strict discipline “to inculcate self-control.”
Had the council's proscriptions been vigorously followed, more leaders in the Church might have spent the last 30 years renewing Christian life by giving the Church's enduring truths a new, contemporary emphasis. Instead, many myths about the council, perpetuated by people who didn't seem to have read the council's documents, held sway.
One myth is that the council was all about laxity — pushing aside the morality of the past and welcoming a “build-it-yourself” Catholicism. The “spirit of Vatican II” was invoked to justify all kinds of atrocities — liturgical, doctrinal, pastoral and moral.
This laxity corresponded with a time in which many seminaries threw out wholesale any serious effort to form their men. The priesthood has always attracted not only authentic vocations, but also men who merely wished to flee from the world in some way, or to mask sinful lifestyle choices. A good seminary formation will be able to weed out many bad candidates prior to ordination — such men tend to flee discipline when it is enforced. But, without discipline, seminaries will only encourage bad seeds to grow.
And so, rather than standing as a bulwark against it, many seminaries in the past decades were infected by the sexual revolution. The Church's teaching that homosexuality is a disorder was too easily rejected by too many. The consequences are here to see. While it's not true that homosexuals are necessarily abusers, it is true that a far greater percentage of homosexuals are abusers and, in fact, nearly all of the abusers in the Catholic clergy in America have been homosexuals.
And yet the “spirit of Vatican II Catholicism” that justified all this laxity was explicitly rejected by the council fathers themselves, in a post-conciliar document whose very TITLE serves as a striking reminder of just how traditional the council was: 1967's “On Dangerous Opinions.”
The synod document lamented “a certain arbitrary and false interpretation of the spirit of the Council.” It sought to remedy the “current crisis concerning Catholic faith and doctrine.” It decried the spreading of error even by “priests, religious, theologians, educators and others.”
Another myth that perpetuated a culture favorable to bad priests was the misunderstanding that the council was a repudiation of “conservatives” in favor of “liberals.”
In fact, the council worked on an entirely different level. The council's teachings could be said to have created a totally different division: on the one hand those who are primarily concerned with the externals of religious ritual (whether of the smells-and-bells or the tambourines-and-lay-ministers variety) and, on the other, those primarily concerned with the universal call to holiness (and who include reverent liturgy as just one important dimension of a holy life).
If Church leaders consider our priests merely ministers of the external aspects of their Masses, then we'll get priests who can put on a good show but who aren't necessarily committed to holiness. If they expect priests to be dedicated to the sacramental life (especially confession) and evangelization — which is what the council and the Pope urge — then our priests will have to clear a higher bar, one more likely to trip up deviants.
Councils usually have a lag time in which the Church adapts to their demands and then begins to implement them in earnest. Without the reforms of the council in place, the Church will wither. We will see a flowering in the Church in our day only when it has formed itself along the lines set out by the bishops and the Pope — under the guidance of the Holy Spirit — in the Second Vatican Council.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Intelligence on Intelligent Design DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:I would like to comment briefly on the article “Will Intelligent Design Survive Scientific Scrutiny?” by David Beresford (In-depth, April 7-13).
As the prominent microbiologist Michael Behe observes, the amazing precision of biological processes at the molecular level, such as associated with the human organ of sight or with the phenomenon of blood clotting, shows that we are dealing with “irreducibly complex entities” which cannot be explained by mere chance, as Darwinists have been asserting for a whole century, but give clear evidence of intelligent design as still only partially understood. The author's contention that the validity of these designs must ultimately rest on the scrutiny of purely experimental science seems to imply that the only true science is experimental science. But what about our faculty of reason, which we use constantly?
As the Catechism teaches: “The existence of God the creator can be known with certainty through His works by the light of human reason” (No. 286). Hence the scrutiny of intelligent design pertains ultimately to philosophy, and is not the exclusive competence of biology or any other purely experimental science.
FATHER JAMES O'REILLY
Hartford, Connecticut
The writer is a Missionary of La Salette priest.
Re: Letter to the Editor, David Beresford's Commentary, April 7-13, 2002 issue.
In the April 7-13 edition biologist David Beresford essentially argued that materialism is necessary and sufficient to guide our investigations into the origin and workings of our creator's world. He inseparably linked scientific activity with “practical” materialism, but fails to warn that materialism is no more scientific or empirically testable than is supernaturalism. The tone of his commentary is such that intelligent design theory shouldn't be taken too seriously because the guidance offered by materialism rules it inadmissible.
Beresford writes that his precarious fence-sitting is intellectually possible because there is a different kind of reasoning on each side of the fence: “scientific” reasoning and the reasoning offered by the philosophy of logic. Even agnostic Stephen J. Gould didn't go this far with his non-overlapping magisterium.
I doubt that Beresford's claim of two kinds of reasoning as means of harmonizing scientific investigation and faith is consistent with the encyclical Fides et Ratio. In fact the rules of reasoning are the same on both sides of the fence and derived from the philosophy of logic. However, secular scientists employ materialism as a guide to what statements, propositions and theories should be considered while Catholic doctrine employs the objective truth.
Beresford missed the most important consequence of Catholic, intelligent design advocate, associate professor of biochemistry, Michael Behe in his work, “Darwin's Black Box.” Behe suggested that Neo-Darwinian theory prohibits the creation of irreducibly complex systems. If biological systems like blood clotting are “genuinely” irreducibly complex then Neo-Darwinian theory as a universal explanation of novelty is refuted.
Finally, intelligent design theorists do not insert God's direct action for every event in space-time. Intelligent design theorists argue, in part, that we can develop naturalistic diagnostic tools to identify when systems or structures (biological or cosmological) are intelligently designed. This is exactly what SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) researchers and forensic scientists attempt with secular sanction. If the conjecture that a system is intelligently designed has empirical consequences (particularly if some of those consequences differ from purely materialistic theory) then that conjecture may be investigated with all of our naturalistic tools. Practical materialism does not allow this, but practical materialism is false.
ANTHONY PAGANO
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Thanks to a ‘True Jesuit’
Thank you, Father Fessio, for Ignatius Press, the St. Ignatius Institute, Catholic World Report, Catholic Dossier and the Adoremus Society.
Thank you for having always been a “Pope's man.”
Thank you for your obedient acceptance of your new role. Yes, you are a soldier of the Church, of St. Ignaitus Loyola, of Our Lord Jesus Christ — a true Jesuit.
MARGARET SHEA
Camarillo, Calif.
Toward 0% Abusers
Regarding “Media Myths fuel Clergy Abuse Scandal” (April-7-13):
As a parent of four, I am very concerned about the priest moral scandal. While I know many priests who are holy men, I also knew many who were not. This leads me to wonder if the bishops have an expectation of holiness for our priests. I've heard in homilies that the office of the priesthood must be respected regardless of the man. How can that be said if the man is chasing people from the Church when he should be an instrument of salvation?
If I were a bishop, I would be as outraged as Jesus tipping over the money-changers’ tables if one of my priests drove a single person from the Church by their immoral behavior. He would be out on the street if not in jail, working out his own salvation.
Our bishops have not dealt with this problem because I believe they have low expectations of holiness for the priests. Saying that the percentage of priests who abuse children is only 2% or the same as other non-Catholic clergy is nuts. It should be zero!
I asked one of the priests at a local seminary if there was a course in spirituality offered, and he said there wasn't but that he tries to weave it into other courses. The fact that our seminarians are not schooled in holiness is a miss. I don't care how much theology, philosophy, or psychology they know. My family and I want a priest whose life is a witness to Christ's presence, and has an intimate relationship with God.
Vatican II called everyone to holiness, but, if the priests are not taught to be holy how can they make our parishes into schools of holiness and carry out their vocation as a representative of Christ?
In too many instances, the bishops have failed to adequately evaluate candidates for the priesthood, failed to form them in the virtues of holiness and failed in their expectations of moral behavior. Perhaps it is because of the lack of vocations that standards have been low. Whatever the reason, the Church has, to an extent, damaged the institution of the priesthood and lost the trust of many of the laity. Many parents will hesitate to leave their children non-chaperoned with priests instead of assuming they are in the safest place they can be. This is very, very sad.
We should pray for a sense of repentance and humility in the Church and maybe for me, too.
BRUCE WEAVER
Slidell, Louisiana
We Will Survive
Scandal, one of the greatest enemies of the Church, is once again afoot.
Justice needs to be done, for the victims of abuse and the guilty. We should not forget, however, that the Church endures, even when it is betrayed from within. It is not merely an institution. It is not only a community.
The Church is Christ in the world. Christ himself was betrayed by one he loved. His Passion was then followed by his Glory. A Glory that endures still.
Blessed Frederic Ozanam, reflecting on the turmoil of his own times, wrote, “Hope! The fault of many Christians of our day is to hope too little. They believe that every battle and every obstacle will be the downfall of the Church.
They are the Apostles in the boat during the storm: they forget that the Savior is with them!”
SCOTT SALVATO
Flushing, New York
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: LITURGICAL LABOR PAINS? DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:I consider myself a conservative Catholic and have always enjoyed your paper, but the views expressed in John Burger's article on the changes taking place in the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) caused me some alarm (“Head of Liturgy Panel Resigns: New Direction for the Mass?”, March 31-April 6).
Mr. Burger interviewed Father Jerry Pokorsky, co-founder of Credo (a society of priests dedicated to the faithful translation of the liturgy), who suggested that a “more accurate and faithful” rendering of the collect for the third Sunday of Lent would run: “Pour forth, kind Lord, we beseech, Thy grace into our hearts that we may always draw back from human failures, and we may be worthy to adhere, by Thy granting it, to heavenly admonitions.”
Apparently, Mr. Burger agrees with another interviewee, Mr. Leininger of the Latin Liturgy Association, that archaic language should be used in translating the missal to “set the liturgy apart.”
I find this conclusion wrong-headed for many reasons, but I can think of at least one very important example where Mssrs. Pokorsky and Leininger's position is a radical break from tradition: the history of scriptural language. The New Testament was written in a very common, almost vulgar form of the Greek language, Koine Greek, which was very contemporary — and common — in the first century. The liturgical hymns and formulae recorded in the New Testament share this contemporary, common character. When Greek became less common, Jerome was instructed by Pope Damascus to render the Scriptures into Latin, and the Vulgate, or “common translation,” was the result.
Perhaps some will argue that scriptural and liturgical language are not comparable. I would disagree, but, even so, the point of constantly revising scriptural translations was to make the word of God more accessible to common people. Shouldn't the liturgy also be made accessible to everyone? After all, the word liturgy means “the people's work.” Mr. Leininger wants worshipers to differentiate time spent in worship from time spent “at Starbucks chatting with our friends.” That sounds noble, but is it practical? Will the Starbucks generation understand and be moved by Victorian English? More importantly, will they be able to make it their own? The prayers of the presider — especially the collect — are our prayers, which he says on our behalf. Shouldn't they reflect who we really are?
And, to specifically address Mr. Pokorsky's translation: He uses the archaic second person singular pronoun (thou, thee, thy, thine) which is usually considered an example of formality and respect for God, and therefore an expression of piety. In reality, the pronoun “thou” was, for Elizabethan and Victorian English, the familiar form of “you,” parallel to the use of tu in French and Spanish. This reflects, again, the practice in the scriptural languages of addressing God in intimacy rather than in formality.
Moreover, Mr. Pokorsky accused the ICEL of sounding “Protestant,” but translations such as the sample he has provided are more reminiscent of the King James Bible or the Book of Common Prayer than they are of any Catholic language I've become accustomed to in my own 35 years as a Catholic.
Ultimately, I can see no sound objective reasons — linguistic, theological or sociological — for translating the Roman Missal into Elizabethan or Victorian English. After reading this article, I fear changes in the ICEL may be no more than the transfer of power from one agenda-driven group to another. I hope that will not prove to be the case.
PETER A. GIERSCH Milwaukee
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter A. Giersch ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Who Has the Answer to The AIDS Epidemic? We Do DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently confirmed what its researchers have long suspected and feared: The lethal HIV virus that causes AIDS is rising at an alarming rate.
About 40,000 Americans are getting infected each year. Last year, the CDC confirmed an 8% increase in new AIDS cases. Moreover, it's believed that somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 people carry the deadly virus without knowing it. Many people don't understand why HIV continues to hit America hard even after state and federal health agencies have been vigorously promoting, for 20 years, a safe-sex policy based on the use of condoms. This dire situation raises a critical question: From a medical viewpoint, do condoms really provide safety against HIV infection?
The National Institutes of Health doesn't seem to think so. After conducting an extensive study for the government on the effectiveness of condoms, researchers there have now concluded that condoms are ineffective against most sexually transmitted diseases, and only about 85% effective against HIV. Consequently, the notion of “safe sex” based on the use of condoms is dangerously misleading. Nonetheless, advocates of safe sex argue that, while condoms do not guarantee protection against HIV infection, they do provide a measure of deterrence.
An HIV/AIDS program that intentionally accepts and promotes a method of prevention that is not 100% safe is unethical. The reason is simple: AIDS kills its victims. There can be no margin of error. Yet advocates of condoms often say there is no other operative response to avoid the transmission of HIV.
Uganda's fight against HIV/AIDS proves this assertion wrong. When Pope John Paul II went to Uganda in 1993, 1.5 million of its 17 million citizens were infected with HIV. At that time, nearly 35,000 had full-blown AIDS. Ugandans were desperate for a solution. The Holy Father reaffirmed to this nation and to the world the Church's commitment to combat the HIV/AIDS based on genuine moral and ethical values.
During a visit to a youth rally of about 30,000 Ugandans, the Holy Father said: “The sexual restraint of chastity is the only safe and virtuous way to put an end to the tragic plague of AIDS, which has claimed so many young victims.” This country, which is 44% Catholic, took the words of the Pope to heart. It launched a national abstinence program stressing the value of chastity before, and fidelity in, marriage.
The result? Uganda's infection rate has dropped dramatically — from 28% of the population in the 1980s to just 8% today. This is one of the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa. And there's more good news. Uganda has slashed the rate of HIV infection by as much as 50% among young people.
‘Both prevention and cure are important, but it is better to prevent HIV than to have to cure it.’
Last June, the Holy See sent a delegation to the United Nations XXVI Special Session of the General Assembly on HIV/AIDS to explain the Church's strategy to stop the spread of this fatal disease. Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragan, head of the Holy See delegation, explained to the assembly the Church's solution to HIV/AIDS.
“Two responses are required in the face of this evil scourge — prevention and cure,” said the archbishop. He went on to say that “both are of maximum importance, but it is better to prevent than to have to cure. … The best and most effective prevention is training in the authentic values of life, love and sexuality. A proper appreciation of these values will inform today's men and women about how to attain full personal fulfillment through affective maturity and the proper use of sexuality, whereby couples remain faithful to each other and behave in a way that keeps them from becoming infected by HIV/AIDS.”
Some critics of this proposal have charged that HIV/AIDS should be treated primarily as a health problem and not as a moral one. The Holy See disagrees. Archbishop Lozano told the assembly: “No one can deny that sexual license increases the danger of contracting the disease. It is in this context that the values of matrimonial fidelity, chastity and abstinence can be better understood.”
Opponents of abstinence education point out that the Vatican's plan may sound good to some, but chastity will be a hard message to sell in a secular country like the United States. No one doubts the sincerity of that concern, yet there are already signs of hope.
For example, President Bush recently proposed to increase abstinence-only education by $33 million. The president's excellent example will perhaps motivate other leaders to support abstinence education. Also, superb initiatives like Elayne Bennett's Best Friends program, which stresses character and abstinence education, is educating about 5,000 adolescents in abstinence. Things are changing.
Prevention based on genuine moral values is not only the best way to stop HIV/AIDS — it is the only sure way.
Legionary Father Andrew McNair teaches at Mater Ecclesiae International Center of Studies in Greenville, Rhode Island.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Mcnair, Lc ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Pray for the Priesthood DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:These are the times that try a church's soul, but take heart. The world can't come up with a court that has the power to sentence the Catholic Church to death.
We may have to do a little hard time in mainstream-media hell. In fact, let's face it: We're incarcerated there even as we speak, with no offer of early release for good behavior. But, then again, maybe this humiliating chastisement is just the scared-straight experience we've needed for a long time now.
Maybe, if we take the right attitude about this present darkness that has descended upon us — if we allow our current confinement to occasion a humble and contrite reckoning with the errors of some of our ways — this moment of disgrace and discouragement will yet sanctify us. It will certainly reduce our chances of recidivism. Isn't that the proper aim of any rightly ordered criminal-justice system?
Such were the thoughts and images that came to my mind as I was considering, over the past few weeks, just how bad things could get before they begin to get better.
The Church will get well again. Won't we?
Or could this appalling chain of events get so despicable that it ends up turning Catholics away from the Mystical Body of Christ en masse? If it does, a temporal tragedy would become an upheaval of eternal import.
I couldn't get that thought out of my mind, either.
Nor the image of hundreds of silent young victims, robbed of their innocence and crying to be heard, helped and healed. This alternated with the picture of thousands of blameless priests bearing the heavy burden of misplaced suspicion. Here the faces of the many priests I personally know have flashed before me — men who would sooner die than bring harm to a young person, yet now move through their days marked with mistrust like so many “outed” members of some twisted pagan cult.
Even Pope John Paul II, our great, priestly champion of the Gospel, is personally distraught by the developments. “[A]s priests we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis at work in the world,” he wrote in his Holy Thursday letter to priests.
Fine as I'm certain the future will be, thanks to God's divine mandate for the Church (Matthew 16:18), the news of late has been seismic enough to shake the foundations of the faith under my feet. And I'm sure I'm not the only Catholic dealing with motion-induced double-vision these days.
Is all the trepidation — this gnawing sense that the Catholic Church in America is teetering on the edge of an immense fault line — an overreaction?
Collared by the Culture
At first, I didn't think so. After all, even before the sexual-abuse scandals blew up into a bona fide fiasco, the Church was already trudging through a tough time. For nearly two generations now, the faithful have remained bound only by the sacraments, all the while pulling apart in point of view. Doesn't it sometimes seem as though there are as many ideas about what's wrong with the Catholic Church as there are Catholics in the pews each Sunday?
Thanks be to God for giving us the Eucharist — the supernatural glue, if you will, that holds all us cracked pots together, both individually and as a covenantal Kingdom under Christ.
But hold on. The bread and wine only become the Body and Blood of Christ through the cooperation of a validly ordained Catholic priest saying Mass. And it's clearly the priest-hood that's being called onto the proverbial carpet in these gloomy days. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to imagine big numbers of Catholics around Boston, Palm Beach and who-knows-where-next coming to feel so disgusted by the clergy and ex-clergy making the headlines that they'd toss Acts 2:42 out with the previous night's paper.
And, from there, it's depressingly easy to see how such mass defections and absenteeism might prove contagious. The media are only too happy to help on that score, positioning, as only they can, the loudest of the lot as courageous Davids who stand up to Goliath, the Catholic Church, just by walking away. Some days it seems like we're on the receiving end of a crusade whose warlords are bent on either changing the Church beyond recognition, rending it into two or combining both strategies to bring it down altogether.
If we are to survive this thing with all our components intact, we need the Eucharist. Therefore, we need the priest-hood. And we need it exactly as Christ established it.
So what can the Church do against an onslaught like this one — a bitter and determined campaign against one of its most essential elements?
St. Francis’ Strategy
It was while troubling over that question, jogging between the heights of hope and the depths of despair like some interior mountaineer loopy on the thin air, that I remembered a story I once heard about St. Francis of Assisi.
The “little poor one” — whose radical conversion from a life of wealth and privilege helped the Church put together arguably its greatest single century, the 13th — likewise lived through a time when the Church was being disgraced by a small, but highly conspicuous, underground of egregiously sinful clerics.
When one of the Brothers Minor told him about a priest living openly with a woman, and asked him if that priest's Masses were thus contaminated beyond legitimacy, Francis went to the priest, knelt before him and kissed his hands.
“But Brother Francis,” the brother said to him afterward, “those are the hands of a sinner, a man bringing terrible shame upon Christ's bride, the Church.”
“Yes, Brother,” St. Francis replied. “And those hands hold God.”
For his part, it is said, the priest was so affected by the eloquence of Francis’ wordless statement that he repented of his sins and went on to live a holy, prayerful life from that day forward.
And that's when, for me, a couple of lights came on pointing the way through this unholy mess. It's not a quick and easy way, but I believe it's the only way that offers good prospects for a full recovery.
Power to the Priesthood
First, I think, we need to let the poverello's insight remind us of a core Catholic doctrine: God does not depend on the health, holiness or disposition of his priests to confer any of the sacraments. He can confect the Eucharist as well through a sick celebrant as he can through a saintly one. So don't even think about turning away from Communion, confession or any of the sacraments over this sad, but passing, chapter in salvation history.
Second, we, the Church, do depend on our priests to cooperate with God in order to bring us Jesus in his humanity as well as his divinity. That's why it's vital that, as we learn from St. Francis’ deep and innate grasp of doctrine, we don't fail to also follow his remarkable example. We don't need to kiss our priests’ hands, but we do need to bring every one of them — the good, the bad and the indifferent — before Christ in prayer. Preferably, prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. Not once, but often.
Reception of the sacraments plus plenty of prayer: Therein lies the way back from this brink.
God is in control. He may have sent an angel to spring St. Peter from jail, but it would be a mistake to wait on a heavenly “get-out-of-jail-free” card to release the Church from its present flogging in the public square. More likely, it'll be a matter of you, me and the works of hope and healing we permit him to achieve through the likes of us. Including those among us serving the Body of Christ, in accord with John 20:21-23, as priests.
No — right now, we especially need to let God work through the hands of our priests.
“As the Church shows her concern for the victims and strives to respond in truth and justice to each of these painful situations, all of us — conscious of human weakness, but trusting in the healing power of divine grace — are called to embrace the mysterium Crucis and to commit ourselves more fully to the search for holiness,” the Holy Father wrote in his letter to priests. “We must beg God in his Providence to prompt a whole-hearted reawakening of those ideals of total self-giving to Christ which are the very foundation of the priestly ministry.”
Have you prayed for the priesthood today?
David Pearson edits the Register's opinion, arts, travel, books and education sections.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Pearson ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Will 'Santorum Language' Save Us From Scientific Fundamentalism? DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:One combustible controversy is raging in Ohio school districts right now.
It's over science education and, soon enough, it will flare up in all 50 states.
To get to the heart of it, the controversy centers on how to teach evolution — not whether to teach it, mind you, but how.
It all began with the passage of the “No Child Left Behind Act” of 2001, a federal education act that, in part, directs states to set up academic standards. An important interpretation of the act, called the “Santorum language” after the interpretation's author, Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, states:
“The Conferees recognize that a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.”
Things are hot now in Ohio simply because it happens to be the first state to approach the question of educational standards since the federal education act (complete with Santorum language) was passed. What is happening now in Ohio will soon enough happen in every state.
Why is this of any concern to Catholics?
Catholic education will either follow the public schools, lead the public schools or part company with them in regard to the question of how to teach evolution. So the sooner we Catholics start thinking seriously about the question, the better off we'll be.
To return to the education act, the Santorum language does not, as has been reported, forbid the teaching of evolution; in fact, quite the contrary. Evolution must be taught, but it must be taught in accordance with the actual evidence both for and against it.
Thus the Santorum language is a two-edged sword, disallowing both religion being taught as science, and science being taught as religion. One edge of the sword cuts religious fundamentalism out of consideration in any science curriculum. The other edge cuts out what might be called scientific fundamentalism.
Scientific fundamentalism? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? Yes, indeed. That's just the point. Protecting scientific theories in general, and Darwinism in particular, from scientific criticism is unscientific.
Just as religious fundamentalists often (consciously or unconsciously) overlook, reject or distort scientific evidence that contradicts their beliefs, so also Darwinian fundamentalists often (consciously or unconsciously) overlook, reject or distort scientific evidence that contradicts their belief in the Darwinian account of evolution.
And so, contrary to the desire of some religious fundamentalists, “Santorum” declares that evolutionary theory must be taught, and the strongest available scientific evidence for it must be presented.
But wherever scientific evidence contradicts expectations of the Darwinian account of evolution, that evidence should also be taught as part of the science curriculum, and students should know why this evidence is so problematic for Darwinism. As it is, such evidence is almost never mentioned in biology textbooks or is glossed over with little or misleading comment.
For example, I open my Raven and Johnson Biology (third edition, updated in 1995) to chapter four, “The Origin and Early History of Life.” There I find that “It is odd to think of life originating from a dilute, hot, smelly soup of ammonia, formaldehyde, formic acid, cyanide, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and organic hydrocarbons. Yet from such an ocean emerged the organisms from which all subsequent life-forms are derived. The way in which this happened is a puzzle and may forever remain so.”
The question is not whether this brief account of the evolutionary rise of life from pre-biotic soup clashes with religion, but whether it clashes with science. According to the Santorum language, students have a right to know that the Miller-Urey experiment, which the text cites as evidence, is scientifically flawed.
They have a right to know that the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection cannot operate prior the existence of living, reproducing organisms and so cannot be used as an explanation of how the first living organisms were produced in the first place.
They have a right to know that the various conjectures offered by some Darwinists about the origin of the first replicating cell (such as the theory that the first proteins formed on silicate clays) are contradicted by other scientific evidence.
And they have a right to know that, if the rise of complex life “is a puzzle and may forever remain so,” then we cannot assume that it has occurred by evolution alone.
In short, students have a right to all the scientific evidence, a right to hear the strongest scientific arguments for the Darwinian account of evolution, and a right to hear the points at which the scientific evidence calls that account into question.
Fifty-two scientists in Ohio felt so strongly about this that they issued a statement in support of the Santorum language. Predictably, they were branded as fundamentalists disguised as scientists. By whom? Those who wish to censor scientific evidence against Darwinism. Who, then, are the real fundamentalists?
Stay tuned.
Ben Wiker teaches philosophy of science at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: 'I Believe All Human Cloning Is Wrong ....' DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Following is an excerpt from the remarks by President Bush on human cloning legislation, made to senators and others visiting the White House April 10:
In the current debate over human cloning, two terms are being used: reproductive cloning and research cloning. Reproductive cloning involves creating a cloned embryo and implanting it into a woman with the goal of creating a child. Fortunately, nearly every American agrees that this practice should be banned. Research cloning, on the other hand, involves the creation of cloned human embryos which are then destroyed to derive stem cells.
I believe all human cloning is wrong, and both forms of cloning ought to be banned, for the following reasons. First, anything other than a total ban on human cloning would be unethical. Research cloning would contradict the most fundamental principle of medical ethics, that no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another.
Yet a law permitting research cloning, while forbidding the birth of a cloned child, would require the destruction of nascent human life. Secondly, anything other than a total ban on human cloning would be virtually impossible to enforce. Cloned human embryos created for research would be widely available in laboratories and embryo farms. Once cloned embryos were available, implantation would take place. Even the tightest regulations and strict policing would not prevent or detect the birth of cloned babies.
Third, the benefits of research cloning are highly speculative. Advocates of research cloning argue that stem cells obtained from cloned embryos would be injected into a genetically identical individual without risk of tissue rejection.
But there is evidence, based on animal studies, that cells derived from cloned embryos may indeed be rejected.
Yet even if research cloning were medically effective, every person who wanted to benefit would need an embryonic clone of his or her own, to provide the designer tissues. This would create a massive national market for eggs and egg donors, and exploitation of women's bodies that we cannot and must not allow.
I stand firm in my opposition to human cloning. And at the same time, we will pursue other promising and ethical ways to relieve suffering through biotechnology. This year for the first time, federal dollars will go towards supporting human embryonic stem cell research consistent with the ethical guidelines I announced last August.
The National Institutes of Health is also funding a broad range of animal and human adult stem cell research. Adult stem cells which do not require the destruction of human embryos and which yield tissues which can be transplanted without rejection are more versatile that originally thought.
We're making progress. We're learning more about them. And therapies developed from adult stem cells are already helping suffering people.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Books By and About Bishops and Cardinals DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:AMERICA'S BISHOP: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FULTON J. SHEEN by Thomas C. Reeves Encounter, 2001 479 pages, $25.95
To order: (800) 786-3839 or www.encounterbooks.com
He won an Emmy award in the “Most Outstanding Television Personality” category, beating out Lucille Ball, Arthur Godrey, Edward R. Murrow and Jimmy Durante. The Catholic Almanac describes him as “perhaps the most popular and socially influential American Catholic of the 20th century.” In 1979, the year he died, Billy Graham called him “one of the greatest preachers of this century.”
Yet, for all his poise and polish, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen had his faults.
And it was these, as much as his gifts, that continue to endear him to Catholics to this day.
Historian Reeves points out early on that America's Bishop is “not an effort to bolster or defeat” the cause of Sheen's sainthood. “Sheen had a few secrets,” he writes, “and his ambition, vanity, and luxurious lifestyle embarrassed him in his old age, yet there were few among the Church's intellectuals who tried harder to be a model for others.” Yet all he did was oriented toward drawing hearts closer to Christ.
Reeves explains how the arch-bishop's dedicated secretaries were endlessly frustrated with their boss for refusing to keep budgets and receipts. He made a lot of money, that's for sure, but, as Reeves shows, he gave most of it away to the poor, the needy and just about anyone who asked for it.
Relegated to the “graveyard spot” on the TV schedule for a half hour once a week, Archbishop Sheen made the most of a modest opportunity. No pomp, no circumstance — he was “just a Catholic bishop on a stage, a talking head, followed around by three (later two) cameras,” writes Reeves.
During each show he would speak for exactly 27 minutes and 20 seconds.
No notes, no Teleprompter. He would later tell interviewers that he spent as much as 30 hours preparing for each show.
A generous intellectual, Archbishop Sheen was up to the task. In 54 years, he authored 66 books, published 62 pamphlets and wrote an untold number of radio talks.
He also wrote articles and columns for magazines and newspapers and was the first American to be awarded a postdoctoral degree from the University of Louvain. He could read in Greek, German, Italian, Latin and French, and spoke Italian, Latin and French fluently. Some of his books were scholarly, including three published between 1925 and 1934 on scholastic philosophy.
His Philosophy of Science showed a sophisticated grasp of physics and mathematics. The list goes on and on.
The archbishop was instrumental in the conversions of an impressive list of celebrity converts, including Henry Ford II and Clare Boothe Luce. Even more remarkable, though, is any calculation of the sheer number of souls he got the Gospel through to — and continues to reach even today, thanks to consistently healthy sales of his audio tapes, books and videos.
Those who remember watching Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen when he could still be seen live will treasure this look at the life of a true son of the Church who spent himself for Christ. (It turns out he consecrated his life to the Blessed Virgin at age 12.)
Those who knew him personally say he frequently reiterated that his communications vocation was about “divine truth, not Fulton J. Sheen.” “I am on television,” he told a journalist, “to communicate and diffuse divine truth. I am not the author, but only an heir and trustee.”
Reeves shows how “America's bishop” transcended his medium, with its temptations to superficiality and artifice, in order to deliver the full Gospel of Jesus Christ. In doing so, he set an example all of us living in the “information age” would do well to emulate.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).
----- EXCERPT: Archbishop Sheen: America's Evangelist of the Airwaves ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: Books ----- TITLE: Dreaming of God With Cardinal John Henry Newman DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS by John Henry Newman Alba House, 2001 74 pages, $8.95
To order: (800) 343-2522 or www.albahouse.org
Cardinal John Henry Newman, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the 19th century, is widely recognized as a prose stylist with few equals.
Less appreciated today are Newman's poetic gifts, even though he enjoyed considerable acclaim as a poet in his lifetime.
Much of that recognition was due to The Dream of Gerontius, a dramatic poem describing the final moments in the life of a dying Catholic (“Gerontius” is from the Greek word meaning “old man”) and his subsequent journey into the afterlife.
It has been aptly described as a “metrical meditation on death.” Following its publication in 1865 in the Catholic periodical The Month, it was hailed in Britain as one of the finest poems of its time.
Even Charles Kingsley, Newman's famed critic, admitted that he read it with “awe and admiration.”
This recent edition of The Dream of Gerontius was inspired in part by the bicentennial celebration of Newman's birth in 1801 and by the centenary of the first performance of Edward Elgar's oratorio, based on Newman's poem.
One of Britain's finest composers, Elgar was commissioned by the Birmingham Oratory (founded by Newman) to compose an oratorio using about a third of the poem's text.
After completing the piece in 1900, Elgar wrote that it was “far beyond anything I have yet written.” Critically lauded as a work of genius, it was described by Pope Pius XII as “a sublime masterpiece.”
This handsome edition of The Dream of Gerontius contains an introduction to Elgar's masterpiece as well as a discography.
In the preface, Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel explains that, “In The Dream, Cardinal Newman brings together scripture, theology, tradition, the revelations of the mystics (especially St. Catherine of Genoa) and his own incomparable intellect to provide a beautiful but awesome glance at the first moments after death. The Dream is an adventure in faith.”
The poem begins with Gerontius crying out, “Jesu, Maria — I am near to death,” and requesting that those at his deathbed pray for him: “Pray for me, O my friends; a visitant/Is knocking his dire summons at my door.” The assistants and the priest at his bedside respond by praying the Litany for the Dying, most of it translated from the Latin by Newman. After Gerontius dies (“I went to sleep; and now I am refreshed”), he attempts to get his bearings and then is met by his guardian angel. After passing a screaming horde of demons, they eventually hear angels singing praises to “the Holiest in the height” and come to the Throne of God. Yet when the soul of Gerontius gazes upon God, it becomes aware of its need for perfect purification, and asks to go away to purgatory:
Take me away, and in the lowest deep/There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night watches keep,/Told out for me.
There, motionless and happy in my pain,/Lone, not forlorn,
There will I sing my perpetual strain,/Until the morn.
The poem ends with Gerontius in purgatory, praising his savior along with the other souls. His angel utters the poem's final lines: Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,/And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
Although the poetic style and some of the language will be foreign to most modern readers, The Dream of Gerontius is a masterpiece with much to offer. Newman's depiction of the soul's journey after death is both poignant and challenging, offering inspired glimpses into the afterlife, all based on the teachings and theological ruminations of the Church. Often compared to Dante's Paradisio and Purgatorio, The Dream of Gerontius is a powerful drama that brings the reader to deeper love of the “true hero of the poem” — the savior, Jesus Christ.
Carl E. Olson is editor of Envoy magazine.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl E. Olson ----- KEYWORDS: Books ----- TITLE: More Than the Absence of War: A Cardinal on Peace DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:RELIGIONS FOR PEACE: A CALL FOR SOLIDARITY TO THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD by Francis Cardinal Arinze Doubleday, 2002 146 pages, $17.95
Available in major retail and online bookstores
As history and recent headlines from the Middle East remind us, getting along with one's fellow man is easier said than done. In a multicultural society or in international affairs, the potential for misunderstanding increases. Add religious differences, and the mix may become quite volatile.
Cardinal Francis Arinze, who has headed the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue for more than 15 years now, is firmly convinced that the religions of the world are not a source of conflict, but a force for peace. In early 2001, he penned a series of reflections on the relations between religion and peace. On the inside flap of this deluxe volume are endorsements from bishops, rabbis and Muslim religious leaders, attesting to the timeliness of the subject today.
“When we say ‘peace’ we mean the tranquillity of order,” writes Cardinal Arinze. “We mean that situation of justice and rightly ordered social relationships that is marked by respect for the rights of others, that provides favorable conditions for integral human growth, and that allows citizens to live out their lives to the full.”
In describing the nature of peace, the cardinal summarizes pertinent passages from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes. Peace is more than the absence of war; it is a positive achievement that must be built up constantly.
In an eye-opening chapter TITLEd “Religions Extol Peace” — particularly poignant in light of today's heated strife between Israel and the Palestinians — the sacred writings of a dozen religions are cited, while the teachings of the major faiths are explained at greater length.
Having noted that the search for God and the desire for “tranquillity of order” are part of universal human experience, Cardinal Arinze addresses the problematic question often asked in our time: Do religions cause war? “Some commentators oversimplify matters by saying that the conflicts are caused by religions. This is often true only in part. There may well be other causes: ethnic rivalry, racial tensions, quarrels over land, and economic struggles. There may also be the burden of history, unhealed memories of past injustices, whether these be real or merely perceived. All these grievances may be smoldering below the surface.”
This essay, along with the one on “Religions and Cultures,” is a powerful apologetic for faiths that condemn violence. At the same time, the author calls upon believers, especially religious leaders, to do some soul-searching and take responsibility for attitudes, actions and omissions that jeopardize peace in the world.
Cardinal Arinze refers often to Catholic social doctrine, especially Populorum Progressio. “The Catholic Church strives to promote integral human development, the development of the whole person and of every person,” he writes. “As Pope Paul VI puts it, the development of peoples is the new name for peace.” Fostering a culture of life and strengthening the family are key elements.
Later chapters of the book describe efforts — by the Catholic Church and by interreligious initiatives — to promote peace. Two examples at the international level are the World Conference on Religion and Peace (established 1968) and the World Days of Prayer for Peace at Assisi in 1986 and earlier this year.
Local goodwill gestures and humanitarian projects are mentioned, too, including practical cooperation in dealing with migrants and refugees. Ultimately, as Cardinal Arinze shows, peace is not a human construction but a gift from on high; hence the ongoing importance of prayer.
The cardinal's message in Religions for Peace is simple and reasonable, but presented with extraordinary wisdom and diplomacy, and a keen sense of human limitations. “This book does not want to say that the religions alone can build peace,” he writes.
“Other promoters of peace are also needed.” We are indebted to Cardinal Arinze for reminding us of the true position of religions in the world today and for this timely, landmark contribution to interreligious dialogue.
Michael J. Miller writes from Glenside, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael J. Miller ----- KEYWORDS: Books ----- TITLE: Scandal in the Church: Seven Things You Can Do DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:You may have heard of 12-step self-help programs. Here's an easier one — a seven-step self-help program for the Church that you and I can do.
The current sex abuse scandal can lead to anger, discouragement and a sense of powerlessness. Yet Our Lord promised to be with us until the end of the world, and he can — and does — bring about good even from the greatest evils when we put our trust in him. Let's look at what we can do to cooperate with divine grace to make a difference for the good.
1. Practice Holiness
“The saints have always been the source and origin of renewal in the most difficult moments in the Church's history” (Catechism, No. 828). In our time we've been blessed with Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, whose holy lives bear effective, credible witness to the Gospel they proclaim. But, as Vatican II teaches, holiness is not just for Catholic “superstars” like the Pope, but for all the faithful. Therefore, the renewal of our own commitment to the Lord must be the first — not last — resort.
While there may be other righteous actions we can take, if we were only to devote ourselves to daily prayer, sacraments, spiritual and corporal works of mercy, and other such activities out of love for Our Lord and a desire to help rebuild his Church, we would become “part of the solution.”
2. Nourish Faith
We should pray specifically for an increase of the virtue of faith. We need to believe all that God has revealed with greater understanding, conviction, and joy. Even more, the virtue of faith enables us to see the fullness of reality, to see the divine amidst the human. Jesus is not simply a good man, but the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Scripture is not just a collection of ancient human writings, but also truly the work of the Holy Spirit. And the Church is not simply a human “institution,” but also the Mystical Body of Christ and the means of salvation for the whole world.
It takes a strong faith to acknowledge an “apostolic” Church if the “apostle” in our midst fails in his duties. It takes a strong faith to accept a “holy” Church when we're constantly having the sins of her members — and even some of her leaders — rubbed in our face.
We cannot deny the failures of Christians through the ages, including those that have been publicized in recent months. But we do need the virtue of faith to see the greater reality. The best way to grow in faith is to ask the Lord for this gift.
3. Encourage Vocations
Vatican II clearly called upon all the faithful to beg the Lord for an increase of vocations to the priest-hood. In a special way, this call went out to families, which must be “incubators” of vocations in the Church. Parents should encourage their children to follow Jesus and accept with generosity whatever specific vocation the Lord has in store for them.
Yet, if our focus is only on the next generation of priests, we're missing an increasingly significant aspect of our vocations effort. Many priests feel the spiritual and material support of the faithful while they're in formation, but once ordained they seemingly fall off the intercessory map. As our spiritual fathers are increasingly subjected to derision and anti-Catholic venom, they more than ever need our prayers, support, and encouragement.
4. Offer Support
Catholics have the duty of providing for the material needs of the Church, each according to his abilities. This can be a real stumbling block for some Catholics today, especially in dioceses where millions of dollars are being paid to settle lawsuits.
Funds donated in the weekly collection plate or to an annual diocesan campaign are not typically used to fund settlements, and the Church's immense humanitarian, educational, parochial and missionary activities are dependent upon our ongoing contributions.
Even more, we must learn from the account of the widow's mite. Her contribution was inconsequential, but she was held up for special praise because she gave what she had, not simply what she could spare. Surely lay people have the right to decide what parishes, diocesan programs, religious communities, and apostolates to which they'll contribute, and likely they'll contribute their hard-earned money to those entities which they consider to be the best stewards of their offerings. But Our Lord and his Church are clear about this. Putting our time, talent, and treasure at the service of the Church is a reflection of the priority of Jesus Christ in our lives.
5. Avoid Scandal
We have to be so careful today in terms of how we talk about the priest-hood and contemporary issues facing the Church. Probably the harshest critics of the Church are former Catholics and those who still consider themselves Catholic but oppose the Church on any number of issues.
It's very easy to find fault in the Church right now. People are rightly upset or disturbed. When we give verbal expression to these feelings, we may be just “letting off steam,” and what we say may well be true. But having part of the “truth” and needing to let off steam don't excuse making statements that will harm the faith of other Catholics, provide an unnecessary stumbling block for nonbelievers, and needlessly and perhaps even unfairly harm the reputations of others. That's why St. Paul advises us to say “only the things men need to hear, things that will help them” (Ephesians 4:29).
Scandal involves inducing others to sin. It's a type of spiritual murder. Are our comments regarding the Church expressed in ways that will actually turn people against the Church? And if giving scandal is like spiritual murder, then taking scandal is akin to spiritual suicide. We must protect our own hearts, that we do not allow our own negative feelings about the scandals to lead us out of the Church.
In the business world, there's a maxim that may help us take the right approach in this situation. Successful managers are able to “catch their employees doing something right” and in the process provide positive reinforcement for good behavior. In the spiritual realm, we likewise do well to “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). There are holy people in the Church. There are many great stories of contemporary Christian heroes, not to mention the lives of saints through the centuries. There is much good going on in the Church globally, nationally, and in our backyard. We need to acknowledge and celebrate this truth. This is by no means to deny the reality of sin. Rather, we must distinguish between acknowledging the truth and taking restorative action from mere venting.
6. Engage the World
The new evangelization entails a prudent engagement with the world. Catholic laity must be holy and informed. We can't run from the media, but neither should we accept the media's rules of engagement — rules which often preclude, among other things, acknowledging the existence of God and an objective moral law. We need, with God's grace, to be smarter and more convincing, not more fearful and compromising.
And all of us know people, many of whom were raised as Catholics, who have an inadequate understanding of the Christian faith generally, and who are inclined to accept uncritically whatever evil the media attributes to the Church. Being able to put such attacks in their proper light is an important form of apologetics.
7. Seek Reconciliation
Regardless of our state in life, all of us as Christ's disciples are called to be ambassadors of his reconciliation, mercy, and healing.
A lively sense of divine mercy is so needed today, and we must be its instruments as well as its recipients. We must be ambassadors of reconciliation within the Church, afflicted as she is with dissent and scandal. We need to forgive from the heart the perpetrators of crimes as well as those who may have allowed such crimes to continue. We must be instruments of the Lord's healing and compassion to all those who have been directly harmed by abusive conduct. We must repeatedly forgive those who have used the scandal as a pretext for attacking the Church and for furthering their own agendas. And we need to be instruments of God's mercy and peace to all those we meet. The current situation does not need more heat. Rather, it needs the light of Christ. May we be ambassadors of this light.
Leon J. Suprenant Jr. is the president of Catholics United for the Faith (CUF) and Emmaus Road Publishing.
The author's e-mail address is leon(cuf.org. He has also written a position paper on the current scandals in the Church for CUF.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Leon J. Suprenant Jr. ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Media Smoke and Mirrors DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:One case is too many, and the several cases that have been revealed of clergy abusing children are far, far too many. But it remains true that this problem is not nearly as bad as most people have been led to believe. Media reports are rehashing case after case of the same 1.6% of priests who abused minors over the past 50 years. At the same time, they aren't reporting on the rates of abuse involving rabbis Boy Scout leaders, teachers, coaches, etc.
There are two terrible consequences of this kind of media smoke-and-mirrors game. First, they scare people away from priests. Second, they make it difficult for a real reform to take place. Even though the number is much smaller than the media suggests, there is a problem in the Church that needs to be addressed. The real problem seems to have to do with homosexuals, who are the abusers in nearly all cases.
By forthrightly reporting on the real problem, the media could help convince Church leaders that enough is enough: No more homosexual priests. To take their current strategy (ignoring the problem, hyping a red herring) frankly makes the media seem more interested in hurting the Church than in helping children.
To show what tricks the media is using to distort the Church scandal, the Register grabbed several headlines from the first page of a Nexis search and analyzed them.
Making two look like many. One headline, “Priest Named In Abuse Lawsuit Was Subject Of Earlier Inquiry,” leaves the impression of a multiple abuser being tolerated by a diocese. In fact, the priest in question only had two accusations against him: The one in the lawsuit (lawyers are anxious to capitalize on the anti-priest climate these days) and an earlier one. Statistically, it is likely that neither is true.
Making no news look like bad news. “Misconduct allegations: ‘Sins’ coming home to roost,” says another headline. Though the headline is meaningless, it raises suspicion. The article doesn't add clarity: “Ask the archdiocese how many of its priests have been accused of sexual misconduct and how much money has been spent to settle the cases, and its spokesman says: ‘We don't do the numbers.’”
But the fact that a spokesman won't give out the raw numbers of any and all allegations makes perfect sense, particularly in today's climate.
Making precautions look like punishment. Dioceses can't win. Here's what happened when one diocese suspended some priests in order to be absolutely safe. Headline: “Diocese suspends 9 more priests.” The lead sentence: “The Catholic Diocese yesterday announced the suspension of nine more priests from their ministries pending a criminal investigation by the county prosecutor's office into years-old allegations of child sexual abuse.” Statistically, the chances are that most of the accused priests will be found innocent, but the damage has been done in the media.
Making good news look like bad news. “Catholics Grapple With Mixed Feelings on Church Scandals,” says the headline. But you read the subhead and see that it's not a story about Catholics “grappling;” it's a story about Catholics getting wise to what's going on: “Some blame the news media as priests address allegations.”
Making non-news look like bad news. Headline: “Religious orders can hide abuse by priests.” Yes. And so can Frisbee manufacturers. But how many have and have not?
Focusing always on the negative. Another diocese tried to do the right thing. So, the news story showed appreciation, right? No. The headline: “Parishioners blast bishop's decision; Bishop's action in removing priests called ‘cruel.’”
Very rare: a full-length good news story. This story could be written in most dioceses in America. It actually was in one: “Local Parishes Detached From Scandals; Pro-Active Diocese Policies Help Avoid Problems Seen Elsewhere.”
More Common: A good news story that is brief and buried. Cardinal Roger Mahoney was unfairly tarred far and wide in the media with an unsubstantiated sex abuse story. So, when it turns out that this story was wrong, there is a loud apology, right? No. There's this one-column headline, on page B5 of the New York Times: “No Case Against Cleric.” The cardinal has become a “cleric” in the headline, leaving page-scanners in the dark about the real news, which ought to have been given this headline: “Cardinal's Innocence Confirmed.”
— Register Staff
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Do You Also Want to Leave? DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:I recently got into a religious discussion with a friend of mine. Not a religious discussion. Actually, it wasn't that bad. I know this because we are still friends. It had to do with the most sacred of all topics, the very cornerstone of our faith as Catholics.
My husband and I went to dinner with some friends who were visiting from out-of-state. During a discussion about the things we value most in life, I mentioned the Eucharist. To this simple, unassuming profession our friend (we'll call him Jeff) asked, “What is Eucharist?” I was horrified, for a moment, at the idea that a person could live 30 some years of life, be this close of a friend, and have not the remotest idea about something that I hold so dear.
I quickly recovered and mumbled a less than eloquent reply about the Eucharist being the body and blood of Christ. Jeff said that they did the same thing at his church about once a month. First, I highlighted some of the similarities, but then went on to say that the core of the belief is different. As Catholics we believe the Eucharist is Christ's actual body and blood. Not a symbol, but his real body and blood.
At this point the first phase of the conversation ended. Jeff said he wanted to talk to his pastor and that it was a shame Catholics and Protestants couldn't come to an agreement on such an important aspect of the faith as the body and blood of Christ.
A couple of weeks later, the subject came up again. By this time, Jeff had talked to his pastor and now he had a few questions for me. To him the idea that the Eucharist was the real body and blood of Christ didn't make sense. Eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood was too absurd. Besides, when Christ talks about eating his flesh and blood (in John, chapter 6) he adds, “it is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail.”
I pointed out that Jesus said, “my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink” and “I am the bread of life.” He didn't say “my flesh is symbolic food” or “I am the symbol of the bread of life.”
In John chapter 6, beginning in verse 51, Jesus reasserts this teaching over and over, each time using stronger and stronger language. Jesus would not spend all that time reasserting that his flesh had to be eaten and then turn around and say the complete opposite — that it was of “no avail.” Rather, in this second instance, Jesus uses the term “the flesh” in contrast to “the spirit” to indicate the issue is one of faith.
If Jesus meant his own flesh, he would have said “my flesh” instead of “the flesh.”
Without a doubt, Jesus’ disciples understood that he was asking them to somehow eat his flesh. That's what he wanted them to think. Otherwise, he would have corrected their misunderstanding, especially after they began to quarrel.
“The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” (John 6:52). The disagreement became so heated that many of his disciples actually got up and walked away (John 6:60 and following).
Jesus knew this was a hard teaching, a test of faith. Some would accept it and some would not. Oddly, the same is true today. Some people will hear and accept and others will walk away.
As for Jeff, well, the discussion lives on. But, with your prayers maybe he will respond like Peter did in verse 68. When asked by our Lord, “Do you also want to leave?” St. Peter answered, “Where else can we go? You have the words of everlasting life.”
Christina Mills writes from Eugene, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christina Mills ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: Fatima by the Lake DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Most shrines and places of pilgrimage seem to be in rather remote places.
Not Milwaukee's Marian Shrine — it's smack-dab in the middle of suburbia.
Less than a mile from an interstate highway, nestled in among the backyards dotted with children at play, its “Hometown, USA” location (in the town of Wauwatosa) makes a quiet place of prayer accessible to families, passersby and busy young adults like me. In fact, I find myself driving past the grounds at least ten times each week — and tempted to stop in again and again.
The shrine's meticulous landscape, its rustic appearance and the life-size statue of Our Lady of Fatima give it an irresistibly peaceful atmosphere. Often I find myself whispering the name of Our Lady as I drive past in the mornings, or stopping on my way back from work to pray at her feet. The Marian Shrine is also adjacent to the cloistered convent of the Dominican Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary. As I pray the rosary, it is encouraging to glance at the cloister convent and know that nuns inside are praying the rosary on behalf of all of us.
Prayerful Processions
The history of the shrine is linked to the convent and to the Blessed Mother's appearances in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. In 1941, barely 24 years after she first appeared to Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta, the United States entered World War II. A friend of the Dominican sisters here asked that a public rosary vigil be held to pray for peace. This first vigil took place in the convent's chapel. A year later, approval was granted for a public 24-hour vigil to be held every month, with exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and uninterrupted recitation of the rosary by the laity. Soon after that, ecclesial permission was granted for a public rosary procession.
The first procession took place on May 13, 1945, the anniversary of Our Lady's first apparition at Fatima. The shrine was dedicated May 13, 1948, by Auxiliary Bishop Roman Atkielski of Milwaukee. It is said that it rained all during the ceremony. Thousands of people participated, no doubt remembering the rain in Portugal the day Our Lady appeared there.
Today the processions, which take place on May 13 and Oct. 13, start at the shrine and wend around the block. The statue of Our Lady of Fatima is carried while enveloped by pilgrims praying the rosary. The police block off the streets to allow for the procession. Usually people are seen looking from their windows; others stare from their cars or beep the horn. Every year I have participated, I've found this procession to be like a mini-pilgrimage. It invites me to persevere with courage along the way of conversion, just as Our Lady would have it.
The procession starts and ends at the grotto. On top of the grotto, there is a life-size figure of Our Lady of Fatima. To her right and left are statues of Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta; they gaze lovingly upon Our Lady. The scene provides a breathtaking sight, especially at night. The grotto is also a sanctuary at which Mass is celebrated on Marian days.
Rosary Reconnaissance
To the left of the grotto is a statue of the Angel of Peace as he appeared when he offered Communion to the visionaries. There is also a memorial to soldiers who have fought and defended our country. To the right, hidden from the main grotto, is a statue of St. Joseph holding the Child Jesus, as he appeared in the final Fatima apparition. There is a small closetsize area where pilgrims can write down their petitions and candles are lit for their intentions. The intentions reach the Dominican nuns, whom I know to be great prayer soldiers: I have relied on their prayers many times.
To the right of the shrine are three altars with carved marble depicting the 15 mysteries of the rosary. The details on these carvings are amazing and it helps pilgrims achieve the proper disposition to pray the rosary.
Nearby a special station offers free rosary beads and leaflets on how to pray them, along with free scapulars and literature explaining their significance. There is also a station that explains the full story of Fatima. The sisters maintain the rosary station, keeping it well-stocked with beads and scapulars, and thus continue to spread the essential message of Our Lady Fatima — a loving, but urgent, call to repentance, fasting and prayer.
Sadly, because the Marian Shrine is so accessible, it has been repeatedly vandalized. On one occasion, the heads of some of the statues were stolen, though the statue of Our Lady wasn't damaged in the attack. Immediately the Dominican sisters called an expert to repair the damage.
But the Marian Shrine has seen its share of miracles, too, among them the increasing number of pilgrims who attend Mass lately and participate in the processions.
Because this shrine is situated in a spot so familiar to so many, and because it is adjacent to the cloister, those who pray the rosary here are afforded a truly unique perspective on the Christian life. For me it is an oasis of deep spirituality in the everyday setting of a residential neighborhood — a place at which I can easily stop to confide in Our Lady before returning to the cares of the world.
At Milwaukee's Marian Shrine, all are welcome to share a quiet moment contemplating Christ with his mother.
Maria Rivera writes from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.
----- EXCERPT: Milwaukee's Marian Shrine, Wauwatosa, Wis. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Maria Rivera ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: On a Cold December Night DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:On a cold December night, the sisters gathered in a Park Avenue church to present an Advent concert.
The perfect fund-raiser, right?
Not even close. It was a Christmas gift form New York's Sisters of Life to their friends — those who support them through volunteering and financial support.
People like Anthony Baldini who with fellow volunteers of the Wall Street Catholic Young Adults donate weekends to the Sisters, doing things like helping convert a mid-town convent into a maternity-services center.
They donate food, clothes, and toys for the babies and mothers. ”We were also able to donate a bedroom set for a new mother that moved out of the center as well as some other furniture items.” They are also groundskeepers of sorts, sprucing up the grounds of their main convent in the fall and spring.
“Whenever I have called the Sisters of Life they have been very helpful in proving assistance to women in crisis pregnancies and providing counseling for women who are suffering after an abortion, says Father Peter West, of Priests for Life. “They are tremendous blessing to the Church and the wider community they serve. What a beautiful legacy for Cardinal O'Connor!”
In 2000, Cardinal John O'Connor wrote of his Sisters: “What do we need for a new culture of human life? Gratitude and joy. Each Sister of Life has in her room a small sign: ‘Without joy there can be no Sister of Life.’ Life should mean joy, joy in this God who brought us out of darkness into His marvelous light. A people of life, for life. ‘Gratitude and joy,’ our Holy Father says, ‘and the incomparable dignity of man impels us to share this message with everyone.’”
— Kathryn Lopez
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Daughters of St. Paul Burst Into Song DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:The first time Tracey Dugas stepped into the Daughters of St. Paul recording studio, she had to wonder what in the world she was doing there.
“The sisters were recording Love Is Born, a Christmas album, and I was asked to come to the studio one morning. I just remember thinking, ‘Why?’ I was brand-new to the convent, and I didn't expect to be asked to sing on the album! Later I discovered that one of the Choir's 10 ‘regulars’ had to bail out at the last minute,” she adds with a laugh, “which explains why I got to fill in.”
Born in Louisiana in 1972, Tracey certainly never planned on leaving her home state. That is, not until she met the Daughters of St. Paul while she was still in high school.
“There was definitely a feeling of connection,” she remembers of that first encounter. This feeling soon developed into a clearer sense of God's call. Tracey followed this call all the way from the deep South to the heart of New England — Boston, Massachusetts. There, she began her formation as a Daughter of St. Paul—a period of living, working, and praying with the Sisters, discerning her vocation to devote her life to sharing the Good News. Now, almost 10 years later, Sr. Tracey Matthia eagerly looks forward to professing her final vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
And her stint as a pinch-hitter for the choir must have gone over well, because Sr. Tracey Matthia's voice is now heard on six of the Daughters’ albums, including the most recent—their first Praise & Worship album, TITLEd Sing Your Praise.
In fact, Sr. Tracey Matthia sings the lead for two songs on the new album: “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever” and “Sweet, Sweet Song of Salvation.”
As a genre, Praise & Worship music continues to grow in popularity in the contemporary Christian music world. With artists such as Michael W. Smith, Rebecca St. James, and Delirious releasing new Praise & Worship albums, the demand for music that lends itself to prayer has grown obvious.
The fascination with Praise & Worship music, according to Sr. Tracey Matthia, has something to do with the fact that “through the repetition common to these songs, you become lost in the music; it becomes your prayer. We're more able to recapture the spirit of worship — God is God.”
Sr. Tracey recalls her first introduction to Praise & Worship music: “I was gathered with about 90 other young students at school [St. Louis University], in a chapel that really only held 50 people! We started singing a Praise & Worship song, and I was impressed that the other students were so ‘into’ it. Some of them were singing, listening, making up harmonies, raising their hands — it was so amazing to see how each of us could express ourselves individually and as a community at the same time.”
Sr. Tracey Matthia explains that music has had a great influence in understanding her call as a Daughter of St. Paul: “Music is a very personal way of communicating with God. Through music, I'm able to allow others to see something of my relationship with God — and tell them that they can have a personal relationship with him, too.”
Having begun classes at Aquinas Institute of Theology (located on the St. Louis University Campus), Sr. Tracey now divides her time between helping out at the Pauline Book and Media Center on Watson Road and studying Italian. Later in the year she will join other young Daughters of St. Paul from around the world in Rome to prepare for professing their perpetual vows. Until then, she hopes others will discover the beauty and importance of prayer that she has experienced through praise and worship. “I helped to lead prayer and music for a weekly Praise & Worship hour of adoration on the university campus. Because other students continue to contribute to the music in their own unique ways, the prayer and worship of God is always full of life and richness.”
“There is so much room for creativity in music,” Sr. Tracey affirms, “Everyone has a place to praise God.” This is the message communicated so vibrantly through the Sisters’ new album; don't hold back — Sing Your Praise!
— Daughters of St. Paul
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: St. Paul ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, APRIL 21
Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film
PBS, 8 p.m.
This 90-minute tribute chronicles the life and projects of the master photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984). He was expert in all genres and undertook varied projects, but he is best known for his striking landscapes. His intent in creating them was to preach the majesty of nature, man's links to nature and every generation's obligation to posterity.
SUNDAY, APRIL 21
Follow That Red, White and Blue Potato
Food Network, 10 p.m.
As every GI who ever pulled KP duty knows, our U.S. Armed Forces consume enormous amounts of potatoes every day. This program details how the military procures potatoes, transports them and prepares them for our men and women in uniform.
MONDAY, APRIL 22
The Journey Home
EWTN, 8 p.m.
Guest Michelle Willis tells Marcus Grodi how she succumbed to the New Age phenomenon but then broke away and returned to the sacraments. She is the author of Reclaiming America's Children: Raising and Educating Morally Healthy Kids.
TUE.-WED., APRIL 23-24
America's First River: Moyers on the Hudson
PBS, 9 p.m.
In this new, four-hour, two-part documentary on New York State's Hudson River, Bill Moyers first examines the Hudson's prominent place in American history and life and then describes 20th-century antipollution campaigns to save the river.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24
Hostage Negotiators
History Channel, 8 p.m.
Find out how law-enforcement personnel train to save hostages from criminals in life-and-death situations.
THURSDAY, APRIL 25
Lance Armstrong: Racing for His Life
Biography, 8 p.m.
U.S. bicyclist Armstrong has won the grueling Tour de France three times after surviving cancer. He endured brain surgery and four rounds of chemotherapy. This show interviews his wife, mom, coach and friends about his comeback and spirit.
FRIDAY, APRIL 26
Islands of Fire and Magic
Travel Channel, 5 p.m.
Adventurer Larry Gray kayaks through the wild Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea.
SATURDAY, APRIL 27
Guadalupe, Mother of All Mexico
EWTN, 8 p.m.
This 56-minute documentary by Patricia Lacy Collins and Robert Cozens shows how deeply the people of Mexico, from pilgrims to scholars, love Our Lady of Guadalupe — she who told Blessed Juan Diego in 1531: “Am I not here, your Mother? … Are you not in the folds of my mantle, the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?”
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: The More Online, the Merrier DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:It wasn't all that long ago that most households had just one television.
Today most seem to have two or more.
The same thing has happened with computers. And guess what everybody wants to do with his or her personal PC or Mac? You guessed it — connect to the Internet. The trouble is, multiple Internet-service provider (ISP) accounts can be costly. If you are using a dialup connection, you may have to add phone lines to make it work. Isn't there a less-costly solution to this problem?
Here at the monastery, I was faced with this very dilemma. The monks were all using one computer for the Internet, taking turns using it. Yet we have other computers here as well. Why not share an Internet connection with multiple computers? How do you do this? Networking. All the computers would have to be networked together to share our broadband-cable connection.
Now there are various options for hooking multiple computers together. The most reliable is by ethernet. Other options are wireless, by phone jacks or even by electrical outlets. I chose ethernet. We are building a new monastery, so it will be fairly simple to have ethernet cables routed throughout the new building. For houses already built, there is no problem if all the computers are in the same room. However, if computers are in different rooms, ethernet cables will have to be routed through floors and walls.
Having worked with computers long enough, I was expecting problems in getting the ethernet network up and running. My first step was to purchase a cable/DSL router. I chose Linksys at linksys.com. Since two of our computers did not have an ethernet connection, I had to purchase ethernet PC cards for them. (It is also possible to purchase USB network adapters if your computers have USB ports.) Finally, I purchased the ethernet cables that would be run from one computer to another. The total cost to do this was less than $200. I hooked up the cable modem to the router and, from the router cables, went out to all three computers. I then followed the quick installation instructions and held my breath. Sure enough, every computer was able to access the Internet through our one Internet-cable account.
There were other benefits to the router, as I soon discovered. For instance, it acts like a firewall, hiding all your computers from the Internet. This keeps malicious Internet users from probing your computers. Another benefit, which parents will enjoy, is the option to enable the router to keep a password-protected log of all Internet activity. This means that parents would know exactly where their children have been on the Internet. Last but not least, all the computers can be enabled to communicate with one another. This allows for sharing files, printers and so on between computers.
Now I know that some of my readers already may have a drill in their hands ready to put those networking cables through floors and walls. But wait — you'd better ask your spouse about this first! And if the answer is as I suspect, we have three other options that may help you avoid arguments. The easiest to work with would be electrical-outlet networking. HomePlug at homeplug.com has developed adapters (available from Linksys, where you can get a device called a PowerLine Bridge for anywhere from $25 to $50 per computer) that will plug into your computer's ethernet or USB port and then into any wall electrical outlet. Through your home wiring already in place, you can network all your computers together. Then purchase a PowerLine Router for about $179 to share your broadband Internet connection.
The next option for easily installing a network and then sharing the Internet is to use an existing phone line and corresponding phone jacks in the house. Unlike electrical outlets, you may not have as many phone jacks or any phone jacks in rooms where you want to network your computers. But, if they are nearby, phone-line networking is possible. And, surprisingly, you can use that same phone line for the telephone at the same time. For more information on this possibility, see HomePNA at homepna.com.
Finally, we come to the wireless network. This could be seen as the most convenient way to set things up. You could walk around with your laptop and still surf the Net. However, the drawbacks to wireless networks are: distance limitations, interference possibilities, security and higher cost. However, for those wanting to pursue this possibility, a number of companies have networking packages (including Linksys, mentioned above).
Now some of you do not have broadband or are not interested in paying for it. Still, you want to share that 56kbps dial-up modem account. Well, don't despair. D-Link Systems at d-link.com sells the DI-704P Broadband Gateway which also includes an external serial port for a dial-up modem. Also, it includes an external parallel port for sharing a printer.
Sharing an Internet connection through networking can save you money. And you may actually be able to communicate with your kids if you enable network communications between computers. Surprise them!
Brother John Raymond, co-founder of the Monks of Adoration, writes from Venice, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: How to get everyone connected under one roof ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Monthly Web Picks DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:This month, we'll look at some examples of Web portals and start pages.
Many people use our live chapel Webcam page at monksofadoration.org/chapel.html as their start page. Why not start your surfing with Jesus in our chapel?
My Catholic start page at catholic-pages.com was set up by a young Catholic family with three small children all living in Australia. You can personalize the page with your name, time zone and favorite links.
Web designer Nik Stanosheck has put together your Catholic Web at YourCatholic.com. It includes a discussion forum and Web portal.
Catholic Exchange at catholicexchange.com includes some extras not usually seen on Catholic portals like global, national, business and sports news. You'll also find health and science information, weather and a stock-lookup feature.
Why limit yourself to English? How about Tantum Ergo at tantumergo.com? It's an Italian Catholic portal.
To order Catholics on the Internet by Brother John Raymond, call Prima Publishing at (800) 632-8676.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:The Time Machine (1960)
Imagination trumps high-tech wizardry every time. A perfect example is the superiority of the original adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, to the remake currently in release. Writer-director George Pal (Tom Thumb) was considered the special-effects genius of his era. But he always took the time to establish a consistent dramatic tone, combining a sense of wonder with moments of terror and suspense.
In Victorian England, a scientific researcher (Rod Taylor) invents a machine that allows him to travel in time but not in space. His first journeys into the future give him glimpses of the two world wars and a nuclear confrontation. When he lands in the year 802,701, he discovers the human race has been divided into two groups. The Eloi are normal-looking but passive — too lazy to read books. They are ruled by the Morlocks, a horrifying tribe of aggressive mutants who live underground. The 19th-century researcher makes an alliance with an Eloi woman (Yvette Mimieux) to help her people overthrow their conquerors.
Paths of Glory (1958)
Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the Vatican's top 40 films) was a master director with a visually arresting style. His movies almost always take a fresh and revealing look at their subject matter. Paths of Glory, based on Humphrey Cobb's novel, is a brutal examination of the stalemate on World War I's Western Front.
The French Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) leads his men on a suicidal assault against a well-fortified German position called the Ant Hill. The generals in command (Adolphe Menjou and George Macready) consider the humiliating defeat of Dax's regiment to have been caused by battlefield cowardice, and they order three of Dax's men (Timothy Carey, Joseph Turkel and Wayne Morris) to be court-martialed as an example. Dax is appointed their defense attorney in the perversion of justice that follows.
Kubrick brilliantly captures the seemingly senseless slaughter of battle and the backbiting politics of high-level military intrigue. The movie is often labeled “anti-war,” but its message could be equally well described as “anti-capital punishment.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: The Biblical Roots of Catholic Liturgy DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:SACRAMENTS IN SCRIPTURE: SALVATION HISTORY MADE PRESENT by Tim Gray Emmaus Road Publishing, 2001 96 pages, $9.95
To order: (800) 398-5470 www.emmausroad.org
Before the Second Vatican Council, the story goes, the typical Sunday sermon had a three-part structure: Father would tell you what he was going to say, say it, and then tell you what he had just said. This may be a caricature of the actual method, but it had two advantages: The people in the pews knew what they were supposed to be learning, and thus were more likely to remember it.
Poor catechetical instruction and much aimless preaching in the “Church of What's Happening” since Vatican II have left more than a generation of young Catholics with inadequate knowledge about their faith. Is it any wonder that so few nominal believers understand the Real Presence of Christ in the tabernacle, for example, when they were taught that the Eucharist is a “communal meal”? A steady diet of “relevance” is like chasing the leaves when they fall, and leaving untended the fruit and the tree that produces it.
Tim Gray, an assistant professor of scripture at Christendom College's Notre Dame Graduate School, has written a very helpful little book that brings the study of the seven sacraments back to their biblical roots. “The meaning of the sacraments flows from Scripture like water flows from a spring,” he writes. “Cut off the sacraments from Scripture, and the understanding and appreciation of the sacraments dry up. What happens when a river is cut off from its source?”
Simply and succinctly, Gray situates the individual's experience of the sacraments (emphasized so often in recent catechesis) within the vastly greater context of God's covenant with his people throughout human history. He is not writing a technical theological treatise, but rather a clear course outline for readers who want a more mature, practical understanding of Christ's mysteries. Even the “blueprint” of the book is instructive:
“[T]he method of this book is to place each sacrament in the context of salvation history. The chapters on each sacrament have three main parts. The first part places the sacrament in the context of the Old Testament, because ‘[i]n the sacramental economy the Holy Spirit fulfills what was prefigured in the Old Covenant (CCC 1093). … For example, the water of Baptism relates to the waters of [Noah's] flood and the Red Sea.
“The second and central part looks at the sacrament in light of Jesus’ life and death. ‘By this re-reading in the Spirit of Truth, starting from Christ, the figures [= typological prefigurations] are unveiled’ (CCC 1094). The Catechism teaches that we should be able to see the relationship between the Old and New Testaments.
“The third part employs Scripture as a lens to see how the mystery of the sacrament is made present in the here and now of our daily lives. … ‘Christian liturgy [including the sacraments] not only recalls the events that saved us but actualizes them, makes them present’ (CCC 1104).”
Confirmation makes a lot more sense when viewed against a pre-Christian background of anointing priests, prophets and kings. To unfold the mystery of the Eucharist, the author examines, not the image of bread, but the theme of the sacrificial lamb in both the Old and New Covenants.
Here Tim Gray, a fine instructor, skillfully introduces Scripture texts and explains them as needed, but most often lets them speak for themselves.
His study of the biblical sources of the sacraments demonstrates that a “closer walk” with Jesus consists of entering more deeply into the sacred, life-giving mysteries which Our Lord left to his Church.
Michael J. Miller writes from Glenside, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael J. Miller ----- KEYWORDS: Books ----- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:WWW.ErmaMuseum.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON, April 3 — The Marianist university has announced the creation of ErmaMuseum.org, an online museum featuring artifacts and writings of humorist Erma Bombeck, who died in 1996. In addition to photographs and samples of her writing, the Web museum also features more than 20 audio and video clips, including Bombeck's description of how her Dayton English professor, Marianist Brother Tom Price, encouraged her to take up writing.
Religious Debate
“With instruction, [students] ought to be able to grasp that systems of belief can be at once appealing and repugnant, and that the student's job is to discriminate between those qualities,” says Shulvetiz. In another place, she complains that Americans are too fearful of religious discussion and debate. “If we weren't allowed to disagree violently about our beliefs, what could we disagree about,” she asks. “Our hairstyles?”
Tax Time
The students helped conduct five tax assistance sessions for taxpayers who earn less than $32,000 a year.
Imposing Patriotism
TOWNHALL.COM, March 20 — In an analysis of a bill before the Minnesota Legislature that would encourage the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by public school students, D.J. Trice disagrees that the bill would produce a “forced patriotism [that] isn't real patriotism.”
In a column for the Web site, he observes: “One doesn't get the sense that today's educators are waiting patiently for students’ purely natural love of recycling to emerge. Teachers aren't holding back so their pupils’ instinctively generous racial and gender attitudes can rise to the surface.”
Honorary Doctorate
SETON HALL UNIVERSITY, April 2 — Sir Martin Gilbert, prolific Holocaust historian and documentary filmmaker, was scheduled to receive an honorary doctorate from the university, operated by the Archdiocese of Newark, N.J., on April 14.
The presentation was to take place at a fundraiser for the Sister Rose Thering Endowment for Jewish-Christian Studies.
Gilbert has served as a representative at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
No to Poster
Though opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and some parents, the newspaper said some lawmakers were “uncomfortable with the offer” because the posters included the Thomas More Law Center ‘s phone number and Web site.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Books No Library Should Be Without DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Even if you're unable to donate $1,500 worth of books to your local library, you might start by donating these popular Catholic TITLEs.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition.
Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” by “Bible Christians,” by Karl Keating
Crossing the Threshold of Hope, by Pope John Paul II
Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, by Michael D. O'Brien
Hitler, the War, and the Pope, by Ronaly Rychlak
How the Reformation Happened, by Hilaire Belloc
The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth, by Scott Hahn
Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton
The Rapture Trap: A Catholic Response to “End Times” Fever, by Paul Thigpen
Surprised by Truth: 11 Converts Give the Biblical and Historical Reasons for Becoming Catholic, edited by Patrick Madrid
Upon this Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church, by Stephen K. Ray
Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church, by Rev. Henry G. Graham
Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II, by George Weigel
— Tim Drake
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Crossing the Threshold of Home DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Q When I've had a real tough day and I come home from work, my wife and kids don't understand that I just want to be alone for a while. This upsets my wife, and we start quarreling. Is it unreasonable to spend a few moments by myself in the house before I meet with everyone and ask about his or her day?
A Sorry, but the picture of dad coming home and tiredly pleading to go into his corner like a defeated prize fighter isn't appealing to me either.
You say your kids and wife don't understand, but what exactly is it they are supposed to understand? They love you and miss you. You owe them your best at that moment no matter how your day was. Now it's their time and they deserve it. So do you.
When you cross the threshold of your home you want to be receptive and enthusiastic about seeing them no matter what kind of a day you had. And if your day was hard, why should they suffer for it? You are their father and they need to see that you are interested in them at the moment you walk in. What exactly could be more important?
A friend of mine has a tough, high-powered job in D.C. with tons of responsibility. He also has six kids. He stops his car a couple of blocks before he arrives home. He turns off the radio and sits quietly and calmly reflecting on the problems of the day, running a few scenarios about things that are due tomorrow, and talking to himself about how his day has gone. He offers it all to God and prays for the strength to be self-giving to those he loves the most: his family.
When he has done this sufficiently to collect himself and feel that he has thought through or dwelt upon some important issues he restarts the car, and drives two blocks into his driveway. He is now prepared to be enthusiastically available for his six kids and his wife. They all want something from him, whether it's a comment, or a leg to hug or to show him a piece of artwork for the fridge door. Or, if it's a better day, a cold one to share with his wife who can't wait (and why should she?) to talk with another adult about her day too.
It takes strength to arrive home in a state of mind whereby we can be available for them. But our goal should be radical availability when we walk in that door. Our kids and our spouse should see a man glad to not only be home, but glad to be with them.
When we come in that door we should be all theirs. That's easier said than done and some prep work may have to be done as it is by my friend. But daddy coming home should be a big deal and dad needs to lead the charge with his radical availability.
Treat the walk over the threshold as the big deal that it is. You are literally explaining to your kids how you navigated the real world today, and that you've come home with stories and a few battle scars but you are not much worse for the wear. Now is the time to show you love to see them and hear from them.
Art Bennett is a licensed marriage , family and child therapist.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters(ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: WORSHIP = HAPPINESS DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:A recent study examining religious commitment among psychiatric inpatients has found that religion is beneficial for mental heath. The study indicates that those who attend worship services more regularly reported shorter lengths of hospital stay, lower rates of depression and alcohol abuse, and higher satisfaction with life.
Average length of hospital stay among those who worship
2 days
Average length of hospital stay among those who do not worship
12 days
Source: Canadian Psychiatric Association, March 2002.
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Looking for Faith at the Library? DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:ALTOONA, Wis. — Have you checked out Scott Hahn's Hail Holy Queen from your local library lately? Don't think you'll find it there?
If you lived in Altoona, Wis., you would. That's because a group there is working to change what they see as an exclusion — intentional or not — of good Catholic literature from libraries.
The American Library Association says there is no concerted effort to exclude Catholic books.
“Most decisions come down to money, space, and demand,” said Paige Wasson, public relations assistant with the American Library Association. “While libraries would love to have every book possible, they tend to go with TITLEs that are popular, well-known, or most requested by readers, such as books from the Oprah Book Club.”
Wasson also said that collections vary regionally. “For example, in Chicago, where there is a larger Polish population, libraries will have Polish newspapers and books. One wouldn't expect to find the same at a library in Springfield, Ill.,” added Wasson.
Be that as it may, a group from St. Mary's Catholic Church in Altoona thought that Catholics were underserved, and so donated more than 100 Catholic TITLEs to their local library on March 13. Approximately 30 people attended the dedication. Dubbed the “St. Mary's Collection” each book bears a bookplate honoring 79-year-old Father Norbert Wilger, pastor at the parish since 1968.
As a result, the Altoona Public Library most likely has more Catholic book TITLEs in circulation than any other public library in the country.
The Idea Arises
The idea first came to Dennis and Leigh Jerz after Father Wilger asked the couple to start an adult religious education program at the parish. “We were buying a lot of books,” explained Leigh, “and I wished that we could borrow them from the local library.” Leigh is a stay at home mother; Dennis is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.
But, as is the case in most public libraries, Catholic books were not to be found. “The library has many Protestant books, even an encyclopedia that is anti-Catholic,” noted Father Wilger.
Leigh scouted the library to see what she could find. “There were only two Catholic TITLEs in circulation among 32,000,” she recalled. “A book on the lives of the saints and one on Mother Teresa that we couldn't locate. The library had two biographies of Billy Graham, but none of the Holy Father. They had Hitler's Pope, but nothing that presented an accurate history of World War II. They had the Left Behind series, but no Catholic fiction.”
The Jerz's decided to change that.
“We felt that by purchasing a collection and placing it at the public library, we could serve the needs of our own parishioners as well as others that may have never read about the Catholic Church,” said Jerz. With the help of another family, their local Knights of Columbus chapter, and Father Wilger, they gathered a list of books.
“The $300 donation from the Knights really got things rolling,” said Brad Payson, another organizer of the project. Through the connection of Catholic convert Audrey Zech — a book buyer at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn. — the group was able to make their money go further by purchasing most of the TITLEs at a 25% discount.
In the end, they had purchased 26 children and teen TITLEs and 88 adult TITLEs valued at $1,500. The collection consists of a variety of both contemporary and classic TITLEs, including Michael O'Brien and Bud Macfarlane Jr.'s novels, works by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and books by Pope John Paul II himself. The collection also boasts a series of saint books for youth published by Ignatius Press.
“Paul Thigpen's Rapture Trap was checked out the first night it was made available,” commented Jerz.
“Many parishes have their own lending libraries,” explained Father Wilger, “but the nice thing about this collection is that the Church doesn't need to provide a librarian to check out the books. The staff at the library do that.”
Librarians Love It
Library director Mary Vernau was very pleased by the donation. “We were thrilled with the donation because we didn't have a great deal of Catholic literature at all. We have a large donation of Buddhist volumes and the Mormons are very generous,” she said. “We were looking to offer a more balanced selection since a large percentage of the community is Catholic.”
An added benefit of the donation is that now that they are in the library system they are available through almost any library on interlibrary loan. “The library belongs to a consortium of 23 libraries,” explained Vernau. “Very few of these TITLEs were duplicates within that system. This means that the books can be used by those in the community, but also by people throughout Wisconsin and beyond. The collection fills a real need.”
“The Pope's biography and the saint biographies for juveniles are especially nice,” she said.
An open house was held to celebrate the addition. Becky Thurner read aloud from the children's book The Princess and the Kiss by Jennie Bishop, Leigh Jerz read from Gregory and Lisa Popcak's Parenting with Grace, Dennis Jerz read from Patrick Madrid's Pope Fiction, and Bert Jordan read from George Weigel's Witness to Hope.
The books currently sit on a special book cart in the library. After about a month they will be filed among similar TITLEs.
The purpose of the donation was threefold. “We wanted to help area Catholics to learn and grow in their faith, we wanted to make available more materials that accurately represented Catholic viewpoints, and we wanted to nurture those who might be searching spiritually,” said Jerz. “I would love it if someone came to the parish years from now and said that they came to the parish because of a book they found in the library when they were questioning or searching.”
“As Mary Vernau was barcoding the books she would say, ‘The nearest copy of this book is at the Library of Congress or Emory University in Georgia,’” added Jerz. “She felt she had something very special.”
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minn.
----- EXCERPT: Stocking the Shelves With Things Catholic ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Natural Family Planning on Your Palm Pilot DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:ST. PAUL Minn. — As with everything else in the modern world, natural family planning has reached the technology age. It only took a few pieces of the puzzle to come together. Soon women will be able to record their fertility cycles using a handheld PDA (personal desktop assistant), better known as a Palm Pilot.
Julie Kaiser and her husband, Joe, are one of 20 couples around the country who are testing this new method of “charting” for the Billings Ovulation Method (BOMA) of natural family planning. The Northbrook, Ill., couple have been using the Billings method since they were married 12 years ago, and Julie teaches it for the Chicago Archdiocese. She was excited about being part of the test group, but wasn't sure about the technology because she's not much of a computer user.
“My first response was I'd love to do it if I can figure out how to use the Palm Pilot,” said Kaiser.
Today she has only good things to say about its ease of use. The only thing you need to do is enter in the words you use to describe the characteristics of cervical mucous. Everything else is already programmed in according to the Billings method, she explained, including the date, the symbols used for dryness, fertility and menstruation, and the rules. The program is designed with a 35-day chart, which can be extended if a cycle goes longer. And, the Palm Pilot has a storage capacity to hold 10 or more years of charts.
“I can't get over how much easier this is. It takes two seconds,” said Kaiser. “I've kept charts for 12 years and the stamps are falling off and it's so much paper to hold on to. Now I have five months of charts in my Palm Pilot and I can go from month to month and see how things have changed in the click of a button. It's amazing.”
She foresees that this technology will not only simplify charting, it will make it easier to transfer charts between an instructor and student via e-mail.
Paul Siml, a clinical software expert who wrote the program, said this will provide an electronic record that users can send over the Internet and get help anywhere. natural family planning would no longer be restricted by geographic location or instructor availability.
The Tucson, Ariz., resident has been in the software business for 20 years and was one of the pioneer developers of software that computerized the medical laboratory when he worked for Sunquest Information Systems. He initially wanted to write a program for him and his wife, Marianne, who is also a computer programmer. When they first started learning natural family planning, they couldn't get used to the idea of charting with paper and stickers.
Others apparently concur, noted Sue Ek, the executive director of BOMA-USA (Billings Ovulation Method), who is coordinating the testing process. “As it turns out, we've heard from a couple of people who were wondering if this was available,” said Ek. “Some are software experts and were planning to design something themselves. I think there is a real interest out there, particularly in our culture where so many of us are mobile and women are traveling for business.”
Serendipity
Several things came together in the last several years to make this possible, explained Siml. One was the development of handheld hardware, particularly the Palm brand of the PDA. The price came down to $100 or less, which is affordable for the average couple. Also, they do not require rechargeable batteries and even a low-end Palm will run several months without needing new batteries, and they have memory cards now so that you do not need a computer to back-up your data.
Secondly, in the last several years software development tools have matured so that they are more reliable. And finally, when BOMA introduced new black and white symbols as an alternative to the colored stickers, it simplified the coding system used in the day-to-day charting.
“PDAs don't have a lot of computing power, but with the Billings method, which is so simple, it was a very good fit. There are not a lot of rules and calculating, and Billings was very attractive because it developed the universal graphic symbols that are in black and white, not color,” said Siml.
He believes that this is just the beginning of using technology for natural family planning, and with that, it will be much more appealing to younger people who have grown up with computers.
“We've got a new generation of people coming up who have no problem picking up a PDA and using it,” said Siml. “If you showed them a charting method using paper and stickers, they'd say ‘get real.”
He also hopes the Palm Pilot will get the husbands more involved. “Ultimately they really want the husband and wife to work together in the charting. I don't know how often that occurs, but the PDA is fun,” said Siml. “I enjoy charting on this thing.”
The testing process ends in June and a final version will then be sent to Drs. John and Lynn Billings for approval. It could be available to the public as early as July, according to Ek. Couples will be able to purchase the software through the BOMAUSA headquarters in St. Paul, Minn., and receive it as an email attachment, which can be downloaded into a Palm Pilot through their computer.
Ek said tens of thousands of couples use the Billings method in the United States, and it is also taught in 120 countries around the world. The potential is there to go international with this, particularly in Europe where a lot of people are very technological, she added.
“It's a unique audience,” she said, “but it's very exciting.”
Barbara Ernster writes from Fridley, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: LIFE NOTES DATE: 04/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: April 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Buffalo City Approves Arch
ASSOCIATION OF THE ARCH OF TRIUMPH OF THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY, April 4 — By unanimous vote, the 13-member Common Council of Buffalo passed a resolution in support of the Arch of Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and International Shrine of the Holy Innocents.
Addressing the pro-life aspect of the immense shrine project, which drew fire from local individuals when first announced in the summer of 2001, the Common Council stated, “the proposed shrine would also encourage increased respect for human life, including prior to the birth of the individual, a value much needed in the present day notwithstanding that there are differing opinions on the issue.”
2 States Pass Informed Consent
The Arizona bill would require doctors to inform women of the dangers of abortion and the age of the unborn baby at least 24 hours before the abortion.
The Alabama bill also requires a 24-hour waiting period after information about abortion and alternatives are given to a woman, but is different in that it requires the abortionist to perform an ultrasound and offer to show the woman her unborn child.
Ugandan Official Speaks Out
ALLAFRICA.COM, March 30 — The Apac District Resident Commissioner, Drani Dradriga, warned medical practitioners and drug shop operators against encouraging abortion.
Dradriga, who was speaking at the closure of a one-day workshop for medical practitioners and drug shop operators at the district headquarters, said there was an increase in the sale of illegal drugs.
“I have heard reports about the increasing sale of illegal drugs on the market that encourage abortions. I warn whoever is doing it to desist from the practice because it is against the professional ethics of medical practitioners and the Constitution,” Dradriga said.
Kansas Approves 4 Pro-Life Bills
ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 2 — The Kansas state House approved four pro-life bills, including measures putting new regulations on abortion facilities and tightening a parental notification law. One bill would require the state secretary of health and environment to establish minimum health and staffing standards for abortion facilities.
Another amends a 1992 parental consent law by requiring abortion practitioners to notify a parent or guardian in person or by certified mail to ensure parents receive the notice.
A bill allowing prosecutors to charge criminals with two crimes when they assault a pregnant woman resulting in the death of or injury to the unborn child was also passed. The fourth bill allows the state to issue “Choose Life” license plates.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: John Paul's Toronto Triumph DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:TORONTO — When World Youth Day organizers said they wanted to stop traffic along one of Toronto's main thoroughfares for a re-enactment of Christ's passion, city officials asked, “You want to do what?”
The task seemed impossible, yet the organizers knew all things are possible with God.
Not only did they succeed in having the Way of the Cross presented in the heart of the city, but they also held the largest gathering of its kind in Canada on July 18-28 for World Youth Day 2002. More than half a million young people from 173 countries gathered to be in the presence of Pope John Paul II, to encounter Christ and to deepen their faith.
The entire event was set up as a kind of mini-Easter, with Friday's Way of the Cross, Saturday's vigil and Sunday's Mass — each event drawing more people than the previous. An estimated 200,000 attended the opening Mass. Two days later 400,000 attended the papal welcoming ceremony. Approximately 600,000 attended the vigil and 800,000 attended Sunday's Mass.
It is, of course, impossible to talk about World Youth Day without mentioning Pope John Paul II. He started the event in 1986.
Confounding those who expected only 200,000, the numbers steadily rose following the Holy Father's arrival in Toronto on Tuesday and his emotional descent down the airplane's staircase.
“He told us on the plane that he was walking down the stairs. How can you say No to the Holy Father?” asked Joaquín Navarro-Valls, press office director for the Holy See. World Youth Day officials said an additional 10,000 pilgrims registered the day after the Pope's arrival.
At the official welcoming ceremony held Thursday, John Paul told the youth, “the aged Pope is full of years, but young at heart.” That youthfulness was exemplified by the Holy Father's frequent smiles and his playfulness as he tapped his hand upon the podium in beat to the youth's familiar cries of “John Paul II, we love you!”
The Pope's energy and vigor was a surprise to many. “Three weeks ago I was in Rome to receive the pallium,” said Archbishop Anthony Meagher of Kingston, Ontario. “At that time the Holy Father could barely stand up and his voice was very weak.” Archbishop Meagher went on to say that it was obvious the Pope draws great strength from the young.
The Holy Father has “been” with the young even when he hasn't been with them physically. “He is on Strawberry Island, but his mind is” in Toronto, said Navarro-Valls, referring to John Paul's retreat prior to World Youth Day. On Friday evening throngs of pilgrims watched a dramatized Way of the Cross, written by John Paul II, while the Pope watched them on television from his retreat.
Then there was Friday's lunch. Continuing a practice he started in Rome in 2000, the Pope invited young people from around the world to join him for lunch at his retreat. “I've asked people of the diocese to take people into their home. I will take people into my home,” the Holy Father said.
The group enjoyed a lunch of salad, spaghetti, asparagus and cake. “I think the Holy Father really liked the cake,” said Anneke Pehmöller, 20, from Germany.
Shirley Tso, a 26-year-old teacher from China, conveyed to the Pope that her people love him. “They love me?” John Paul asked. “Yes,” she replied, to which the Pope said, “It is incredible.”
Gizelle Michael Mijmeh, 25, from Amman, Jordan, summed up the experience of the group. “When I return, I will tell others that I spent time with the representative of Jesus on earth,” she said. “Can there be anything better?”
Moved to Tears
Even for those unable to get close to the Pope, they said simply being in his presence was moving. It was an experience that brought tears to the eyes of many.
“Knowing everything he has been through and the faithful shepherd he has been … in his weakened condition he still came all the way here to see us. That shows his love for us and you can't help but cry when you see that,” said Bobby Garrison from Atlanta.
“I was 12 years old when John Paul was made Pope,” said Father James Capoverdi from Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish in Bristol, R.I. “I've been formed and molded by John Paul II. His vigor and his trying to turn the culture of death has inspired me to try to be holy and orthodox.”
Draped in an Italian flag and leading a group of 30 youth from the Providence Diocese, Father Capoverdi said the highlight of World Youth Day for him was concelebrating Mass with the Holy Father.
“It has reinvigorated my priest-hood,” he said.
At successive events John Paul urged the young to be a “new people of the beatitudes,” to “build a city of God,” and to strive for holiness. “Do not wait until you are older to set out on the path of holiness,” he said. “Holiness is always youthful.”
“You are young and the Pope is old,” said the Holy Father, resulting in the crowd chant, “The Pope is young!”
“Eighty-two or 83 years of life is not the same as 22 or 23,” responded John Paul, “but the Pope still fully identifies with your hopes and aspirations.”
Meeting Christ
“I've enjoyed hearing the words of someone who will probably be a saint,” said Molly O'Neill, 23, from Houston. “However, as exciting as it was to celebrate with the Pope, the youth recognize that this was not the key reason for their pilgrimage. The young aren't here just to see the Pope. They're here to meet Christ. It just so happens that the Holy Father is facilitating the encounter.”
The secular media frequently likened the event to a party, but for most of the youth it was far more. They described it as meeting Christ by learning about their faith, participating in the sacraments and meeting others.
On three consecutive mornings, youth gathered with 136 bishop and cardinal catechists in churches around the city. The topics included being salt for the earth, being a light to the world and being reconciled to God.
“I thought the catechesis would be the most boring part of World Youth Day,” admitted John Marotta, 16, of Atlanta, “but it turned out to be very good. A bishop spoke about the Church of the family and human dignity.”
“It's been beautiful to receive the precious Body and Blood of Christ,” said Nicola-Maritza Coombs, 18, of Trinidad. “That is what I will hold in my heart.”
For still many others, they felt they had met Christ in meeting so many people from around the world. A global sea of humanity was present. Americans sat next to Brazilians, Australians next to Polish and Kenyans next to Indians. Many youth carried journals, recording the names and addresses of others they met along the way.
For Ana-Maria Cagalj, 26, of Bosnia-Herzegovina, this was her third World Youth Day. “It's wonderful to see youth from all over the world again — to think together, to pray together and to change things,” she said, dressed in a traditional northern Bosnia dress adorned with gold coins.
This also impressed upon them the universality of the Church.
“When we welcomed the Pope on Thursday, I was struck by the procession of flags,” said Father Greg Paffel of Foley, Minn. “I thought ‘every nation will bow’ to Jesus Christ, the Church and spiritual life. That was an awesome thing to see.”
John Marotta spoke of meeting people from Italy, Ireland, South Africa, Germany and France. “We all share the same love for the Church and the Holy Father,” he said.
The value of such global solidarity was not lost on observers. “This provides an opportunity for a significant portion of the Church to see that the Church is a global community,” said Carl Anderson, president of the Knights of Columbus. “Rich countries meeting their counterparts in poorer countries. This will change the reality of the Church for the future.”
The event was not without its challenges. Youth spoke of their lack of sleep, the hot weather, the rain and the mud, and frequent walks, especially their five-mile trek to Downsview Lands, the site of Saturday's vigil and Sunday's Mass.
“When we started our hike I realized that I had packed too much,” admitted Brenda Maurer, 18, of St. John's Catholic Church in Foley, Minn. “My bag was hurting my shoulder. I realized though that this was my own Way of the Cross. I realized what Jesus did for us, and now I was doing it for him.”
“The real story of World Youth Day is the conversion of hearts — whether little everyday conversions or the big ones like St. Paul,” O'Neill said. “If the young are seeking truth, they're going to find it.”
Byron Alvares, 17, of Toronto, is hopeful that it might transform the Church. “There are many Catholics in Canada, but very few of them go to church each Sunday,” he said.
“The Church in Canada has been hurting, but it is not dead,” said Robin Daniels, 18, from Victoria, British Columbia. “Catholics in Canada have seen what World Youth Day has done in Denver. The same will happen here.”
Tim Drake is the Culture of Life editor.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Christians Divided Over Iraq Invasion DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:ROME — In a message last month addressed to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Pope John Paul II said he prays for peace in that country and in the region.
The letter was written in the midst of increasing talk of U.S. force against Saddam, who is suspected of being behind international terrorism and harboring weapons of mass destruction.
According to the official Iraqi News Agency, the Pope's message was sent on the anniversary of the July 17, 1968, revolution that brought Saddam's Ba'ath Party to power. The Pope said he “implores God to bless Iraq and its people, and to make peace reign in the region.”
There are sharp divisions in the international community — and among Christians with an interest in the region — on the wisdom of a U.S. invasion. Iraqi Christians opposed to Saddam support President Bush's goal of a regime change in Baghdad.
“The head of all terrorists is Saddam Hussein,” said Albert Yelda, a founding member of the Iraqi National Congress, which met with other opposition groups and former Iraqi generals in London last month to discuss the overthrow of Saddam and plans for a post-Saddam government. “If we can get rid of him, peace in the Middle East will come more easily.”
While Christian leaders within Iraq have repeatedly denounced the idea of an invasion (see sidebar), Yelda said his group supports the U.S. effort to topple Saddam and replace his regime with a democratic government that is based on the rule of law and protects minorities. Yelda is a member of the Assyrian Church of the East, which is in communion with Rome.
“Saddam has used chemical warfare on his own people, including the Assyrians,” said John Nimrod, a former Illinois state senator who is secretary-general of the Chicago-based Assyrian Universal Alliance. “He's never hesitated to do whatever's necessary to keep himself in power.”
But Katia Mikhael, project manager at Catholic Relief Services’ regional office in Cairo, Egypt, said an invasion would be a “mad move” and that the populace would be the victims.
“War is not the solution,” said Mikhael, a Lebanese who manages projects in Iraq and other countries where CRS does not have a presence. “There are a lot of other choices. Think about the consequences, not just for the Iraqi population. … [Invading] troops would meet with a lot of resistance. Iraq is not Afghanistan.”
She said she does not see enough “clarity” in Bush's thinking on Iraq. “Talking about war against Iraq as the objective of fighting terrorism, that's mixing two things. What is the evidence [that Saddam is behind terrorism]? Why Iraq? What are the objectives?”
Mikhael, who visits Iraq two or three times a year, said Iraqi society is suffering from the continuing U.N. sanctions against the government, which refuses to allow weapons inspectors into the country. She argued that 10 years of sanctions have not brought about their desired result, because the government “steps on the shoulders of the populace so it doesn't suffer from the sanctions.”
But a recent report from the British Broadcasting Corp., based on interviews with Iraqi dissidents, said Saddam is inflating numbers when he claims 7,000 children a month die as a result of the sanctions and from depleted uranium leftover from Western weapons in the Gulf War. Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990.
The BBC report said Saddam stages public funerals with corpses of babies that have been frozen for months.
A related report in London's Observer calls into question the reason Saddam's regime gives for many of the deaths, dating back to 1991. The Observer quotes Dr. Nick Plowman, head of clinical oncology at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, who points out that depleted uranium bombs that fell in the 1991 Gulf War could not have caused cancers or birth defects in that year. Fast leukemias might occur in four or five years and tumors about now, he said.
Richard Guthrie, a chemical weapons researcher at Sussex University, said the cause was much more likely to be chemical weapons employed by Iraq itself.
“There are serious clusters of cancers in the south of Iraq near Basra,” Guthrie told The Observer. He said Saddam used chemical weapons there in the late '80s to fend off an Iranian attack. By accident, he also dropped the weapons on Basra residents.
The sufferings of the Iraqi people are very real, however. Several Vatican congregations have called an end to the sanctions there.
Ancient Christian Land
Iraq's population of 22.3 million people is 97% Muslim (60% to 65% Shiite and 32% to 37% Sunni). The remaining 3% consists of Christians and other minorities.
“Christianity in Iraq has its roots in the country for thousands of years, since the Apostle Thomas, who converted the Iraqis in Mesopotamia to Christianity,” said Faiq Bourachi, who oversees implementation of Caritas programs in Iraq from Jordan. “The Chaldean Church in Iraq is the only Apostolic Church in the Middle East.”
Assyrians and Chaldeans are considered by many to be distinct ethnic groups who speak a distinct language, Syriac. But Iraq's Constitution does not provide for the recognition of these groups, and the government does not recognize political organizations that have been formed by Shiite Muslims or Assyrian Christians.
Catholic Relief Services’ Mikhael contends that “there has never been a persecution of Christians” because the ruling Ba'ath Party is “absolutely a lay regime.”
But the U.S. State Department's International Religious Freedom Report last year said the Iraqi government “severely limits freedom of religion.” The government, the report said, has for decades conducted a “brutal campaign of murder, summary execution, arbitrary arrest and protracted detention against the religious leaders and followers of the majority Shi'a Muslim population and has sought to undermine the identity of minority Christian [Assyrian and Chaldean] and Yazidi groups.” Yazidis are a syncretistic religious group, many of whom consider themselves Kurdish.
The former U.N. Special Rapporteur for Iraq, Max Van Der Stoel, and others have reported the government has engaged in various abuses against the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, especially in terms of forced movements from northern areas and repression of political rights.
The Assyrian Universal Alliance's Nimrod and the Iraqi National Congress’ Yelda say that the Church in Iraq is under the control and watchful eye of the government.
Nimrod, who attended the London meeting of Iraqi opposition groups, said a million Assyrians have fled Iraq during the past 15 years and those who remain are not allowed to speak their own language. He said the government is supposed to be secular, but Islam creeps into legislation.
As well, there are signs of a creeping Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq that might pose a problem for Christians in the future. For the past two years, a law has forbidden the use of non-Arab names for newborns. And Assyrian groups have reported several instances of mob violence by Muslims against Christians in the north in recent years, the state department report said.
Also, a fundamentalist Islamic group has been growing in the north of Iraq. Ansar al Islam, (Partisans of Islam) is suspected of having ties to both al Qaeda and the Saddam regime.
Yelda hopes Christians in the West will go beyond their condemnations of the U.N. sanctions. He thinks Christians in Iraq have been largely forgotten.
“It's strange when people of God state, ‘Don't attack Iraq,’” he said. “They're saying, ‘We don't want you to help the people of Iraq by getting rid of this evil regime.’”
The Iraqi opposition is hoping the Western powers won't abandon them as they say happened during the 1991 popular uprising against Saddam following the Gulf War.
Emanuel Kamber, an Iraqi Assyrian Christian who is a professor of physics at Western Michigan University, said opposition groups would like to see the United States provide “some kind of cover so they can move against the government.”
Yelda predicted that as soon as the opposition sees there is a “genuine, serious commitment” from the United States and its allies, Saddam's “special guards will turn against him.”
“We don't need 250,000 men,” said Yelda, referring to the number of troops news reports said the Pentagon is considering. “The Iraqi people will do it.”
Would Christians fare better or worse under a post-Saddam regime? If the United States does not oversee the installation of a proper government, they might be worse off, said Nimrod, a Presbyterian.
“I would hope that we as Christians would have our voice heard in whatever government is installed,” he added.
Several Iraqi bishops declined to be interviewed for this article. One high-ranking Church official in Baghdad said he did not want to speak by telephone because government officials monitor such communications.
Mikhael believes negotiations are still possible between Iraq and the United Nations to make it clear that Iraq is under sanctions because of its efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction and its threat to the region.
“War should be very far in the U.S. vision,” Mikhael said. “The will of peace and negotiations would be very helpful.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bush Axes U.N. Agency's Funding Over Ties to China DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — In China's Chongqing municipality, where United Nations Population Fund workers assist Chinese family-planning officials, coercive population control is a fact of life.
Couples who break government birth-control laws face penalties of two to three times their combined annual salaries. Fines double for repeat offenders. Any difficulty collecting the fees or late payments, according to current government regulations, results in an additional penalty.
U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher cited these regulations when he announced July 22 the Bush administration's decision to withdraw $34 million earmarked for the U.N.'s population control agency, known as UNFPA, on grounds that it has aided the Chinese government in coercing abortions and sterilizations.
“While Americans have different views on the issue of abortion, I think all agree that no woman should be forced to have an abortion,” Boucher said. “After careful consideration of the law and all the information that's available … we came to the conclusion that the U.N. Population Fund moneys go to Chinese agencies that carry out coercive programs.
“Regardless of the size of the UNFPA's budget in China or any benefit that its programs provide,” he said of the agency, which has operations in 32 Chinese counties, “support of and involvement in China's population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion.”
The Bush administration will direct the $34 million Congress set aside for UNFPA to other “population programs” within the U.S. Agency for International Develop-ment's Child Survival and Health Program Fund, Boucher added.
This will boost the total the United States spends directly on population programs worldwide to $480.5 million this year from $446.5 million.
UNFPA denounced the decision. “The loss will be devastating for women and families in the poorest countries,” said Thoraya Obaid, the agency's executive director, in a public statement. She denied UNFPA supported the Chinese government's one-child policy and said the UNFPA's presence in China was moving it away from coercion toward a “voluntary approach.”
Her statement alleged that the displaced $34 million — 12.5% of the organization's total budget — might have prevented 2 million unwanted pregnancies, nearly 800,000 abortions and 77,000 infant and child deaths.
Pro-abortion advocates lined up behind the population control agency. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., wrote a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who signed the funding decision though last year he had applauded the UNFPA's work as “invaluable.” Boxer charged that the State Department had been “hijacked by right-wing domestic policy-makers in the White House.”
U.S. Law
Boucher, however, said the State Department had little choice in the matter. The Kemp-Kasten Amendment forbids taxpayer funding of coercive family planning programs and abortion.
“Our hope is that this step will bring us into compliance with U.S. law,” he said. “We don't want to spend money [or] send U.S. taxpayer money into a stream of funding that ends up partly going into the hands of people who carry out coercive abortion.”
A New York Times editorial attacked the decision as fueled by “mind-bending illogic” and called it an obvious capitulation to “right-wing anti-abortion activists.”
Like many other major media outlets, the Times declined to report on documentation of widespread coercion, including coercive abortions and sterilizations, that has occurred under the Chinese govern-ment's population program. Instead, the Times cited a report from a three-member investigative team the State Department sent to China in May.
It stated that UNFPA did not knowingly support China's human rights abuses and recommended the agency be given the $34 million.
The State Department team did find evidence of coercion in China, however, and suggested the agency not spend the U.S. funding in China.
Boucher said the report was considered, as were Chinese documents reviewed later that the investigators had suggested the department obtain. “When we did that … it became much clearer where the decision had to go,” Boucher told reporters.
State Department lawyers who reviewed the additional information cited instances where UNFPA provided materials such as computers and vehicles that became part of coercive Chinese programs. They were used to send notices to people about not having further children and to enforce punishments.
“In the context of the [People's Republic of China] they are supplying equipment to the very agencies that employ coercive practices. And that amounts to support or participation in the management of the program,” Boucher said.
Pro-Life Concerns
While pro-lifers applauded the decision to withdraw UNFPA funding, some groups have expressed concern about giving the money to USAID instead. The American Life League warned that this would mean the funding of programs that distribute abortifacient contraceptives.
“The concern is that USAID has a population control component, too,” said Ed Szymkowiak, national director of STOPP International, a division of American Life League. “You may be stopping forced surgical abortions, but that isn't going to stop the use of abortifacients.”
Szymkowiak cited a document TITLEd “Overview of USAID Populations Assistance for the Year 2000” (the most recent data available). It noted that in 2000, USAID shipped 1.24 million IUDs (implanted birth control devices that cause early abortions).
But Steven Mosher, president of the Front Royal, Va.-based Population Research Institute, applauded the Bush administration for defunding UNFPA. He said channeling the $34 million to appropriate programs was a separate battle.
Mosher's group was instrumental in initiating the State Department review of UNFPA funding. Last year, the Population Research Institute sent a covert team to China's Guandong province, where UNFPA officials share office space with government family-planning officials. The investigators videotaped and audiotaped testimonies of more than two dozen witnesses documenting pressures ranging from imprisonment and forced abortions to family-planning officials destroying homes.
The press office of the European Union announced a pledge by the EU commissioner of 32 million euro to UNFPA in the wake of the Bush administration's decision to make up for the loss to the agency. But Mosher doubts the money will actually make it into the agency's hands because of its tainted record and growing lack of support for it.
Dana Scallon, a pro-life Irish Member of the European Parliament, said the Irish Constitution forbids tax funding of abortions abroad and she intends to make defunding UNFPA a priority when the Parliament reopens later this month.
Scallon also said she intends to challenge the EU commissioner's pledge to the UNFPA. “The commissioners are not elected,” Scallon said. “We have to question what authority they have to do this. The EU has no legal right to use public money to fund abortions, let alone forced abortions.”
UNFPA and Peru
UNFPA's entanglement in human rights abuses is not confined to China. In Peru, a congressional commission issued a report at the end of July that said more than 200,000 women were forced or intimidated into undergoing surgical sterilization in a family-planning campaign conducted under former president Alberto Fujimori between 1996 and 2000.
The report states that UNFPA acted as “Technical Secretary” of the infamous program and “increased their support and even participation in the task during the government of the ex-president.” Fujimori, who has been in exile in Japan since fleeing the country in 2000, is to be charged with genocide for his role in the campaign.
UNFPA spokeswoman Kristin Hetle said last week that Peru's sterilization campaign is “an old story” and said that UNFPA, when it learned of the human rights abuses from the media in 1997, began trying to correct the situation.
But Mosher said the Peruvian report is “another black eye” for UNFPA, which he called a “rogue organization with an anti-people agenda.” Mosher also denounced UNFPA's claim that lives would be lost because of the U.S. withdrawal of funding. Claiming to “save lives” by contracepting, aborting and sterilizing women is like “ending traffic fatalities by forcing people to stop driving cars,” he said.
The $34 million in U.S. funding could save hundreds of thousands of lives and reduce infant and maternal mortality, Mosher said, if directed instead to prenatal care and helping women in delivery and other basic health care programs.
“It's time we take a hard look at the costs of population control programs,” Mosher said. “Costs in terms of human rights. Costs in terms of undermining primary health care programs. And the fact they make no sense in a world of rapidly falling birthrates.
“Defunding the UNFPA is a first step toward ending this war on people.”
Celeste McGovern writes from Portland, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Celeste Mcgovern ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Witness to the 'Young' Pope DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:The chief executive officer and national director of World Youth Day 2002 hosted Pope John Paul II — and hundreds of thousands of pilgrims — in Toronto. A priest of the Congregation of St. Basil, he has served World Youth Day since being appointed by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops in June 1999. Register features correspondent Tim Drake spoke with Father Rosica in Toronto.
What has been the biggest challenge in putting World Youth Day 2002 together?
There have been lots of challenges with this. The world scene has been one of the most difficult challenges.
I never realized that world events can impact so much, even on a daily basis, on what this event would turn out to be. The biggest, of course, was the event of Sept. 11. As I watched those images that day on television I remember thinking, “Oh my God, what is this going to be for us?” And then the situation of economic instability in several South American countries, and the war that broke out in Afghanistan, and the very difficult situation in the Middle East which has affected all of the Arab countries and many, many Christians.
The media reported that approximately 400,000 people attended the welcoming ceremony, 600,000 attended the vigil, and 800,000 attended the Mass. Did the number surprise you?
Yes, I was very happy. I've never been worried about numbers. This is not a story of numbers.
The numbers is the game of the world, for me it is what lasting impact does this have?
The very fact that in this day and age — just stop and think — that an old man, infirm, can bring together that many people in the name of the Gospel, in the name of goodness, and the name of peace, is a miracle.
What has been a highlight for you?
I watched the young people praying around the Holy Father's chair, touching the chair and [later] touching him and it was quite remarkable. It was truly astounding to see that kind of response. These are not religious fanatics or teen-gers on some kind of a high because some superstar was in their presence. These were young adults who were up there, and they caught the message. The communication that exists between them and the Holy Father is a deep one and a significant one, and is a model for the rest of us.
It's common to see young people in tears in the Pope's presence. What accounts for the connection that the young feel with the Holy Father?
There is certainly the emotional element, but this is much more than emotion. I've been in concerts where young people carry on. This is something much more significant. This is young people saying that they are in the presence of goodness. I know some very hard-nosed, hardline and very cynical people. There were no dry eyes at the airport on Tuesday including in the media pool, and there haven't been many dry eyes since.
What is it that you hope the youth will take away from World Youth Day?
First of all, the whole purpose of World Youth Day is to get to know the person of Jesus Christ — to fall in love with Jesus Christ. When you embrace Jesus Christ and the message of the gospel it is inevitable that you will accept the Church. Jesus Christ, in the Gospel and the Church, gives birth to community and we need the community. Therefore, the whole purpose of World Youth Day is introducing people to a living, breathing person that is forever young and invites people into a concrete expression of community.
In what ways have you seen youth coming to Christ here?
In unbelievable ways. It's a very moving thing for me. Over the past year I thought I was losing it a couple of times because when I was with the kids, with the World Youth Day cross or at different things, I found that there were a lot of tears. One can easily try to explain that away as fatigue, but it is not fatigue.
I think what this whole experience has done is touch the core of humanity. I know all of the people involved in the different ceremonies. They are from across the country. I know the commitment. This is not photo opportunities that we present here. Nor are we into doing a soundbite World Youth Day. These are about speaking of conversion and transformation of the Church and of culture. And certainly here in Toronto something extraordinary is happening here … something much bigger than the numbers, the eventsand logistics.
Have you been pleased with the media coverage of World Youth Day?
I am very grateful for what they have done and the manner in which they have done it. They are doing something beautiful for the world. This is not for the Church, this is for the entire world. We needed something of good news and the good news they have transmitted is outstanding.
Some coverage has dwelled on the difference of opinions in the Church. Have you noticed such views among the youth at all?
Those are issues of the media reading into the lives of kids. Those are all adult issues. That's my generation and the older generation. Talk to the young people. It's their story. They will tell you — and then we get very upset with them when they don't tell us what we want to hear. World Youth Day is not about polls or taking a poll.
What will be the long-lasting story of World Youth Day 2002?
This whole experience has touched us as a Canadian people. It has reminded us of our deeply Christian origins. It has reminded us that though we may boast of distances and vastness of the country we can become very close together. Linguistic barriers have crumbled. There is a tremendous unity.Hopefully we have become more generous, kinder and more hospitable. And my deepest wish is that we become people who re-enact the beatitudes every day.
Are you hopeful that it may bring a renewal to the Church in Canada?
Oh yes, it can't help but do that. With the work and effort of so many people, many people on the fringes have drawn a little closer and they realize that this institution must be doing something good.
----- EXCERPT: Father Thomas Rosica has just had a week unlike any other. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Thomas Rosica ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Chinese Catholic Community Perseveres Through Good and Bad DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:MONTEREY PARK, Calif. — The Chinese Catholic community at St. Thomas Aquinas parish is one that might not exist today had it not been for a snakebite.
To help a young man bitten by a cobra in Taiwan many years ago, an American missionary priest found medicine to save the man's life. As a result of that gesture, the man became good friends with the Vincentian priest.
That relationship led to the man's conversion from Buddhism to Catholicism.
Today, his son is a Catholic priest. Father Gabriel Liu is the associate pastor and head of Chinese Catholic ministry at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, a parish located in a city whose population is more than 60% Chinese, mostly immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Singapore.
His parish is an example of the difficulties — and accomplishments — people of other countries face when they convert to Catholicism in the United States.
Cultural Changes
Although the Chinese community in Monterey Park is, for the most part, culturally (not religiously) Buddhist, Father Liu said converts often have to struggle with relatives who oppose Catholicism.
“When that person becomes Catholic, it's hard for other family members to accept it,” he said. Some relatives will question Catholic sacraments and Church rules.
“Many family members don't want to come to Catholic weddings. Many come reluctantly,” he added. “Grandfathers [will ask], ‘Why are you going to have your baby baptized at church?’ Why not let him wait and decide [whether or not to become Catholic] when he's 20, like you did?’”
Father Liu explained that some parents of converts do not understand why their children must wait six months before getting married, as the Church prescribes. According to Father Liu, many Chinese parents believe that once they give their approval, a couple should be able to marry within a month or two.
Besides dealing with disappointed relatives, some converts also struggle with breaking away from old Buddhist traditions.
“The old religion is still in them,” Father Liu said. “[For example], when something goes wrong, if the saints don't answer their prayers, they turn to Buddhist gods and palm readers.”
Being Catholic and Chinese is especially difficult for those who live in areas of Southern California where there are no Chinese-speaking priests.
“Their faith stops growing. Many don't go [to church] because they don't feel welcome or they don't speak English,” Father Liu said. He pointed out that there are only five to six active Chinese-speaking priests in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who have to minister to more than 10,000 Chinese Catholics. In contrast, there are more than 200 Chinese Protestant ministers in the same area.
Father Liu emphasized the great need for Chinese-speaking priests. In fact, he and the Chinese Catholic community at St. Thomas Aquinas have a standing policy to pay all the expenses of any priest who wants to study Chinese overseas in order to reduce the financial burden on the archdiocese.
According to Father Liu, the three biggest vices within Chinese culture that Catholics must contend with are glaring advertisements for sexual immorality such as massages and strip clubs, obsessive gambling, and dishonesty in business dealings.
He said daily Chinese newspapers, unlike American papers, run two full-page ads — every day — for sexual acts and casinos.
“Most Chinese people see sex as something for marriage, but many do it anyway,” he said. “They believe reckless gambling is not a sin but a recreation. They go once a week or more.”
And for many, the virtue of honesty has its place only at home.
“When it comes to business, the Chinese don't think honesty is a virtue,” he said. “Parents emphasize honesty in the family, but in business all is fair.”
Jean Chituc, 53, a Catholic Chinese convert, grew up in a nominally Buddhist household in Taiwan before coming to the United States in 1974. She married her husband, a Romanian-American Catholic, in 1991.
“My husband is a cradle Catholic,” she said. “It took me 10 years to convert. It took me a lot of years to believe this is the true religion.”
Chituc said she learned much about the faith through her husband and one day decided to learn more about it in her native tongue. She befriended a Chinese nun who instructed her in the Catechism for more than a year. Finally, Chituc was baptized into the Church at the Easter Vigil in 2000.
Even then, Chituc admitted, she still had some lingering doubts.
“I wished God would show me a miracle to make me 200% sure,” she said.
But, she said, her husband pointed to the miracle right under her nose.
“He told me, ‘Your attitude has changed. Before, you used to complain about giving money to the poor. Now you give,’” she said.
Chituc said her mother was supportive of her decision to convert.
“She was very happy with my husband, so she was very supportive. My husband set a very good example,” she said. She also said her mother-in-law supported her with prayer and encouraged Chituc with the words, “Jean, God is good.”
The Chitucs have a 10-year-old daughter, Christina, who was baptized as an infant and now attends Sunday school. Chituc said she is proud of her daughter, who knew exactly what to tell a fellow classmate when he asked Christina why Catholics “worship Mary.”
“We don't worship Mary,” Christina said. “We honor her because she is Jesus’ mother. Don't you think you should honor your mother?”
Faith in Action
Father Liu emphasized that the Chinese Catholic community is one that puts its faith into action: “We do many things that regular parishes would never do.”
People carpool to Mass together on Sundays from all ends of Los Angeles and beyond. Agnes Yu, president of the Chinese Outreach Center at St. Thomas Aquinas, said Christian service is indeed a big part of parishioners’ lives. They also work with Catholic Charities and teach English and math to socioeconomically disadvantaged Mexican-American children in the area.
“Faith is strengthened through service,” Yu said. “We have Bible study groups, retreats and lectures. And we go out to help the community.” The community is currently raising money to build a senior citizens home for people of all races — Catholic and non-Catholic alike. In less than two years, he has received $2 million from the Chinese Catholic community for the project.
“One lady gave all her savings — $300,000,” he said.
Martin Mazloom writes from Monterey Park, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Martin Mazloom ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Pledge of Allegiance Case Based on a Lie
One is the inventive logic used by the judges to find constitutional rights never envisioned by the American founders. Another is that both cases are based on falsehoods. In Roe v. Wade, the original plaintiff falsely claimed that she was the victim of a rape; the feminist groups that took over her case kept that fact quiet until after the decision. Likewise, the plaintiff who sued the state of California to have the Pledge of Allegiance removed from classrooms used lies to advance his case, according to reports cited in The Jewish World Review.
Michael Newdow, an atheist, had complained that his third-grade daughter had to “watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that our's (sic) is ‘one nation under God.’”
However, the girl's mother has gone public with the fact that the child attends a Christian church on Sundays and says she enjoys reciting the phrase “under God.”
Patrick Buchanan Calls for Caution on Iraq War
WORLDNETDAILY.COM, July 22 — In his weekly column published at Worldnetdaily.com, Catholic commentator and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan called for Congress to be cautious in evaluating President Bush's war plans against Iraq.
Pointing to the invasion plan published in The New York Times,“calling for 250,000 U.S. troops to strike Iraq from three directions,” Buchanan argued that a conflict with Iraq seemed likely — and must be debated by Congress, which has the sole right to declare war under the U.S. Constitution.
He also noted reports in The Washington Times on Saddam Hussein's planned response to a U.S. invasion, to “kill as many Americans as possible, before his life ends in a Baghdad bunker … All the weapons in Baghdad's arsenal, including chemicals and gas, will be used on U.S. troops, while 'sleeper cells’ in the United States will be activated to pay us back in sabotage and murder.”
Asked Buchanan: “Is massive U.S. military intervention on the side of Israel and Ariel Sharon in the turbulent world of Islam not exactly what Osama bin Laden was praying for when he sent those airliners into the World Trade Center?”
‘Voice of the Faithful'Seeks Changes in Church Structure
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 20 — One of the loudest groups emerging from the recent scandals over bishops’ treatment of abusive clergy is Voice of the Faithful, which had its first national meeting last weekend in Boston.
Associated Press reported that the group “called for drastic changes in the way the Church is governed.” In a statement, the group vowed to find ways for lay Catholics to “actively participate in the governance and guidance of the Catholic Church. Included among proposals under discussion were policy-making power for lay Church members and giving parishioners a role in the appointment of bishops and pastors.”
The keynote speaker, Father Thomas Doyle, said recent scandals had arisen thanks to “the delusion that the clergy are somehow above the rest,” and to some bishops’ “unbridled addiction to power.”
Many Church dissenters were prominently featured at the Boston event. For example, an official panelist at the meeting was Thomas Arens, who has led petition drives seeking the ordination of women to the priesthood.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Senate Democrats Dragging Feet on Bush's Judicial Appointments DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Under pressure from the pro-abortion lobby, Senate Democrats have slowed the nomination of judicial nominees to glacial speed, according to pro-life activists.
“Even the Washington Post editorial board is criticizing the slow pace,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for National Right to Life. “The interest groups that are calling the shots are implementing a harsh strategy.”
Johnson said groups such as People for the American Way, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood are leading the charge against President Bush's nominations to the federal judiciary.
“They pick out somebody and target them and the Democratic leadership falls into line,” Johnson said.
The current judicial pick earning the wrath of the pro-abortion lobby is Judge Priscilla Owen, who is nominated for the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She is currently an associate justice on the Texas Supreme Court.
“Owen's record demonstrates her willingness to ignore the law in pursuit of an ultraconservative agenda, and that agenda gets in the way of her responsibilities as a jurist,” said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way.
California Democrat Dianne Feinstein echoed Neas’ comments at a Senate judiciary committee hearing regarding Owen's nomination.
“Accusations have been made that Justice Owen too often stretches or even goes beyond the law as written by the Texas legislature to meet her personal beliefs on several core issues, including abortion and consumer rights,” Feinstein said July 23.
But, as Johnson noted, the Washington Post disagreed with both Feinstein and Neas.
“Her opinions have a certain ideological consistency that might cause some senators to vote against her on those grounds. But our own sense is that the case against her is not strong enough to warrant her rejection by the Senate. Justice Owen's nomination may be a close call, but she should be confirmed,” stated a July 24 Post editorial.
Daschle Stalls
In order for Owen to be appointed to the federal judiciary she must receive a majority vote by the Senate. A majority vote in the judiciary committee is needed for a full Senate vote unless the Senate majority leader uses his power to bring the vote directly to the floor.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who has been considering a presidential run in 2004, has been unwilling to bring a vote to the Senate floor if the judiciary committee will not approve a candidate.
“The committee is split between 10 Democrats and nine Republicans. If just one Democrat votes for her, she'll be approved. But that's the problem,” said Byron York, White House correspondent for National Review.
At her hearing, Judge Owen defended herself.
“I truly believe that the picture that some special interest groups have painted of me is wrong,” she said, “and I very much want the opportunity to try to set the record straight.”
But Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin grilled Owen during her testimony on her judicial opinion in a case involving exceptions to a Texas statute barring minors from procuring an abortion without parental consent.
“You tend to expand and embellish” on the text of the law, Durbin told Owen. “You don't think the positions you take reflect any opposition to a woman's right to choose?” he asked.
“No, I don't think they do,” Owen replied.
Wiser White House
It appears the White House has learned from the Democratic Senate's rejection of Judge Charles Pickering earlier this year and will work harder to get Owen confirmed.
White House counsel Alberto Gonzales wrote a letter July 23 to Democratic Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy saying, “Respectfully, the pace of holding a hearing and confirming circuit court nominees is harming the federal court system.”
His letter came in response to a letter from Leahy that had defended the slow pace of nomination hearings.
Gonzales noted in his letter: “Your letter compares the record to that of the Senate of the past. But the Senate has confirmed only 11 of 32 circuit nominees, which is a 34% rate.”
Gonzales pointed out that the confirmation rate in President Bill Clinton's first two years was 86%, President George H. W. Bush's first two years saw a 96% approval rate and President Ronald Reagan had 95% of his nominees confirmed in his first two years.
“Focusing on these numbers, one could conclude that the Senate currently is well behind the pace of the Senate in the past, particularly with respect to circuit court nominees,” Gonzales wrote.
National Right to Life's Johnson said he thinks a regional prejudice also might be at play in Democratic resistance to appointing Bush nominees.
He referred to comments made by Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, who expressed dismay over laws passed by elected representatives from southern states during confirmation hearings for Pickering. The judiciary committee did not confirm Pickering.
“The 5th Circuit covers three states — Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi — that have each passed more anti-choice legislation restricting a woman's right to make personal choices about her own body than any other states,” Cantwell said. “In fact, all three states continue to have unconstitutional and unenforceable laws prohibiting a woman from receiving an abortion on their books, because the legislature in each of these states will not repeal the laws,” she added.
Johnson said Cantwell's statements are highly undemocratic: “She's saying, 'There must be something wrong with these people. We need to get some pro-abortion judges down there.’”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope Greets New Anglican Head
VATICAN INFORMATION SERVICE, July 24 — Pope John Paul II sent a message welcoming the new archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Douglas Williams, the first Welshman to lead the world's Anglicans.
Williams will begin his new position in October, when the current archbishop, George Carey, retires.
“I am confident that, with God's help, we can make progress along the path toward unity, in order to experience anew ‘how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!’ (Psalm 133:1) I send my best wishes for your new and demanding ministry.”
“I have had the opportunity to know and work closely with your predecessors, Archbishop Runcie and Archbishop Carey, in the shared task of promoting understanding between the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church,” the Holy Father continued.
The new archbishop is a longtime opponent of abortion. His support of women bishops and actively homosexual clergy are likely to prove obstacles to ecumenism, observers predict.
Chinese and Arab Catholics Swell World Youth Day
FIDES, July 23 — Among the many youth groups performing during World Youth Day events in Toronto were more than 1,000 young Chinese people from Taiwan, Macao and immigrant Chinese communities around the world.
The songs, centering on the theme “you are the salt of the earth, the light of the world,” were in Mandarin and Cantonese.
Some 240 young people from the troubled Middle East also attended the event, led by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah, who offered catechism in Arabic, French and English.
A ‘Low-Risk’ Event for STDs
THE NATIONAL POST, July 20 — Catholics who reject Church teaching on birth control awaited pilgrims to World Youth Day at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, distributing condoms.
The National Post reported that members of the international movement We Are Church gathered at the airport, claiming concern that “the delegates would not follow the Church's teaching of abstinence” during the week of papal ceremonies.
“I think abstinence is a great thing for everybody who can manage that,” said the group's spokesman, Tobias Raschke. “But it doesn't work for everyone. It's not reality.”
He went on to suggest that condoms ought to be included in the information kits at all World Youth Days to help the pilgrims avoid spreading disease. The group planned to hand out some 10,000 condoms during the course of the papal event.
The Post noted that “earlier this year, another reform group announced it would distribute condoms to youth delegates that would carry the slogan ‘don't leave it up to your guardian angel.’”
It also cited the response by Msgr. Peter Schonenbach, general secretary of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, who said in a February interview, “It's a free country. They can do what they want. … The Church is stuck with its position on this.”
Dr. Bonnie Henry of Toronto Public Health said her organization had stockpiled condoms for the event, as it would for any other summer festival, but told The Post that “Toronto Public Health considers World Youth Day to be a low-risk event.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Pope's Toronto Homily: 'You Are the Salt of the Earth' DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:On a hillside near the lake of Galilee, Jesus’ disciples listened to his gentle and urgent voice — as gentle as the landscape of Galilee itself — as urgent as a call to choose between life and death, between truth and falsehood. The Lord spoke words of life that would echo forever in the hearts of his followers.
Today he is speaking the same words to you, the young people of Toronto and Ontario, of the whole of Canada, of the United States, of the Caribbean, of Spanish-speaking America and Portuguese-speaking America, of Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Listen to the voice of Jesus in the depths of your hearts! His words tell you who you are as Christians. They tell you what you must do to remain in his love.
But Jesus offers one thing, and the “spirit of the world” offers another. In today's reading from the letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul tells us that Jesus leads us from darkness into light (Ephesians 5:8). Perhaps the great apostle is thinking of the light that blinded him, the persecutor of Christians, on the road to Damascus. When later he recovered his sight, nothing was as before. He had been born anew and nothing would ever take his newfound joy away from him.
You too are called to be transformed. “Awake, O sleeper, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light” (Ephesians 5:14), says St. Paul.
The “spirit of the world” offers many false illusions and parodies of happiness. There is perhaps no darkness deeper than the darkness that enters young people's souls when false prophets extinguish in them the light of faith and hope and love. The greatest deception, and the deepest source of unhappiness, is the illusion of finding life by excluding God, of finding freedom by excluding moral truths and personal responsibility.
The Lord is calling you to choose between these two voices competing for your souls. That decision is the substance and challenge of World Youth Day. Why have you come together from all parts of the world? To say in your hearts: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Jesus — the intimate friend of every young person — has the words of life.
The world you are inheriting is a world that desperately needs a new sense of brotherhood and human solidarity. It is a world that needs to be touched and healed by the beauty and richness of God's love. It needs witnesses to that love. It needs you to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
Salt is used to preserve and keep. As apostles for the third millennium, your task is to preserve and keep alive the awareness of the presence of our savior Jesus Christ, especially in the celebration of the Eucharist, the memorial of his saving death and glorious resurrection. You must keep alive the memory of the words of life that he spoke, the marvelous works of mercy and goodness that he performed. You must constantly remind the world of the “power of the Gospel to save” (Romans 1:16)!
The Vatican translation of Pope John Paul II's Englishand French-language homily at the closing Mass July 28 at World Youth Day in Toronto.
Salt seasons and improves the flavor of food. Following Jesus, you have to change and improve the “taste” of human history. With your faith, hope and love, with your intelligence, courage and perseverance, you have to humanize the world we live in, in the way that today's reading from Isaiah indicates: “loose the bonds of injustice … share your bread with the hungry … remove the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil. … Then your light shall rise in the darkness” (Isaiah 58:6-10).
Even a tiny flame lifts the heavy lid of night. How much more light will you make, all together, if you bond as one in the communion of the Church! If you love Jesus, love the Church! Do not be discouraged by the sins and failings of some of her members. The harm done by some priests and religious to the young and vulnerable fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame.
But think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests and religious whose only wish is to serve and do good! There are many priests, seminarians and consecrated persons here today; be close to them and support them!
And if, in the depths of your hearts, you feel the same call to the priesthood or consecrated life, do not be afraid to follow Christ on the royal road of the cross! At difficult moments in the Church's life, the pursuit of holiness becomes even more urgent. And holiness is not a question of age; it is a matter of living in the Holy Spirit, just as Kateri Tekakwitha and so many other young people have done.
You are young, and the Pope is old and a bit tired. But he still fully identifies with your hopes and aspirations. Although I have lived through much darkness, under harsh totalitarian regimes, I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young.
Do not let that hope die! Stake your lives on it! We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.
O Lord Jesus Christ, keep these young people in your love. Let them hear your voice and believe what you say, for you alone have the words of life.
Teach them how to profess their faith, bestow their love and impart their hope to others. Make them convincing witnesses to your Gospel in a world so much in need of your saving grace.
Make them the new people of the Beatitudes, that they may be the salt of the earth and the light of the world at the beginning of the third Christian millennium!
Mary, Mother of the Church, protect and guide these young men and women of the 21st century. Keep us all close to your maternal heart.Amen.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Brazilian Pro-Lifers Blame Bishops' Conference for CEDAW Approval DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:SAO PAULO, Brazil — “In many countries the CEDAW protocol has been approved, but Brazil will go down in history as the first and only in which such protocol was approved with the support of the Catholic bishops’ conference.”
With these blunt words, Father Luiz Carlos Lodi, one of Brazil's most influential pro-life leaders, summarized the awkward episode that has placed the world's largest episcopal body, the Conferencia Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil (CNBB) at odds with countless Brazilian Catholics and pro-lifers.
The episode started in late April, when the Brazilian Senate announced it was going to discuss the approval of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women — known as CEDAW — and its controversial new protocol, which grants the committee that monitors nations’ compliance with CEDAW with the authority to hear complaints from individuals and groups about national legislation and policies that allegedly contravene the U.N. treaty.
Since the CEDAW monitoring committee has consistently reflected a radical feminist ideology bristling with contempt for family, motherhood and religion, 72 Brazilian archbishops and bishops — including two cardinals — on April 27 sent a collective letter to the Senate requesting the delay of the discussions and the rejection of the protocol.
Radical Agendas
In recent years, for example, the CEDAW committee has criticized Ireland's anti-abortion laws (even though the CEDAW treaty itself makes no mention of abortion) and criticized the influence of the Catholic Church on Irish society; criticized Belarus for establishing a Mother's Day because it promotes damaging “sex-role stereotypes"; called on China to legalize prostitution; and urged Libya to reinterpret the Koran to conform with “the provisions of the convention and in the light of the current social environment.”
In their April 27 letter, the Brazilian bishops stated that CEDAW was imposing “an ideological perspective at odds with Brazilian laws and cultural values that defend the sanctity of life,” and warned that approving the CEDAW protocol would mean “to relinquish Brazil's legal and political sovereignty.”
The letter was circulated and signed during the bishops’ general assembly in Itaici, near Sao Paulo, where more than 250 bishops gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the bishops’ conference.
The letter had such an impact that CEDAW promoters immediately convened a public hearing for May 21, inviting a roster of feminists and pro-abortion speakers as well as a CNBB representative, Archbishop Aloysio José Leal Penna of Botucatu, head of the CNBB's Commission of Life and Family.
Father Lodi, who attended the hearing, said that “strangely, Archbishop Penna pronounced a neutral discourse, filled with words but very imprecise in its content. Whoever listened to it would have had the impression that it supported the CEDAW protocol or at least did not have objections to it.”
Archbishop Penna's only demand to the senators regarding CEDAW was to keep in mind that “nothing will preserve more the physical or mental integrity of women than a fair distribution of income.”
Father Lodi said that “when the most aggressive feminist, Sen. Sílvia Pimentel, decided to respond point by point to the letter signed by the 72 bishops, Archbishop Penna interrupted her and said that the document she was preparing to criticize was not the official position of the CNBB, which was expressed, instead, in the statement he had read.”
In late May, a pro-abortion organization known as CFEMEA highlighted Archbishop Penna's remarks, saying in its newsletter that “all distortions and misconceptions [about the CEDAW protocol] were dissolved. Moreover, the Archbishop of Botucatu … Aloysio José Leal Penna, admitted that [the letter signed by the 72 bishops] was a mistake of the CNBB and does not represent the official position of the bishops.”
On June 5, the day the Senate voted on the CEDAW protocol, Bishop Manoel Pestana Filho of Anapolis accompanied Father Lodi to lobby senators to vote against approval.
Sen. álvaro Dias read a letter from Bishop Filho requesting consideration of the April 27 letter, and Sen. Mauro Miranda, in turn, read the list of the 72 bishops who had signed it.
But Sen. Emília Fernandes stood up immediately and several times read the May 21 remarks of Archbishop Penna that claimed the April 27 letter was “a mistake.” The Senate subsequently ratified the CEDAW protocol.
Archbishop Criticized
“Unfortunately, in the process, the words of Archbishop Penna, repeated by Sen. Emília Fernandes, saying that our letter was a mistake were very influential,” Bishop Filho said. “Without the intervention of Archbishop Penna, the ratification of the protocol, although possible, would had been much harder.”
Jerson Lourenço Flores Garcia, leader of the largest pro-life organization in Brazil, the “Movimento da Defesa da Vida,” subsequently wrote to the president of the bishops’ conference, Bishop Jayme Chemello of Pelotas, requesting clarification of the CNBB's official position regarding the CEDAW protocol.
The same request was made by international leaders such as Jorge Scala, an Argentinean attorney who is regional coordinator of the Latin American Council for Life and Family.
But both Bishop Chemello and Archbishop Penna defended the ambiguous statement issued by the conference in May, insisting that it was the official position and crafted with advice from “the best experts.”
Contacted by the Register, Archbishop Penna again referred to the statement and said he was not giving any interviews about the incident, which he said he considered “closed.”
Nevertheless, the archbishop told the Portuguese edition of Vatican Radio that “I want to make very clear that my position as representative of the Commission of Life and Family of the Brazilian bishops’ conference was expressed after consulting some 10 advisers who were gathered in Brasilia for that purpose.”
In the interview, Archbishop Penna also said that the CEDAW protocol “has nothing to do with matters of abortion or life. It is just a protocol, with a committee, which is responsible for receiving accusations referred to violations of women's rights.”
Pro-life leader Scala responded that whoever advised Archbishop Penna that the CEDAW protocol was acceptable was “completely misinformed or ill-intentioned.”
In a letter to Archbishop Penna, the Argentinian attorney listed all the interventions around the world that the CEDAW monitoring committee has made that demonstrate clearly an anti-life and anti-family agenda.
“This committee, without any legal knowledge and with a clear ideological bias, will be monitoring and forcing changes to Brazil's constitution and laws, unfortunately with the support of the Brazilian bishops’ conference,” Scala wrote. “The damage has been done already.”
Alejandro Bermúdez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:‘Democrats,’ But Not ‘Christian’?
DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, July 11 — The political party that led the reconstruction of postwar Germany was dubbed the “Christian Democrats,” in part to distinguish the new regime from the paganism of the Nazis. But Germany has changed and so has the party, which has proposed policies offering special rights to homosexuals and which recently appointed Katherina Reiche, a pregnant, unmarried mother, as its spokeswoman for family issues.
Noting this resurgence of pagan values in the party, Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne has asked the party to change its name, the German news service Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported.
“If he is going to keep Frau Reiche, he should take the ‘C’ off the CDU,” said Cardinal Meisner. “If the CDU leadership want to take on the Church, then they had better be prepared to fight it out.”
China Locks Up Nun for Teaching Religion
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 22 — In China, where the Catholic Church has been illegal since 1951, authorities continue to persecute believers for the most basic of Christian practices.
Associated Press reported late last month on the arrest and detention of Sister Chen Mei in Linjiang County of Fujian province for “teaching a summer vacation religion class for children” at a private home. Some 26 students and four chaperones were also arrested and later released. The Cardinal Kung Foundation of Stamford, Conn., broke the story.
A local Chinese government official confirmed the arrests for “attending an illegal religious activity.” The catechism class was organized by underground Chinese Catholics, who reject the schismatic China Patriotic Catholic Association created by the Communist government.
British Seize Islamic Tapes that Inspired Pearl's Murderer
The tape, called “The Destruction of a Nation,“ is still being sold and passed around in British mosques and Islamic bookstores, according to the Times, which cites a British security source who calls it “part of the process of brainwashing.”
In 1999 Saeed said that watching the tape — which purports to show Serbian soldiers butchering Bosnian Muslims — shook his heart and led him to volunteer alongside “jihad fighters” in Bosnia. Saeed first saw the tape in 1992 when it was shown by the London School of Economics Islamic Society, to which he belonged.
British police have seized thousands of audiotapes recorded by Muslim extremist preachers after complaints in Parliament and by moderate Muslim clerics. The Times cited recent reports that “at least 3,000 British Muslims have been trained in al Qaeda and Taliban camps in the past decade … showing that the recruitment of militants in Britain has been far more effective than previously believed.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Clamoring for Confession DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:For the world, the phrase “crisis in the Church” refers to the abuse scandals. But Pope John Paul II uses the term to refer to the neglect of the sacrament of reconciliation.
World Youth Day suggested that young people welcome confession when it is offered and explained.
Reconciliation was the theme of Friday morning's catechetical sessions. Throughout the course of World Youth Day, about 1,000 priests offered the sacrament, not only within their pilgrimage groups but also in all of Toronto's exhibit halls and at Coronation Park, which was temporarily renamed Duc in Altum Park (Put Out into the Deep) for World Youth Day.
It was a common sight to see young people lined up, reading an examination of conscience in their pilgrimage prayer guide, in preparation for confession. In one exhibit hall alone, approximately 25 purple confessionals had been set up along the walls. Young people standing five to eight deep waited for the sacrament. Jason Benedict, 16, of Taylor, Wis., was among them.
He had been encouraged to partake of the sacrament on Friday in preparation for Sunday's Mass. “Confession is very helpful for me … anything I've done I can take off my chest.” Speaking to the grace of the sacrament, he said, “As soon as it's done I feel completely different.”
Benedict said he goes to confession approximately once a month back home. “My mother taught me about the sacrament and has modeled it for me,” he explained.
Nicola Maritza Coombs, 18, of Trinidad, took advantage of the sacrament on Wednesday following the first catechetical session. She echoed the comments of many. “It's nice to be able to go with a foreign priest,” she said, laughing, “someone you aren't likely to see again.”
Large-scale individual confession was first given a prominent role at the Circus Maximus at World Youth Day 2000 in Rome. So convinced of its value, the Knights of Columbus contributed $1 million to World Youth Day in Toronto specifically for the purchase of 1,500 stoles, the construction of the purple confessionals and training for the sacrament.
Knights of Columbus Supreme Knight Carl Anderson said he was very encouraged by the large numbers of young people attending the sacrament.
“The Holy Father asks us to remain youthful and regain our youthfulness. One way to regain our youthfulness is through reconciliation,” he said. “An encounter with the Lord is always a new beginning and that is what the sacrament of reconciliation is all about.”
The sacrament was clearly in demand. Father Greg Paffel, pastor at St. John's Catholic Church in Foley, Minn., told his experience of standing in line waiting to go to confession himself. “I was pulled out of line three times by youth asking me to hear their confessions,” Father Paffel said.
Robin Daniels of Victoria, British Columbia, spoke of his nine-year absence from the sacrament. An athlete, he compared it to disinfectant: “It hurts, but it's necessary.”
— Tim Drake
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Collars and Habits Drew Respect, Not Scandal DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:The young people came dressed in bright colors — T-shirts of aqua, lemon, orange, red and blue.
World Youth Day's consecrated attendees didn't attend in quite as many bright colors as the youth, but they did come in colors nonetheless. Dressed in black or blue clerics, or habits in various shades of brown, blue, gray, black or white, the religious at World Youth Day were easy to spot along Toronto's streets, on trolley cars and at the week's events. Consecrated lay men and women were harder to spot, but were also at the event.
Their presence, in addition to the event as a whole, cannot help contribute to future vocations. Certainly, vocations have been the fruit of past World Youth Days.
“Many young people have told me they are so happy to see the diversity of religious orders represented here,” said Third Order Regular Franciscan Sister Ellen Marie with the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother in Toronto, Ohio.
Sister Ellen Marie was among a group of approximately 80 Franciscan orders that staffed a booth at World Youth Day's vocation pavilion. She was encouraged by the response she had received from young people.
Brother Pio Maria, bearing the distinct shaved head and long beard of the Bronx's Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, said the interest has been great: “I can't go 20 feet without someone taking my picture, asking me my name, or asking me about my vocation.”
For one young woman, attending World Youth Day is part of her discernment process. “A few weeks before World Youth Day I began feeling a calling toward the religious life,” said Paula Rooney, 21, of Elrosa, Minn. She currently works for a family-owned business. She was able to speak with the Carmelites at the vocation pavilion and is also considering attending an upcoming weekend with the Poor Clares.
Women weren't the only vocation-seekers. “I've particularly noticed an interest, mostly among men, interested in the priesthood,” said Jennifer Brennan, a campus minister at the University of Toledo. “They seem to be seeking an identity that allows them to be uniquely Catholic.”
Bishop George Lucas of Springfield, Ill., said he was witnessing “a real openness among youth to do whatever God is calling them to do.”
He recalled the story a fellow bishop had related to him. “He told me of a young man entering the seminary this year. The seminarian had been at World Youth Day in Rome and said it made a difference for him.” In addition, the bishop said he had many young people asking him about his own vocation, particularly following his Friday morning catechesis session.
Father Greg Mastey, vocations director for the Diocese of St. Cloud, Minn., agreed. He said the event had given him the opportunity to speak to many youth about vocations, including several college-age students in his own group of 47 pilgrims. “It helps the youth just to see that we're human,” Father Mastey commented.
Remarkably, the interest in vocations appears strong in spite of the media's continued attention on the Church's sex-scandals.
One seminarian had a theory why. “When your country is attacked, it makes you want to defend it,” said Bobby Garrison, a second-year Franciscan University of Steubenville pre-theology student from Atlanta. “The scandals haven't discouraged me, they've made me want to defend and fight for the Church.”
At Sunday morning's Mass, the Holy Father addressed the scandals and encouraged youth to consider the consecrated life.
“If you love Jesus, love the Church. Do not be discouraged by the sins and failings of some of her members,” John Paul told the crowd, “but think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests and religious whose only wish is to serve and do good. There are many priests, sisters and consecrated persons here today. Be close to them and support them. If in the depths of your hearts you feel the same call, do not be afraid to follow Christ on the royal road of the cross.”
— Tim Drake
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Real Catholic Church DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Rumors of the Catholic Church's demise in America have been greatly exaggerated. But then, the Catholic Church is used to outliving those who predict its doom.
Two threats have loomed large for the Church this year. The horrendous scandals of priests abusing children and of bishops failing to react appropriately is one. The hurt to the victims, the scandal to those who learned of it later and the wounded relationship between bishops and their flocks have been painful and destructive.
But the other threat to the Church has been the media hype that accompanied these very real scandals — hype that took a problem that involves less than half of 1% of all priests (according to Associated Press) and tried to make it look like the priesthood itself is suspect.
Journalists speculated that the abuse scandals would hurt the numbers of attendees at World Youth Day. They were wrong. Pilgrims flocked to World Youth Day, 800,000 slogging through mud and rain for the final Mass. If the Pope hadn't planned to travel to Latin America for enormous canonization events immediately following World Youth Day, the numbers would have rivaled other recent World Youth Days.
Papers like USA Today thought that a frail Pope doddering over a Church crippled by abuse and dissent was the real story of the Catholic Church today — so said their story choices for the day the Holy Father arrived in Toronto. Instead, the news out of Canada was about an energetic Pope overcoming physical hardship through courage and determination. Pictures of his arrival showed young people bursting into tears of emotion and waving words of love on banners to greet him.
Photos in the secular press from World Youth Day events showed young people going to confession in a park and on gym floors, kneeling on asphalt after Communion. Teens from all over the world prayed together, their smiling faces tear-streaked, and they walked right past the few, lonely detractors.
Sometimes, John Paul seems to be working in a special partnership with Providence. His high-profile events in Canada and Latin America were scheduled long before the abuse situation devolved into an American media feeding frenzy. But they are just what is needed at this moment, on this continent, a vivid reminder of the purpose and special power of the Catholic Church.
One sentence of the Pope's sums up what the real story of the Church is today. “Dear friends,” said John Paul, “the aged Pope, full of years but still young at heart, answers your youthful desire for happiness with words that are not his own.”
Young people have heard plenty of offers of happiness — from MTV, from credit card companies, from politicians, even from religious people who promise an easy, self-centered faith. But all of those voices offer happiness in words that are very much their own. Here comes a man who is no longer attractive physically, offering happiness the hard way, according to Christ. And the young people eat it up.
When the Holy Father visited Poland in the 1980s, his presence and his words started an interior revolution in the people that made it just a matter of time before the communist rule there crumbled. More accurately, John Paul reminded Poles what they already were and unleashed their most authentic spirit.
We hope that the Pope's visit to the Americas, in an entirely different set of circumstances, will have the same effect. The self-doubt and the constant attention on the sins of the past can put the Church in a stasis.
The Pope who gave the “mea culpa” address during the Jubilee Year has shown the way out: forgiveness, fearlessness and faith.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Father de Souza Fan DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding “Stops on My Way to the Altar” (July 21-27):
I join your other readers in wishing all of God's blessings on his newly ordained disciple, Father Raymond J. de Souza. In addition to being an asset to your newspaper as a fine writer, he is also a beautiful example of why the Catholic priesthood is not only intact, but flourishing.
I had the privilege of meeting Father de Souza while my husband and I were vacationing in Rome in March 2001. He was then a seminarian at the North American College (known as “the NAC”). It was a Lenten Friday and the NAC seminarians had the custom of leading pilgrims on the Stations of the Cross on the Ponte Sant'Angelo. We joined his group and listened to his beautifully written, prayerful script composed not on the traditional Stations but on those portrayed by the Bernini angels on the bridge. His reverence and piety were evident as was his skill in crafting words into thoughtful contemplation on the passion of Our Lord.
We spoke to him for a few minutes following the Stations and I asked him for a copy of the prayers, which he subsequently sent to me. We have remained in occasional contact ever since. It was not until returning home that I learned he was a correspondent for the Register. Naturally, I subscribed immediately!
In the future I see Father de Souza as a writer and a scholar, but first and foremost as a faithful, holy priest. He is one of God's shining servants.
MARY GAY MOORE
Virginia Beach, Virginia
Single No More
I wanted to thank you for your story on Web sites for Catholic singles (“Single Catholics Find Each Other, and Fall in Love, Via the Web,” July 21-27). I think that it is important to let Catholic singles know that these sites can be used by God in discovering vocations.
Last year I heard about StRaphael.net, but I figured I wouldn't want to meet my future spouse on a Web site. However, my curiosity got the best of me and I created a profile.
For two months I enjoyed the e-mails shared while meeting new people. It was only two months before I was swept off my feet by an amazing and holy Catholic man.
We courted six months through the Internet and frequent visits before he proposed.
We will be married in October. While we both still laugh about how we met, we can't deny the divine intercession that came from that chance we both took.
ELISABETH TOWNSEND
Staten Island, New York
Diagnosis: Normal
Thanks, Dr. Ray Guarendi, for your recent Family Matters column TITLEd “Disordered Diagnoses” (July 21-27). As I read your answer to the question about kids being diagnosed with all kinds of disorders, I realized that I had found a professional who has finally said what I've believed all along.
I was so excited about this item that I had to share it with my friends and family — especially those who have kids. And they, too, realized that what you say is sad but true.
We live in a society that wants a quick fix for everything, one whose members don't want to take responsibility for their actions. And we have many parents who would rather let the teacher, babysitter or extracurricular activity raise their children. Then when they get in trouble with drugs or commit a violent act, these same parents ask: How could this have happened to my child?
Our society needs to wake up and take charge and responsibility for those who are not only our future, but also are most precious to our Lord. We need to teach and show our kids love, respect, manners, responsibility. And, above all, we need to raise them in the Church and share with them God's love for them so they can learn to share that love with others.
RICHARD GARCIA
Glendora, California
Under God's Wings
Regarding “Rethinking Environmentalism” (July 7-13):
The forest fires bring to mind an article I saw in National Geographic several years ago that provided a penetrating picture of God's wings. After fighting a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park, forest rangers began their trek home. One ranger found a bird literally petrified in ashes, perched statuesquely on the ground at the base of a tree. Somewhat sickened by the eerie sight, he knocked over the bird with a stick.
When he gently struck it, three tiny chicks scurried from under their dead mother's wings. The loving mother, keenly aware of impending disaster, had them under her wings, instinctively knowing that the toxic smoke would rise. She could have flown to safety but had refused to abandon her babies. Then the blaze had arrived and though the heat had scorched her small body, the mother had remained steadfast.
Because she had been willing to die, those under the cover of her wings would live. “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge” (Psalm 91:4).
Being loved this much should make a difference in your life. Remember the one who loves you and then be different because of it.
NORM BEZNOSKA
Cleveland, Ohio
‘Fidelity, Fidelity, Fidelity’
Thanks for your good paper. Your interview with Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel (“Father Groeschel on the Scandals: Where to Go From Here,” June 24-30) was very helpful. I heard Father Groeschel say the laity ought to do something to get things turned around spiritually on EWTN's “The World Over” a while back, same as in your interview.
The first thing to do is publish a list of solid Catholic magazines and newspapers — like yours, along with First Things, Crisis and New Oxford Review. There are others as well. Tell people to start educating themselves about what's going on in the Church and in the world through the eyes of Catholic teaching. Stop supporting feel-good spirituality and go for the deeper thoughts of faith.
Next, maybe the Serra Club, which is in the business of promoting vocations, might be approached to help push the bishops to reform the seminaries. This would be a prime organization to begin a movement by the laity. The Knights of Columbus also might be helpful.
If people really want “this, too” to pass, they need to realize this might be a time when the situation is so grave it might not simply “pass.” When even our bishops don't seem to be aware of what to do, for goodness’ sakes, how in the world would you expect the dumbed-down version of the laity out there to know how to help?
So the laity should “do something”? I really would love to march on some bishops’ chanceries with banners or whatever else I thought would do any good in a respectful but attention-getting way. If you can get some buses lined up, sign me up! But for now, I plan to pray, pray, pray, as Our Lady told us to do. And practice fidelity, fidelity, fidelity — to put it in words of the editor of First Things (Father Richard John Neuhaus).
God bless all you are trying to do and have already accomplished over the years!
RETA TALLMAN
Reno, Nevada
Another Posthumous Honor
Regarding “Medal of Honor Given Posthumously to Green Beret,” about the late Capt. Humbert Roque “Rocky” Versace (July 21-27):
The article referred to that most excellent book, Five Years to Freedom, by the late Col. James “Nick” Rowe. I read Col. Rowe's book while I served with the Naval Advisory Group in Vietnam in 1973.
What the article omitted to say was that Col. Rowe was captured as a result of a similar combat action against the Viet Cong in 1963. He entered captivity as a 1st lieutenant and is the only American POW known to have escaped from imprisonment by the Viet Cong. He was a major by the time of his successful escape!
Maj. Rowe eventually left the U.S. Army for a number of years before joining again. Tragically, Col. Rowe was subsequently murdered by communist insurgents while on active duty in the Philippines.
The article showcased the immense courage exhibited by Capt. Versace. Col. Nick Rowe was also an extraordinary hero himself as his book so wonderfully testifies. He maintained his humanity throughout the brutal conditions of his imprisonment. He may not have earned the Congressional Medal of Honor, but his personal courage deserves to be publicized.
JAMES B. COFFEY
Albuquerque, New Mexico
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Tattoos in Toronto DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding Pia de Solenni's opinion column “Tattooed In Toronto: Can Catholics Bear Body Art?” (July 14-20):
I found this piece informative. My only problem was that she failed to mention Leviticus 19:28, which speaks out against tattoos and piercings. Since she talked about Scripture, I figured it would be good to talk about the passage that states, “Do not lacerate your bodies for the dead, and do not tattoo yourselves. I am the Lord.”
DWAYNE COLEMAN JR.
Los Angeles
Pia de Solenni is right when she writes, “most of them [the young people attending World Youth Day] will be good Catholics.” And, if some of these good Catholics come to Toronto displaying “body art,” I for one will not be casting stones against them.
“The sacraments have a truly indelible, permanent nature,” she says, and that's true. If I take off my wedding ring, the sacrament of marriage is not removed; only the external identity of that sacrament is removed. If the priest removes his collar, the sacrament of Holy Orders remains; only the external identity is removed. When I die and my body goes away, the soul remains; only the external identity of the soul is removed.
These kids, these teens, these good Catholics are not trying to recreate themselves to mislead God; neither are they trying to communicate to the Church a new sign for the marriage covenant. These children want love and attention. Attention they have, but love … I wonder.
JOSEPH MATA
Rockford, Illinois
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: John Paul II And the Youth: Kindred Spirits DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:As the latest World Youth Day has once again reminded us, young people have a special place in the heart of Pope John Paul II.
On the very day of his papal inauguration on Oct. 22, 1978, the Holy Father said to the youth who had gathered in St. Peter's Square: “You are the hope of the Church and of the world. You are my hope.”
He has often repeated these words as he looks to young people with the particularly fervent hope that they may provide a new beginning of evangelization and a new springtime for the Church.
Love is contagious. John Paul's love for the young is evident and warmly reciprocated. Although today's young people live in a strikingly different milieu than the one the Holy Father experienced during his own adolescence, there is a common thread that unites all youth. As John Paul states, youth is not merely a period of life that corresponds to a certain number of years, but “a time given by Providence to every person and given to him as a responsibility.”
During this time, young people search not only for the meaning of life, but also for a concrete way to go about living their lives. It is this fundamental characteristic of youth, according to the Pope, that we must love.
Here the Holy Father cites the timeless question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” asked by the young man in Matthew 19:16ff. As John Paul reiterates, in this search the young “cannot help but encounter the Church, and the Church also cannot help but encounter the young.”
The Pope has stated that, “if at every stage of his life man desires to be his own person, to find love, during his youth he desires it even more strongly.” But this desire to be one's own person, he is quick to caution, is not to be understood as a license to do anything without exception.
Proper authority figures are needed. And even when the young follow figures that are rightly considered “a scandal in the contemporary world,” “in the depths of their hearts they still desire a beautiful and pure love.”
The Pope tells us that from his earliest days as a priest he felt a call to minister to young people in a special way: “to teach them to love.” “In the young,” he writes in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “there is, in fact, an immense potential for good and for creative possibility.”
And yet he is remarkably self-effacing about the role he plays in the spiritual and moral lives of young people. As he frequently points out to them, “What I am going to say to you is not as important as what you are going to say to me. You will not necessarily say it to me in words; you will say it to me by your presence, by your song, perhaps by your dancing, by your skits and finally by your enthusiasm.”
Even now, severely bowed by old age, John Paul is respected by youth as a singularly courageous and reliable role model. Why?
John Paul does not want anyone to forget for one moment that a person's relationship with a pope is not nearly as important as one's relationship with Christ. “An important day in a young person's life,” he writes, “is the day on which he becomes convinced that this [Christ] is the only friend who will not disappoint him, on whom he can always count.”
We will not always have this Pope to walk among us. He is a temporary vicar and, as a good vicar, his most essential task is to introduce us to Christ.
While some cynical and weary adults are trying to find words to discredit the aging John Paul, calling him “unbending,” “inflexible,” “iron-willed,” “rigid” and “intransigent,” the young are describing him more justly and more accurately as “a man of integrity.”
At a time when the young observe terrorism, corporate greed, scandals within the Church, the plague of AIDS, rampant consumerism and self-defeating hedonism, the Holy Father stands as a singularly courageous and reliable role model.
“You are the salt of the earth … You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14). This was the Pope's theme in Toronto.
He challenged young people, as “salt,” to preserve the faith and to pass it on intact to others. “Do not be conformed to this world,” he said, citing St. Paul, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.”
And as “light,” he is urging the young to illuminate the darkness and reflect the glory of God: “I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).
“Come,” the Holy Father invites us with open heart, “and make the great avenues of Toronto resound with the joyful tidings that Christ loves every person and brings to fulfillment every trace of goodness, beauty and truth found in the city of man.”
Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus of philosophy at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Donald DeMarco ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Cohabitation Cheats and Still Loses DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Cold-footed bachelors have provided comedians with surefire material for centuries. The latest study of American marriage suggests, however, that more and more young men are contracting an allergy to commitment — one whose social consequences will be no laughing matter.
That's one of the leading conclusions of this year's “State of Our Unions” report, an annual survey of trends affecting marriage and family life in the United States. Pro-family scholars Barbara Whitehead and David Pope-noe of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University produced the report.
On average, U.S. males marry for the first time at age 27 today. (Women's median age for marrying is 25.) That's the latest it's ever been for men. And while the social sciences indicate that marriages contracted too early (i.e., before the early 20s) generally result in divorce, nothing is gained in terms of marital stability if marriage is pushed off into the late 20s or early 30s.
Delayed marriage does, however, bring other drawbacks. This year's report focuses on “Why Men Won't Commit” and even offers 10 main reasons for commitment phobia. One of them, simply translated, is that the older men are, the more set they are in their ways and less prone to compromise.
Last year's report focused on the quest for “the perfect soul mate.” The marriage project has been studying American dating patterns and expectations, and concluded that many single young people today are seeking an ideal “soul mate” whom they still haven't found in real life. Absent Mr. or Ms. Right, they have been willing to remain in the dating market, often cohabiting with non-soul mates. The dissonance between future expectations and current behavior has never been greater.
This year's report reconfirms the ongoing search for a “soul mate” among American males (at least in the 25-33 age bracket). These men want Princess Charming and have been alone long enough not to compromise on their sometimes-unrealistic expectations. This lack of practice in compromise also augurs ill for another aspect of family life: child centeredness in marriage. The presence of kids in a marriage forces adaptation and compromise in relationships — skill sets in which growing numbers of American males seem lacking.
In the past, there were pressures to wed. Now boys can remain boys indefinitely.
Other factors figure in the failure to temper unrealistic expectations in a future spouse and in the tendency to avoid marital commitment. For one thing, there are ever-fewer social pressures to marry. A generation or two ago, social pressures nudged men toward the altar. Today those forces have largely dissipated, often reduced to a “mild teasing.” The report puts it bluntly: “In the past … men might drag their feet about getting hitched, but there were pressures to wed. Marriage was associated with growing up and taking on male adult roles and responsibilities. … Now those pressures are mild to nonexistent. Boys can remain boys indefinitely.”
I Don't Wanna Grow Up
The fluidity of many young men's living and job situations reflects this prolonged adolescence. Starting in the 1980s, articles began appearing about boys who moved back into the family home after college. The marriage project notes that a typical current progression is moving out of an apartment with roommates into a cohabitation arrangement.
Women have also surrendered a powerful trump card in getting men to commit by depreciating virginity. The marriage project notes that, in general, men can easily get sex without marriage today. And the “spousal” benefits available without marriage aren't limited to sex. Marriage typically enables two individuals to enjoy greater purchasing power through “economies of scale.” For example, most spouses make do with one set of silverware rather than two. To the extent that cohabiting couples combine assets to achieve those economies of scale (something not all that frequent, since cohabitation relationships often strive to avoid too many ties that bind), unmarried men living with women save. They also have somebody to feed the dog when he has to go on a business trip.
The implications for women don't end with feeding Fido. To the extent that they further delay marriage, men's marrying age will start bumping up against women's biological clocks. A first marriage at 27 likely means first kids around 30 (who will graduate college when Mom is around 50 and probably undergoing menopause). The men in the latest marriage-project study had some interest in having kids, but this need was never as immediately felt as among women of the same age. When pressed to consider this problem, many male respondents dismissed it as “their [women's] issue.”
Finally, the double standard is still alive and well. While men are willing to cohabit, a single woman with a child comes in low on the totem pole of desirable marriage partners. Ditto for women who want babies. (Male fear of paternity entrapment remains strong.) So, too, are women who want sex on the first date. Women in whom men are interested are women who postpone sex, says the study. Postponement, however, isn't that demanding, as the marriage project observes without further comment: “Apparently, ‘waiting’ for sex typically means holding off until the fourth or fifth date, though one man said he waited seven months.” The authors report that “[o]ver half of all first marriages are now preceded by living together.”
Almost two-thirds of the respondents in one survey also believed that cohabitation is a good way to avoid “an unhappy marriage and eventual divorce,” even though the evidence suggests that those who cohabit suffer from higher incidences of eventual marital dissatisfaction and divorce.
In the Name of Love
If “Why Men Won't Commit” isn't sufficiently distressing for young American women, it should also sound some alarm bells for social policy-makers. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher showed in their book The Case for Marriage, a wedding ring is a powerful prophylactic against destructive male behaviors like excessive drinking, drug abuse, bad driving, general recklessness and antisocial behavior. When men put off marriage, it's not just their girlfriends who suffer. Untempered destructive behavior has social ramifications, too. The community has a vital stake in good marriages. The most powerful incentive to marriage today should not just be a big drop in your car-insurance rates.
The data drawn from this year's report is chilling. The report suggests that the mindset of the contemporary culture, especially among young men, is significantly at variance with a Catholic vision of marriage and family life. This is particularly alarming because most observers will concede that the pastoral outreach of the Church in the United States is probably most anemic among unmarried young adults.
Some of the problem probably comes from the basic difference between the sexes: Men's knees have often had to be shored up on the way to the altar. But many of these problems also come from the dissociation of marriage from parenthood and sex from marriage. The upshot, unfortunately, has been a trail of victims — people used in the name of “love.”
The marriage-project report should cause the Church to quadruple its efforts in outreach to young unmarried adults (or they won't get married). It should also drive us to proclaim the truth about marriage and family life in ways that take account of the real consequences that flow from rejecting that truth. It should cause us to think seriously about today's dating climate. And, finally, it should cause us to pray.
Once upon a time young Catholic women prayed for a “good husband.” They're still looking for a few good men. One hopes there's still at least a few out there.
John M. Grondelski, a moral theologian, writes from Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Tears for the Pope Who Leans on Christ DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:To see Pope John Paul II is to see Christ.
Of that, I have no doubt. I had the fortune of observing him for a week in Toronto.
How is it, I wondered, that a man they have never met could move so many people to tears? A cult of personality alone cannot account for all the tears I witnessed being shed in Toronto.
Certainly, there is much to admire. The Holy Father's childhood and vocation amidst the ravages of war. His prayer life. His canonization of more saints than any other Pope in history. His love of the youth. His dedication to Vatican II. And the encyclicals, his gift to the Church.
Yet, most of Toronto's tears came from the unexpected moments. The Holy Father is a man full of surprises.
The crying eyes were evident upon John Paul's arrival in Toronto, as he slowly and unexpectedly walked down the airplane's stairs with minimal assistance. A young girl, one of the first to meet the Pope, burst out in tears. The Prime Minister's wife had tears streaming down her face, and there were no dry eyes even in the media pool.
There were tears as the Holy Father blessed a group of mentally handicapped people from his boat on Lake Simcoe, even from those watching the event with binoculars from a distant shore.
There were tears among the youth and the religious gathered to welcome the Pope.
On July 27, he was scheduled to meet with Canada's politicos. Along his way, he saw a group gathered at the fence at Morrow Park. There, he stopped his vehicle to greet them, where a 2-year-old girl was brought to him. He kissed and blessed her. And again, there were tears.
Following July 25's evening welcoming ceremony, several people ran up to the popemobile as it was departing from the exhibition grounds. The Holy Father, in response, lowered his window. According to Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Pope's spokesman, a security guard asked, “Does the Pope know what he is doing?” to which Navarro-Valls responded, “He knows exactly what he is doing.”
From where does the Holy Father get his strength? We might be tempted, in this case, to say that he gets it from the youth, and this, in part, would be true. Karol Wojtyla has always enjoyed spending time with the young. As a priest and bishop he frequently went camping with them.
Yet, he has another source for his strength as well. He frequently writes before the Blessed Sacrament. He attends confession weekly, and prayer has worn out his knees. This other source of power was clearly visible during Sunday's Mass, and this source is apparent any time he is shown with his papal crosier — bearing an image of the crucified Christ at its top. It's a picture we're all familiar with.
When he is standing, the Holy Father often uses his crosier to prop up his ailing body. It is a metaphor for everything for which the Pope stands. We see the Holy Father literally leaning on Christ, both physically and spiritually.
As pope, he is not only the father of World Youth Day, but a father for all Catholic Christians. His role as a priest, he reminds us simply by his presence, is one of service — service to Christ and his Church.
In the end, we see a man, picking up his cross — the sufferings of old age, limited mobility, and Parkinson's disease — and carrying it with dignity for all the world to see.
“Be Not Afraid,” the Holy Father said at his inauguration, and it is obvious to all who see him that he is not afraid of growing old before our eyes.
This, then, is what the young respond to so enthusiastically. He is what he is asking the young to be — salt and light. He is a sign of contradiction.
So what accounts for the tears for a man that most have never met? I'm not certain I can say. For there I was, standing near the stage on July 25, in the presence of the Holy Father, weeping along with the rest of them.
To read, to listen to, or to see Pope John Paul is to be reminded of another man that has changed our lives, in spite of the fact that we have never met him — a man just like us in all ways but sin, who lived and died for each one of us 2,000 years ago.
Then again, we have met him, haven't we? We meet him each time we receive him in the Blessed Sacrament. How appropriate, then, that the Holy Father is at work on his 14th encyclical.
The subject? The Eucharist.
As he said during Sunday's homily, “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.” Truly, to see John Paul is to see Christ.
Tim Drake wrote this in Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Why Kids Love the Pope DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Dear Adrienne, I am grateful for how you often simplify a complicated world for me.
I was speculating why so many young attended World Youth Day. There seemed to be lots of reasons, including the following:
All my friends are going.
There are lots of fun things to do there.
It is a chance to get away from home.
My parents made me.
I am a young Catholic and it will reinforce my faith.
It sure beats working.
I've never been to Canada.
I enjoy travel.
Of course, you put it more simply: “You get to see the Pope and be with lots of other kids who have faith.”
So why do kids want to see the Pope, Adrienne?
“Because he is the most important person in the world.”
Why?
“Because he is the head of the Catholic Church and he has helped to convert lots of people and changed their lives.”
Anything else?
“Well, Dad, he is the holiest man in the world, you know.”
Well … you gotta be impressed by the wisdom of 10-year-olds and the charisma of the Pope.
Frankly, logic tells me that an elderly man in poor health, barely able to hobble from his airplane, shouldn't be a charismatic figure. But despite his bodily woes, and with the weight of the world on his shoulders, young people are drawn to him.
He may have trouble walking and talking. He may need help reading his speeches. But he obviously has no difficulty believing and loving. And people of all ages, nationalities and faiths can sense his faith, hope and charity.
Letters to My Children
Remember the last Star Wars movie we saw? (It was either the fifth or second one, depending on how you count.) With all due respect to the burgeoning beauty of Natalie Portman, I thought the cutest character was Yoda — especially when he did battle in the cave with the light saber, flying about in defiance of his shriveled and diminutive physique. It was amazing that such a little, old guy could so gloriously battle evil.
Of course, Yoda depended on the magical powers of “The Force” to accomplish his feats. And at the end of the day, he isn't real.
On the other hand, despite being of increasingly feeble physical presence — and a distinct inability to fly about with a light saber in a cave — the Pope continues to accomplish amazing feats. He is old and bent like Yoda, although lacking the green skin, hairy ears and reverse syntax.
But unlike Yoda, the Pope is real, a tangible symbol of faith, a continued beacon to the world of faith and love.
Frankly, there aren't many individuals who could draw a crowd of hundreds of thousands of young people, bring them to hushed silence, keep them on the verge of tears, hanging on his every world.
Elvis couldn't do it, dead or alive. Not Britney Spears, Eminem or Bono.
We live in a world that worships youth and beauty, but our glorious youth flock to catch a glimpse of a man of age and inner beauty. You can sense that he is our greatest living guide to the things of this world and the next that really matter. And like the other saint-in-waiting who has passed the test of this world — Mother Teresa — his inability to win a beauty contest isn't a handicap. Love is more attractive than beauty, and the Pope loves.
You've told me in a simple way why young people wanted to go to World Youth Day: they wanted to see the Pope. So I'll tell you why the Pope wanted to go to World Youth Day and will continue traveling the world.
He wants to see us, too.
Love, Dad
Jim Fair writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Fair ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Where to Find Your Angel in Sin City DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:It used to be a simple shrine. Now it's a captivating cathedral.
Either way, this sanctuary has been calling casino-weary hearts to implore the intercession of their respective guardian angels since 1963.
That year, Las Vegas’ Shrine of the Guardian Angel was established to serve the spiritual needs of Catholic tourists and residents, many of whom worked in the city's increasingly frenetic gaming and hospitality industry. The pastor of nearby St. Viator Parish, to which today's Guardian Angel Cathedral is attached, helped build the shrine by securing donations of land and money from local hotel owners.
Originally, there was one diocese for the entire state of Nevada — the Diocese of Reno-Las Vegas. The shrine became its co-cathedral, under Bishop Norman McFarland, in 1977. Eventually, as both the cities and the state itself grew in population, the diocese was split into two dioceses. (The Diocese of Las Vegas was not established until 1995.)
In 1996, Bishop Daniel Walsh undertook a major renovation of the cathedral. The sanctuary area was completely redone, with marble installed both on the floors and walls. New pews were also installed.
The most conspicuous holdovers from the original structure are the stained-glass windows, mural of the risen Christ in the sanctuary and mural of a guardian angel on the front of the cathedral's exterior.
All of the cathedral artwork was completed by two sisters, Isabel and Edith Piczek, who had fled from Hungary during the uprising there in the 1950s. Both sisters spent time studying in Rome. There they won the Galleria de Roma prize for their painting and were also commissioned to paint a fresco mural at the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute.
Isabel and Edith currently maintain a studio in Los Angeles and continue to do repair work on the cathedral's stained-glass windows when the windows become cracked or broken.
The shape of the cathedral is rather unusual. It is supposed to imitate a tent, presumably because early settlers in Nevada first lived in tents. Adjacent to the cathedral and slightly in front of it is a tower with a cross on top. At its base is a statue of the Holy Family — patrons of the Las Vegas Diocese.
Glass Stations
Unique to the cathedral is the location of the Stations of the Cross within the stained-glass windows. The first station is situated over the entrance to the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, which is located to the right of the sanctuary. Most of the windows contain two stations.
The large mural over the main altar depicts the Resurrection and is the 15th Station of the Cross. It reflects the modern yet respectful style of the stained-glass windows. In the mural, five couples surrounding Our Lord represent the five senses — hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. The senses are elevated as they perceive the power and glory of the risen Christ.
The two stained-glass windows in the sanctuary are a departure from the theme of the Stations of the Cross. One window represents the risen Christ; the other some activities of mankind. There's agriculture, industry, science and also play, which incorporates a depiction of the casinos and hotels of Las Vegas.
The windows were donated by prominent individuals; I noticed one that was a gift from the late entertainer Danny Thomas, well-known for founding St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.
Our Lady's Chapel is located to the left of the sanctuary. The windows in that chapel show scenes from the life of the Blessed Mother. There is also a mosaic of Our Lady over the altar in the chapel. A mosaic over the Blessed Sacrament Chapel altar shows Christ performing corporal works of mercy.
Las Vegas is the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country. As a result, it boasts the fastest-growing Catholic population — and fastest-growing diocese — in the country. Many senior citizens have moved to Las Vegas in order to take advantage of both the pleasant weather and the variety of entertainment available.
While the cathedral has a stable community of registered parishioners, between 75% and 85% of the 7,000 to 9,000 people who attend Mass here on the weekends are out-of-towners.
In regard to the casinos, the Nevada Legislature approved gambling in the 1930s, and someone got the idea of building a casino out in the desert. Las Vegas also grew when the Hoover Dam was under construction in the 1930s. Of course, when air conditioning became practical, there was no limit to what could be done.
Well-Worn Wedding Aisle
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of Catholic visitors come to the cathedral to get married. Of the 70 to 80 weddings celebrated here, only a small handful of the couples are locals. That's an interesting aside since it takes some doing for out-of-towners to get married here: They have to complete their marriage preparation in their home town, and all of the documentation must be sent from their home chancery office to the Las Vegas chancery. The couple must also obtain a Clark County marriage license.
Though many of the Las Vegas hotels offer wedding packages, the diocese does not permit a priest to perform weddings in the wedding chapels found in the hotels and also along the Strip. (Las Vegas is also a popular place for non-Catholics to marry.)
Often a couple marries in Las Vegas in order to avoid the obligation of giving an expensive reception — one they can't afford — back home. Not infrequently, the groom and bride come alone, and the cathedral must supply lay staff members as witnesses. The policy of the cathedral is not to have a Mass unless both bride and groom are Catholic because if a nuptial Mass were held, the couple would be united in marriage but separated at the Communion rail. It seems counterproductive to the priests of the cathedral to invite division right after a beautiful marriage ceremony. Instead, the Catholic party and entourage, if one has brought family and friends, will be encouraged to attend a scheduled Mass on the day of the wedding and receive holy Communion at that Mass.
The cathedral thinks of itself as a parish that invites visitors — even though the visitors overwhelmingly outnumber their hosts. The cathedral has 1,100 registered households. Some are widows and widowers. Others are retired couples without children. There are very few families in the parish. And the boundaries of the cathedral comprise mostly hotels.
The cathedral is staffed by the religious community of the Clerics of St. Viator (Viatorians). Four Viatorian priests are stationed here; another three Viatorian retired priests help out on weekends. The cathedral is sufficiently staffed for the priests to hear confessions for a half-hour before every scheduled Mass.
Although Las Vegas has a reputation as “Sin City” — and rightly so — the priests at the cathedral, rather than tell visitors what not to do, emphasize the meaning of being a Catholic Christian. The Viatorians here maintain that visitors can come to Las Vegas to enjoy the recreation, rest and scenery without succumbing to the temptations.
Joseph Albino writes from Camillus, New York.
----- EXCERPT: Guardian Angel Cathedral, Las Vegas ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Albino ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Gangland Redemption? DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Gangster films strike a chord deep in our collective psyche.
Movie-thug life seems fascinating because the genre can be used to excavate certain aspects of the dark side of the American dream. The usual focus is on members of a downtrodden ethnic group (Irish, Italian, Latino, African-American, etc.) who hunger to move up into the middle class and choose crime as their means of passage. The movies show us how this kind of take-no-prisoners ambition can exact a terrible price.
Gangland activities mandate an ultraviolent way of life that conflicts with the devotion to family values that is the bedrock of middle-class culture. Positive personality traits like energy, hard work and the willingness to take risks turn destructive.
The dramatic result is an intense moral struggle with life-and-death stakes. The ends are devoured by the means, and we learn that you cannot achieve virtue while practicing vice.
The Oscar-winning Godfather trilogy defines the genre. A multi-generational family saga, it elevates these ethical dilemmas to a level that almost approximates Shakespearean tragedy. Another significant marker in gangland mythology is the current HBO television series “The Sopranos,” which takes a more ironic look at the same set of problems as they play out in present-day, upper-middle-class suburbia.
Road to Perdition, based on a graphic novel by comic-strip artists Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, continues this tradition, exploring these themes in a haunting, inventive manner. Its story skillfully weaves together a pair of similar father-and-son dramas set in 1931 during the Great Depression.
Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) is a well-paid enforcer for a small-time Midwestern mob family allied with Al Capone. The gang's boss is the avuncular John Rooney (Paul Newman), of whom it's said: “You rule this town as God rules the earth. You give, and you take away.”
Sullivan, born an impoverished orphan, has moved his wife, Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), along with sons Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) and Peter (Liam Atkins), into a spacious home on the right side of town. Neither of the two boys has any idea what their father does for a living.
Michael Jr. is curious and follows his dad on a “mission” that ends in a senseless murder committed by Rooney's psychopathic son, Connor (Daniel Craig). Fearful that the boy may talk, Connor orders the entire Sullivan family to be killed. Michael Sr. and Michael Jr. escape and must go together on the run to survive.
The elder Rooney had taken Sullivan into his own family as a child and treated him as a surrogate son. He realizes that his flesh-and-blood heir has made a horrible mistake and tries to apologize. “It's a natural law,” he says to Michael Sr. “Sons are put on his earth to trouble their fathers.”
The mob boss offers to give Sullivan $25,000 if he'll flee to Ireland. But his former top enforcer insists on revenge and Rooney must choose between him and Connor. He decides that blood trumps morality and hires a free-lance hit man, McGuire (Jude Law), to kill Michael Sr.
The elder Sullivan must find a way to smoke out his family's killer while hiding from McGuire, who's as psychopathic as Connor. To achieve this, Sullivan concocts a complicated scheme that involves knocking off the banks that launder Capone's money and requires him to educate his son in the tradecraft of robbery.
British director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) and screen-writer David Self tell the first part of their story from Michael Jr.'s point of view. Cameraman Conrad Hall paints a dark landscape of dimly lit rooms and driving rain. The boy sees his dad at arm's length and can't comprehend what he's about. When father and son finally connect and discover each other's better nature, the sun finally appears, revealing wintry rural and urban vistas.
The filmmakers also frame their drama with Catholic worship and symbols. Sullivan regularly prays with his family and carries a rosary in his pocket along with his gun. When he wants to meet with Rooney in safety, he surprises his boss in a church just after he's received Communion.
While no one in the film could be called a good Catholic, the culture of faith that surrounds the two fathers seems to have an impact. Both Sullivan and Rooney have the glimmerings of conscience, and they are acutely aware of the evil they have done. “None of us will see heaven,” the elder Rooney declares. “Michael could,” Sullivan replies.
Unlike his boss, Michael Sr. is determined that the sins of the father not be visited upon his son. Perdition is often defined as eternal damnation. The elder Sullivan is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to see that Michael Jr. won't travel down that road even if it costs him his own salvation. With this, the elder Sullivan achieves a redemption of sorts. (In the movie, Perdition also ironically refers to the small Illinois town by the lake where the Sullivans hope to find safety.)
Mendes and Self have fashioned a deeply moral film. But it's not a Catholic one, despite the persistent religious imagery. The lives of Sullivan and Rooney are ruled by an implacable fate that's closer to the Old Testament and Greek tragedy than the Gospels or Church teachings. There's little sense of God's grace or miracles in their universe, and forgiveness seems a neglected virtue. Nevertheless, Road to Perdition is a challenging contribution to Hollywood gangster mythology. It touches our emotions and then makes us reflect on the ethical meaning of what we've seen.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Road to Perdition is a haunting father-son gangster fable ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring(2001)
The Sept. 11 attacks have created a climate in which fantasy tales of good and evil have special resonance. This, the Oscar-winning adaptation of the first of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy of novels, magnificently captures the transcendent dimensions of this kind of conflict. The action takes place 7,000 years ago in Middle-earth, a land populated by men, hobbits, elves, dwarfs and wizards. A hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) has a golden ring coveted by the dark lord Sauron. The wise wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) understands that evil is also an interior moral struggle and insists that Baggins give it to his nephew, Frodo (Elijah Wood).
Gandalf and Frodo join forces with a pan-species fellowship of seven warriors to return the ring to its place of origin. They embark on a picaresque journey filled with fantastical and dangerous encounters. Director Peter Jackson dramatizes their quest with moral precision. The grandeur of his achievement will elevate your spirit.
A League of Their Own(1992)
Sports films usually hinge on a series of clichés that revolve around making the team and winning the big game. A League of Their Own breathes fresh life into the genre. The time is World War II, and most of the men have been drafted to fight. A savvy promoter (Gary Marshall) decides to a launch a women's baseball league. Recruited to the Rockford, Ill., team is an Oregon farm girl, Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), who can catch and hit but won't leave without her sister, Kit (Lori Petty).
Their coach is Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), a former home-run king whose career was wrecked through drinking. Kit has a falling-out with Dottie and joins a rival team. In the season's climactic game, the two sisters find themselves playing against each other. Director Penny Marshall (Big) and writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel pepper the action with clever gags and one-liners. Although there really were such all-girl teams back them, the story is fictional.
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Many film buffs think Singin’ in the Rain is the greatest musical ever made. Co-directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen (Charade), along with screen-writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, set their comedy in Hollywood in the late 1920s as sound movies are replacing the silents and a whole generation of stars is being discarded. Most of the delightful songs (“You Were Meant for Me,” “Beautiful Girl” and others) are from the same period.
Don Lockwood (Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) are the silent era's most popular on-screen couple. Lamont wants their romance to become real, but Lockwood falls for Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), who is hired to dub Lina's screechy voice in the first Lockwood-Lamont talkie. Lockwood's former song-and-dance partner, Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor), gets caught up in the intrigue. The dazzling pace and improvisational air make you want to sing and dance along with the characters. Most exhilarating is the movie's TITLE song, with Lockwood wearing his yellow slicker, stomping through puddles and swinging his umbrella in joy.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:AUG., VARIOUS DATES
August Pledge Specials
PBS, various times
Check your local listings for the dates and times of PBS'August specials in your area. Highlights: In Andrea Bocelli: the Homecoming, tenor Bocelli returns to Tuscany and reprises the pop tunes he used to do as a restaurant singer-pianist. In Celebrate! With the Celtic Tenors, Matthew Gilsenan, Niall Morris and James Nelson sing songs of the world in Hamburg. The Drum Corps International Competition 2002 showcases the finest youth drum and bugle corps. In The Spirit of America Concert, host Daniel Rodriguez, New York City's “singing policeman,” performs with Broadway star Linda Eder, the Metropolitan Opera's Aprile Millo and trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.
SUNDAY, AUG. 4
Evening at Pops
PBS, 7 p.m.
Classical violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Irish-country violinist Eileen Ivers and jazz violinist Regina Carter guest with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops.
SUNDAY, AUG. 4
World Diary:
Holy Land Divided
National Geographic Channel, 8 and 11 p.m.
Correspondent Mick Davie seeks to summarize the tragic conflict in the Holy Land.
MONDAY, AUG. 5
Monster Mystery: Loch Ness
Travel Channel, 4 p.m.
Learn the latest on the legendary Scottish lake monster.
TUESDAYS
Cooking Thin
Food Network, noon
Chef Kathleen Daelemans went from a size 22 to a size 8. Find out her yummy recipe secrets and follow her action plan: “Eat healthy, start moving, do it now!” Other episodes, as well as rebroadcasts, air Saturdays at 10:30 a.m. and Sundays at 1 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, AUG. 7
Room by Room: Biltmore Estate Style
Home & Garden TV, 10 p.m.
Hosts Matt Fox and Shari Hiller visit Asheville, N.C., to research redoing a cottage in the Biltmore Estate style.
FRIDAY, AUG. 9
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly
PBS, 5 p.m.
The first part of this show covers Southern rural black Protestant churches’ handling of AIDS. In the second half, Fred de Sam Lazaro interviews Welshman Donald Jackson about the illuminated Bible he is making for St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn.
SATURDAY, AUG. 10
Classic American Cars of Cuba
PBS, 8 p.m.
Cars of the 1950s are collectors’ items in the United States, but in communist Cuba people desperately maintain them for daily travel. This hour-long special depicts Cubans’ love for their pre-Castro American autos — mute witnesses to Marxism's built-in inability to meet even people's most basic needs — food, clothing, shelter and transportation.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: All times Eastern ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Koran Reading Provokes Outcry - and Lawsuit DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — A requirement that all incoming students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill read a book containing passages from the Koran has generated controversy, praise and criticism.
Now, it has also generated a lawsuit.
The plaintiffs are three unnamed University of North Carolina students — one Catholic, one evangelical Christian and one Jew — and two leaders of the Family Policy Network, a conservative Christian advocacy group. The lawsuit, filed July 22 in federal district court in Greensboro, alleges that the university is infringing upon the religious free exercise of its students and violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment, forcing students to study Islam against their will.
“We had hoped the university would see the error of its ways and correct this wrong without going to court,” said Family Policy Network President Joe Glover, who hand-delivered the summons for Chancellor James Moeser and Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Learning Cynthia Wolf Johnson. Both are named as defendants.
Family Policy Network Board Chairman Terry Moffitt, a University of North Carolina alumnus; and the group's state director, James Yacovelli, are the two named plaintiffs.
The book, Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations, translated and introduced by Michael Sells, contains 35 suras, or short passages, from the holy book of Islam. All incoming freshmen and transfer students are required to read the book, write a 300-word response and participate in a small-group discussion session the first week of classes.
During the week of July 15, University of North Carolina amended the policy on its Web site. It said that students do not have to read the book if they find it offensive, but they must still complete a paper describing their objections. They also must attend the discussion sessions.
The lawsuit seeks an injunction against the reading program and nominal damages for university actions.
A university spokesman declined comment on the lawsuit, citing pending litigation.
Catholic Response
Reaction from Catholic groups has been largely muted.
“Unless there's any element of proselytizing or promoting the Muslim religion, I think it's a wonderful program,” said Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society. “[The university] is recognizing that a particular religion is having a profound effect on world politics today.”
In fact, Reilly foresees an advantage: “If they're acknowledging that Islam as a religion has an important effect on society, then it shows me they're closer to realizing the importance of faith in the world. They may be closer than ever to discussing Christianity and its influences.”
But requiring students to read just one religious text and not the Bible or the Torah is what has sparked the outcry. Glover said he would react just as vehemently if University of North Carolina required that students read portions of the Bible with no balance from other religious texts.
“I don't trust a state university to properly present Christianity, Judaism or Islam,” he said.
Michael Chepul, Catholic campus ministry assistant at University of North Carolina, said he doesn't take offense at the fact that the school did not choose passages from the Bible.
“Most people already have knowledge about the Bible, but not necessarily about the Koran,” he said. “There's a big misconception about the Muslim faith.” Chepul has spoken with campus ministers of other faiths, and he said he senses an agreement among them that the book is a good selection. Seven ministers of various faiths will be among those leading the discussion sessions.
Catholic League President William Donohue spoke out against the Family Policy Network lawsuit, saying the university is within its rights to require the reading.
“There is a fundamental difference between indoctrination and education,” Donohue said in a July 23 Catholic League press release. “It is the difference between proselytization and illumination.”
Legal Issues
The discussion sessions are what could pose constitutional problems, said Seth Jaffe, staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
When school convenes in August, all incoming students will attend a two-hour small-group session where they will turn in their written responses and discuss the book. Their essays are responses to suggested prompts. Among these prompts are: Read a sura while listening to the Koranic recitation and describe what the experience adds to the understanding of the text; or explain how a certain sura treats the relationship between the external world of nature and the internal world of faith and moral obligation.
Jaffe said the ACLU will keep a close eye on the discussions. It would violate the establishment clause, he said, if the book is taught in a way that proselytizes or encourages students to adhere to the teachings of Islam.
But he cautioned that for now, there is no violation of civil rights. “To require students to read about a religion is not the same as endorsing or promoting that religion,” he said.
“The stated purpose is not a religious purpose,” he said. “Our general position is that this is a concern, but it doesn't appear to be problematic according to the stated purpose.”
The stated purpose of the book selection is to provide a common experience for incoming students and to promote cultural understanding. It is also a nod to the sudden prominence of Islam since the events of Sept. 11.
Thoughts on Campus
Marissa Heyl, a freshman from Raleigh, read the book early. “I think it's important for people of all faiths to grow in understanding of other religions,” said the graduate of 13 years of Catholic schools.
Her mother, Pam Heyl, teaches a law class at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh and sees no legal grounds for critiquing the requirement. Instead, she views it as an opportunity to debunk myths about Islam.
“It's good for students to get a perspective on what other religions teach, especially a religion that's associated with terrorism,” she said.
Her daughter noted another benefit: “It will only help me enhance my relationship with God and with others.”
Glover acknowledged that many students have no objection to reading the book.
“Those people don't know what this requirement is really all about,” he said. “It's a very one-sided presentation on Islam that leaves the most egregious parts out.”
Egregious parts, Glover said, include passages like suras 434 and 95, which deal with Islam's treatment of women and pagans. By not requiring students to read passages like these, he said the university is giving them a skewed view of Islam.
But Carl Ernst, a religion professor at University of North Carolina who has taught the book twice in freshmen seminars, stressed that the reading is not presented as a theological or authoritative text.
“We do not teach religion as religious communities do,” he said. “We teach about religion. We do not advocate particular religious texts or theologies.”
The program was instituted in 1999 as part of an effort to improve the university's intellectual climate.
Dana Wind writes from Raleigh, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Wind ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Contraception: Catholics Are on to Something DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:OPEN EMBRACE: APROTESTANT COUPLE RETHINKS CONTRACEPTION
by Sam and Bethany Torode William B. Eerdmans, 2002 144 pages, $12
One of the most destructive errors of our time is the belief that the pro-creative, unitive and sacramental dimensions of marriage can be torn from one another with no harm done to the state of marital unions. Sam and Bethany Torode make a compelling case for doing all we can do to keep the three together.
Catholics practicing natural family planning will find nothing new here, but then they don't comprise the book's intended audience. Rather, the Torodes have written a book for Protestant couples who were never taught to oppose contraception — like themselves not so long ago.
Like Kimberly Hahn and others who have traveled the same road before them, Sam explains that he once incorrectly assumed that the Catholic Church's prohibition on contraception was a superstition, an unnecessary holdover from the Middle Ages. After a friend explained that the Church actually had good reasons for its teaching, he decided to research the subject himself. This book is the result.
Beginning with what it means to be created in the image of God, the Torodes reason that our sexuality reflects God's likeness. It is from this “theology of the body” that the Torodes flesh out their embrace of a one-flesh union that cannot be diminished or compromised by contraception.
Their logic is clear, simple and easy to follow. Desiring to conform their desires and actions to the natural cycle of the woman's body, they lead the reader to natural family planning. Here they encounter a profound, biblical perspective on the meaning of sex — namely, that love cannot be contained in just two bodies: Marital union reflects the Holy Trinity.
One minor weakness of the book is that it makes no attempt to examine contraception from a moral standpoint. Rather than suggesting that contraception is evil or sinful, the Torodes are content to say that it is not “ideal.” Again, one must remember their audience.
While they do not address the theological implications of the factors that led to their decision, the authors do present a convincing argument. They are particularly effective at refuting the defenses of contraception that rest on the intention of the couple using it.
The book stands as a challenging critique to a culture where the contraceptive mentality treats fertility as a sickness and children as inconveniences. The Torodes lay to rest the long-held myth that NFP is synonymous with the “rhythm method"; they also address the many marital and child-spacing benefits of modern, scientific NFP. Finally, they demonstrate how the contraceptive mentality leads to abortion-on-demand.
In the book's final section, Bethany writes a touching affirmation of what it means to be a mother. Her chapter “Be Not Afraid,” reflecting both Scripture and the favorite words of Pope John Paul II, will warm the heart of any mother.
The book's great strength is that it packages a very Catholic message in decidedly Protestant gift wrap. Many Protestants refuse to hear the Catholic perspective on contraception simply because they discount the authority of the source. The Torodes, however, quote from a variety of Catholics — Mother Teresa, various popes, G.K. Chesterton and Fulton Sheen among them. For example, in the book's second section, Sam provides a historical perspective on contraception. He effectively draws from the early Church fathers to demonstrate the Church's condemnation of contraception and abortion from the very beginnings of the Christian faith.
I heartily recommend this book not only for Protestants, but also for the Catholics who ignore the Church's teaching on contraception. It would make a wonderful engagement or wedding gift for a young couple. Judging from their words in this book, the Torodes are Catholic. They just don't know it yet.
Tim Drake edits the Register's Culture of Life section.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:For Church and Pope
ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY, June 17 — Daughter of Charity Sister Margaret John Kelly, executive director of the New York university's Vincentian Center for Church and Society, was recently chosen by Pope John Paul II to receive the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Medal, according to an announcement by St. John's.
“Through a range of projects with the clergy, religious, charities, education and health care personnel of this [Brooklyn, N.Y.] diocese, we at St. John's have discovered the great value of Church-university collaboration in the spirit of Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” said Sister Margaret John.
New Degrees
CHRONICLE.COM, July 15 — Mount St. Clare College in Clinton, Iowa, will offer three new bachelor's degrees beginning in the fall, according to the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education. They include psychology, computer graphic design and a degree that combines computer science and mathematics. The college is run by the Franciscan Sisters of Clinton.
Pastoral Ministry
ANNA MARIA COLLEGE, July 20 — The Massachusetts college has introduced a new graduate program in pastoral ministry “designed to prepare men and women for service to the Church and their parish communities,” said a university press release.
Centered in a commitment to adult faith formation, the pastoral ministry program integrates the academic, human and spiritual dimensions of faith formation in order to provide the theological and spiritual background that is essential for pastoral ministry.
Areas of concentration will include religious education, pastoral leadership and administration, pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, youth ministry and adult faith formation. Anna Maria is administered by the Sisters of St. Anne.
Capital Gift
JOHN CARROLL UNIVERSITY, July 19 — The Jesuits’ university in Cleveland recently announced a $2 million grant from Gerald and Helen McDonough as part of the kickoff of the public phase of the university's capital campaign.
The university's $125 million campaign includes the Dolan Center for Science and Technology, which is near completion.
Whiz Kid
He came up with his idea while working on a science fair project that used mathematical equations to improve computer animation. The project was inspired by animated movies that assign apparently random numbers to body movements.
Kauffman's idea is to assign more numbers to more body parts and gestures. He believes he has devised a way to use random numbers in an equation to encrypt data, making it impossible for hackers to solve it. The university is working with the student to patent and market his ideas.
Scholarships
AQUINAS INSTITUTE OF THEOLOGY, June 27 — The Dominican graduate school in St. L o u i s has received a $150,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation for use as scholarships for its master of divinity students, said an institute press release. The scholarships are slated for “younger, full-time lay students,” said the announcement.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: The Reluctant Dad DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Q When we were first married, I hoped to have children immediately, but my husband wanted to wait two years. I deferred, thinking 32 is a safe age to conceive, but now he's still trying to delay. Is it common for men to be anxious about starting a family?
A Tom: It's not unusual for men to be apprehensive. However, he may have a skewed perspective concerning the lifestyle changes a baby will bring. While there will be sacrifices to make, the rewards are so much greater. Comparing it to the transition to marriage might help your husband. His single friends may have more lifestyle freedom, but are they happier?
When we get married, we give up so little to gain so much. It's the same with having children. Your husband is likely thinking of the burdens we associate with infants: dirty diapers, sleepless nights. He may need to reconsider the long view of family life — the playfulness of toddlers, their blossoming into adulthood, the camaraderie of adult children and the rejuvenation grandchildren bring.
Long after his career has come and gone, it's his family that will remain to love him unconditionally. When my father died of cancer last year, it wasn't his boss, college roommate or poker buddies at his bedside when he passed away. It was his six adult children.
Caroline: When we were pregnant with our first, Tom was worried about providing financially for our family. But if we all waited to start a family until we felt totally confident and ready, the human race would die out! Instead, we must trust what our Lord promises: that “we may receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). Whom God calls — and he's definitely called you to openness to life in your wedding vows — he also empowers. I'm happily pregnant with No. 3, but right now I honestly don't feel like I have the strength for three.
What I'm counting on is that the Lord will supply my every need, as St. Paul says.
Don't whine or complain about this issue to your husband; that's a bad strategy in any marital difficulty. First, redouble your efforts in prayer, asking God to bless him with the graces he needs to be a good husband and father. (St. Joseph is a great intercessor here.) Pray too that you will grow in virtue so that you can be a better helpmate. Then pray that you will both know God's will for your family.
Reassure him that you think he'll be a great dad. Tell him you can't wait to have boys just like him. Make friends with strong Catholic families with excited, kid-loving dads who could be good role models for your husband.
Finally, I've learned that a strategically placed book or article may help (try the bathroom!). Tom was particularly moved by Scott Hahn's new book on the family, First Comes Love. We'll be praying for you.
The McDonalds are the Family Life directors for the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom And Caroline Mcdonald ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:BENEFITS OF CAMPUS
Among those who attended non-Catholic colleges.
Campus ministry students who attended Mass a few times per month.
Other Catholic students who attended Mass a few times per month.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: The Artist Behind World Youth Day's Saints DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:If it surprises you that a lifelong Protestant would be painting Catholic saints, you don't know Lisa E. Brown. Her outlook is as broad as her art. A professional artist for more than 10 years, her work includes portraits, murals, furniture painting, landscapes and figures in a wide range of mediums.
This year, she was commissioned to paint the patron saints of World Youth Day 2002, which include St. Agnes of Rome, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, St. Josephine Bakhita, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, Blessed Andrew of Phù Yen, Blessed Pedro Calungsod, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Blessed Marcel Callo and Blessed Francisco Castelló Aleu.
Originally from Ann Arbor, Mich., Brown lives now in Arlington, Va.. Some of her work can be seen at www.lisaebrown.com. Register correspondent Zoë Romanowsky recently spoke with her about her latest project.
Tell me how you were commissioned to paint the patron saints of World Youth Day 2002.
A friend of mine, Christopher Séguin, is the director of registration at World Youth Day and he had the idea of having portraits done of the World Youth Day patron saints. Along with other artists, I was invited to submit samples of my work. When the art director for World Youth Day saw some paintings of blues artists I did for a restaurant, he thought that style would work, so they hired me.
You're a devout Christian, but not a Catholic. What attracted you to this particular project?
I was drawn to paint fellow followers of Christ who have loved God with all their lives. I also love to do portraits — that's my favorite subject because there's so much in a face. I feel close to God when I'm painting a face because we're made in his image. To paint what's going on — what's behind the eyes and face — is to paint the soul. And these are huge souls for God.
Tell me a little about your own faith background.
I'm a Presbyterian minister's daughter and I grew up in a rich environment of both traditional and charismatic faith. My background included a very ecumenical focus as well. When I was in college, my father became pastor of a fellowship in an ecumenical community. That's a very comfortable thing for me and something I'm desirous of — to have as much unity as possible, knowing that's the heart of Christ. My Catholic connection started with a friend who went to Franciscan University. My undergraduate degree was in art but I was interested in studying counseling so I went to Franciscan University for my master's degree. Since then, I've spent a lot of time in Catholic environments.
What are the portraits like?
Each canvas is roughly 20 by 30 inches. I wanted to focus on the face and get a lot of emotion and expression so I painted them larger than life. The process is two colors — the canvas is a midnight blue and the name of the paint is “Hockey Puck,” which I thought was appropriate for World Youth Day in Toronto! It makes a good contrast with the white. I used tiny brushes with a fine point to get the range of light and dark, grays and brights.
Did you paint from specific images?
World Youth Day sent me some images to work from but the decision on how to paint each one was mine. I did the patrons’ faces so they look directly at the viewer. With some, like St. Agnes of Rome, I photographed a living model and then looked at frescos painted of young girls from the time of St. Agnes to use for reference on clothing and hairstyle. For the saints we didn't have photos for, I tried to go with models of people from the same ethnic background.
Let's talk about a few of the portraits. St. Thérèse of Lisieux is a favorite of so many people — why did you paint her the way you did, and what did you want to communicate in your rendition of her?
There's a photo of St. Thérèse when she's about 15 years old where her hair is up and she's looking very expectant. I liked the expression of love on her face. Although I made her look a little older, I wanted to capture her before she entered the convent and to show her on the verge of making a vocational decision. As I painted her, I had a strong sense of her strength and intensity, her passion for God, and her deep love.
I've seen that painting and you can see that in her face, especially in her eyes. You mentioned St. Agnes of Rome, and that's a beautiful painting — maybe my favorite. Tell me about her.
When I painted Agnes, I imagined she was before her accusers, knowing she was going to die for her faith. I thought about how she faced her death — with strength, pure love for God and acceptance. She knew she belonged to God. There's a quote when she was about 13 years old where she says, “For a while I have been engaged to a celestial spouse.” At that early age she felt strongly called to be God's alone. Also, I really got a sense for her stand on consecrating her virginity to God and keeping her body for God. She's a great example for youth today and it was powerful to paint her.
While painting these saints, did you learn anything new or did it affect your faith life?
The portraits were in my living room as I painted them and it made me think of Hebrews 11, “Since we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us.” I felt surrounded by them, their goodness and love. Now they're gone and I miss them! I really felt their presence — that they were with me. And it meant a lot to be painting for youth.
How do you think these images will communicate with younger people in particular?
Michael Madden, the art director of World Youth Day, said that he sees these portraits as a form of icon — a modern icon. The goal of the whole project is to make the saints real, not idealized. Many saint images, while serving their own purpose, are very idealized and glamorous-looking. I tried to make each saint look human — for example, I painted Kateri Tekakwitha with her smallpox scars. Another goal was to show each saint's unique love for God so that the youth might be inspired to realize their own unique way of expressing and living out God's love.
Do you have a favorite? Which one, and why?
On one hand, no. I connected with each one. But as a painter, I particularly like how some turned out — the lighting or the expression or how various factors came together. There are others whose stories I connect with more. Some are less known and you have to use your imagination about what their lives were like. I love how Agnes of Rome turned out, and Thérèse, and I love the lighting in Francisco Castelló Aleu's portrait.
What will World Youth Day be doing with these paintings?
The portraits will be made into 20 by 50 feet banners and displayed along the main entrance of Exhibition Place, where the main events will be held. They will also be made into postcards.
Will the Holy Father have a chance to view the paintings?
They will be the first things the Pope sees when he processes through the main entrance way during his arrival ceremony. The original paintings will be on display at his Toronto residence and I am scheduled to meet and talk with him about the paintings on July 28.
Zoë Romanowsky writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ZoZoÎ Romanowsky ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Much More Than John Wayne's Grandson DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Ordained on Jan. 19 for the Orange Diocese, Father Matthew Munoz is currently the parochial vicar at St. Edward's Catholic Church in Dana Point, Calif. The eldest of seven children, Munoz is the grandson of actor John Wayne. He recently spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake from his home.
Do you have a favorite memory about your grandfather?
I used to tell my students that if I say anything about my grandfather John Wayne, I also have to say something about my grandfather Fernando Munoz. Although you haven't heard of him, Fernando was a Mexican immigrant coal miner that helped this country to grow. He came to the United States 82 years ago. He was a real cowboy.
In many ways, John's life on the screen depicts much of the life of my grandfather Fernando.
My grandfather John was just Granddaddy. As kids we thought anyone's grandfather could be on TV. As we got older we got to meet different actors and actresses. On screen they seem larger than life, but they're just human beings. I remember when Clint Eastwood was upand-coming, he brought one of his early films for my grandfather to watch. He was very unassuming and down-to-earth. It doesn't strike you as something different until you realize how many people's lives around the world have been affected by an actor.
My fondest memory is from when I was 9 years old. We were on Balboa Island. My parents let us drive the boat, but told us not to go more than 300 yards from shore. One day I asked my cousin, who was 10, to go with me, and we took the boat a mile up the back bay all the way to my grandfather's dock. When we arrived, in shorts and full of sand, my grandfather was entertaining guests with a formal dinner. He let out a big hoot, pulled me onto his lap, and asked me what we were doing there. I can still remember his huge smile, and the company smiling, enjoying that moment. I told him that Mom and Dad didn't know we took the boat.
He covered for me until we told the story a few years later.
Tell me about your family growing up.
I was born in Encino and my family moved to Tustin when I was 5. I am the oldest of seven, with four sisters and two brothers. My mother lost one son, and one daughter, right after birth. We always include them and have a prayer relationship with them. My mom's next pregnancy was twins — a boy and girl.
My father was an attorney for 30 years and for the last several years has been a Superior Court judge. My mom was a stay-at-home mother and was active at Church, teaching natural family planning and doing outreach with cancer patients.
Was there a time you fell away from your faith?
Yes, when I was in college my parents went through a difficult separation and divorce and it shook my roots for a good solid three to four years.
I was caught up in the secular ways of college life and was really searching. I felt as lost as anyone could be and was searching for meaning in life. I lost my faith at St. Mary's, but I also got it back. I graduated in May, but took my final course, in heretics, the following January.
During that class, taught by Brother Brendan Kneale, I learned about the heretical attitudes of history and how they have recurred through time and are still present in our modern time. At a time when I was seeking meaning and truth, that class was the spark that reignited my faith and got me back to the Church.
What did you do prior to becoming a priest?
After I graduated, I spent some time in my father's law office, I did some construction work, I coached high school cross country, and I explored an acting career.
One professor at St. Mary's encouraged me to be an actor. Although she didn't know about my grandfather, she felt I had a gift. So, for a while I worked in a Beverly Hills art gallery trying to sell art so that I could work on my acting career. It took just a couple of months to discover the emptiness in the work. I felt that the draw of the money and the fame and all that goes along with that lifestyle were traps for me in my life.
I had been through enough during college to know that I didn't need to see any more of it. I learned a great deal about the value of poverty and working together as a family from my father's side.
The prayer life was calling to me.
What led to your vocation?
I felt the calling more strongly at certain times of my life. As a young altar boy I began to experience this vocation. However, I used to think that the priests were dumb because they had to look at the book. I had memorized all the prayers and would pray them when I was serving.
When I was 14, I was invited to attend a junior seminary, but when I saw how many cute girls were going to Mater Dei I lost interest in seminary. I was active in youth ministry in high school, but the vocation slipped away in college.
After my final college class I experienced a tremendous conversion that led me to get rid of my worldly possessions and desires. Thereafter, I entered St. John's Seminary in Camarillo.
You were 14 years old when your grandfather passed away. Is there any truth to the deathbed conversion story that's been told about him?
Yes, one of the great stories of his life was that my grandmother prayed for his conversion. He would often attend Church with her and was involved with Catholic Charities and helped the Franciscan sisters with their charitable works.
He often used to take his boat down to Panama. He was fond of the Latino people and had a real heart for the working people. It was there that he met Archbishop Clavelle. When he got ill, Archbishop Clavelle wanted to baptize him, but couldn't.
His successor, Archbishop McGrath, ended up baptizing my grandfather. The current Archbishop Torres told this story to me on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Dec. 12, 2000. My grandfather was very stubborn, but prior to his death, Archbishop McGrath said, “Come on Duke, let me wash you up,” and he converted.
Do you have a favorite film of your grandfather's?
Yes, I prefer The Searchers and The Quiet Man. My mother was in The Quiet Man, as was Maureen O'Hara. Maureen was at my ordination and is a wonderful Catholic woman. She was a good friend to my grandfather and was a positive influence.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 08/04/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 4-10, 2002 ----- BODY:Planned Parenthood Sued
Davis said there is evidence that Planned Parenthood has always targeted minority groups for abortion. “This organization was founded for bad purposes, it's only conducted [for] bad purposes. This is truly a sinister criminal enterprise,” Davis said.
Surgeries on the Unborn
The standard treatment requires one or more surgeries after birth to replace the intestines within the infant's abdominal cavity and close the abdominal wall. The new treatment involves periodically flushing out some of the amniotic fluid and replacing it with saline solution to reduce inflammation of the fetal organs.
Abortion Memorial
The memorial features a 100-foot meandering stream interspersed with 14 waterfalls that empties into a pond 20 feet by 20 feet.
Stephen Hardie, who helped design the memorial, said, “Instead of just a headstone marking the event of an abortion, we wanted to carry it a little further and provide an area that would lend itself to quiet reflection and contemplation, to allow those involved in the abortion decision to have a quiet place to go.”
3,000-Mile Pro-Life Walk
CROSSROADS, July 19 — For the past seven years, Crossroads has sponsored college students who walk across the country, pray at abortion facilities, speak at churches and host town-hall meetings to educate the public about abortion.
Two teams of Crossroads walkers have covered more than 4,000 miles on foot this summer and were sheduled to meet at World Youth Day on July 22. The northern team began its walk in San Francisco while the southern team began its journey in Tampa, Fla.
Aaron Redmon, director of Crossroads, said that, at World Youth Day in Denver, the Pope encouraged youth to take a stand against the culture of death.
Miss Oregon, Brita Stream, won
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Pro-Life Law Protects Babies Who Survive Their Abortions DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:PITTSBURGH — At a signing ceremony here Aug. 5, President George Bush has signed a law that protects children who are born “accidentally” during a late-term abortion. They are often left to die.
With Gianna Jessen, who survived an attempted saline abortion in 1977, witnessing the event, the president gave meaning to the signing of a bill that might have otherwise been quietly lost in the slew of legislation passed during marathon Capitol Hill sessions before the August recess.
The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act passed on July 18 at night with no debate in the Senate, by unanimous consent. In the House it passed by voice vote in March.
At the signing ceremony for the new law, Bush connected it to the pro-life movement. “Today, through sonograms and other technology, we can see clearly that unborn children are members of the human family,” he said. “They reflect our image, and they are created in God's own image. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is a step toward the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law.”
Douglas Johnson, National Right to Life Committee legislative director, said the measure is very much a part of the pro-life movement's agenda. “Some newborn infants, especially those who are born alive during abortions, have been treated as non-persons,” he said. The Born-Alive Act “says that every infant born alive, even during an abortion and even if premature, is a full legal person under federal law.”
The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act was first introduced in the House by now-retired Congressman Charles Canady, RFla., passing the House 380-15 in September 2000. The Senate subsequently killed it by an anonymous objection before the 2000 session ended.
It was reintroduced this session by Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, and Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.
The Born-Alive Act marks the first pro-life bill that has made it to the Senate floor since Democrats took control in May of last year when Vermont senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party.
The legislation is simple. It protects every baby who survives an abortion attempt, covering cases where there is a “complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother” of a baby who “breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section or induced abortion.”
‘Live-Birth Abortion’
The legislation was largely triggered as a consequence of the efforts of whistleblower Jill Stanek, a nurse who was fired in September 2001 from Christ Hospital and Medical Center in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, Ill., two years after she drew attention to the practice of what has become known as “live-birth abortion.” In such cases, children are delivered and purposely left unattended to die following a botched abortion even though it is clear the baby is very much alive.
Stanek was also present at Bush's signing of the bill Aug. 5.
In congressional testimony last year, Stanek told gruesome stories of babies purposely left to die. “One night,” she recalled, “a nursing coworker was taking an aborted Down-syndrome baby who was born alive to our soiled utility room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him.
“I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a soiled utility room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived,” Stanek said. “He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about half a pound and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet that I couldn't tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his chest wall.”
Stanek's chilling testimony made it near-to-impossible, even for abortion advocates, to oppose the Born-Alive Act. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat and member of the House Judiciary Committee, supported and spoke in favor of it, despite describing himself as being “as pro-choice as anybody on earth.”
Still, some pro-abortion advocates are on record opposing it. When the bill was first introduced in 2000, the National Abortion Rights Action League said the bill “would inappropriately inject prosecutors and lawmakers into the medical decision-making process” and “effectively grant legal personhood to a previable fetus ‘in direct conflict with Roe.’”
Helen Alvare, then serving as a spokeswoman with the U.S. bishops’ conference, observed at the time, “The pro-life community predicted that failure to stop partial-birth abortion would lead to infanticide. Now, NARAL is arguing for precisely that.”
This time around, NARAL stayed largely silent about the bill. One concession to pro-abortion activists, which made it possible for many Democrats and moderate Republicans to support the bill, was a move by House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., to remove the findings of fact from the bill that stated the events Stanek reported upon.
Hadley Arkes, the Princeton professor formerly of Amherst College who first came up with the concept for the bill, calls the removal of the findings by committee Republicans an unfortunate “cave-in.”
The bill, Arkes stressed, means “that the child marked for an abortion but born alive has a claim to the protection of the law, and that claim cannot pivot on the question of whether anyone wanted her.” In other words, it states that the constitutional “right to abortion” first set forth in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wadedoes not establish an absolute right to kill a child even after it is alive outside the mother's womb.
Arkes said the bill is the “most modest first step imaginable on the issue of abortion,” but pro-lifers believe it is a key one. Senate sponsor Rick Santorum wrote in his weekly press column, “The fact that neither chamber needed a roll-call vote to determine the legitimacy of born-alive infant protection but decided unanimously to pass a law establishing such protection is significant.
“It underscores the popular understanding that the life of a unique human being is indisputable and should be safeguarded, regardless of its stage of development,” he said.
Santorum added: “Upon the president's signature, there will be no legal distinction between a 50-year-old, a 15-year-old, a 5-year-old or a 5-minute-old. Between them, their worth as individual people should bear no distinction, either.”
Bush cited Pope John Paul II at the signing ceremony when he called the law “a step toward the day when the promises of the Declaration of Independence will apply to everyone, not just those with the voice and power to defend their rights. This law is a step toward the day when America fully becomes, in the words of Pope John Paul II, ‘a hospitable, a welcoming culture.’”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Another Triumph DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:12 Million Cheer Pope in Mexico
MEXICO CITY — David Margáin is a 24-year-old engineer from Monterrey, Mexico. Every morning for the past two years he has started off early in order to get to work at the large glass factory on the outskirts of this city. But July 31 was different.
“I'm here to see the Holy Father, to try and receive his blessing,” he said while walking over to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where John Paul II later canonized Juan Diego.
Beyond the basilica, 12 million people filled the streets of Mexico City to see the Pope, who had said Mass for 800,000 World Youth Day pilgrims in Toronto only a few days before.
“You could say the country has been paralyzed since the Pope arrived,” Margáin said. “There were people from all around the country who traveled thousands of miles just to feel near him, maybe to see him for a couple of seconds. Sometimes we forget about Mexico's faith. I have learned not to underestimate the way we still feel about the important things in life.”
St. Juan Diego is the Indian witness of the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose image helped convert Mexico. The saint, who lived from 1474 to 1548, was the first Indian of the Americas to be raised to the altar.
Describing the newly canonized saint, the Holy Father said: “He brought about the fruitful meeting of two worlds” — the European and Indian, which have contributed to the making of present-day Mexico.
The climax of the celebration came when the Holy Father read the formula for the canonization in Spanish. The basilica was flooded with people, as were the square in front of the basilica and nearby streets.
“We declare and define as saint Blessed Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin and inscribe him in the catalog of saints, and we establish that he be honored with devotion by the whole Church,” the Holy Father said in a slow, clear voice.
The Holy Father touched Mexican soil on July 30 for the fifth time since the beginning of his pontificate. After months of discussion concerning his health, John Paul surprised both critics and fans when he insisted on his 97th international trip.
“I noticed the Pope was very happy. He looked really satisfied with what he was doing: He was fulfilling a promise our Lady had made to Juan Diego — now St. Juan Diego,” said Paulina Garza, a 28-year-old administrative assistant who traveled to see the Holy Father. “He was tired; it was a very tiresome trip for him. But even after all that, he was so happy, he glowed like a little kid.”
Garza said she absolutely had to see John Paul because it was a great opportunity for any Catholic to show his or her support.
“He left us a very important commitment with our Church. If he was able to be here and do everything he did, even though his body made it really hard for him, he's showing me that nothing's too hard when you're trying to do what the Lord wants you to,” she said.
“I saw the Pope with an amazing inner strength — an invincible willpower — but at the same time he was very serene and peaceful, in a manner which only someone close to God can be,” Margáin said. “After the Pope's testimony, we cannot be afraid of the things life throws at us. We have to keep going, fight till our last breath to fulfill God's plan.”
In his homily (see full text, Page 5), the Holy Father said, “Beloved brothers and sisters of every ethnic background of Mexico and America, today, in praising the Indian Juan Diego, I want to express to all of you the closeness of the Church and the Pope, embracing you with love and encouraging you to overcome with hope the difficult times you are going through.”
John Paul ended his homily with a prayer to Juan Diego, in which he asked that he look with “favor upon the pain of those who are suffering in body or in spirit, on those afflicted by poverty, loneliness, marginalization or ignorance.”
“May all people, civic leaders and ordinary citizens, always act in accordance with the demands of justice and with respect for the dignity of each person, so that in this way peace may be reinforced,” the Pope concluded.
Speaking to the Heart
For Gerardo González Cantú, a father of two children who went to Mexico City with his wife to participate in Juan Diego's canonization Mass, this visit represented an invaluable opportunity to be close to Christ's special envoy.
“For us, just to have the opportunity of seeing John Paul II up close, in our Mexico, is more than we could ask for. The strength he gives us is just invaluable for our efforts,” he said.
“He was so direct in his speech,” González said. “He told us about truth as one of God's gifts to us — we should not look for complex solutions and not let vanity grab ahold of our lives, because we'll find truth in the simple things in life. You don't hear that often, do you?”
González said he and his family got to sit near the altar during Mass.
“During the Mass we were pretty close, and I was thinking he looked tired. But then he stood and read his homily. You couldn't believe his desire to do everything, and to do everything right. His attitude showed us nothing can be so hard in this life. Everyone can say he looked tired, but I'm sure I saw him smiling,” he said.
“I felt as if I could breathe the spirituality in the air,” he added. “There were people who stood on their knees for the whole ceremony. The group my wife and I were with was praying the rosary. I'm absolutely sure Our Lady of Guadalupe was right there with us.”
Fighting the Crowds
After starting off at 1:30 a.m. in order to beat the crowds trying to make it the canonization mass, Czarina Villarreal de Velarde thought she should be tired. But after seeing everyone's enthusiasm, the 46-year-old mother of four suddenly found herself renewed.
“People were happy, I mean, really, really, 100% happy,” she said. “Just imagine: We rose at 1:30 in the morning, and even though everyone was tired, emotions ran high and our sense of happiness and peace was enough to carry us through the event.”
“His body looks tired, fatigued, but you can't believe the energy in him. He's so strong, so certain and full of authority,” she added. “After this, I'm compelled to try and be a saint. We need to be better at all the little things we do, every day. The difference is in the way we look at our daily efforts.”
For the duration of the whole visit, Claudia Padilla said, the air was full of happiness and smiles.
“Everyone was as happy as always. Just the sight of him moves you. Suddenly you've got tears coming out of your eyes, and your heart feels like it's going to explode,” said the 30-year-old from Mexico City. “It never ceases to amaze me to see those crowds who brave adverse weather, uncomfortable locations, and wait for hours, just to catch a glimpse of the Holy Father. Just to feel him near is worth it. He really is St. Peter's successor.”
St. Juan Diego is remembered as the humble Indian to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe revealed herself.
“Juan Diego is a very important saint for us; I'm so proud of him being a Mexican, a poor Mexican loyal to what Our Lady of Guadalupe wanted of him. He was brave when nobody believed him,” added Paulina Garza, while David Margáin chose to designate him as a role model.
“St. Juan Diego is the Mexican Our Lady of Guadalupe chose,” he said. “As such, he is a role model to all of us, especially when speaking about humility: ‘My son, my smallest son,’ she said to him.”
Amid the millions of faithful trying to be near the Holy Father, cheering and applauding for him, there was a sense of spirituality and hope, a sensation of peaceful energy to strengthen Mexico's faith.
“I saw him full of hope, absolutely faithful,” Padilla said. “I saw a coherent man, someone true to his vocation and in love with his life's mission. He maintains his penetrating gaze. I really hope this visit will stay in our hearts for a long, long time.”
René Lankenau filed this story from Mexico City.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: RenÈ Lankenau ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 50 Defectors Saw Mass As Last Chance For Freedom DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:TORONTO — “Cuba sí,” say several billboards around Toronto, trying to lure Canadians to visit the sunny beaches of Cuba.
But a group of about 50 Cuban pilgrims to World Youth Day in July said “Cuba no!” and defected to Canada during the July 28 papal Mass in Toronto.
“In Cuba,” Renier Figueredo, one of the defectors, told the Register, “we are young only in age, because we are forced to live like people with no hope in the future.”
Raisel Dominguez said he knew his actions would strain Church-state relations in Cuba. “I know what this means for the Church, and I am sorry,” he said. “But I hope they will understand that this was the only opportunity we would have.”
The group separated from their 200-member group during the Mass to become, at least temporarily, illegal immigrants.
The Cuban delegation at World Youth Day was visible and rowdy. Father Thomas Rosica, director of World Youth Day 2002, said both the Canadian and the U.S. bishops joined forces to pay for up to 1,000 Cuban young pilgrims to attend the event, but finally only 200 professionals in their 20s made the trip after Castro issued an 11th-hour approval.
Headed by the bishop of Guantánamo, Carlos Baladrón Valdez, and joined by priests, nuns and three other bishops, Cubans proudly waved their flags during World Youth Day activities, frequently attracting cheers and signs of support from fellow Latin Americans.
Then on July 29 Canadian news reported that “a group of Cuban pilgrims” had evaded their security guards and gone into hiding, defecting from the official delegation.
The news was surprising for World Youth Day organizers. In fact, Bishop James Wingle of St. Catherines, Ontario, said the Canadian bishops gathered in World Youth Day “unwinding” meetings were “caught by surprise by this news like everybody else.”
Paul Kilbertus, spokesman for World Youth Day, said the organizers of the event were not aware of either the number or the whereabouts of the group but that the news was disappointing.
“This is not why we put on World Youth Day,” he said. “You do your best to have the best system in place. We knew this was one of the risks.”
Later, Ismael Sambra, president of the Toronto-based Cuban Canadian Foundation, revealed that the group of Cuban youth contacted his organization and revealed that the first group had about 23 members, “but now we know there are some 50 of them.”
According to Sambra, the Cuban young people who defected “were not only tired of their lives in Cuba, but also of the control of their moves even here in Canada.”
That's understandable, according to what Joanne Boisvert, a World Youth Day organizer of the Diocese of St. Hyacinth, east of Montreal said. She hosted the Cuban pilgrims the week before the main World Youth Day events.
“They were always under special rules governing their stay. When they were in our diocese, they were all there,” said Boisvert, who revealed that the group's leaders “even kept their passports. There were constraints. We couldn't billet them in homes and they had to be in large groups and sleep in church basements and community centers.”
Some of the nearly 50 Cubans who left their country's delegation announced later in the week that they would apply for refugee status, placing the Canadian government — usually friendly to Castro's regime — in a difficult situation.
Some of them have already contacted a local Cuban-Canadian lawyer, Andrés Perera, who has committed help from his law office.
And Joe García, executive director of the Miami-based Cuban-American National Foundation, announced that his organization has sent a lawyer to provide further legal help to the group.
“We are willing to provide any kind of support that is possible, especially now that we know the group seems to be growing,” García said.
When asked for an interview with the defectors, Perera warned that most of them are “obviously paranoid and scared.”
But two of them, who are staying together near Toronto, discussed their decision and why they defected.
Raisel Dominguez admitted being divided about remaining with his relatives or starting a new life, but said that finally the possibility of “starting anew, with opportunities and a future before me,” made the decision for him.
Both he and Renier Figueredo criticized the lack of opportunities in Cuba and the critical situation the country is currently facing at all levels.
Dominguez said the youth delegation was requested by Cuban priests not to defect to Canada because it would hurt the Catholic Church in Cuba.
Church Leaders Upset
As predicted, the news was not received well among Catholic leaders in Cuba.
“I have been informed that this development has embittered the rest of the delegation,” Bishop Baladrón said. During World Youth Day, the bishop declared that the presence of a large Cuban delegation was a goodwill gesture from Fidel Castro toward the Church.
Bishop Baladrón denied reports that his delegation traveled to Canada under the surveillance of Cuban security forces. “We felt totally free during our stay in Canada,” he said.
The bishop also denied that there is any sort of religious prosecution in Cuba. He said the defection was basically a “migration issue.”
“Young people migrate from one place to another, frequently for material reasons,” he said.
Another young Cuban defector in Canada, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that material reasons were involved in his decision but said that stories of religious persecution in Cuba are not exaggerated.
“I understand that the bishops must refrain from openly criticizing Castro, but for Catholics and Christians it is not a secret that there are serious religious limitations on the island,” he said. “You can go to church and to religious activities, but whenever you try to organize something that will bring your faith to the social or political level — I mean, to any kind of public presence — then for one reason or another, you end up in jail.”
He mentioned as examples of such persecution the situations of Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, a Catholic pro-lifer who is in jail for protesting against abortion and the death penalty, and Oswaldo Payá, a militant Catholic founder of the Liberation Christian Movement who has suffered imprisonment and permanent harassment for proposing a national referendum called the Varela Project on behalf of Cuban hero and priest Father Felix Varela.
However, Payá was critical of the defectors. “It is true that the oppression and the lack of perspectives for the future are making millions of Cubans desire to leave the island,” he said. “But in this case, these people earned the trust of the Catholic Church and finally ended up using the representation of the Cuban laity for their own personal projects. I don't want to be harsh on these kids, but I think it was very low for them to use the Church for their personal purposes.”
Pablo Alfonso, a journalist and expert in Cuban issues for the Miami-based El Herald, shared that opinion.
“I don't know the reason why they ‘defected,’ but I can say it is deplorable,” Alfonso said. “They were not part of an official or government's delegation but of youth allegedly committed with their Church and lay organizations.”
Concluded Alfonso: “They did not defect from the government but from their own commitment and responsibility with the Church, which is striving uphill to evangelize in Cuba.”
Alejandro Bermudez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic Teaching Has the Best Way to Stop AIDS DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — The AIDS epidemic has only just begun. Mistakenly considered a diminishing problem of the past by some, it threatens more than 3 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone. But the key question remains: Does the distribution of condoms lessen its spread or actually fuel transmission of the fatal, incurable disease?
The United Nations warned in July that China, the world's most populous country, faces a catastrophic outbreak.
Former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, president of the Global Business Council on HIV/AIDS (GBC), said mankind has no choice but to end “the worst epidemic in 600 years” because it poses a major threat to peace and stability worldwide.
What might stop the spread of AIDS? The Catholic moral teaching regarding human sexual behavior, say condom critics who are working on the front lines of AIDS treatment and prevention.
“Condoms don't work,” said Dr. George Mulcaire-Jones. “In addition to doing little physically to prevent the transmission of HIV, condoms exacerbate the problem by promoting promiscuity in places where that behavior is most deadly at this point in time.”
Past efforts to end the epidemic, headed mostly by the United Nations, have involved shipping millions of condoms to plagued regions. In the 1990s, the U.S. Agency for International Development distributed more than 200 million condoms to AIDS-plagued nations and the problem only worsened.
And the leading U.N. agencies that deal with AIDS continue to promote condom use. In a new study titled “Young People and HIV/AIDS: Opportunity in Crisis” published by UNAIDS, UNICEF and the World Health Organization, condoms are highlighted as a critical element in fighting the spread of the disease.
“Proper condom use and other preventive behaviors, like abstinence, need to be taught early,“ the three U.N. organizations stated in a July 2 press release announcing the new study's publication.
Mulcaire-Jones understands the arguments about condoms; as a physician he has studied most of the research. Even when they are properly manufactured and used properly, condoms can have failure rates of up to 15%. And when defective condoms are distributed — as was the case in Tanzania, where the U.N. Population Fund was forced in May to withdraw 10 million condoms that were found to have holes and to be prone to bursting — or are used improperly, condom failure rates can be far higher.
And Mulcaire-Jones also knows firsthand condoms don't work through his regular travels to Africa — about three trips a year — to work hands-on in the war against AIDS. He volunteers his time and expertise for Maternal Life International, a Catholic organization dedicated to providing women with emergency obstetrical care and AIDS testing, prevention and treatment.
Jesuit Father Richard Cremins also battles AIDS on the front lines in Africa and agrees with Mulcaire-Jones that condoms might be a cause of rapid growth of the disease.
“The hourly jingles on African radio, like the billboards and posters plastered along its roads, tout the ease, safety and unqualified efficacy of condom use,” Father Cremins wrote recently in an unpublished article. “Such messages contain a subtle yet deadly lie — that a person will be completely protected by a latex device that is often not properly used and will likely fail at least one out of 10 times.”
Mulcaire-Jones, Father Cremins and other Maternal Life volunteers began working several years ago with Sister Miriam Duggan, an obstetrician-gynecologist doctor, whom some call “the Irish Mother Teresa.” Sister Duggan uses her vocation to counter the spread of AIDS in Africa. Her medical philosophy and ministry are grounded in a belief that behavioral change through evangelization is the key to combating the spread of AIDS in Africa — not issuing condoms.
Mulcaire-Jones said his entire philosophy about AIDS prevention has changed as a result of his work with Sister Duggan.
“When I first started doing this, I went over to Africa as a Catholic who believed strongly in virtues of NFP [Natural Family Planning],” said Mulcaire-Jones, a resident of Butte, Mont. “But it was my belief that AIDS was so bad in Africa — that it had reached such a critical state — that we needed to forget about teaching NFP and focus on condoms. What I learned is that NFP and AIDS prevention are the same thing. The only proven way to prevent the spread of AIDS is through abstinence before marriage and faithfulness in marriage. What I found is that AIDS prevention, in fact, leads to NFP.”
Father Cremins cited medical studies that show hormonal contraception has an “AIDS-enhancing” transmission factor. Hormonal contraception, including the contraceptive pill, is believed to affect immune barriers of the vagina and cervix. One study found that prostitutes who used injection contraceptives were 240% more likely to contract HIV.
“The failure of condoms, the AIDS-enhancing effects of hormonal contraception and the need for a mature understanding of sexuality challenge us to make NFP, with its attendant values, an integral part of the primary prevention of AIDS,” Father Cremins said. “In this context, NFP must move from the margins of health care to the mainstream.”
To understand how important AIDS prevention is, Mulcaire-Jones said, one needs to realize that there is no AIDS cure and the best AIDS treatment drugs merely slow progress of the virus in an individual carrier. Even those treatments aren't available to the vast majority of people outside of the United States who contract HIV. In Swaziland, Mulcaire-Jones said, about $18 is spent each year on each person for medical care — an amount far insufficient for even one dose of modern HIV antibodies. Each person in Uganda consumes about $8 each year worth of health care, and only one of every 1,000 people infected with HIV are receiving medicinal treatment.
“We've looked at the numbers of people who have AIDS in Africa and run those against the availability of resources for treatment,” Mulcaire-Jones said. “Based on those numbers, we figure that for every 10 people we treat we have to be successful in preventing at least 100 other people from contracting the disease in order to have made any progress at all.”
Back when Mulcaire-Jones believed NFP instruction had no place in regions ravaged by runaway HIV/AIDS, he also believed that it would be nearly impossible to get African men to understand and adhere to lifestyles of abstinence and sexual faithfulness in marriage.
“I have found there is a tremendous willingness to hear and adhere to the Catholic teachings about sexual morality,” Mulcaire-Jones said. “One almost senses there's a desperate thirst for this message. We are having tremendous success in getting African men to embrace this lifestyle — but first they need to learn about it. The Catholic Church really does have the answer to this.”
Hopeful Statistics
Although recent AIDS statistics have alarmed world leaders, regional surveys contain promising information about abstinence education.
“In Uganda, where there has been an intensive AIDS prevention program centered on abstinence, HIV among 15- to 19-year-olds has dropped from 25% of the population in that age group to 9%,” Mulcaire-Jones said.
“During the same period in neighboring Kenya, Malawi and Zambia — where AIDS prevention involved condom distribution and no change in sexual behavior patterns — there has been no drop in new infections,” he said. “Why? Because in ideal, perfect conditions — in which the condoms are worn properly and are in perfect condition — condoms fail one in 10 times. So in perfect conditions it's not much of a guarantee, and they're seldom used in perfect conditions. Meanwhile, they send a message that sexual behavior patterns should continue on as they always have.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Bright Light in Hiroshima DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Aug. 6 is a tragic anniversary for Notre Dame Sister Lucia Akie Aratani.
She was 10 years old when 500,000 of her townspeople died in the 1945 atomic bomb explosion.
In the aftermath of the trauma, which caused the death of her mother in 1951 of radiation-induced leukemia, she began a spiritual search and converted from Buddhism to the Catholic faith. Inspired by American nuns, she eventually became a Notre Dame sister. Sister Aratani, 67, currently teaches English, Bible studies and moral education at Notre Dame Seishin Junior College in Hiroshima.
She told Register correspondent Paul Burnell about the day she will never forget.
What are your memories of Aug. 6, 1945?
I saw a sheer blue light and the blackboard became blue lines. I heard a blast and then it became dark, black. We hid under our desks. All of the glass fell on us; there was black smoke and black dust all over the place. I wasn't injured.
My elder sister was 2 kilometers [1 and a quarter miles] from the epicenter. She saw the floor of the large post office open, heard a loud blast and everything went dark. She didn't know where to get out; she couldn't find the door — she was terrified. Then she found the staircase. She had been bleeding but she was not seriously injured. Our mother went back later that day and became contaminated.
The next day I saw many wounded people. I saw many burned people, many blackened and charred bodies; many bloodied people. All their hair was gone.
Many people were coming away from the center of the city either on the street or sheltering under the trees. All over the place there were burning and wounded people begging for water. We had no water because the city was burning and in the countryside there was no water left. The day after we passed through that place, all of the people were dead. On the street all over the place there were dead people.
I don't think of these things; I don't remember — I try to put it out of my mind.
Many people must feel the same way you do.
A sister who entered the order with me had a terrible, terrible experience as a 5-year-old. She had to carry the body of her dead mother. Then her father and her two brothers died. The sisters in our convent have never spoken to each other about their experiences. It is very difficult for them to talk.
Your mother and your family suffered as a result of the bomb. What feelings did you have toward the United States?
We don't have any feelings against the United States or any other country — we just feel sorry for Asia, the United States and Europe. During World War II our country went cuckoo; we were brainwashed to be cuckoo. After the war we were sorry. At the same time we were relieved — no more bombs.
We feared that when the Americans came they would kill us. We had been told to fight them to the death. We thought they would be like this. It was a big shock to find that the Americans who visited the country wanted to be friends, especially the missionary sisters who came from the United States.
Four years ago I was in England with a group of students who were learning English. I was asked to speak at an open-air service remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was very difficult for me to do it, but I am glad I did. I told the people I had a great mission to promote peace and justice.
Is it true American nuns who taught you in high school had a big influence on you?
Yes, the American nuns were a great influence on the students in Catholic schools in Japan. Now, our Notre Dame American nuns have gone back to their own country as they became old or sick. Although actually, I was influenced by a Jesuit priest to become Catholic and went to Catholic high school. It was there that I was influenced by Notre Dame nuns to become a Sister of Notre Dame.
What impelled you to the Catholic Faith?
We were very strong Buddhists, but I went to a mission school in junior high. Missionaries came from the United States. I found a spiritual home in the Catholic Church.
How did you become a nun?
In high school I became Catholic because of my experience with the missionary sisters. People had lost everything; we were looking for something different in life. The Notre Dame sisters were a big influence on me — it was a Notre Dame high school. At the end of high school, I wanted to be a sister. These sisters were so devoted to God. I found out there was another way of living instead of marrying and having a family. I realized I could influence more people if I gave my life to God.
What do you think when you see other nations in Asia arming themselves with nuclear weapons?
They are really stupid. They don't know the result of the experience that was the atom bomb. When the Holy Father came to Hiroshima in 1981, he prayed that God in his mercy would never allow “the destructive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs to be released on earth again.”
We are living at the turn of the 21st century, and this is one of the most significant periods in our history. I feel a great mission to pray and work for justice and peace in our world. I pray we will all strive for this.
Paul Burnell writes from Manchester, England.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sister Lucia Akie Aratani ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Bush Promotes Adoption With New Web Site and Ad Campaign DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Edward and Jayne Lyons weren't looking to jump into family life by adopting a 4- and a 6-year-old. They had tried having children since their marriage in 1990 but were unsuccessful. They applied to Catholic Charities in St. Paul, Minn., to adopt an infant, but in the meantime learned that Jayne's niece and nephew needed a permanent, stable home.
They would have been helped by an initiative, announced by President Bush, which includes the first federal adoption Web site, AdoptUSKids.org, which will feature photos and profiles of children available for adoption and maintain a database of prospective adoptive parents.
The Bush initiative also includes a public service announcement featuring First Lady Laura Bush and actor Bruce Willis, who was appointed national spokesman for children in foster care. The ad urges families to consider adopting children in foster care and provides a toll-free number families can call to receive information on how to adopt.
The Lyons said this would have been great for them. “We just decided to open our hearts and home,” Jayne said. And Devon, now 7, and Chanel, 9, became their son and daughter. The Lyonses suddenly had a lot to learn about being Mom and Dad — parents of school-age children.
“I guess there's a reason they come in small packages,” Jayne said. Parents normally have a chance to grow into their role when their first child is still an infant, she and her husband explained.
In a speech in the East Room of the White House on July 23, Bush said, in cases like the Lyons, adoption “reveals the good heart of America.”
“Extending the welcome of family to a vulnerable child is a great commitment, but it's an extraordinary act of love,” Bush said.
Bush's brother Marvin and his wife, Margaret, have two children who are adopted.
“Common sense and social science lead to the same conclusion: children thrive in secure, loving and stable homes,” the president said. “Providing that kind of home through adoption can be a long and a time-consuming process.”
The Lyonses, who live outside St. Paul, know about that. They have been waiting three years to adopt an infant.
“I know there are so many couples out there waiting to adopt, especially for a Caucasian baby,” Jayne said. “This has made me think about a couple of things — for example, about how many abortions there are, about the number of pregnant teen-agers and how that's no longer a social stigma.”
Ed Lyons remembers that 30 or more years ago, when unmarried mothers more readily gave up their children for adoption rather than suffer that stigma, “you just got in line [to adopt] and that was it.” Now, he said, more and more grandmothers are insisting on raising children born out of wedlock.
Foster-Care Kids
Bush pointed out that there are about 130,000 children in the nation's foster-care system waiting to be adopted.
“For those of us who support the dignity of every human life, we have a responsibility to encourage hopeful lives for children who are born,” he said.
Willis said many children are leaving the foster-care system as young adults “without any support to help them reach their full potential.”
“There are many, many people in this country who would welcome the chance to help children in foster care, if only someone showed them how they could do it,” Willis said.
The Lyonses also had to help their new children deal with “detachment disorder” stemming from leaving their biological parents and having been moved through the foster-care system.
Adopting children required “a lot of sacrifice and prayer,” Ed said. “It helped us get closer to God.”
But he said the joy of being adoptive parents “definitely outweighs the challenges,” and he and his wife, who are still waiting to adopt an infant through Catholic Charities, are happy to see the White House promoting adoption.
Patrick Purtill, president of the National Council For Adoption, predicted that with the “bully pulpit” of the White House behind it, the new initiative will raise adoption “a lot higher on the radar screen than it's been.”
“Trying to find homes for needy children — permanent, loving families — is a very noble and compassionate thing for Bush to be involved in,” said Purtill, who attended the White House announcement.
“It's a concrete step toward respect for life and being more pro-family,” Ed Lyons commented.
With adoption, the Catholic teaching that married people be open to children has become more important to him and his wife. “We see American society today not always being open. People think of being open to having children in the biological sense. But a more holistic view includes adoption,” he said.
“People think of pro-life as being against abortion,” Jayne Lyons said. “But it's important to look out for kids in foster care too. It's a hard thing for them to be in foster care. … It's great to have information on the new Web site, especially for folks who don't know how to adopt.”
Things have gotten easier for the Lyonses since the period of adjustment when Devon and Chanel started to wonder if their new home would be permanent. They also went through a stage of testing out their new parents to see if some of the rules they lived by in foster homes would work in their new home.
‘Great Experience’
Jayne had the support of a Familia group at her church, who threw her a baby shower. Familia is an apostolate of the Regnum Christi movement.
“It's been a great experience being able to be a parent,” she said. “Adoption is a terrific thing. People say the kids are lucky to have you. We feel we'rethe lucky ones being able to be parents. On a daily basis, they bring joy.”
Having Devon and Chanel adds another incentive for adopting an infant: the boy and girl “need to know that they're the older brother and older sister,” Ed said.
“I can't wait to help take care of the baby,” Chanel wrote on a family Web site. “I'll even help with the diapers.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Only 1/4 of Americans Support Current Abortion Law
LIFESITE NEWS, July 25 — While major media portray those who object to abortion as extremists, surveys continue to show most Americans oppose some abortions permitted under current law.
Lifesite News (www.lifesite.ca) reported Gallup polls consistently show that between 51% and 54% of Americans think abortion should be “legal only under certain circumstances,” between 25% to 27% believe it should be “legal under any circumstances,” while 18% to 22% hold it should be “illegal in all circumstances.”
These divisions of opinion have not changed much in more than 20 years. Lifesite concluded: “What that means is that status-quo abortion on demand does not reflect the beliefs of 75% of Americans, and that since the 1970s, the view of only 25% of Americans has been imposed as law by activist court judges and abortion-supporting politicians.”
'I Left $2.5 Million in Jewels in Poor Box’
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 24 — A New York-based investor has accused his one-time hypnotherapist of tricking him and looting his wealth while he was “under.”
Irwin Uran, 76, claimed that his hypnotherapist Stephen Hymowitz, 59, stole “hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and at least $2.5 million worth of jewelry that belonged to his late mother,” Associated Press reported.
Hymowitz admitted that he had received more than $700,000 from Uran during 15 years of treatment but said he had spent most of it on Uran's behalf, keeping $286,550 “for his own fees and expenses. As for the jewelry, Hymowitz said that he and Uran walked to an Upper East Side Roman Catholic Church and dropped it in the collection box,” according to Associated Press.
A bemused Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the New York Archdiocese for most of the past 20 years, replied, “I don't recall any church finding $2.5 million worth of jewelry in their poor box during all that time.”
EWTN to Reach 98% of World
ETERNAL WORLD TELEVISION NETWORK, July 27 — EWTN Global Catholic Network, which describes itself as “the world's largest religious media organization,” announced last week a 10-year agreement with PanAmSat Corp. to distribute its TV programming throughout Africa and the Indian Ocean region.
“With this agreement, PanAmSat now transmits EWTN to more than 98% of the world's population,” said EWTN President Michael Warsaw. “It is truly incredible for us to know that so many people around the globe can access our message.”
Reaching more than 75 million television homes across the globe, EWTN transmits its signal via more than 12 satellites (North America, Latin America, Europe, the Pacific Rim and Africa/India) with customized channels for each continent, 24 hours a day. EWTN reaches countless millions more via short-wave radio, satellite-delivered AM/FM radio and its online services.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Encouraged by Abstinence Programs, More Teens Remaining Chaste DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:EASTON, Mass. — A summer camp in New York changed Jordan Payne's life forever.
That's where she heard a positive message for chastity from Denny Pattyn, director of the Silver Ring Thing, an abstinence program based in Pittsburgh.
“There were so many kids at this camp wearing silver rings,” Payne said.
Her curiosity brought her and a friend to Pittsburgh to see a program put on by the Silver Ring Thing.
“It's a hi-tech setting. They get the message out in a very funny sketch. It's like ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I thought it was going to be stupid, but it was awesome,” Payne said.
Now's she busy recruiting friends to come to a Silver Ring Thing production in nearby Boston.
“I tell them, ‘You don't have to make a decision.’ They usually say, ‘I don't think I can do it, but I'll come out and support you,” Payne said. “They don't think they're putting on rings, but I think their attitude will change and they'll put on rings.”
Not only is the abstinence program effective, but young people are receptive to the ideas, she said, because they've seen the dangers of sexual activity.
“I've seen so many of my friends who have had their hearts broken because guys take advantage of them,” Payne said. “People are sick of the consequences of sex and playing around. They're ready for something real.”
CDC Data
According to a new federal study, more teens are following Payne's lead.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that in 1990 the number of virgins stood at 45.7%. But in 2001, that number grew higher than the halfway mark to 54.4%.
The information came in the CDC's annual Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey. The study noted that girls were more likely to be virgins (57.1%) than boys (51.5%).
“Latex is out, virginity is in,” said Leslee Unruh, director of the South Dakota-based Abstinence Clear-inghouse. “There are more virgins than sexually active teens. People are buying intimacy, not lust.”
Unruh said that some teens today are second-guessing their parents on sexuality — for the better. “They're saying, ‘Wait a minute. We do not buy into the lies of the ‘60s. Sex is dangerous.’”
The New York-based group SIECUS also heralded the news about chaste teens, but said that abstinence-only education would threaten the decline in teen sexual activity during the last 10 years.
“As we acknowledge the gains of the last decade in reducing the nation's teen pregnancy rate, it is time for the public health community, parents and policy-makers to seriously evaluate how to build upon and expand this positive trend,” said Tamara Kreinan, president of SIECUS, which stands for Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.
“The massive funding of unproven abstinence-only-until-marriage programs may indeed threaten the decline in the nation's teen pregnancy rate witnessed over the last decade,” Kreinan said.
Wrong Message
Edwin Fuelner, a Catholic who is director of the Heritage Foundation, believes that SIECUS is sending the wrong message to teens.
He wrote in the Washington Times: “Guidelines developed by SIECUS, for example, recommend teaching children as young as 5 about masturbation, teaching 9-yearolds about oral sex and teen-agers about anal intercourse. (Hard to believe, I know, but it's true.) This despite the fact that sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in this country have reached epidemic proportions among young people. Some 3 million teen-agers contract STDs each year, afflicting roughly one in four teens who are sexually active.”
Mary Beth Bonacci, who has brought the chastity message to millions of students for the last 16years, also criticized Kreinan's comments.
“Let me see if I get this,” she said. “We've been funding abstinence programs over the last 10 years and we found a big drop in sexual activity.
“But we need to stop funding? If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to get the opposite result?” asked Bonacci, who is also director of Colorado-based Real Love Productions.
“These people are getting more desperate in defending their positions,” she said about SIECUS. Bonacci said the decline would continue if organizations remained focused on funding abstinence programs.
“When I started this in ’86, [youth] had never heard this,” Bonacci said. “Now more and more students show me their commitment cards. More exposed are exposed to this life-affirming message. There's now this whole movement.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Guess Who's Hosting Lunch? Pope Receives 14 Youths at Private Meeting DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:TORONTO — Approximately 500,000 youth gathered to celebrate World Youth Day 2002 with Pope John Paul II, but 14 had an opportunity they won't soon forget. They were invited to a private lunch with the Holy Father at his retreat on Strawberry Island.
Continuing a practice he started in Rome in 2000, the Pope invited 14 young people from around the world to join him for lunch at his retreat on July 26. “I've asked people of the diocese to take people into their home. I will take people into my home,” John Paul said.
The group included three Canadians, one young person from the United States, two from Europe, two from Africa, one from the Middle East, one from Latin America and the rest from Asia and Oceania.
According to Father Thomas Rosica, national director of World Youth Day 2002, the Holy Father asked organizers to choose youth from particularly troubled, persecuted or war-torn areas of the world.
After greeting the Pope, the young people entered a wooden cabin with a fireplace for a meal of spaghetti with asparagus and coleslaw, followed by cake. “I think the Holy Father really liked the cake,” said Anneke Pehmöller of Germany
Conversation centered around the guests: who they were, where they were from and what they did. After lunch, the group sang some songs, including the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” and John Denver's “Take Me Home, Country Road.” Frank Sinclair, a musician from Toronto, led the group on his acoustic guitar.
“We also sang ‘Happy Birthday.’ I'm not exactly sure why we did, but the Pope said Robin Cammarota, who represented St. Francis de Chantel parish in the Bronx. Cammarota shares her own birthday with the Holy Father — May 18.
Cammarota admitted to being nervous before the meeting. “At last night's papal welcoming ceremony I was crying. I thought, ‘If I'm crying now, I'll never be able to make the lunch.’ He's the most important man in the world today. Everyone knows who he is whether they are Catholic or not. You cannot help but be overwhelmed with emotion when you see him,” she said.
“He said it was a terrible tragedy,” Cammarota said. “He said he would keep us in his prayers.
Some members of the group entertained the Holy Father. Sangeetha Joseph of India sang the song “El Shaddai” and said the Pope liked it. At another point, Daniel Sadera Kuntai, dressed in the red robe of the Maasai, performed a traditional dance for the Holy Father. A very tall youth, he had to do the dance outdoors so he could jump as high as was necessary.
Shirley Tso, a 26-year-old teacher from China, conveyed to the Pope that her people love him. “They love me?” asked John Paul. “Yes,” she replied, to which the Holy Father said, “It is incredible.” She said she hoped one day World Youth Day could take place in China.
Sangeetha Joseph suggested to the Holy Father that World Youth Day be celebrated every year. He said he would think about it. Afterward she described her visit as similar to a “little daughter visiting her father.”
“He made us feel at home. He was more lively and more stronger than a youth,” she said.
When Soraya Tsing told him that she was from Tahiti-French Polynesia, he seemed genuinely surprised that young people would come from so far.
Ana-Maria Cagalj, dressed in northern Bosnia traditional dress, was one of eight attendees from her country. She said she wished the Pope good health and many more years. She said she also enjoyed seeing the Holy Father so cheerful.
“When he is with youth his face cheers up, he sings, and he almost dances. He shows us the right way of life,” Cagalj said.
“The Holy Father is trying to build us up — to tell us we are all one family,” Kuntai added.
Each of the youth gave John Paul a gift. Marianne Desgagné from Quebec gave him a T-shirt. Shirley Tso gave him a flag signed by people from her country. Anneke gave him a glass prism. She said he described it as “really shiny.” She hoped that he might set it near a window and that it will remind him of the “light of the world.”
Cliffton John William Mamid, of the Yarru aboriginal people of Australia, gave him some musical clapping sticks. “It was extraordinary,” Mamid said of the luncheon. “It was just like having dinner with your grandfather.”
Gizelle Michael Mijmeh of Jordan summed up the experience of the group: “When I return, I will tell others that I spent time with the representative of Jesus on earth. Can there be anything better?”
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:'Images of Salvation’ Attracts Young Pilgrims
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 25 — One of the less well-publicized sides of World Youth Day was the art show timed to mark it. “Images of Salvation: Masterpieces from the Vatican and Other Italian Collections” came to the Royal Ontario Museum last week and will run until Aug. 11.
According to Associated Press, it employs pictures and sculptures by “Michelangelo, Bernini, Lorenzo Lotto, the schools of Raphael and Rubens and others to illustrate the history of the Catholic Church from medieval times to the present.”
Museum curator Corey Keeble described why the show is unique: “It has works from private collections and diocesan collections throughout the length and breadth of Italy, and these things have never traveled.”
One painting, a Baroque work by Ludovico Mazzanti, depicts the ecstatic, levitating St. Joseph of Cupertino, a friar whom Keeble described as “a 17th-century Franciscan Spider-Man. … This is a man who did not merely jump for joy; he flew, he levitated and circled walls and ceilings,” Keeble said.
Associated Press noted that the flying friar is now the patron saint of airline pilots.
Mexican Boy Busted for Firing Air Gun Near Pope
REUTERS, July 31— According to Reuters news service, police arrested a 14-year-old Mexico City boy on July 31 for shooting a policeman with BB's from an air rifle not long before Pope John Paul II's motorcade passed by his house.
However, police denied any connection to the Holy Father. “This was not against the Pope. There should be no confusion about that,” police said.
Mexico's Federal Preventive Police, municipal police and presidential guard guarded Mexico City's streets for John Paul's fifth visit to Mexico. The 82-year-old Pope, who survived a 1981 assassination attempt in St. Peter's Square, was transported in a bullet-proof “pope-mobile” as tens of thousands of cheering, flag-waving Mexicans lined his route, Reuters reported.
The Holy Father and his convoy were unaware of the air gun incident, a Vatican spokesman said.
Pope Grieves Over Ukraine and India Disasters
VATICAN INFORMATION SERVICE, July 28 — Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state, sent telegrams in the Pope's name to two bishops whose local flocks suffered tragedies last week.
One went to Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, apostolic nuncio in India, where at least 29 died in a shipwreck on a lake in the Christian-inhabited region of Kerala. The other went to Archbishop Nikola Eterovic, apostolic nuncio in Ukraine, where last week's air show in Lviv caused more than 80 deaths and many more injuries.
“Pope John Paul, profoundly upset over the many victims and injured, wishes to express his closeness to those affected … and mourns with them,” the first telegram said.
The second telegram stated, “His Holiness invokes eternal rest upon those who have died and prays that the Lord will sustain the injured and the bereaved with his blessings of grace and strength.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What Was Juan Diego Like? DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:“I thank you, Father … that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was your gracious will” (Matthew 11:25-26).
The following is the text of the Pope's homily from the canonization Mass of St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in Mexico City on July 31.
These words of Jesus in today's Gospel are a special invitation to us to praise and thank God for the gift of the first indigenous saint of the American continent.
With deep joy I have come on pilgrimage to this Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Marian heart of Mexico and of America, to proclaim the holiness of Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, the simple, humble Indian who contemplated the sweet and serene face of Our Lady of Tepeyac, so dear to the people of Mexico.
I am grateful for the kind words of Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico City, and for the warm hospitality of the people of this primatial archdiocese: my cordial greeting goes to everyone. I also greet with affection Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, archbishop emeritus of Mexico City, and the other cardinals, as well as the bishops of Mexico, of America, of the Philip-pines and of other places in the world. I am likewise particularly grateful to the president and the civil authorities for their presence at this celebration.
Today I address a very affectionate greeting to the many indigenous people who have come from the different regions of the country, representing the various ethnic groups and cultures, which make up the rich, multifaceted Mexican reality. The Pope expresses his closeness to them, his deep respect and admiration, and receives them fraternally in the Lord's name.
What was Juan Diego like? Why did God look upon him? The Book of Sirach, as we have heard, teaches us that God alone “is mighty; he is glorified by the humble” (Sirach 3:20). St. Paul's words, also proclaimed at this celebration, shed light on the divine way of bringing about salvation: “God chose what is low and despised in the world … so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:28, 29).
It is moving to read the accounts of Guadalupe, sensitively written and steeped in tenderness. In them the Virgin Mary, the handmaid “who glorified the Lord” (Luke 1:46), reveals herself to Juan Diego as the mother of the true God. As a sign she gives him precious roses, and as he shows them to the bishop, he discovers the blessed image of Our Lady imprinted on his tilma.
“The Guadalupe event,” as the Mexican episcopate has pointed out, “meant the beginning of evangelization with a vitality that surpassed all expectations. Christ's message, through his mother, took up the central elements of the indigenous culture, purified them and gave them the definitive sense of salvation” (May 14, 2002, No. 8). Consequently Guadalupe and Juan Diego have a deep ecclesial and missionary meaning and are a model of perfectly inculturated evangelization.
“The Lord looks down from heaven, he sees all the sons of men” (Psalm 33:13), we recited with the psalmist, once again confessing our faith in God, who makes no distinctions of race or culture. In accepting the Christian message without forgoing his indigenous identity, Juan Diego discovered the profound truth of the new humanity, in which all are called to be children of God. Thus he facilitated the fruitful meeting of two worlds and became the catalyst for the new Mexican identity, closely united to Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose mestizo face expresses her spiritual motherhood that embraces all Mexicans. This is why the witness of his life must continue to be the inspiration for the building up of the Mexican nation, encouraging brotherhood among all its children and ever helping to reconcile Mexico with its origins, values and traditions.
The noble task of building a better Mexico, with greater justice and solidarity, demands the cooperation of all. In particular, it is necessary today to support the indigenous peoples in their legitimate aspirations, respecting and defending the authentic values of each ethnic group. Mexico needs its indigenous peoples and these peoples need Mexico!
Beloved brothers and sisters of every ethnic background of Mexico and America, today, in praising the Indian Juan Diego, I want to express to all of you the closeness of the Church and the Pope, embracing you with love and encouraging you to overcome with hope the difficult times you are going through.
At this decisive moment in Mexico's history, having already crossed the threshold of the new millennium, I entrust to the powerful intercession of St. Juan Diego the joys and hopes, the fears and anxieties of the beloved Mexican people, whom I carry in my heart.
Blessed Juan Diego, a good, Christian Indian, whom simple people have always considered a saint! We ask you to accompany the Church on her pilgrimage in Mexico, so that she may be more evangelizing and more missionary each day. Encour-age the bishops, support the priests, inspire new and holy vocations, help all those who give their lives to the cause of Christ and the spread of his Kingdom.
Happy Juan Diego, true and faithful man! We entrust to you our lay brothers and sisters so that, feeling the call to holiness, they may imbue every area of social life with the spirit of the Gospel. Bless families, strengthen spouses in their marriage, sustain the efforts of parents to give their children a Christian upbringing. Look with favor upon the pain of those who are suffering in body or in spirit, on those afflicted by poverty, loneliness, marginalization or ignorance. May all people, civic leaders and ordinary citizens, always act in accordance with the demands of justice and with respect for the dignity of each person, so that in this way peace may be reinforced.
Beloved Juan Diego, “the talking eagle"! Show us the way that leads to the “Dark Virgin” of Tepeyac, that she may receive us in the depths of her heart, for she is the loving, compassionate mother who guides us to the true God. Amen.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:China Continues Persecution
THE CARDINAL KUNG FOUNDATION, July 27— Three Catholic priests were sentenced to several years in a labor camp for saying Mass and for rejecting membership in the “patriotic church” okayed by the communist government in China.
The Cardinal Kung Foundation, based in Stamford, Conn., said that Father Pang Yongxing, Father Ma Shunbao and Father Wang Limao were arrested for breaking anticult laws and “disturbing the peace of society.”
Apparently Father Pang, 30, was arrested at his home in December 2001; Father Wang, 32, was arrested March 24 while saying Palm Sunday Mass; and Father Ma, 50, was arrested the next week during Easter Mass.
Associated Press noted that despite harsh punishments, “millions of Chinese remain loyal to the Pope and worship in underground churches, whose leaders are appointed in secret by the Vatican.”
Monks Fight Atop Holy Sepulcher
Control over the church has been subdivided over the centuries among five Christian denominations — Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Egyptian Coptic, Ethiopian Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox — that have long competed for every inch of sacred ground, to the consternation of Muslim, British and now Israeli authorities.
Last week, 11 monks went to the hospital after a fracas erupted between Ethiopian and Coptic monks, who have been fighting for centuries, sometimes literally, over control of the church's roof.
The fight began because of the position of a chair an Egyptian monk uses to stake his claim to the rooftop, part of which the Coptics use as their monastery. On a hot day the monk decided to move his chair out of the sun.
According to the Daily Telegraph, “This was seen by the Ethiopians as violating the 'status quo’ in the church, set out in a 1757 document which defines the ownership of every chapel, lamp and flagstone.”
Tension rose for several days, until at last “black-clad monks threw stones and iron bars at each other” until the Israeli police arrived and took 11 injured monks to the hospital.
“The Egyptians said their monk was teased and poked and, in a final insult, pinched by a woman,” according to the paper, which called the site “the most un-Christian place on earth.”
Terror Suspects Die By the Sword
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 28 — Six Pakistani men accused of being Islamic militants died during a firefight with police last week. Four of them were suspects in a bloody attack last year on St. Dominic's Church in Behawalpur, during which 16 people died.
Pakistani police had been escorting the four suspects, members of the illegal Islamic group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, outside the city of Behawalpur when a car full of attackers started firing at them and freed the militants, wounding nine policemen.
Police gave chase for miles, finally catching the escapees and their accomplices near Kherpur Tamewala. Six radicals died, including all four escaped prisoners. Two of the men who tried to free the suspects did escape.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Lay Evangelizers Go on Offense In Mexico DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:MEXICO CITY — With the canonization of St. Juan Diego, witness of the Guadalupe apparitions and an evangelizer of the Aztecs, Pope John Paul II highlighted the role Indians have in proclaiming the Gospel.
This is, in fact, the objective of the Full-Time Evangelizers program of Mexico and Central America, which trains and supports lay catechists, including many Indians.
Alejandro Pinelo, director of the organization, spoke with Zenit about the program, which has 1,000 Indians dedicated full time to evangelization and 35,000 part-timers.
When did you begin this initiative?
Initially, the work was conceived for rural areas where priests cannot carry out all their activities because of the vast territorial expanse of Mexican parishes. Some have up to 20 or 30 chapels. One can only respond with the laity to the great demand for formation, liturgical services, pre-sacramental courses and preparation of catechists.
The great majority of evangelizers are Indians. Today they have a saint who is very close to them.
Indeed, many of them are bilingual, because in Mexico there is a great quantity of dialects and Indian languages. There are more than 27 different ones among our evangelizers and catechists.
They are people as native as Juan Diego himself, with whom many of them identified before he was beatified. The one who is now a saint is very much loved throughout Mexico. Now he will be able to be a more effective model and intercessor in the new evangelization.
Does this mean that they only work in rural areas?
No. Our work is carried out both in cities as well as the country, wherever the bishop indicates a priority.
On which bishop does the program of evangelizers depend?
On each one of the dioceses where we are invited. The one who requests and authorizes the program is the bishop. Often it is he himself who brings together his priests to make a general presentation of the program. Each one of the parish priests chooses the candidates among those agents who already have three or more years of pastoral service.
Following the example of Juan Diego Cuahutlatoatzin, we do what the bishop tells us, with the certainty that in doing so we please God and will attain excellence.
What is its specific charism? What is novel about the program?
Apostolic effectiveness. We have St. Paul and St. Peter as patrons. The former enlightens us with his capacity of evangelizing work; the latter compels us to maintain unity around the Vicar of Christ, giving us the guarantee of going on the right road.
St. Augustine advises paying attention to the road you take, because if you are mistaken, the more you run the farther away you are from the goal. We regard effectiveness as reaching the greatest number of brothers, in a profound way, in proclamation and formation, in the least time possible.
This sounds like business language.
Yes. The fact is that the program is carried out by the laity, many of whom are professionals and, needless to say, we have wanted to put the best methodology at the service of the Church. The latest fashion in the 16th century was the printing press, and the Franciscans worked to bring it over; we use current tools.
How does the program work in practice?
We give in-depth formation to full-time evangelizers so they can form others who will be dedicated, even though part time, to catechesis, liturgy or human development. In this way, we have been able to prepare 35,000 part-time evangelizers.
Who accredits the formation of these agents?
Our programs are based on the methodology of the pontifical School of Faith, a university institution directed by the Legionaries of Christ.
Who pays for the scholarships?
They are paid for by committed laymen who finance the project.
Juan Diego's canonization is a very special moment for you. Have you prepared a special activity?
Of course. We have been preparing ourselves for more than a year. Twelve hundred of our evangelizers were able to attend the canonization in the basilica of Guadalupe, as the space was very limited, but almost all of them were on the streets.
The congress we hold every two years; [this year it was scheduled to] take place on Aug. 2 and 3. Obviously, on this occasion we have dedicated it to St. Juan Diego and the Virgin of Guadalupe as the first evangelizers of America. The motto is “go out into the world and preach the Gospel.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Surprised by John Paul DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:The full measure of Pope John Paul II's triumph in Toronto can be seen in the media's overwhelmingly positive coverage of World Youth Day 2002. Following are excerpts from articles published in Toronto's secular dailies, which often seemed surprised at their own reaction. Our thanks to the Canadian online publication Lifesite, which gathered these excerpts:
“When I walked into one of the major TV network offices, those present burst into applause: one senior woman blurted out: ‘This is one of the most beautiful stories we have ever covered. Thanks for helping us to arrange it.’”
— Column by Father Tom Rosica, World Youth Day chief organizer, Toronto Sun, July 29.
“John Paul, we have a confession to make. We underestimated you. Thanks. Thank you for reminding us, regardless of our religion, about the importance of duty and determination. About the power of faith and the power of God. Thank you for bringing to Toronto those hundreds of thousands of wonderful and sincere young people.”
— Editorial, Toronto Sun, July 29. “[A]s the papal coverage built to a deafening crescendo over the past week, until it was difficult to distinguish some of our main media outlets from the Vatican press office, I started to ponder a different question: ‘How can one keep any sort of secular perspective in a world awash in faith?’”
— Pro-abortion columnist Linda McQuaig, no fan of the Catholic faith, in the Toronto Star July 28.
“[T]he issues of modern day aren't so ‘modern’ after all. St. Paul's letters make clear that the early Christians lived in a society every bit as materialistic, selfish, violent and exploitive as our own. … The Pope stands tall not because he changed, but because he's had the courage to remain constant. That's precisely why his message will remain relevant and have staying power.”
— Column by Guy Giorno, chief of staff to former Ontario Premier Mike Harris, Toronto Star, July 28.
“The groups of young Catholics brandishing flags of their countries, singing, cheerful, polite and friendly, marching through Toronto, have had a stunning effect. … They put cynics to shame.”
— Pro-abortion columnist Peter Worthington, Toronto Sun, July 29.
“The most unbelievable experience I've had in 31 years of policing. … All these people and no trouble; it was breathtaking, out of this world.”
— Toronto Police Sgt. Jim Muscat, after working all night, quoted in the National Post, July 29.
“The irony is that what critics see as the Pope's weakness is his greatest strength. John Paul has proven what politicians say but don't mean: if you are true to yourself, and if your heart is pure, people will respect you, even if they disagree with you. … And because John Paul, throughout his papacy, has been true to himself, he towers above politicians when it comes to public respect. … May God bless him and keep him with us for many years to come.”
— Editorial, “A force for good, for God,” Toronto Sun, July 28.
“As a non-Catholic I found the event quite inspirational. And quite frankly, I got a little tired of all the whining about clogged roads, about how World Youth Day didn't include non-Catholics and on and on. Frankly, as an Anglican I envy the Catholic Church the ability to organize such an event. … The reason the Pope maintains his moral authority is that he doesn't take political sides. He takes on all sides, right or left, for what he sees is right, is moral.”
— Regular political columnist Christina Blizzard, Toronto Sun, July 28.
“All right. I give up. I've been overcome by a surge of papal envy. … Only events on the magnitude of Sept. 11 have commanded more space in the media recently. … I have a lot of problems with the Catholic Church — all the usual ones like abortion, contraception, divorce … but the hordes at World Youth Day knocked me out. [I]t is a joy to see the crowds of youthful believers out there singing songs on the subway and behaving angelically.”
— Regular columnist Connie Woodcock, Toronto Sun, July 28.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Hello, Goodbye DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:I appreciate the attention drawn to Michael Rose's lapse in responsible journalism ("Goodbye, Good Journalism?” June 30-July 6) and sincerely hope Father Taillon's reputation as a faithful priest is honorably restored.
However, if even a quarter of what Rose uncovered in his book Goodbye, Good Men is true, the Church in America owes him a debt of gratitude for his courageous exposé. I have served seven years on the vocations board of the Phoenix Diocese and have a deep love for seminarians and for their formation. May God have mercy upon the bishops, rectors and seminary faculty members who are, or have been, party to this shameful desecration of the priest-hood of Jesus Christ.
JENELLE VAN BRUNT
Tempe, Arizona
They Accused Padre Pio
Regarding “Let's Roll” (ncregister.com):
We need to see both sides of the coin. Critics charged St. Pio with sexual improprieties and mishandling of donations. An archbishop called him “demon-possessed” and a “corrupter of morals.”
At Padre Pio's beatification, our Pope said God had allowed these misunderstandings to serve as a “crucible of purification. What concerns me at this time is that innocent priests may well be unjustly accused.
EILEEN FEEHAN TOEDTLI
Salem, Oregon
Priests and Me
Regarding “Let's Roll” (ncregister.com):
I have no desire to minimize the seriousness of the accusations that have been leveled; correction of these abuses will require the utmost seriousness and dedication. Indeed, I pray that the lessons learned and the humiliation we Catholics have endured will not be forgotten, dismissed nor excused. May God bless us with the courage to make the right decisions, according to his plan and will, and not according to the currently fashionable advice being proffered so freely.
My real purpose in writing is to simply express one Catholic's deep appreciation for the gift the priesthood is to the Church, to society and to me. The faithfulness of so many priests has helped me immeasurably to encounter Christ. Their counsel, concern and committed love have enabled me to deal with my daily challenges, and to make decisions of lifelong importance to me and my family. Their joy and sense of humor have helped me to keep my difficulties in balance. It has been their sacrifices, including the commitment to celibacy they and so many other religious men and women in the Church have made, that have allowed them to be available in service to those of us occupied in the trying task of caring for our families.
I remember sitting down with my wife's longtime pastor, Father Cimperman, to ask if he would marry us in his parish church. Before getting down to business, he proceeded to ask my fiancé about each of her 11 brothers and sisters, inquiring as to their present health and well-being.
Several years later, my wife expressed concern to our pastor, Father Hilkert, who didn't look like he was getting enough sleep while enduring medical problems. He said he thought of playing tapes of some of his homilies at bedtime; he had noticed that they seemed to help so many others get to sleep.
At all the turning points of my life, there has been a priest. I pray for them daily. I pray that they may not be disheartened or intimidated by these present passing scandals. Rather, I pray they may take courage from the opportunity to be more like Christ in his willingness to endure all, that others might come to know the Father's love.
DAVE MYERS
Wildwood, Missouri
A Plea for Prayer
I read the interview with Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR ("Father Groeschel on the Scandals: Where to Go From Here,” June 14-20). It is right in line with what I have been telling my fellow Catholics. It is very easy to make an accusation without any real basis for it. But once the damage is done, it is hard to convince anyone that it was “just an accusation” and not really true. It is like opening up a “feather pillow” in the wind.
While there is a possibility of some accusations having merit, the media is bent on exploiting every accusation and not just those that are true. I happen to believe that there is a real effort out there to try to discredit not just priests, but the Catholic faith and all faith in God in general. I would not put it past them to even fabricate some of their own.
Only through a groundswell of prayer, such as we saw after the Sept. 11 tragedy, can we overcome this latest threat. I have, on my own in a small way, tried to get a prayer crusade going. But it will take more than my meager effort to get it going throughout the United States. I also think that every church should sponsor holy hours either weekly or even daily so that this crisis will pass. If our priests ask for prayers we will support them, and we would want them to also be prayerful.
Lastly, I hope every Catholic priest proudly wears his collar and becomes a witness on the streets by doing so. The only fear we should have in our life is fear of the Lord and not someone's opinion. In the end it is not the
polls, the media or anyone else who has the final say. God looks into each person's heart. He knows exactly where we stand and is also ready to help us when we need him. After all, what we are going through is no less than what he went through 2,000 years ago, and he endured it for each and every one of us. Have courage. God is with us and will not abandon us. Believe it!
JO HRABLEY
Lakewood, Ohio
Miesel and the Miracle
Sandra Miesel voices disbeliefs typical of those who deny all miraculous events ("In Her Eyes,” Letters, July 28-Aug 2). She claims to only see blobs of clouds in the Virgin's eyes, yet questions why and how the 25-power enlargement of the eye contains a bearded bust of St. Juan Diego. She contends an indigenous Mexican would not have had a beard.
Let me attempt to answer Miesel's concern as to how Juan Diego's bust can be in the eyes of his tilma that he is presenting to the bishop. The reflections in the eyes on the tilma are known in photography as a “Purkinje-Sanson” effect. Photography did not exist in 1531, yet the best explanation of the image on the tilma, by Kodak officials no less, is that the image is a color photographic print developed on the cactus fiber tilma.
So how did God pull that feat off? The Blessed Virgin must have been invisibly present in the room as Juan was presenting the flowers to Bishop Zumarraga. God used his miraculous polaroid and photographed his mother, and also let her eyes reflect at least three persons standing in front of her, including St. Juan Diego. God then instantly developed the photograph on the tilma as the roses cascaded to the floor.
Since 1956, these eyes have been examined by many ophthalmologists using ophthalmo-scopes; all have seen the miraculous reflections and none have reported seeing blobs of clouds. To those with the gift of faith, little proof is required. To nonbelievers, no amount of factual evidence will ever suffice to document the intervention of God in our scientific world.
GREG WATKINS
Concord, California
Adam in the Garden
Regarding “Eco-Theology” (Letters, July 28-Aug. 3):
I am sure Greg Wood is technically correct, but I think human interaction with the world's resources is what we are supposed to be doing. God gave us the earth to take care of. We are the stewards of his creation.
My father, former Interior Secretary Walter Hickel, once was quoted as saying “we can't let nature run wild” and meant that we are supposed to take responsibility in this regard.
Our own safety often depends on cutting the brush and trees away from buildings to protect them from wildfires caused by lightning strikes or careless people. The forests might be healthy in themselves, but not for us, the stewards of the earth. Sometimes we have to step in and prevent damage from insects that would damage or destroy the resource.
The forest in that condition, without our interaction, is not healthy.
TED HICKEL
Portland, Oregon
Contraception Kills
Regarding “N.Y. ‘Pill Bill’ Puts Church in Tough Spot” (July 28-Aug. 3):
There are flaws with local Catholic conferences and bishops’ groups not opposing “family planning” programs but focusing only on abortion because of the difference between killing human life and preventing contraception.
God struck down Onan for the most inoffensive of contraceptive activity: withdrawal. Modern-day contraceptives are very damaging to women and ultimately increase medical (and social) costs to society. Contraceptive use increases abortion rates. The Alan Guttmacher Institute statistics and “pro-choice” experts readily admit this among themselves. That's why they lobby so hard for contraception.
Most of the popular contraceptives are abortifacient. This cannot be stressed enough! It doesn't matter that the abortifacient potential is listed as a third mechanism behind suppression of ovulation and thickening of cervical mucus to prevent sperm and egg from meeting. No one knows when the abortifacient mechanism comes into play in an individual woman. It is possible that more human life is destroyed by these chemicals than by surgical abortion.
I sympathize with Msgr. William Smith's assertion that the state should not be forcing individuals or religious institutions to violate their conscience. Alas, the Constitution's principles are violated every day. Unless American Catholics start to obey the teaching authority of the Church, the future does not look too bright for our Church in this country within the next few decades, and I think a great deal of damage will be done to Catholic health care systems.
KATHRYN GROENING
Midland, Michigan
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: John Paul II and the Worldís Hope DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding “John Paul's Toronto Triumph” (Aug. 4-10):
I am so pleased to be able to say that, contrary to what the doom-and-gloom folks have been saying about our young people having no regard for anything, they have made quite an impression on me with the way they greeted the Holy Father on his visit to Canada.
Watching that truly remarkable man in his 80s take Toronto by storm, amid the cheers and praise of so many of the world's young folks and others, was a truly remarkable sight. They are so vocal in their praise and adoration of him. Frail he may be, but mover of the multitudes he is! These scenes most assuredly give the world hope that there are better times in store for us all.
BILL ROUCHELL
River Ridge, Louisiana
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Getting an Apologetics Handle On 'the Scandal' DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Over the last few months the term scandal has achieved new vitality in politics, finance and religion.
Hardly a day goes by that headlines do not feature the word, particularly in reference to the Church. The word has become so ubiquitous that Catholics use a shorthand when speaking among themselves. We refer to “the scandal,” with no need for further elucidation. We all know which scandal we mean, even if we do not all know what is meant by the underlying term.
Most Catholics were brought up thinking that scandal means giving a bad example. Protestants commonly thought that it referred to sexual improprieties. It actually has a wider and deeper sense. I like the way Msgr. Ronald Knox (1888–1957) explained it in Trials of a Translator when he noted that our Lord's teaching was said to “scandalize the Pharisees.”
“What was the trouble with the Pharisees?” asked Knox. “Not that they were shocked, exactly — that is a modern connotation of the term; not that they were indignant — that is a false inference from the Authorized Version's ‘offended.’ To be scandalized is, rather, to be ‘put off'; if only slang were not so much more expressive than English!
“You have been going along, so far, quite happy and undisturbed in your religious beliefs, your spiritual loyalties, and then suddenly something crops up, something seen or heard, which throws you out of your course; you have the feelings of a man who has tripped over some unseen obstacles and stumbled off the pathway into rough ground; that is to be scandalized.”
A lot of Catholics have been tripping over obstacles recently — some of their own making, some made by leaders of the Church. It has not been a pretty sight.
Understandably enough, we take more offense at scandals perpetrated by others than by ourselves. If the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, so the scandal in the neighbor's yard is always worse than the one in our own. This is almost always true in terms of perception, but sometimes it is true in terms of fact.
This should not be grounds for self-satisfaction, of course; my neighbor may be guilty of a spiritual felony, but that does not mean I am not guilty of a string of misdemeanors.
How will “the scandal” play out? I have no idea — and neither does anyone else.
We all have hopes, but few of us will allow our expectations to match our hopes — we have been disappointed too often in life to set ourselves up for that kind of fall. Only the very young and the very holy are likely to get through this time without anxiety and without keen disappointment. The rest of us will just have to offer it up.
Will any exodus from the Church be offset by an influx? Stranger things have happened.
In his autobiography, The Church and I, Catholic apologist Frank Sheed titled one of his chapters “I Lose My Awe of Bishops.” He was writing about the way things were at the upper levels of the Church in America more than half a century ago. There was no evidence of today's problems back then, but there were problems nevertheless among bishops and priests — only to be expected, since the sacrament of ordination does not do away with the effects of original sin.
If nothing else, we can take satisfaction in knowing that God brings good out of evil and that he can bring great good out of great evil. This is not to say that we should will evil so that God might display his magnanimity, but it is a consolation. How unbearable it would be if the only result of evil were still more evil! The ancient Romans had a saying: “The corruption of the best is the worst.” It hurts more when those who should be exemplars turn out to be bad examples.
It is far too early to say how “the scandal” will affect the line of work I am engaged in, apologetics. So far I have not received many querulous letters or e-mails, and I do not have the sense that Catholics are turning their backs on the Church. That still may come, if at length it appears there is no authentic reform in the making.
For all I know, “the scandal” may redound to the Church's benefit in terms of raw numbers. It does seem that Catholics of all stripes are acknowledging that Church teachings have not been lived up to. If nothing else, this implies we have teachings that are supposed to be followed.
What we see observed in the breach, if not in the practice, may end up making some people focus on what those teachings are. If they do that, they may find the teachings attractive because true, and that might mean that any exodus from the Church will be offset by an influx. Stranger things have happened.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karl Keating ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Praying For Prosperity: The Jabez Juggernaut DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:As scandals rock the world of finance, a special genre of Christian books — books linking faith and prosperity — may look like a good antidote.
Look again.
The BreakThrough Series, authored by evangelical Protestant pastor and author Bruce Wilkinson, is selling out of Christian bookstores. The first book of the series, The Prayer of Jabez, was the non-fiction sensation of 2000. Published by Multnomah Press, it's a slender book about a short and obscure Old Testament prayer buried among the genealogies of 1 Chronicles. It topped the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists, sold nearly 10 million copies and became a merchandising monster (you can now get Ja-bez apparel, videos, mousepads and so on).
The second BreakThrough book, Secrets of the Vine, was published in April 2001 and has also enjoyed great success. Essentially an extended sermon about the first few verses of John 15, it's already sold more than 3 million copies. The third book in the series, A Life God Rewards, will be released next month — along with an extraordinary assortment of spinoff products. There'll be A Life God Rewards CDs, prayer journals, study guides, devotionals and a leather-bound collector's edition. Rewards focuses on eternity and, according to the book's Web site (www.pray-erofjabez.com), will show “why it's worth it (at a 1,000% return on investment) to serve God with all your heart for all your life!” Once again, more breaking through, more investing — and, undoubtedly, more chart-topping sales figures.
Even if Wilkinson's books hold little interest for Catholics, their impact on the culture would be difficult to ignore. While most of his sales are to evangelical Protestants, many Catholics are reading the books, too — and urging other Catholics to do likewise. Judging by some online reviews I perused recently, they find the books to be spiritually encouraging and even life-changing. One Catholic writes, “[The Prayer of Jabez] has brought me closer to my religion. As a Catholic in difficult times, it has renewed my faith in God.” Other Catholics openly wonder if the books align with Church teaching but find the benefits too good to resist.
Eternal Insecurity?
Do Breakthrough books nudge investors toward greater spiritual accountability via a soul audit? Or do they give a Christian veneer to corporate greed?
Neither. Energetic, earnest and occasionally muddled, they are self-help books formed from evangelical Protestant preaching, pentecostalism, motivational workshops and the business world. They represent a growing segment of mainstream evangelical-Protestant spirituality that is theologically simplistic, heavy on emotion and oriented toward quick, concrete results.
The Prayer of Jabez is a classic case of a molehill turned mountain. The prayer found in 1 Chronicles 4:10 is modest and earthbound. But for Wilkinson, the prayer is revolutionary, miraculous, able to unlock God's blessings. Just pray its words every day for a month and see God work miracles in your life. It “distills God's powerful will for your future,” he writes, “[and] reveals that your Father longs to give you so much more than you may have ever thought to ask for.” This exuberant approach has led many critics to point out flaws in Wilkinson's understanding of prayer, God and the Christian life.
And, indeed, the book lacks both context and balance. Prayer is presented as largely a matter of asking, with little thought for prayer that is liturgical, communal or contemplative. There are hardly any references to the Trinitarian nature of God, Jesus Christ or even a basic Gospel message. Wilkinson's interpretation of 1 Chronicles 4:10 is highly subjective and relies heavily on anecdotes, which he uses to build a case for the “transforming” power of the Jabez prayer.
Secrets of the Vine is a better book than The Prayer of Jabez: It's got more substance and less sensationalism. Although it opens with a rather heady claim — “The secrets of the vine that I will show you in the chapters to come are our Father's amazing plan to keep His children flourishing physically, emotionally, and spiritually” — the majority of Vine is more sober and balanced than Jabez.While Jabez is relentlessly optimistic and often unrealistic, Vine emphasizes that the Christian life is filled with difficulties. Sometimes the struggles are due to our sins and God's disciplinary response. On other occasions God prunes away distractions separating us from his will. In this pruning, Wilkinson notes, “God's goal isn't to plunder or harm, but to liberate us so that we can pursue our true desire — His kingdom.”
This is well and good, but there are problems with Wilkinson's understanding of John 15. Believing that salvation, once obtained, can never be lost (a popular, though not uniform, Protestant teaching often termed “once saved, always saved” or “eternal security"), Wilkinson misinterprets John 15:2, which states: “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, he takes away.” He claims this refers to branches being lifted up and “cleaned off,” that is, disciplined. Ignored is John 15:6, which states that those branches not abiding in Christ will be thrown away, dried up and burned. Wilkinson's belief that salvation cannot be lost is intriguing since his understanding of grace is much closer to Catholic doctrine than to classical Protestant teaching. He refers to grace as a “life force,” and describes it as the dynamic, internal life given by God, a far cry from the external, legal notion of grace taught by Luther and Calvin. Repentance, he notes, is not a “one-time act,” but a “lifestyle.”
Break On Through
But if the life of grace is dynamic and relational, why believe it cannot be destroyed through sin and neglect? Why insist that Christians who choose to disobey God are on their own, separated from Christ — and yet remain “saved"? On one hand the book is filled with the relational, subjective language common in various evangelical and pentecostal circles; on the other, it clings to the juridical model of salvation shaped by the Protestant reformers. The result is theological incoherence. Instead of a choice between heaven and hell, readers are told they are choosing from among different “seasons,” or spiritual levels: disciplining, pruning and abiding. What could have been a rousing call to holiness becomes a step-by-step system for “breaking through to abundance.”
As in The Prayer of Jabez, there is a basic confusion about what is the goal of the Christian life. Is it attaining personal fulfillment? Glorifying God? Expanding one's ministry? Enjoying abundance? This uncertainty reflects the failure of the BreakThrough Series to contemplate, even in the most elementary form, the nature of God and the reality of the Incarnation. Without a recognition that God's Trinitarian nature is love, sacrifice and self-donation, it is difficult to appreciate how and why the disciple of Christ is called to the same holy life as lived by the God-man: one of self-giving and sacrifice.
There is a palpable longing for the sacraments in Secrets of the Vine. Wilkinson writes, “When you read your Bible, receive, and savor it like food.” References to reading Scripture, keeping a spiritual journal and spending time with God reflect an innate desire for liturgy, confession and the Eucharist.
As a former evangelical Protestant, I recognize this hunger that can only be satisfied by the Eucharist and the fullness of the Christian faith found in the Catholic Church.
These books won't stop the meltdown in money morals, by any means. But their contribution will be a net positive.
Let's pray the BreakThrough Series, despite its flaws and limitations, will bring some readers to an awareness that the abundant life awaits them on the altar of their local parish. Then let's explain, by our actions as well as our words, what that life consists of.
Carl Olson, editor of Envoy magazine, writes from Heath, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl E. Olson ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: 500 Years and Millions of Masses Later, What Next? DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:At their June meeting in Dallas, the U.S. bishops designated this Aug. 14 a day of prayer and fasting for themselves.
The object, they said, would be to do penance for their failures to prevent priests from sexually abusing minors.
That certainly makes next Wednesday an important day for all American Catholics. It wouldn't hurt any of us to fast with the bishops that day and to pray for them.
But Aug. 14 is significant for another reason as well — one that is far more encouraging and joyful. As the bishops offer their prayers of penance, Cardinal Nicolas de Jesus Lopez Rodriguez, archbishop of Santo Domingo and cardinal primate of the Americas, will celebrate Mass in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
The sentence is a mouthfull. But it's worth saying, because the cardinal's Mass will be celebrated to mark the 500th anniversary of the very first Mass celebrated on the soil of the Americas.
The first American Mass was celebrated in Honduras in 1502, during the fourth and final voyage of Christopher Columbus to “the New World.” One presumes that Columbus himself was present at the Mass, but, as far as I have been able to learn, the name of the priest who celebrated that Mass is lost to history.
It seems worthwhile to reflect on the past 500 years from the perspective of this celebration. How many Masses have been celebrated in the Americas since that first one? Millions, certainly.
Countless priests have offered them. Some of these have been bishops, cardinals, even a couple of popes. Most, though, have been offered by simple priests. In parishes, in missions, in convents and monasteries — the great preponderance of Masses have been celebrated by priests as nameless to history as the one who offered that first Mass here 500 years ago.
Some of those millions of Masses have been celebrated by saints and heroes. One hundred and forty years after that first Mass in Honduras, Jesuit Fathers Isaac Jogues and John de Brebeuf celebrated Mass near Lake Superior, even as their very lives were threatened (and later taken) because of the work they did to make known the mystery they celebrated.
A little more than 300 years after that, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in El Salvador while celebrating one of those millions of Masses, because what he celebrated daily in that sacrament compelled him to demand justice for the people entrusted to his care. Much more recently, Archbishop Isaias Duarte died in Colombia for similar reasons. He was leaving a church after celebrating a wedding Mass.
How many times has Communion been received, and by how many laity and religious, at all those millions of Masses? It is awesome to consider the grace that has been offered and received through the Masses celebrated here since that first one. Awesome, too, to consider what that grace has done in the lives of those it entered.
Martin de Porres was there in the pews in Peru. Juan Diego in Mexico. And Frances Xavier Cabrini in the United States. And many holy men and women unknown to just about everyone. Their sanctity, though hidden, has sustained the faith on this soil for five centuries.
Without a doubt, many sinners have offered Mass, too. And that is fitting as well. “Two sorts of people ought to go to Mass frequently,” said St. Francis de Sales. “The saints in order to remain so, and those who are not saints, in order to becomes saints.” I know which group I'm in. Thank God, then, for all those sinners at all those Masses.
The Mass celebrated by Cardinal Rodriguez in Honduras will be a remarkable occasion, and I wish I were able to be there. I'd like to think these thoughts and pray prayers of thanks for them “on location.” But there is no reason that a little city in Honduras should be the only place that the anniversary is commemorated.
At your local parish church this coming Wednesday, morning Mass will no doubt be offered in celebration of the Feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe. In 1502, of course, only God knew that Father Kolbe would one day exist.
Why not make it a point to attend Mass that day? Do it to join with our bishops in prayer but also to give thanks for the gift of the Mass, and for the gift of the faith in North and South America. Attend and receive the Communion that unites you to our Lord and to the people who make up his Church throughout the Americas and elsewhere — indeed, throughout the entire earth.
Attend, and then leave the Mass more determined than ever to make your own personal sojourn through life in your own little corner of the Americas something worthwhile — something that makes the love of God more present, the mercy of God more palpable, the glory of God more honored.
When they are one day celebrating the 1,000th anniversary of the first Mass offered in the Americas (presuming God does not call a close to history in the meantime), what will they remember of the Masses celebrated here and now? Who are the holy and courageous priests they'll remember as offering those Masses? Who are the laity who will end up heroes and saints from the grace received when they walked up in the Communion line?
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Barry Michaels writes from Blairsville, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barry Michaels ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: World Youth Day Begins on the Shores of Lake Ontario DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:You Have Come on a Journey With Christ
Pope John Paul II's opening greeting at the papal welcoming ceremony, July 25, follows:
Dear Young Friends! You have come to Toronto from every continent to celebrate World Youth Day. My joyful and heartfelt greetings go to you! I have been eagerly looking forward to this meeting, especially when day after day from all parts of the world I received in the Vatican good news about all the initiatives that have marked your journey here. And often, even without having met you, I commended you one by one in my prayers to the Lord. He has always known you, and he loves each one of you personally. With fraternal affection I greet the cardinals and bishops who are here with you; in particular Bishop Jacques Berthelet, president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Canada, Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic, archbishop of this city, and Cardinal James Francis Stafford, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. To all of you I say: may your contacts with your pastors help you to discover and appreciate more and more the beauty of the Church, experienced as missionary communion.
Listening to the long list of countries from which you come, we have practically made a trip ‘round the world. Behind each of you I have glimpsed the faces of all your fellow young people whom I have met in the course of my apostolic travels, and whom in a way you represent here. I have imagined you on a journey, walking in the shadow of the Jubilee cross, on this great youth pilgrimage which, moving from continent to continent, is eager to hold the whole world in a close embrace of faith and hope.
Today this pilgrimage makes a stop here, on the shores of Lake Ontario. We are reminded of another lake, the Lake of Tiberias, on the shores of which the Lord Jesus made a fascinating proposal to the first disciples, some of whom were probably young like you (cf. John 1:35-42). The Pope, who loves you dearly, has come from afar to listen again with you to Jesus’ words. As was the case for the disciples on that day long ago, these words can set the hearts of young people aflame and motivate their whole lives. I invite you then to make the various activities of this World Youth Day, which is just beginning, a special time when each of you listens attentively to the Lord with a willing and generous heart, in order to become the “salt of the earth and light of the world” (cf. Matthew 5:13-16).
Men and Women of the Beatitudes
The address of the Holy Father at the papal welcoming ceremony July 25:
Dear Young People! What we have just heard is the Magna Carta of Christianity: the beatitudes. We have seen once more, with the eyes of our heart, what happened at that time. A crowd of people is gathered around Jesus on the mountain: men and women, young people and elderly folk, the healthy and the infirm, who have come from Galilee, but also from Jerusalem, from Judea, from the cities of the Decapolis, from Tyre and Sidon. All of them anxiously awaiting a word, a gesture that will give them comfort and hope. We, too, are gathered here this evening to listen attentively to the Lord. He looks at you with affection: you come from the different regions of Canada, of the United States, of Central and South America, of Europe, of Africa, of Asia, of Oceania. I have heard your festive voices, your cries, your songs, and I have felt the deep longing that beats within your hearts: You want to be happy!
Dear young people, many and enticing are the voices that call out to you from all sides: many of these voices speak to you of a joy that can be had with money, with success, with power. Mostly they propose a joy that comes with the superficial and fleeting pleasure of the senses. Dear friends, the aged Pope, full of years but still young at heart, answers your youthful desire for happiness with words that are not his own. They are words that rang out 2,000 years ago. Words that we have heard again tonight: “Blessed are they.” The key word in Jesus’ teaching is a proclamation of joy: “Blessed are they.”
People are made for happiness. Rightly, then, you thirst for happiness. Christ has the answer to this desire of yours. But he asks you to trust him. True joy is a victory, something which cannot be obtained without a long and difficult struggle. Christ holds the secret of this victory. You know what came before. It is told in the Book of Genesis: God created man and woman in a paradise, Eden, because he wanted them to be happy. Unfortunately, sin spoiled his initial plans. But God did not resign himself to this defeat. He sent his Son into the world in order to give back to us an even more beautiful idea of heaven. God became man — the Fathers of the Church tell us — so that men and women could become God. This is the decisive turning point, brought about in human history by the Incarnation. What struggle are we talking about? Christ himself gives us the answer. “Though he was in the form of God,” St. Paul has written, he “did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant … he humbled himself and became obedient unto death” (Philippians 2:6-8). It was a struggle unto death. Christ fought this battle not for himself but for us. From his death, life has sprung forth. The tomb at Calvary has become the cradle of the new humanity on its journey to true happiness.
The Sermon on the Mount marks out the map of this journey. The Eight Beatitudes are the road signs that show the way. It is an uphill path, but he has walked it before us. He said one day: “He who follows me will not walk in darkness” (John 8:12). And at another time he added: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).
It is by walking with Christ that we can achieve joy, true joy! Precisely for this reason he again repeats the proclamation of joy to you today: “Blessed are they…” Now that we are about to welcome his glorious cross, the cross that has accompanied young people on the roadways of the world, let this consoling and demanding word echo in the silence of your hearts: “Blessed are they…”
Gathered around the Lord's cross, we look to him: Jesus did not limit himself to proclaiming the beatitudes, he lived them! Looking at his life anew, rereading the Gospel, we marvel: the poorest of the poor, the most gentle among the meek, the person with the purest and most merciful heart is none other than Jesus. The beatitudes are nothing more than the description of a face, his face! At the same time, the beatitudes describe what a Christian should be: they are the portrait of Jesus’ disciple, the picture of those who have accepted the Kingdom of God and want their life to be in tune with the demands of the Gospel. To these Jesus speaks, calling them “blessed.”
The joy promised by the beatitudes is the very joy of Jesus himself: a joy sought and found in obedience to the Father and in the gift of self to others.
Young people of Canada, of America and of every part of the world! By looking at Jesus you will learn what it means to be poor in spirit, meek and merciful; what it means to seek justice, to be pure in heart, to be peacemakers.
With your gaze set firmly on him, you will discover the path of forgiveness and reconciliation in a world often laid waste by violence and terror. Last year we saw with dramatic clarity the tragic face of human malice. We saw what happens when hatred, sin and death take command.
But today Jesus’ voice resounds in the midst of our gathering. His is a voice of life, of hope, of forgiveness; a voice of justice and of peace. Let us listen to this voice!
Dear friends, the Church today looks to you with confidence and expects you to be the people of the beatitudes.
Blessed are you if, like Jesus, you are poor in spirit, good and merciful; if you really seek what is just and right; if you are pure of heart, peacemakers, lovers of the poor and their servants. Blessed are you! Only Jesus is the true master, only Jesus speaks the unchanging message that responds to the deepest longings of the human heart, because he alone knows “what is in each person” (cf. John 2:25). Today he calls you to be the salt and light of the world, to choose goodness, to live in justice, to become instruments of love and peace. His call has always demanded a choice between good and evil, between light and darkness, between life and death.
He makes the same invitation today to you who are gathered here on the shores of Lake Ontario. What call will those on early morning watch choose to follow? To believe in Jesus is to accept what he says, even when it runs contrary to what others are saying. It means rejecting the lure of sin, however attractive it may be, in order to set out on the difficult path of the Gospel virtues.
Young people listening to me, answer the Lord with strong and generous hearts! He is counting on you. Never forget: Christ needs you to carry out his plan of salvation! Christ needs your youth and your generous enthusiasm to make his proclamation of joy resound in the new millennium. Answer his call by placing your lives at his service in your brothers and sisters! Trust Christ, because he trusts you.
Lord Jesus Christ, proclaim once more your beatitudes in the presence of these young people gathered in Toronto for the World Youth Day. Look upon them with love and listen to their young hearts, ready to put their future on the line for you. You have called them to be the “salt of the earth and light of the world.” Continue to teach them the truth and beauty of the vision that you proclaimed on the mountain. Make them men and women of the beatitudes!
Let the light of your wisdom shine upon them, so that in word and deed they may spread in the world the light and salt of the Gospel.
Make their whole life a bright reflection of you, who are the true light that came into this world so that whoever believes in you will not die, but will have eternal life (cf. John 3:16)!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Prayer in the Park as Clouds Gather DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Men and Women of Tomorrow
John Paul II entrusted the 600,000 young people gathered at a July 28 prayer vigil with the mission to be builders of a new civilization of love.
The Holy Father appeared in good physical state and showed his joy when gazing on the ocean of young people listening to him.
The young people spent the night in Downsview Park and endured a storm at dawn while waiting for the closing papal Mass.
Builders of a Civilization of Justice and Love
TORONTO — Here are the texts and translations of the opening address and homily that John Paul II delivered during the prayer vigil Saturday, July 27, in Downsview Park, attended by 600,000 young people.
Holy Father's greetings at the July 27 prayer vigil:
Young people of the world, dear friends,
With affection in the Lord I greet you all! I am happy to be among you again, after the days you have spent in catechesis and reflection, meeting one another and celebrating. We are coming toward the final phase of your World Day, the high point of which will be our eucharistic celebration tomorrow.
In you, gathered from the four corners of the world, the Church sees her future and feels the call to the youthfulness with which the Holy Spirit always enriches her. The enthusiasm and joy that you are showing are a sure sign of your love for the Lord and of your desire to serve him in the Church and in your brothers and sisters.
A few days ago, in Wadowice, my hometown, the Third International Young People's Forum took place. It brought together Catholics, Greek-Catholics and Orthodox youth from Poland and Eastern Europe. Today, thousands of young people from all over Poland are there and are connected with us through a television linkup to celebrate this prayer vigil with us. Allow me to greet them in Polish:
I greet the Polish-speaking young people, so many of whom have come from our homeland and from other countries throughout the world, and the thousands of young people from all of Poland and from the countries of Eastern Europe who have gathered in Wadowice to participate in this prayer vigil with us. To all of you I express the hope that these days will bear abundant fruits of generous fervor in holding fast to Jesus Christ and his Gospel.
During this evening's vigil we shall welcome the cross of Christ, the sign of God's love for humanity. We shall praise the risen Lord, the light that shines in the darkness. We shall pray in the words of the Psalms, repeating the very words that Jesus used during his earthly life when he spoke to his Father. The Psalms are still the prayer of the Church today. Then we shall listen to the word of the Lord, a lamp for our steps, a light for our path (cf. Psalm 119:105)
I invite you to be the voice of the young people of the whole world, to express their joys, their disappointments, their hopes. Look to Jesus, the living one, and repeat what the apostles asked: “Lord, teach us how to pray.” Prayer will be the salt that gives flavor to your lives and leads you to him, humanity's true light.
Beatitudes
Following the July 27 Liturgy of the Word, the Holy Father delivered this address.
Dear Young People,
When, back in 1985, I wanted to start the World Youth Days, I was thinking of the words of the Apostle John that we have listened to this evening: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life … we proclaim also to you” (1 John 1:1.3). And I imagined the World Youth Days as a powerful moment in which the young people of the world could meet Christ, who is eternally young, and could learn from him how to be bearers of the Gospel to other young people.
This evening, together with you, I praise God and give thanks to him for the gift bestowed on the Church through the World Youth Days. Millions of young people have taken part and as a result have become better and more committed Christian witnesses. I am especially thankful to you, who have responded to my invitation to come here to Toronto in order to “tell the world of the happiness you have found in meeting Jesus Christ, of your desire to know him better, of how you are committed to proclaiming the Gospel of salvation to the ends of the earth!” (Message for the 17th World Youth Day, No. 5).
The new millennium opened with two contrasting scenarios: one, the sight of multitudes of pilgrims coming to Rome during the Great Jubilee to pass through the Holy Door which is Christ, our savior and redeemer; and the other, the terrible terrorist attack on New York, an image that is a sort of icon of a world in which hostility and hatred seem to prevail.
The question that arises is dramatic: On what foundations must we build the new historical era that is emerging from the great transformations of the 20th century? Is it enough to rely on the technological revolution now taking place, which seems to respond only to criteria of productivity and efficiency, without reference to the individual's spiritual dimension or to any universally shared ethical values? Is it right to be content with provisional answers to the ultimate questions, and to abandon life to the impulses of instinct, to short-lived sensations or passing fads?
The question will not go away: on what foundations, on what certainties should we build our lives and the life of the community to which we belong?
Dear friends, spontaneously in your hearts, in the enthusiasm of your young years you know the answer, and you are saying it through your presence here this evening: Christ alone is the cornerstone on which it is possible solidly to build one's existence. Only Christ — known, contemplated and loved — is the faithful friend who never lets us down, who becomes our traveling companion, and whose words warm our hearts (cf. Luke 24:13-35).
The 20th century often tried to do without that cornerstone and attempted to build the city of man without reference to him. It ended by actually building that city against man! Christians know that it is not possible to reject or ignore God without demeaning man.
The aspiration that humanity nurtures, amid countless injustices and sufferings, is the hope of a new civilization marked by freedom and peace. But for such an undertaking, a new generation of builders is needed. Moved not by fear or violence but by the urgency of genuine love, they must learn to build, brick by brick, the city of God within the city of man.
Allow me, dear young people, to consign this hope of mine to you: you must be those “builders"! You are the men and women of tomorrow. The future is in your hearts and in your hands. God is entrusting to you the task, at once difficult and uplifting, of working with him in the building of the civilization of love.
From the Letter of John — the youngest of the apostles, and maybe for that very reason the most loved by the Lord — we have listened to these words: “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). But, John observes, no one has ever seen God. It is Jesus, the only Son of the Father, who has revealed him to us (cf. John 1:18). And if Jesus has revealed God, he has revealed the light. With Christ in fact “the true light that enlightens every man” (John 1:9) has come into the world.
Dear young people, let yourselves be taken over by the light of Christ, and spread that light wherever you are. “The light of the countenance of Jesus — says the Catechism of the Catholic Church — illumines the eyes of our heart and teaches us to see everything in the light of his truth and his compassion for all” (No. 2715).
If your friendship with Christ, your knowledge of his mystery, your giving of yourselves to him, are genuine and deep, you will be “children of the light,” and you will become “the light of the world.” For this reason I repeat to you the Gospel words: “Let your light so shine before others, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).
This evening the Pope, along with all of you, young people from every continent, reaffirms before the world the faith that sustains the life of the Church. Christ is the light of the nations. He died and rose again in order to give back to those who journey through time the hope of eternity. Nothing human is hurt by the Gospel: every authentic value, in whatever culture it appears, is accepted and raised up by Christ. Knowing this, Christians cannot fail to feel in their hearts the pride and responsibility of their call to be witnesses to the light of the Gospel.
Precisely for this reason I say to you this evening: Let the light of Christ shine in your lives! Do not wait until you are older in order to set out on the path of holiness! Holiness is always youthful, just as eternal is the youthfulness of God.
Communicate to everyone the beauty of the contact with God that gives meaning to your lives. In the quest for justice, in the promotion of peace, in your commitment to brotherhood and solidarity, let no one surpass you!
How beautiful the song that we have been hearing during these days. Light of the world! Salt of the earth! Be for the world the face of love! Be for the earth the reflection of his light!
That is the most beautiful and precious gift that you can give to the Church and the world. You know that the Pope is with you, with his prayer and fond blessing.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: When an Assignment Becomes a Pilgrimage DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Following are excerpts from Tim Drake's online diary about his assignment to cover World Youth Day for the Register:
Home at Last
All I can say is “wow.” World Youth Day was both uplifting and exhausting, between taking in the sights and the sounds, listening and praying, and interviewing attendees.
If you've never been to a World Youth Day, I highly recommend it for the simple reason that it will give you a renewed hope for the future of the Church. In the face of terrorism, Church infighting, and the sexual-abuse scandals, World Youth Day was a clear reminder that, as the Holy Father said, we must “make known the reason for our hope.”
It was fascinating to observe each day of World Youth Day, each event drawing more people than the previous event. An estimated 200,000 attended the opening Mass. Two days later 400,000 attended the papal welcoming ceremony. No one was able to count the number at the Way of the Cross, but I expect it would have been nearly 500,000 as it went directly through the heart of the city — drawing spectators from restaurants, hospitals and office buildings. About 600,000 attended the vigil and 800,000 attended Sunday's Mass.
Yet beyond the numbers are the stories that the young will take home with them. Stories of meeting other Catholic youth from around the world. Stories of meeting Christ in the sacraments and in one another. Stories of getting close to the Holy Father and simply being in his presence.
The great stories of the Pope during World Youth Day involve the many unexpected surprises along the way, with the Holy Father's arrival in Toronto on Tuesday and his emotional, independent descent down the airplane's staircase kicking them off.
There was also his impromptu tour of Strawberry Island when he arrived and his blessing of several mentally handicapped people from his boat on Lake Simcoe.
On Saturday, he was scheduled to meet with Canada's politicos. Along his way, he saw a group gathered at the fence at Morrow Park. There, he stopped the golf cart to greet them, where a 2-year-old girl was brought to him. He kissed and blessed her.
In spite of hot weather, rain and mud, the young people remained enthusiastic. It was infectious. As one traveled the streets of Toronto it was common to run into groups from Kenya, from Edmonton, and from the United States gathered around praying, singing, playing cards or hacky-sack.
Even when groups from different countries and unfamiliar languages met up with one another they would share what they could. One group from Brazil met up with a group from Minnesota. Unable to speak one another's language, they sang. The Minnesotans taught the Brazilians the chicken dance, and the Brazilians sang the tune in Portuguese. It provided a global perspective on the universal Church.
Bumblings and Grace
Technically, I was covering World Youth Day as a journalist rather than enjoying it as a pilgrim. Yet from the time I arrived in Toronto I found that my work often became a pilgrimage experience.
During my first trip from my hotel downtown to the Canadian Exhibition Place where many of the events were being held, the bus was unable to take me all the way there and dropped me two miles away. Thus began the endless walking that would mark my next four days.
Apparently, because of the Pope's impending arrival, all bus traffic was being limited as roads were being closed. Fortunately, along the way, I met a German journalist and a photographer from Catholic News Service in Bonn that knew their way around. After about a one-mile walk we were able to catch a trolley that took us very near our drop-off point.
Each day, and at each turn, similar experiences would take place — preventing me from doing what I had originally intended but placing me in position for something else. It was a wonderful lesson in being open to God, even if it turned out at times to be frustrating.
On Saturday, I made a similar attempt to get by bus from one point to another. It also proved unsuccessful. However, shortly after being returned to my original starting point I ran into the confessional booths at Downsview. Located at the rear of the park, had I made it to my original destination, I never would have known that the confessionals were available amidst the massive sea of humanity gathered there. Fortunately, I was able to partake of the sacrament with a wonderful young priest from the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. Shortly thereafter I had the fortune of running into a Sister that I know. Again, had my attempted trip been successful it's very doubtful that we would have run into one another.
And this is the way it went, day after day. Seldom taking the time to find food to eat, on three occasions different youth had an extra lunch or dinner which they offered to me during my interviews. On another occasion, lost, a young man pulled the map from his pocket and gave it to me, directing me to where I needed to go.
The final grace-filled moment, however, took place when I arrived at the airport for my departure. Under direction from the hotel staff, I arrived at the airport five hours early, exhausted and hungry. When I approached the ticketing counter, the agent asked if I would like to take an earlier flight, leaving in just half an hour. “If there's room, sure,” I replied.
And then, mimicking O.J. Simpson's famous (or perhaps infamous) commercial, I ran through Toronto's Pearson airport to make the gate on time, forced to butt in line ahead of people at customs and at the security checkpoint. Imagine my surprise, when I boarded the plane, to realize that the agent had upgraded my ticket to first class. For the first, and only, time in my life I was seated in the plane's first row of seats — being pampered by the stewardess and treated to a full breakfast.
It was like God was saying, “You see Tim, I've been preparing a place for you all along.” It was the perfect ending to a grace-filled trip.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Pilgrim in the Rain DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:I had never been so grateful I had packed an umbrella in my life. I was sleeping out in Downsview Park for World Youth Day 2002. I scrunched up as much of myself, my backpack and my sleeping bag as I could under my umbrella as I sat on my portion of the tarp.
As I looked out at my fellow pilgrims in their makeshift tents and heard the rain begin to pound against my umbrella, I began to reflect upon the difficult times that my generation is experiencing and will experience. Terrorism. The 9-11 tragedies. Drugs. Broken families. Religious persecution.
Just as rain is a predictable part of life, Jesus told us that (in the last days) there would be famine, floods, earthquakes, persecution and much suffering. So many of my brothers and sisters sitting in that field that night have experienced untold suffering and hardships. What they had hoped would be a happy and peaceful time in their youth turned out to be a tumultuous time. The future for my generation is certainly going to be filled with very stormy times.
I began to reflect on the Pope's message that week about how Jesus longs to be an intimate companion with us on our journey through life. What does it mean for me to allow Jesus to be an intimate companion with me during this storm?
“God, make it stop raining! You can easily do that!” I prayed. Yet the rain continued to pour. God was still very real and very present. Just because God wasn't answering my prayer the way I wanted to, didn't mean he couldn't or wasn't worthy of my trust.
I wanted to go home. I was exhausted after a week of only minimally adequate sleep. My allergies to grass and weeds were acting up. I had seen way too many bugs. I was tired after little sleep and a more than four-mile hike that day. Some pilgrims began to leave from other groups. The sky showed no evidence of the storm ending soon. Yet someone in our group had heard the forecast that said that the storm would pass and it would be sunny, hot and humid later that day. Our group was staying.
As the rain was still coming down hard and I began to question if my poor umbrella could take much more, the choir began to sing the prelude to Mass. It was gloriously angelic. It was almost unreal. Here I was in the middle of a downpour clutching my umbrella and I began to listen to the “Alleluia” chorus from Handel's Messiah.
And He shall reign forever and ever!
Kind of Kings!
Alleluia! Alleluia!
I had to wipe the tears from my eyes as I listened to both the words and the gloriousness of the choir's singing.
I began to imagine what heaven must be like. I imagined God on his throne as described in the Book of Revelation. The angels and saints surround him in all of his majesty and glory on his throne. Everyone is singing and rejoicing in the utter and indescribable goodness of God. I thought about how that goes on constantly in heaven. God is so utterly awesome that the angels and saints just can't stop worshiping, praising and thanking God.
God never changes. He is always that good, that kind and that amazing in his love for you and me. Regardless of the storm that I can see, the glorious reality of God is still the same, even if I'm in the midst of a storm.
The rain did finally stop at the beginning of the papal Mass. Our prayers were answered.
The sun came out and quickly dried up our drenched belongings. We wouldn't have to carry the weight of the rain on our way back.
Jennifer Czajka writes from Pewaukee, Wisconsin.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jennifer Czajka ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Light of the World DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:The One that we have seen with our own eyes,
The One that we have touched and felt with our own hands,
The One that we have heard with our own ears,
The One that in the depths of our hearts we have met:
He is the One whom we proclaim to you …
His splendor is on all,
For he shines upon the world.
So many in our world drift into sleep,
while others only know a darkness without end.
Let brothers rise to call them from the deep!
Let sisters take their hands to heal and be
their friends.
Together, let us stand against the storm
and in the heart of night be the
watchers of the morn.
The light of the world
The salt of the earth,
We scatter the darkness
When love becomes our way.
The light of the world
Christ is our light.
We shine with his brightness,
The reflection of his light
From day to day!
— World Youth Day theme song
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Don't Feed the Bears DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:People who think bears are simply cute and fuzzy, please heed this word of caution.
Talk to someone who has seen what a bear can do to a salmon as it's swimming peacefully upstream. Bears may look cute and fuzzy on the outside, but they can be quite destructive.
The same goes for some of today's more, “popular” religious notions. They might sound cute and fuzzy, but in reality they are quite destructive.
For example, have you ever heard someone say, “It doesn't matter what church you go to as long as you're a Christian?” If you challenge that statement, you'll provoke a strong reaction in people. This is because many Catholics as well as Protestants falsely assume that one church is just as good as another.
A good way to approach a difficult issue such as this is to follow the instructions given to us in the Bible by St. Peter himself: “Always be ready to give a reason for the hope you have but do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).
One way to show respect is to find a way to agree (at least in part) with what your challenger has said: “Yeah, Christians can learn a lot from each other, regardless of what church they go to.”
To show gentleness, try a thought provoking question. “How did you decide to go the church you attend now?” is a gentle way of getting them to reflect upon and hopefully revaluate their decision. Make sure you listen with a sincere heart. Your interest should be in the person, not in proving your point.
Hope is a third aspect of St. Peter's instruction. Share an experience that has led you to believe as a Catholic. This can be difficult. It requires a living faith driven by personal convictions. Matthew 16:13-19 is a good place to start if you're interested in deepening those convictions.
Jesus begins by telling Simon, “You are Peter and upon this Rock I will build my Church.” Note that Jesus changes Simon's name to Peter. The name “Simon” is a derivative of the word Simeon which means “uncertain.” The name Peter means “rock": something solid and secure. In the Bible, a name change always signifies election or a new responsibility. For example, In Genesis 17 God changed Abram's name to Abraham and he went on to be the “father of many nations.” This is true for Peter as well. Jesus changed Simon's name to Peter and Peter went on to be the visible leader of the Church on earth.
Jesus also gives Peter “the keys to the Kingdom of heaven” and the power to “bind and loose.” Both are symbols of power and authority. In Isaiah 22 “keys” were given by the king to the prime minister who was expected to rule as a spiritual father of the people. Peter is to the Kingdom of heaven what the prime minister was to the kingdom of David. Jesus is the king who gives Peter the power to rule the Kingdom of heaven on earth (the Church) as a spiritual father.
From here it is easy to put all the pieces together. It was Christ's mission, in both his life and his death, to establish a Church. He did this through Peter and his successors. Why would we want to choose anything besides what he has already given us?
The question seems harmless enough, until you look into it.
Just like a bear does.
Christina Mills writes from Eugene, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christina Mills ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Marian Magnificence in the Pacific Northwest DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:A forested path winds past the Stations of the Cross. Other trails lead past shrines and into a 5-story-tall chapel.
At the center of the complex is a grotto, carved into the base of a 150-foot basalt cliff that separates the lower from the upper level and its monastery, convent, gardens, more shrines, meditation chapel with a vista of the city and a small rustic chapel.
Over and through it all there is the lush, green profusion of a Pacific Northwest forest. The shade is dense beneath the towering fir trees; there is a cool stillness, even in the heat of a summer day.
You're at the National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother, a 62-acre refuge in the middle of Portland, Ore. — a perfect place to “treasure the things of God in your heart” on Marian feast days such as Aug. 15, the feast of Mary's Assumption into heaven.
This still and beautiful place of prayer is a testament to the work of the Servite friars, who conceived and have faithfully added to the sanctuary for 78 years.
“We intend this to be a treasure,” says Servite Father Jack Topper, executive director of this site known simply as “the grotto” to locals and regulars. More than 150,000 people visit each year.
“We look to the needs of the people who come here,” Father Topper adds. “As Servites, we've always looked to Our Sorrowful Mother because she understands what real suffering is about. The grotto is about creating a space for you to reflect and pray, to leave more at peace for having been here.”
Servite Spirituality
The site certainly accomplishes that. Located on land purchased from the Union Pacific Railroad in 1923, through the efforts of Servite Friar Ambrose Mayer of the Order of Service to Mary, the grotto has been carefully crafted over the decades to foster rich and reverent spirituality amid nature's scenic splendor.
The spiritual heart of the site is the grotto shrine itself. Created in 1925, it encompasses the chancel and sanctuary of an outdoor chapel, surrounding a high stone altar carved from the rock of the cliff and a reredos of stones; this is topped with lighted seraphim and occupied by a white marble replica of Michel-angelo's masterpiece, the Pieta.
Above the grotto, at the pinnacle of the bluff, is a bronze statue of Our Sorrowful Mother, designed for the sanctuary and blessed by Pope Pius XI in 1934 to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the Servite Order.
On the other side of a stone altar rail, also made from the rock of the cliff, is the shrine of St. Peregrine, a 13th-century Servite friar and patron saint of those suffering from cancer or other incurable diseases. A St. Peregrine Mass and anointing of the sick are celebrated at noon on the first Saturday of each month.
Beyond the altar rail is an open space under the vault of 200-foot evergreen trees. This serves as the nave for weekly outdoor Mass during the summer months and as a plaza for the Chapel of Mary, Mother of the Human Race.
Dedicated May 24, 1955, the interior of the granite and stone chapel is adorned with white and black marble along with light sandstone behind tall bronze doors. A marble high altar rests beneath a bronze canopy and mural of Blessed Mother's Coronation in heaven painted by Spanish artist Jose DeSoto.
On the north side of the plaza is a religious art gallery and conference center; to the east is the Christus Garden with its forested Stations of the Cross trail and the sanctuary's visitor center, restaurant and gift shop. To the south, between the chapel and grotto, is an elevator to the upper level.
On the upper level are more paths and gardens, including a lovely rose garden in front of the Servite monastery and convent, and St. Joseph's Grove alongside the rustic St. Anne's Chapel, built in 1935. Shrines are built along the paths for the Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Jude Thaddeus. The Lithuanian Wayside Shrine is dedicated to that nation's Catholic martyrs.
The centerpiece of the upper level is the Marguerite M. Casey Peace Garden. A path winds through landscaped forests and meadows, interlaced with ponds and streams. Marking the path are bronze plaques commemorating the Joyful, Glorious and Sorrowful Mysteries. The path leads out to the Way of Our Sorrowful Mother, a forested trail back to the plaza and elevator.
East of the plaza is the Marilyn Moyer Meditation Chapel, a contemporary glass and granite sanctuary offering a panoramic view of the Columbia River and the snow-covered peaks of Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens.
The grotto's ministries include clinical and pastoral counseling programs as well as a retreat house and spiritual conference programs. But it's as a place of simple peace and prayer — with a distinctly Marian, contemplative flavor — that this place really shines: a sort of natural reflection of the Blessed Mother herself.
Philip S. Moore writes from Camas, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother, Portland, Ore. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Philip S. Moore ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Singing God's Praise the Contemporary Way DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:The Choir of the Daughters of St. Paul has recorded a dozen albums, selling more than 500,000 copies since 1988.
It has won three major awards for excellence in media for its albums since 1993. The choir's music has been heard on two movie sound-tracks. With the 2002 release Sing Your Praise the sisters made their first foray into the upbeat contemporary-Christian genre: It's got “praise-and-worship” songs that make you want to clap your hands and sing along.
The international order of the Daughters of St. Paul dedicates itself to communicating God's love and truth through the media. It operates 20 Pauline Book & Media Centers in the United States and Canada and, from its Boston headquarters, produces books, CDs, magazines, videos and software products. Register correspondent Joseph Pronechen spoke with Sister Bridget Charles Ellis, the music director and CD producer, and Sister Margaret Timothy Sato, a member of the choir, while the group was preparing to perform at World Youth Day in Toronto.
It seems Sing Your Praise is something of a departure for you, style-wise.
We started out in 1988 with a more traditional approach, a “golden-oldies” type of music. Our audience then was primarily made up of people in their 50s and 60s. In 1994, with A Little Love, we changed styles and got a bit more contemporary. We included some songs like “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” and the “Peace Prayer of St. Francis.” But we gave them a totally new approach with the arrangements. The arrangements gave them freshness.
We made the departure in A Little Love from our previously more orchestral tracks to a lot of percussion. We were really happy with the result. We wanted to convey God's love for us in an upbeat manner.
We decided to do a “praise-and-worship” CD because it's a popular form of music for young people. We did concerts and were struck by how drawn into praise and worship the people were. The thought of it is to get people to talk to God, to pray to God. And with each album, we're trying to broaden our audience and reach young people.
You've tried different musical styles but stayed consistent with your basic message.
Through all the albums we've done, we've tried to communicate the message of hope and love. These are the two connecting themes in our albums from when we started out with Marian hymns and then went all the way to Touched by Love in 2001.
In the albums, it's the whole sense of being witnesses and giving testimony to God's love. We also try to evoke a response in the people. That's part of the philosophy behind it. This music can be really able to reach down into the person's soul. With the music, there's more of a potential to move the person toward God.
How do you know when you've succeeded with that aim?
At concerts and by e-mail we hear and have experienced how people are so touched by the music. They really have an experience of God in the music, and they can feel God in a new way. Music is very powerful. One of our main thoughts is, we're doing this music in a way that hopefully facilitates an encounter with God for those persons. It ties into our whole media ministry.
How long does each album take to record?
All the sisters who sing on the album are in other full-time ministries; they're scattered in places such as St. Louis, Boston, Chicago, California and Louisiana. Sister Bridget, who's now studying for a degree in musical composition in Boston in order to write arrangements, has to come up with a nice compilation of songs. Then there's work with the arrangers in California. From the planning stage to the final master takes about a year. A couple of times we've been able to do two albums because we've made the effort to bring all the sisters together.
In the works at the moment is an instrumental album with two music lines. One is orchestrated, one is contemporary. It has current liturgical music, and it's in a meditative style. Our last instrumental, Sojourn, was more lively. This one is prayerful.
Can we look forward to another praise-and-worship album?
Yes, in the future we hope to make more music in this style. With it we're inviting our listeners into a truly prayerful experience of worshiping God — whose love, fidelity and sweet mercies flow from heaven. Our hope is that people are drawn into the music and each song becomes a prayer in which they feel embraced by God's love.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: The Choir of the Daughters of St. Paul lifts hearts up to the Lord ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Leave it to Beaver (1997)
Movie studios keep turning old TV shows into features, with mixed results. Leave it to Beaver, based on the series created by Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly, is as corny as the original. But there's still some charm left in its wholesome small-town atmosphere and unapologetic embrace of family values. The time frame is moved from the 1950s to the late 1990s. The 8-year-old Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver (Cameron Finley) wants a bike. Eddie Haskell (Adam Zolotin), the best friend of his older brother Wally (Erik Von Detten), suggests he play football to make his dad Ward (Christopher MacDonald) proud so he'll spring for it.
Beaver's grades plummet and when school authorities recommend counseling, his mom June (Janine Turner) imagines her kid is in a lot of trouble. Director Andy Cadiff and screenwriter Brian Levant deliver the gags and one-liners in a spirit of good, clean fun.
The Summer of Ben Tyler (1996)
The segregated South of the mid-20th century has been a fertile setting for coming-of age stories in which an idyllic childhood is disrupted by racism and other evils. The choices made by adults in these situations present the kids with a moral code that sticks with them for the rest of their lives. The Summer of Ben Tyler, a TV movie, continues this honorable tradition. Temple Rayburn (James Woods) is an idealistic lawyer with a lovely wife, Cecilia (Elizabeth McGovern) and a precocious daughter, Nell (Julie McIvaine). Their position in the community is threatened when they take in Ben (Charles Mattock), the mentally challenged son of their deceased African-American housekeeper.
Temple faces further ethical challenges when he agrees to defend Junius Maitland (Kevin Isola), the son of the town's richest citizen (Len Cariou), who's charged with drunk driving and manslaughter. Director Arthur Allan Seidelman uses this courtroom drama to examine the difference between right and wrong and between the law and justice.
Nowadays it's politically incorrect to say anything positive about Spain's conquest and evangelization of Latin America. Captain from Castile, based on Samuel Shellabarger's novel, is hardly a piece of cheerleading for colonialism or the Spanish Inquisition. But it does give these issues a balanced presentation inconceivable in present-day Hollywood.
The aristocratic Pedro de Vargas (Tyrone Power) saves the impoverished Catania Perez (Jean Peters), from the henchmen and hunting dogs of Diego de Silva (John Sutton), the inquisitor general. De Vargas is unjustly imprisoned, and, after sword fights, intrigues and an escape, he and the peasant girl flee Spain to the New World. The scenery and costumes are spectacular, the action is rousing and Alfred Newman's Oscar-nominated musical score stirs the blood.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Court Says Aid Program Discriminates Against Religion DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:KIRKLAND, Wash. — When Northwest College student Joshua Davey chose pastoral ministry as a major, he received a phone call from the college's financial aid department regarding his Washington Promise Scholarship.
“I could either change my major and get the money or keep my major and lose the scholarship,” Davey said.
Wanting to keep his major andthe money, Davey sued on the grounds that the state law denying his scholarship violated his religious freedom.
On July 21, a federal court decided it was all right for Davey to study theology without losing the state education grant.
Davey argued he had met the requirements for the scholarship: a top-10% ranking in his high school class, attendance at an accredited college and his family's income was less than 135% of the state's median income of approximately $77,600 in 1999-2000 for a family of four.
The scholarship is part of a state aid program awarded to high school students to defray costs during the first two years of college. Davey had earned the scholarship, totaling $2,600 over two years, which he used to attend the Assemblies of God-affiliated school.
In the landmark case, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Washington state could not prevent students such as Davey from using a state grant to study religion.
“I'm excited about the ruling,” Davey said. “I feel vindicated.”
The 2-1 decision came as a surprise to many, including Davey, because the 9th Circuit often rules the other way in such cases involving religion. The 9th Circuit is the court that recently ruled forcing children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance violated the Constitution.
“It has a reputation for being liberal and antagonistic to religion,” Davey said. “We were amazed.”
Northwest College President Don Argue welcomed the news and said he is happy to welcome Davey back to campus to finish his senior year.
“While Northwest College was never a participant in this suit, we are pleased with the outcome for two reasons,” Argue said. “First, it rewards Joshua Davey for his courage and tenacity in pursuing what he believed was right. Second, this decision reaffirms what has been the historical position on this matter — that financial aid issues are directly between the student and the corresponding governmental entity, whether state or federal. After receiving an award, the student is free to use it to invest in an educational future at any accredited institution.”
The American Center for Law and Justice argued the case for Davey.
“This was the only major that would make one ineligible for the scholarship,” said Stuart Roth, who argued the case before the court. “If someone studied theology from a secular viewpoint, he could still receive the scholarship.”
He accused the law of “creating a system of education where they can tell you what you can and cannot study.”
State officials argued that the law protects the state from establishing or sponsoring religion.
“The value of the state law is to put a clear separation between the state and religion,” said Marcus Gaspard, executive director of the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board.
But Judge Pamela Ann Rymer disagreed. “To the extent that the message behind the Promise Scholarship is that doing well in high school pays off and that going to college in Washington is a good thing, and that developing the talents of promising students is of great importance to the state, it is qualified with the message, ‘unless the student pursues a degree in theology from a religious perspective,'” Rymer wrote.
“This necessarily communicates disfavor, and discriminates in distributing the subsidy in such a way as to suppress a religious point of view,” she added.
Said Roth: “The state's justification was separation of church and state. The state has erected a higher wall than the federal Constitution. That's all fine and good. But the state constitution can't violate the First Amendment of the federal Constitution.”
Richard Garnett, professor at Notre Dame law, agreed with Roth's assessment.
“It's like Mississippi saying, ‘I know you have that 13th Amendment, but our state constitution allows slavery,'” he said.
Garnett said the case was a “major victory” because Washington's constitution has one of the nation's strictest bans on aid to religious institutions. Known as Blaine amendments, the provisions were demanded by anti-Catholic forces in Congress before states like Washington, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted into the union. They prohibited any aid to “sectarian” institutions.
“It's now the law for 60 million people in the 9th Circuit. Blaine amendments can't be used to deny equal treatment in the context of state scholarship programs,” Garnett said.
He added that the timing of the case “couldn't be better.”
“Coming on the heels of Zellman, it's huge,” said Garnett, referring to the Supreme Court case in June that upheld the constitutionality of school vouchers.
“Opponents of vouchers said, ‘Not so fast, we've got these Blaine amendments,'” Garnett said. “To have the 9th Circuit say, ‘Hey, these Blaine amendments aren't the smart bombs you think,’ is quite a victory.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Campaign Closed
THE UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON, July 20 — A university press release announced Dayton has closed the books on its “Call to Lead” fund-raising and image-building campaign with nearly $158 million in gifts and commitments, according to a press release.
One of the goals of the program was to foster a stronger Catholic and Marianist identity for the university. Initiatives have included the establishment of a Ph.D. program in theology with a focus on the U.S. Catholic experience and a $2 million scholarship program for students from Marianist high schools around the country.
Scandal 101
BOSTON COLLEGE, July 26 — The Jesuit college has launched a series of programs for the next two years that will examine issues relating to the Church's sex-abuse scandals. The program will combine the college's educational and theological resources with other Catholic experts to provide a public forum for discussion.
The effort will include public lectures; seminars for the campus community, alumni and the general public; preparation of “issue papers” for scholars and the public; and the development of new undergraduate and graduate courses in ecclesiology, evangelization and sexuality.
College Fined
CHRONICLE.COM, July 25 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to fine Manhattan College $111,199 for alleged violations of federal and state rules on hazardous-waste storage, reported the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The hazardous wastes include arsenic, paint, used fluorescent light bulbs, discarded computer monitors, ink, paint, photographic chemicals, oily rags and “unknown chemicals,” according to a statement from the environmental agency.
The complaint was issued after government officials declared as “insufficient” the responses made by the Christian Brothers’ Bronx, N.Y., college to letters sent in 2001.
Trusting God
Part of a national movement — and one that that picked up steam after Sept. 11 — Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah have similar laws. Mississippi was the first state to pass such a law in 2000, while South Carolina, like Virginia, adopted the mandate this year.
“In God We Trust” is the national motto, established by Congress in 1956.
Community Service
“God says to whom much is given, much is expected,” Luttrell told the newspaper. “I feel he has given me so much and he wants me to give back something.”
The youngster learned this lesson in a new way after a mission trip to Central America in her sophomore year. “Until I went to Honduras, I didn't realize that's what God calls us to do,” she said. “I made a commitment that [helping others] was what I would fill my time with because that was what God wanted me to do.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Weekly Book Pick DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Sex Scandals: Cuts That Only Zeal Can Heal
FROM SCANDAL TO HOPE
by Father Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR
OSV Publishing, 2002
216 pages, $9.95
If the events usually described as the “clergy sex-abuse scandal” remain a whirlwind for you, this little book will go a long way toward putting the matter in a hopeful and realistic — that is, Catholic — perspective. Designed to be a cat's lick treatment of a complicated set of problems while they are still top-of-mind, this book does its job admirably, especially for those who are not Church insiders.
Father Groeschel hopes that the events of 2002 will be the touchstone of a major reform built on devout prayer and personal conversion to Christ. “The bell is ringing in the Church,” he writes, “and remarkably, those who can lead the reform are the young.”
Though still ignored by many, it is becoming increasingly obvious, he writes, that “a whole army of fervent young Catholics” has emerged in the ecclesial movements, Catholic colleges, seminaries and in religious communities such as his own Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. “Practically a theological miracle,” he argues that this cadre forms “the greatest single sign that the Church will recover from the present disaster.”
Father Groeschel does not back away from the many and sordid issues associated with the scandal that are, for him, familiar problems, given his apostolates as seminary professor and spiritual director to priests. Despite the often-bleak subject matter, he also maintains a sense of humor, even wondering if Voltaire merits being named the patron saint of seminary personnel. His motto: “Anything but zeal.”
It may surprise some readers that Father Groeschel faults some bishops in the exercise of their teaching office — not for improper supervision of those below them, or for not being appropriately empathetic to the victims of abuse. He holds that the failure to correctly promote and defend the faith at various levels in the Church has served as the foundation for the current “moral mess” with scandal a natural result.
Though far from an exhaustive treatment of such issues as discipline and fidelity, Father Groeschel's book conveys much about the failure to love that occurs when priests, theologians and the laity are not called to account for their active or passive dissent. How much damage has been done by not caring enough to intervene? Though he recounts the story with little comment, one of Father Groeschel's anecdotes makes the point quite well. He describes how a young priest one Sunday pointed to the Eucharist and said, “This is not the Body of Christ. We are the Body of Christ.” This, by the way, was the teaching of Huldrych Zwingli, founder of the Reformed Church.
Perplexed, “many of the parishioners complained to the pastor, who said that he couldn't do anything,” reports Father Groeschel. “So they went to the bishop. The bishop also said he could do nothing, so nothing happened.”
If a priest could think and preach so far beyond the bounds of Catholic doctrine and spirituality, isn't it fair to wonder how far might he stray in the living of Catholic morality? And, did “nothing” really happen in the story of the young priest who lost his way, or who was never properly prepared for his journey?
He — and his parishioners, no doubt — may be a few more of the “victims” whom, we pray, only a reformed and ever-reforming Church can reach and heal.
Joe Cullen writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Scouting the Catholic Way DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Learning cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on a mannequin borrowed from the local fire department. Spending an afternoon at an equine center learning to groom and ride horses. Lolling down a placid river in a canoe.
Sounds like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in action, right?
Almost. You'll definitely find these activities on the to-do list of any Cub Scout, Brownie, Boy Scout or Girl Scout, but you'll also find them on the itineraries of families who have chosen to do scouting a little differently — in ways that explicitly incorporate the Catholic faith.
Signing up kids for scouting used to be a simple matter of going down to your local church or public school and finding the troop appropriate to their age and sex. But traditional scouting in America has changed in ways that make some Catholic families wary.
Boy Scouts of America has been under attack for years over its staunch refusal to allow homosexual men to be scout leaders. A June 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision upheld the organization's right to retain this policy, but the simmering controversy still makes some boys and their parents uncomfortable.
And although Boy Scouts of America remains the gold standard of scouting organizations, family-friendly policy and excellent program content cannot always guard against indiscretions or errors in judgment by local leaders. Catholic parents who enroll their sons in the Boy Scouts must make at least an implicit commitment to eternal vigilance.
Leo and Barbara Corbalis of San Jose, Calif., enrolled their son William in the Cub Scouts when he was a small boy. Barbara became a den mother in her son's pack in order to monitor activities. At one point, lack of discipline in the pack prompted the Corbalises to change packs.
“One boy in the pack would insult his father to his face in front of everyone,” says Barbara. “The father, who was a pack leader, never did anything in response.”
They also pulled William from Cub Scout seminars on sexual abuse and, as a 15-year old scout, their son once stood out in the hallway at a scout seminar rather than watch the R-rated movies being shown to the scouts inside.
William is now 17 and on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout and, while the Corbalises have found the Boy Scout experience to be both challenging and rewarding, they never even considered enrolling their daughter in the Girl Scouts. Girl Scouts USA has avoided controversy by adopting the very policies the Boy Scouts fight against.
Girl Scouts USA promotes the acceptance of homosexuality as normal — as an aspect of “diversity” to be celebrated. The organization is openly tolerant of lesbians within its ranks. And in 1993, the organization revised the Girl Scout Promise to reflect a policy making use of the word “God” optional. Members can substitute another word or no word at all. The “Beliefs and Values” page on the Girl Scouts Web site (www.girlscouts.org) recommends to girl scouts and their families the book A Grateful Heart: Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to the Beatles.
Holy Heritage
For Patti Garibay of Cincinnati, this was all just too much. Patti had been involved in Girl Scouts since she was a Brownie, and her four children also were scouts. She was a troop leader, camp director and served as a delegate to the local Girl Scout council. Friends would say that she bled Girl Scout green.
But one year, during Christmas, she discovered that technically it would be “illegal” for her to sing Christmas carols with her troop because the references to God and Jesus were considered discriminatory against nonbelievers.
Eternal vigilance was no longer an option. Garibay felt she had no choice but to leave.
“It was the saddest day of my life,” she recalls.
But she sees now that all those years of involvement in Girl Scouts were preparing her for a greater task: In 1995 she founded her own scouting program and called it American Heritage Girls. American Heritage Girls is not Christian, but makes a point of putting faith in God at the top of its priority list. The American Heritage Girls’ oath reads: “I promise to love God, cherish my family, honor my country and serve in my community.”
Carolyn Moore, who now serves as the organization's national growth director, was also a lifelong scout. She said her decision to leave Girl Scouts was difficult, but necessary. “We took the best of the existing national programs and melded them into a quality program that also promotes moral values, service and patriotism,” says Moore. “We don't bleed green anymore. We bleed red, white and blue.”
Parents who want to provide their daughters with a wide range of activities — camping, bicycling, art, community service — in a traditional troop setting complete with uniforms, proficiency badges and challenging activities will find American Heritage Girls an excellent alternative to Girl Scouts. American Heritage Girls currently has 1,300 members and is incorporated in nine states, with more and more requests for new troops coming in.
Pilgrim Power
For some parents, their troubles with mainstream scouting were not just a matter of content and policy; scheduling and logistics figured in as well. Five years ago Nancy and Kerry MacArthur of Houston had five children, 7 to 17 years of age, with four of them in four different scouting programs. “One weekend we found ourselves going in four different directions,” says Nancy, who wondered at the time why they couldn't do all the scouting activities together, as a family. And then Nancy mused, “What if we took the basic scouting structure and made it Catholic?”
The result was Pilgrims of the Holy Family, a Catholic family activity program that mirrors traditional scouting in the areas of proficiency it stresses but adds strong Catholic elements — plus the advantages of a more homespun structure. Unlike Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts or American Heritage Girls, there is no national headquarters, no incorporation, no chartering of troops. This gives the program great spontaneity and flexibility. Families order the materials and jump right in.
“It's perfect for families in remote areas who don't have a local scout troop,” explains Kerry. “You can keep everything within your own family or you can join together with other families.”
The MacArthurs have written a guidebook for the program, with checklists for earning 74 proficiency badges. All the traditional scouting topics, such as camping, boating and woodworking, are covered. For parents who may be concerned about how the content of the program measures up to Boy Scout standards, many of the badge requirements, especially for the most challenging skills such as lifesaving and first aid, are the same as those found in the Boy Scout Handbook. (For these badges, the MacArthurs recommend parents contact their local Red Cross chapter for qualified instruction.)
The program also includes many uniquely Catholic topics, such as Liturgy and Catholic Social Thought. Each proficiency area has its own patron saint; for example, herpetology (the study of reptiles) falls under the patronage of St. Patrick.
For their charity achievement badge, the MacArthur children and their friends did yard work, house-cleaning, maintenance and odd jobs for senior citizens.
“The kids begged to keep doing it,” says Nancy, “because they had befriended the people they were working for.”
The MacArthurs’ Pilgrims of the Holy Family troop received the “Volunteers of the Year” award in April 2002 from Associated Catholic Charities of the Galveston-Houston Diocese.
All materials, including sashes, vests and badges, are available from Catholic Heritage Curricula. Pilgrims of the Holy Family is designed for both boys and girls 10 and older. Catholic Heritage Curricula also carries programs for children under 10: Blue Knights for boys and Little Flowers for girls.
Clare Conneely writes from Winfield, Illinois.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Clare Conneely ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Special Love For Special Children DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Twenty years ago, Pat Hammeke and his wife faced a situation any parents would find daunting.
With the birth of their son Brendan, the Arlington, Va., couple learned that not one but two of their children suffered from Down syndrome. As experience had already taught them with Brendan's older sister Casey, this meant a lifetime commitment of helping their children overcome mental and developmental challenges. Devout Catholics, the Hammekes accepted the challenge and eagerly welcomed these children into their family. They resolved to provide their special children with a lifetime of love and good parenting. Nevertheless, the young couple still found the situation overwhelming.
Where do we turn for assistance within the wider Catholic community? How do we include our children in social functions? Do other Catholic parents understand our situation? These questions trouble many parents of the mentally and developmentally challenged. Fortunately, one Sunday morning God provided Pat with an answer. It came after Mass, through the International Order of Alhambra. “We met one of the Alhambra's members at their annual church-door collection,” Pat recalls. “He saw our two children with Down syndrome and was interested in our experiences.”
The Hammekes soon learned that the Alhambra's interest went beyond casual conversation. The Alhambra is a Catholic fraternal organization dedicated to serving the needs of the mentally and developmentally challenged. Based in Baltimore, the organization has 120 active caravans (chapters) with 5,500 members in the United States and Canada.
The Alhambra finances homes for the developmentally challenged and provides scholarships for special-education teachers. The group also assists families of the developmentally challenged and, for the last 18 years, has assisted the Hammekes with meeting the exceptional needs faced by parents of special children.
Yet not all such needs are financial. For example, special-needs children often lack a safe social environment within a Catholic context.
This did not go unnoticed by the Hammekes, both of whom appreciate the hands-on approach taken by the Alhambra in carrying out its mission. “The Alhambra put us in touch with other Catholics who love to help people with mental challenges,” explains Pat. “Casey and Brendan both enjoy being part of the Alhambra. They enjoy helping with our local caravan's social and charity events. It gives them a good sense of accomplishment.”
The Kingdom Is Theirs
Roger Reid is a past supreme commander of the Alhambra as well as the organization's current executive secretary. In carrying out the Alhambra's apostolate, he strongly promotes the practice of personal interaction between the membership and God's special children. “Jesus is clear,” Reid says. “'Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.
“Interacting with God's special people provides Alhambrans with an inner peace that suggests that whatever we do for any of God's special people, we do for him,” Reid says. “I cannot begin to express the spiritual satisfaction I feel when I ease their burdens, make them happy and show them the same Christian love that they have for me. Their simplicity is rewarding.”
Yet, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Reid makes one thing clear to all potential members — the organization's service to God's special children is carried out within the context of the Alhambra's Catholic identity. “Our Catholic identity is essential,” he says. “We follow the example of popes and saints, particularly our patron St. Francis of Assisi.
“In the 13th century St. Francis gave the Church a heartbeat that is still heard today. He humbled himself by feeding the poor, caring for the lepers and preaching the Word of God through his example. Alhambrans are called to assist the developmentally disabled within the broader context of our Catholic community. So who better to teach us than St. Francis?”
Fraternally, St. Francis
At 83 years of age, Bill Fuchs’ zeal for the Alhambra's patron shows no sign of diminishing. “St. Francis of Assisi's life and teachings provide a model for us to follow in carrying out our work,” Fuchs says. “His prayer, often recited throughout the order, is a pillar of strength and gives direction to all members in contributing to our parishes.”
This brings to light another important facet of the Alhambra's work — service to the local parish. Marvin Peschel, Florida regional director of the Alhambra, puts it bluntly: “Our priests know that when Alhambrans promise something, it's a promise kept.”
Father Simon Kenny, parochial vicar of St. Raphael Catholic Church of Englewood, Fla., Peschel's parish, supports this claim. “Alhambra forms an important part of our parish community,” says the retired Carmelite priest. “When there is work to be done or events to be organized, I can depend upon the Alhambra's support.”
Membership in the Alhambra is open to all Catholic men 18 and older. Women are invited to join the Sultanas, which is the women's auxiliary. One need not have developmentally challenged family members to join. But, of course, God's special children are invited to join as well. In fact, Brendan Hammeke is now a full member of the fraternal organization. “The Alhambra is fun,” he says with a smile. “I like helping others and doing adult things.”
Pete Vere writes from Nokomis, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Pete Vere ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Mealtime Madness DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Q
Mealtime conversation is virtually impossible at our house. The kids repeat song verses ad nauseum and generally create chaos. What can we do?
A
Sometimes my wife and I fantasize about eating a picnic lunch all alone, in a peaceful place far from the family dinner table, say, the median strip of an interstate highway or the deck of an aircraft carrier. But we realize that would just spoil us.
Your situation touches on a broader parenting question: Should you discipline a child when he's not really misbehaving, but only being exuberant? In other words, can you punish a kid for just being a kid?
That depends. Any kid conduct, however positive or admirable in one setting, can be completely out of line in another. Would you allow your 4-year-old to whistle “Jesus Loves Me” during the eulogy of his great-aunt's funeral service? Likewise, the appropriateness of any behavior depends also on its frequency. One “I love you, Mommy” is precious at bedtime. Maybe even several.
Stand and listen to 36 variations of that theme while Eve tries to keep you bed-bound with her, and you've moved from precious to manipulative, from warm to weasel. As the saying goes, sometimes a vice is just a virtue taken to extreme.
In my book Back to the Family, a survey of how good families raised great kids, parents frequently smoothed out mealtimes with a few simple rules:
1) No interrupting or talking over the person speaking, not just with words, but assorted noises, songs, deliberate burps, obnoxious chewing or “guess what I'm eating.”
2) To discourage meal-long kid monologues, time limits can be established, for instance, five minutes per child, which can be an eternity when listening to a 3-year-old's story of a ball caught in a tree. Time limits may vary from child to child and story to story, or can be invoked simply by a parent saying, “Okay, it's Oral's turn to talk now.”
3) A hand signal to “lower the volume” is in effect at each meal. Does your hand reach to the floor?
4) No television, radio, computer, maybe even phone is allowed to talk during meals. No sense letting anyone or anything else add to the cacophony.
5) All expectations are backed by consequences. For example, ignoring the rules will lead to removal from the table for five minutes. Second offense is 10 minutes (How long is your meal?), loss of dessert, or depending upon the willfulness of the infraction, removal to somewhere else for the rest of the meal. Food can be finished in silence after the family meal.
Are you stifling your children's natural mealtime joyfulness? No. You're giving the kids freedom within limits, thus making the meal more digestible for everyone.
Dr. Ray Guarendi is a psychologist, author and father of 10. He can be reached at www.kidbrat.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 08/11/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: August 11-17, 2002 ----- BODY:Baby Born Despite Odds
REUTERS, July 25 — A baby girl who was conceived despite her father's supposed sterilization and then survived a bungled abortion attempt has been born to a Norwegian couple.
The father, Anders Ovretveit, said he was sterilized after a cancer operation — yet in January 2001 his wife Tove learned she was pregnant
Tove had an abortion, but discovered she was still pregnant a couple months later. She gave birth on July 14, two months early, to a healthy baby girl in a car on the way to the hospital.
The couple named the baby Trude, which sounds like the Norwegian phrase “believe it.”
Abortion Facility Closed
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 21 — The costs of new state regulations have driven the Palmetto State Medical Center abortion facility in South Carolina out of business, said attorney Randall Hiller, who repres e n t s the abortion business’ owner, William Lynn.
“The unnecessary costs added by these regulations were financially impossible,” Hiller said.
Lisa Van Riper, president of South Carolina Citizens for Life, said abortions in South Carolina have declined by 47% in the past 10 years.
Cadaver Transplants
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 26 — Kidneys transplanted from a cadaver keep working just as long as those taken from a brain-dead patient with a still-beating heart, according to a Swiss study that offers a promising way to ease the severe shortage of donor organs.
In the first long-term study comparing the two approaches, doctors at University Hospital of Zurich followed nearly 250 transplant patients for up to 15 years and found nearly identical survival rates.
At 10 years, 79% of patients whose kidney came from a donor with no heartbeat were alive, as were 77 patients whose organ came from a brain-dead donor whose heart was beating.
Malta Backs Pro-Life Stand
The European Parliament had recommended that abortion be made “legal, safe and accessible to all.” It also recommended that governments should strive to implement a health and social policy to lower the incidence of abortion.
Malta's Permanent Delegate to the EU, Ambassador Victor Camilleri, wrote in response that the government's position was clear and unequivocally pro-life.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Goodbye, Poland DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:KRAKOW, Poland — Will this month's four-day trip to his beloved Poland be Pope John Paul II's final visit home?
That's up to divine providence, the Holy Father told more than 2 million faithful gathered here at a beatification Mass on Aug. 18.
“Goodbye. I would like to say that I will see you soon, but this is totally in God's hands,” the 82-year-old Pope said following the beatification of four Poles in Blonie Park under a burning sun.
“We wait for you,” an enthusiastic crowd responded in unison.
“I entrust it totally to Divine Mercy,” the Pope responded, visibly moved by the fervor of his countrymen.
Some young people cried out, “We wait for you in Wadowice,” his birthplace near Krakow. And the crowd pleaded: “Stay with us! Stay with us!”
“You want to convince me to desert Rome,” John Paul said jokingly, in a response to rumors that he would resign and remain in Poland until his death.
When young people began to sing “The Boat,” the hymn of the “Oasis” movement of Polish Catholic youth, the Pope put his hand on his forehead, again visibly moved.
The hymn says: “I leave my boat on the shore, as I am going with you, my God.”
“I heard this song when I left Poland 23 years ago. It resounded in my ears when I heard the conclave's verdict,” said the Holy Father, who was elected as pope on Oct. 16, 1978. “I have heard it during all these years. It has always reminded me of my home-land and has guided me on the different ways of the Church.”
Divine Mercy
At the Mass, John Paul beatified four Poles and highlighted Divine Mercy as the answer to contemporary man's suffering.
The newly beatified are Zygmunt Szczesny Felinski (1822-1895), archbishop of Krakow for 16 months before being deported to Siberia by the czar; Father Jan Balicki (1869-1948), confessor and teacher of seminarians; Jesuit Jan Beyzym (1850-1912), “apostle of lepers” in Madagascar; and Sister Sancja Szymkowiak (1910-1942), known as “the angel of goodness” by English and French prisoners of the German army during World War II.
Among those attending the Mass were Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that championed Poland's liberation from communism in the 1980s; Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski; Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus; and Slovakian President Rudolf Schuster.
In his homily, the Pope said from “the beginning of her existence the Church, pointing to the mystery of the cross and the Resurrection, has preached the mercy of God, a pledge of hope and a source of salvation for man.”
“Nonetheless,” he continued, “it would appear that we today have been particularly called to proclaim this message before the world. We cannot neglect this mission, if God himself has called us to it through the testimony of St. Faustina Kowalska,” the Polish nun (1905-1938) who received revelations and visions from Christ on his Divine Mercy.
“God has chosen our own times for this purpose,” the Holy Father said. “New prospects of development are opening up before mankind, together with hitherto unheard-of dangers. Frequently man lives as if God did not exist, and even puts himself in God's place. He claims for himself the Creator's right to interfere in the mystery of human life.”
Added the Pope: “Perhaps for this reason, it is as if Christ, using the testimony of a lowly sister, entered our time in order to indicate clearly the source of relief and hope found in the eternal mercy of God. The hour has come when the message of Divine Mercy is able to fill hearts with hope and to become the spark of a new civilization: the civilization of love.”
After the Mass, John Paul lunched with Poland's 120 bishops and prayed in the medieval cathedral where, newly ordained, he celebrated his first Mass on Nov. 2, 1946, for his dead parents and older brother. Then, visibly moved, he visited the family tombs in a nearby military cemetery.
John Paul's mother, Emilia Kaczorowska Wojtyla, died of kidney and heart failure when he was 9, and his brother Edmund, a doctor, died of a scarlet fever he contacted treating patients in an epidemic when the young Karol Wojtyla was 12. His father, also Karol, an official in the Austrian and Polish armies, died of a heart attack in 1941 when the young Karol was 21.
In the evening, a crowd of young people chanted, “Stay with us,” to the Pope outside the archbishop's residence, Associated Press reported.
“In my heart and my mind forever,” he replied, adding in the local Krakow dialect, “The farewell wish to the one who departs is, ‘Speedy return.’ I hope that this is your wish for me.”
Clogs of the Fisherman
The previous day, the Pope had dedicated the new Divine Mercy shrine in Lagiewniki, a suburb of Krakow. Celebrating the first Mass in the church, he removed his ring and anointed the bare, white marble top of the altar with holy oil.
Behind the altar hung a painting of Jesus as he appeared to St. Faustina, in white robes with red and white rays, symbolizing the wine and the water of the Mass, emanating from his heart. Sculptures of the bare branches of two twisted trees, recalling the crucifixion, and a large golden globe stood below the painting.
“How greatly today's world needs God's mercy,” John Paul said. “In every continent, from the depth of human suffering, a cry for mercy seems to rise up.”
The 4,000-seat church, which is shaped like a boat, was filled to capacity. Some 8,000 worshippers watched the Mass on television screens in the church garden while an estimated 200,000 more gathered in fields surrounding the convent of the Sisters of the Merciful Mothers of God.
Just a few meters from the shrine is the site of the Solvay quarry where the Pope worked in his youth during the Nazi occupation of Poland. At the end of the Mass, he recalled, “The Solvay industry was near this place. When I passed every day, going from home to work, dressed in a pair of wooden shoes, I would never have said that one day this person with the wooden shoes would consecrate the Basilica of Divine Mercy in the place where I stopped to pray so many times on my return from work.”
Driving back to the residence after the Mass, John Paul stopped briefly to bless a library under construction at the Pontifical Theological Academy at Pychowice near the new campus of Jagiellonian University and the former quarry. Msgr. Tadeusz Pieronek, rector of the academy, presented the Pope with a student identity card entitling him “to study whenever you want without having to take any exams.”
The Pope's motorcade also stopped outside the house where he lived in an apartment with his father from 1939 to his father's death in 1941. John Paul did not get out of his car, but the present tenant, Dorota Bielatowicz, and her neighbors gave him an album of photographs of Krakow, and Bielatowicz's four small children handed him a bouquet of flowers.
Farewell
The Holy Father concluded his 98th international trip Aug. 19 by celebrating a Mass at the Shrine of the Passion of Jesus and of the Virgin of Sorrows in the Basilica of Kalwaria Zedrzydowska, where he often visited as a boy and as a young priest.
Seated at the altar beneath a gilded painting of Mary and the child Jesus, he signaled his resolve to keep serving as pope, Associated Press reported.
Said the Pope: “Most holy mother, our lady of Calvary, obtain also for me strength in body and spirit that I may carry out to the end the mission given to me by the risen Lord.”
----- EXCERPT: Pope: 'God Will Decide' if I Return ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Zero Tolerance Turmoil: Dioceses' Mixed Results DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Two months after the U.S. bishops adopted their zero-tolerance policy at a June 14 meeting in Dallas, the strict sex-abuse guidelines have been getting decidedly mixed reviews.
The most important review of all — the Vatican's — is still forthcoming. Rules drawn up by U.S. bishops in June to crack down on sex abuse by priests are still under study by three Vatican congregations, Vatican spokesman Joaquìn Navarro-Valls said Aug. 17 in response to reports that Rome would reject the rules because they do not conform to canon law.
In an Aug. 8-10 meeting in Philadelphia, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, which represents 15,000 priests who belong to religious orders, adopted its own plan to keep abusers away from minors. Unlike the Dallas policy, it would not remove abusers from the priest-hood but would assign them to safe ministries because, they said at the meeting, putting them on the streets would only add to the risk to children.
Meanwhile, many U.S. dioceses have already taken steps against priests in conformity to the policy, which vowed to remove from ministry any priest guilty of sexual abuse of a minor, “past, present or future.”
Many of the cases in recent weeks are being cited by supporters of the zero-tolerance policy as a sign that it is working: Two New Jersey priests who were arrested for soliciting young male prostitutes in Montreal come under the strictures of the policy. And the Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y., removed a pastor after the local district attorney's office said it regarded decades-old accusations against him (by an alleged victim who is now a priest) as credible, although no longer prosecutable.
But other cases are cited as evidence that the zero-tolerance policy's zeal has had unintended bad consequences.
One is the case of Father Francis Perry, a priest of the Diocese of Raleigh, N.C. During Holy Week, Father Perry was called in to Bishop Joseph Gossman's office to discuss a letter that had been sent to the diocese by a relative of the priest.
Part of letter was true, Father Perry told his bishop. Perry admitted that 41 years ago, when he was 16, he “acted inappropriately” in the presence of a 4-year-old child — a case of indecent exposure. The incident occurred 29 years before Francis Perry — raised as an Episcopalian — converted to the Catholic faith and 37 years before the former psychologist was ordained a priest in 1998.
A month after their meeting, Bishop Gossman put Father Perry on administrative leave and later chose to remove him from all public duties as a priest. Parishioners at St. Joseph Catholic Church, in Burgaw, N.C., and Transfiguration Catholic Church in Wallace, N.C., where Father Perry served as pastor, were outraged.
“Father Perry is simply a great man and a great priest,” said Milton Swinson, a friend of Father Perry's and a lifelong parishioner at Transfiguration. “My Bible says we are supposed to forgive, and I really don't have any problem forgiving some transgression by a teen-ager that took place more than 40 years ago.”
Father Perry, who declines to speak with the press, told Swinson and other parishioners that the incident involved no molestation.
Scared Silent
Families of several fired priests who were removed for questionable, decades-old allegations, declined to speak with the Register. The brother of one popular priest, whose removal shocked and angered the parish, said the family is embarrassed and ashamed, and fears being named in the press.
Similarly, most friends, parishioners and colleagues of Father Perry won't talk, saying they fear being miscast as people who condone the sexual abuse of children. One priest who worked with Father Perry agreed to talk, but asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution.
“He admits to doing something wrong as a teen-ager more than 40 years ago, when he was neither a Catholic nor a priest nor someone even considering the priesthood,” the priest said. “Canonically, however, they're treating him as if he had done something wrong when he was a priest, and there isn't even an allegation that he has done anything wrong since his ordination. There has been absolutely no due process regarding Father Perry, none whatsoever.”
Speaking publicly, Bishop Gossman has explained that he expected anger and hurt feelings about the firing of Father Perry.
However, he said Father Perry was let go because he failed to disclose the old accusation on a form when he enrolled in seminary. Bishop Gossman said his decision also involved the fact that Father Perry did not disclose on his seminary application an arrest, 15 years ago, in which he was charged with taking indecent liberties with a 15-year-old. Father Perry maintains his innocence on that accusation, and it doesn't appear on his record because police dropped charges for lack of evidence and testimony by anyone claiming to be a victim.
Father Michael Higgins, a canon lawyer who heads Justice for Priests and Deacons, said his research indicates that “several hundred” priests have been targeted since bishops adopted the zero-tolerance policy and accompanying norms in Dallas. He says he's concerned that priests are being fired, without the benefits of due process as outlined in canon law, in order to appease an angry public, press and lawyers who are protecting diocesan funds from potential lawsuits.
Father Higgins cited Canon 220 of the Code of Canon Law, which states, “No one is permitted to damage unlawfully the good reputation which another person enjoys nor to violate the right of another person to protect his or her own privacy.” A good reputation, by canon law, is presumed until proven otherwise.
“A suspension is a public act and it injures the good reputation of a priest,” Father Higgins said. “Long before there's a suspension, a priest should be put through a long list of canonical procedures that are designed to prevent unfounded accusations from ruining reputations and careers.”
Cases Mount
Concerns about zero tolerance have no easy answers. The policy has been used to remove priests who most people would consider a danger, and priests who most people would consider harmless.
In Baltimore, about 70 Catholics picketed outside the Archdiocese of Baltimore's headquarters June 26, after learning that Father Thomas Malia had been asked to resign because he once hired someone who had engaged in sexual abuse of a minor. The picketers wanted Father Malia reinstated as pastor of Holy Cross, and St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic churches. Father Malia was asked to resign after he admitted to hiring a convicted child-sex offender, Robert Gee, as music director for Holy Cross.
“This particular mistake didn't harm anybody,” picketer and Holy Cross parishioner Jay Schwartz told the press. “Gee was the music director. He came in, played on Sundays and left.”
In Anchorage, Alaska, Archbishop Roger Schwietz faces an agonizing situation involving Father Timothy Crowley, an administrative aide in the chancery. Father Crowley lost his post in Ann Arbor, Mich., because of sexual misconduct involving a 15-year-old boy in the early 1980s. In 1995, then Archbishop Francis Hurley looked into Father Crowley's case and decided to give the priest an opportunity to serve in a limited ministry in Anchorage.
Archbishop Hurley made his decision after learning that Father Crowley had been put through intensive treatment for two years, and had convincingly turned his life and attitudes around. Father Crowley was sent to Anchorage on loan from the Diocese of Lansing, Mich.
For the past seven years, Father Crowley has seemingly epitomized what Pope John Paul II told American cardinals about in April: God's power to transform repentant priests.
“This is a priest who today is theologically in line with the Church in every way,” said Father Steven Moore, a canon lawyer and vicar general for the Archdiocese of Anchorage. “I would describe him as a little bit right of center, pious, energetic, loyal and eager to serve. He understands fully what he did, and the consequences of that and the pain it caused his victim. He just wants to continue being a priest — to continue celebrating the sacraments is very important to him.”
If the Vatican approves the norms requested by the bishops, however, Father Moore suspects Father Crowley's days in Anchorage will be over.
“He may be left with no livelihood, no community and no restrictions on his conduct whatsoever,” Father Moore said. “If we're really worried about the safety of children, the last thing we want to do is take away the structure, and the limitations and the community that a known offender answers to. It doesn't make sense. This is a man who has turned everything around and is in a situation in which he's of no threat to anyone. This zero tolerance, punitive approach is not coming from the values of the Church. This is a political, public relations, civil law approach that has nothing to do with Church values.”
Father Moore said he's finding cases all over the United States in which good, safe priests — assigned to safe positions — are getting booted out. He says he knows of a priest, whom he declines to name, who had sex with a 16-year-old girl more than 30 years ago. At the time, the priest was merely an 18-year-old first-year seminarian.
“He went home on break and had consensual sex with a girl, and when he returned from break he confessed this to his rector,” Father Moore said. “Somehow this ends up in his records, and now he's being targeted under this zero tolerance thing because she was 16. ... Of course it's ridiculous to remove him from ministry, but this isn't about concern for victims and would-be victims anymore. It's about destroying the moral authority of the Church.”
Victims Like Policy
Although laity are protesting the way some priests have been affected by zero tolerance, a leading victims' advocate has little sympathy for any of the priests who will lose their ministries — guilty or not. David Clohessy, director of Survivor's Network for those Abused by Priests, said the tables are finally turned.
“For decades we have erred on the side of protecting abusers, because they might be innocent or they might be reformed,” Clohessy said. “If we have to err at all, let's err in favor of the kids. And if an abusive priest is cured, so what if he loses his ministry? There are many ways a person can contribute to society without being a priest.”
If that's the approach society wants regarding sexual abuse allegations, said Father Higgins, then society should be consistent.
“You have five priests in Chicago right now who all maintain their innocence, yet they're losing their ministries,” Father Higgins said. “You go into Chicago and try to remove a doctor over a sexual abuse allegation, and you're in for an extremely rigorous process in which the doctor is enTITLEd to have the allegations proven. We're not using due process under canon law or any other law. We're playing politics and public relations, just like some big, heartless, secular corporation.”
Father Art Espelage, executive coordinator of the Canon Law Society of America in Washington, told Catholic News Service that appeals by priests are possible. In fact, the Chicago priests are appealing.
“Although the policy in Dallas made no specific mention of appeals, when we talk about a sense of justice, I don't see how we could have no appeals,” he said.
Calling the right to appeal fundamental, Father Espelage said that for more than 1,000 years canon law has a tradition of allowing appeals. The Dallas policy's implementation will need more work, he warned: “The whole thing is in so much turmoil.”
Wayne Laugesen is based in Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic Radio Takes to the Air DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:WRIGHTSTOWN, Wis. — As far as numbers go, Catholic radio stations represent merely a drop in the bucket. Of approximately 2,000 religious radio stations nationwide, only about 77 are Catholic, of which only 46 are currently on the air.
Yet even a tiny ripple can become a wave, and proponents of Catholic radio say the time is ripe for growth.
While the numbers still remain relatively small, historically there are more Catholic radio stations on the air than ever before. With new stations being added each year, most think the future of Catholic radio is bright indeed.
The Catholic Radio Association is one organization that is responsible, in part, for the industry's recent growth. Originally set up to support just three radio apostolates and two individuals, the association opened up membership to all Catholic radio apostolates earlier this year. The association currently has approximately 30 members.
“The association is designed to help people establish Catholic radio stations, bring people together and provide products and services to its members,” said Catholic Radio Association Executive Director Stephen Gajdosik.
Currently the association is working with groups in Denver, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Fargo, N.D., to set up stations, as well as with groups in smaller markets in Pennsylvania, Iowa and Louisiana. International in its reach, the association has also helped Archbishop Lawrence Burke of Nassau, Bahamas, to obtain the first-ever blanket FM license for the Bahamas. Gajdosik expects that by the end of the year at least three major cities that never had Catholic radio before could have a station.
Other organizations have seen similar growth. Starboard Broadcasting, a Green Bay, Wis.-based company, currently operates five stations throughout Wisconsin. In the near future, it hopes to expand to Milwaukee, Chicago and Minneapolis. In addition, Catholic radio consultant Avila Radio recently helped with a contract to begin a full-time Catholic radio station in Atlanta.
The recent pattern of steady growth might come as a surprise on the heels of the demise of Catholic Family Radio just a year ago.
Rising from the Ashes
Many might remember the attempt to launch Catholic Family Radio. In 1998, Ignatius Press' Father Joseph Fessio, mutual fund guru Peter Lynch and Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan attempted to launch a $37 million, 10-station network it had purchased from Children's Broadcasting Corp.
“Before they even began airing,” said Michael Dorner, editor of Catholic Radio Update, “they had to sell three of their stations in Dallas, New York and Phoenix.”
Catholic Family Radio began broadcasting in 1999 in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Kansas City, Mo., with a broad range of religious and political programming. It had hoped to purchase additional stations in Washington, D.C., Boston and New York. However, unable to generate advertisers, the network was discontinued in February 2001 and sold to Salem Communications, a Protestant-owned chain of Christian stations.
“Some in the industry said that with Catholic Family Radio's failure they expected all Catholic radio stations to go down the tubes,” said Sherry Kennedy Brownrigg, president of Starboard Broadcasting and former general manager of KVSS in Omaha, Neb. “But that's just not the case.”
“One of Catholic Family Radio's fundamental flaws was that it was operated as a for-profit venture,” Gajdosik said. By comparison, the stations that have been developed since that time have been not-for-profit.
Instead, Catholic radio stations have adopted a public radio format. “The burning question remains how to support Catholic radio,” Dorner said. “Those that are making it are asking listeners to support them through freewill donations.”
In fact, although Monaghan took a financial hit with Catholic Family Radio, he shows no sign of giving up on radio.
Monaghan's Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Ave Maria Foundation recently ceased publication of its 6-year-old Catholic newspaper, Credo, in order to put additional resources toward Ave Maria Radio, which operates two southeast Michigan AM stations (WDEO and WMAX). The Ave Maria Satellite Network currently distributes Kresta in the Afternoon and Catholic Answers Live. With additional resources, it hopes to grow as national distributors of Catholic programming.
“It's clear that the future of evangelization lies in electronic media,” said WDEO host Al Kresta. “If we're going to reach people with the message of the Gospel, we've got to meet them where they live. And like it or not, this is less a society of readers and more a society of listeners and viewers.”
The key for most Catholic radio stations is their ability to tap into existing satellite feeds for programming. There appears to be no shortage. “For every 24-hour period, there are almost 48 hours of programming available now,” noted Avila Radio President Jim Duffy.
Others, such as KVSS in Omaha, Neb., and WBVM in Tampa, Fla., do some of their own programming. Starboard, for example, offers local bishops an hour of programming per day. In addition it airs four hours of local programming and the remainder is from satellite feeds from St. Joseph Radio Presents, Catholic Answers Live and EWTN.
About half of all Catholic stations are EWTN affiliates, meaning they broadcast EWTN programming either in part or in full. “EWTN offering the signal to their satellite made Catholic radio possible,” Duffy said.
Overcoming Challenges
The challenges to starting a station, however, are very real. FCC regulations, the lack of available frequencies, a difficulty in finding sponsors as well as hostility in some dioceses make the endeavor precarious.
It is difficult in some dioceses to start a radio station, Dorner said, because the bishops or chancery do not want EWTN programming.
Not only that, but the initial cost alone to purchase a station can range between $175,000 and $3 million.
Yet, time and time again Catholic lay people, feeling called to start stations, are doing just that.
Two years ago, lamenting the loss of Catholic Family Radio in the Twin Cities, businessmen Terry Betthauser, Mark Hapka and Doug Heider formed a nonprofit, Twin Hearts Media, and began seeking a station to purchase. Earlier this year they had a contract to purchase Minneapolis station KSSM, but within weeks of its closing they decided to team up with Green Bay, Wis.-based Starboard Broadcasting.
While the two groups are still in the process, the station has been providing full-time Spanish language Catholic programming since July to the Twin Cities' 300,000 Hispanics. Once the sale is complete, Starboard hopes to not only operate a Catholic radio station in the Twin Cities but also to produce its own original programming, including a daily two-hour morning show hosted by EWTN's Jeff Cavins.
“Given all of the challenges and cross-purposes, I'm amazed that any Catholic radio stations get started at all,” Dorner said. “That proves that the hand of God is involved.”
Gajdosik said he has seen great success when Catholic radio is responsive to and run by the local community.
“When you own it, you control it and know what is best for your area. The reason Catholic radio is succeeding now is because God wants it to,” he said. “If you look at the efforts of those God has called to Catholic radio it is, by and large, those who have no money and no radio experience. The Catholic Radio Association exists to assist individuals such as these.”
Starboard's Brownrigg agreed. “Any time a new station was going on, in the past, they would have to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “The Catholic Radio Association has enabled these groups to get what they need.”
Experienced or not, the Church cannot afford to ignore radio as a medium. According to a recent Barna Research Group study, Christian mass media reaches more adults with Christian messages than do churches. That study showed that while 63% of adults had attended a church service during a month's time, 67% had given time to Christian media.
“The Second Vatican Council specifically called for Catholic radio and the media to be leaven,” Gajdosik said. “No other medium can proclaim the message of Jesus Christ as intimately or effectively as radio. Catholic radio is truly an answer.”
“As more and more people get a taste of Catholic radio, more people will want it. As our bishops see how powerful a tool it can be for them in fulfilling their role as teacher of the faith, they will either welcome lay groups to establish stations or establish them themselves,” he said.
“When you receive a letter from a listener saying that they fell in love with Jesus or learned something about their faith they didn't know before, it makes it all worthwhile,” Gajdosik added.
Duffy's impression is that Catholic radio efforts will steadily increase over the next four to five years. To date, at least 17 additional stations have been applied for but are not yet on the air.
Others aren't quite as optimistic. “I am upbeat about Catholic radio,” Dorner said, “but I know how few Catholics financially support the Catholic press, so only time will tell.”
Tim Drake is the Register's
Culture of Life editor.
----- EXCERPT: New Stations Make Ripples in the Airwaves ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Coping With Mental Illness, the Catholic Way DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Jane has been struggling with depression her whole life.
“People who have a melancholic personality like me are more prone to get depressed,” said the 29-year-old single Catholic who declined to use her real name. Her family situation has only aggravated her tendency toward depression. “My parents separated when I was a child. It was hard to deal with that and to see my mom struggling.”
As a teen-ager and young adult, she turned to alcohol and sex for escape. “I engaged in self-destructive behavior. I internalized everything. It would come out as anger and bitterness,” she said. “I had no self-worth and no self-esteem. It wasn't until my mom forced me to see a therapist that I started dealing with depression.”
Jane is not alone in her fight against depression. According to the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), approximately 18.8 million American adults, or about 9.5% of the U.S. population, have a depressive disorder of some kind. The NIMH also said mental disorders of all kinds are common in the United States and that roughly 22% of Americans — or about one in five adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder.
Dr. Philip Mango, a Catholic psychotherapist and the director of the St. Michael's Institute for the Psychological Sciences in New York, said Catholics often confuse the spiritual with the psychological.
“The problem with Catholics,” Mango said, “is that for a long time they thought if they just prayed and frequented the sacraments everything would be fine. But the psyche and soul are different. St. Thomas Aquinas said that.
“You can have an extraordinarily good and holy person who is deeply psychologically troubled,” he continued. “We have saints who were psychologically troubled. Psychological troubles are not signs of bad character or a shoddy spiritual life.”
Mango said many Catholics are afraid to deal with mental disorders for various reasons. Some mistrust secular practitioners, he said, but with good reason. Indeed, Mango emphasized the tremendous need the Church has for devout mental health professionals.
“The problem we have is, we have very few highly trained psychologists and psychiatrists who are loyal to the Holy Father and the Church,” he said.
He said he thinks some Catholics have a lack of knowledge and unjustified fear of the sciences and many Catholics are misusing religion.
“Many are hiding behind a religious wall,” he said. “They refuse to look at their emotional wounds. Occasionally, Catholics will tell me, ‘I don't need therapy. I'm a daily communicant. I go to confession.’ But a humble person will say, ‘Christ wants me to go to a doctor.’ If you have a heart attack, you don't just pray.”
The Roots of Disorders
Mango said five basic types of psychological disorders exist: biological disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease; major mental illnesses like schizophrenia and severe depression; anxiety disorders like phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder; character or personality disorders such as schizoid personality disorder; and psychosexual disorders like homosexual orientation. He stressed that sexual addiction — especially to masturbation — is extremely prevalent throughout the country.
Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, a prominent Catholic psychiatrist, said emotional and mental illnesses start with emotional pain. According to Fitzgibbons, the roots of emotional pain can be genetic but are many times environmental. “The absence of a father is very traumatic,” he said, citing a common example. “As children, we're like sponges. People get wounded very early.”
“There's also a feeling of lack of safety — Sept. 11, scandals in the Church and upheaval in business and the stock market. People think, ‘Whom can we trust?’” he said.
Fitzgibbons said many people suffer from chronic depression as well because they suffer from loneliness. “‘It's not good to be alone,’ Genesis tells us. It's important to deal with loneliness.”
Moreover, Mango pointed out Americans' profound inability to grieve properly and thoroughly.
“Jesus said, ‘Blessed are they who mourn,’ but America has a very tight lid on mourning,” he said. “We have a quick-fix mentality: ‘Get over it as fast as you can.’ These feelings get repressed and that causes painful symptoms.”
By way of example, Mango said dealing with the loss of a parent at a young age can take years to get through. “We have to give people space to mourn so they naturally will come through it,” he explained. “People here [in New York City] are still traumatized. The World Trade Center horror is still going on.”
According to Mango, the mission of St. Michael's Institute is to “integrate Catholic theology and spirituality, psychology and psychiatry for the healing of individuals, marriages and families.”
Mango and his colleagues use a variety of techniques to aid people with psychological disorders. Such practices include hypnosis; dream analysis; transference and counter-transference analysis; cognitive restructuring; and medication. He said he and his associates also pray with their patients and go to the sacraments themselves. Even Mother Teresa, with whom Mango worked for 12 years, brought patients to him.
Role of Religion
Although it is difficult to pinpoint precisely how much a disorder is due to biological, psychological or environmental factors, one thing is certain: the need for religion.
“We know for certain that authentic religious commitment promotes physical and mental health,” Mango said. “A person who participates in [his] faith and does it from the heart enjoys a sense of contentment and well-being.”
Fitzgibbons concurred: “It's very hard to get over emotional pain without God.”
Jane said she has experienced contentment and well-being since she started seeing a therapist in addition to a spiritual director.
“My therapist was very good,” she said. “He helped me to deal with the loss of my dad. He helped me to heal that wound. I looked for my father. Now he and I have a relationship.”
She said her spiritual director — a Catholic priest — has also helped her to cope with depression and guilt.
“My spiritual director is very gentle, compassionate and an excellent listener,” Jane said. “He told me to write everything down, the story of my life. I gave the pages to him and used that as a basis for a general confession. I used to be obsessed with my sins. Now it doesn't weigh on me. I put it in God's hands.”
“Through my director, I learned to accept myself,” she added. “He helped me to feel sorry for my sins and to see the good I've done and the good I can do.”
Father C. John McCloskey, director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., underscored the importance of regular spiritual direction in helping people detect whether they have a mental disorder.
“Everyone should have a spiritual director,” Father McCloskey said. “If you're a spiritual director, over time you get to know people just like a doctor. I'm trying to help spiritually, but I may sense that the person coming to me is also a person who needs help physiologically or psychologically. I try to discern what these persons need. It's a holistic solution.”
He said he refers people to faithful Catholic psychiatrists, psychologists or therapists but maintains that the Church will not alter its teachings on subjects such as sexual morality, homosexuality and contraception in order to rationalize immoral behavior that may stem from mental disorders.
“The Church is here to lay down a standard of morality that is liberating,” he said.
Father McCloskey encouraged those who are struggling with mental disorders to “get help.” He recommended a person “talk to a holy, intelligent priest or a very good woman religious” who is faithful to the Church.
He also suggested people turn to good books by prominent Catholic psychologists such as Father Benedict Groeschel's Arise from Darkness and The Courage to Be Chaste, which deal with depression and homosexual orientation respectively. Mango recommends Dr. Conrad Baars' Healing the Unaffirmed, and advocates The Journal of Psychology and Theology as a resource for mental health professionals.
In addition, Father McCloskey advised the family and friends of someone struggling with a mental disorder to “treat that person like another Christ.”
“It's important to stay away from a judgmental attitude. Be very positive about the possibility of their recovery,” he said.
Mango also emphasized the importance of affirmation. “A woman patient recently told me, ‘Thank you for believing in me when I couldn't believe in myself,’” he said. “The patient is Jesus Christ disguised. This is an incarnational, mystical reality. If Christ is the patient, then the patient is coming to help me.”
Although Jane still struggles with depression daily, she said the illness has taken on new meaning.
“It is no longer empty suffering,” she said. “The suffering has meaning, like Christ's suffering in the Garden. Through sound therapy and wise spiritual direction, I now know that life has meaning and that God created me for a purpose. Ironically, mental illness becomes an instrument of your salvation and sanctification.”
Martin Mazloom writes from Monterey Park, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Martin Mazloom ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Church and the News DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Information sources have changed significantly in the last 20 years, with the growth of cable television and the advent of the Internet.
As president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Archbishop John Foley has witnessed it all.
His own background in mass media — from newspapers to radio to television — has provided him with a unique look into how the Church can respond to and use the media to impact the world with the Gospel message. He spoke with Legion of Christ Brother Raymond Cleaveland about the media and the Church's approach to communications.
Can you provide some examples of the way in which the Church is using radio and television to positively impact individual lives?
The Holy Father's Christmas Midnight Mass is the most popular televised religious program in the world. It goes to about 70 countries. And the Italian Television Network, the RAI, said Christmas of 1999, when the Pope opened the Holy Door, it had an audience of 2 billion people. I think they exaggerated, but even if the exaggeration was by 1 billion, that is still one-sixth of the population of the world.
When I do commentary on these religious ceremonies, I view it as a tremendous opportunity for evangelization. I try to gear my comments so as not to offend the people who are familiar with the Catholic liturgy, so as not to leave in the dark the people who are not familiar with it.
You are referring to television in the above example. What about radio?
You have spot announcements on the radio: “Come home at Christmas” campaigns; campaigns for Holy Week and the Easter season inviting people to the Church at Pentecost; and I think these radio spot announcements can be very effective.
There are two types: The “reflective” spot announcements that dedicate 30 seconds or a minute to reflect on a certain theme, giving people something to think about. Then you have spot announcements aimed at a specific event or inviting people to come to a particular activity in the parish church. I have also heard of “radio retreats,” which can then be made into audiocassettes to be played back in your car.
How well does the Church use radio and TV around the world?
The Church universal uses radio and TV very well. The largest radio network in Portugal is Catholic. Spain has a Catholic radio network and France has two of them.
In the Synod of Bishops for Asia, one particular bishop said he realized the importance of having a Catholic radio station because one day he saw a man coming down the mountain, totally naked, holding just an umbrella over his head to protect his tiny transistor radio. So he said that the impact of radio in rural areas of the developing world is great because the little transistor radios are inexpensive. Everybody can have one.
In Latin America, you have many networks of Catholic radio stations. Some of them are developmental, focusing on helping the poor to grow in knowledge of the faith; others are primarily devotional. I would personally like to see a combination of both.
In other parts of the world, activity is equally vigorous. Chile's Catholic University has the most popular television station in the country. There are at least two Catholic television networks in Brazil and about 24 radio stations in Venezuela. Furthermore, the archbishop of Santo Domingo wants to start a continent-wide television network in Spanish.
Your council's recent document, “Ethics and the Internet,” makes reference to the “profound changes” journalism is undergoing. Can you describe some of the positive changes in journalism that are currently helping the Church make inroads in the mass media?
Well, regarding schools of journalism, I went to Columbia [University in New York]. We had a course called “Basic Issues” — which considered the economy, education, politics — and I told them that religion was lacking. I said religion was one of the most profound influences in the world. In fact, now they have a regular religion department in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
I have also tried to sensitize the networks to have regular religion reporters. And I have emphasized that they must have producers who are literate in the field of religion. There's the old story about a reporter sent out to cover the ballgame who knows nothing about sports. Well, they send a reporter out to cover religion who knows nothing about it and they call it objectivity. I call it ignorance.
We have seen some positive effects of our work with the networks. CNN is good. NBC has always been cooperative. CBS said the program they did here a few years ago, “48 Hours: Inside the Vatican,” was the best they have ever done in that series. And “The Today Show” continues to say that its week here in 1985 was the best in the history of the program.
So you don't just focus on the Catholic networks? You are orienting your pastoral outreach to the mainstream, secular media?
We believe that through cooperation with the secular media, our message will have greater credibility and a wider audience. We are trying to reach people with the message of Jesus Christ and the example of those who are trying to follow Christ; doing so through the secular media is more effective than if we just focused on our own channels. If we get the message from “48 Hours” or “The Today Show” or the nightly news, you reach many more people and it's much more credible.
Here you are referring to a national or international level. What is the best way to reach out to and befriend the secular media at the diocesan level?
I think that an effective program of public relations is the best thing a diocese can do. First, the public relations officer should be informed, always honest and very approachable. Second, that person should be creative in searching out stories that would make good feature stories for news publications or TV stations. For example, he or she could prepare stories about those who work with the poor, showing how the Church imitates Christ in that way.
Can you also touch upon some of the negative trends in journalism that we have to be aware of?
We live among people who are suspicious. I think that's good. There's nothing like a lot of suspicion to keep us on our guard. Now, as you know, we are going through a particularly difficult period in many nations with regard to sexual misconduct, and that tests us all. A cardinal asked me what we could do about cases like these. “Virtue,” I said. “The only adequate response is virtue; and in the absence of virtue, candor.” If we're not virtuous for God, we're virtuous for fear of getting caught. Forgive me for saying that, but it goes back to the old adage: “If you don't do it for love of God, do it out of fear of hell.”
What specific instances stand out in your mind as examples of how the Church was unfairly treated in the mainstream media?
Well, let us consider for a moment the case of Cardinal [Joseph] Bernardin, who was falsely accused of sexual abuse. I talked to CNN about this because it was the first mainstream news medium to report it. I said: “How could you accept the word of an admitted male prostitute, who was a drug addict, who said he ‘vaguely recalled in a suppressed memory’ something that had happened in his teens when this young man was a seminarian?”
“If a seminarian had really had a sexual contact with an archbishop,” I continued, “that memory could never be suppressed. It would cry out.” So I asked them point-blank: “Wasn't there any suspicion on your part about this truth of these accusations?” And they admitted that they had made a mistake.
In that instance, you personally went to bat for the Church, but there are probably lots of other times when you cannot do so. What should be done on a local or diocesan level in this regard?
Well that is why I have insisted on good public relations officers who establish an atmosphere of trust with the media. The journalists will know that if they ask a question, they will get a prompt and honest response; and they have confidence in him. One of the worst things we can do is to hide or say, “no comment.” So, I think that effective public relations are one of the best means of getting better coverage. I don't think the news media deliberately want to do the Church in. It's true that if they see a “juicy story” coming up, they will jump on it. However, if you have a well-informed public relations officer, that person will be able to give complete, honest and informative answers. For some people in the media, the Church is unapproachable and unresponsive, and we have to overcome that.
The other recent document that your council published, “The Church and Internet,” called for Church leaders/pastors to “receive media education.” Do you remember any instances when that education was sorely missing?
Not a specific moment, but it is seen in the general failure to prepare people to respond to questions accurately, giving specific facts instead of opinions, and not reacting with anger. I do think that some type of “ambush interview preparation” would be very good for everybody who is ordained a priest — whether that be in radio or television. How careful we have to be: accurate, honest, open, but careful.
What about the formation of seminarians to meet this specific pastoral challenge? How do you envisage future seminary training so the clergy of tomorrow will be able to “hit the ground running” with regard to the mass media?
I still think most people under-value the importance of the media in the Church. There was a document in 1984 from the Congregation for Catholic Education about the training of future priests in communications, but it has been universally ignored. And I think that's a tragedy.
One of the areas where we should see good communications skills is in the formation of priests — even in the example of the seminary teachers: They should be creative and interesting in their lessons. Jesus said that he “came to cast fire upon the earth,” and often we throw wet blankets because things are presented in a manner which is dull.
Now I don't know why that 1984 document isn't being enforced. It would seem so obvious to me. You might have the most precise knowledge of theology, but if you don't know how to present it, what a waste it is! What good will it do? We're supposed to preach the Gospel, and all of our theology should be taught in a manner in which we will be able to go out and share it and preach it.
So I think the Church is at fault for not having implemented those indications for training in seminaries and also for not trusting creative people and encouraging them. The Church has always been a great patron of the arts, but why hasn't She been a great patron of communications and drama? Those means can carry a powerful moral message.
As you come up on your 20th anniversary as president, describe for us the greatest contribution — the greatest achievement — your council has made to the Church of the 21st century.
The document Aetatis Novae, the 1992 Pastoral Instruction on Social Communications, which has been effective in trying to get people to incorporate communications into every aspect of the Church. The appendix contains concrete guidelines for designing pastoral plans for social communications. It is not enough for every diocese or Church institution to have a pastoral plan for communications; communications should be part of every pastoral plan.
You have to let people know what you're doing, and make what you're doing attractive and compelling and linked to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So that document, obviously, has been the most important activity on our part. We have to plan to be able to take advantage of every opportunity not only to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ but to show what the Church he founded is doing in his name.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Archbishop John Foley ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: San Francisco Judges Banned From Involvement With Scouts DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:SAN FRANCISCO — Superior Court judges in the city of San Francisco can no longer associate with the Boy Scouts in any way. The new policy alarms many Catholics, who say it opens the door to disallowing judges from participation in churches that teach homosexuality is morally wrong.
Members of the court adopted rules July 11 “prohibiting [the court's] members from activities that may give the appearance of bias based on sexual discrimination.” Judges are already banned from associating with groups that discriminate based on race or gender.
According to the policy, the judges are not allowed to be scout-masters, troop leaders or hold a position on any governing board associated with the Boy Scouts or any organization that excludes homosexuals. It was not clear whether any current judges were associated with the Boy Scouts.
At issue is the Scouts' ban on homosexuals that was upheld in 2000 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said the organization could define its own principles.
San Francisco Bar Association President Angela Bradstreet, a lesbian and a lawyer at a San Francisco law firm, specifically cited the Boy Scouts as the motivating factor in the judges' policy and promised to try to export San Francisco's policy to municipalities around the country.
“We are now approaching other metropolitan bar associations and local courts to ask them to follow the Superior Court's lead to ensure there is both perception and actuality of equality and impartiality in our court system for everyone,” Bradstreet said in a statement.
According to Edward White, a lawyer with the Thomas More Center for Law and Justice in Ann Arbor, Mich., bias is exactly what has motivated the policy. “They want judges with a particular ideology,” he said.
White said the broad language adopted by the Superior Court could be used to ban anyone belonging to any religion that disavows homosexual behavior. “[This policy could] prevent any candidate who is a member of any orthodox church or the Boy Scouts from serving on the bench,” he said.
In addition, such a ban on association should be totally unnecessary, White said, since “judges take an oath to uphold all the laws of the state of California.” White said judges normally follow the maxim “By our actions we are impartial,” and their association in most groups is immaterial.
“I am amazed that judges would so freely give up their free-association rights,” he said.
The Pacific Justice Institute, a nonprofit law firm that specializes in religious liberty and family values cases, has publicly vowed to fight for the rights of judges who do not wish to follow the new policy. It said several judges in other municipalities where the policy is likely to be adopted had already contacted the institute.
Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute, said he is certain the policy will be exported to other California cities.
However, Bradstreet said the new rules will not affect a judge's association with religious groups. She said the policy would only apply to organizations that did not allow homosexuals to participate in any way. Since the Catholic Church allows homosexuals and anyone else to pray in its churches, she said, there would be no effect on Catholic adjudicators.
Legal Groups Disagree
Not all legal groups agree with San Francisco's policy. The Arizona Supreme Court Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee released a report in December 2000 that stated members could engage in activities with the Boy Scouts regardless of their policy toward homosexuals.
Boy Scouts spokesman Greg Shields said the Scouts' policy prohibiting homosexuals stands, and said the Scouts will not allow the San Francisco Bar Association or anyone else to stop their work.
“We hope to continue our mission of building young men of character, and we won't let anything get in the way of our mission,” he said.
Shields added that overall, the Scouts are doing very well, with membership increasing over the last year.
“[The negative publicity] has been pretty minor,” he said. “We get a lot of support for what we do.”
Father Jim Maher served for 10 years as the Boy Scout chaplain for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and is now chaplain emeritus. Father Maher said he sees the San Francisco policy as “overkill.”
Like the Thomas More Law Center's White, Father Maher worries the San Francisco policy could grow to exclude anyone who is not politically in line with the bar association.
“That's exactly what's going to happen if this is allowed to continue,” Father Maher said.
Father Maher explained that the Scouts' policy on homosexuals is not nearly as radical as Bradstreet claims. He said Catholic scouting troops do allow people with a homosexual orientation to be involved with scouting as long as they are not engaging in homosexual behavior.
“We follow the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality,” he said, citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states on the topic of homosexuality: “This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them [homosexuals] a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition” (No. 2358).
The Catechism also stresses that homosexuals should be chaste.
It continues: “Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection” (No. 2359).
Still Scouting
Catholic layman Tom Serafin was a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout for more than 10 years. He later served as a scout instructor. Serafin has only good things to say about the scouts and said he believes the policy in San Francisco misses the point.
“The advantages of exposing boys to other cultures and economic brackets far outweigh the sexual politics of San Francisco,” he said.
“If I had a son, I would not feel comfortable as a parent allowing him in close proximity, on short or extended camping trips with a male who was a practicing homosexual,” he said. “When you are an 8- or 9-year-old Boy Scout, you should not be concerned with sexuality; you should be learning to build character, tie knots and cut logs — that's what the Boy Scouts are all about.
“It's ironic,” he continued, “that some people seem to have learned nothing from the recent scandals in the Catholic Church — is it unreasonable to want to protect our children?”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Window Into the Confessional
Bishop Patrick McGrath is the first bishop to take such a step, and it is unknown whether other dioceses will follow suit.
“I want to make sure people feel safe, that everything's aboveboard, and that confession is visible, but not audible,” Bishop McGrath explained.
The newer confessionals, which permit the sacrament “face to face,” will be the ones renovated, according to the diocese. The traditional confessionals, found in about a quarter of local parishes, will not be modified, since they offer no chance for priest/penitent contact and are not open to abuse, the paper explained.
Will Couples Be Cloned?
LIFESITE NEWS, Aug. 7 — At least one infertile American couple will allow themselves to be cloned by self-anointed cloning pioneer Panos Zavos, according to the Canadian pro-life news service Lifesite (www.lifesite.ca). Six other couples will also take part in the experiment.
“We want the world to know we are progressing responsibly,” Zavos told reporters.
The plan is to emulate the cloning of Dolly the sheep by transferring DNA from a cell taken from each of the mothers into donor eggs that have been hollowed out, deprived of a nucleus.
“The fusion would then be electrically stimulated, and any resulting embryo transferred to the womb of a surrogate mother,” according to LifeSite.
The experiments have been denounced by local politicians and by Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics.
“The technology does not exist,” Caplan said. He described Zavos' experiments as “way outside the box as far as where the science is today.”
Catholic Vietnamese Celebrate Marian Days
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 10 — Some 40,000 Vietnamese Catholics from that country, the United States and Canada gathered in Carthage, Mo., for a four-day-long Marian Days festival, according to Associated Press.
It began with a solemn procession through the streets led by Boston Cardinal Bernard Law. The celebration was held at the Congregation of the Mother of Co-Redemptrix, a Vietnamese-American monastery.
Associated Press reported that “another 20,000 people lined the Ozark town's streets to watch the four-block procession behind a float covered in flowers and bearing a statue of Our Lady of Fatima.”
Cardinal Law encouraged the attendees to witness forcefully to Christianity.
“You are the future of the Church in this country and in Vietnam,” the cardinal said. “From you will come the political leaders in this country, from you will come business leaders in this country.”
Cardinal Law, once the bishop of a neighboring diocese in Missouri, had been instrumental in helping some of the Vietnamese when they were “boat people” and in founding the monastery.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Keating Rebuked for Counseling Catholics to Avoid Church and Not Donate DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:OKLAHOMA CITY — The man appointed by the U.S. bishops to head their clergy sexual-abuse review panel has advocated boycotting churches as a way of forcing bishops to do a better job policing priests.
Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, chairman of the National Review Board on clergy sex abuse, said Catholics unhappy about the way their bishop is handling the matter might withhold contributions or refrain from attending Mass in that diocese.
“That's a time for the lay community of that diocese to say we are not writing another check, we are not going to go to Mass in this diocese,” Keating told a reporter from Boston television station WHDH on July 29. “In effect a strike, if you wish, a sit-down until things change.”
For the majority of Catholics who live too far from a church in a neighboring diocese, that would mean missing Mass altogether. The Church teaches that deliberately skipping Mass on Sundays or holy days of obligation is a mortal sin. Withholding contributions is a violation of the fifth precept of the Church, which requires Catholics to “help to provide for the needs of the Church.”
Keating denied he was counseling Catholics to miss Mass altogether, but the governor's remarks were criticized in an editorial in the Aug. 9 issue of The Pilot, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, and by his own bishop.
The Oklahoma governor's “well-known, no-nonsense attitude may play well in the secular media, but there are certain things that are not admissible in the Church,” the Pilot editorial read. “For a Church-appointed leader to publicly orchestrate a kind of protest that would call for the faithful to stop contributions or, worse, to boycott Sunday Mass — in effect calling all Catholics in a diocese to commit a mortal sin — is just surreal.”
The newspaper, which is published by the Archdiocese of Boston, said it hopes Keating's comments “will not pass unnoticed by those who appointed him to his current position.”
Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
Archbishop Beltran
But Archbishop Eusebius Beltran of Oklahoma City, with whom Keating has disagreed in the past, said the governor's advice was wrong.
“I find it necessary to respond to Gov. Frank Keating's statements regarding the Catholic Church,” Archbishop Beltran wrote in an Aug. 9 statement. “I was told about his comments and then I heard Gov. Keating wrongly advising Catholics how to live their faith in response to the current sexual-abuse scandal. His statements are totally inaccurate, divisive and contrary to the teachings and beliefs of our Catholic faith.”
Archbishop Beltran made it clear that although Keating chairs the review board, he is not a spokesman for the teachings and practices of the Catholic faith. The archbishop, who issued his statement while he was out of the state, said he would address the matter in an upcoming issue of his diocesan newspaper, The Sooner Catholic.
Keating said in an interview that his remarks were taken out of context. But he said that he would still counsel Catholics, if a bishop or pastor is “indifferent to the rape or abuse of children,” to “vote with their feet, to go to Mass in a different diocese.” That could take the form of attending Mass in a church not run by the diocese but by a religious order, he said. He said if he were in Boston and unhappy about the way things were going there, he would attend Mass at Boston College, a Jesuit school.
“The mission of the Church is too important to be subverted by sinning or criminal priests or bishops,” he said.
Not the First Time
It's not the first time Keating has stirred controversy involving the Mass. In February 1999, Keating, who supports the death penalty, decided to skip Mass one Sunday because he said he could not sit silently as a letter written by Archbishop Beltran was read criticizing his stand on capital punishment. The archbishop prepared the letter after Keating said Pope John Paul II was mistaken in his opposition to the death penalty.
Keating, a former FBI agent and federal prosecutor, has been seen as determined to take a no-nonsense, get-tough approach to the clerical-abuse situation. But some have wondered if his respect for Church teaching and practice hasn't taken a back-seat to his tough attitude. Soon after he was appointed to head the board in June, Keating promised to use his position to help lay people remove bishops who might have looked the other way or transferred known priest-abusers.
Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said in response that he did not think that was part of the job description. “Whether a bishop resigns is an issue between that bishop and the Holy Father,” the cardinal said in an interview.
Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute and a spokesman for Catholics for Authentic Reform, said Keating is a “terrific governor, but out of control on this new committee.”
“He's said some scandalous things,” Ruse said. “On this issue [of clerical sex abuse] he just does-n't know what he's talking about. I mean, to advise people to commit a mortal sin? It's been gaffe after gaffe with him.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Remarkable Reversal: New Basilica Latest Chapter in Divine Mercy Saga DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Twenty-five years ago, her writings were banned by the Vatican and her legacy, a special devotion to the divine mercy of God, seemed in doubt.
Today she is a saint, her diary has been translated into more than a dozen languages and her Divine Mercy movement has attracted millions of Catholics around the world.
For St. Faustina Kowalska, it's been a remarkable reversal. And like several other sainthood stories in recent years, this one had a hidden protagonist: Pope John Paul II.
The Holy Father, who beatified her in 1993 and canonized her in 2000, was scheduled to go back to his Polish homeland Aug. 16-19 to inaugurate a $20 million basilica and pilgrim complex dedicated to St. Faustina and the Divine Mercy movement.
It's the latest chapter in the Pope's ongoing interest in the saint, who lived several years in John Paul's archdiocese of Krakow and died there in 1938 at age 33. As a young man in the same city, the Holy Father used to visit a sanctuary dedicated to her after her death.
After he became archbishop of Krakow in the 1960s, he pressed the Vatican for years to lift the ban on St. Faustina's writings. Convinced that Rome's opposition was based on a faulty translation of her diary, he had it retranslated — and the ban was lifted in 1978, six months before his election as Pope.
The second encyclical of his pontificate, Dives in Misericordia (Rich in Mercy), published in 1980, was dedicated to the divine mercy theme that drove St. Faustina's spiritual life.
Anyone who's ever waded through that papal text knows its language is not easy. Buttressed by a footnoted explanation of the linguistic and philosophical history of the concept of divine mercy, it explains how “in the eschatological fulfillment, mercy will be revealed as love.”
Anyone who's ever read St. Faustina's diary knows she wrote fairly simple thoughts, some based on her visions of Christ, who tells her plainly: “I have opened my heart as a living fountain of mercy. Let all souls draw life from it.”
While simplicity might not be the Holy Father's own writing style, he knows God sometimes speaks to the world through simple and uneducated people.
He has proclaimed a number of them saints in recent months, including St. Padre Pio, the Italian mystic, and St. Juan Diego, the Mexican peasant who had visions of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
St. Faustina's followers now call John Paul the “Mercy Pope,” and his support of the mystic nun goes back many years. As archbishop of Krakow, however, he sometimes had to temper the enthusiasm of her religious order, the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, who wanted him to fight the Vatican ban on Faustina's writings and get her sainthood cause rolling.
“They are bombarding me with requests to begin the process,” he said in 1965, according to his long-time biographer, Marian Father Adam Boniecki.
Then Archbishop Wojtyla did open the diocesan sainthood process and wrapped it up quickly, depositing the documentation at the Vatican in 1967. He figured the Vatican would be more open to dropping its ban on her writings once it had studied the beatification material.
At the same time, he cautioned his own priests against celebrating weekly Mass at the “altar of Mercy,” lest this be seen as promoting her cult.
“We are presently treading as if on glass,” he said of his delicate efforts to deal with the Vatican on the issue, according to Father Boniecki's biography.
The Vatican's attitude was dictated in part by the Church's longstanding suspicion of private revelations.
“The Church has always taught that revelation ended with the Apostles. For that reason, it has been deeply concerned not to give official credit to these presumed private revelations,” said Father Gianfranco Girotti, who worked at the Vatican's doctrinal congregation when the ban was in force.
In the case of St. Faustina, the imperative tone of some of the writings was also a factor. There was a “categorical” style to the diary entries that only added to the Vatican's caution, Father Girotti said.
Interspersed among the pages of the diary are warnings from Christ about dire consequences unless the mercy devotions are practiced and an annual Divine Mercy Sunday is established.
“I am giving them the last hope of salvation; that is, the feast of my mercy. If they will not adore my mercy, they will perish for all eternity,” one entry reads.
Part of that directive was fulfilled in 2000 when the Pope proclaimed the second Sunday of Easter as Mercy Sunday throughout the world.
St. Faustina wrote that she had witnessed a vision of Jesus — one hand raised in benediction and the other resting on his breast — from which emanated two rays of light. She said Christ demanded to have this image painted and venerated.
The image is now found in many churches around the world, including the Church of the Holy Spirit near the Vatican. The Holy Father visited that church and blessed the painting in 1995.
Some of St. Faustina's reported spiritual gifts set her apart from the Catholic mainstream. According to a Vatican biographical note, in addition to revelations and visions they included hidden stigmata, bilocation, the reading of human souls and prophecy.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Thavis ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Poland Had Doctors at the Ready
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 9 — Elite medical teams and a hospital were set aside in Pope John Paul II's old home city of Krakow, Poland, for his visit Aug. 16-19, according to Associated Press.
Poland Deputy Health Minister Aleksander Nauman said the country prepared thoroughly to care both for the sickly Pope and the needs of the estimated 4 million pilgrims who attended.
New Vatican Envoy to Khartoum
AFRICAN CHURCH INFORMATION SERVICE, Aug. 12 — War-torn Sudan, where Christians have been persecuted through war and induced famine for more than a decade, has a new apostolic nuncio, Bishop Dominique Mamberti.
According to the African Church Information Service, Cardinal Angelo Sodano hailed the Church in Sudan “for its involvement in evangelization and human development,” noted the sufferings of Christians in that country and said the Church asked for nothing more in Sudan than “the freedom to proclaim the Gospel as a message of peace and hope.”
Lebanese President Congratulates Pope
In a letter, Lahoud described the event as “an opportunity for youth from all over the globe to gather and share their spiritual experiences and values together in a world threatened by winds of divisions, anxiety and uncertainty.” He added: “I am sure that this new generation of youth ... is capable of constructing a loving civilization, unshaken by world divisions.”
Lebanon, once a successful multireligious society, fell into a vicious, decade-long civil war. Christians began having smaller families than Muslims in the 1960s, upsetting the balance of power enshrined in its 1930s constitution.
Now the nation struggles to rebuild as younger Christians stream out to Europe and the United States as refugees and the country lies under the heavy hand of Syrian occupation.
Catholic-Muslim Accord Announced
VATICAN PRESS OFFICE, Aug. 9 — According to a release published by the Holy See's press office, the Islamic-Catholic Liaison Committee, which met in England in mid-July, has issued its final report.
The Muslim attendees were led by Professor Kamel Al-Sharif, secretary general of the International Islamic Council for Da'wah and Relief. Catholics were led by Cardinal Francis Arinze. Their report stated:
“We affirm that our religions both teach that Almighty God has created all people equal in dignity, and therefore we reject every form of racism.
“We condemn the racist practices which exist today in many societies and we accept our responsibility to endeavor to eliminate misconceptions and prejudices which in turn generate racial discrimination.
“We call upon individuals, educational and social institutions and the media to join this effort against racism.
“We believe that adherence to religious values and engaging in dialogue to achieve mutual understanding and mutual respect are conducive to a world of justice and peace.
“We commit ourselves to continue to promote a culture of dialogue and to work together in order to introduce this culture of dialogue into our respective communities and more specifically in educational and cultural programs.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Report Details Everything From Rolls of Film to Meals Served DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Each year the rhythm of activity inside the Vatican walls — from public papal Masses to meals served to Vatican employees — is charted in minute detail in a thick tome graced with color photos of the Pope and Vatican stamps.
The 2001 report, contained in the annually published “Attivita della Santa Sede” (“Activity of the Holy See”), was released in late July.
From the introduction to the report on the Vatican motor pool, the 2001 volume is filled with references to returning to a normal work pace after the extraordinary events of the Holy Year 2000.
However, there are exceptions. For example, the office that distributes certificates attesting to a papal blessing said so many people discovered the scrolls during the Holy Year that the Vatican issued even more in 2001 — some 300,000 of them.
Obviously, though, without the almost daily public audiences and liturgies of the Jubilee, the Vatican Television Center saw a major drop in the hours of live broadcasting it offered: 197 hours in 2001 compared to 622 hours in 2000.
The day-by-day summary of Pope John Paul II's activity took up the first 672 pages of the 2001 volume; in the Jubilee Year, 716 pages were needed.
Still, the official papal photographers kept busy, shooting some 6,500 rolls of film, each with 36 exposures.
And while there might have been fewer tourists visiting St. Peter's Ba-silica, janitors still had to maintain a regular rhythm of cleaning the 645,000 square feet of floor space open to the public.
The end of the Jubilee meant a return to studies for several categories of Vatican employees and officials.
To ensure there always would be an ample number of confessors in the major basilicas of Rome during the Holy Year, the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican court, suspended the study sessions it offers the priests.
But the courses were offered again in 2001 and included separate presentations devoted to Church teaching, ethics and morals related to medical treatment of conjoined twins; human embryo stem cells; divorced and civilly remarried Catholics; transexuality; and “confession by telephone or Internet.”
With fewer huge crowds to handle, the Swiss Guards also took the opportunity to sharpen their skills.
The book explained, “The service of close, plainclothes protection around the Holy Father increasingly must be marked by readiness, discretion and effectiveness,” and so four officers went to Switzerland for a special course in the latest bodyguard techniques.
While the book also points out that new guards are required to take intensive Italian courses, other statistics show how English has surpassed Italian as the “lingua fran-ca,” especially when dealing with visitors.
A severely limited number of people are allowed to go with a guide into the excavated necropolis under St. Peter's Basilica; 42% of the almost 36,000 people allowed in asked for an English-speaking guide.
Italian was the next most-requested language, accounting for about 25% of the tours. Guides also were available for tours in French, German and Spanish.
A similar situation could be seen among the 3.3 million visitors to the Vatican Museums in 2001. Of the 224,000 people who rented the audio “Gallery Guide,” 48% used the English version.
John Paul's Jan. 21, 2001, announcement of new cardinals led to the biggest day for the Vatican press office's Internet site and, even there, English was the most popular language.
The press office said its biographies of the new cardinals were accessed 16,278 times in English, 8,969 times in Italian and 6,229 times in German.
The press office also is counting its “cookies,” computer codes that allow it to know that, although its Web pages were consulted 6.4 million times in 2001, all of those hits came from only 532,000 different computers.
Other statistics included in the 2001 volume:
E 153 prelates participated in an eight-day course for new bishops sponsored by the Congregation for Bishops.
E There are 258 retired bishops from the Church's missionary territories.
E The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments dispensed 540 men from the obligations of the priesthood.
E The Vatican's daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, is sold at about 1,400 newsstands in 40 Italian cities.
E Vatican Radio's 398 employees come from 61 nations.
E 532 people held Vatican citizenship Dec. 31, 2001; they include 59 cardinals, 272 members of the Vatican diplomatic corps, 58 “other clerics,” 94 Swiss Guards and “49 other laypeople.”
E The employee cafeteria served more than 65,000 meals during the year.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cindy Wooden ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Models for the New Evangelization DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:During the Angelus last Sunday, I offered some reflections on Toronto, where the 17th World Youth Day took place. Today I would like to dwell on my subsequent stops in Guatemala and Mexico during my apostolic trip, where the Lord gave me the joy of canonizing and beatifying some illustrious sons of the American continent.
First of all, I feel the need to reiterate my heartfelt gratitude to the political, administrative and military authorities of these respective countries, as well as their institutional organizations, for the warm welcome and the hospitality that they extended to my collaborators and me.
I also extend my gratitude to the bishops, priests, brothers, sisters, volunteers and families who generously made every effort to welcome the pilgrims and to see that everything went as smoothly as possible. Their mutual efforts helped to insure that a spiritual climate of joy and celebration characterized every stage of my pilgrimage. But my deepest and warmest thanks go to the Christian people who turned out in such vast numbers to meet me in Guatemala and Mexico. The strong turnout of these brothers and sisters enabled me to catch a glimpse of the faith that impels them, their filial affection for the Successor of Peter and their enthusiasm for belonging to the Catholic Church.
Their lives constitute an exemplary model of attaining the heights of sanctity while remaining faithful to an ancestral culture that has been illuminated by Christ's renewing grace.
An Apostle to the Poor
The occasion for my visit to Guatemala City was the canonization of Brother Pedro de San Josè de Batancur, who was born on the island of Tenerife and who traveled across the ocean to evangelize the poor and indigenous people of Cuba, then Honduras, and finally Guatemala, which he loved to call his “Promised Land.” He was a man of intense prayer and a dauntless apostle of God's mercy. He found energy for his ministry by reflecting on the mysteries of Bethlehem and Calvary. Prayer was the source of his zeal and his apostolic courage. A humble and austere man, he was able to recognize in his brothers and sisters, especially in those who were most neglected, the face of Christ, and for each person who was in need he was “the man who helped them with alms.” His example is an invitation to practice merciful love toward our brothers and sisters, especially those who are most neglected. His intercession inspires and sustains believers in Guatemala and throughout the whole world so that they will open their hearts to Christ and to their brothers and sisters.
The First Indian Saint
The last stop during my pilgrimage was Mexico City, where on two different occasions in the Basilica of Guadalupe, I had the joy of raising to the honors of the altar three sons from that beloved land: St. Juan Diego, the Indian to whom the Virgin appeared on the hill of Tepeyac, and Blessed Juan Bautista and Blessed Jacinto de los Angeles, who shed their blood in the year 1700 in order to remain faithful to their baptism and to the Catholic Church.
Juan Diego, the first Indian to be canonized, was a humble and generous man of great simplicity. He is intimately linked with Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose mestizo face manifests a tender, maternal love for all the Mexican people. The events at Guadalupe constitute the beginning of evangelization in Mexico — a model of evangelization that is perfectly integrated within the culture, thereby showing how people can receive the Christian message without having to give up their own culture.
Models of Holiness
Blessed Juan Bautista and Blessed Jacinto de los Angeles are the fruit of holiness from that initial evangelization among the Zapotecan Indians. Fathers of families and men of utmost integrity, they knew how to carry out their responsibilities in a way that was inspired by the teachings of the Gospel without giving up their traditional indigenous culture. Their lives constitute an exemplary model of attaining the heights of sanctity while remaining faithful to an ancestral culture that has been illuminated by Christ's renewing grace.
These faithful disciples of Christ, filially devoted to Mary, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mother and Queen of the Americas, whose memory constantly accompanied me throughout my pastoral visit, are sustaining the surge of missionary activity among believers in America who are serving the new evangelization. They are a stimulus for all of God's people to build a new humanity that is inspired by the perennial values of the Gospel.
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Register Summary DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:On Aug. 7, Pope John Paul II met with pilgrims from around the world for his weekly general audience. It was held in the courtyard of his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo. During the audience, the Holy Father recalled some highlights of his visit during the previous week to Guatemala and Mexico.
Pope John Paul II thanked all those who were instrumental in making his pilgrimage to these countries a success. He offered special thanks to the vast numbers of people who turned out to see him. “The strong turnout of these brothers and sisters enabled me to catch a glimpse of the faith that impels them, their filial affection for the Successor of Peter and their enthusiasm for belonging to the Catholic Church,” he noted.
While the Holy Father was in Guatemala, he canonized Brother Pedro de San Josè de Betancur, a Spaniard who found his “Promised Land” in Guatemala where he worked among the poor. “A humble and austere man, he was able to recognize in his brothers and sisters, especially in those who were most neglected, the face of Christ,” the Pope said.
In Mexico, John Paul canonized the first Indian ever — St. Juan Diego. St. Juan Diego was “a humble and generous man of great simplicity” to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared in the 16th century. He also beatified two Zapotecan Indian martyrs who shed their blood for their faith. “They are a stimulus for all of God's people to build a new humanity that is inspired by the perennial values of the Gospel,” the Holy Father said.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Church Strives for Social Integration in Ethnically Divided Sri Lanka DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — With Sri Lanka on the threshold of historic peace talks to find a lasting solution to the country's 20-year-old ethnic conflict, the Catholic Church is doing its best to foster reconciliation.
The chance for peace in the war-ravaged nation increased in February when the Sri Lankan government and Tamil rebels signed a historic truce halting the bloodshed that has claimed nearly 65,000 lives. The two sides are now working together to reach a permanent peace agreement.
The ongoing peace process has generated a “lot of positive changes in the people and most of them are eagerly looking forward to lasting peace,” said Archbishop Oswald Gomis of the Colombo Archdiocese, which contains more than half of the island nation's 1.2 million Catholics, in an interview in late July.
However, some are still apprehensive about the prospect of lasting peace. In response the Church has taken up peacemaking as a mission.
“The peace process cannot succeed unless there is community integration between the ethnically divided [Sinhala and Tamil] people,” said the archbishop, who was installed July 27 after being transferred from the Anuradhapura Diocese.
Based on this vision, the archbishop pointed out, the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka has set up “peace desks” and peace committees with the collaboration of other religious communities to foster reconciliation and understanding between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority. The move has led to innovative campaigns by the Church to build support for the peace process.
A cycle rally initiated by the peace desk in the northern Mannar Diocese saw 400 minority-Tamil youth pedaling their way to Colombo in a 98-mile bicycle rally in late July. The rallyists received rousing receptions — even at dozens of exclusively Buddhist townships and villages — during their five-day ride to Colombo to bring the message of peace.
“We are happy about the enthusiasm the cycle rally created,” said Father Damian Fernando, director of Caritas Sri Lanka. The Church in Sri Lanka, with the help of the Caritas network, is exploring different methods to muster support for peace, he said.
Serious efforts are being made at the diocesan level to make the Sinhala and Tamil populations sensitive to the suffering and concerns of others. The efforts have resulted in dozens of exchange programs between the Sinhala and Tamil areas.
“It is not Christians alone we take on the exposure programs,” Father Fernando said. “We are acting in collaboration with Buddhist and Hindus.”
With the easing of travel restrictions after the Feb. 23 cease-fire, the Church's effort to build bridges between the ethnically divided communities has become much easier, he added.
History
The Liberation of Tigers of Tamil Elam, known as the Tamil Tigers, had been waging an armed conflict against domination of the Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority against the Tamil minority since 1983, leaving the Tamil Hindu areas in the north and the east inaccessible to the Sri Lankan army and the Sinhala majority.
The Sinhala population accounts for more than 74% of Sri Lanka's 19.4 million people while the Tamils account for 18% of the population. By religion, Buddhists comprise 69% of the total population, Hindus 15%, Christians 8% and Muslims 7%.
Following the elections last December that brought the current government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinge into power, the Tamil Tigers declared a unilateral truce on Christmas Eve. The Wickremesinge government responded to the gesture with several goodwill measures, including the lifting of an embargo on the Tamil Tigers-controlled areas, leading to the historic cease-fire agreement signed Feb. 23.
The truce has brought a “fresh lease on life” to the war-weary nation, said Father Anthony Leo, coordinator of Caritas Sri Lanka's program in Trincomalee, which lies 168 miles east of Colombo.
“Now, we find Sinhala people coming here on picnics after years [of absence],” Father Leo said.
‘Community Integration’
With lasting peace now “closer to reality than ever before,” Father Leo said Caritas has already gone beyond the relief and rehabilitation programs for the displaced people in place for years. The challenge before the Church in the new circumstances, he said, is to promote “community integration.”
“There are thousands of families in this country across both sides of the ethnic divide that have lost someone due to the war,” he said. “We need to help them overcome the feeling of vengeance and reconcile them to the reality of one nation with different people.”
With this goal, he said, the dioceses in the south sent Sinhala youth to live with Tamil families in Trincomalee. “When they left, they had a different understanding of the Tamils,” he said.
Such exposure programs are being carried out in a larger scale at schools and among youth, Father Fernando said. Similarly, he said, the Church has organized several gettogethers of war widows from both sides to help them understand and share their sorrows.
Sagari Kakumari, a Sinhala Catholic living in a refugee camp near Trincomalee, said she and her family fled their Tamil-majority village following intense fighting between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan army a couple years ago.
Despite being Sinhala, Kakumari said, she is now confident her Tamil neighbors would continue to invite her family for the Hindu festivals and share their meals when she returns to her native village.
Archbishop Gomis said the Church's bid to forge understanding among the ethnically divided communities has already started yielding results.
Said the archbishop: “After the exposure programs, I have heard the people say this fighting has been a folly and unnecessary and how much we have been made to suffer for this.”
Anto Akkara writes from
New Delhi, India.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anto Akkara ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Fictitious Priests Behaving Badly
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 9 — In Mexico, an upcoming film that deals with moral struggles and failings among that country's clergy has raised hackles among many Catholics — but not among all the country's bishops.
According to Associated Press, the Mexican bishops' conference spokesman described the film as a “wake-up call” for Christians.
The Crime of Father Amaro, a modern-day adaptation of Jose Eca de Queiroz's 19th-century novel by that name, opened in Mexican theaters last week. It depicts priests who violate their vows in a number of ways, including love affairs, drug trafficking and involvement with leftist guerrillas.
One bishop, Alberto Suarez of Michoacan, decried the film as “loaded with hatred of our Church.”
But Father Rafael Gonzalez, a representative for the Council of Mexican Bishops, said the film simply called on the Church “to review its procedure for selecting and training priests and [become] closer to the people.”
Since the film was partly government-funded, some Catholic groups are suing the relevant agencies that contributed to it.
More Christians Die in Indonesia
FRONTPAGEMAGAZINE.COM, Aug. 14 — The savage Muslim attacks on Christians in Indonesia's Sulawesi province have begun again, according to Ian Freestone, a director of International Friends of Compassion, a human rights group.
Writing in the U.S. Web site FrontPage Magazine, Freestone reported the massacres that marked November and December 2001 have begun again.
“Whole villages are being burnt to the ground, churches are being destroyed and Christians are being shot and hacked to death,” Freestone said. “Desperate calls for assistance are being received via CB radios to neighboring villages.”
The attacks were apparently orchestrated by Laskar Jihad, an Islamic militant with links to al Qaeda. Security forces were reportedly absent from the scene, though they have been sent to the religiously mixed region specifically to protect Christians.
“Is there a conspiracy between the Laskar Jihad and part of these defense forces?” one Christian leader asked. “Who knows! Indeed there is nothing we can do. Apparently we have no right to live in our homeland, the Republic of Indonesia.”
German Diocese Would Dismiss ‘Married’ Homosexuals
LIFESITE NEWS, Aug. 12 — While the Church in Germany was unable to prevent that government from fabricating “civil unions” for homosexual couples, one diocese has taken steps to show its profound disapproval of the law, according to LifeSite News (www.lifesite.ca).
Because the Church considers such unions an attack on the sanctity of marriage, the Diocese of Limburg will not employ people who enter such “registered life partnerships.”
In a letter sent out last week to heads of all Church-sponsored groups, the diocese said anyone who contracts such a civil union “loses credibility in fulfilling the tasks he has to perform in an ecclesiastical institution. Since entering a registered life partnership is considered a serious violation of loyalty obligations ... dismissal is in principle justified and can only be disregarded in special cases.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Outdoing Dallas DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Zero tolerance, Dallas-style, has been in effect for two months for many dioceses and the results are starting to come in. What they show is that fixing the cover-up of priests' abuse of minors is best handled with prudence and care — more prudence and care, perhaps, than the bishops' June 14 Dallas meeting allowed.
The policy has not been a total disaster. In many cases, it has done exactly what its supporters hoped: driven from ministry men who have no business being there — men who have abused minors, scarring them emotionally for life, and causing grave scandal.
But it has also “zeroed out” some priests who could be doing great good in their ministries — men like those cited in our Page One story this week. One was guilty as a teen-ager of indecent exposure. Decades later he became Catholic; still later he became a priest. But all of a sudden, the long-ago incident is enough to remove him from ministry. Another priest was apparently “zeroed out” because, while an 18-year-old seminarian on leave, he had an affair with a 16-year-old girl. He told his rector about the incident, which put it on his record and has now, years later, caused his dismissal.
Incidents like these have sparked protests in parishes. Parishioners understand the need to remove priests who pose a danger to minors. They are questioning what good is served by removing those who don't.
The bishops' conference leaders themselves admitted the Dallas meeting alone did not give them enough time to achieve a better solution than they did, but it was necessary to produce something in order to appease hostile media and an anxious public. It couldn't even attempt to address the root cases of the abuse cover-up.
This brought us the spectacle of bishops telling the meeting they disagreed with the policy but suggesting their brother bishops vote for it anyway.
The bishops' conference is a consensus-forming instrument. The way it works, through committees, produces documents that most bishops can agree with, or at least live with. This can be effective at showing a common purpose and a shared good will on the part of bishops, but it discourages nuance — and courage — in its answers to complicated questions. Individual bishops' ideas, no matter how weighty, come across as nitpicking when they are raised at such a meeting.
It is no place, as one archbishop put it, “to do theology.”
How can the bishops form a better policy — one that is harder on root causes and less prone to a “shoot-first, ask-questions-later” approach?
A plenary council would seem to be the best way. Some 50 bishops have signed on to one proposal for such a council. There is no need for enthusiasts of the workings of the bishops' conference to get defensive over the proposal to handle the abuse cover-up crisis with a council. The approach of the U.S. bishops' conference can work well in many circumstances, but it has patently and publicly failed in this extraordinary circumstance.
A plenary council would allow the kind of input from bishops and representatives from the wider Church that generated such energy and enthusiasm at Vatican II.
Vatican II worked because it allowed for wide-ranging input from bishops around the world in a way that was not dominated and controlled by powerful committee chairmen. What the Church in the United States needs now is wide-ranging input from bishops across the country to address the fundamental issues at play in the scandal.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Assyrian Assimilation?
I think that you are quite mistaken in putting the Assyrian Church of the East “in communion with Rome” ("Christians Divided Over Iraq Invasion,” Aug. 4-10).
Since 1553, branches of that Nestorian church have been in and out of union with Rome. Finally, in the 19th century, three of its four branches agreed on one patriarch and were constituted the Chaldean Rite of the Catholic Church.
The Nestorian Church and our Chaldean Rite are people of the same Assyrian ethnic group. Around Chicago “Assyrians” seem to be pro-Israel and anti-Saddam, while the two Chaldean parishes do not make any such noises. When a second Chaldean church was opened in Chicago, the patriarch of the Assyrian Church attended, but the Catholic Ukrainian Rite bishop was in charge of the ceremonies. With his residence in Baghdad, Chaldean Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid would oppose any invasion of Iraq. He was born in Mosul in the north.
When Israel has undeclared and uninspected nuclear weapons, I am not impressed with the fuss raised by our irresponsible politicians about the possibility of Iraq securing weapons of mass destruction. Even if Iraq got such weapons, their delivery systems could not get them to the United States. I am opposed to a never-ending worldwide expansion of the “war against terrorism.”
In a newspaper interview in Chicago, the Assyrian patriarch claimed good relations with the Vatican, but he did not claim union with Rome.
ROBERT J. GORMAN
Bad Bodings for Democracy
Regarding “N.Y. ‘Pill Bill’ Puts Church in Tough Spot” (July 28-Aug. 3):
I find it extremely disconcerting that our government consistently uses a methodology of smoke screens and distractions to pass highly contentious, and at times blatantly unconstitutional, legislation. Every citizen in this country should be outraged that state lawmakers have been cleverly masquerading the real issue of the right to religious freedom for some time now by passing it off as simply a private battle with the Catholic Church.
When legislators from each state enact laws that circumvent or distort the wording of our nation's constitutional laws, they have, in effect, acted to destabilize the foundation of those very laws. In so doing, they have exposed the rights protected by those laws to future abuses through governmental obstruction. We've just witnessed that domino effect in New York, but, viewed in the proper light, it is quite clear that religious freedom no longer exists when any part of the fundamental right to freely practice those beliefs has been usurped by governmental authority and those practicing their beliefs are forced to support something that is in direct opposition to their religious teaching.
Things don't bode well for a democracy when its citizens become a complacent people. As a nation that holds certain freedoms to be the inalienable rights of every human being, we cannot allow the heavy hand of our own government to assault the rights of any American or institution by indiscriminately dismissing the freedoms guaranteed to us by the constitution of this country. This is not an issue affecting just the Catholic Church. This is a fundamental issue about constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom. It affects every single one of us. This is not the time for complacency.
LITA MURAWSKI
Tonawanda, New York
War Horrors Beyond Number
I'm not sure if “A Bright Light in Hiroshima,” your Aug. 11-17 “Inperson” interview with Notre Dame Sister Lucia Akie Aratani, contains a typo — or if your correspondent, Paul Burnell, really believes that 500,000 people died when the atomic bomb was dropped on that city. Every source I have found sets the initial death toll at about 70,000 and the delayed death toll (five years later) at about 200,000.
It amazes me that we continue to memorialize the dropping of the atomic bomb as the worst event of World War II. The number of people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a small fraction of those killed during these brutal years.
The horror cannot come from the numbers — it must be due to the fact that these particular cities were destroyed by a single bomb from a single plane, as opposed to thousands of bombs from hundreds of planes. I'm sure that we all cringe at the possible destruction that will be caused if any country ever uses the “big brothers” of the “babies” that were used in 1945.
JEAN BRINZER
Verona, Pennsylvania
In God America Still Trusts
I would like to comment on the article “Pro-Life Law Protects Babies Who Survive Their Abortions” (Aug. 11-17), as well as on the separation of church and state, and the crisis in today's Church.
First, having been a registered nurse for more than 32 years, I'm very proud of nurse Jill Stanek, who stood up for what she believed in, although it cost her her job. Thanks be to God that I never worked in a hospital that allowed babies to die, but I knew it was going on in other hospitals. Many people are mistaken about the Hippocratic Oath in that they assume it is taken by all newly graduated physicians. If they take it at all, it is not something that is binding by law. It is very similar to the “Florence Nightingale Pledge” that some newly graduated nurses take: It is not binding by law, either. Rather, these two oaths or pledges are an ideal for doctors and nurses to try to live up to.
Second, people who argue that the First Amendment to the Constitution forbids any state-sponsored religion are correct. The term “respecting” in the amendment's wording is not used in the way that we use it today, i.e., “having regard for"; it means “concerning.” The next sentence, left out by those who have no regard for any religion, especially in public life, reads “ ... or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” One should not have to be a constitutional scholar to understand that our founding fathers, who were religious men for the most part, were justly concerned that no one be forced to become a member of a state-sponsored religion or denomination. They did not mean that religion shouldn't be a part of being a good citizen. On the contrary!
All of our money, coins and paper state “In God We Trust,” both houses of Congress have a chaplain, and all of the oaths taken by officers of the government or by witnesses in a court of law state “so help me God.” God, therefore, has been an important person in our nation's history from its inception to the present day.
SISTER GERALDINE M. WAGNER, OP, R.N.
Lompoc, California
Tough Pill Bill to Swallow
Regarding “N.Y. ‘Pill Bill’ Puts Church in Tough Spot” (July 28-Aug. 3):
Passage of New York's Equity in Prescription Insurance and Contraceptive Coverage (EPICC) bill forces New York's fully insured health plans to subsidize all FDA-approved contraceptive pills and devices. In addition to violating religious liberty and an individual's right of conscience, this law undermines parents by expanding government control of American children's sexual and reproductive health.
How dare Ms. [Assemblywoman Deborah] Glick get away with her comments in this article. The bill is not about religious freedom, she says, but about individual choice and health care.
This bill is not about individual choice nor health care. It is about state and federal control of our children and what we finance in health care. This is a totalitarian agenda, proposed by Planned Parenthood and the Alan Guttmacher Institute.
How does the Church get out of cooperating with a state law that interferes with parents' right to shape the conscience of their children? The Catholic Church still does have options of setting up self-insured plans that are regulated by ERISSA, the federal law that frees self-insured health plans from state contraceptive mandates. However, if Sen. Ted Kennedy and Congressman David Bonior get their way with S 104 and HR 1111, those options will quickly vanish.
President Bush could be forced to use his veto power — or every private and public health insurance plan that has prescription coverage will force employers and individuals, through taxes and insurance premiums, to confidentially fund unhealthy and morally objectionable contraceptive chemicals and devices for children, without parental consent or knowledge.
In addition to challenging this insidious New York EPICC legislation in the court and teaching the intrinsic evil of contraception, Catholics must unite to establish, administrate and control financing in their own self-insured Catholic health plan. Catholics must also unite with other faith-based organizations and defeat EPICC. If EPICC is not defeated, what will employers and individuals be forced to pay for next — euthanasia, artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, cloning and coverage for unmarried and same-sex partners?
America prides itself on assuring parents the opportunity to raise children without government intrusion and interference. A nation with the greatest political freedom is being undermined by a few powerful political-interest groups. At this critical time, when the health and welfare of the American family, our nation's future and our political freedom are all at stake, it is time for all Christians, particularly those in positions of leadership, to take charge of what we pay for in health care and “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.”
MICHAEL J. O'DEA
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
The writer is executive director of the Christus Medicus Foundation (www.christusmedicus.com).
Panetta Pathetic
Regarding “Panel Chairman Stands Firm on Prosecuting Bishops” (Aug. 4-10):
One of the members of the Church's national review board on clerical sex abuse, chaired by Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, is former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta.
According to a spokesperson for California Right to Life, as a congressman in that state prior to his Clinton-administration days, Panetta made 69 votes on abortion funding in various forms: the Hyde amendment, the Mexico City Policy, UNFPA and funding of abortions in the District of Columbia. He voted pro-abortion on 67 of those 69 ballots. Mr. Panetta also defended Clinton's vetoes of the ban on the barbaric partial-birth abortion procedure.
Mr. Panetta's public positions on abortion are a severe and direct contradiction to the Catholic Church's position that all human life is sacred, because it is created by God in his image and likeness. The selection of Panetta is an affront to God, the Pope and those Catholic legislators who risk their careers to vote pro-life.
How can someone who voted to abuse women and to pay for killing the pre-born in abortion be chosen to help in this crisis?
WILLIAM LUKSIC
Rockville, Maryland
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Toronto's Priests And the Teens Who Trust Them DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:They get the quotes just right yet manage to miss the story.
How many times have we seen that from the secular media?
As World Youth Day drew to a close, many of the world's reporters were quick to quote what they regarded as the “nutshell” of the powerful message delivered by Pope John Paul II to the 800,000 young people gathered at Downsview Park: “The harm done by some priests and religious to the young and vulnerable fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame.”
Yes, the Holy Father said this. But is that all the reporters heard him say? What about what was going on all week among the throngs of young people?
It was as if much of the press corps had been sent all the way to Toronto to cover “what the Pope says about the sex scandals in the United States” rather than “what's going on with all those young Catholics gathering around the Pope.” Many of the reports I read and listened to could have been filed from in front of a television set.
Being a journalist at Downsview Park myself that morning, wet by the rain, burnt by the sun and as joyful to be there as any of the other attendees, I couldn't avoid resenting the omission by most of the media of the Pope's statement: “But think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests and religious whose only wish is to serve and do good! There are many priests, seminarians and consecrated persons here today; be close to them and support them!”
The press also ignored the standing ovation the enormous crowd gave to the good priests upon hearing those words. And what a strong showing of priests we saw, including American priests.
In fact, from the very beginning I was surprised by the large number of delegations from all the United States led or accompanied by a priest. At first I tried to keep a mental record of the places they told me they had come from: Des Moines, Omaha, Baton Rouge, Portland, Denver, El Paso, Brownsville, Hawaii. But then I realized it would be impossible to keep track. There were just too many; they numbered in the hundreds. Priests in clergy collars, cassocks or religious habits, young and not so young — all leading their vibrant flocks of teen-age boys and girls. And the boys and girls trusted them, followed them, shared their meals with them, played soccer or Frisbee with them. The priests talked to them, explained the faith to them, heard their confessions. And I realized that the kids were only there because their parents trusted the priests to lead their children on the pilgrimage.
At the sight of this, a visitor from another planet would have never figured out that there was an ongoing crisis involving priests taking advantage of young people's trust. But there is a crisis. And the standing ovation that Sunday at Downsview Park was not only a signal of the massive approval of the Pope's words, but also a way for the young people to tell the world that they know most priests have had nothing to do with scandalous behavior. Some of the kids came right out and shouted it: “Yeah! Don't mess with my priest!”
The blossoming of the ‘JPII Generation’ is getting harder to ignore every day — even for the secular media.
It would be naive and childish to pretend the event had erased the reality of the crisis, which the Pope himself acknowledged. But what happened in Downsview Park that Sunday morning now stands as a source of new hope — and more importantly, a sign of the revival of the priesthood in America.
Since the scandal broke, I have seen many of my American friends, good faithful Catholics, argue about the roots of the crisis and what the response to it should be. Each one proposes solutions ranging from changes in the leadership of the Church to a complete “re-engineering” of seminaries. Most of the proposals are commonsensical and tackle a real aspect of the problem. But as Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput said during one of his catechesis sessions at World Youth Day: “What sense does it make to change the diapers if you are not going to clean the baby?”
The kids and their priests in Toronto showed that the solution to the crisis is not a matter of just “restoring credibility.” These kids already love and believe in their shepherds, although news businesses like the Boston Globe and the New York Times will never believe these young people, no matter what they do or say. The solution, these kids know, will come down to nourishing the fruits that have quietly sprouted and are now ripening on the branch — a new breed of not only priests but also consecrated laypersons and dynamic Catholic movements. It's the blossoming of the “JPII Generation,” and it's getting harder to ignore every day. Even for the secular media.
The youth at World Youth Day love their priests. But it's not priests they place their faith in. It's God. They see holiness in their priests, they see in them an authentic witness of God's grace and they see that it points directly to the cross of Jesus Christ. There's a story you won't read in your daily paper.
R
Alejandro Bermùdez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Berm˙dez ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Love, Responsibility and the Wojtyla Way DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:In 1960 a young professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, published the first edition of his book, Milosc i odpowiedzialnosc. A second, fuller edition appeared two years later. A third edition came out in 1964, published by a Polish Diaspora press in London.
By the middle-1960s, the book appeared in French and Italian. Rumor has it that some Spanish cardinals took copies into the 1978 conclave. The book didn't appear in English, however, until 1981. By that time, its author had already spent two years as Pope John Paul II.
The book is Love and Responsibility. Without exaggeration, it should be numbered as one of the most important books of the 20th century, certainly one of the most important in philosophy and theology.
Thanks to that book, I became a moral theologian. Love and Responsibility became the core of my Fordham doctoral dissertation.
Is the book easy to read? No. Its author is, after all, a philosopher. Plumbing all of Karol Wojtyla's points takes time, but it repays the effort. Frankly, in reading Love and Responsibility I discovered an intellectually satisfying explanation of truths about God, love and sex that I had learned, in much simpler language, from my mother. And that is the beauty of this book: It provides a rigorous proof of truths Catholics had long heard, in simpler language, at their mother's knees. I figured that if the Pope and my mother both agreed, there had to be something to this.
The Prism of Personalism
Remember that opponents of Humanae Vitae branded the encyclical as “physicalistic,” subordinating the “person” to “biological functions.” Now everybody admitted that John Paul II was a Christian personalist through and through. If that was the case, how could he reach the same conclusions Pope Paul VI did in Humanae Vitae? Love and Responsibility tells you how.
In the space of a single article, it isn't easy to summarize a complex, 319-page book. But certain points do stand out, truths worth reminding today's world of.
Persons should be loved, never used. Wojtyla argues clearly that, ultimately, there are two ways of relating to another person. You can love the other person, or you can use him. To love a person means to love him as he is, completely and totally, in a full and integral vision of the person. To use a person can take two forms. One can use a person by simply making him a means to one's own ends. Or, in the area of sex, one can use a person simply for the purpose of deriving pleasure. Persons, however, are worthy only of love, not use. In this, modern philosophy and Judaeo-Christian thought coincide: Kant's dictum that the person is always an end and never a means dovetails with the Great Commandment to love one another.
The human sexual urge has an existential meaning. That God endowed the human person with a sexual urge is apparent. The question that has plagued much of 20th-century thought, however, is: What is that urge for? What is the meaning of the sexual urge? Wojtyla argues that there are three main ways of understanding the sexual urge. The “rigorist” position, which he rejects, claims that sex exists only for procreation, with the pleasures associated with it a necessary evil. The “libidinistic” position, which he also rejects, sees sex merely as a quest for pleasure. The meaning of the sexual urge, Wojtyla insists, is “existential": It promotes existence, persons. Because of the sexual urge, human persons come into existence and human persons express themselves as co-creators with God. The sexual urge is not concerned with mere biological material; it is concerned with human persons. That's why the question of how persons come into existence is not and cannot be a merely “physicalistic” problem.
Chastity as a virtue is not a ‘no.’ It is not a denial of sex. So what is it, really?
Love is, in the last analysis, a choice. The love between a man and a woman is made up of many components. Both physical attraction and emotional satisfaction enter the picture. Both of these are components of love between men and women. But they are not full-grown love. Love demands an act of will, a choice, a decision to seek the genuine and authentic good of the other. In doing so, one does not deny physical attraction or emotional compatibility, but it does put them in proper perspective. Because if, in the last analysis, one chooses a spouse “for better, for worse,” that vow is binding — even if beauty pales or feelings sour. A love not based on decision lacks a backbone.
Chastity is about persons. Because human love is made up of components like physical and emotional attraction and rests upon the fragile choice of the human will, there are times when mere physical attraction might be mistaken for real love. Given the fact that people can deceive themselves into believing that lust is really love, chastity exists to protect persons. Chastity as a virtue is not a “no.” It is not a denial of sex. Rather, chastity is an affirmation of the person, always challenging us to raise our sights from the other as merely an object of physical attraction and gratification to the level of the person, whom we are called to love and not to use.
Parenthood is a share in God's creative work. Having children is not just a biological phenomenon, because children are not just physical realities. They are persons, and since only God can create a soul, each child is a recapitulation of God's creative work in which human parents are invited to share. Parenthood is thus a conscious collaboration with God, with purposes that transcend the parents' own.
Sharing in God's creative work demands justice to the creator. God always remains God and we always remain creatures. It is God who made us and God who endowed sexual intercourse with its existential meaning. We are free to engage in sex or not, but we are not free to redefine the meaning of sexual intercourse in a way to exclude God from what God himself created and which shares in his creative work. Acknowledging what sexual intercourse means and admitting who we are and who God is merely renders God his due: It is justice to the creator.
Principles of Persuasion
The principles Karol Wojtyla set forth in Love and Responsibility more than four decades ago remain vital and important — and today seem even more urgent than when they were first written. Why? Because this is a book about principles. It is not about particular issues in sexual ethics.
When Karol Wojtyla was writing in 1960, the debate over the pill was just beginning to stir. Looking back over the years since then, Catholic sexual ethics has in many ways lost time, sometimes failing to give the unadulterated Gospel witness to the Christian meaning of life and love because it was bogged down in debates with dissident theologians trying to justify homosexual coupling, cohabitation, contraception, artificial reproduction and sometimes even abortion. Whatever particular debates it may have been mired in, Catholic sexual ethics has always been challenged to return to its principles, its vision of the meaning of life and love.
And it has received no better challenge than the creative thought that has informed the papal magisterium of Pope John Paul II, all the way from his catechesis on the human body through encyclicals like Evangelium Vitae. But to understand Pope John Paul II, one needs to go back to the underlying principles. Reviewing Love and Responsibility 21 years ago, Joseph O'Leary described the book as articulating a persuasive vision its author was not likely to abandon. Indeed, as a faithful servant, he hasn't. Rereading Love and Responsibility today can rekindle our enthusiasm for just how persuasive those principles really are.
R
John M. Grondelski, a moral theologian, writes from Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: 'Where Is the Heart of Your Home to Be?' DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Half a gallon of holy water mixed with blessed salt splashed over the newly poured concrete of our foundation.
Father Augustine Akinluyi carried the kettle to the next corner.
“Li oruko Baba ati Omo ati Emimimo,” he said.
Another half-gallon washed over the concrete and down the corner boards framing the footer of our house-to-be. Two more corners and then Father turned to us. “Where is the master room?”
Embarrassing silence. Master room? Master bedroom? What does he mean?
“Where is the heart of your home to be?”
We hadn't really thought about our home that way. We'd mapped out rooms to the house, but didn't have one marked “heart.”
“The family room — I guess. Over there,” I said, pointing to the southern corner.
He lugged the kettle to where a room would soon be and emptied the remaining holy water onto the dust.
“Li oruko Baba ati Omo ati Emimimo.” In the name of the Father (Baba), the Son (Omo) and the Holy Spirit (Emimimo), spoken in his native Yoruba, the language of Western Nigeria. Our first foundation blessing. Father's first in America.
He pointed to the four corners, still wet with their holy dousing. “The foundation is the most important part of your home,” he said. “If the foundation is weak, your house will be weak. The same thing with your faith. The sacraments are your foundation. Without them, your faith is weak.”
“This is only a temporary home,” he added, then looked upward. “There is your true home, in heaven. We only are pilgrims here. Seventy, 80 years. That is why you must fill your home with holy things, with holy pictures, and build a small altar where your family prays every day. I will show you how to do it when your house is built and we bless it.”
Having Father Augustine bless our foundation was a holy inspiration, a thought that came to me as we scrambled to plan and prepare for the building of the home on our homestead. In Nigeria, blessing the foundation would have been thought of first. “In my country, everything is blessed,” Father Augustine told us. “Everybody is always coming to the priest. ‘Father, bless this. Father bless that.’ In America, nobody thinks of such things.”
I'm afraid he is right. As so often happens, a foreigner sees us with far clearer eyes than we see ourselves.
I recall the assessment of Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States in the first half of the 19th century, and who captured so well the American character in his justly famous Democracy in America. Americans are an agitated people, Tocqueville noted, a people constantly on the move. A family in America will build a house and sell it before the roof is on; Americans will plant trees and uproot them before they've produced their fruit. That was America around 1830. Our love of change, our characteristic continual mobility, has only gotten more pronounced since.
My family has been no exception. In our 19 years of marriage, my wife and I have moved 12 times. We have lived in Virginia, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Minnesota and California. When we decided to move back to Ohio to be closer to our families, we decided that our nomadic existence must end. This would be our last home. Our final resting place.
And so, in building our house, we knew that this would be the place where our children would grow up. Here we would grow old together, here where the apple trees I planted even before the house was built would bear fruit picked by our grandchildren. Here, finally, we will put down roots.
Hence the importance of having the foundation blessed. If the family is really the domestic church, then the home must be its cathedral. That doesn't mean, contrary to American housing trends, that each family should live in an enormous, imposing edifice. On the contrary, it means that (as Chesterton said) the home must be larger on the inside than on the outside. Rather than adding on merely decorative rooms, true spaciousness is achieved, first of all, by having the inside open onto eternity. Of course, a foundation cannot support a house that reaches to the heavens unless it is supernaturally strong. Without holy water and a priest's blessing, I would now be afraid to build.
But the house itself must be a kind of icon of the family's status as the domestic church. Americans, even and especially contemporary American Catholics, tend to be iconoclasts. Look at the insides of our houses. We have every imaginable trinket and bauble dangling from our walls — icons of ephemeral things — but few, if any, crucifixes and holy pictures. Icons are, as the Church Fathers taught, windows to eternity. How much more breathtaking our views would be if our houses had windows that remind us of our ultimate and proper home.
An altar in the home? I had never seen such a thing and was a bit surprised when Father Augustine suggested it. But then I thought about it. If the family is the domestic church, then the home should be a kind of icon of a Church. The heart of any Catholic Church is the altar, the sacred place where Christ, crucified and resurrected, is present at every Mass. In Nigeria, houses have thin altars, adorned by icons and candles, pressed against a wall. That's where the family gathers for prayer.
And it's what Father had in mind when he asked, “Where is the master room?” In my foolishness, I was thinking of myself as the master, as we do when we build master bedrooms. Father was thinking of the Master, the Lord, and so wanted to know in what room we were going to put the altar. That is truly the heart of any home.
Watching the workers building the walls this morning, carefully laying block upon block, I am more eager than ever for the next spiritual phase, the blessing of the completed house. Finally, I think, we have found our home. Then I remember Father's words of warning. This, too — blessed as it will be — is still only our temporary home.
R
Benjamin Wiker, author of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, writes from Hopedale, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin D. Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: September Sadness DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:September has always been a time for sorrow, according to the Church's understanding. But, for Americans, this September will be especially sad. It's time to pause and remember the first anniversary of the terrorist-hijacking attacks that claimed the lives of more than 3,000 civilians.
Even our children were noticeably affected by what happened in New York. They found out what the World Trade Center was by finding out that it had been destroyed. We were on a home-school outing that morning, one we had looked forward to for some weeks. We had to turn around and come home, traveling in a caravan with other families down side roads, because everyone was worried about what else terrorists might do.
The children certainly recognized the change in our home. For three days, we had the television on constantly. Before that, we hadn't watched television at all, apart from the Olympics. And we began a regular daily family rosary after the Pope asked for daily rosaries for an end to terrorism.
To this day, the children are affected by their memories of that time. We visited a family we know earlier this year. When it was time to go, we looked for our 8-year-old daughter and she wasn't in any of the usual places, playing. Nor were the friends' two sons there. We found them all on the back porch, deep in conversation.
“We were talking just like grownups do,” Cecilia told us.
“What were you talking about?”
“What happened at the World Trade Center.”
The Spiritual Life
Every night, we pray together as a family. Each person offers something that he is thankful for, and each person offers a petition (we write them down). Often, since last September, one of the children will pray for the families who suffered after “what happened at the World Trade Center” or, “for the people who did that at the World Trade Center, that God will change their hearts.”
The liturgy gives us a good way to understand Sept. 11.
Sept. 14 is the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Here we have the opportunity to explain to children why God allows suffering to happen. God wants us all to be happy. But the only way to be truly happy is to be close to him, because he is the source of all happiness. The Cross of Jesus makes it possible for us to be near him because it makes heaven possible for us. It also made it possible for us to be close to him when we suffer.
As Christians we know that true happiness isn't the absence of suffering but the nearness of God.
Pope John Paul II gave us a good perspective on suffering when, in pain and infirmity, he celebrated World Youth Day in Toronto this summer. Here, truly, is a man who suffers — yet he's not anxious, depressed, hopeless or angry. He's happy.
Sept. 15 is the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, another day on which the Church looks at suffering. For our family, it has been a time to remember a child lost to miscarriage. I have always been impressed with St. Thèrése of Liseux's frequent references to her brothers in heaven — a reference to her mother's miscarriages. Though it is not a subject we dwell on, our own children are aware of their brother in heaven, and they refer to him and remember him.
This, too, helps us deal with the loss and tragedy of an event like Sept. 11. We pray for the dead and commit them to God, and try to live our lives in such a way that we can hope to meet them in heaven some day.
April Hoopes writes from
Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: April Hoopes ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Blessings of St. Benedict on the River Sarthe DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:This past spring, four members of the American military forces stationed in Germany awakened before dawn and began a 10-hour journey that would take them to a remote rural location.
Upon their arrival, they would be sequestered from the world for three days, surrounded by 80 or so other men in uniform. Their three days would pass in a ritualized observance of strict rules. These rules would entail, among other things, communal meetings seven times a day, meals taken in silence and hours spent listening to a language that long ago ceased to be spoken in everyday discourse. As the Americans loaded their vehicle with equipment and supplies, they understood well that they were about to enter a strict world of discipline and routine — a “drill,” of sorts, for which not even their extensive military training and experience had prepared them. Nevertheless, as they began their journey, the Americans had no fear or even apprehension. On the contrary: Each felt overwhelmed by a sense of expectation and even joy.
No, the U.S. military had not sent these four servicemen on a secret mission as part of the global war on terrorism; nor was their destination some distant outpost in the Muslim world. Rather, the Americans were traveling to a Benedictine monastery located in Solesmes, France, some 150 miles southwest of Paris. Their hosts, the “80 men in uniform,” would be the monks whose lives are regulated by the Rule of St. Benedict and the Liturgy of the Hours, chanted in the Gregorian style in Latin. At the end of their stay, the Americans would emerge from the monastery walls with a deeper understanding of their faith, a renewed piety and confidence, and an appreciation for the perseverance of a holy community that had triumphed over intolerance, oppression and even war.
The Abbey of St. Peter is an edifice of granite and brick dominating the banks of the River Sarthe, and is easily the largest structure in the rural village of Solesmes. Inside the abbey walls reside dozens of Benedictine monks, whose song, piety and tradition have been a luminous presence in the Catholic world for centuries. From its ancient beginnings, the abbey has become the motherhouse for the Benedictine Congregation in France, overcoming adversity and suppression to expand into other monasteries in both Africa and Eastern Europe. Although the monastery will observe its 1,000th anniversary in 2010, the abbey is already laboring to ensure the “spirit of Solesmes” will endure for another millennium, introducing its life and work to the world through its Web site, www.solesmes.com.
St. Benedict's Balance
Since the middle 1800s, the monastery has achieved a worldwide reputation for its revival and restoration of Gregorian chant, a liturgical form that had fallen into disuse over the years. In the early stages of this restorative work, the monks concentrated on deciphering and restoring ancient Gregorian manuscripts by hand. This entailed a tedious and labor-intensive process that often took decades of work and a sophisticated level of scholarship. The monks also combined this scholarly approach with the actual performance of the chant, enabling this form of worship to regain a vibrancy and life that previously had dissipated as the melodies of the liturgy changed. Over time, the monks were able to restore the harmony and rhythm unique to the original form of the chant. The advent of modern technology has enabled the monks to record their performances of the chant on compact disc and to publish their many works of spirituality and chant scholarship in formats accessible to the lay reader.
Since the middle 1800s, the monastery has achieved a worldwide reputation for its revival and restoration of Gregorian chant, a liturgical form that had fallen into disuse over the years.
More recently, the monks have inaugurated a Web site, through which they offer for sale their many publications and CDs. This year, the monks will undertake a “modest” advertising campaign to publicize the site and, they hope, awaken in a broader audience an appreciation for the beauty and importance of Gregorian chant as a form of worship.
“A Web site is an ideal tool for monks,” explains Father Michael Bozell, an American who has been a monk at Solesmes since 1978. “It allows us to communicate just what it is we are all about — something most people do not know — and even peddle our wares: St. Benedict insists his monks earn their living.”
The monks' hard work is evident in the complexity and appeal of the Web site. The site itself is designed as more than a vehicle for offering the monks' publications and other items to the public; it also provides a portal to the structure and life of the abbey that previously only those determined and fortunate enough to travel had been able to view in person, given the abbey's distance from the usual tourist destinations of Paris or Mont St. Michel. “Cyber tourists” can follow a series of hyperlinks displaying photographs of the main structures of the abbey. The monks have accompanied the photographs with a narrative that conveys what one veteran abbey visitor has described as the abbey's “unmistakable feel and aroma of age and piety and indomitability.” Through other hyperlinks on the site, the Internet visitor can learn of the history of the abbey, the origins and progression of the chant and, perhaps most interesting, a sense of the monks' daily life of work and prayer.
Something for Every Soul
The monks are aware of the symbolism and spiritual heft the abbey can provide to pilgrims who journey to Solesmes. “Each person who comes here does so for his or her very personal reasons,” says Father Bozell. “Each soul is truly unique. But whatever those reasons may be, a visit here invariably has the effect of a deep dive into the cool waters of the spirit. I don't think I have ever known someone who left here without a sense of renewal and heightened inner vitality.”
For those with a true monastic vocation, however, the cloistered life can be serene and harmonious. “Work stoppage is an unknown affliction in monasteries,” the monks explain on their Web site. “We do not see time as ‘going by.’” The life of the monks cannot be entirely removed from the world, however, because they derive their support, in part, from the sales of their books and recordings.
As our four military members discovered at the completion of their trip, whether one's interest in Solesmes is spiritual renewal, interest in Gregorian chant or mere curiosity, visiting the monks at the Abbey of St. Peter will not fail to affect one's life for the better in a very individualized way. Fortunately, those unable to visit in person can get a taste of the “Solesmes Spirit” at the Web site. For the lucky few who are able to travel to the abbey, a visit in person is guaranteed to be the start of a rewarding spiritual journey.
Darrel Vandeveld writes from
Erie, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: The Benedictine Monastery of Solesmes, France ----- EXTENDED BODY: Darrel Vandeveld ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Pop-Up Advertising: Don't Get Mad - Get Filtered DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Brother Craig here was researching a medical question on the Internet when suddenly a window popped up warning that his computer was at risk for being hacked.
Did he want to protect it?
Brother clicked on “Yes.” This led to a “pop-up” advertisement offering to sell him an antivirus program. He closed the pop-up window only to find the “at-risk” window still there. When he went to close it, up came the antivirus ad again. Guess what happened when he went to close that window?
The pop-up window seesaw game went on until Brother managed to close both windows. But the frustrations weren't over yet. There still remained an advertising pop-up window; evidently, it had been hiding in the background. That one closed without incident — but, in the midst of all this, the original medical site Brother had wanted to peruse had somehow closed, too.
Right after this incident I was in the office at the chancery and one of the staff members had a computer problem. There must have been 10 pop-up window advertisements on her screen and she didn't know how to close them. They were all minimized on her task bar. I right-clicked on each one and selected close on them all. Someone in the chancery mentioned to me they were working on protecting the chancery network users from these annoying advertisements.
Pop-up advertising has gone beyond annoying. Brother Ryan here had his computer lock up because so many pop-up ad windows were left open on his desktop. Thinking he could just ignore them, he minimized them on the taskbar and let them keep piling up. He learned that computers do have limitations.
I had to move our message boards off a free service I was using called ezboard because of its aggressive pop-up advertising. I found it almost impossible to get around on our boards because of the many pop-up windows that kept opening to try to get me to buy things.
Now I realize that Web sites have to fund themselves and that advertising plays a big role in their revenue generation. People were ignoring banner advertising, so now the idea is to make sure you don't miss the advertisement. This would be tolerable if we were talking about an occasional pop-up window. But some sites throw four or more at you in rapid succession. And closing them all only leads to more being thrown at you. Try moving on to get away from certain Web sites, and multiple windows keep popping up. I don't know about you, but for me such aggressive advertising drives me away from a site. I wonder if the site designers have ever tried to navigate their own sites and had to put up with an avalanche of pop-ups!
Annoying is one thing — but deceitful advertising is another. Like Brother Craig with the virus scare, many people are being tricked into downloading files they don't want or visiting sites they don't want to go to. A certain advertiser's pop-ups force-feed your computer a file even if you have done nothing at all to ask for it. The download window pops up on your computer, asking you where on your hard drive you want to store the program. When it happens to me, I immediately hit the cancel button. I'm sure that some people don't know enough to hit that cancel button and do download it.
Nor is deceitful advertising limited to the pop-up window variety. Banner advertising can also use tricks to make you click. Some e-mail advertising employs tricks as well. I'm sure you've seen them. Here's one I recently received that had in the subject line: “$2,500 confirmed. Please verify your identity.” Upon opening the e-mail, of course, things change. You are now told: “GUARANTEED AWARD PAYMENT OPPORTUNITY up to $2,500.” Naturally the “up to” part is in small letters. You are given a link to claim your prize. If you just happen to read the bottom of the e-mail you find, “By registering for GroupLotto and playing our game 10 times on the date of registration, everyone wins at least $1 and you are entered into our $2,500 monthly cash prize drawing.” So my confirmed $2,500 becomes $1! And, of course, to collect that dollar, I have to register with PayPal.
So how can you defend yourself against intrusive advertising on the Internet? If you don't want to pay anything, you can close pop-up windows by pressing Ctrl + W or clicking on the X in the upper-right hand corner of the window. If it is minimized on your taskbar, right-click on it and select “close.” To shut out the advertising altogether, you might want to download the free utility called WebWasher at webwasher.com. Another free program like this, called Guidescope, can be found at guidescope.com. With e-mail you'll have to look at the e-mail program you are using to see if it has any filtering capabilities. For Outlook Express, select Tools>Message Rules>Blocked Senders List from the menu toolbar. Click on the Add button to send specific advertisers immediately to the Deleted Items folder.
Don't let pop-up advertising be the bane of your Internet experience. There's too much good to see and do on the Web to let the experience be ruined by hyper-aggressive sales pitches.
Brother John Raymond, co-founder of the Monks of Adoration, writes from Venice, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Monthly Web Picks DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Let's concentrate on Marian sites for this month's Web picks.
The Marian Library at udayton.edu/mary was put together by the Marianists, appropriately enough. Located at the University of Dayton, this library has the world's largest collection of printed information on Mary. Marian questions, meditations, prayers and a gallery are some of the selections you will find on the Web site.
Anna, who has multiple sclerosis, put together For the Love of the Blessed Virgin Mary Web ring at http://2hearts.net/BVMary.htm. The ring links to 154 sites that honor the Blessed Mother.
Catholic Answers has a category on its Web site called Mary & Saints at catholic.com/library/mary-_saints.asp; it answers some common questions on Mary.
Make sure you see what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about Mary at scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a9p6.htm.
This summer you might want to plant a Mary Garden. Don't know what that is? See the Mary's Gardens Home Page at mgardens.org for everything you need to know.
One can never get enough on Mary. So check out further sources on her in my Marian Catholic Internet Directory category at monksofadoration.org/mary.html.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:We Were Soldiers (2002)
Vietnam is the war Hollywood loves to hate. We Were Soldiers, based on a book by Lt. Gen. Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway, is one of the few films to treat its soldiers sympathetically. In 1965 Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) and 450 men are helicoptered into a highland area where they're surrounded by 2,000 enemy troops and must fight their way out.
Director Randall Wallace also devotes considerable time to the home front. Moore cares as much about raising his five kids with proper values as he does about his career. A practicing Catholic, he teaches them how to pray before they go to bed. When one of his officers (Chris Klein) wonders what is “God's plan,” Moore also prays with him for guidance. As America continues to face up to the challenges posed by Sept. 11, it is important to realize that we can be inspired by our soldiers' performance in Vietnam rather than ashamed. The violence and language are raw, but appropriate for a realistic battlefield drama.
Andre (1994)
Even animals can be celebrities, and the effects can be beneficial for them in a way it usually isn't for humans. Andre, based on a true-life book by Harry Goodridge and George Dietz, is the story of an orphan seal pup of the same name who's adopted by the Whitney family of Rockport, Maine, in 1962. Papa Harry (Keith Carradine) is the seaport's harbormaster who allows Andre to accompany him while scuba diving. His youngest daughter, Toni (Tina Majorino), also bonds deeply with the creature.
At first the media coverage has a negative impact as Andre becomes a tourist attraction. When a local lobsterman (Keith Szarabajka) complains that the seal is stealing his lobsters, the creature is removed to a Boston aquarium. Andre escapes and returns to Rockport. When the seal rescues one of his human protectors from a life-threatening incident, the resultant publicity forces the authorities to allow him to swim free. Director George Miller (The Man from Snowy River) involves us emotionally while keeping a light touch.
The Lady Vanishes (1936)
Alfred Hitchcock invented the spy movie in a series of British films made before World War II. One of the best is The Lady Vanishes, adapted by Frank Launder and Sydney Gilliat from Ethel Lina White's novel. It's unusual in that the story is told primarily from a woman's point of view. On a train in the Balkans, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a young English woman, befriends a sympathetic elderly lady, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty). When the older woman suddenly disappears during the trip, Iris sets out to find her. But all the other passengers on board deny having ever seen the missing lady.
The only person who believes Iris' story is Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a musician. Together they uncover a spy ring that's connected to Miss Froy's disappearance and they must save her from further harm without fully understanding what she's up to. The story has the genre's key ingredients — mystery, intrigue, romance, suspense-filled action and a secret message — all mixed together with wit and style.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, AUG. 25
The Chelsea Flower Show 2002
Home & Garden TV, 5 p.m.
This spectacular annual exhibition on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in London features nearly 50 floral gardens and two mammoth floral pavilions.
MONDAY, AUG. 26
Wage Slaves:
Nickled and Dimed in America
A & E, 9 p.m.
Barbara Ehrenreich took a series of poverty-level jobs and then wrote a book about her experiences. This episode of “Investigative Reports” describes her impressions about the daily lives and financial difficulties of America's “working poor” labor force.
TUESDAY, AUG. 27
Secret Passages:
America's Stonehenge
History Channel, 8 p.m.
America is dotted with mysterious centuries-old stone structures. This show describes one such site in New Hampshire. Some scholars think its monoliths, stone passageway, underground chamber, rock slab and “speaking tube” were the work of pre-Columbian Celts. Others believe American Indians or colonial settlers were the builders.
WEDNESDAY, AUG. 28
Against All Odds:
Rowing the Pacific
National Geographic Channel, 9 p.m.
Tired of waiting for a hip replacement in socialized-medicine England in June 2000, businessman Jim Shekdar decided to have an adventure instead. This installment of “On the Edge” shows what happened after he decided to row across the Pacific single-handed.
THURSDAY, AUG. 29
Swallowed by the Sands
National Geographic Channel, 1 p.m.
“Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep,” as the lyric runs. In this 60-minute “Expedition Journal,” divers comb massive sandbars to find the shipwrecks underneath.
FRIDAY, AUG. 30
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly
PBS, 5 p.m.
Kim Lawton reports from Shanksville, Pa., on what residents are saying about their spiritual lives one year after the hijacked United Flight 93 crashed nearby on the morning of 9-11-01. Program content is subject to last-minute change.
SATURDAY, AUG. 31
College Football Kickoff Classic
ABC, 8 p.m.
Yes, it's already time for another season of college gridiron heroics. Catholics will notice that the names of each team in tonight's contest from the Meadowlands in New Jersey are reminders of the Blessed Mother: Maryland and Notre Dame.
SATURDAY, AUG. 31
Facelift for the Facade
EWTN, 9 p.m.
This half-hour documentary follows the Knights of Columbus-funded restoration of the façade of St. Peter's Basilica that began in 1985. It took 70 artisans two years to finish reconditioning the giant statues, replacing the tiles and hand-cleaning the exterior.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Southern College to Emphasize Strong Catholic Identity DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:ATLANTA — A new Catholic college, the first to model itself on Ex Corde Ecclesiae, has taken an apt regional name.
Southern Catholic College, located about 50 miles outside Atlanta in Dawsonville, Ga., is the first Catholic college in Georgia and one of only a handful in the Southeast.
The coeducational independent liberal arts school broke ground in July for its 356-acre campus. When it opens in fall 2003, it will be on its way to achieving what founder and chairman Tom Clements hopes will be a college known for its strong values, rigorous academics and an authentic, vibrant Catholicity.
When Clements sold his software company in 1999, he knew he wanted to build some sort of community. After starting a men's group at his home parish, he realized it wasn't enough. “Some of the people then said to me, ‘Let's talk about a school,’ so we did,” Clements said.
After that, it was a short jump from a business plan to a $34 million fund-raising campaign that will provide for just a fraction of the $300 million campus.
“Tom Clements has taken from Vatican II the instruction that laymen take responsibility,” said Jeremiah Ashcroft, president of Southern Catholic and a 29-year veteran of university administration.
Although completely lay-run and lay-founded, the college will be advised by several religious orders, including the Benedictines and Jesuits. The sacraments will form a critical part of the structure. Daily Mass, frequent confession and spiritual guidance will be offered. The administration hopes to have a resident campus priest.
“In order to be Catholic, from our perspective, you have to have the sacraments,” Clements said.
Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, said the emphasis on Catholic identity is what most impresses him about Southern Catholic.
“They've made it clear that this identity will be extremely important in every facet of what they do,” he said.
Also enhancing the Catholic foundation is the college's dedication to Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the 1990 apostolic constitution from Pope John Paul II that calls on Catholic colleges to more readily adhere to their Catholic identity and to Church teaching.
Literature describes the college as “dedicated to providing a technologically advanced learning environment grounded in the teaching of Catholic values and the Catholic intellectual tradition.” It also presents itself as committed to the authoritative teaching of the Church.
Its mission is “to prepare moral and ethical leaders who will enlighten society and glorify God.”
“I just love the kind of evangelical, Gospel-oriented spirit of the mission. It's faith-filled,” said Father Dennis Dease, member of the new college's board of trustees and president of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.
He said he is also attracted by the opportunity to build a college from the ground up. “You can do so many things when you start from scratch. You're not saddled by histories that can distract,” Father Dease said.
But it also presents potential students and parents with a quandary: Whether or not to take a chance in such an unknown entity.
Jan Caron's son, David, is considering applying for the first year. “The ideals are right,” the Atlanta resident said. “And what I have seen and heard so far gives me confidence that it will be very ‘in the heart of the Church.’”
But, she acknowledged, the unknown still lingers. “I just have to be hopeful,” she said. “Whenever you have a Catholic college that's being built in your back yard, you take a look.”
And that “back yard” has experienced tremendous growth in its Catholic population, according to retired Msgr. Daniel O'Connor, who served in Atlanta for 41 years.
“I've seen it grow from 75,000 to 300,000,” he said of the area's Catholic population. “We're one of the few archdioceses without a Catholic college, and I think this one will be a great benefit to young people and to the local Church.”
Archbishop John Donoghue of Atlanta attended the dedication in July and gave the opening prayer. “The Catholic college is a place where this revelation of faith and this enlightenment of the human spirit can and will take place,” he said. “Too long our home — this beautiful state of Georgia — has been without a temple for this synthesis of faith and reason.”
Community-Building
The campus will also fulfill Clements' original desire to build a community. Located in the rolling foothills, the school will form the center of a residential and commercial district complete with a convention center and health care facility.
“We want the college to be integrated with the community so that after Mass on Sundays people will go over to the coffee shop or bookstore and interact,” Ashcroft said.
The founders see this taking shape over the next 15 years. But within five they see the college as a school of 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students. They envision a place where parishes and other dioceses will sponsor summer camps for Catholic children and where senior citizens will gather for programs.
But when it opens in fall 2003, it will start much smaller. The residence halls — apartment-style, fully wired and accommodated with study, recreation and lounging areas — will house just 135 beds. Intramural sports and clubs, mostly determined by student interest, will be an important part of university life. Ashcroft said the college could one day compete in intercollegiate athletics. Yearly tuition will be about $15,000 and housing and meals around $6,000. Financial aid is available.
Majors for the first class include history, philosophy, literature, business writing and theology. Others will be added as students request them.
“If there are 10 students who are interested in a B.A. in French, then we'll add a major in French along with the others,” said Paul Voss, vice president for academic affairs.
Some standards are already set. The core curriculum requires students take at least nine hours of philosophy, theology, foreign language, English literature and math/science, along with classes in social and political science, fine art and history for a total of 61 credit hours in the first two years.
The college will become a candidate for accreditation before the first class graduates. It will not receive accreditation until one year after that (five years after it opens). Five years is standard for all startup colleges applying for accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges. In August, the school received official college designation from the Nonpublic Postsecondary Education Commission, a state of Georgia agency overseeing private postsecondary education. Southern Catholic can now accept student applications.
In all possible cases — both inside the classroom and out — Catholicism will be integrated. “Obviously, there won't be a Catholic calculus class,” Voss said, “but in a business class we might talk about business ethics or about being a Catholic and the responsibility we have as stewards and to be charitable.”
Of requirements for hiring administrators and faculty, Voss said, “Our litmus test is if they are interested in building the Church.” The majority of the faculty will be practicing Catholics; the rest must at the very least be respectful of the Church's teachings.
According to the norms set forth in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, all Catholic faculty teaching theology will be required to sign an oath of fidelity to the Church and to the Holy Father. Furthermore, faculty will be encouraged to begin class with prayer and to “provide a living model of authentic Catholicism,” according to information on the school's Web site (www.southern-catholic.org).
“It's a very bold undertaking, a tremendous task,” Msgr. O'Connor said, “but they've set out in faith that their hopes will be realized.”
Dana Wind writes from Raleigh, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Wind ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Weekly Book Pick DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Von Hildebrand and the Happy Marriage
MAN, WOMAN, AND THE MEANING
OF LOVE: GOD'S PLAN FOR LOVE,
MARRIAGE, INTIMACY, AND THE
FAMILY
b yDietrich von Hildebrand
Sophia Press, 2002
130 pages, $12.95
or www.sophiainstitute.com
Dietrich von Hildebrand (1899-1977) was a philosopher of profound intellectual and spiritual depth. Hitler hated him (and nearly succeeded in killing him), while Pope Pius XII called him a “20th-century doctor of the Church.” A professor for many years at Fordham University, von Hildebrand wrote books on spirituality, liturgy, marriage, the Second Vatican Council and moral philosophy. These works are notable for their crisp writing, penetrating thought and spiritual richness, balancing technical precision with an emphasis on the deeply personal and relational nature of the Catholic faith.
These qualities are evident in Man, Woman, and the Meaning of Love, originally TITLEd Man and Woman when first published in 1966. While many moral theologians of that time were attempting to reshape Catholic doctrine in the image of secular lies about sexuality, von Hildebrand warned of the grave dangers of the sexual revolution. “A sterile approach to sexuality dominates our time,” he writes. “Out of boredom, people have granted to casual, shallow and neutralized sex a distorted role.” Undoubtedly he was mocked by many who thought their “progressive” approach to sex was anything but sterile. Yet time and sad experience has shown that von Hildebrand, Pope Paul VI and like-minded thinkers were absolutely correct in their prophetic warnings against contraception and about sex apart from marriage.
A central premise of this book and of von Hildebrand's thought is that if love is misunderstood, so is man. “To the extent that we fail to grasp what love really is,” he writes, “it is impossible for us to give adequate philosophical consideration to what man is. Love alone brings a human being to full awareness of personal existence. For it is in love alone that man finds room enough to be what he is.” This unifying theme unites the subsequent chapters, in which von Hildebrand discusses the nature and beauty of love, the sublimity of spousal love and the sexual union, the fruit of love and the moral implications of sexuality. He shows that a puritanical view of sex — one that has often afflicted Catholics — is not only unhealthy but also incompatible with the mind and heart of the Church. The sexual union within the marital relationship is holy; it is the revelation and gift of the deepest self to one's spouse. Catholics shouldn't deny or minimize the realm of sex but rather guard and protect it, treating it with the respect and reverence due a precious mystery.
Von Hildebrand's writing is direct and clean, but many passages are filled with philosophical language that may prove daunting to some readers. However, the book is worth the effort, for it beautifully elucidates the logic and wisdom of Catholic teaching about marriage and sexuality. Similar to Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, which often points to natural law and common experience, von Hildebrand seeks to assist those who are serious about understanding the mystery of love. He does so with firmness and passion. This is evident in how he describes artificial contraception as the height of human arrogance and the result of a disastrous attempt at autonomy from God: “It is the same sinfulness which lies in suicide or euthanasia, in both of which we act as if we were masters of life. It is the same irreverence which ignores the indissolubility of marriage and in which marriages are contracted and ended as one would change gloves.”
One flaw of the book, perhaps resulting from a lack of reliable demographic and scientific information in the 1960s, is the acceptance of the supposed “threat of overpopulation.” Von Hildebrand describes this “threat” — now known to be mythical and politically driven — as a “calamity.” No doubt he would quickly revise that assessment if he were still alive. However, there would be no need to revise the remainder of the book. It's just as prophetic, instructive and valuable as the day he finished writing it.
Carl Olson, editor of
Envoy magazine, writes from Heath, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl E. Olson ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Barring Islam?
Alternatively, new students may decline to read the book — a sympathetic portrait of the Islamic scriptures — and write essays explaining their decision.
Contending their First Amendment rights to religious freedom are being violated, three students have also filed a lawsuit in federal court against the university.
Gifts
The Chronicle also reported the capital campaign of Cleveland's John Carroll University, also administered by the Jesuits, has received a gift of $450,000 from Barbara and John Schubert.
Party Poopers
THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, Aug. 13 — The association is urging Princeton Review Inc. to remove a ranking of the top “party schools” from its annual Best Colleges guide.
Calling the infamous list unscientific and misleading, the AMA said the party-school rankings harm students and colleges by “legitimizing high-risk drinking.”
Princeton Review, a test-preparation and college-admissions service, bases the Best Colleges guide on surveys that ask students to rank the top 20 colleges in numerous categories, including “Party Schools,” “Lots of Beer” and “Lots of Hard Liquor.”
Bonds Upgraded
MOODY'S INVESTORS SERVICE, Aug. 2 — The credit rating agency upgraded $48.6 million in new bonds issued by Minnesota's College of St. Catherine to Baa1 from Baa2.
Reasons cited for the action include an increase of nearly 50% since 1998 in freshman applications, a fund-raising campaign that has drawn $51 million and the college's “solid market niche” as the nation's largest Catholic women's college. The school is administered by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.
Ground Zero Campus
The campus, situated in the District Council 37 headquarters just blocks from the former World Trade Center, was shut down after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The campus is exclusively used for union members.
Tough Market
And, said Conrad Obregon, the director of treasury operations at the Jesuits' New York university, the situation has only gotten worse. “We had about $250 million,” he said, “and the last time I looked we were down to about $210 or $211 million.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: The Sacrament of Matrimony, by the Book DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:The Catechism of the Catholic Church begins its section on marriage this way:
1601 “The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament.”
1602 Sacred Scripture begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God and concludes with a vision of “the wedding feast of the Lamb.” Scripture speaks throughout of marriage and its “mystery,” its institution and the meaning God has given it, its origin and its end, its various realizations throughout the history of salvation, the difficulties arising from sin and its renewal “in the Lord” in the New Covenant of Christ and the Church.
1603 “The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. ... God himself is the author of marriage.” The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures and spiritual attitudes. These differences should not cause us to forget its common and permanent characteristics. Although the dignity of this institution is not transparent everywhere with the same clarity, some sense of the greatness of the matrimonial union exists in all cultures. “The well-being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life.”
1604 God who created man out of love also calls him to love the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: “And God blessed them, and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’”
1605 Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The woman, “flesh of his flesh,” his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a “helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been “in the beginning": “So they are no longer two, but one flesh.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Foundations of Many a Great Marriage DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:A big wedding sounds so romantic. The bride in white. The smiling groom. Lots of hugs and kisses. But after the wedding dress has been placed in the closet and the photo album stored on a shelf, after the bouquet of flowers has dried up and the romance has dissipated into routine conversation, many spouses often become disillusioned and distant with one another.
Having been married for 35 years with seven children ranging in ages from 32 to 12, Steve and Kathy Beirne know how difficult marriage and family life can be. They also know the statistics: One in three first marriages ends in divorce within a decade, while one in five ends within the first five years.
But the Beirnes believe in marriage. They learned reverence for the institution from both their parents, who were not only devoted Catholics but also devoted partners. Steve's parents had been married 46 years when his father died; Kathy's were closing in on their 30th anniversary.
The Beirnes also want to help others believe in marriage. That's why, nine years ago, they launched a newsletter for newly married Catholic couples. Published six times a year, Foundations covers one specific marriage-related topic per issue — communication, finances and sexuality are recent examples — and contains articles, book reviews, cartoons and exercises. All the content is designed to spur couples to think and talk about their relationship.
“It just takes one article, one cartoon, one exercise that grabs them and gives them that epiphany experience: My marriage is important; this person is important; this relationship can last forever,” says Kathy, 57, who met Steve in high school. “We're not looking to transform peoples' lives with every issue and every article. We just want to get a toe in the door. “
With few examples of lifelong marriages in their lives and often with little connection to a faith community, many couples don't know how to work on nourishing their sacramental vocation, Steve says.
“The first and most important thing is that our Church believes that marriage is a sacrament,” explains Steve, 59. “In this sacrament, the very life of Jesus becomes real and present in the life of the couple. And their committed love is a sign to the world of God's love for humanity and Jesus' love for the Church. Married couples are instruments of evangelization, just by being married couples, just by living a life of true love for one another and service to one another and to the larger community they evangelize. So why should we do this? Because we believe in marriage. We believe it's a path to holiness for the couple. It is their way to God. Their way to work out their salvation with and through each other.”
Marital Work Plan
If Steve sounds like he has worked for the Church, it's because he has, as director of family-life programs, first for the Diocese of Jefferson City, Mo., in 1977 and then for the Diocese of Portland, Maine, in 1984. He was on the board of directors for the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers (NACFLM) when the organization decided in 1991 to look into publishing a magazine that would act as a follow-up to the many marriage-preparation programs in dioceses and parishes in the United States.
The idea interested Steve, who started researching it with Kathy, and soon the idea of a publication began to take shape. It would be a newsletter, it would come out bimonthly, and it would not be published by a Catholic publishing company because all the publishers the Beirnes talked to either had no interest or didn't want to take a risk. A friend suggested they publish it themselves and, with the permission of their publishing partner, NACFLM, the Beirnes sent out their first issue to 200 couples in April 1993. Steve has been working full time on Foundations since 1998.
From the beginning, the couple had two main goals, says Kathy, the newsletter's main researcher and writer (who has a master's degree in child and family development from the University of Missouri): to help couples develop skills in areas that most marriages need work, like communication and conflict resolution, and to keep them connected to the Church.
Andre and Karina Lopez, from Flushing, N.Y., were married in a civil ceremony two years ago, but got married in the Catholic Church last August and have received two issues of Foundations so far. They realize that marriage takes work, and they like what the newsletter brings them.
“It helps us to come to know that we're not the only ones out there with minor problems, or even big problems,” says Andre, 21. “It helps to bring you closer together so you understand each other and understand the meaning of life — hopefully forever.”
Circle of Conjugal Life
Couples receive Foundations in several ways after their weddings: as a gift from their parish or a friend or as part of their marriage-preparation program. Some of the dioceses that offer the newsletter as part of their pre-Cana programs, meaning that couples get a free year's subscription, include Hartford, Conn.; Miami; Brooklyn, N.Y.; San Antonio; and Cincinnati. An individual couple ordering a subscription pays $20 for a year, while dioceses or parishes pay $10 per couple.
One challenge facing the Beirnes, who live in Portland, Maine, was that couples don't get married at the same time. In other words, what happens if the issue on communication has been published in April and a couple gets married in November? For this reason, they decided to cover 18 topics over a three-year period. And as each year passed, the topics would be a subset of the previous year. For instance, communication was the topic during April 1993. The next April, something similar — decision making — was addressed, while in the third year conflict resolution was up to bat. The cycle then starts up again at the end of the third year.
“It's kind of like a ferris wheel,” Steve says. “People get on in different cars. The wheel goes around and around and, sooner or later, every car gets back to the first point again.”
The articles are never repeated, and the research is always up-to-date. No matter the topic, every issue contains an article on the spiritual dimension of that topic.
About 13,000 couples, from almost every state and from parishes in countries as far away as Ireland and Australia, subscribe to Foundations, Steve says.
“It is our belief that God uses us to evangelize these newly married couples,” Steve says. “God presents the opportunity. He does-n't need a lot of time to change our lives around. He just needs a little opening somewhere along the way.”
Carlos Briceno writes from
Woodside, New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carlos Briceno ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: 'Keep Him Alive!': Words That Saved DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:A while back, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights cited a nationwide survey in which 60% of pediatricians agreed that it is ethically permissible to starve a newborn baby to death if that child is afflicted with certain birth defects. The commission concluded that withholding nutrition and water from such babies is widespread in our nation's hospitals.
Likewise, a newborn's chances of escape from physician-aided death and euthanasia decline further as perceived effects of mental retardation are more evident.
Some things hit home.
Thirty years ago our newborn son's delivering physician and a hospital pediatrician draped arms around my shoulder to announce the birth, and the rest.
Hydrocephalus, they said. Brain-damaged. If he survives, they said, my son would be greatly disabled and suffer mental and physical defects.
He might never walk or talk. And, by the way, they added, he also suffered severe cerebral edema from oxygen deprivation during delivery. Their brief also suggested at least partial spina bifida, a cleft in the spinal column.
The doctor offered what he thought might be comforting advice.
“It may be best if he doesn't make it,” said this modern Hippocrates. His medical companion nodded assent.
All I could blurt out was, “Keep him alive!” And I immediately repeated that demand at least six or seven times. “Keep him alive!”
Better Off Living
Over the years I've puzzled about this clumsy life plea that seized me. I've said to my wife that I don't know why I repeated those words only. Obviously the doctor heard me several times, yet I uttered no lucid commentary.
“Keep him alive!” It was all I knew to say, because it was all.
The child is father to the man, wrote Wordsworth. That sounds clever in a poem. But first the child is a child, helpless and dependent. Later, perhaps, Wordsworth has a point; yet even then only in some metaphorical sense. I suspect Wordsworth's phrase came not from seeing his newborn child's life in peril.
Every child needs a mother to give life and nurture and a father to protect and help sustain that life. Yet here I was, unable to mutter more than “keep him alive.” What an inarticulate lout I am, I thought then.
Recalling today that poll of pediatricians (the branch of medicine to which we entrust our children), I know why I was so repetitive, so definite, so glued to the life of my only son. He did live, and the doctors were wrong. He beat all the odds, the illness, the threats, symptoms and perceptions of major disability. Human doctors were wrong!
continuing page 16 story
My wife and I took our son home and to every possible life-giving medical agent. Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, Easter Seals, March of Dimes, hospital therapists. A succession of highly regarded specialists and neurologists.
Our own family pediatrician was superb. Dr. Suzanne Widrow never, to our knowledge, gave up for a second on our son's chances. Nor did Dr. Arnold Gold of Columbia University.
At home our whole family pitched in. But mostly it was my wife and the boy. She developed his muscle tone, patterned his motionless arms and legs and, on her knees for long hours, taught him to walk because he could neither stand nor crawl on his own. And so he walked. Then she taught him to crawl. He learned courage and willpower on his own.
Always we remained in God's presence and hope through prayer and sacrifice. My wife's long, painful hours on her knees remain to me the dearest prayer.
Better than Wordsworth's aphorism is a thought expressed by Father Theodore Hesburgh, former president of the University of Notre Dame: “The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” And I do.
To that, let's stress the need for all husbands and fathers to support mother and children and their family-focused efforts in every way possible.
I know a bright athlete who would second these observations.
Today our son is a 6-foot-3-inch young man who served with the U.S. Marine Corps in the Pacific Fleet, fought forest fires near the Canadian border, completed the Los Angeles Marathon and cycled through a recent 500-mile bike race in Alaska. He was an award-winning editor in chief of a college weekly newspaper.
Don't tell him he would have been “better off” not making it, as those faithless physicians said so many years ago. And don't tell me. Mostly, I suggest, don't ever tell that to my wife.
We must remain open to God's plans. Not all who suffer the threat of disability escape its ravages. Many do not. But how do we know who will and who will not — unless we allow each child to live to fight, or to accept? But first, to live.
Eternal Players
Surveys of medical ethics indicate that too many physicians nod in the wrong direction. Doctors need to remember, as most do, that they are called in a very special way to be healers, not executioners. Nor are they to be silent accomplices in deaths of innocent human beings, born and unborn, regardless of indicators of potential frailties. Physicians need to speak out.
The hearts of new parents surge joyfully at the three words: “It's a boy!” And “It's a girl!”
Despite a hand dealt us for some reason or no reason, each of us in this society founded on life, liberty and pursuit of happiness must seek courage to help children and heart-ached parents to find meaning in those three other words: “Keep him alive.”
It is not the province of the living to choose death for any innocent human person reaching out, however feebly for life.
Shakespeare was incomplete — the world is more than a stage. For who but the Eternal Playwright knows the full measure of the actors and how the plot may evolve when the curtain rises? No one among us can foretell how life's drama may impact its characters and audience. Who can judge ultimate value of each cast member before the final curtain falls and reviews are written?
Drew DeCoursey, author of
Lifting the Veil of Choice (OSV, 1992), writes from
Morristown, New Jersey.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Q What can be done about the corruption and collapse of corporations?
A We're now entering an inevitable period of radical book monitoring; laws are already being changed to support and require that. “We know you're in there. Drop your Excel spreadsheets! Put your hands up! Open the books and show us what's really going on!”
Because we have so institutionalized selfishness, the legal solution is the only way some can imagine getting things under control. But this corporate breakdown might put us in a position for a corporate breakthrough. Could we change the culture of corporations in addition to policing them better?
One change I'd like to see is making corporations more inclusive. Not inclusive in the politically correct sense — motivated by jealousy and envy as much as injustice. Rather, inclusiveness based on strong relationships and an appreciation for openness, communication and genuine interdependence.
Instead of being legalistic entities based solely on contracts, could organizations not become based on covenant relationships with shared commitments to “ideas, issues, values, goals and management processes”? Does this sound quixotic or utopian? These words are from successful executive Max DePree in his book Leadership As An Art.
DePree concludes that exclusivity institutionalizes selfishness. And contrary to the Machiavellian myth that selfishness is a necessary evil that is good for business, perhaps the present crisis can teach us that it not only can destroy business, but it can also destroy the lives and futures of many people.
DePree argues that the relationships at work are more like a covenant than like a contract. What's the difference? A contract “covers the quid pro quo of working together ...” but “it almost always breaks down under the inevitable duress of conflict and change. A contract has nothing to do with reaching our potential.” A covenant relationship rests on “shared commitment to ideas, to issues, to values, to goals and to management processes. ... They reflect unity and grace and poise. They are an expression of the sacred nature of relationships.”
As a starter perhaps we should try to see fellow workers as persons and not just as human resources. If just resources, then we reduce our interactions solely to using others when we need them. And vice versa. It can't be said of resources, but it can be said of people, that they have “a gift to bring,” they are social beings and “they have a deep-seated desire to contribute.” We don't need to include, or be fair toward, or communicate with, or develop the potential or future of resources. We do with people. As a leader I feel little obligation and certainly no indebtedness or responsibility to my resources. I do to the people whom I lead.
Art Bennett is the director of
Alpha Omega Clinic and
Consultation Services.
----- EXCERPT: Corporate Corruption ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 08/25/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: August 25-31, 2002 ----- BODY:Adult Stem Cells
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 8 — Injecting patients' own stem cells into their leg muscles could create new blood vessels, eliminating pain from bad circulation and helping to prevent gangrene or amputations, new research indicates.
The study, described this week in the British medical journal The Lancet, is the first time implanted stem cells resulted in new blood vessel networks, a process called angiogenesis.
Experts say the findings offer hope to millions of people who suffer pain in their limbs because of clogged arteries but cannot have an operation.
Idaho Keeps Pro-Life Law
Planned Parenthood of Idaho has opted not to appeal a judge's decision allowing the funding ban to take effect. The group said it has taken the money it would have spent in court and is offering it to women who would have otherwise turned to state funding to pay for their abortions.
The pro-life law, passed two winters ago and recently upheld by 4th District Judge Michael McLaughlin, eliminates taxpayer funding for “health-related” abortions paid through the state's Medicaid program.
Babies Can ‘Share Womb’
BBC NEWS, Aug. 4 — Doctors usually advise women who develop a molar pregnancy to have an abortion to avoid developing cancer. That might be about to change.
A molar pregnancy is caused by an error in the transfer of genetic information between the sperm and egg resulting in a hydatidiform mole, which has the potential to develop into a tumor.
One in 100,000 women become simultaneously pregnant with a healthy baby and a hydatidiform mole — which shares sustenance from the mother and grows alongside the healthy fetus as though they were twins.
A study by a team from Hammersmith Hospital and Imperial College London found as many as 40% of these women can go on to have a normal healthy birth and that none of the 53 women who opted to continue the pregnancy suffered any lasting complications.
Babies May Hold Key to Disease
BBC NEWS, Aug. 3 — Scientists are studying babies in the womb to try to establish the cause of osteoporosis and reduce fractures in the elderly.
Researchers at Southampton University will study whether unborn babies' bone growth can be affected by their mother's diet.
The researchers will study a group of about 500 pregnant women and quiz them about their diet, smoking habits and exercise levels.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Kopp Admits Shooting Buffalo, N.Y., Abortionist DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:BUFFALO, N.Y. — Anti-abortion activist James Kopp admitted in a jailhouse interview Nov. 20 with the Buffalo News that he fired the shot that killed abortionist Dr. Barnett Slepian on Oct. 23, 1998.
Kopp said he did not intend to kill Slepian but only wanted to wound him to prevent further babies from being aborted.
“The truth is not that I regret shooting Dr. Slepian. I regret that he died,” Kopp told the newspaper. “I aimed at his shoulder. The bullet took a crazy ricochet, and that's what killed him. One of my goals was to keep Dr. Slepian alive, and I failed at that goal.”
Slepian was shot in the presence of his wife and four sons as he warmed soup in the microwave in the kitchen of his home in Amherst, a Buffalo suburb. Kopp said he saw him appear in the window as he put the soup in the microwave and knew he'd be back in the same spot to get it soon after.
Kopp quickly became one of the suspects and was placed on the FBI's most-wanted list. For two and a half years he traveled to Mexico and Ireland wearing disguises and using fake identities. He was eventually captured in Dinan, France, in March 2001.
Kopp said his outrage over abortion prompted him to shoot Slepian. When other tactics, such as leafleting, writing protest letters to government officials and blocking abortion clinics didn't work, he said, he decided to take more drastic action. He admitted stalking Slepian for months before hiding in the woods behind Slepian's home on the night he fired the shot that killed him.
Kopp said he decided to make a public confession because he believes his supporters have been misled, and he wants them to know the reasons behind his actions. He also said he feels sorrow for Slepian's wife and four sons.
Kopp's supporters described him as a pacifist and a poor marksman. Others had suggested the FBI might have framed him. Both the Denton, Texas-based pro-life organization Life Dynamics and Catholic World Report magazine had questioned some of the evidence in the Kopp investigation.
The reaction to Kopp's confession from most pro-life groups was one of condemnation.
So was the reaction of pro-abortion groups. Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Gloria Feldt described Kopp as “an extremist, a terrorist and a confessed murderer.”
Feldt described Kopp's confession as “a ploy that comes at a time when the Bush administration and Congress are poised to enact a laundry list of restrictions to under mine a woman's right to choose. Kopp's confession is a painful reminder of the dangers to our individual rights posed by extremists who will go to any lengths to impose their ideology on others.”
Father Frank Pavone, president of Priests for Life, said violence against abortion providers stops needed work from being done.
“One of our areas of specialty at Priests for Life is dialogue with abortion providers and assisting former abortionists on the road to reconciliation and healing,” he said.
Father Pavone said he recently signed a joint statement with Bill Baird, the “father of the pro-choice movement.” In the statement, the two declare that “respectful dialogue, while not expecting either party to compromise his or her beliefs, can lessen or stop dangerous, dehumanizing assumptions about those on the opposite side of this issue. … We believe that regular meetings, including social ones, between opposing sides should be conducted at least once a month to encourage people to form civil relationships.”
With regard to violence against abortion providers, Father Pavone said the reason it is wrong is that “the sanctity of every human life really means ‘every,’ no matter how young, how small, how sick … or how wrong. As the Pope writes in [his 1995 encyclical] The Gospel of Life, ‘Not even the murderer loses his personal dignity.’”
While the Stafford, Va.-based American Life League had no comment on the case, it referred to its “Pro-Life Proclamation Against Violence,” which says the organization rejects violence and those who commit violent acts. The statement also says “all perpetrators of violence, far from being pro-life crusaders, are nothing more than common criminals.”
Some in the pro-life movement wonder if the news won't lead to a backlash from pro-abortion groups. “Our opponents might try to capitalize on it,” said Laurence Behr, president of Western New York Lawyers for Life and executive director of the Association for the Arch of Triumph, a Buffalo nonprofit that hopes to erect a 700-foot-high pro-life arch in Buffalo containing a shrine dedicated to the Holy Innocents.
“There were previous letters to the editor of the Buffalo News by individuals who felt it was inappropriate for us to be proposing a pro-life arch in the same community where an abortionist was murdered,” Behr said.
Still, Behr was not concerned about Kopp's confession impacting his efforts to move ahead with plans for the Arch of Triumph. “Our supporters are not people who would approve of what Kopp did,” Behr said.
Innocent of Murder?
Kopp has pleaded innocent to charges of second-degree murder and interfering with the right to an abortion and is scheduled to go to trial in Erie County Court in February.
Behr questioned whether a court would allow Kopp's defense.
“It's basically a justification defense and courts have not allowed such a defense for abortion protesters who have blocked clinic access,” he said. “I would be surprised if such a defense would be allowed.”
“Clearly, it's always wrong to turn to violence in such circumstances,” said Cathleen Cleaver, director of Planning and Activities Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities for the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, “just as it's wrong to turn to abortion to solve the problem of a crisis unplanned pregnancy. Using violence in the name of pro-life makes a mockery of the pro-life cause.”
“This has been an unresolved case for many years,” Cleaver said of the Kopp case. “Any step toward its resolution, including the latest revelation, is a good step.”
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'Under God' Rallies Lawmakers Around the Pledge of Allegiance DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania is on the verge of requiring every school, public and private, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Twenty-eight states already require the pledge to be recited, according to the Education Commission of the States. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a recent court ruling declaring “under God” to be unconstitutional have fueled the recent resurgence.
“After 9/11, we discovered, unfortunately, that many people hate this country,” said Fred Cabell, education department director for the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference. The conference supports the legislation, Cabell said, because Catholic schools already say the pledge.
The bill's author, state Rep. Allan Egolf, decided to push the bill after finding out from fellow veterans that local schools didn't routinely require the pledge's recital.
“I checked some local schools and found that was the case,” Egolf said. “I decided to do something about it.”
While the Pennsylvania bill would require all schools to recite the pledge, even private and religious schools, a provision in the bill excludes private schools only on religious objections.
The bill passed the Senate unanimously, without floor debate. The House passed the bill 200-1 and will take up the bill next week. The bills differ slightly and must be worked out before the bill is sent to Gov. Mark Schweiker's desk.
Schweiker said he plans to review the bill but is expected to sign the legislation.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled on June 26 that schools could not force students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because it contained the words “under God.” After an immediate public outcry and denunciations from national leaders of both political parties, the court suspended its own ruling. But the reaction from the ruling has spurred other states to act.
Tennessee, Illinois and Missouri all enacted laws requiring the pledge since the appellate court ruling. Montana and New Hampshire have also passed similar laws this year.
On Nov. 13, President Bush signed a law reaffirming references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance. The legislation criticized the court for its “erroneous rationale” and “absurd result.”
The Senate passed the bill unanimously. In the House, five Democrats opposed the bill and four Democrats voted “present.”
Despite a nearly unanimous political environment, a requirement to recite the pledge has its strong opponents.
The American Civil Liberties Union opposes all bills to require the pledge precisely because it mentions “under God.”
“You look at all the problems public schools have and all this legislature can accomplish is mandating the Pledge of Allegiance,” said Larry Frankel, legislative director of ACLU of Pennsylvania. “Why are we trying to impose patriotism, rather than voluntarily encouraging it?”
But Cabell said it is important for the people of Pennsylvania to teach their children about the country's important values.
“It's important to impress upon our children how good America is and that we have to be loyal to it,” he said.
The Knights of Columbus also have supported the wording of the current pledge. In fact, it was the Catholic fraternal organization that sponsored the legislative initiative that added “under God” to the oath nearly 50 years ago.
President Dwight Eisenhower supported the Knights's drive, saying inclusion of the words helped keep respect for the state in perspective.
“These words, ‘under God,’ will remind Americans that despite our great physical strength we must remain humble,” Eisenhower wrote to then Supreme Knight Luke Hart after the president signed the legislation.
This year's court action, which affects nine Western states, was brought by an atheist parent who said it was a violation of the Constitution for his daughter to have to listen to her classmates recite the pledge.
An official with the Knights of Columbus said in June fears that the words violate the proscription against government establishment of religion are unfounded.
“In 48 years, there is no evidence of the emergence of a theocracy,” said Paul Devin, executive vice president for legal affairs.
Devin said the organization would support efforts to get the 9th Circuit ruling overturned.
Bishop Donal Wuerl of Pittsburgh also expressed hope a Supreme Court review would overturn the ruling.
“We should not and cannot remove all mention of God from public life, including now the Pledge of Allegiance, simply because a minority have chosen to reinterpret American history and tradition,” Bishop Wuerl said. “It is historical fact that this nation was founded under God and seeks every day to be blessed by God, including in Congress.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
(Catholic News Service contributed to this story)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic Games `R` Us - and More Gift Ideas for Christmas DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:CARLSBAD, Calif. — Move over Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley: There are some new games, action figures and audiotapes in town just in time for Christmas — with a Catholic twist.
Aside from merely entertaining, these items are designed to teach children and their parents about the Catholic faith. Created by former entrepreneurs and devoted Catholic families, these game-makers hope their products will strengthen and inspire the Church's future.
Lee Leichtag, who is now in his 80s, began creating games with a Catholic focus at age 74. What's more, Leichtag is Jewish. In 1973, he started M.D. Pharmaceuticals, a generic drug and vitamin manufacturing business. Upon retirement in 1991, he sold the company for millions. In 1992 he founded Catholic Games — the creator of the Divinity Catechism board game, a series of Catholic Quiz flip books, and Bible and catechism CD-ROMs.
“I wanted to work with a religious organization that has an approval process,” Leichtag explained. “The Catholic faith is the only one that has an imprimatur” (official Church approval).
As a result, Leichtag's products are the only Church-approved series of learning games in the world, having received the imprimatur of Bishop Robert Brom of San Diego.
“I wanted children and parents to feel comfortable that they have the right answer,” Leichtag said. “That's critical for what I'm doing.”
“Who would have believed you could discuss the catechism with a 5-year-old?” he asked.
He hopes children and adults will learn their purpose for living by playing the games.
“It's just possible that the answers to many people's problems might be found in religion,” he explained. “I feel so strongly about the place tradition and values have in a family, I feel committed to this project, no matter how much money it takes.”
Former bankers Maryann and Michael Cottrell of Arlington, Texas, heard the call as well. They have turned their home into the distribution center for their realistic plastic figurines.
“Six years ago, Michael woke up one morning and said, ‘We are going to make toys,’” recalled Maryann. Tired of the gory action figures commercially available, Mike was inspired by the need for better toys for his eight children to play with. The result: Christian Soldiers, the business they started.
Although they had no background in toy production, the two set out to explore how to create sets of Christian action figures, eventually creating their first set — of David and Goliath — within the first two years. Six months later they created a set featuring Daniel and the lion.
Each set features 12-inch “Fontanini-style” polymer action figures, a hardcover book and a dramatized audiotape. In addition to David and Daniel, they also produce a Baby Jesus set.
The business has become a family affair. The family built a warehouse in the back yard and created a home office in their barn. Their 12-year-old son, Daniel, helps his father create the play scenes that are included in the sets. Daughters Sarah, 11, and Elizabeth, 9, help their mother package and ship the sets.
In addition to individual sales, vacation Bible schools have often used the sets as “Christian happy meals,” giving children various figures with their lunch each day. To date, the Cottrells have sold more than 5,000 sets.
Saints on Tape
Former physician Bruce Carroll and his wife, Cindy, a former loan officer, trace the creation of their Topeka, Kan.-based Regina Martyrum Productions to their early interest in theater.
Both belonged to a theater group in the early 1990s that did stage productions. In 1991, some friends loaned the couple an old phonograph recording of the life of St. Dominic Savio. Listening to the recording, the Carrolls wondered if Catholic audio dramas could be produced on tape. During the next three years, their dream began to take shape.
In 1994, the Carrolls produced their first production, “Christian Soldiers.” It is their only production not dealing with the life of a saint and it tells the story of a group of teen-age boys that form a Christian “gang” in response to an uncontrollable gang in town.
For many listeners, that cassette became a favorite. “The story is good and I like the professional sound effects,” said Anthony Jay, 17, of Morris, Minn. The Jay family owns Regina Martyrum's entire tape collection.
The Carrolls produced their second tape, “Model of Humility,” on the life of St. Gerard Majella, only a few months later, followed by “Recourse to Thee.” The pace has continued, with Regina Martyrum producing as many as four tapes per year. To date, they have produced 34 and sold more than 30,000.
Featuring full casts, digital sound, inspiring music and realistic Hollywood-like sound effects, the tapes are not books on tape but rather dramatic re-enactments that tell engaging stories. A dozen volunteer readers help to select scripts, auditions are held for the various parts and the tapes are produced in the Carrolls's own professional studio.
Most of the cassettes last from 45 minutes to an hour. Cindy Carroll noted they offer an excellent alternative to television, movies and video games. “Each tape has something for everyone … the young and the old,” she said. “Families particularly seem to enjoy them before bed or in the car on long trips.”
Physician George Jay, Anthony's father, agreed.
“All is silent from our five children, ages 8 to 18, as we listen to the tapes in the car. They are glued to the tape player,” he said. “The cassettes are entertaining, factual and touching … often moving us to tears.”
“We continue to receive many letters from dedicated fans writing to share how the tapes have touched their lives,” Cindy Carroll explained. “One mother told us her son chose Dominic as his confirmation name after listening to that tape. Another mother wrote to tell us that her son had given up sweets for three weeks after listening to a similar story on the tape about St. Mother Cabrini.
“One woman wrote to say that she had heard our Miraculous Medal tape while outside the Catholic Church. After listening to the tape she started wearing the medal. She later converted to the Church.”
Tim Drake is executive editor of Catholic.net.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Time Manager for Catholics DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Wake. Pray. Get the kids ready. Go to Mass. Work - at an office or at home. Juggle family schedules. Do apostolic work.
A Catholic's schedule can be tough.
A business executive and professional speaker and trainer, Dave Durand has led hundreds of seminars on leadership, sales and time management. Married with five children, Durand recently published Time Management for Catholics (Sophia Institute Press).
He spoke from his home in Waterford, Wis., with Register features correspondent Tim Drake about how Catholics can better manage their time.
Did you grow up Catholic?
Yes, I grew up Catholic. I have wonderful Catholic parents. My father is an engineer and my mother is a teacher, although she stayed home with us when we were young. I am the second-oldest child from a family with three boys and two girls.
From my late teens through my college years I was a “cosmetic Catholic.” I went to Church on Sundays, but it was just makeup, that's all. At about age 27 I went through a series of events — including having some Protestant fundamental-ists challenge me in my faith — that eventually led to my reversion to the Church.
Essentially, in my mind, I had left the Church for a few months to become a Protestant fundamentalist, but through the prayers and help of my parents I returned to the faith of my childhood.
What led you to write your book on time management for Catholics?
I felt that God was saying to me, “I've given you certain skills. It's fine that you're using them to help people make more money, but you need to use them to advance the Kingdom as well.”
So I wrote a manuscript titled “How to Wake the Sleeping Catholic” and sent it off to Sophia Institute Press. At first they were skeptical because I was a motivational speaker. They came back to me with a proposal to write a different book. I fought it for a while, thinking, “Let God's will be done, but let it be done my way,” but eventually wrote the book Sophia wanted.
What are the most common mistakes Catholics make regarding time management?
There are 10 time bombs that most people, not only Catholics, do that waste time. They include things such as procrastination and derailment.
Derailment is when you go to pay your bills, but you find that you don't have a pen, so you go to look for a pen and you see the dirty dishes. Intending to do the dishes you drop a cup and in leaning over to pick up the cup you find the lost television remote, which reminds you that you need to go to the store to buy batteries, so you go to the store instead of paying your bills.
Then there is the atomic time bomb, which is television. The average American watches 28 hours of television per week. That's a part-time job. When you add time spent on the Internet, it becomes a full-time job.
Overall, the biggest mistake that most people make is failing to establish a mission statement in life. Once a mission statement is established, people know where their priorities are.
There are six plates that people must spin every day — faith, family, finances, physical health, social contributions in light of Christ and continued education/vocation. If someone fails to spin even one of these plates each day, the plate will wobble, fall off, break and need to be repaired. And if one falls it has the potential ability to tear down the rest as well.
Sometimes when I give seminars people wonder, “Where is the golf plate?” When something becomes too important that it becomes a plate of its own, it threatens the others. If golf, for example, isn't put on the health or family plate — meaning that it isn't done for exercise, as a family activity or to conduct business — it becomes destructive.
You argue that Catholics must look at time differently than secular time-management seminars such as Franklin Planner. Can you explain?
A Franklin Covey survey showed that among their typical customers the No. 1 priority is their spouse. Their finances are typically second. Their children are fourth and spirituality comes in at about fifth.
Secular seminars will not help you to reprioritize the list — they'll just help you to reach your goals. In Catholic time management I would say, “Because of absolutes and right and wrong, we need to change our priorities.” Secular seminars that are working with major corporations can't do that. Ultimately, they have different philosophies than we do. They focus on self-esteem whereas we focus on self-knowledge. They speak about being a self-made man. We speak about stewardship.
Our mission is not necessarily to reach our goals but to reach heaven. We are not necessarily focused on our will but on discerning God's will.
Let's use an example, say, of a stay-at-home mother who home schools five children. What practical tips can you offer her?
Again, it boils down to a mission statement. If she has her priorities pre-established she will not have to spend a lot of time deciding what is important to put on her plate and what not to spend time with. It will come naturally.
I would also recommend developing a tomorrow to-do list instead of a today to-do list. As she goes through her day she can put those hot and heavy items on the list for tomorrow. If she puts this list together before she goes to bed, her anxiety will be lower, and she will wake up refreshed and will get the important things done that day.
I would also recommend that families cease using a duplicate-entry system. Perhaps they have a planner at home and at work or a calendar upstairs and another downstairs. This is the greatest way to create chaos. The average American uses 13 different methods to manage their time. People need one system that they can take with them anywhere they go.
I have found in my own life that when I offer my time up to God, things get done. God gives you more and he's not necessarily testing you, but our instinct is to run from our need for God's help. What he's asking from us is a more prayerful life.
The optimal way to handle your time is through daily Mass. While there are people who are unable to attend daily Mass, by and large most people could get to daily Mass. Most people overlook the magnitude of daily Mass.
You yourself are the father of five. How do you incorporate your suggestions into your own life?
There are two ways that I do this. In time management we tend to put the blame on other people. We say, “I'm great with my time, but others are not” or “If my wife would only do this for me.”
We would do better to ask, “What am I not doing to love my spouse or serve my spouse?” I find that I do my best by doing things to serve my wife — like doing the dishes, changing a diaper or suggesting she go take a nap. I find I can obtain the same graces and virtues from serving and listening to my wife as I can from praying the rosary. When I serve my wife I find she serves me better. When I offer to her to help her in her time, she offers to help me in my time.
The second thing is to pray unceasingly. If we are to pray unceasingly it means our every action must resonate with prayer. God gave us practical techniques to manage our time, but prayer is the most overlooked solution because it sounds unrealistic. God is the ultimate place to go for time management.
Look at what Mother Teresa was able to accomplish in her life. She managed and helped more people in her life than some denominations will ever do. The first thing she did was to go to God for help. If that's the first thing that people do, they will never have a need for time-management techniques, because it will be obvious to them. God will grant them wisdom like Solomon received.
Scott Hahn has said that if you do missionary-type work or charitable work but cannot find the time to pray, you should stop the missionary work. Generally speaking, people go to the wrong source for answers about time. We go to books, but we seldom go to the Creator. If your Ford engine breaks down, you don't go to Sony to fix it.
If we simply pray to the Lord and say, “I have more things on my to-do list than I can possibly do. Can you help me accomplish them?” God will help you take care of your priorities. God is the supreme authority over our time.
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dave Durand ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: U.S. Chaldean Catholics From Iraq Speak Out on War With Saddam DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:The U.S. Eastern Catholic Chaldeans number more than 200,000. Many fled Iraq when Saddam came to power in 1979; others emigrated after the 1991 Gulf War. Chaldeans comprise about 3% of Iraq's estimated 24 million people, most of whom are Muslims.
The U.S. Chaldeans — as well as some Latin-rite clergy and laity — differ on strategies to disarm Iraq, which is believed to have weapons of mass destruction.
Bishop Ibrahim Ibrahim of the Michigan-based Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle said he hopes Saddam will comply fully with the latest U.N. resolution, which demands a report of his weapons systems — including chemical, biological and nuclear programs — and unrestricted access to international inspectors. The resolution threatened "serious consequences" for noncompliance.
Bishop Ibrahim called for "dialogue and negotiations," to resolve the conflict. "The United States is the only superpower in the world. Its mission is to provide for world peace, not war," he said.
Sam Kosa of St. Michael Chaldean Catholic Church in El Cajon, Calif., said opposition parties in Iraq, including Assyrians, could topple Saddam if they had support from outside the country. But he believes the United States will attack Iraq regardless of Saddam's compliance with the U.N. resolution.
Deacon John Kalabat of St. Peter Chaldean Church in El Cajon said teams will be unable to inspect Iraq's movable and underground weapons. "Only God and the United States can remove Saddam … whose hobby is killing and making war," he declared.
During the Gulf War, Saddam placed aircraft in populated areas and weapons in churches and mosques, then blamed civilian deaths on U.S. bombing missions, the deacon explained. During Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s, Saddam told his officers not to care about the number of casualties in their ranks, he added.
A U.S.-led attack on Iraq would "destroy the image of the United States in Arab nations," and lead to terrorist retaliation, Bishop Ibrahim said.
Sam Yono of Southfield, Mich., agreed. Attacking Iraq will incur the hatred of more than a billion Muslims worldwide and incite the wrath of terrorists who think the United States discriminates against Muslims, he said. Yono formerly chaired the Michigan-based Chaldean Federation of America.
Jane Shallal, an immigration attorney in West Bloomfield, Mich., believes if Iraq is attacked, it might fire missiles at Israel and "put us in the middle of a biological and nuclear war."
Garabad Sahakian of El Cajon fears another war with Iraq will be an "environmental disaster," causing disease and death to countless civilians.
Children and animals in Iraq have birth defects from low-grade radiation poisoning, and thousands of children suffer from illnesses related to depleted uranium in discarded shall casings and other munitions used during the Gulf War, according to a report submitted to the United Nations by the International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project.
Yono and Saad Marouf, who chairs the Chaldean Federation, recalled the destruction they saw when delivering food and medicine to churches and mosques after the Gulf War.
"Baghdad was paralyzed in 1991 … it was like living in the 11th century," Marouf said. He described homes lighted by candles, waste water running in the streets and contaminated water running from faucets only a few minutes a day.
Today most of the population still lives in poverty, Deacon Kalabat said, due to Saddam's $400 million military machine and his control of the nation's resources.
Bishops's Stance
The U.S. bishops have acknowledged that Saddam must stop suppressing his people and abandon efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, but they oppose a preventive attack on Iraq.
In a Sept. 13 letter to President Bush, Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote that a just war must be based on moral principles. Using force to oust Saddam must have “serious prospects for success” and must not cause greater harm than the “evil to be eliminated. … An attack on Iraq could inflict “incalculable consequences” on civilians who have “suffered so much from war, repression and a debilitating embargo,” the bishop wrote.
However, some Catholics, including George Weigel, believe using force to remove Iraq's government can be justified. Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
“States cannot be permitted to obtain weapons of mass destruction and [have] the means to use them, directly or through terrorists,” he said. “If inspection leading to disarmament fails to disarm” Saddam's lawless regime, it would be “morally justifiable” to use armed forces to do so. … If and when that happens, I expect those who end Saddam's blood-drenched reign will be welcomed as liberators.”
After 9/11, Weigel stated in an interview for a Polish newspaper: “I don't think it makes much moral sense to argue that we have to wait until the nuclear-tipped missile or the biological or chemical weapon is launched until we can do something about it.”
Amid this controversy, U.S. Chaldeans continue to help their relatives in Iraq with finances to purchase rationed food and scarce supplies of medicine — shortages caused by economic sanctions.
Kosa and Yono blame the sanctions for the deaths of their relatives in Iraq. Kosa's uncle died of an ear and throat infection six years ago because he could not obtain the necessary antibiotics. Yono's cousin died from heart failure because he was denied surgery for blocked arteries.
More than 1.5 million Iraqis have died since the U.N. sanctions took effect, including at least 47,500 children under age 5, according to former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
Today, the Chaldeans dread having Iraq again turned into a battlefield. They are praying for peace during Masses and in their homes and wonder if the Iraqi regime will satisfy requirements of the latest U.N. resolution.
“The lives of the entire population [of Iraq] are at stake,” Kosa said. “War is a human-rights issue. I trust that God will work through people that are faithful to him” in their struggle for peace.
Joyce Carr writes from San Diego.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joyce Carr ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Jersey-Based Arab Paper Publishes Protocols
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Nov. 15 — American Jewish leaders have demanded an apology from an Arab newspaper, The Arab Voice, based in New Jersey, for reprinting sections of the infamous antiSemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a work that purports to be a blueprint for Jewish world domination, according to the wire service.
Written in the 1890s and spread by the Czarist secret police in Russia, The Protocols was widely credited for many years until scholars decisively demonstrated their fictitious origins. The Council on American-Islamic Relations joined in the call for an apology, according to the AP.
Arab Voice editor Walid Rabah denied any wrongdoing and claimed he printed the sections from The Protocols to educate his readers while including a disclaimer alongside it.
“The Arab Voice's republication serves no function but to spread anti-Semitic lies,” replied the Anti-Defamation League's Charles Goldstein. “It echoes what is occurring in Egypt this month.” Egyptian television is currently showing a miniseries based in part on The Protocols, according to the AP.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for CAIR, a Washington-based Muslim civil rights group, said the newspaper's action is as offensive as anti-Muslim comments made recently by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, other evangelical Christians and critics of Islam.
Pro-Life Qualms Stop Bankruptcy Bill
DOW JONES, Nov. 15 — Despite strong pressure from Republican donor groups such as banks and credit card companies, House Republicans last week rejected a bill that would have greatly tightened the conditions and terms of bankruptcy.
The key issue, according to Dow Jones news service, was the insistence of House Democrats that the bill include language preventing pro-life demonstrators from declaring bankruptcy in the face of massive legal judgments obtained by abortionists.
The House vote was 172 to 243 against rules that would have cleared debate for the bill's final passage. This issue brought together pro-business and pro-abortion politicians on one side and pro-life legislators with liberal, pro-consumer groups on the other, Dow Jones reported. Pro-life leader Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) voted along with Democrats such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.).
Both the Christian Coalition and the U.S. Catholic Conference had lobbied against the bill, which is now considered dead.
Homosexual Activists Arrested at U.S. Capital
PLANETOUT.COM, Nov. 13 — The Web site Planet Out, a site for homosexuals, reported that three demonstrators were arrested last week in a Washington, D.C., hotel lobby after they importuned Catholic bishops for holy Communion.
The three openly homosexual Catholics had been denied Communion the night before at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception because they were wearing rainbow pins, the symbol chosen by homosexual activists, the site reported.
So the three protestors, members of a homosexual group called Soulforce, went to the hotel where the bishops were staying for their national conference and harried bishops as they passed in the lobby.
According to Planet Out, Kara Speltz of Oakland, Calif.; Ken Einhaus of Arlington, Va.; and Mike Perez of Seattle were released from jail Nov. 13 after pleading not guilty to unlawful entry.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: NOW v. Scheidler Comes to Supreme Court for Decision - Again DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — A 16-year-old case against veteran pro-life activist Joseph Scheidler and his Pro-Life Action League will reach the U.S. Supreme Court this term. This marks the second time NOW v. Scheidler has reached the high court in its long history.
“It started in June of 1986, so for 16-and-a-half years it's been hanging over like the Sword of Damocles,” Scheidler said.
Scheidler, one of the deans of the pro-life movement in America, and his Chicago-based group were targeted in 1986 by an evolving group of lawyers basing their case on evolving legal grounds. The case against him is now based on the civil law portion of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and the federal Hobbs Act, laws that were meant to target organized crime.
“They're trying to break us. They've said that,” Scheidler said. “They're trying to bankrupt us.” RICO provides for triple damage awards, making losing a RICO case exceptionally expensive.
Scheidler and his wife have been forced to put their house in escrow for the duration of the case. “We could lose our house if we lose the case,” he said.
“There are two legal issues before the court,” said Scheidler's attorney, Thomas Brejcha of Chicago's Thomas More Society. “One is the question of whether peaceable nonviolent direct action constituted the federal felony crime of extortion, so that conducting a ‘pattern’ of such demonstrations violated the federal racketeering law.”
By preventing or delaying the entry of women into abortion clinics, Scheidler said, “we supposedly took their property. We denied the abortionists their fees and the women their ability to get an abortion.”
Brejcha noted that federal law says someone must “obtain” property in order to violate the law. “Here, there was no obtaining of property and, in fact, there was no property,” he said.
In addition, the plaintiff claimed — successfully before a jury in 1998 — that Scheidler, the Pro-Life Action League and co-defendants Andrew Scholberg and Timothy Murphy used “actual or threatened force, violence or fear,” as the Hobbs Act requires.
“They never claimed that I or the Pro-Life Action League did anything violent,” Scheidler said. “They said that I created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation that promoted violence. They said that violent acts committed by other protesters were inspired by me. They made me the kingpin, the capo, of violence.”
The plaintiffs did, however, come up with examples of what they called threats of violence. “I wrote on a card I gave to an abortionist ‘Choose Life,’” he said. “They introduced that as a death threat.”
Brejcha said the Supreme Court would also consider the relatively minor question of whether a private group can obtain an injunction under RICO. An injunction against the defendants prevents them from obstructing abortion clinics.
Oral arguments will be held Dec. 4. A decision will likely be rendered in the first half of next year.
“The Bush administration, while it supports us on the injunction, is against us on the guts of the case,” he said. “They are not exactly supporters of civil disobedience. … We invoke the name of Dr. [Martin Luther] King here because he is recognized as the apostle of nonviolent protest. If we lose this case, similar arguments can be made against any protesters.”
He said the case was not necessarily over, no matter which way the Supreme Court ruled. “If we win,” he said, “there are predicate acts other than extortion [that the plaintiff could use].”
Scheidler said there were other ways for him to challenge the case if the Supreme Court ruled against him this time. “I don't want to get into that now,” he said.
Support for Scheidler
When the case was originally filed, it was handled by lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center, not the National Organization for Women (NOW), and was based on antitrust laws, not RICO, Brejcha said. The RICO law argument was added in 1989.
The civil liberties concerns raised by this case have attracted many other groups to Scheidler's side. The Illinois Catholic Conference, the Seamless Garment Network, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Sheen, Pax Christi USA and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are among those who support Scheidler in the case.
“All of the amici, whether individuals or communities, join this brief because the novel view of extortion expressed by the court of appeals exposes them to liability under the [RICO] act in a manner that they deem clearly at odds with the history of civil disobedience in this country and to the core principle of the First Amendment,” said a large group of supporters who filed an amicus curiae brief.
“Despite a deluge of inaccurate news reports and false claims by the defendants, NOW v. Scheidler is only about whether courts are permitted to prohibit violence and in no way seeks to limit peaceful protest on any issue,” said NOW President Kim Gandy in a statement Oct. 4. “This lawsuit is about the coordinated use of fear, force and violence aimed at the clinics and the women who use them.”
“We wrote an amicus brief in support of the Scheidler side,” said Robert Gilligan, acting executive director of the Catholic Conference of Illinois. “NOW's position is that it's extortion to be protesting in front of abortion clinics. We disagree with that. We believe in free speech.”
Gilligan said the long-running case has been much discussed in Illinois's Catholic circles, and he and other pro-life Catholics there feared a loss by Scheidler. “In terms of being under RICO, they can go after you for triple damages,” he said. “We're concerned about that.”
Scheidler said that although the case has been expensive, he has continued his pro-life activism. “As long as I am still free,” he said, “I will fight abortion.”
Joseph D'Agostino writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph D'Agostino ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Jail Sentence Stuns Italians
DEUTSCHE PRESS-AGENTUR, Nov. 18 — Italians were shocked when they learned that Giulio Andreotti, the country's seven-time prime minister, was found guilty of ordering the mafia in 1979 to murder Mino Pecorelli, a reporter who was allegedly about to publish documents that could have damaged Andreotti's political career.
Judges ruled the 83-year-old should spend the next 24 years in prison, according to the German news agency.
The reaction to the unexpected verdict ranged from the “profound agitation” of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Italy's president of the republic, to “bewilderment” in the Vatican. Andreotti is not only considered one of the most powerful men in postwar Italy but he has also been a friend to many popes and the man the Vatican relied on to press its agenda in the Italian parliament, Deutsche Press-Agentur reported.
Andreotti's lawyers plan to argue on appeal that their client is too old to be kept behind bars.
Maronite Patriarch Visits Vatican
DAILY STAR (Lebanon), Nov. 18 — The patriarch of the Eastern Catholic Maronites visited the Vatican to take part in a bishops's council, according to Lebanon's Daily Star.
Patriarch Nasrallah Butros Sfeir was joined by Catholic Armenian Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX Taramouny and Syriac Catholic Patriarch Agnatios Butros XVIII Abdel-Ahad.
Sfeir told the Daily Star that those bishops would meet Pope John Paul II and take part in the General Assembly of the Oriental Churches, which is held every four years.
Sfeir also called for an end to “Syrian interference in Lebanese internal affairs.” Syrian troops still occupy much of Lebanon.
Vatican Stamps Mark Papal Travels
He Associated Press, Nov. 16 — The city-state of the Vatican has begun to release a new series of stamps marking the travels of Pope John Paul II in 2001, featuring the Holy Father's face and the country's name written in its local language.
The countries to be commemorated are Greece, Syria, Malta, Ukraine, Kazakstan and Armenia.
Also planned are stamps for Christmas and coins for John Paul's 24th anniversary as Pope, according to the Associated Press.
Those coins will read, “There is no peace without justice. There is no justice without forgiveness.”
Vatican Forgives Archbishop Milingo
REUTERS, Nov. 15 — Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, an African bishop who shocked the world last year when he joined Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and was joined with a young woman in a church-arranged marriage, repented some months ago.
He has returned to the public practice of the priesthood duties with papal approval, according to Reuters news.
The Vatican issued a statement notifying “any faithful who may be interested” that he would celebrate Mass at his parish south of Rome, seen as an official sign the Vatican had forgiven the archbishop.
Archbishop Milingo has long had problems with Church authorities, in part because of his charismatic tent-revivals and mass public exorcisms, which were broadly popular in his native land.
The Vatican had threatened Milingo with excommunication, a punishment he avoided when he ended the uncanonical marriage and came to Rome to meet with Vatican officials.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Good Shepherd: God Most High and Most Wise DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II continued his series of meditations on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours during his general audience with 7,000 pilgrims on Nov. 20. His weekly catechesis focused on a canticle from Isaiah 40 that depicts God as the Good Shepherd.
“This image, which appears frequently in the Bible and in other ancient writings, evokes the ideas of leadership and domination,” he noted. “But in this case the characteristics are above all those of tenderness and passion since the shepherd is also the traveling companion of his sheep. He cares for his sheep not only by feeding them and making sure that they do not get lost but also by carrying his lambs in his arms and leading the ewes with care.”
At the same time, he emphasized that the canticle also recognized God's omnipotence as Creator of the universe. “No one can equal him in this grandiose and colossal work,” he noted. “No one is capable of measuring the immense universe that God has created.”
The Holy Father pointed out that St. Cyril of Jerusalem warned us not to “measure God with the yardstick of our human limitations.” Likewise, St. Gregory of Nyssa encouraged us to adore the almighty God.
Nonetheless, the Pope pointed out, St. Jerome recognized that the most amazing evidence of God's power and tenderness can be contemplated at Bethlehem, where God, who is infinite and omnipotent, made himself little and limited. John Paul ended by quoting St. Jerome: “Behold, he who holds the universe in one hand fits in a narrow manger.”
The book of the great prophet Isaiah, who lived in the eighth century B.C., includes words of other prophets who were his disciples and carried on his work. Such is the case with a prophet from the time of Israel's return from exile in Bablyon that took place in the sixth century B.C., whom biblical scholars call the “Deutero Isaiah.” His work is found in Chapters 40-55 of the Book of Isaiah. The canticle that we have just heard and that is recited during morning prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours is taken from the very first of these chapters.
This canticle is comprised of two parts. The first two verses are taken from the end of a very beautiful word of consolation that announces the return of the exiles to Jerusalem under the leadership of God himself (see Isaiah 40:1-11). Subsequent verses form the beginning of an apologetic discourse that exalts God's omnipotence and omniscience and that harshly criticizes those who make idols.
The Good Shepherd
The powerful figure of God appears at the beginning of this liturgical text, as he returns to Jerusalem preceded by his trophies, just as Jacob returned to the Holy Land preceded by his flocks of animals (see Genesis 31:17; 32:17). God's trophies are the exiled Jews, whom he snatched from the hands of their conquerors. Therefore, God is depicted “like a shepherd” (Isaiah 40:11). This image, which appears frequently in the Bible and in other ancient writings, evokes the ideas of leadership and domination, but in this case the characteristics are above all those of tenderness and passion since the shepherd is also the traveling companion of his sheep (see Psalm 23). He cares for his sheep not only by feeding them and making sure that they do not get lost but also by carrying his lambs in his arms and leading the ewes with care (see Isaiah 40:11).
The description of the entrance on the scene of the Lord, who is both King and Shepherd, is followed by a meditation on his work as Creator of the universe. No one can equal him in this grandiose and colossal work: certainly not man, much less dead and impotent idols. The prophet then engages in a series of rhetorical questions — questions, that is, that already include the answer. These questions are asked like in a trial: No one can rival God or claim his immense power and unlimited knowledge.
No one is capable of measuring the immense universe that God has created. The prophet helps us to understand that any human instrument is ridiculously inadequate for such a task. Moreover, God is its sole artisan: No one is capable of helping him or advising him in such an immense project like that of creating the universe (see verses 13-14).
God Is All-Powerful
In his 18th Baptismal Catechesis, which is based on this canticle, St. Cyril of Jerusalem instructs us not to measure God with the yardstick of our human limitations: “For you, who are a small and weak man, the distance from Gotia to India and from Spain to Persia is great, but for God, who has the whole world in the palm of his hand, every land is near” (Le catechesi, Rome, 1993, p. 408).
After having extolled God's omnipotence in creation, the prophet describes his lordship over history and over the nations — over mankind that inhabits the earth. The inhabitants of those lands that are known as well as those remote regions that the Bible calls far-flung “islands” are a microscopic reality in relation to the Lord's infinite grandeur. The images are brilliant and intense: The nations are “as a drop of the bucket,” “as dust on the scales” and “weigh no more than powder” (Isaiah 40:15).
No one is capable of preparing a sacrifice worthy of such a glorious Lord and King: All the sacrificial animals of the earth would not be enough, nor would all of Lebanon's cedar trees suffice for lighting the fire for this holocaust (see verse 16). The prophet makes man aware of his limitations before God's infinite grandeur and supreme omnipotence. His conclusion is incisive: “Before him all the nations are as nought, as nothing and void he accounts them” (verse 17).
The faithful are invited then, from the very beginning of the day, to adore the omnipotent Lord. St. Gregory of Nyssa, a father of the Church in Cappadocia in the fourth century, meditated on Isaiah's canticle with the following words: “When we hear the word ‘omnipotent,’ we think about the fact that God holds everything together in existence, both those that are intelligible as well as those that belong to material creation. For this reason, therefore, he maintains the entire earth in existence, for this reason he holds all the ends of the earth in his hand, for this reason he is able to hold heaven in one fist, for this reason he measures the waters with his hand, for this reason he contains within himself the entire intellectual creation: so that all things will remain in existence, held powerfully with the power that embraces them” (Teologia trinitaria, Milan, 1994, p. 625).
For his part, St. Jerome was amazed by another surprising truth: Christ, who “though he was in the form of God … emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming into human likeness” (Philippians 2:6-7). This infinite and omnipotent God, he noted, made himself little and limited. St. Jerome contemplates him at the stable in Bethlehem and exclaims: “Behold, he who holds the universe in one hand fits in a narrow manger” (Letter 22:39 in Opere scelte, I, Turin, 1971, p. 379).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: An Ugly Business: Calgary's Talisman Energy Inc. Cuts Ties to Genocidal Sudan DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:CALGARY, Alberta — As an astrophysicist in the 1960s, Jim Buckee studied the universe's ancient past.
But if Buckee, who is now president and chief executive officer of Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc., had been able to turn a telescope toward the future four years ago, he might never have led Talisman to buy a 25% share in Sudan's Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company.
By becoming partners with the Khartoum-based Islamic government of Sudan, which has waged a two-decade long genocidal civil war against Christian and animist residents of southern Sudan, Talisman ended up badly damaging its reputation.
Overwhelmed by the prospect of huge profits — current production in Sudan is around 240,000 barrels per day — Talisman overlooked the downside generated by the investment: crowds of protestors marching outside shareholders' meetings; Talisman's near delisting from the New York Stock Exchange; and the passage this fall of U.S. legislation that helped make it impossible for Talisman to continue denying its complicity with Sudan's genocide.
But even the toughest chief executive officer has a breaking point. After four years of insisting that all was well in Africa, Buckee announced late in October that Talisman had sold its Sudan operations for $758 million to a subsidiary of India's national oil company, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited. He also admitted what oil industry observers had been saying for at least two years: that his Sudan venture had become a corporate albatross.
“Shareholders have told me they were tired of continually having to monitor and analyze events relating to Sudan,” he said in a news release announcing the sale. “Selling our interest in the project resolves uncertainty about the future of this asset.”
Talisman's announced sale of its Sudanese holdings came little more than a week after the Sudan Peace Act passed by a vote of 359-8 in the U.S. House of Representatives and by unanimous consent in the Senate, then was signed into law on Oct. 21 by President Bush. The Sudan Peace Act is historic because it is the first time Washington has declared a nation's actions to “constitute genocide as defined by the [U.N.] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
And although Talisman is not mentioned by name, the act notes that the Khartoum government “has repeatedly stated that it intends to use the expected proceeds from future oil sales to increase the tempo and lethality of the war against the areas outside of its control.”
Atrocities
According to the Sudan Peace Act text, during the past 20 years the war has already cost more than 2 million lives and displaced more than 4 million people. The tempo of the slaughter increased rapidly in 1989 after the National Islamic Front took power in a coup. Christians and animists living in the south, mostly Nuer and Dinka tribesmen, have been forced to flee their homes and farms or face rape, slavery or slaughter.
A report to the U.S. House Committee for Refugees documents cases of infants spiked to trees or beheaded, people who have been tortured then had their lips punctured and padlocked as a warning not to talk and schools and hospitals that have been repeatedly bombed and strafed.
A February 2000 report to the Canadian government by Africa expert John Harker revealed that much of the killing took place to clear oil field areas preparatory to drilling. At the time Harker wrote that Talisman was in a state of “denial” regarding the ongoing “extraordinary suffering and continuing human rights violations” in areas surrounding its holdings.
While mentioning no company names, Harker concluded that “the oil operations in which a Canadian company is involved add more suffering.”
Talisman continues to deny complicity in Sudan's human rights transgressions. “I am ambivalent about [the sale of its Sudan holdings], because the project was really good,” Buckee told reporters at a press conference in Calgary. “We met good people and we thought we were doing good things in Sudan.”
Investor Relations Manager David Mann lists some of Talisman's good deeds, including building hospitals, digging water wells and helping local farmers develop commercial crops. “We stand by our assertion that the four years spent in Sudan were beneficial to the people,” he said.
“Talisman did build hospitals and dig wells,” countered Mel Middleton, director of Calgary's Freedom Quest International, “but the only beneficiaries are people the government approves, either northerners taking over land after southerners have been displaced or southerners who've bowed to the pressure of forced conversion to Islam.”
People are often herded together and deliberately starved, Middleton said, then offered food and aid packages from the West only if they convert.
Despite Mann's insistence that it is “virtually 100% certain the sale will go through,” hurdles remain. The Indian government's proposed purchase still has to be approved by the Khartoum government. And while Sudan is likely to cooperate, it remains an open question whether India wants to conclude with the deal (which will not be finalized until Dec. 31).
“We're already collecting signatures in India,” said Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C. “We're going to let the [Indian] government know that anyone who helps make Sudanese oil production profitable is guilty of funding genocide.”
Shea admits the Indian government is not listed on the NYSE and therefore may be less responsive to Western pressure. But India is proud of its Western reputation for protecting diversity and pluralism within its own borders and could be influenced by the negative publicity attached to doing business with an Islamic government charged with carrying out genocide against some of its own people.
Shea adds that the Indian people could oppose the purchase if they learn revenues from Sudanese oil are likely used to support Pakistan-based terrorist groups.
Documentation
Asked if it is possible that Talisman officials could legitimately have failed to see the connection between oil profits and the Khartoum government's war against the south, human rights lawyer Bill Saunders, who represents Sudan's Catholic Bishop Macram Max Gassis and the Bishop Gassis Sudan Relief Fund, was dismissive.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” Saunders said. “We documented the slave trade in Sudan on film, and I've written articles for peer-reviewed journals documenting Sudan's violations of the U.N.'s antislavery and genocide conventions, and the Geneva Conventions regulations regarding noncombat-ants. Talisman has received copies of all these things. It's ludicrous for them to pretend they don't know what's going on.”
Talisman defenders insist that without the ameliorating influence of a Western-based oil company in Sudan, conditions will only get worse. But Saunders says the opposite will likely occur.
“Talisman was a major apologist for an evil government,” he said. “Now that it's gone, the U.S. and Canada are free to see the government of Sudan for what it really is.”
Shafer Parker writes from Edmonton, Alberta.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Shafer Parker ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Mexican Cardinal Killed by Government?
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Nov. 15 — When Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo was murdered at the Guadalajara Airport in May 1993, authorities attributed the crime to drug lord Benjamin Arellano Felix. But Arellano Felix was just acquitted of any role in the slaying, leading some to accuse the former anti-clerical Mexican government of the slaying, according to the Associated Press.
Earlier this month, the current Archbishop of Guadalajara, Juan Cardinal Sandoval, told the newspaper Reforma that the Mexican Church suspected a government role in the slaying.
“The official explanation is now totally discarded,” Sandoval said. A provocative new book written by a former attorney general in Mexico also attributes the cardinal's murder to the old government without laying out its likely motive.
Church Mediates Land Conflict Among Catholics
FIDES, Nov. 15 — Land ownership is frequently a source of conflict in the developing world. But the Church has helped avert violence in a largely Catholic region of Indonesia, according to Fides, a Vatican missionary news agency.
Father Fransiskus Aliandu told Fides that for generations the Diocese of Larantuka has labored to stop fighting between the Paji and the Demon tribes on Adonara Island, which is just east of Flores Island. The Paji and the Demon tribes do not recognize private property rights and often resort to violence to claim tribal lands. Migrant workers returning to the island from Malaysia have worsened land conflict among tribal Catholics on this small island, Fides reported.
Two killings in September were related to just such a land dispute between Lewokelen and Tobi villagers. Father Aliandu said the local Church will “continue mediating, cooperating with the local government and tribal leaders to stop the land-motivated killings. It is the Church's responsibility to always guide the Catholic faithful.”
For the people of Adonara, he said, “land gives happiness and life.” Larantuka Diocese has a population of 247,268, of whom 230,375 are Catholics.
Pearl of Indian Culture Might be Lost Forever
UCA NEWS, Nov. 11 — Due to negligence and disinterestedness of the authorities, a pearl of India's Christian culture risks being lost forever, according to UCA News, an Asian Church news organization.
St. Anne's Church was built between 1681 and 1695 during Portuguese colonial rule in Goa on India's western coast. Now it has been put on the List of 100 Most Endangered Sites of the World Monuments Watch, a New York-based nonprofit fund dedicated to preserving historic art and architecture worldwide.
In 1986, the Indian government's conservation agency was supposed to restore the structure, which features Indian motifs such as lotus and palm leaves, as well as a vault that fuses Gothic and Roman styles.
The estimated cost of 9 million rupees (then $214,000) was to be shared by World Monuments Watch and Fundacao Oriente, a Portuguese organization, but it never took place.
Now the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage will reapply for funds and suggests that Church authorities hire experienced restoration architects for the work.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What' a Pro-Lifer to Do? DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:With Republicans in control of Congress and poised to act on anti-abortion legislation, the abortion fight is about to get even nastier than it already is. A glance through this issue of the Register will prove that the debate over abortion isn't exactly starting from a state of calm and understanding.
On the front page, we have James Kopp's confession to shooting abortionist Barnett Slepian through the window of the doctor's house.
On page three, we have Joe Scheidler, who has never met with calm and understanding as he has pressed the pro-life side, finally getting his day in court on the outlandish charge that his pro-life ministry is a criminal conspiracy along the lines the RICO anti-racketeering law was designed for.
And on this page in the Letters section, we have a continued debate about what pro-lifers's strategy should be. Should it be that of the “hard-liners” — in the phrase Dinesh D'ouza used in his recent Register commentary — or should it be an “incremental” approach?
These three different stories tell different lessons about the state of the abortion debate — and what its future should be.
Shooting doctors. James Kopp says he meant to wound, not kill, Slepian. He's sorry that the doctor died but has not said he's sorry he shot him. Did Kopp save lives by shooting the abortionist? The answer isn't obvious. Terrorism can be very effective at obtaining its aims — witness the effects of Sept. 11 on the U.S. economy, still felt today. Perhaps Kopp's terrorist act achieved its aim.
But evaluating the matter can't simply be an exercise in counting the casualties on both sides. The problem of abortion runs deeper than that. It's a problem in the human heart, in a generation that has so desensitized itself to killing that abortion — which used to be reviled — has become the most common surgical procedure performed on women under 50.
Will more violence, more killing, make our generation's hearts more open to life? It couldn't possibly. It will only harden hearts further. Can gunmen convince the culture that abortion is wrong by killing? Certainly not. They only convince the public that the pro-life position is the wicked one, not the pro-abortion.
Criminalizing opponents' tactics. In the Joe Scheidler case — as in the case of the Federal Access to Clinics Entrances Act — we see the “if you can't beat ‘em, jail ’em” tactic that the pro-abortion side has adopted. Faced with a strong pro-life opposition that they apparently can't out-argue, they have found ways to shut down the opposition altogether.
The problem with this situation for pro-lifers is clear. But it's also problematic for the pro-abortion side. Those who try to win arguments by silencing their opponents are not likely to win their arguments for long. Totalitarian regimes have found that out the hard way. And in fact, pro-lifers are already starting to win: Recent polls for the first time show a majority of Americans are pro-life.
Hard-liners and incrementalists. Dinesh D'ouza argued in the Register that the pro-life argument could be won the way the antislavery argument was won: Lincoln ceded much to the pro-slavery constituency and this held them at bay while he quietly won key tactical battles that ensured slavery's days were numbered. Readers wrote to complain about this “incremental” strategy as applied to abortion — why should we cede anything in a life and death question?
“Great letter,” he said, when we shared one such letter with D'ouza. “In a sense she's right: Lincoln needed the abolitionists, even as his strategy was ultimately superior to theirs. They could not have gotten rid of slavery: He did.”
It's an important point, we think. The fight between hard-liners and incrementalists needn't drag the pro-life movement down. The two positions are complementary. One wouldn't make as much sense without the other.
The pro-life message needs to be pressed with urgency and effectiveness, particularly now that government is in the hands of the (formally) anti-abortion party.
----- EXCERPT: EDITOR ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Panetta a 'Faithful Catholic'? DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:It was shocking to read that Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, referred to Leon Panetta, a proponent of partial-birth abortion, as a “faithful Catholic” (“No Wonder Granholm Won,” Letters, Nov. 17-23).
Panetta, who previously served as a congressman and chief of staff for President Clinton, is now serving on the bishops's national review board for sex-abuse monitoring.
Bishop Gregory's characterization of someone who condones the partial-birth abortion procedure (in which a doctor takes an almost delivered baby in his hands, punctures a hole in the baby's head and suctions out the baby's brains) as a “faithful Catholic” is inappropriate and an affront to millions of real faithful Catholics.
Bishop Gregory's labeling Panetta a “faithful Catholic” raises the question: Just what does one have to do to be considered an un-faithful Catholic? Panetta's presence on the bishops' board further erodes its credibility.
JAMES FRITZ Great Cacapon, West Virginia
Beyond Laissez-faire Faith
I have been reading the Register for two years. It is always informative, well-written, educational and loyal to the magisterium. In recent issues, several articles have pointed out that many Catholics support abortion and pro-choice candidates. The tone is one of dismay and confusion.
I am a convert and perhaps this is why I am surprised by this tone of disbelief. It has been my experience that “Catholic” is a relative term. For most Catholics, the faith is simply a cultural label. It is a characteristic like having brown eyes. It does not inform beliefs or affect attitudes.
When I first converted, I worked in a doctor's office with two other “Catholics.” They attended weekly Mass but remained pro-abortion and/or pro-contraceptive. Neither had any desire to learn the teachings of the faith. (I made several attempts to invite them and the “Catholic” drug representative to different programs, but to no avail.) They even went so far as to call the archbishop and the Legionaries of Christ “stupid” for wanting more religion classes in a local Catholic school. (They were commenting on a dispute involving the removal of students by parents when the priests attempted to re-Catholicize the school).
I also helped with a Catholic high-school retreat in which ignorance of the faith among the students was appalling, despite their nine years of Catholic education. It has been my experience that evangelical Protestants tend to be more pro-life because a personal decision to be a Christian has been made.
This informed, voluntary decision renders them accountable in a way the Catholic faith does not. Most Catholics think all they need to do is follow the order of sacraments and salvation is sealed. This is one reason I oppose confirmation before age 18! Sadly, I do not expect Catholics to necessarily be pro-life. My experience has taught me otherwise. I suggest that you redirect your focus to discussing the theological/philosophical arguments against abortion instead of wasting valuable space lamenting the views of laissez-faire Catholics.
CORETTA ALEXANDER Atlanta, Georgia
The Granholm Gang
As a former college instructor in Catholic social philosophy, I wish to clear up the confusion in Michigan Gov.-elect Jennifer Granholm's mind (“Pro-Abortion and Catholic?” Nov. 3-9). Her quoted comments show she knows little Catholic philosophy and less science. And, in light of their supposed training, the priests who support her may be more confused than she is.
To make clear what was common knowledge as long ago as 1970, before Roe v. Wade: An article written for physicians, “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society,” in the September 1970 edition of California Medicine, admitted (while espousing a pro-abortion position): “The result [of society partially rejecting the philosophy that human life is sacred] has been the curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intraor extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.”
Even if, for the sake of argument, we pretend that we do not know that human life begins at conception, Granholm's support of abortion is morally indefensible: No one doubts that, as it is being born, the “being” in the womb is a human child. Is Ms. G opposed to “partial-birth abortion”? Would she promote laws to stop this form of infanticide? If not, how can she claim to be “Catholic” — much less a civilized person — when she would permit the murder of babies when there can be no doubt, not even a contrived one, about what is happening?
If she does admit that pre-born babies at the sixth to ninth months are human persons, and would indeed support laws to stop the butchery of such innocents, isn't that the same as “imposing her morality” on others — i.e., on the butchers? Or, would this woman who wants to govern the people of Michigan stand back and say, “No, let the murders continue?” If that is her view of what public morality should be, why not go all the way: repeal the laws against child abuse. Because to criminalize such conduct “imposes the morality” of the non-abusers onto the abusers.
Ms. Granholm is not qualified for public office. She is not qualified to call herself a Catholic. I doubt that the priests who support her are — philosophically and theologically, whatever their personal probity — qualified for the priesthood. They all should decide which church they want to be in: the Catholic Church or the secular-humanist church. Then choose one and leave the other.
WILLIAM A. STANMEYER, ESQ. Great Falls, Virginia
Death by Increments
Regarding “Pro-Life Stasis? It's Time to Do What Lincoln Did” (Nov. 3-9):
Dinesh D'ouza pleads the “incrementalism” approach to stopping abortion. Father Anthony Zimmerman also has a similar advocacy letter in that paper. In my opinion they are both off track for very basic reasons:
Law has not only an executory function but also a vital educative function. By identifying pro-life law with abortion exceptions (as an example, rape, incest and life of the mother) we confuse “thou shalt not kill” in the public mind. We splinter our pro-life identity and promote complexity and difficulty in later trying to re-educate the public about moving off that position.
Not everyone is a tactician, as the incrementalists seem to infer with their strategy. The average person takes things at face value and is confused by inconsistencies.
Incrementalists ever remind us that we live in an imperfect world. Let us remind them that we are trying to overcome imperfection, and that's why we don't pre-design imperfection into our pro-life laws. Imperfections will show up there naturally, defaults to our unsuccessful efforts.
Jesus, the paradigm of all moral strategy, never accepted evil for later good; as an example, to the adulteress, he said, “Go and sin no more.” He never said, “Let's cut that adultery down to 20% for now.” While understanding that there may be later failures and providing for recovery needs, Christ's strategy never involved appearances of compromising with evil.
While Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae frees moral culpability for incremental pro-life people whose goal is clearly to stop all abortion, he is not addressing this as preferred political strategy.
We must keep our goals simple and, above all, unambiguous to the whole public!
FRANK STRELCHUN, PH.D Canaan, Connecticut
No Room for Martians
Regarding “Brother From Another Planet: Redeemed?” (Oct. 6-12):
The search for life on other planets boils down to the basic question: Does life occur spontaneously as the result of chance — or was life created by an intelligent designer? We must not deceive ourselves, for these are the only two possible explanations as to how we got here.
Perhaps atheists search for life on Mars because they fail to find the “smoking gun” here on earth — where, if life springs forth from chance, they should have found at least one occurrence of this by now. They have not, and the Christian knows they will not — not here, not on Mars, not on any planet in any galaxy.
GREG DENT Reed City, Michigan
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Many Ways to Fight for Life DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:I wish to sincerely apologize to Mr. Greg Chesmore of Chicago (“Protest Has Its Place,” Letters, Nov. 17-23), and any other hardworking, faithful pro-life person who was unhappy with the interview I gave to Tim Drake in the Register (“Challenging Pro-Lifers to Change,” Oct. 6-12).
Even though an interview [sometimes] represents the interpretation of the reporter, and not the exact words of the interviewee, I was allowed the opportunity to review Mr. Drake's article before it went to press, and so I take full responsibility for any misunderstanding.
The truth is that I never indicated, as Mr. Chesmore charges, that “there is only one way to be an effective pro-life advocate.” Nor did I “describe picketing abortion facilities as negative and potentially self-righteous” or say anything to suggest that I believe “pro-life legislative and political actions are unsuccessful and not useful.” Even after reading Mr. Drake's interview, I cannot see how Mr. Chesmore interpreted my comments this way. In fact, my comments were not about the activities of public protest or legislative action. They were, rather, about my own naïve and self-righteous attitude as a young activist.
I am truly sorry if Mr. Chesmore believed I had anything at all negative to say about activities in peaceful public protest or lobbying. In truth, I believe these activities are highly necessary when coupled with a mission of education and an attitude of love. In fact, last month, I participated in a public rosary with Bishop Paul Loverde in front of an abortion facility in Arlington, Va. I am also a registered pro-life lobbyist for the state of Washington and have been for the past 10 years.
I deeply regret any injury I may have caused to any member of the pro-life body.
CAMILLE E. DE BLASI Redmond, Washington
The writer is director of the Center for Life Principles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Civil Remedies Will Not Heal Spiritual Pain. This Might . . . DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Recently I celebrated Sunday Mass for a group of American sisters in Rome, and afterward I was asked to expose the Blessed Sacrament for adoration. They told me that they each do two hours of adoration on Sundays in reparation and prayer in response to the clergy sexual-abuse crisis in the United States.
And they fast every Friday for the same intention.
It was about the first “good news” I have heard in relation to the sexual-abuse crisis. It's been an unpleasant story to cover. It's dispiriting enough to hear about priestly betrayal and sin, episcopal malfeasance and sin, chancery incompetence and sin. It's even worse to have to write about it.
Recently, I have devoted a lot of attention to the legal aspects of the proposed remedies agreed to in Dallas, and those issues are important. But to write about due process is a little like writing about labor law during a baseball strike. It is not the heart of the matter.
Sexual sins and crimes by priests, and the staggering ineptitude of bishops in handling the aftermath, is not a legal crisis, nor a liability crisis, nor a crisis of public confidence, nor even — as I have heard it described recently — a public health crisis.
It is a profoundly spiritual crisis.
The sisters, more than most priests and bishops, have the common sense to realize that.
Their response reminded of me what Cardinal J. Francis Stafford said last April during the cardinals' summit in Rome. Cardinal Stafford, who never speaks without prior theological reflection, said that the Church had “spiritual resources” to address the crisis. He mentioned penance, conversion, mercy and healing. Nobody paid much attention. Perhaps the sisters were listening.
The typical line one hears from chancery officials these days is that after this whole mess is dealt with, the safety of children will be better protected than ever before. Which is all well and good but is nevertheless a rather minimal standard for the Church. The local square-dancing club should keep the children safe — one hopes that the Church is aiming a little higher.
When the Boston Globe is on your tail and the arch-diocesan budget is being slashed, it is admittedly difficult to raise one's vision above the worldly matters that demand urgent attention. Yet if all we achieve are favorable editorials for our child-safety policies and healthy diocesan finances, we shall have failed.
We need a spiritual response commensurate to the sin committed. The sexual abuse of minors by priests is, on the scale of priestly sins, perhaps second only to desecration of the Blessed Sacrament or apostasy from the faith.
The victims of clergy sexual abuse have a right to something more than bureaucratic boilerplate that “steps are being taken” and “procedures are in place” to make sure “this never happens again.” The coroner's office says as much after investigating an amusement park accident.
The common good of the faithful demands that punishments be administered — in accord with Church law — and are publicly known. We all need to know that restitution is being made, penance is being done, and conversion is being sought.
There is something spiritually unsatisfying about hearing that a fallen priest has been removed from ministry and is now living with his spinster sister and teaching conflict resolution seminars at the local community college.
It would do a lot more good to know that he has been sent to a cloistered monastery where he is spending his days in prayer and penance.
His victims should know that while he has disappeared from their community, he has not left his past behind like an unscrupulous salesman moving on to the next town. They should know that he has a new assignment from his bishop: To spend several years offering penances and prayers for the ones whom he has hurt.
That would be a spiritual response that would serve the victims and the common good precisely because it is spiritual. It should not be something strange for the Church to do. There is a handful of lawyers and activists who seek profit in the spoils of sexual abuse, but they do a disservice to the victims who are not out for cash.
Victims have been spiritually violated and they are entitled to spiritual remedies. Aside from keeping the children safe, it might just make a saint out of the priest who has sinned grievously.
Father Raymond J. de Souza is the Register's Rome correspondent.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Marriage on the Block in Massachusetts DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:In his video The Crisis of Marriage and Family in Modern Society, the theologian Scott Hahn mines the Book of Genesis to learn what happens to societies that embrace behaviors that tear apart the covenant of marriage.
Like contemporary cable TV, Genesis is rife with examples of sexual sins, such as fornication, adultery and sodomy. But unlike HBO, Genesis also details the real consequences of these acts on families and on societies. It is a pity that some of the legislators in my state are ignoring these timeless lessons.
Massachusetts, America's “cradle of liberty,” is now considered “ground zero” by special-interest groups that want to give same-sex couples the myriad of legal and financial benefits traditionally reserved for marriage, the building block of society.
Aggressive and organized, the advocates of “equal rights” initiatives in Massachusetts are led by homosexual activists and include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the National Organization for Women and even the AFL-CIO. (Do all those iron workers, teachers and truck drivers know what their labor unions are promoting?)
Their objective is to force same-sex marriage on the state through the courts, thereby setting a legal precedent for the other 49 states.
Church on Defense
Thirty-six states already have marriage protection laws in place. Texas recently gained a Republican majority in the House, and next year's legislative session might see it become the 37th state to adopt defense-of-marriage legislation. This would leave the states without defense-of-marriage laws (Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming) vulnerable to groups seeking to revolutionize marriage through the courts.
The majority of Americans would be silenced and our most basic institution endangered.
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the local Church is attempting to defend the marriage bond. The Massachusetts Catholic Conference supports a proposed “Protection of Marriage Amendment” to the state constitution, affirming that marriage is a union between one man and one woman, and would prevent “civil union” or “domestic-partnership” benefits (examples of the “small-steps” strategy for the ultimate recognition of same-sex marriage).
The journey of the proposed amendment has been a rocky one with hairpin turns.
According to The Massachusetts News, homosexual activists used harassment, intimidation and vandalism to interfere with voters signing petitions for the amendment. As a result, Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage, the sponsor of the amendment, was forced to hire paid signature-gatherers, whom local homosexual-rights activists trailed, as they'd been trained to do at an AFL-CIO union hall by ACLU organizers flown in from California. Despite this harassment and a smear campaign in the press, Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage collected 76,607 valid signatures, as certified by the Secretary of State.
The amendment has broad support — polls indicate more than 60% of citizens support “defense-of-marriage” legislation. But so far it has been blocked at a critical stage, in the heavily Democratic legislature. According to Massachusetts law, the amendment needs to be approved twice by the legislature before it can make it to the voters in 2004.
The leading enemy of the amendment is Senate President Thomas Birmingham, a labor lawyer by profession and an avowed Catholic. Birmingham toes the AFL-CIO line on the bill, opposing any “defense-of-marriage” legislation. In a July article in the Boston Globe, he said the Amendment was “wrong-hearted and wrong-headed.”
C.J. Doyle of the Catholic Action League commented in the Globe about Birmingham's procedural maneuver to kill the ballot question. “Everything that is wrong with Massachusetts state government was apparent today for all the world to see,” Doyle said. “A lame-duck Senate president, Thomas Birmingham abused his power to subvert the constitution and frustrate the democratic process because his failing gubernatorial campaign could not withstand pressure from the homosexual lobby.” (Birmingham lost his bid to run for governor as a candidate of the Democratic Party to State Treasurer Shannon O'Brien in the September primary.)
Legislators were put under heavy pressure and accused of attempting to deny health care to single people if they supported the amendment.
But enough lawmakers would have stuck with the amendment to shepherd it through two legislative sessions if they were not adjourned. Gerry D'Avolio, executive director of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, praised these law-makers: “Those legislators who refused to be swayed by the extreme misrepresentations by the amendment's opponents deserve our most heartfelt gratitude. They stood tall despite a withering stream of attacks accusing supporters of the amendment of harboring bigotry and hate.”
A lawsuit has been filed against Birmingham and the Secretary of the Commonwealth by Sarah McVay Pawlick, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage. It has been scheduled to be heard by the Justices of the Supreme Judicial Court during the first week of December.
In May, the Superior Court affirmed state marriage laws in answer to a lawsuit filed last year by the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders on behalf of seven same-sex couples. GLAD has filed an appeal to the decision. It is clear from the battles that are being waged on Christian teaching on life, marriage and the family that Catholics have a renewed responsibility to be informed, active and responsible participants in the political process.
As Maria Parker of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference has said, “If we don't act now, the courts will make the decision for us, like they did in Vermont.”
Vermont law now treats persons in same-sex “civil unions” as spouses with all the rights of spouses except for the federal benefits associated with civil marriage. Grass-roots efforts are crucial, Parker says. “Without Catholics and other concerned citizens in their districts coming forth to express their support, legislators can simply walk away from the issue.”
50-Year Siege
When individuals and nations do not renounce their sins and those of their forefathers, as the Book of Genesis records, then their descendants embrace those sins, even institutionalizing them.
And that is what we have seen in America during the past 50 years.
The gradual dismantling of marriage and family life — beginning with their legal status — are the fallout of the sexual revolution, which began with the erosion of religious faith and the legalization of all birth control in the early 1960s. It proceeded with the institutionalization of abortion with Roe v. Wade (1973), the creation of no-fault divorce — which made marriage a contract that is legally unenforceable — and now culminates in proposals for same-sex marriage. All this would have seemed unthinkable to most Americans in 1960.
The U.S. Catholic Bishops' 2001 Statement on Same-Sex Marriage affirms that “marriage is a faithful, exclusive and lifelong union between one man and one woman joined as husband and wife in an intimate partnership of life and love. This union was established by God with its own proper law. By reason of its very nature, therefore, marriage exists for the mutual love and support of the spouses and for the procreation and education of children.”
The statement calls for Catholics to preserve, protect and promote the institution of marriage in both private and public realms, “At a time when family life is under significant stress, the principled defense of marriage is an urgent necessity for the well-being of children and families and for the common good of society.”
The Massachusetts State House is a good place to carry this out.
Kathryn Dillon works in the Clinical and Trial Advocacy Programs
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Dillon ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Is The Three Musketeers a Catholic Novel? DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Is The Three Musketeers an anti-Catholic book? At first blush, some might think so.
Its most famous villain is a man of the Church, Cardinal Richelieu; Alexandre Dumas, the book's author, had a rather irregular private life; and the idea of cavaliers having mistresses is taken for granted.
But for a Catholic to deny himself The Three Musketeers would be an enormous mistake, for it is one of the greatest adventure yarns ever written, one that hasn't dated a bit.
That's almost recommendation enough, for let us remember our heritage. As Catholics, we're not Puritan bluenoses, inherently suspicious of art or narrow-minded in intellect. While one might never find books with such titles as A Treasury of Presbyterian Art or Great Baptist Intellectuals on library bookshelves, replace Presbyterian and Baptist with Catholic, and such titles seem perfectly reasonable, necessary even. The Catholic faith affirms everything that is good, and in the great Catholic theologian Karl Adam's words, “Art is native to Catholicism.”
The Three Musketeers is a fine example of popular literary art, and if one approaches it without puritanical fear, one will be rewarded not only with excitement and joy but also with a few theological surprises.
With regard to Cardinal Richelieu, we need not be shocked, if we have the remotest gleanings of Catholic history or have paid attention to Catholic news over the last year, by the idea that clerics are not immune from original sin. Indeed, as Catholics, we are required to believe that they are not. The commander of the musketeers himself reminds the king, in a rather admirable ultramontane way, that “His Eminence [the cardinal] is not His Holiness, sire. … It is only the pope who is infallible, and … this infallibility does not extend to cardinals.” And, of course, even the pope has his confessor. So if Cardinal Richelieu, as a cleric-statesman, falls short of sanctity or even of good judgment, I don't see that we need to be scandalized by this fact.
This is especially so when one discovers that our heroes, the musketeers, though hostile to the cardinal and jealously and belligerently the king's men, (or really the queen's, as the story centers on their gallant defense of her interests), are also Catholic men. The dashing Aramis not only toys — to his colleagues' amusement, given his susceptibility to romance and adventure — with the idea of a priestly vocation, at the end of the book he takes up a monk's cowl.
Athos, the hard-fighting, hard-drinking musketeer of few words, who keeps his own counsel on principle and has nothing to do with mistresses or romantic folly, is a man of unimpeachable integrity. “This quality was specially praiseworthy in that lax age,” Dumas writes, “in which soldiers readily compromised their consciences, lovers fell far short of the standards of honor which prevail nowadays and poor men often failed to observe the seventh commandment. Athos at his best was, in fact, a paragon of knowledge and virtue.”
If the large-framed dandy Porthos is a comic character and d'Artagnan has the awkwardness and ardent excesses — but also ardent courage — of a young man, it is the virtuous Athos who in the second half of the book leads the musketeers. And it is Athos who says during the siege against the Huguenots (Protestants) of La Rochelle, “Silly asses! Why won't they see that Catholicism's the best and pleasantest religion in the world? Never mind, they're a gallant lot” — which makes Athos both Catholically orthodox and magnanimous at the same time.
The real villain of The Three Musketeers is not Cardinal Richelieu — who always admires the musketeers and actually commissions d'Artagnan as a lieutenant at the novel's finale — but “Milady,” a feminine fiend of a type instantly recognizable to any who today toil in the environs of Washington, D.C.
How does Milady begin (at least so far as we're told) her sordid career of crime? “She was a nun at the Benedictine convent at Templemar. There was a young priest, a simple, honest fellow, who officiated in the convent chapel. This woman made up her mind to seduce him and succeeded. She'd have seduced a saint. Both of them, priest and nun, had taken vows which were sacred and irrevocable.”
Breaking these vows to God and man leads next to thievery and eventually, on his part to remorseful suicide and on her part to remorseless murder. The ultimate villain is thus an anti-Catholic renegade, who even feigns a passionate Puritanism at one point in the story, to seduce her Puritan jailer to assassinate the Duke of Buckingham.
The assassin, the duke, Cardinal Richelieu, the king, the queen and much else besides, perhaps even the musketeers themselves, are based on actual history — touched up a bit, of course. If one is looking for a further “it's good for you” excuse to pick up this classic tale, one might add that it is also, like most good writing, strewn with biblical and classical allusions. A few are even of a wryly provocative kind, as witness Aramis' theological view of ghosts: “The Bible makes our belief in them a law; the ghost of Samuel appeared to Saul, and it is an article of faith that I should be very sorry to see any doubt thrown upon.”
But that is all by the way; pick up the book for the sheer pleasure it will give you. If you are such a one — as I am — who believes with d'Artagnan that “There's room in heaven for soldiers as well as priests,” you won't be disappointed.
H.W. Crocker III is author of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History. His comic novel , The Old Limey, has recently been reissued in paperback.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: H.W. Crocker III ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Holding Out for an Antihero? Take Two DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:After 9/11, many thought America would be hungry for heroes who would inspire us.
Hollywood exists, in part, to satisfy that kind of cultural need and, in the past 12 months, it has given us appropriate archetypal figures in movies like The Lord of the Rings and We Were Soldiers.
The box-office success of two recent releases, 8 Mile and Frida, reminds us that our culture also craves other sorts of role models — people whose better qualities seem worlds removed from traditional notions of virtue. These films' protagonists are supposed to be admired for their ability to overcome great obstacles in pursuit of personal goals. But their characters' value systems reflect a moral anarchy that's truly frightening, especially since the assumptions behind the value systems are never challenged by the films' creators.
8 Mile is, on one level, a familiar Hollywood fairy tale: a rags-to-riches show-biz success story that's a cross between A Star is Born and Rocky. The loosely constructed plot is a fictional riff on the early life of its star, Eminem, whose platinum-selling rap-music CDs have offended everyone from feminists and homosexual activists to conservative Christians.
Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers III, plays Jimmy Smith Jr., also known as Bunny Rabbit. Rabbit works in a Detroit factory by day, trying to save enough money to make a demo of his rap songs. His personal life is chaotic. Having just broken up with his girlfriend, who falsely claims to be pregnant, he moves into a rundown trailer with his mother (Kim Basinger) and little sister (Taryn Manning). Temporarily rooming with them is his mother's alcoholic, unemployed boyfriend (Michael Shannon), who's waiting to collect a big but unspecified settlement check.
Director Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential and Wonder Boys) and screenwriter Scott Silver skillfully capture the textures of that milieu where downwardly mobile blue-collar workers mix with welfare dependents. One of Rabbit's few appealing traits is his determination to escape and be more than “poor white trash.”
At night the white would-be rapper hangs out at black clubs with two black buddies (Mekhi Phifer and Omar Benson Miller) and a white, physically handicapped friend (Evan Jones). Rabbit competes in musical contests. His show biz ambitions are fueled by a local black promoter (Eugene Byrd) who claims to have industry connections and an aspiring white model (Brittany Murphy) who's willing to sleep her way to the top.
Rabbit has the occasional decent impulse (he's nice to his sister). But mainly his personality is consumed by a deep-seated anger that can be triggered at any time.
The filmmakers present the roots of this rage as poverty and a dysfunctional home life. However, there may be other causes. Rabbit's father is never seen or referred to, and one can speculate that this paternal abandonment may be the unconscious source of many of the young man's near-pathological outbursts.
The moral tools the would-be rapper has been given to cope with his environment are a social conservative's worst nightmare. His life appears untouched by any religious, political or educational influences. His entire system of values springs from popular culture in general and rap music in particular. He identifies completely with the inchoate rage of black street culture and makes it over into his own through cleverly rhymed lyrics that focus more on class than race.
Rabbit's final victory in a rap contest displays a breathtaking inversion of traditional values. He destroys his black opponent by revealing, among other things, that his rival is being raised in a household with (horror of horrors) two parents. The implication is that, for maximum street credibility, a one-parent, broken home is the desired norm.
Meanwhile Frida, based on Hayden Herrera's biography, represents a parallel Hollywood trend: the injection of what were once anti-establishment, avant-garde, bohemian values into mainstream popular culture. Frida Kalho (Salma Hayek) was a gifted mid-20th-century Mexican painter whose sexually promiscuous lifestyle and radical political beliefs are assumed to have important lessons to teach us today.
Director Julie Taymor (Titus) mounts a visually imaginative production that's morally obtuse. She and her four screenwriters are also unable to decide which of their mate-rial's many plot strands to focus on. The action begins with Frida suffering a horrible accident that leaves her in excruciating pain for the rest of her life. The movie appears to be a story about a woman's courageous achievements in the face of debilitating physical handicaps.
Then Frida falls in love with and marries (twice) the famous muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), whose infidelities surpass hers. We think we're watching a lusty, epic romance between artistic equals.
Both are also committed communists whose activities lead them to shelter Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush) during his forced exile from the Soviet Union, and the movie wanders off into Marxist arguments over art and revolution. (Amazingly, the film-makers offer no criticism of this total-itarian ideology that later resulted in the deaths of millions.)
For viewers who yearn for moral stability, the movie offers Frida's two devoutly Catholic aunts who appear only briefly as comic relief. They sprinkle holy water on her house to protect her while Trotsky is living there. The filmmakers, of course, depict this negatively, as an action that's symbolic of the religiously repressive, bourgeois social order against which their heroine has rightly rebelled.
Since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, America has been in the throes of a national renewal in which spiritual values and family play a prominent part. 8 Mile and Frida remind us that instant gratification and permissive behavior still have mass appeal. America's culture wars are far from over, and some of its most important battles are being fought at your local multiplex.
John Prizer is currently based in Washington, DC.
8 MILE
----- EXCERPT: Frida and 8 Mile present moral anarchy as a cultural treasure ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:American Experience: Alone on the Ice (1999)
At one time explorers were celebrities. Admiral Richard Byrd was considered one of the greatest, a media-certified hero with three New York ticker-tape parades in his honor. This PBS documentary examines the controversy around this self-promoting scientist, inventor and aviation pioneer. In 1926 Byrd was hailed as the first person to fly over the north pole, a claim some now doubt. Three years later he completed a 1,600-mile flight across the south pole.
In 1934 he launched a second expedition to Antarctica to map territory and conduct scientific research. He lived alone for four months in a hut under arduous conditions. When he had to be rescued near death, it became an international media event. Host David McCullough chronicles Byrd's adventures, combining archival film footage and photographs with interviews with polar experts and some of the expeditions' survivors.
Follow the River (1995)
America's conquest of its indigenous peoples was longer and more closely fought than many of us imagine, with dangerous consequences for the early settlers. This TV movie, based on James Alexander Thom's novel, dramatizes a real-life story set during these conflicts in 1755. Mary Ingles is 23 and expecting her third child when the Shawnees raid her Virginia Colony settlement in the Blue Ridge Mountains, kidnapping her and killing others. (An estimated 2,000 homesteaders like her were abducted during the French and Indian Wars.)
Wildcat, the Shawnee chief, admires Mary and proposes marriage. But she chooses to remain faithful to her husband, Will, back at the settlement even though she's not sure he's still alive. She escapes with her sister, Bettie, and struggles her way to safety across 1,000 miles of uncharted Ohio Valley wilderness. The action revolves around the appealing heroine's indomitable spirit.
Henry V (1944)
Kenneth Branagh's 1989 adaptation of Shakes-peare's epic portrait of kingship emphasized “the fog of war” and its senseless violence.
Laurence Olivier's earlier version of Henry V reflects the more straightforward patriotism of his era, World War II when Britain was under attack. Imaginatively structured, Olivier's film begins with a 17th-century staging of the play at the Globe Theater. The proscenium slowly disappears as the stylized sets give way to realistic battle recreations.
The pageantry and language are glorious.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
DEC., VARIOUS DATES
Christmas Specials PBS, check local listings
Two fun specials are America's Home Cooking: Cookies, which showcases home cooks and family recipes; and American Soundtrack: A Classic Christmas from the Ed Sullivan Show, which features Bing Crosby, Connie Francis and many more stars.
SUNDAYS IN DEC.
Sunday Rosaries on EWTN EWTN, various times
Pope John Paul II has proclaimed October 2002 to October 2003 as The Year of the Rosary. In his new apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae (The Rosary of the Virgin Mary), the Holy Father reminds us of the rosary's power. He reminds us that to “recite the rosary is nothing less than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ,” and he asks each of us to pray the rosary and promote it. EWTN offers Holy Land Rosary at 7:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m., Scriptural Rosary at 11:30 a.m. and International Rosary at 3:30 p.m. These shows will also air in these time slots daily throughout Christmas week.
MONDAY, DEC. 2
IR: Forensic Fraud A & E, 10 p.m.
“Investigative Reports” dissects criminal cases in Chicago that turned out to involve misrepresentation of forensic evidence such as DNA. The show evaluates the reliability of forensic science and notes that scientists, prosecutors, police and defendants can lie.
TUESDAY, DEC. 3
Francis Xavier and the Samurai's Lost Treasure EWTN, 4 p.m.
On the feast day of this great Jesuit saint, make sure your children see this animated story of his adventures for Christ and the Gospel in 16th-century India and Japan.
WEDNESDAY, DEC. 4
Pearl Harbor: The Death of the Arizona Discovery Channel, 9 p.m.
Daniel Martinez, chief historian at the USS Arizona Memorial, hosts “Unsolved History,” a new show about notable historical events. In this episode, he notes recent discoveries about the sinking of the battleship Arizona in the Japanese surprise attack on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. Rebroadcast Thursday at midnight and Saturday at 1 p.m.
THURSDAYS
The Router Workshop PBS, 5 p.m.
Bob and Rick Rosendahl find ingenious ways to construct knickknack shelves.
FRIDAYS
Wall $treet Week with Fortune PBS, 8:30 p.m.
See what leaders in business, finance and government think about the economy.
SATURDAYS
Household of Faith: Now That We're Catholic EWTN, 5:30 p.m.
Converts Kristine Franklin (exfundamentalist) and Rosalind Moss (ex-evangelical) tell exciting stories of their discovery of the fullness of truth in the Catholic Church. Also shown Tuesdays at 11 a.m.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Cell Phone Charity DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Dear Lance and Adrienne,
There are many differences between your generation and mine. One of the most obvious is our comfort with the cell phone.
For me, the cell phone is a useful tool. My boss can find me when I'm away from the office and I can find mom when I can't remember which of you I'm supposed to pick up after school. There are all sorts of features on my phone that I neither use nor understand.
You, at ages 11 and 17, are members of the cell phone generation. You are comfortable with the gadgets and understand all the special features, including those video games I can't figure out.
But out of respect for our Catholic faith (and with regard for the welfare of the human race in general), our two generations (and any other generations lurking out there) should agree on a few points of behavior. In doing so, we'll be acting in accord with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which offers the following with regard to how we use the channels of social communication: “It is necessary that all members of society meet the demands of justice and charity in this domain.”
We'll also be following the advice of noted theologian Germain Grisez, who writes, “Since all communication should further community, a person should be appropriately receptive to efforts to communicate but should resist abuses of communications.”
Perhaps you think I'm stretching a bit to connect the proper use of cell phones to the catechism and theology, but I think the connection is clear. Let's consider some basic rules that would, as they say in corporate America, align our theory and practice:
Rule 1. Don't drive a car while holding a cell phone to your ear. It simply isn't safe and could cause you to violate the commandment not to kill (and break the law in some states). Contrary to what you may have observed people doing (or attempting to do), it isn't wise to drive a car, talk on the phone, apply makeup (or shave) and drink a cup of coffee — simultaneously.
Rule 2. It you are talking with someone face-to-face, don't suddenly ignore them when your cell phone rings and leave them standing there in mid-conversation. This communicates to the “live” party that they aren't as important as a ringing phone, which means, as your generation would say, you are “dissing” the person.
Rule 3. If you are going to carry a cell phone, don't bother to give anyone the number unless you are going to either answer the phone or promptly reply to your voice mail. Promptly is defined as a couple hours, as opposed to a couple days, weeks, years or centuries.
Rule 4. Listen to your voice mail and erase old messages so your in-basket doesn't fill and refuse to accept new messages.
Rule 5. Turn off your cell phone in such obvious places as church, theaters, funeral homes, hospitals, sit-down restaurants and schools. The consecration during Mass should be accompanied by an alter boy ringing bells, not a cell phone playing theme music from a television sit-com. (There is something about a ringing cell phone that seems to violate the commandment about loving the Lord God.)
Rule 6. When you must make a call in public, step out of the crowd and keep your voice low.
A cell phone is a wonderful tool that can help us stay in touch with people. But we shouldn't be rude — or unchristian — to others in the process. A cell phone is a lousy substitute for a living, breathing, human.
Jim Fair writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Fair ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: From Russia With Love DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Icons are like great gems to be mined by Christians who want to better understand their faith.
So says James Jackson, curator of the James and Tatiana Jackson Collection of Russian Icons. Based in Cedar Falls, Iowa, the 84-piece collection is on display through Jan. 31 at the Knights of Columbus Museum in New Haven, Conn., in an exhibit titled “Holy Icons of Mother Russia: Sacred Art 1650-1917.”
This reverential show glimmers with inspiration — and information. Did you know that iconography developed as a way to make the Gospel accessible to everyone from simple peasants to cultured nobility? Or that the traditional, Byzantine styles of the form familiar to millions were largely inspired by western European art?
The exhibit is all the more compelling for the history of the works themselves: They were secreted out of Russia during its communist era, when they were outlawed.
In fact, this show is, more than anything else, a stirring testimony to the enduring faith of the Russian people. For more than 1,000 years, the icons acted as powerful spiritual beacons, calling the faithful to prayer from churches, homes and even stables. Every important milestone of life was prayed for, or about, before the artworks the Russians called “windows into heaven.”
These portals of praise line the walls of two museum galleries with images of Jesus, Mary, angels and saints. The Blessed Mother holding the Child Jesus seems to have been an especially popular subject. Jackson, an internationally recognized iconography expert, points out some famous icons associated with Russian cities: the Korsun Mother of God, the Feodorskya Mother of God, the Smolensk Mother of God. Each is a copy after the original attributed to St. Luke and is as well-known in the east as Our Lady of Lourdes is in the west.
The Russian faithful instantly recognize these icons because many miracles were attributed to the originals. In the same way western homes have an image of Our Lady of Fatima or the Miraculous Medal, many eastern faithful wanted a copy of the original miracle-working icons in their homes.
Beautiful Corners
Most of these icons are egg tempura on wood panels. Some of the colors are brilliant; others are dulled by age and varnish. Some sparkle with a brilliant riza, a metal ornamentation often used to cover an icon's surface except for face and hands.
While most icons of the Blessed Mother are not full-length figures, one exceptional icon called The Mother of God is. Painted about 1900, it copies the fresco over the altar in the Cathedral of St. Vladimir in Kiev, Ukraine. This image and its companion piece, The Lord Almighty, combine deeply felt spirituality, a strong Russian flavor and decidedly western style. The two have proven so popular in this show that scores of visitors have requested copies.
Christ appears in several other icons in the traditional pose of The Lord Almighty, usually holding a Gospel in one hand and giving a blessing with the other.
These larger icons, as well as icon panels of angels, especially Michael and Gabriel, likely came from churches or chapels. The smaller ones in the exhibit, most the size of books, likely came from homes in which they were placed on shelves or a wall in a special spot called “the beautiful corner.” Around 90% of the Russian peasant population, even in the poorest hovel, had such a corner, says curator Jackson. Even the lowliest peasants had several icons.
This exhibit also outlines how western influence appeared in some icons after about 1650, then took hold when Peter the Great opened Russia's doors to western Europe. Russian painters slowly adapted the art of Italian masters, such as Raphael, to the centuries-old Byzantine iconography — flat, two-dimensional, stylized figures and scenes not meant to be realistic. They were the only accepted style of iconography from 988, when the Kievan-Rus converted to Christianity under Prince Vladimir.
Gradually, icon painters added western realism. In the show's Tikhvin Mother of God, painted about 1660 and likely from a church iconostasis (altar screen), Mary's eyes have tear ducts. Earlier, traditional, stylized icons would never include such an anatomically correct feature.
If you ask Russian peasants which is better, the Byzantine or the western style, “they don't see any difference,” notes Jackson. “They give it the same respect because of who the image represents.” Yet the style changes actually caused a split between old believers and the state church that permitted icons with western influence.
The Real St. Nick
Intricate detailing is a hallmark of some icons. In the 1816 Christ Immanuel, which pictures Jesus as a youth, every single hair on his head was individually painted. Detailing sometimes includes a long written description directly on the icon. On the Feodorskya Mother of God, the history is told of the original, miracle-working icon. Writing on most icons identifies the image, but faithful Russians knew Mary in her various titles.
Highly detailed scenes grace several icons. The Four Births presents four panels depicting the births of Christ, Mary the “Most Holy Birth-giver of God,” John the Forerunner (the Baptist) and “Holy Nicholas the Wonderworker.”
Another, Resurrection with Feasts, borders the central image of Christ's resurrection within 16 small scenes of feasts celebrated during the liturgical year.
Because St. Nicholas of Myra is the favorite saint of Russia, several icons of him grace this exhibit. With Advent upon us, it's a particularly fitting time to get to know the actual saint on whom the fanciful figure we've come to know as Santa Claus is based. In two much-repeated scenes, Christ gives Nicholas the book of Gospels and Mary gives him his bishop's stole. Others picture his saintly acts of faith, hope and charity.
In the show, visitors will also meet saints of the Orthodox Church. St. Korniliy, Holy Princes Boris and Glyeb, and Seraphim of Sarov — these holy souls are unfamiliar to us. It's good to make their acquaintance right here on American soil.
And to remember what they have in common with our saints — and with us. “Each icon has the same unceasing song,” says Jackson. “All day, every day, what they say is: ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Knights' icon exhibit showcases Eastern faith ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: 100% Catholic: Christendom at 25 DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:The Shield of Roses, a group that prays the rosary at an abortion clinic every Saturday morning.
FRONT ROYAL, Va. — Twenty-five years ago, Warren Carroll had one goal in mind when he set out to found a new college: He wanted it to be “100% Catholic.”
With a vocations rate of 15%, three daily Masses, a core curriculum in philosophy and theology and a graduate school that has educated more than a quarter of all religious education directors in the Diocese of Arlington, Va., Christendom may have met his goal.
At the time of Christendom's founding in 1977, the Catholic world was reeling from the Land O'sLakes conference, where Catholic universities formally severed ties with the Church. The word “Christendom” had vanished from the English language, and the social mores of the 1960s dominated the culture.
Then, Christendom had only 26 students. The first classes were held in a small parish in Triangle; now the buildings are sprawled across 100 acres overlooking the Shenandoah River and the population has swelled to more than 350 undergraduates, 180 graduate students and 40 faculty members.
“We had five faculty, one librarian and a part-time cook,” recalled Kristin Burns, one of the original faculty members and today a philosophy professor and acting dean of the graduate school, formed when the Notre Dame Institute merged with Christendom in 1997.
Not everything has changed, she said. Faith and reason are still at the heart of Christendom. “It's really important in Catholic education to train the mind and get students to think well, in a way that coordinates with the faith.”
The school's reputation has also grown — so much that even Rome took note. In a private audience with Pope John Paul II several years ago, the Holy Father leaned over and told Carroll, “You have done a great work for the Church.”
Arlington Bishop Paul Loverde echoed that sentiment in a homily delivered for Christendom's 25th anniversary in September. He called the school “an institute of higher learning that is unabashedly faithful to the Church's magisterium, is committed to reinstating the two millennia of Catholic academic teaching and thought that has been cast aside by many of today's colleges and universities, and is determined to educate and form young men and women to be apostles of the third Christian millennium.”
Christendom has also shown a knack for fostering vocations. More than 70 graduates have entered consecrated life, 11 as priests for the Arlington Diocese. At least 10 more are in seminary, and the president's own daughter, Mary Colleen O'Donnell, joined a cloistered Poor Clare monastery last year.
“In such a pastoral setting, it's a beautiful location, a beautiful spot for prayer, reflection and just to calm down,” President Timothy O'Donnell said of the surroundings. “It leads to deeper reflection upon what God wants you to do.”
He also cited the abundance of spiritual activities as factors. “We have eucharistic adoration, frequent confession, daily Mass — all readily available and strongly encouraged by the faculty,” he said.
But that's not all there is to Christendom. Greg Polley, a 2000 graduate, said, at Christendom, “You build friendships on solid ground, not on parties and fraternities.”
Popular student activities include College Republicans, the Legion of Mary and the Shield of Roses, a group that prays the rosary at an abortion clinic every Saturday morning. As student council president, Polley organized dances on campus and outings to concerts.
Senior Paul Jalsevac experienced the strength of the Christendom community last year when, after a car accident, the doctors listed him as close to death. Within hours the students and faculty had mobilized prayer chains and vigils. In the days that followed, Jalsevac received thousands of cards and e-mails from around the country.
“Through a chain of pretty near miraculous events, I managed to survive,” he said. “That's the power of the Christendom community in prayer.”
Christendom maintains its small-community feel by keeping a 15-to-1 ratio of students to teachers. O'Don-nell came to Christendom as a teacher in 1985. When he was offered the position of president, he accepted only on the condition that he could continue to teach. O'Donnell knows most students by name, conducts exit interviews with all graduating seniors and teaches a freshman history course each fall.
For the future, O'Donnell sees “steady prudential growth.” The student body will likely grow to 450 during the next five years. New dorms and a 39,000-square-foot library will complete the physical campus.
O'Donnell also plans to strengthen the Semester in Rome program, new this school year. Half of Christendom's juniors are spending the fall semester just minutes from St. Peter's, taking core classes in addition to Italian art, architecture and language.
Dana Wind is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Danawind ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: For Advent, a Thoroughly Modern Augustine DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:SERMONS TO THE PEOPLE: ADVENT, CHRISTMAS, NEW YEAR's, EPHIPHANY by Augustine of Hippo Translated by William Griffin Doubleday/Image, 2002 231 pages, $13.95
There's no place like Hippo for the holidays. Especially when it's the turn of the fifth century and you've gotten yourself over to the cathedral early enough to score a good spot for the bishop's Mass. I'm telling you, that guy can flat-out preach.
Fast-forward 16 centuries. Many familiar with St. Augustine know him from his greatest written works, The Confessions and The City of God. Both are bedrocks in the Western literary canon, fussed over by students not only of literature, but also of history, philosophy and theology. But how many of us, his fawning fans included, know what it was like to have your ears tickled by the very voice of Christendom's greatest genius?
William Griffin thinks he has a pretty good idea. And he does a fine and fun job of putting his insights across in these translations of Augustine's Christmas-season sermons.
This is Augustine like you've never read him. Glib, pointed, playful, colloquial, streetwise: He'll say whatever needs to be said to get you to let the facts of Christ's coming open your mind, penetrate your heart and change your life. And, true to form, for all his crafty rhetorical flourishes, he doesn't speak a word or even think a thought that can't be directly traced to Scripture. We already knew that about the bishop of Hippo, but we haven't seen it relayed in quite this way before.
“Let's recognize this day for what it is, my dear Brothers and Sisters,” Griffin's Augustine says of Christmas. “From this point onward in human history, the nights grew shorter, the days longer.” John 1:9, anyone?
Just as Augustine was a dexterous and innovative interpreter of the Word of God, ever intent on making the Bible accessible to the widest possible swath of humanity, so Griffin shows himself a witty and creative interpreter of the words of Augustine. In fact, so breezy is the sermonizing here that many turns of phrase beg the question: At what point does Augustine leave off and Griffin pick up?
The latter drops some helpful clues. The largest single section of Griffin's informative and entertaining foreword is an apologia for his use of the paraphrasal method of translation, rather than the literal, in turning ancient Latin into contemporary English. It's an approach that allows him to present Augustine as he might sound were he alive today.
Naturally, it also permits plenty of leeway for artistic indulgence. “Neither [men nor women] should give the Creator the finger,” Griffin has the saint saying, “for that horrible trick he played on them in the Garden.”
The bishop of Hippo may well have been similarly jarring in person. But would he have used so low-brow an expression — in a homily? I'm not sure, but I'm giving Griffin a pass on that passage and several others in the same vein because, on the whole, Augustine in this brusque, thoroughly modern voice is so arresting and thought-provoking. There are worse ways to get good theology. And I've seen no better way to absorb Augustine for Advent.
“The angel delivered the message,” we read. “Kindly the Virgin listened to it. Against her better judgment she believed it. The conception took place. Faith in her soul. Christ in her womb. And that's all there was to it. … What storyteller — the great Isaiah included — could do justice to a birth like that?” If Augustine wasn't up to the job, neither is William Griffin. But what a joy their combined efforts are to read — make that hear — as Christmastide comes this year.
David Pearson is the Register's features editor.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Books Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Pearson ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Legionary College
THE SACRAMENTO BEE, Nov. 8 — The Legion of Christ plans to build a Catholic university in the Sacramento, Calif., area and is considering a number of locations for a campus, reported the city's daily. The Sacramento region is the largest in the state without a private four-year university. Bishop William Weigand welcomed the congregation's plans.
Won On Appeal
CHRONICLE.COM, Nov. 15 — Six months after denying preliminary accreditation to Virginia's Patrick Henry College, the American Academy for Liberal Education has approved the institution after an appeals process clarified the college's teachings in favor of creationism, reported the Web site of The Chonicle of Higher Education.
No-Nonsense Nun
USA TODAY, Nov. 12 — Sister Alice Hess of Philadelphia's working-class Archbishop Ryan High School is at once a throwback to a different era and a model for modern educators concerned with academic standards, reported the national newspaper in an extensive feature.
Her record of achievement after 40 years of teaching math is awesome: Anywhere from 89% to 96% of her calculus students score 5 out of 5 on the advanced placement exam each year.
Catholic Politician
THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, Nov. 13 — Bernhard Vogel, minister-president of the German state of Thuringia, was recently awarded an honorary doctor of law degree for “his efforts to achieve political goals in accord with the Western moral tradition represented by the Catholic Church,” the Washington, D.C., university announced.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Advent Evangelization DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:We've said it before, and it remains true: If the Catholics of the world had done all of the things Pope John Paul II has asked us to do, the world would be a radically different place.
Starting in this issue, the Register will reprint four guides that are meant to help us fulfill the program the Holy Father has set for the Church at the beginning of the new millennium. What the Pope asks is specific, practical and, if we take him up on it, will have extraordinary consequences that we can't even imagine.
Our guides take up four proposals that John Paul made in last year's Novo Millennio Inuente (At the beginning of the new millennium), one for each week of Advent. The guides can be cut out of the paper, photocopied and given to those we hope to attract to Catholic faith and practice. We will make new, improved versions of them available on our Web site, www.ncregister.com, in a .pdf and other formats.
Week 1, Sunday Mass. The Holy Father uses strong language in calling for the promotion of the Sunday Eucharist, saying he must “insist that sharing in the Eucharist should really be the heart of Sunday for every baptized person. It is a fundamental duty, to be fulfilled not just in order to observe a precept but as something felt as essential to a truly informed and consistent Christian life.”
Week 2, Confession. When John Paul talks about a “crisis” in the Church, he means in the sacrament of confession. In Novo Millennio Ineunte, he wrote, “the crisis of the sacrament was there for all to see.” He asked for bishops to have “courage” enough to reestablish the sacrament of confession in their dioceses. He said it is “necessary that pastors should arm themselves with more confidence, creativity and perseverance in presenting it and leading people to appreciate it.”
Week 3, Prayer. John Paul's next suggestion is to promote prayer, a suggestion that he has amplified by proclaiming October 2002 to October 2003 a Year of the Rosary. Prayer will be the secret weapon of the new evangelization, said the Holy Father. “As this millennium begins, allow the successor of Peter to invite the whole Church to … a renewed commitment to prayer.”
Week 4, Catholic Living. Our fourth guide will give the basics elements of living a Catholic life, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
We hope that, by making these guides widely available, Register readers can fulfill the great hopes of the Holy Father for a new evangelization — which he said can usher in a new springtime of faith.
Father Owen Kearns is publisher & editor in chief of the Register.
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Owen Kearns, LC ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: The National Catholic Register's Clip-Out and Pass-On Guide for the First Sunday of Advent DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Reason 1 It's your way to relive the Last Supper.
Reason 2 When was the last time you prayed too much?
Quick Tip Be early. Would you come late to your wedding? (Women, don't answer!)
Reason 3 If you want to spend an eternity with Christ, you need to get to know him now.
Reason 4 It's the central, necessary activity of Christian worship (Luke 22:14-23; John 6:53ff; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26).
Reason 5 It's your best way to identify yourself with Christ's sacrifice on the cross.
Reason 6 Some of the greatest people in history made it a habit to go to Mass (St. Francis, Mother Teresa, John Paul II …)
Quick Tip Be well dressed. Would you come dressed for jogging if you were invited to the White House?
Reason 7 Wise people invest money for the future. How much more should we invest in eternal life?
Reason 8 It has to be better for you than TV.
Reason 9 If you've been to confession, you get to receive Jesus Christ. If you find a better deal, do that instead.
Quick Tip Forgotten what to do at Mass? You'll remember. It's like riding a bicycle! Follow the Mass closely with a helper: missalette, missal or Magnificat.
Reason 10 If you knew Jesus would be somewhere, wouldn't you go see him?
Reason 11 Guaranteed Bible readings. Countless lives have been changed by Scripture. Might yours?
Reason 12 Statistics say that people who go to church are happier and less stressed out.
Reason 13 It's the best way to pray for your family and friends — and to cope with troubled times.
Reason 14 One out of Ten Commandments asks us to go to Mass every Sunday.
Quick Tip Communion is open to all who are not conscious of committing a serious sin (anything from missing Sunday Mass to infidelity) since their last confession
Reason 15 Life is complicated. Get directions that work — from the One who created life.
Reason 16 It's your way to go most directly through Jesus Christ to God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit in prayer.
Quick Tip Bow your head as a sign of reverence before receiving Communion. (Do it while the person in front of you is receiving Communion.)
Reason 17 Is one hour too much to give to God? How many do you spend on other priorities?
Quick Tip In prayer after Communion, make one resolution about how you'll live your life differently. (Think back on the homily for ideas.)
Reason 18 You'll become a better person at Mass. The more you are part of God's life, the better you'll be.
Quick Tip Feel alone and unsure at Church? Bring a friend!
Content: Martha Fernandez-Sardina (www.adw.org/evangel/office.html); Father Richard Gill (www.legionofchrist.org); Curtis Martin and Edward Sri (www.focusonline.org); Father C. John McCloskey (www.cicdc.org); Father Rob Panke (www.gwu.edu/~catholic). Art: Tim Rauch. Photos: Pope and clock CNS, Mother Teresa KRT.
----- EXCERPT: How (and Why) To Return to Sunday Mass ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Common 'Good Excuses' DATE: 12/1/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:What's in it for me?
Everything! God desires only and always your good. He became a man in large part to give us himself in the Mass. Why should you deny yourself such a gift?
I don't need to go to Mass to get close to God.
At Mass, you receive God himself — Jesus Christ truly present in the sacrament. Even a beautiful mountain vista can't compare to that.
I had a bad experience with the Church.
This is always sad. But many of us also had bad teachers — and we know the whole education system isn't bad. Jesus wants to bring you healing at Mass.
I don't get anything out of Mass.
Don't expect it to be entertainment. Learn about what it does: joins us to Christ, separates us from sin, wipes away venial sins, commits us to the poor, prepares us for heaven.
I don't have the time.
God has been very generous with time: 24 hours a day, 168 hours a week. That's less than 1% of your week.You have the time; find it.
I'm a sinner. I don't deserve to be at Mass.
Welcome to the club! We are a Church of saved sinners. None of us deserves to be here. See you at the confessional …
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Vatican to Bishop: Donít Ordain Homosexuals DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Ordaining homosexuals “is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent and, from a pastoral point of view, very risky,” wrote the Vatican's point man on the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments in an official communication.
Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez, responding to a letter from a bishop, added that “a person who is homosexual or has homosexual tendencies is not, therefore, suitable to receive the sacrament of sacred orders.”
The Congregation (Vatican Department) for Divine Worship and the Sacraments published Cardinal Medina's letter in December in the congregation's bulletin. It was written last May to an unnamed bishop who had inquired about the propriety of ordaining homosexual men. The cardinal retired as congregation head in October.
Cardinal Medina said he drafted the response at the request of the Congregation for Clergy and in cooperation with the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
News of the letter came shortly after The New York Times reported the Vatican dismissed a priest from his parish known in Italy for joining a homosexual pride march in Rome.
The priest, Father Vitaliano Della Sala, 39, was forced to leave his parish in Sant'Angelo a Scala, near Naples, on Nov. 28 for what the Vatican called “scandalous behavior,” reported the Times.
The letter and story show a Church cleaving closely to the doctrine about homosexuality as stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
In addition to stressing respect due to homosexual persons, the catechism teaches: “Basing itself on sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved” (No. 2357).
In the case of Cardinal Medina's letter, the bishop originally had sent his question to the Congregation for the Clergy, which passed it on to the sacraments congregation. After consulting with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Medina expressed “the following judgment” in a three-paragraph letter:
“The ordination to the diaconate or to the priesthood of homosexual persons or those with a homosexual tendency is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent and, from a pastoral point of view, very risky,” Cardinal Medina wrote.
Cardinal Medina wrote that in making its judgment the congregation took into consideration its experience in processing requests for laicization by some priests. It said it was publishing the response because it deemed it opportune to do so at this “particular moment.”
The letter touched on an issue that has received increasing attention at the Vatican. In October, sources told Catholic News Service that the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education was quietly circulating a draft document containing proposed directives against the admission of homosexuals to the priesthood.
The sources said part of the reasoning in the draft document was that since the Church considers the homosexual orientation “objectively disordered” such people should not be admitted to the seminary or ordained.
The Vatican press office later confirmed that a document was in the works but said it also would look at other ordination issues and be addressed primarily to local bishops and seminary rectors.
Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, head of the education congregation, said in November that he would not comment on the reports until — and if — a document is published. He offered no target date.
The question of excluding homosexuals from ordination had been considered at the Vatican for years without finding a consensus. It received new attention in the wake of U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal. Most abusers were homosexuals.
Last year Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, said in a CNS interview, “Persons with a homosexual inclination should not be admitted to the seminary.”
In an article published by the Catholic magazine America in September, an American Vatican official at the Congregation for Bishops, Father Andrew Baker, articulated arguments against acceptance of homosexuals as priesthood candidates.
Father Baker said if a man has a predominant or exclusive same-sex attraction that in itself is grounds for bishops to have “a prudent doubt regarding the candidate's suitability” for receiving the sacrament of orders. Church law says if such a doubt exists the person should not be ordained.
Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls addressed the issue of homosexuality and the priest-hood in March, saying that men with homosexual inclinations “just cannot be ordained.”
“That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality,” he said. “But you cannot be in this field.”
These men's remarks might make it seem like the Vatican is just waking up to the problem, but Rome has been speaking out for some time. The question is whether dioceses and seminaries in the United States have been implementing its directives.
A 1961 instruction to the superiors of religious communities on “Careful Selection and Training of Candidates for the States of Perfection and Sacred Orders” states:
“Advancement to religious vows and ordination should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and the priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers.”
Even further back, Pope Pius XI, in a 1935 encyclical on the priesthood, said that those in charge of the clergy must not only foster and strengthen vocations but also “discourage unsuitable candidates, and in good time send them away from a path not meant for them.”
“Such are all youths who show a lack of necessary fitness, and who are, therefore, unlikely to persevere in the priestly ministry both worthily and becomingly,” Pope Pius wrote in Ad Catholici Sacerdotii. “In these matters hesitation and delay is a serious mistake and may do serious harm. It is far better to dismiss an unfit student in the early stages” to prevent him from being a “stumbling block to himself and to others with peril of eternal ruin.”
Closer to home Bishop John Nienstedt of New Ulm, Minn., who is the newly elected chairman of the U.S. bishops' priestly formation committee, told the Register that he personally would have “serious reservations” in accepting a seminary candidate who is homosexual.
“I would say in the main that a person with a homosexual orientation would not be a good candidate for seminary life,” he said. “The temptations are too great: You're living in an all-male environment, your closest friends are men. You're putting a person in harm's way.”
Finally, in September, Pope John Paul II himself concurred in the opinion.
“It would be lamentable if, out of a misunderstood tolerance, they ordained young men who are immature or have obvious signs of affective deviations that, as is sadly known, could cause serious anomalies in the consciences of the faithful,” he said, “with evident damage for the whole Church.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Register Staff ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Time Cover Shows Shift Toward Life DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK—The image on the cover of the Nov. 11 issue of Time is arresting if only because the media so infrequently display photographs of unborn children.
But there the child is—hands near his face, feet up, floating inside his mother's womb.
Pro-life organizations wonder if the Time story, as well as other recent developments, represents a turning of the tide on the issue of abortion in America, 30 years after it became legal.
Catholics, celebrating the Virgin Mary's conception on Dec. 9, hope so.
The computer-enhanced fetal photographs accompanying Time's “Life in the Womb” article leave little doubt about the humanity of the unborn child. Such detail has not been seen since Lennart Nilsson's fetal portraits appeared in Life magazine in 1965. The new images are from the book From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds (Doubleday), by Alexander Tsiaras and Barry Werth.
Commenting on the article, Cathleen Cleaver, spokeswoman for the pro-life secretariat of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “Science has always been on the side of life. The more we learn the more we will come to love human development.”
Ron Galloy, director of the pro-life organization Life: God's Sacred Gift, commended Time for presenting a photograph of an unborn baby on the cover and for its honesty in the cover caption, “An amazing look at how we all began.”
Galloy took exception, however, with the dehumanizing language used in one of the articles. He noted such examples as Time's use of the term “child-to-be,” the statement that “it takes nine months to make a baby” and the frequent comparison of a fetus to animals such as a pig, elephant, chick and a ladybug.
“Such language dehumanizes the unborn child, who is a baby,” Galloy said. “If a child were born at seven months or five months, he or she would be called a baby. It is no less a baby in the womb at nine months.”
Pro-Life Future?
Overall, the number of surgical abortions in the United States has declined during the past several years. The Alan Guttmacher Institute has noted a decrease from 1.56 million abortions in 1987 to 1.31 million abortions in 2000. Additionally, the abortion rate among 15- to 17-year-olds saw the biggest decline, falling to 15 abortions per 1,000 teens in 2000 from 24 per 1,000 teens in 1994.
“There are many positive trends taking place,” Cleaver said. “The mistake that the pro-life movement sometimes makes is to focus on the courts. The election, for example, was virtually a referendum on the pro-life issue. In addition, for the last 10 years polling numbers have been shifting. All of these things point out that hearts are changing and the culture is beginning to turn away from the culture of death.”
Some, such as Laura Echevarria, spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee, credit laws requiring parental consent or notification about abortions for playing a role in lowering both teen pregnancy rates and abortion rates.
“There has been a concerted effort over the last few years by pro-life groups, health departments and others to encourage teens to really think about the consequences of engaging in early sexual activity,” Echevarria told Zenit, a Rome-based news agency.
Those are not the only numbers showing promise. In recent years public opinion has also shifted in favor of life. In fact, more than 65% of respondents to Time magazine's online poll asking, “When you do you think life begins?” appeared to agree with the Church, responding that life begins at conception.
Children of Roe
Other polls have confirmed this trend. According to a recent Buffalo News poll conducted by Zogby International, more than one-fifth of Americans say they are less in favor of abortion today than they were a decade ago, a number that's nearly twice the number who say they've become more pro-choice. Likewise, a July 2000 CBS/New York Times poll noted that 62% of Americans support either stricter limits on abortion or believe it should not be permitted at all.
Most surprising about the polling data is that those who have grown up with legalized abortion are more opposed than the previous generation. Recent Gallup polls quoted in “A Matter of the Heart,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Nov. 12 statement on the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, demonstrate that major restrictions on abortion are supported by 55% of adults under 30 years old—a higher figure than any age group except those age 65 and older.
“Why so much youthful energy in the cause of life?” the bishops ask. “Because the hearts of the young are open to life and are filled with love of life. The minds of the young are open to the truth about abortion,” wrote the bishops in their statement.
“Young people know that the future is in their hands, and their hearts yearn to bring a message of hope and healing to a culture in great need of hearing it,” the statement continued.
The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League was not aware of any recent surveys that countered such polling data and declined to comment for this article.
In addition to the support for life among youth, some wonder whether technology, such as General Electric's new 4-D ultrasound technology, might be responsible for the change in attitude.
“Technology has allowed people to see life in the womb,” Echevarria said. “Everyone has seen a sono-gram now. In 1973, they were almost unheard of.”
“Ultrasound has been with us since the 1960s,” Cleaver added. “We've come from black-and-white fuzzy images where you couldn't make out the picture to being able to see three- and four-dimensional color images of moving babies. There is even technology which allows a parent to touch an unborn child with a special glove.”
Ever Vigilant
All the same, Ron Galloy isn't yet content to give up his work with Life: God's Sacred Gift. He isn't even ready to ease up on Time magazine.
Twice a week for the past two years Galloy has stood outside the entrance to a dozen New York media organizations, including ABC, CBS, Time and AOL/Time Warner, with a pro-life message. All of his posters bear an image of an unborn child, not unlike the one that appeared on the cover of Time. They bear positive messages such as, “The right on which all others depend” and “Who we were. Protect life.”
Galloy thinks news coverage like that in Time might be a crack in the shell, but he isn't certain whether hearts are beginning to change.
“I can only hope that hearts are changing … that they are being touched. Scores of media representatives—Barbara Walters, Connie Chung, Charles Gibson and Dan Rather—have seen my pro-life message. How could their hearts not be touched?”
Tim Drake is executive
editor of Catholic.net.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic Toy Maker Preaches Through Puzzles DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:ELKTON, Fla.—David Fisk gesticulates excitedly as he sits in a straight-back chair and talks about the wooden toys he makes.
“Jesus said unless we are like little children, we're not going to see God,” he says, supporting his 4-year-old daughter, Rita, on his right knee.
In the corner of the old, country house, his 2-year-old son, Jonathan, plays on the hardwood floor.
“What I'm doing I wouldn't claim to be art,” Fisk says, as if he had been challenged on this point. “They're toys. They're not art.”
Fisk, a Catholic convert who grew up gardening and making squirrel traps, went to Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, some 10 years ago and majored in theology. But it wasn't until after graduation that he found what he wanted to do with his life: handcraft wooden toys that teach the faith.
“It just dawned on me. Toys! Of course—for children,” says the 39-year-old Fisk, whose youthful face belies the fact that he once had a beard like a Franciscan Friar. “And then I thought, I've got a theology degree. Let's put it to work.”
In 1997, with the prayers of St. John Bosco, a 19th-century Italian priest who rescued boys from the slums and taught them trades, Bosco Toys Inc. was born.
The business started in the basement of a rickety house Fisk had bought years earlier in Steubenville for $4,750 and renovated himself. He loved having the woods behind his house there, he says, and now being in Elkton and rearing five goats, he talks convincingly about the creamy sweetness of goat's milk.
It wasn't until this past summer that Fisk began working full time to build his toy business, having worked part time in the construction industry for years.
Part of the Bosco Toys operation is set up in a small room adjoining the living area of the house. The other half is behind Fisk's home, in an old milk barn, where amid the sawdust a couple of Swiss Style yogurt cups filled to the brim with tool parts sit on a shelf. It's here that Fisk, president and sole employee of the company, lives out his dream of teaching truth through toys.
“I don't know if it's a passion or an insanity,” says Fisk inside the milk barn.
Fisk began making Noah's arks, with the accompanying biblical figures and animals, using untreated Baltic birch plywood and child-safe elastic hinges. Now, Fisk has an Internet site, www.boscotoys.com, that showcases the Noah's ark set as well as two puzzle sets, each consisting of six puzzles that illustrate events in Scripture.
“We wanted something unique,” says his wife, Chris, also sitting in a straight-back chair and holding 2-month-old Monica against her chest. “Not something people always see in pictures and books.”
The Passion/Resurrection series depicts events centering on Easter, and the Incarnation series contains a puzzle of the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary and a puzzle showing Mary and Joseph journeying to Bethlehem. Imprinted on each puzzle is a Scripture passage explaining the illustration, done by a graphic artist outside the business and transferred to the wood by Fisk.
Hard Times
Although a passion of his, the business has been “an enormous cross to bear all along,” Fisk says. Computers have crashed, erasing design specifications, and a motor on one of the machines one day burst into flames.
With credit card debt and college student loan interest to pay off, the family makes use of food stamps and lives in a house owned by Chris' uncle. To help pay for the utility bills and general upkeep of the house, Chris works three days a week at the rectory of St. Ambrose Catholic Church, located just down the road.
The Fisks have gotten some financial help from Mark Ryland, an old friend and now president of AMDG Systems Inc., a computer software consulting company based in Great Falls, Va.
“We had enough faith in him and enough friendship that we decided to give a small investment,” says Ryland, who lives in Seattle with his family of eight children. “We are excited to see that he has a passion for this.”
It was Ryland who Fisk says encouraged him to follow his passion to build toys. Fisk met Ryland and his family in Steubenville while working in construction shortly after graduating. He says seeing the Rylands home school their children inspired him to want to do the same for his children one day. It also helped confirm his desire to make toys, a career that would allow him to spend a lot of time at home with his family.
Ryland, a member of the board of directors at Virginia's Christendom College, later became the godfather of Fisk's 4-year-old daughter, who seems to stick close by her dad's side.
“He struck me right away, even before he married, as someone who would make a good father,” Ryland says of Fisk. “When he expressed interest in the toy business, I thought that it was a great fit, from what I knew of him.”
Building Blocks
Now that he's concentrating on the business full-time, Fisk says he has begun selling his toys by mail order through the Internet site and, primarily, at church craft fairs in the area. He has also advertised his business nationally in several Catholic publications and sold some puzzles to small local retail shops and people at his church.
Recently, Fisk sold 14 sets of puzzles to a St. Augustine, Fla., couple, Fred and Peggy Miller, Catholic missionaries with the Arkansas-based Go Ye Ministries. They plan to go to Peru and Honduras this winter and give the puzzles to children.
“It helps our group out because it's something we can give kids in another country,” says Fred Miller, who met Fisk at church. “If we have a choice of whether to buy toys from a secular or Christian company, we'd rather buy from a Christian company.”
Comparing a wooden puzzle to a plastic, mass-produced product on today's market, Miller says one reason he likes the puzzles is that they're durable and can be passed on from generation to generation.
This is the first year Fisk has marketed his toys and puzzles at craft fairs during the pre-Christmas season, so it's hard to say if business has picked up because of the approaching holidays. But at one fair in early November, Fisk says he did better than usual, selling 39 puzzles and seven arks.
The process of crafting the toys is innovative and complex. Fisk uses machines such as a vacuum jig, shrink wrap and shop bot, along with a $10 computer monitor he bought at a church yard sale, to help automate the process.
It's taken him years to research and learn what he knows about making wooden toys and puzzles that are long-lasting and safe for children. It's perhaps taken so much time that he often refers to accomplishments in the plural, as if to say his wife and children, too, have shared in all the ups and downs of the business.
“It's taken us a long time to get where we're at,” Fisk says. “I've done a lot of learning in the past few years. I've learned by the school of hard knocks.”
Fisk says he plans to make wooden board games someday and maybe little wooden shrines of favorite saints. He says he wants to eventually move from selling his toys at craft fairs to marketing them at professional trade shows, where retailers scout out new products to sell at their stores.
But for now, Fisk doesn't have the equipment or labor to mass-produce the toys, nor does he have the money—what he makes from the toys is still used to pay off his debts.
“I would like to get to the point where I could market these wholesale,” Fisk says. “We want to teach children Bible stories and we want to teach them the faith. To reach that goal, I need to be able to produce as much as I can.”
Bart Price writes
from St. Augustine, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bart Price ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Who's Pro-Life? DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:ABITA SPRINGS, La.—Although retired at age 70, Ed Jeanfreau is working harder than ever before. He was working to educate Catholics about the very different positions held by Louisiana's pro-abortion incumbent, Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu, and her pro-life Republican challenger, Suzie Terrell.
The two Catholic women were set to face off on Dec. 7 for the 100th seat in the U.S. Senate.
“This is one of the most important elections in our lifetime,” said Jeanfreau, who directs pro-life activities for the Louisiana Knights of Columbus. “And we are doing everything we can to get the Catholic vote out.”
Jeanfreau directed his son to create an online pro-life resource called cpforlife.org, distributed more than 12,000 pro-life lawn signs and delivered hundreds of speeches to local Knights of Columbus councils around every swamp in Louisiana.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Landrieu's support for the abortion agenda got the attention of influential Catholics.
Danny Loar, executive director of the Louisiana Catholic Conference, maintained that with control of the Senate in Republican hands, the only real issue in the race would be abortion.
“I think it's a critical election. Unfortunately, a lot of Catholics in southern Louisiana think Landrieu is pro-life,” Loar said. “That is certainly not the case. Her voting record is certainly pro-abortion.”
Loar said that in talking with people across the state, he discovered that thousands of Catholics maintained that Landrieu is pro-life, despite her long record in support of abortion.
He said he understands why so many pro-life Catholics are confused.
“We sent a questionnaire to the candidates on a variety of issues. And they both responded. Landrieu answered all the questions as if she is pro-life,” he said.
The bishops' conference left each of Louisiana's seven dioceses to decide whether they want to publicize the questionnaires, and several opted against doing so.
With pro-life support divided, Loar expected a nail-biter on election night, similar to the race in 1996, which Landrieu won with less than half of 1% of the vote.
Clueless Voters?
Jeanfreau said educating Catholics about each candidate's position on abortion is an uphill battle. Many Catholics remain more loyal to political parties than their own personal—often conservative—beliefs.
“Unfortunately, Catholics are Democrats by nature. They're union people and it's tough to get beyond that,” he said. “They just look for the letter by the name. They just vote for the D. We need to get beyond that mentality.”
That mentality is why so many pro-life Catholics are supporting pro-abortion candidate Landrieu, he said.
“She tries to say she's pro-family. She talks about her ban on cloning,” Jeanfreau said. “And she voted for the ban on partial-birth abortion, but only after she tried everything she could—with Tom Daschle—to water it down.”
Jeanfreau said Landrieu's support for abortion is proved by years of voting in the U.S. Senate, a record that earned her a 90% rating from Planned Parenthood, the organization that commits the most abortions worldwide.
Landrieu has unsuccessfully attempted to mandate taxpayer support for abortions and to allow abortions at U.S. military hospitals. She also voted in 1999 to affirm Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973.
Abortion Voters Unsure
Abortion activists appeared to be lukewarm about re-electing Landrieu. The pro-abortion group Emily's List removed its support for Landrieu after she voted for the ban on partial-birth abortion. Emily's List gives money exclusively to pro-abortion women running for office. It supported Landrieu in 1996.
Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League both refused to endorse Landrieu despite giving her 90% and 80% voting records, respectively.
The National Organization for Women offered its support but not its endorsement. An endorsement is reserved for candidates NOW describes as “not perfect on NOW issues but who are identified as women's rights supporters.”
Only the Women's Campaign Fund, a pro-abortion group, mustered a financial donation to Landrieu. It gave her $2,000.
Part of the reason for the tacit support by abortion groups has been Landrieu's tendency to use pro-life rhetoric to appeal to Catholic Democrats.
In a Nov. 24 debate, Landrieu emphasized her support for pro-family positions.
“I voted against late-term abortion,” she said. “I have promoted adoption. I respect life.”
John Maginnis, publisher of the Louisiana Political Fax Weekly in Baton Rouge, said the choices on abortion would be clear by Dec. 7.
“Anyone who is serious about the abortion issue hasn't much choice,” he said. “Pro-lifers from Tony Perkins to National Right to Life Committee have closed ranks behind Terrell. Perkins, who attacked Terrell's pro-life credentials, said after the primary that regardless of where she stood in the past, they know where she stands now.”
Maginnis referred to a 1994 Planned Parenthood event that listed Terrell as a co-sponsor. She said she wasn't aware of the fund-raiser and didn't support it.
“I've never been pro-choice,” Terrell said.
A new Catholic organization wants to make sure Louisiana Catholics will know about Landrieu's support for legal abortion and Terrell's defense of the unborn.
“For too long the pro-abortion forces of Emily's List, Planned Parenthood and NARAL have out-organized, out-fundraised and out-maneuvered the believers of the largest religious denomination in the United States,” said Joe Cella, executive director of Ave Maria List, which considers itself the exact opposite of Emily's List. It lends financial support to political candidates who affirm the right-to-life ethic.
“We are convicted that it is our moral obligation to Catholics to have an organized, unambiguous, effective, substantive and vocal presence to counter their efforts to promote a culture of death in our country,” he said.
The group focused on this year's Senate races in Minnesota, Missouri and South Dakota. In each case, it determined that the Democratic incumbent's views were out of step with the cultural conservative views of their constituents.
The same holds true in Louisiana, where Landrieu doesn't properly reflect the values of Louisiana voters, Cella said. And that's why the group is unleashing resources to educate Catholics in Louisiana about the differences between Landrieu and Terrell.
Jeanfreau applauds the efforts to educate Catholics about the candidate's positions on abortion.
“We're letting our members and their friends and their families know the importance of this election,” he said. “Louisiana is the most pro-life state in the country. And this is our last, best chance to get a better senator. The longer a senator stays in, the harder it is to get him out. How can we continue to elect a pro-abortion senator?”
Peg Kenny, spokeswoman for Louisiana Right to Life, was calling pro-life activists across the state while she prepared her family's Thanksgiving dinner. She had been up since 4 a.m. and was trying not to ruin the dinner.
“This is a real opportunity to put a pro-life woman in the U.S. Senate,” she said.
Her organization has been making phone calls and sending out literature in the mail to educate voters about Landrieu's pro-abortion record.
“When they see this information they'll say, ‘I thought Mary was pro-life,’” Kenny said. “It's an uphill battle, but it becomes very important that this literature gets out.”
Joshua Mercer filed this story
from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
----- EXCERPT: Louisiana Race Showcases Confusion ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bethlehem's Shattered Silence DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Brother Vincent Malham was studying Spanish and taking a sabbatical in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1995 when he received a call from Rome.
The superior general of the Christian Brothers asked Brother Malham to be seated before proposing he consider an unexpected assignment—moving to the Holy Land to take leadership of Bethlehem University, the Vatican-affiliated institution that has recently found itself caught in the cross fire of the Middle East conflict.
During a May visit to the United States, and more recently through e-mail correspondence, Brother Malham discussed with Register correspondent Tom Tracy the situation in the Middle East, the November reoccupation of Bethlehem by Israeli military, how he administers Bethlehem University and his musical interests.
How is this reoccupation affecting the university, students and academic life?
Bethlehem has been under strict curfew since Nov. 22. The university is closed since no one is permitted out on the streets. We are quite concerned how long this latest occupation will last and how serious the negative impact will be on the functioning of the university, which—until this closing—had been moving in a positive direction. If the occupation continues, as is presently feared, it will have debilitating negative results on academics, finances and on an already demoralized student body and staff still trying to recover from previous invasions, occupations and curfews.
How are the looming war with Iraq and the United States' war on terror affecting your work and the students?
There is strong negative feeling among staff and students about an impending war in Iraq. We believe a war on Iraq will exacerbate an already explosive situation in the region and make much more difficult any positive movement toward peace. I was in Washington, D.C., in October to deliver a letter signed by eight De La Salle Christian Brothers and a Jesuit priest [nine U.S. citizens working at Bethlehem University], which I delivered on Capitol Hill.
We first had a private audience with Sen. Carl Levin [D-Mich.], foreign policy aide Jeremy Hekhuis and then a public briefing on the House side. I discussed how the last two years in particular have been increasingly difficult for students at Bethlehem University due to the incursions and curfews that have been placed on residents of the area by the Israeli military.
How do you look back on your decision to go to Bethlehem?
I accepted the invitation because I believed it was an important ministry for both the Church and our institute, the De La Salle Christian Brothers, and for other reasons.
Although my parents emigrated from Syria-Lebanon, I had not studied Arabic and knew the language would be a challenge. I speak it just a little now, but I tell people my heart and soul are Arabic.
As I often told Brother John Johnston, the superior general who asked me to go there, the experience has literally changed my life—and for the better. It has been the most difficult, challenging and frustrating time of my life on the one hand, but on the other, most satisfying. Our young people need an education and deserve a chance to know a better life for themselves other than the tragic situation they have grown up in.
Tell us about the siege of Bethlehem University earlier this year.
At 2:30 a.m. on April 2, I was in my bedroom sleeping when I got a call to come over to the university because the Israeli army took over our campus. I talked to the commander and said, “We expect you not to trash this place.” I also mentioned that there were eight U.S. citizens living on campus, all De La Salle Christian Brothers.
Another brother and I walked the soldiers around while they searched every room for arms or people with arms. One of our brothers went out to look into a commotion and was shot at. He was extremely lucky not to have been injured or killed. We still have vestiges of the shots inside the entrance to the brothers' residence.
The soldiers stayed on the campus for four days. Our brothers were under house arrest all this time. The soldiers left us on the fifth morning and, in general, had treated us with civility.
What was the result of the university siege?
They were looking for either arms or people with arms and found neither. They came back a second time a couple weeks later and did another search but didn't stay long and didn't find anything.
Our staff was offered to evacuate at that time through the U.S. Consulate and the British Consulate. It was important to us to remain in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Our physical presence and the symbolism of our staying meant a great deal to our university staff and students as well as to the people in Bethlehem.
Has your student population dwindled in light of the intifada? How are the students handling it?
A few have had to drop out. It is hard for them. Some take three or four buses to get to the university each day. Getting through checkpoints is hard for them, and sometimes they can't get past them.
One of the characteristics of the Palestinians is their tenacity. They know they have to get an education to compete, so they are willing to do whatever it takes. The students were bored to death for these 40 days of closure. The first day they came back, they were running up, hugging and kissing everyone, so glad to see each other. They missed each other after being cooped up in their houses for so long.
How is the faculty doing?
We are losing a few teachers. Right after the occupation of 40 days, two came in to say they were leaving and that they believed more would also be emigrating because they just could not see light at the end of the tunnel.
Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah is very concerned about losing more Christian families. After we reopened I talked to one of our teachers who seemed down. I will never forget her response: She said, “You know, Brother, more and more we are being asked to hope for less and less.”
You must get a lot of visitors from around the world.
We used to, but because of the situation it has curtailed quite a bit. We used to say we don't get out into the world much but the world comes to us. We get counselors, embassy officials, bishops; we've had Knights and Ladies (of the Holy Sepulchre Order) from around the world, American and European groups. For a school so small, we do operate on an international level in many ways.
How is the intifada affecting your financial situation?
We will tighten our belts this next year and show we are willing to make some real sacrifices to help our cause. Bethlehem University is the only university in Palestine that has never missed a monthly payroll, even when we were shut down for three full years during the intifada from 1987-1990. This year, we were shut down for 60 days, the latest being the Bethlehem siege of 40 days, and we still paid salaries.
We lost several hundred thousand dollars from damage to buildings, closures and loss of revenues, and are having to go through extraordinary means to make it through this year. It has been a real struggle financially for us.
For next year, I am suggesting a freeze on salaries with no bonuses, no promotions, no sabbaticals. We haven't made any decisions. Tuition for one student per year is $1,000, but the real cost of educating the student is $3,000. Trying to make up the difference is very, very difficult.
What about the possibility of a Palestinian state?
With recent events, I think maybe that movement has been slowed down. There is a feeling among some Palestinians that there needs to be governmental reform, even among staunch Arafat supporters, and that the Palestinian Authority needs substantial change. It will be helpful for the country, as it tries to grapple with so many problems, to try to introduce some changes in the government. I think this could help us in terms of elections, which are always a big thing on campuses over here.
We are the only Palestinian university where Fatah is the major party and not Hamas. If the country runs a bit more democratically, we hope to help lead our students through elections and other means to more democratic modes of acting. The Mideastern mentality is so different from that of the West.
What about the fate of Arafat?
I really believe Arafat has served his time and should graciously make way for new leadership to help move the country forward. Our students are somewhat frustrated since they haven't been allowed to have elections for two years.
And the status of Jerusalem?
Three years ago the Vatican restated its position at a conference there and stressed the unique, international character of the city. The problem is that for the Israelis, Jerusalem is their city; they always say “eternal and undivided” and aren't open to having the two capitals there. It's a big stumbling block and extremely difficult to be adequately addressed.
Most of the world would like to see it as an international city shared by the three religions. I don't think the Israelis are willing to compromise. Nothing can change until the two sides get back to the negotiating table. Along with the issue of right of return for refugees, the status of Jerusalem, I believe, will be the most difficult to resolve in final status negotiations.
Do you have trouble moving about the region and traveling to and from Israel?
Sometimes at the airport I am given a hard time due to my Arab roots and the fact that I live and work in Bethlehem and my passport shows I have been to the Gulf many times.
Before a recent trip to Florida, security wanted to see the text of my speech. I wouldn't show it to them, since they had no right to see it. I tried to be polite but held my ground on principle. On a previous trip to Germany in the same circumstances, I simply said, “This has nothing to do with your security or mine. This time you have gone too far.” I was punished by being pulled aside and made to wait for about an hour and a half.
Where do you draw your strength from and what do you do to keep your sanity?
I draw my strength from spirituality, and on a personal level I have the piano as a wonderful outlet for me. I try to begin my prayer and social life with the brothers when I leave the school. We have a good community life in the house and are really blessed to have a veteran, experienced group of brothers—men who don't fluster easily, who are able to withstand the difficult circumstances over here and to respond calmly, patiently and in a spirit of faith.
But I must admit that I have gotten on my knees more than ever before in my life because there is so much I don't understand, so many unexpected events to respond to, so much out of my control.
Tom Tracy writes from
West Palm Beach, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother Vincent Malham ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Deacons Still Looking for Role in Church After Second Vatican DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:VANCOUVER, Wash.—Deacon Carl Anderson, whose bearded and patriarchal face adorns the Archdiocese of Seattle's new diaconate handbook, is the epitome of a permanent deacon.
The 74-year-old retired aluminum smelt worker was ordained in the second-to-last graduating class of deacons for the archdiocese in 1982. His service since at St. Mary of Guadalupe parish in rural Washington has been—as with many deacons around the country—a monument to endurance and adaptability.
Ordained to the service of charity, “I thought I'd be visiting nursing homes, or doing some other type of volunteer work,” he said. “I didn't expect having this much to do with liturgical needs or operation of the church itself. I'm doing baptisms, burial services and weddings.”
Usually unpaid, with a mission that is frequently misunderstood by laity and clergy alike, the permanent diaconate is staggering into its fourth decade in America. What the next decade will bring is unclear.
‘A Driving Force’
Restored by the Second Vatican Council, the permanent diaconate was commissioned by Pope Paul VI in the 1972 motu proprio Ad Pascendum to both lead and promote lay participation, “to be a driving force for service … which is an essential part of the mission of the Church,” he wrote.
However, Pope Paul VI's vision of deacons serving primarily in remote areas of underdeveloped nations fell by the wayside as developed nations began ordaining far more deacons than the underdeveloped. Also, the revived diaconate's ordination to serve bishops and priests made parishes, rather than social service agencies and missions, the natural focus of their ministry.
This caused ambivalence at the diocesan level and boiled over into opposition when the deacons overlapped the duties of the concurrently growing lay ministry. Yet the permanent diaconate was instantly popular among potential candidates, especially those already serving as volunteers in parishes and charitable agencies.
According to a research report by the Bishops' Committee on the Diaconate and the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, there were 529 candidates for the diaconate by 1971. By 1980, the number had soared to 4,744 deacons and 8,514 candidates.
By 1999 there were 12,862 ordained permanent deacons and 2,582 candidates in the United States, more than all other nations combined. Yet despite the growth, most dioceses are cautious and several have been, at least periodically, hostile to the permanent diaconate.
“More often than not, it depends on the needs of the diocese,” said Deacon Anthony Cassaneto, president of the National Association of Diaconate Directors and director of deacon formation, ministry and life for the Archdiocese of New York. “Many have developed strong lay leadership programs, so they favor those over the diaconate.”
“However,” he added, “150 dioceses now have formation programs, and more will come as the need for the ministry of the deacon becomes more and more evident.”
The most enthusiastic diocese has been the Archdiocese of Chicago, with 604 deacons in active ministry and 40 of them in full-time paid positions.
“We've had great success,” said Father Ed Salmon, vicar for the archdiocese's diaconate community, who said it uses permanent deacons in parishes, hospitals, prisons and airports.
“I know many dioceses have ambivalence, but I don't know why,” he said. “They've been a great benefit to this archdiocese. We couldn't do what we do without them.”
Among those that remain indifferent to deacons is the Diocese of Sioux Falls, S.D., with 28 active and retired deacons. With only a few candidates ordained periodically since 1977, the diocese has discontinued deacon ordinations pending a review.
“We had a small program, when we had one,” said Chancellor Jerry Klein.
Now, the diocese has the vocations director and a theologian redesigning it. “I'm not sure how active we are in this process,” he said.
First ambivalent, then indifferent and now cautiously supportive of the permanent diaconate, the Archdiocese of Seattle is preparing to ordain its first 28 deacons since 1986.
“We've learned from the programs in place across the country for the last 35 years,” said Father Stephen Rowan, vicar for education.
Sponsored by Archbishop Alexander Brunett, the new deacon ordination program is designed as a formation process to prepare the candidates for a central role in the parishes.
“One of the constants for us is the need for deacons who will be prepared to understand the Church's traditions and beliefs,” Father Rowan said, “so that when they get through formation, they've pulled a lot together.”
Shortage Solution?
For the Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., the Archdiocese of Chicago and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, there is an assumption that deacons will move into greater pastoral roles in parishes as the number of priests continues to fall behind population growth.
In the latest bishops' conference report, 3,400 men were reported to be studying for the diocesan priest-hood, a significant increase from previous years but still as little as half of what is needed to replace the 31,162 diocesan priests now serving in 19,000 parishes across the nation. With a national average of one priest for 1,200 people—up to 50% higher in the West and Midwest—deacons are being prepared to take on more parish responsibility.
However, the Archdiocese of Seattle isn't prepared to accept deacons in positions of primary responsibility.
“We're training deacons to be prepared for integrated ministry,”
Father Rowan said, “[but] they were never intended to be a solution for the priest shortage.”
However, Father Salmon in Chicago is more pragmatic.
“We've discussed the possibility [of deacons as parish administrators],” he said. “We have enough priests, for now, but we might have to do that in the future. That is the reason for our move to heighten [deacon candidate] qualifications.”
Meanwhile, Pope John Paul II has become an enthusiastic advocate for permanent deacons in America, cautioning that their role should never be confused with that of a priest, but otherwise encouraging them to foster “common service to the Kingdom of God.”
Speaking in Detroit in 1987, the Holy Father said, “If we keep in mind the deep spiritual nature of this diakonia, then we can better appreciate the interrelation of the three areas of ministry traditionally associated with the diaconate; that is, the ministry of the word, the ministry of the altar and the ministry of charity.”
Philip S. Moore writes
from Portland, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Philip S. Moore ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Planned Parenthood Weds Library System
CYBERCAST NEWS SERVICE, Nov. 20—Waco,Texas, is in the news again.
The city of Waco has made a deal with Planned Parenthood of Central Texas to incorporate that group's agenda into the local public library system, according to Cybercast News Service.
The pro-abortion group is dedicating a room with its collection of “women's health care materials” to the library with the proviso that it can deny access “to anyone who has participated in protests” against the organization.
That Planned Parenthood site will now be an official “branch of the Waco-McLennan County Public Library System,” according to the organization.
According to a spokesperson for the city of Waco, which received approximately $10,000 from the organization, the new library is not an official library branch because it neither employs civil servants nor receives taxpayer funds to support its operation.
D.C. Paper Criticizes New Democratic Leader
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Nov. 18—In an editorial, the Washington Times wrote of new Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: “Few members of the House over the years have been as zealous in their pursuit of unlimited abortion rights as Mrs. Pelosi, a Roman Catholic who has steadfastly supported partial-birth abortion. While Mrs. Pelosi has shown no concern for the life of the innocent unborn, she has repeatedly voted to protect the lives of convicted murderers sentenced to death.”
“In 1998, Mrs. Pelosi opposed a constitutional amendment to allow school prayer in the classroom. In 1999, she opposed permitting state and local governments to display the Ten Commandments on public property, including schools. However, in 1991, in the wake of an artist using taxpayer funds to submerge a crucifix in urine, Mrs. Pelosi voted against barring the National Endowment for the Arts from funding projects that offensively depicted excretory matter. … She has voted against experimental voucher programs.
“Across the issue spectrum, Mrs. Pelosi has proudly become one of the most liberal members of the left-of-center caucus that she has just been elected to lead.”
Powell Condemns Christian Critiques of Muslims
THE GUARDIAN (U.K.), Nov. 15—Secretary of State Colin Powell criticized members of the “Christian Right” last week for their ongoing criticism of Muslims and Islamic attacks on Christians around the world, according to The Guardian.
The liberal British paper said this appeared to be part of “a coordinated White House campaign to confront anti-Islamic rhetoric” from conservative Christians.
Days before, Pat Robertson had said on the Christian Broadcasting Network that “what the Muslims want to do to the Jews is worse” than the Holocaust.
“This kind of hatred must be rejected,” Powell said of the statement.
Previously, Jerry Falwell had to apologize after calling the prophet Mohammed “a terrorist,” and longtime evangelist Jimmy Swaggart referred to Mohammed as a “sex deviant.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: With Newly Canonized St. Juan Diego, Mexicans Have Double Celebration DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES—The official feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe is Dec. 12, but Catholics such as Rosa Garcia started their celebrations early.
Two weeks before the feast day, she and about 300 others—some in traditional Aztec costume—attended a weeknight Mass at St. Philomena Church southwest of Los Angeles to honor “La Virgen de Guadalupe” and to venerate a replica of her image that is traveling to parishes throughout the archdiocese.
The image of our Lady of Guadalupe—which was responsible for the massive numbers of conversions in Latin America in the 16th century—continues to be the most identifiable and loved Catholic image in the western hemisphere.
Thousands are expected at various events not only in Mexico but also throughout the United States. The reasons for the expected turnout include the publicity surrounding the canonization in July of St. Juan Diego, the humble native who received the visions and the miraculous and scientifically inexplicable image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531, and the increasing number of Hispanics in the United States.
As a result of this renewed interest and the long-standing devotion of Hispanic Catholics to La Virgen de Guadalupe, large-scale celebrations are planned from Los Angeles to New York to honor both Juan Diego's first feast day as a saint Dec. 9 and the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Dec. 12. It was between those dates in 1531 that the apparitions took place.
Because Dec. 8 falls on a Sunday this year, the feast of the Immaculate Conception will be celebrated on Dec. 9, taking precedence over St. Juan Diego. But for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, there will be four days of nonstop celebration at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels recalling Juan Diego's vision.
This first-ever event will include traditional dancers, a play portraying the events surrounding the apparitions and the recitation of the rosary, according to Carolina Guevara, associate director of media relations for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
“The four days at the cathedral will give everyone [in the archdiocese] an opportunity to celebrate the feasts of Juan Diego and the Virgen de Guadalupe,” she said, adding that they expect thousands to attend.
Anticipation is building on the other side of the country as well.
“Interest has been growing since [St. Juan Diego's canonization in] July,” said Rodrigo Zuloaga, a spokesman for Asociación Tepeyac de New York, a nonprofit coalition of groups helping to organize the celebration of the feast in New York City.
As a buildup to the feast days, a torch from the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City will arrive in various American cities, culminating in its arrival at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on Dec. 12. Two special Masses will be held in the cathedral, and torches lit from that torch will then be sent to the Spanish-speaking parishes of the Archdiocese of New York.
Zuloaga said Cardinal Edward Egan of New York had the idea of bringing a torch up from Mexico City to strengthen the largely immigrant Mexican community.
In addition to the attention of the faithful, media coverage of such events has been very intense since the canonization, Guevara said.
Though some publicly raised doubts prior to the canonization about whether St. Juan Diego ever really existed, Father Cesar Ruffo, who celebrated the Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Philomena Church, said that while canonization was a long time coming, those rumors have proved baseless.
“The doubts about whether he existed were not founded,” said Father Ruffo in between blessing medals and images of Our Lady and St. Juan Diego for the largely Hispanic crowd.
The Mexican priest explained during his homily that if St. Juan Diego had not existed, there could be no miraculous image.
Americas' Patroness
The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe—which continues to baffle scientists, who cannot explain how it was created—might be located in Mexico, but her influence extends far beyond that country's borders.
In his 1999 apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America, Pope John Paul II discussed Our Lady of Guadalupe's influence on the American continent.
“The appearance of Mary to the native Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 had a decisive effect on evangelization. Its influence greatly overflows the boundaries of Mexico, spreading to the whole continent,” the Pope wrote. “Consequently, not only in Central and South America, but in North America as well, the Virgin of Guadalupe is venerated as Queen of all America.”
The Pope stated that he sees Our Lady of Guadalupe as the principle player in the “new evangelization” of the Americas.
“It is my heartfelt hope that she, whose intercession was responsible for strengthening the faith of the first disciples, will by her maternal inter-cession guide the Church in America … so that the new evangelization may yield a splendid flowering of Christian life.”
Father Ruffo agreed that Our Lady of Guadalupe is a powerful intercessor and encouraged Catholics to look to St. Juan Diego as an example.
“We can learn from his profound faith and humility,” Father Ruffo said, occasionally using a translator, of the man who persevered in delivering Mary's message despite the initial resistance of everyone, including the bishop of Mexico City.
“Look at the power that even poor people have to evangelize,” he said.
Increasing Numbers
The increasing number of Hispanics in the United States is also helping to move Our Lady of Guadalupe into the American spotlight.
Nearly 40% of American Catholics are now Hispanic, according to a recent document by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In some parts of the country, the numbers are even higher. About 80% of Catholics in Los Angeles are Latino, Guevara said.
Zuloaga thinks all Catholics can learn a valuable lesson from the devotion of those of Hispanic descent.
Referring to the way in which Latinos celebrate devotions like this feast day, he said: “People can learn to give themselves to a cause and to be passionate about something.”
Andrew Walther writes
from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What Is Blocking Dialogue Between Muslims and Christians? DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:ROME—Dialogue between Muslims and Christians, not regarded as a strong point, has been hampered even more since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to an expert on the subject.
More than ever, the dialogue requires well-prepared individuals who can understand the Muslims, Father Maurice Borrmans said in the following interview with Zenit, a Rome-based news agency. Father Borrmans, a missionary in the Arab world for 20 years, has been for a longtime consultor of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue.
He now teaches Islamic law and Muslim spirituality at the Pontifical Institute of Arab Studies. He is also director of the Islamochristiana review, which publishes articles by Christian and Muslim scholars.
How do you evaluate today's dialogue between Christians and Muslims? Are there difficulties?
Since 1964, that is, since Nostra Aetate, (Relation of the Church to non-christian religions) the Islamic-Christian dialogue has had considerable positive results. The first difficulty we meet today stems from a certain cultural, political and religious departure from the established norm.
We are witnessing everywhere what Mohammed Arkoun calls the “political overriding of the religious.” This complex relation between religion and the state influences profoundly the intercultural and interreligious dialogue.
In other words, every dialogue with a religious dimension necessarily has political implications?
In reality, if one studies closely the history of Muslims, one observes that there was always a subtle distinction between those who held political power and the religious heads, a combination of powers without confusion.
However, in many Muslims the ideal is still present of an Islamic state that promotes, transmits, interprets and organizes Islam. The Medina period becomes a point of reference, when the prophet Mohammed became a political man and military chief.
At the dawn of modern times, it was thought that Islam was only a religious event, but it immediately revealed itself to be a political event, too.
Let's not forget that in the Christian world also, time was needed to accept a modernity that challenged the traditional forms of expression of the faith, of worship, of morality and of life, and to recognize the possibility of a purification of the faith of individuals and of the mission of religious institutions.
On the Muslim side, things seem to be more complicated as modernity came to them “from outside,” particularly from the Christian West. Just as the Catholic Church was able to define with Vatican II what it understood by evangelization, so today Muslims are questioning themselves about how to understand what is meant by Islamization.
How do Muslims regard Christians committed to interreligious dialogue?
There is quite a bit of suspicion on both sides. Muslim magazines are not friendly toward Christian missions, and Christian publications are concerned about the progress of the Muslim “da'wa” [mission] in all countries and the construction of mosques in Europe.
In essence, it must not be forgotten that many Muslims still make the anti-Christian debate one of the forms of coming together with the “people of the Book,” and that the invitation to dialogue and even Christian humanitarian action seems to many Muslims to be an astute tactic to make the mission progress.
Are there other impediments to the dialogue?
Christians have structures that call for collective responsibility. Muslims virtually don't have representative entities. Often, they commit themselves on their own to the dialogue.
On the other hand, Christians have carried out a notable effort—recognized by the rest of Muslims—to get to know Muslim thought through books and the media. The sources of Islam—the Koran and Sunna—and the classics of religious thought have been translated into the principal European languages.
It is important to note, however, that the fundamental texts of Christian thought are virtually not translated into Arabic and that the books of Muslim thinkers who speak about Jesus Christ were written in Egypt between 1945 and 1954, namely, during a period that was still democratic. Since then, the difficulties of economic development and of democratic expression, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have made the dialogue more precarious and more reduced.
Given this reality, what room is there for dialogue?
To respond to our Christian initiatives for dialogue and to begin at the same time is a question of honor for Muslim authorities, be it in Cairo, Tunis or Beirut.
For the past 30 years we have witnessed a multiplication of interreligious talks and conferences that, however, almost always end only with good intentions. How many times has there been talk of revising school textbooks, to change the way of seeing the other religion! A slight change has been made on our side but almost none on the Muslim side.
Do you think the situation has worsened since Sept. 11?
Undoubtedly, the Gulf War already slowed down the dialogue endeavor. The most open intellectuals were accused in their countries of being too favorable to the West called “Christian.” Since Sept. 11, we can speak of blockage, although the Arab world realized that the Holy See did not support the North American reactions.
On the question of war and peace, it must be admitted that Muslim thinkers are divided. It is true that there are different possible readings of the Koran, from those that exalt the values of peace and justice to those that evidence above all the aspects of struggle and affirmation. On the other hand, is not this also the case with some texts of the Old Testament?
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Vatican Document Goes Welsh
LOS ANGELES TIMES, Nov. 23—For what is believed to be the first time, a Vatican document—one concerned with Christian unity—is being published in Welsh.
The document, published in English as “The Search for Christian Unity,” is TITLEd “Chwilio am Undod Cristnogol” in Welsh.
The three Catholic bishops of Wales—Archbishop Peter Smith of Cardiff, Bishop Edwin Regan of Wrexham and Bishop Mark Jabale of Menevia—released the document at the Welsh Center for Ecumenical Studies at Trinity College, Carmarthen.
Of the three, the Los Angeles daily reported, only Bishop Regan, whose episcopal motto is in Welsh, is a Welsh speaker. His two colleagues are still learning the language.
Pope to Visit Spain Next May
DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, Nov. 19—Pope John Paul II will make his fifth visit to Spain next May, the Vatican announced.
The trip will be the Holy Father's 99th abroad and his first since visiting his native Poland in August. The Vatican confirmed the plans after an announcement by Madrid Archbishop Antonio Rouco Varela.
“We can confirm that the Pope will visit Spain, although the exact dates and the details of the trip have yet to be finalized,” Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told Deutsche Presse-Agentur, a German news agency.
Iraqi Christians Hope Relics Will Prevent War
MONTREAL GAZETTE, Nov. 23—Christians in Iraq have high hopes the relics of St. Therésè of Lisieux, a French saint, will help maintain peace to the unstable country.
The relics arrived by plane from Lebanon on Nov. 20 after touring that country for 77 days.
Hundreds of Christians celebrated a Mass at Baghdad's St. Joseph's Chaldean Catholic Cathedral to celebrate their arrival.
Ramzia Isaac, a retired teacher, said she hoped St. Therésè would cure her sick son, according to the Montreal daily. “I also hope that she will keep war away from us and end the embargo.”
Imad Elias, another worshipper, said he hoped the saint would cure him of his diabetes and stop “the hostile war against us.”
The saint's relics are scheduled to tour Iraq until Dec. 27.
The Pope and Homer Simpson?
ANANOVA, Nov. 21—The British network BBC3 will be airing a gently satirical, 10-part cartoon series about the Vatican called “Popetown.”
Comedian Ruby Wax will play the Pope of Popetown, while model Jerry Hall will provide the voice of a nun.
BBC3 Controller Stuart Murphy told Ananova.com, a United Kingdom-based news service: “I hope Ruby, being Jewish and female, may bring something to the role which the Church may have so far overlooked.”
A Church spokesman declined any controversy over the series, telling a British paper, “The Church is big enough to have fun poked at itself.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Eleanor Roosevelt: An Advocate of Papal Teaching on Human Rights? DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Harvard Professor Mary Ann Glendon, one of the leading legal scholars in the United States, argued Nov. 27 in Rome that Eleanor Roosevelt was an unwitting advocate of Catholic social teaching during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s.
The address was delivered at the Domus Guadalupe, a residence for American women religious studying in Rome. As such, it was an evening celebrating, in a certain sense, American women, with the United States' most prominent Catholic lay-woman addressing American sisters on an American first lady.
“Most people would not connect Eleanor Roosevelt with anything Catholic,” Glendon said in a lively address that included the professor's impression of Mrs. Roosevelt's speaking voice.
Yet despite the cultural anti-Catholicism of her upbringing, Glendon said, there was a “felicitous convergence between the principles of the New Deal—the philosophy of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt—and the papal teaching as found in documents such as Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.”
Rerum Novarum was the 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, which began the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching, and Quadragesimo Anno was Pope Pius IX's treatment of the question in 1931.
Glendon said her talk could be thought of as “outtakes” from her 2001 book, A World Made New:
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Mrs. Roosevelt, as the United States' delegate to the newly formed United Nations, was elected chairman of the committee responsible for drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was approved in 1948 and had become “a polestar of the post-WWII human rights movement.”
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has much in common with Anglo-American tradition and includes many of the protections found in such documents as the Bill of Rights. Yet it also includes a richer treatment of the dignity of the human person, economic and social rights, and the duties that correspond to rights.
“Dignity is the [interpretative] key of the UDHR,” Glendon said, noting that many of the passages on the dignity of the person in the declaration are standard phrases in Catholic social teaching.
According to her research, the key figure was human rights committee member Charles Malik, an Orthodox Christian from Lebanon. Malik began the committee's work by asking fundamental questions.
“One could imagine John Paul II saying the same things,” Glendon said. “Does man exist for the state, or does the state exist for man?”
In talking to Malik's surviving son, Glendon inquired as to the roots of Malik's philosophy. She discovered that not only did he teach St. Thomas Aquinas as a philosophy professor but also that he kept on his desk heavily annotated copies of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.
Another key player in the drafting, Frenchman Rene Cassin, wrote in his diaries that he was helped in 1948 by the “nuncio in Paris.” The nuncio at the time was Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, who later as Pope John XXIII made robust use of human rights language in his own encyclicals.
“Eleanor Roosevelt's role at the human rights commission was the same as George Washington's at the Constitutional Convention,” Glen-don argued. “Washington didn't write a line, but there would not have been a constitution without him. We can celebrate that no matter what Eleanor Roosevelt thought of us Catholics and our Church—and she opposed the campaign of John F. Kennedy because he was Catholic—she did not reject the wisdom of our tradition.”
The Domus Guadalupe, established in 1998, is an initiative of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, an umbrella group for religious congregations committed to traditional religious life. The congregations that belong to the council—which include the well-known “Nashville Dominicans” and the Religious Sisters of Mercy from Alma, Mich.—have a growing number of vocations, hence the need for a house of studies.
The Glendon lecture was the first in a planned series intended to ensure that the sister-students do not become too focused on their particular specialties and lose a sense of the broader picture of the Church.
Father Raymond J. de Souza
writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: God the Upright and Holy King DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II met with 6,000 pilgrims in the Paul VI Hall for his general audience Nov. 27. He continued his catechesis on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours by reflecting on Psalm 99.
Psalm 99 extols God's infinite transcendence as supreme ruler, the Holy Father said. But it also recognizes God's readiness to respond to man's needs. “God is superior to us and places himself infinitely close to every one of his creatures. This transcendence, however, does not make him a ruler who is distant and who cannot be moved. When people call on him, he answers. God is the one who can save and the only one who can free mankind from evil and death,” the Pope said.
This bond between God's holiness and closeness is manifested today in the Church as the Church undertakes her saving mission in the world. “Psalm 99 has become a reality today in the Church, which is the seat of the presence of the holy and transcendent God,” John Paul pointed out. “God came into our midst in his Son, having made himself one of us to infuse us with his life and holiness. Because of this we can approach God with trust, not fear.”
“The Lord is King.” Psalm 99 begins with this acclamation, which reveals its basic theme and its particular literary genre. It is a song that the people of God sing to the Lord, who governs the world and history as a transcendent and supreme ruler. It reminds us of other similar hymns — Psalms 96-98, upon which we have already reflected — that the Liturgy of the Hours includes as ideal morning prayers.
Indeed, as the faithful begin their day, they know that they are not abandoned to the mercy of a blind and uncertain fate — facing the uncertainty of their freedom, dependent on the decisions of others or dominated by the events of history. They know that their Creator and Savior, in his grandeur, holiness and mercy, is above every earthly reality.
God came into our midst in his Son, having made himself one of us to infuse us with his life and holiness. Because of this, we now approach God with trust, not fear.
God Is Holy
Scholars have put forth several hypotheses about how this psalm was used in the liturgy at the Temple of Zion. In any case, it has the tone of a contemplative prayer of praise to the Lord, who is seated in heavenly glory before all the nations and the earth (see verse 1). Yet, God makes himself present within a certain place in the midst of the community—Jerusalem (see verse 2)—thereby showing that he is “God-with-us.”
The psalmist attributes seven solemn TITLEs to God in the first few verses. He is described as king, great, exalted, awesome, holy, mighty and just (see verses 1-4). Further on, God is also described as “forgiving” (see verse 8). Above all, God's holiness is emphasized. Indeed, the words “holy is God” are repeated three times, almost as a kind of antiphon (see verses 3, 5, 9). In biblical language, these words denote first of all God's transcendence. God is superior to us and places himself infinitely above every one of his creatures. This transcendence, however, does not make him a ruler who is distant and who cannot be moved. When people call on him, he answers (see verse 6). God is the one who can save and the only one who can free mankind from evil and death. Indeed, he is a “lover of justice” and he is the one who “created just rule in Jacob” (verse 4).
God Is With Us
The Church Fathers have reflected at length on the theme of God's holiness, extolling God's inaccessibility. Nevertheless, God, who is holy and transcendent, came to dwell in our midst. Moreover, as St. Irenaeus says, he “became accustomed” to man already in the Old Testament by revealing himself in apparitions and speaking through his prophets, while man “became accustomed” to God by learning how to follow and obey him. Likewise, St. Ephrem in one of his hymns emphasizes that just as through the Incarnation “the Holy One made his dwelling in the womb [of Mary] in a bodily way, now he makes his dwelling in our minds in a spiritual way” (Inni sulla Natività, 4, 130). Moreover, through the gift of the Eucharist, just like the Incarnation, “the Dispenser of Life descended from on high to dwell in those who are worthy of him. After he entered, he made his dwelling with us, so we ourselves are sanctified in him” (Inni conservati in armeno, 47, 27, 30).
This deep bond between the holiness and closeness of God is also developed in Psalm 99. In fact, after having contemplated the Lord's absolute perfection, the psalmist recalls that God was constantly in contact with his people through Moses and Aaron, who were his mediators, as well as Samuel, who was his prophet. He spoke and was heard; he punished sin but he also forgave.
The sign of his presence in the midst of the people was “his foot-stool”—the throne of the ark of the Temple of Zion (see verses 5-8). Therefore, the holy and invisible God made himself accessible to his people through Moses the lawmaker, Aaron the priest and Samuel the prophet. He revealed himself in words and deeds of salvation and judgment and was present in Zion through the worship that was celebrated in the Temple.
God Sent Us His Son
We can say, therefore, that Psalm 99 has become a reality today in the Church, which is the seat of the presence of the holy and transcendent God. The Lord has not withdrawn into the inaccessible realm of his mystery, where he is indifferent to our history and to our expectations. He “comes to govern the earth, to govern the world with justice and all the peoples with fairness” (Psalm 98:9).
Above all, God came into our midst in his Son, having made himself one of us to infuse us with his life and holiness. Because of this, we now approach God with trust, not fear. Indeed, in Christ we have the holy high priest, who is innocent and without stain. He “is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). Our song, then, is filled with serenity and joy. It exalts the Lord who is king and who dwells among us, wiping every tear from our eyes (see Revelation 21:3-4).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Indian Church Founded by St. Thomas Marks 1,950 Years of Christianity DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:KOCHI, India—More than 100,000 Catholics, including nearly 100 bishops and 1,500 priests, marked the 1,950 years of Christianity in India since the arrival of St. Thomas the Apostle.
Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, special envoy of Pope John Paul II and prefect of the Congregation for Evangelization of Peoples, celebrated a solemn Mass of thanksgiving here in southern Kerala state Nov.
17.
The massive celebration was organized by the Catholic Bishops Conference of India and the Kerala Catholic Bishops' Council to commemorate the arrival of St. Thomas in Kerala in the year 52 and of St. Francis Xavier 1,500 years later.
“His Holiness is very grateful to India for opening its doors to Christianity and for the enrichment that has brought to the universal Church,” Cardinal Sepe said. The message was read during a closing ceremony that was attended by a host of prominent national leaders, including Indian President Abdul Kalam.
Describing the jubilee celebrations as an “important milestone” in Indian Church history, the papal message recalled that “India, this land of ancient cultures and religions, opened its heart at different points of history to these apostles from the West.” Sts. Thomas and Francis Xavier “played a very special role in India's religious history.”
The “doubting” Apostle had followed spice merchants from the Middle East to the Malabar (the name of Kerala in ancient times) coast on the Arabian Sea. He was martyred at Mylapore in neighboring Tamil Nadu state, pierced with a lance by Hindus envious of his miracles and conversions. Today, thousands throng the Mount St. Thomas shrine at Mylapore near Madras.
The Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, who reached India in the company of Portuguese invaders in 1542, preached the Gospel across India before he set out for China, where he died in 1552. The mortal remains of the saint were later brought back to India and are preserved at the Basilica of Bom Jesu in Goa, where he first set foot in India.
A Model for Others
In his homily, Cardinal Sepe hailed the “glowing past” of the Indian Church and commended the missionary zeal it has shown as a “model” for other churches.
The Kerala-based Syro-Malabar Church that traces its origin to St. Thomas is one of the vibrant Churches in the Catholic communion. It was raised to “autonomous” status in 1992. The 3.3 million-strong Syro-Malabar Church has an enviable vocation ratio of a nun or priest for about every 50 members of the Church. Hundreds of nuns and priests from the Church are working in Africa, America and Europe.
More adulation for Indian Christians came from Indian President Kalam—a Muslim—who hailed the Christian contribution in the field of education and health care.
Born in a poor fishing family in south India, Kalam was educated at a Protestant school and a Catholic college and went on to spearhead India's missile program for two decades before he was chosen as Indian president earlier this year.
Hailing the patriotism of the Indian Church, Kalam narrated an incident that led to India's first missile being built inside St. Mary's Catholic Church near Thumpa in Kerala. Kalam recalled that when India's defense research scientists were looking for an ideal location for a space research center in the early 1960s, they identified Thumpa village with the Catholic church and a school surrounded by fishermen's dwellings.
Responding to the scientists' request to hand over the church land in the interest of the nation, Bishop Peter Pereira of the Trivandrum Diocese invited the chief of the team of scientists to address the faithful at Sunday Mass. The congregation agreed to hand over the church premises in exchange for a new church built at government expense.
‘Foreigners’
However, during a seminar on the history of Christianity in India, Church historians and others expressed “perplexity and deep anguish” over growing attempts to portray Christians as “foreigners” by Hindu fundamentalists.
The seminar, part of the Jubilee celebration, ended with a statement decrying attempts “to vociferously malign our community by distorting historical facts and representing us as aliens in our own motherland.”
“Our fears get ever more confirmed that despite the good will of the vast majority of fellow citizens, there are people who intentionally exploit the religious sentiments of the majority [Hindus] to achieve at our expense political gains for themselves,” said the statement, endorsed by 200 seminar participants, including a dozen bishops.
Despite these difficulties, the statement reiterated that the Indian Church “will continue” all its ministries and will show a preferential concern for the less privileged sections of Indian society—with more than 30% of India's 1 billion people living in penury.
The Holy Father in his message also urged the Church in India to follow the example of Jesus, “who sought out the lowly and those in need, irrespective of their background.”
“As long as one person is suffering, the Church cannot turn a blind eye or close up and get into a shell looking after its own members,” exhorted the papal message.
Archbishop Cyril mar Baselios, president of the bishops' conference, said the Indian Church is thrilled by the Vatican's commendation of her missionary work as “a model for other churches.”
Asked whether the Church in India feels intimidated by increasing anti-Christian propaganda, Archbishop Baselios replied: “There is nothing new. Even our Apostle [St. Thomas] was martyred. We should be ready to face obstacles to defend our faith and our mandate.”
“In the face of opposition we cannot keep quiet or back away,” continued the archbishop. “Only trials can test the strength of our faith. The challenge [before the Indian Church] is whether we are prepared to embrace martyrdom to prove our faith if at all it is required.”
Anto Akkara writes from New Delhi, India.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anto Akkara ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Christian Missionary Killed in Lebanon
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Nov. 25—An American Protestant evangelist was murdered in Lebanon, according to the New York Times, which pointed to the killing—blamed on Islamic extremists—as evidence of renewed tension between the two faiths in that war-ravaged country.
Lebanon was once the sanctuary for Arab Christians in a Middle East dominated by Islamic or pro-Islamic governments. Once a majority Maronite Catholic country, Lebanon is now home to a shrinking Christian minority devastated by civil war, a falling birthrate and emigration to the West. But missionary work is still legal in Lebanon, so Protestant evangelists have taken the opportunity to preach there and set up medical missions.
Bonnie Penner Witherall, 31, worked in a prenatal care clinic in Sidon, Lebanon, run by the Christian and Missionary Alliance. She was killed by one or more gunmen who walked into the clinic.
“I think she was killed because she was preaching Christianity to Muslims,” said Bishop George Kwaiter of the Roman Catholic diocese.
Miss World Violence Enflamed by Media
FIDES, Nov. 23—The Miss World Pageant, which had been scheduled for Kaduna, Nigeria, has been moved to London after a wave of violence between Muslims and local Christians, which wrecked churches and mosques alike, has claimed more than 200 lives so far and almost saw the destruction of the hotel that held the beauty pageant finalists.
According to Fides, the Vatican missionary news agency, one spark that kindled the violence was a local newspaper that made a flip reference to the Muslim prophet Mohammed.
Fides contacted representatives of the local Church for comment. Father Andre Sampaio de Oliveira at the Nunciature in Kaduna said the trouble really started when the Miss World contest participants, young women from all over the world and interviewed by the local Nigerian media, voiced support for women condemned to stoning by strict Islamic laws.
Nobel Laureate Bishop Steps Down in East Timor
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Nov. 26—The Nobel Peace Prize-winning bishop of Dili, East Timor, Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, has resigned from his post after 19 years because of health reasons, the French news agency said.
Pope John Paul II has accepted the resignation, a Vatican spokesman said. The Timor Post quoted Bishop Belo as saying he needed rest and medical treatment for one or two years. He also said at a recent Sunday Mass that the long years of conflict have left him with high blood pressure and vulnerable to a stroke.
The bishop received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 together with Jose Ramos-Horta, now East Timor's foreign minister, for their struggle for independence from Indonesian rule. Bishop Belo was one of the very few people in the island territory who risked speaking out against human rights abuses during Indonesia's occupation.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Clash of Civilizations? DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Scholars are talking of a clash of civilizations. Catholics are suddenly romanticizing the Crusades again. Anti-Christian violence perpetrated by Muslims is on the rise—it's in the headlines from Africa, India and Oceania and it's hinted in the terrorism we've suffered at home, also.
It makes you want to hit back. Or, short of that, the situation can convince Catholics that Islam and Hinduism are to be denounced, that it's mere political correctness to pretend that our religious persecutors aren't our enemies. Enough, we want to say, is enough.
But that isn't the way a Christian should respond, Pope John Paul II tld Catholics in Rome at the 375th anniversary of the founding of the Pontifical Urban University.
The Pope's remarks there took on an international resonance when he used them as an opportunity to explain his vision of how religious “opponents” should coexist.
He used words that, having been abused in other contexts, make some Catholics wince. Nonetheless, they apply here: Christians are to be “people of dialogue” in the face of warring factions.
“Without failing to affirm the force of the Gospel message,” he said, “in today's lacerated world it is an important task for Christians to be people of dialogue in order to resist that clash of civilizations that at times seems inevitable.”
“Violence, terrorism, war do no more than build new walls between peoples,” the Holy Father added. Christians shouldn't reinforce those walls with their own antagonistic response.
He said he longs for a school like Urban to be a “gymnasium of universality, in which one must be able to breathe that sense of profound communion that characterized the early community.”
It's easy to dismiss talk of dialogue as an easy way out, or even a suicidal response to a world in which there is so much enmity.
But, in the end, the Pope's way isn't so easy after all. It is, however, the way of Christ, who rejected the “clash of civilizations” view of the Messiah that his Apostles hoped he would champion. And which is more suicidal—agreeing with radical Muslims that we cannot coexist with them peacefully or finding a way to neutralize the conflict?
All the same, “neutralizing the conflict” is only a byproduct of the approach the Pope has in mind when he hopes that Urban will be known “among the other universities in Rome precisely for its special attention to peoples' cultures and to the great world religions, beginning with Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism.”
Understanding what is true and good in other religions is exactly what a university should do—so long as it keeps its “theological, Christological and ecclesiological” bearings, he added.
Catholics aren't necessarily pacifists and we aren't afraid to acknowledge legitimate disagreements with other religious or ideological world-views. Despite scandalous excesses, there really was something noble about the Crusades, which were largely defensive wars. They weren't among the abuses the Pope mentioned in his year-2000 mea culpa for past misdeeds by Catholics.
But in a culture that has gone too far in its zeal for tolerance, it's easy for us to forget that there really is a legitimate virtue of tolerance, too. How to balance appropriate commitment to the faith and appropriate tolerance for other religions?
Holiness, the Pope explained. “The Church of the third millennium needs priests, religious and laity who are holy and educated. This is not a new program,” he said. “The program already exists: It is the same as always, taken up in the Gospel and living Tradition. In the last analysis, it is centered on Christ himself, who must be known, loved, imitated, to live the Trinitarian life in him and with him in order to transform history.”
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: No Lay Deacons Here DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding “Vatican Envoy to Mexico Urges Priest Training” (Vatican Media Watch, Nov. 24-30):
There are no “lay” deacons in the Catholic Church. Diaconate is holy orders. Deacons are clerics. Deacons may also enjoy the sacrament of matrimony. That does not make one “lay”—as any married Eastern Rite Catholic priest will tell you.
I would like to see a story correlating this article to the other one that says the number of Hispanics in the United States who identify themselves as Catholic has declined.
REV. MR. DENNIS DOLAN
Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut
Editor's Note: The item in question was quoted from an Associated Press report about Chiapas, Mexico. We regret that we failed to point out the error.
Why Spotlight Non-Catholics?
I was greatly disappointed with the “Inperson” interview with Sue Thomas (“Deaf FBI Agent Inspires,” Nov. 24-30). While Sue Thomas' struggle to overcome her disability is certainly inspirational, I don't understand why the Register would devote front-page space to someone who is not a Roman Catholic and, moreover, appears to have been “ordained” by some sort of nondenominational Protestant sect.
I had thought that the Register was loyal to the magisterium (which would mean not advocating the ordination of women, etc.) This article makes me question the truth of that assumption. I would appreciate an explanation of this situation by the editors.
ALEXANDER M. BIELAKOWSKI, PH.D.
Findlay, Ohio
Editor's Note: Our Inperson section highlights people with national apostolates who credit the Catholic faith for their apostolic inspiration. Sue Thomas fits that description because Catholic nuns provided her formative experience. We thought readers would appreciate the power of the faith to reach people like Thomas in other denominations. We hope to report her conversion in a future issue!
Natural Family Power
Thank you for such an excellent, positive column from Tom and Caroline McDonald on learning natural family planning before marriage (“Natural Family Preparedness,” Family Matters, Nov. 24-30). I hope it will open a few eyes. It is important to present this information in short, positive, informative sections. Although there is quite a bit of positive info on NFP, much of it is too long to appeal to the average person.
Could I have permission to copy this column and give it to a few priests and young people preparing for marriage? My husband and I teach NFP through the Couple to Couple League.
Thanks again, and God bless you for helping to spread the true teachings of the Church.
TERESA TILLOTSON
via e-mail
Editor's note: Feel free to photocopy and share this column—or any of our content. If you want to reprint our content in another publication, however, you'll need to contact us with the details before proceeding.
Whither Pastoral Will?
Regarding “Nancy Pelosi Is No Conservative Catholic” (Inbrief, Nov. 24-30):
It is unfortunate that we have a number of high-level politicians who claim to be Catholic and are anything but. The series includes, but is not limited to, Pelosi, Kennedy, Davis, Granholm and Daschle. No Catholic can, in their right mind and conscience, turn their back on the unborn and either say “kill them” or ignore those who are taking steps to kill the unborn.
If a man walked into a schoolroom stating his intent to harm a child and the teacher said to him, “That's your business, and none of mine,” that teacher would be guilty of being an accessory to the fact—and, in God's eyes, as guilty as the perpetrator. Some of these politicians will do that by ignoring the problem, some will refuse to vote against such acts of murder and some openly vote for the killing of unborn children. They do not appear to fear God or hell.
Far worse is that their parish priests not only fail to instruct them in what is morally right but also seem to back them in their efforts to achieve political power and promote the killing of unborn children. It is wrong to give absolution to any person who has no intention of trying to change and, in fact, makes it known that they fully intend to continue committing mortal sins. These priests fail in their priestly duties—both to the unborn children and to the [so-called] penitents.
The priest who supports a pro-abortion politician—and the bishop who fails to take action against the “Catholic-pro-abortion” politician—contribute to murder of the unborn. In the least, these politicians should be denied the sacraments, if not excommunicated entirely.
At some point, our bishops lost the will and desire to take action against evil, be it sexually abusive priests or murderous politicians. It seems that the only time most bishops get the attributes to take action against evil is when their own hide is on the line. The ambiguity against evil only contributes to it. The murder of many unborn children lies on the conscience of priests and bishops. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
LARRY CIEJKA
Boise, Idaho
Anglican Oops
Thank you for publishing my letter (“Anglican Angst,” Letters, Nov. 24-30). I do, however, need to ask you to make a correction. I made a big blunder.
I wrote my letter in response to a column you published by Dwight Longenecker TITLEd “Figuring Out the New Bishop of Canterbury” (Nov. 3-9). I wrote, “There is another bit of information that [former Canterbury archbishop George L.] Carey is ‘an acknowledged liberal who supports the ordination of women and gays.’”
In fact, the article I referred to said it was Rowan Williams, the new archbishop of Canterbury, who is “an acknowledged liberal who supports the ordination of women and gays.”
I felt it important to set the record straight, as I made a big mistake. Please accept my apologies.
ELVIRA FLYNN
Rio Rancho, New Mexico
Pro-Life Stasis: The Missing Piece
In your Nov. 3 issue, I read two very good essays—Father Anthony Zimmerman's letter (“Ice the Abortion Inferno”) and Dinesh D'souza's column (“Pro-Life Stasis? It's Time to Do What Lincoln Did”).
Each complements the other in recommending a phased, pragmatic approach to ending abortion in this country by addressing the body politic and human sexuality. I suggest though that the important theater of religion could also have been blended into their comments about politics and sexuality.
The horror of abortion is not a product of the political process. It has engulfed us because of the failures in Protestant Christian churches—first on contraception (witness the Lambeth Conference of 1939), then accepting easy divorce following World War II and, finally, acceptance of abortion to save the life of the mother following Roe v. Wade. An interesting progression from idolatry to adultery to murder.
We in the Catholic Church have not been fully spared. While formal Church teaching remains solid, that same teaching is considered more in the breach than through observance by many in the pew, and by more than a few theologians and priests.
As in the two essays referenced above, Catholics leaders will go public from the pulpit and in print against abortion. But little is said about the idolatry of contraception and the adultery spawned by divorce (your paper excepted).
D'souza recognizes the linkage of abortion as “the debris of the sexual revolution.” Father Zimmerman appreciates the need to “turn the big hose on the hottest flames” of big money in the abortion industry. However, what we need is something very simple that will take the wind out of these unholy sails. We need our priests to step forward to teach Catholics true human sexuality. Fix the Catholic problem first. Get our own house in order. Then change the wider culture of American society.
But first priests must immerse themselves in the Holy Father's major teaching of the theology of the body and then broadcast it from their pulpits. This is the truly pragmatic step that is missing.
MICHAEL A. FAULKNER
Ocean Grove, New Jersey
Motivated Subscriber
My one-year gift subscription to the Register expires soon, and I have decided to renew in large part because of Tim Drake's uplifiting coverage of abortion in politics. I truly believe that if we are to convert the country to respect life, it will be through the Catholic Church.
Our faith mandates a respect for life at all stages, including the unborn. Yet more than 50% of Catholic voters typically vote for abortion candidates. That is a scandal.
With sadness, I watch my beloved Church, at multiple levels, fail its obligation to guide the faithful on these moral matters of life and death.
With joy, I see that we need only convert Catholics to affect a widespread movement toward a pro-life majority. Drake's articles in the Register play an instrumental role.
His recent column on the pro-life victories in the U.S. Senate elections has inspired me to organize, or join, a group of Catholic grass-roots activists in California, and hopefully nationwide. If the Church hierarchy refuses, justly or not, to inspire its faithful, the faithful will have to inspire itself.
RAYMOND J. TITTMANN
San Francisco
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Thomas More, Inverted DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding “Pro-Abortion and Catholic?” (Nov. 3-9):
Pro-abortion Catholic politicians bring to mind St. Thomas More, our most famous conscientious objector: The current pro-abortion appeal to conscience seems upside-down.
St. Thomas More objected to the new law of the land in defense of the Church. The modern conscientious objectors, like Jennifer Granholm and Gray Davis, promote the new law of the land in spite of the Church.
The old-fashioned conscientious objectors, like St. Thomas More or antiwar protesters, formed their objections based on religious beliefs. The new objectors form their objections based on anything but Church teaching.
St. Thomas More lost prestige, power and wealth. The modern objectors gain prestige, power and wealth.
St. Thomas More suffered a glorious martyrdom. Our current political conscientious objectors enjoy a gilded glory.
THERON C. BOWERS JR., M.D.
Houston, Texas
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Theron C. Bowers ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Compromise Leaves Us Compromised DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Call it the law of moral compromise:
“What yesterday was barbaric will tomorrow be considered part of the general advance of civilized society, if today it is accepted under extreme circumstances.”
To state it in another way: “Exceptions to moral rules become immoral rules.”
I am not concerned to prove this law, in either form, for every society throughout history. It may or may not be universally true. But it certainly is true of the Christianized West and describes all too accurately the law governing its accelerating de-Christianization in regard to morality. If we stand back and watch the law at work, we may understand a bit more clearly why the Church is so uncompromising in morality.
When the big push for legalized abortion began prior to Roe v. Wade, the public was kneaded with stories of extreme cases—pregnancies from rape and incest, horribly deformed fetuses, bodies mangled from desperate back-alley abortions, women on the edge of suicide. All these extreme cases were very real, and only a stone-cold heart could not be moved to compassion.
Today, of course, the right to abortion for any reason whatsoever is taken to be part of the general advance of every civilized society. Abortion has very quickly moved from being something allowed only under extreme circumstances to something demanded under any circumstances, no matter how trivial. Abortion as an exception to a moral rule has become the immoral rule.
The same historical pattern can be seen in regard to the acceptance of divorce and contraception.
The Christianized West rejected both. In the early part of the 20th century, advocates of divorce and contraception kneaded the public with stories of extreme cases, cases that moved hearts of flesh to compassion. Today, both divorce and contraception are considered part of the general advance of civilized society and are permitted and provided for the most trivial of reasons.
Perhaps the nasty bite of the law of moral compromise can be felt more deeply if we examine some moral issues that are currently at an earlier stage.
Just yesterday, euthanasia was considered barbaric. Today, it is being put forward as something to be accepted out of compassion in extreme cases. The public is being kneaded with visions of the pain-wracked and frail, the deathly sick and the terminally ill. Their plight cannot help to move a heart still human.
But where will this compassion lead? To a tomorrow where euthanasia will be available for the broadest spectrum of reasons, from the serious to the utterly trivial. As the law of moral compromise dictates, the right to euthanasia on demand will simply be considered (along with abortion, divorce and contraception) as part of the general advance of civilized society.
Infanticide? Wasn't it just yesterday that it was considered one of the surest signs of barbarism? But then came abortion and partial-birth abortion. Today, as a quite logical extension, the right to infanticide is being put forward in extreme cases, when the child is so deformed he or she will surely die or lead an utterly miserable life.
Who could not be moved? But having been moved by compassion once again to provide an exception to a moral rule, how will our tomorrow look? The law is quite clear. Infanticide, for any reason, will be considered part of the general advance of civilized society, along with divorce, contraception, abortion and euthanasia.
“Impossible! Mere scare tactics! No society could exist that allowed euthanasia and infanticide even for trivial reasons!”
But, my friend, much the same was said early last century when the Church warned that allowing divorce for extreme reasons would lead inevitably to the demand for divorce for any reason. And again, when the Church warned that allowing contraception within marriage would lead to the acceptance of contraception outside of marriage. And again, when the Church warned that allowing abortion under extreme circumstances would lead to the belief that abortion was a right under any circumstance.
The Church doesn't allow moral compromise because she operates out of a deeper compassion, one guided by a far more profound grasp of the human heart and what it takes to keep humanity humane. She has a far greater memory than we who merely live in the present. Christianity was born into the Roman Empire, where divorce, contraception, abortion, infanticide and euthanasia were considered, by the Romans, to be part of the most advanced, most humane society that ever existed.
The Church would not compromise with pagan Rome but out of a deeper compassion preached an extreme moral creed concerning the sanctity of marriage, sexuality and all life. Centuries of struggle, and the West became slowly Christianized and its moral creed permeated not only the hearts but also the civil law of the Christianized West.
Now, however, we are experiencing the moral unraveling of the Christian West as it becomes de Christianized and returns to a state of moral paganism. As it did in ancient Rome, the Church refuses to bend with the times, knowing full well that breaking moral rules ends in a broken humanity.
The good news, however, is that the law of moral compromise is only inevitable if we compromise. That's the same Good News that conquered the darkness in Roman times. Pope John Paul II expects a renewed embrace of holiness—the new evangelization—to renew the face of the earth.
Benjamin Wiker writes
from Steubenville, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin D. Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Into Temptation DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:My old high school friend sat across from me, nursing a Heineken. He didn't want to talk about the Gulf War, but I insisted.
He'd been a U.S. Army captain at the time, commanding U.S. troops that swept across the Iraqi front line trenches, quickly breaking the resistance of thousands of Saddam Hussein's conscript soldiers, who surrendered en masse—or tried to.
“They made it look like a video game on CNN,” I began. “But I'm sure it wasn't.”
He snorted, and took a gulp. “It was just about that easy.
The fighting part, I mean—after we'd bombed the daylights out of them for months, then shelled them for more than 24 hours. We barely had to show up for those guys to throw down their guns and beg us to take them captive.“ My friend shook his head and looked away. “I wish we could have.”
He took a deep breath, and waved for another beer. “After so many thousands of prisoners, the order came down that it was endangering our men to capture any more. There were so many at once—it seemed like a trick. So we called in the bulldozers.” No one knows how many of those soldiers were trying to surrender, since U.S. forces stopped offering them the opportunity, as the Pentagon has admitted.
My friend, the veteran, shoved his empty glass away. “I had to give the order, order men who drove the earthmovers to just cover up the trenches. To bury those poor bastards alive.”
“Try telling that in confession,” he continued. Before he enlisted, he'd himself been a seminarian. “I had to. I said to the priest ‘I buried hundreds of men alive.’ And I told him why—how if I'd disobeyed orders I should have been shot for insubordination on the battlefield. He didn't know what to say.” The priest asked if he was sorry, and my friend said he sure was. He gave the soldier absolution.
I asked him if he would do anything like that again. He said, “Not unless they order me to.” Then he waved for another drink. “That's war.”
My friend was discharged honorably, and now leads a normal life. I won't vouch for his dreams. Thousands of Americans who fought for our country in World War I and World War II, in Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War served with distinction, endured the anxiety, tedium and terror of military service and came out all right. They look back warmly on the friendships they forged, with pride in deeds of courage and self-sacrifice.
Good men, thrown into a man-made hell—the battlefield, where human beings are expected to butcher each other—can come out with their characters intact, even refined. Think of those veterans of Gettysburg, who put on their tattered uniforms 50 years later to cross the hallowed battlefield and greet their former enemies, shaking hands. (The moving moment was captured on silent film.) That reunion inspired another, held in 1994 at Normandy.
Not all soldiers do so well. Men with weak moral training, with fragile psyches or lousy luck may not emerge from the killing fields with medals and memories, then return to lives of peaceful retirement. We've all seen the media stereotype of the tragic Vietnam vet, tortured by flashbacks.
Still worse things can happen.
In Germany after World War I, ex-soldiers still in love with war formed the nucleus of the Nazi party.
But it's not a “German thing,” this intoxication with killing that can infect a human soul. We have our homegrown examples in Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh; in Gulf War graduate and urban sniper John Allen Muhammad; in the five veterans of the Afghanistan campaign who killed their wives at Fort Bragg, NC., this summer; in Robert Flores, the Gulf War veteran who on Oct. 28 murdered three faculty members and then himself at the nursing school from which he was flunking out.
There will be more. If the United States sends its troops to conquer Iraq, to bomb its cities, defeat its armies and disarm its dictator, some men will return physically sound but morally broken. Having crossed to the other side—to the place where killing is allowed, encouraged, demanded—they will not be able to return. They'll be a threat to their neighbors, their spouses, their teachers and themselves. Dispatched into hell, they'll bring it back with them.
Of the men who fight our wars, only a very small percentage are killed or wounded. Still fewer are psychologically ruined, like McVeigh. But who knows how many of our men (and nowadays, women) will be faced with the crushing temptation to abuse the awful power that comes to soldiers of a winning army—to obey immoral orders, wreak devastation on cities, to pile up enemy civilian dead if it might save our soldiers' lives?
Our record in Vietnam and Kuwait is not encouraging—not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Of course, it is not the soldiers who start wars. It is civilians, sitting in safety, far away. When men are ordered into battle, they do things that are inhuman. It is the men initiating the action, and the citizens who voted them into office, who are ultimately responsible.
That means us.
So as civilians it's our duty to enter war only regretfully, in obedience to “laws of war” that rigorously seek to spare civilians of enemy countries, treat enemy soldiers humanely and take as few lives as possible.
I'm not saying we shouldn't fight wars. I've read The Diary of Anne Frank, and I hope her ghost arises to haunt the pacifists out there. I've seen the footage of our men liberating the Nazi camps. I wish President Roosevelt had rained some of the bombs that annihilated Dresden on the rail tracks that led to them.
Sometimes the refusal to fight comes from cowardice, from the selfish unwillingness to defend the innocent.
But a war is only just if it is the last resort, the sane alternative to conquest by tyranny, or to the imminent slaughter of civilians.
That Christian notion—often violated in Christendom—has since become the basis of international law.
President Bush deserves our gratitude if he takes steps to make any action against Saddam a last resort. Because with every war, however just or necessary, we deliver our boys into temptation—as my friend learned on the killing fields.
J.P. Zmirak is author of
Wilhelm Röpke: Swiss Localist,
Global Economist (ISI Books,
Wilmington, Del., 2001).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: J.P. Zmirak ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: The Bulldozer Assault DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:In one way, it's no different from the usual forms of warfare. But it reveals war's horror.
Between Feb. 24 and 25, 1991, thousands of draftee Iraqi soldiers may have been sealed in their trenches by U.S. Army vehicles to suffocate, according to an article in the Sept. 23, 1991 Time magazine: “Were thousands of Iraqis buried alive during the allied operation against their front line last February? U.S. Army officers say that as tanks equipped with plows and bulldozers punched holes in the 70-mile-long Iraqi defense strip, enemy soldiers who refused to surrender were trapped under avalanches of sand.
Col. Anthony Moreno, commander of a unit that followed the initial U.S. breakthrough, recalls seeing arms protruding from the sand. ‘For all I know, we could have buried thousands,’ he told New York Newsday.”
This account was also covered in The San Francisco Chronicle, which reported that the decision to use bulldozers was later justified in a report to Congress by then Secretary of State Dick Cheney: “Because of these uncertainties and the need to minimize loss of U.S. lives, military necessity required that the assault … be conducted with maximum speed and violence. … There is a gap in the law of war in defining precisely when surrender takes effect or how it may be accomplished. An attempt at surrender in the midst of a hard-fought battle is neither easily communicated nor received.”
PBS Frontline reported in an online article “Iraqi Death Toll,” that “One infamous incident during the war highlighted the question of large-scale Iraqi combat deaths. This was the ‘bulldozer assault’ in which two brigades from the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized)—The Big Red One—used plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury Iraqi soldiers defending the fortified ‘Saddam Line.’
“While approximately 2,000 of the troops surrendered, escaping burial, one newspaper story reported that the U.S. commanders estimated thousands of Iraqi soldiers had been buried alive during the two-day assault Feb. 24-25, 1991.
“However, like all other troop estimates made during the war, the estimated 8,000 Iraqi defenders was probably greatly inflated. While one commander thought the numbers might have been in the thousands, another reported his brigade buried between 80 and 250 Iraqis. After the war, the Iraqi government
found 44 bodies.”
The Frontline article cited the original NY Newsday report, “Buried Alive” by Patrick J. Sloyan, Newsday, Sept.12, 1991. Sloyan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Gulf War. Sloyan's summary of the eventmay be found online at www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0211/sloyan.htm.
— J.P. Zmirak
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: J.P. Zmirak ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: The Once and Future King DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Operation CPB is the code name for the public relations campaign to convince the British public that Prince Charles' mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, should be the Queen of England one day.
The plot is worthy of the juiciest fairy tale or historical romance.
It goes like this: Queen puts pressure on her son and heir to marry. So heir marries airhead. But heir has a secret girlfriend who is a married lady. Poor princess is justifiably unhappy. Prince and princess divorce. Married lady and husband divorce. Princess dies in terrible crash with swarthy foreign millionaire. Presto! Prince is free to marry Camilla. But British public mourn the pretty princess and think Camilla is the wicked queen with the poisoned apple.
As a result, the public relations experts have been called in to gently persuade the British public to forget Princess Diana and realize what a charming and good person Camilla Parker Bowles is. Gradually, Camilla has been seen in public with the prince. Step by step, she is being eased into a public role. Carefully chosen photo opportunities are used to place her next to the queen, next to the royal princes and alongside Prince Charles. It seems to be working, but still most English people don't want her to marry Prince Charles.
The hypocrisy of it all is stunning. Considering how congested the roads are, getting a divorce in Britain is easier than passing the test to get a driving license. Something like two out of three marriages in Britain end in divorce and most divorced people go on to marry someone else. Despite this, many British people think their future monarch should not marry a divorced woman.
The plot thickens because the Church of England is involved. The Queen is the nominal head of the Church of England, and Prince Charles will take up the same role someday. The rules of the Church of England still forbid divorcees to be remarried in church. Many think it would be terrible to have a divorced and re-married head of the Church of England.
Catholics in this country have long memories. Five hundred years long. They can't help asking what all the fuss is. After all, the Church of England was founded by a king for the very reason that he wanted to marry his mistress. If the founder of the church went on to divorce one wife, bump off the next, bury the third, divorce the fourth, bump off the fifth and then die of syphilis, what's the big deal?
Still, the idea offends those who believe in the sanctity of marriage, and so it should. No matter what you might think of royalty, the royal family ought to provide a role model of family life, loyalty and Christian commitment.
The sad fact is that the disastrous marriages of the royal family reflect the parlous state of family life in Britain generally.
Because ministers of the Church of England are still expected to officiate at the majority of weddings, the divorce and remarriage situation is at a crisis point. Although the rules don't allow it, most Anglican vicars at least perform “blessings” of marriages for divorced people and many flaunt the rules and remarry divorced people whenever they wish. Quite a few of the Church of England clergy are themselves divorced and remarried. There was even a Church of England bishop who married the divorced wife of one of his clergymen.
As a result of this chaos, the Anglican Church has been under extreme pressure to change the rules. Earlier this year the General Synod of the Church of England proposed changes to allow remarriage of divorcees in church under some circumstances, and it looks like the new rules will go through. So is that a green light for Charles and Camilla to get hitched?
Not really, because one of the proposed regulations is that the relationship between the people who want to get remarried in church should not have been the cause of the breakdown of either first marriage. Princess Di made it quite clear before she died that there were “three people in her marriage.” Everybody now knows that Charles and Camilla maintained a relationship all through Charles' “fairy-tale marriage” to Diana.
If the new rules are applied, the heir to the throne and his mistress are still left out in the cold because their adulterous relationship caused the breakdown of both marriages.
What are the other options? When Charles' sister Anne wanted to remarry she simply skipped across the border where the Church of Scotland (which is Presbyterian) allows the remarriage of divorced people in church. Charles and Camilla could go the land of kilts and bagpipes, but this would look suspiciously like the couples who sneak off to the marriage chapel in Las Vegas for a quickie marriage.
So the prince and his mistress are still stuck. There is one other option that no one seems to have considered. Prince Charles might actually display some moral courage. He could show a Christian example and sacrifice his own selfish “happiness” for the sake of his faith.
In other words, he might put away his mistress and either live as a celibate widower or marry someone who is free to be his queen.
Then, despite the personal difficulties for the prince, the fairy tale might have a happy ending after all.
Dwight Longenecker, a former
Anglican priest, is author of
The Path to Rome
and More Christianity.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dwight Longenecker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Love Songs to the Church's Spouse DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Not so long ago, Paul Savageau was earning extra cash playing folk-rock cover songs at Massachusetts nightclubs.
Then he “got real with God.” Shortly after, he began playing at Sunday Mass, leading youth choirs and folk groups—and writing original tunes of Catholic devotion, praise and worship. He released his first CD, Giving My Heart to You, last June. Now he's on sabbatical from his work as a finance manager in order to devote himself full time to promoting the Gospel in word and song. He described for Register correspondent Joseph Pronechen the ways he draws insights from his marriage in order to tell the world about Christ's love for his bride, the Church.
What prompted you to turn to Christian music?
I wrote “Let Me Share Your Joy” for my own wedding Mass. I sang it at my wedding for my wife, Diane. That was the first song I ever wrote that was Christian in nature. Shortly after, Father Dan Sheehan prompted me to get active in the music ministry. Maybe this song was the genesis for it. It's an easy-listening song; it's sacramental and liturgical. I have sung it on numerous occasions for weddings.
You seem to find marriage a rich mine for songs.
The sacrament of marriage mirrors God's love for the Church. The Church is Jesus' spouse. There's this great analogy between Christ and the Church and a man and a woman. He chose to make the union sacred and holy. But today's society doesn't put enough emphasis on the sacramental side of marital union. I thought putting some of my marriage songs on the CD would give people a place to go for inspiration if they were getting married or if they were at a point in their marriage where they're renewing their commitment. They can enjoy the music while being reminded that marriage is a blessed and holy union.
A number of your songs could be read as love songs to a spouse or as love songs to Christ.
The TITLE song, “Giving My Heart to You,” speaks of a couple's love for one another. I have sung it at weddings. I put a band sound to it because a young couple can use it in church, then the song could extend the Christian character from the church to the reception, where the couple could use it as their first dance. I wanted to write music people could be joyful about.
I wrote “Jesus Hear Our Prayer” for the marriage of my wife's niece. As we were getting in the van for the five-hour ride to the wedding, my wife asked if I had written a song for her. I hadn't—so I spent the trip writing this one. Only when I got to the studio to record it did I decide to make it a duet; the bride and groom talk back and forth about their commitment to one another.
Does your interest in encouraging strong marriages extend beyond music?
Yes. I got involved as a leader in pre-Cana, the Catholic marriage-preparation program, too. The challenging questions really make couples communicate. Most are young, there's infatuation going on and problems that may show up later on are put aside. What they haven't spoken about are the sacramental aspects of marriage.
You mentioned earlier that devotion to the Divine Mercy is a big part of your life. How so?
It's a big part of my life and my music, too. That's why I closed my CD with the song “Mercy O God.” It's a contemplative song based on Psalm 51.
I began to read St. Faustina's diary in the late 1980s. I found it a very inspiring work by a true mystic of the Church. I was deeply moved by its pointed references to the difference between Christ's justice and his mercy, and how it says that we're better off leaning on his mercy than waiting for his justice.
Also, rather than have my picture on the CD cover, I decided to use two different interpretations of the prophecy of Merciful Light that Jesus gave to St. Faustina. I thought this image would draw people closer to God. My wife painted the water-color of one of the images, the one showing the cross, the light and the earth. A priest at my parish painted the other. In both, the cross and the light envelop the earth and show God's mercy for mankind. I thought this song is a nice, indirect way to proclaim God's mercy.
Why did you include a song about the Eucharist, “The Elevation,” in what is largely a collection of songs about marriage?
In a way the sacrament of marriage really leads you to communal life with Jesus. The connection is easy to see when you contemplate the fact that Jesus is the spouse of the Church. And I've always had a special love for and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. I've never, ever had a doubt in my mind that the Eucharist is the true body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. I believe my faith in the real presence is a gift God has given me: “How kind is God to give this Gift/In the humble form of bread,/and the wine transformed reminds our hearts/of how Our Savior bled.”
What do you hope to achieve as a Catholic singer-songwriter?
What better thing to convey than the Gospel message of hope? I hope God will use me as an instrument to convey his message and my CD can be one of the instruments he will use to lead people to his mercy. I hope my music inspires people to come back to Jesus, but of course I leave it up to God's will. The fruit of my labor is in his hands.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Spider-Man (2002)
Franchise event-films ruled the summer of '02. Spider-Man, based on Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's comic strip, was the season's biggest success story. The good news is that there's nothing in it to offend family viewers. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is a nerdy outcast rejected by his high school's in-crowd and ignored by the pretty girl next door (Kirsten Dunst). When he's bitten by a genetically engineered spider, he develops the ability to spin gigantic spider webs. He also becomes super-strong and super-quick.
Director Sam Raimu and screen-writer David Koepp chart Peter's progress in learning how to deploy his unique gifts for the service of the greater good, and he turns himself into the scourge of New York City's worst criminals. The film is an enjoyable roller-coaster ride even though some of its pleasures seem too calculated. Good and evil are clearly defined, but parents should be warned that some of the violence in the action sequences may be too intense for younger viewers.
Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken (1991)
American culture encourages people to live out their dreams no matter what obstacles fate may throw in their way. Disney dramatizes this theme in a heart-warming, coming-of-age story set in the 1930s. Sonora Webster (Gabrielle Anwar), a tomboy orphan, runs away from her aunt's farm to seek her fortune in a traveling carnival owned by a crusty old cowboy named Dr. Carver (Cliff Robertson). She aspires to be the rider of a “diving horse” that leaps from a high platform into a tank of water.
Carver's son, Al, teaches her how to perform the stunt, falling in love with her in the process. The young man gets into a fight with his father and leaves, but Sonora becomes the show's star anyway. When tragedy strikes, the young couple is reunited and works against impossible odds to help her realize her dream.
The Gold Rush (1925)
Silent-movie comedy is one of the glories of film history, but far too few present-day buffs have sampled its delights. The era's most popular character was Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, with his black mustache, bowler hat, twirling cane and penguin-like walk. Numerous short films humorously pitted this populist underdog against a sometimes-cruel world filled with unyielding, hostile obstacles.
The Gold Rush, written and directed by Chaplin, was the char-acter's first successful feature. The Little Tramp travels to Alaska during the gold-rush fever and struggles for survival in a desolate Yukon cabin with two grizzled prospectors.
He also falls for a dance-hall girl whose intentions at first seem untrustworthy.
The most famous sequence is the Thanksgiving dinner with Big Jim where the Tramp cooks one of his outsized boots, pretending it's a feast fit for a king.
Equally hilarious is the scene in which the Tramp is trapped inside a cabin that's teetering on the precipice of a cliff.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
DEC., VARIOUS DATES
Trappist ABC affiliates; check local listings
This special, a rebroadcast, tells the fascinating story of the Cistercian Trappists at Our Lady of Mepkin Abbey, which was founded in 1949 outside Charleston, S.C. The abbey was built on a 1681 rice plantation donated by the publisher Henry Luce and his wife, the diplomat and author Clare Booth Luce, who was a convert to the Church. The program includes a quick but helpful history of Catholic monasticism. Ask your local ABC station to be sure to air this high-quality show.
SUNDAY, DEC. 8
A Charlie Brown Christmas ABC, 8 p.m.
With a little help from his friends — Linus in particular — Charlie Brown comes to see the real meaning of Christmas in this animated Christmas classic. A postlude features the actress Whoopi Goldberg.
SUNDAY, DEC. 8
Emeril Live Food Network, 9 p.m.
Chef nonpareil Emeril Lagasse prepares his mother's favorite Christmas dishes for us.
MONDAY, DEC. 9
Hail, Holy Queen EWTN, 2:30 p.m.
Today's episode of this Scripture- and tradition-rich series from Scott Hahn and Mike Aquilina is “The Immaculate Conception.”
TUESDAY, DEC. 10
Decorate for the Season Home & Garden TV, 9 p.m.
Matt Fox and Shari Hiller decorate a room with Christmas trees, lights and slipcovers. They also visit a house that has Christmas trees in every room.
WEDNESDAY, DEC. 11
Sing! PBS, 8:30 p.m.
Eight-year-old kids audition for Anne Tomlinson's Los Angeles Children's Chorus, then learn how to sing as a group.
THURSDAY, DEC. 12
Animals of the Nativity
Animal Planet, 8 p.m.
This new special highlights the animals that tradition associates with the birth of Jesus. Some are still common in the Holy Land today.
FRIDAY, DEC. 13
Christmas: Behind the Traditions Home & Garden TV, 10 p.m.
Starting with the original Santa Claus — the fourth-century St. Nicholas of Myra — this special examines the origins of Christmas customs such as gift-giving, wrapping paper, eggnog, mistletoe and Christmas trees and ornaments.
SATURDAY, DEC. 14
Silent Night Hallmark Channel, 9 p.m.
In this new three-hour drama based on a real-life incident, a German mother and her son huddle in their forest cabin on Christmas Eve 1944 as the Battle of the Bulge rages around them. When three GIs and then three German soldiers take refuge there, the mother makes them hold their fire and then have Christmas dinner together. Advisory: contains scenes in which the soldiers, some wounded, are about to kill each other.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:College Town
ORLANDO SENTINEL, Nov. 22—Ave Maria University, the new Catholic college spearheaded by philanthropist Thomas Monaghan, is expected to spawn a town of its own that will rise along with the campus in what are now cane fields in southwest Florida, the newspaper reported.
The new university plans to start classes in a temporary location in Naples, Fla., next fall and then move within a few years to 750 acres near the Collier County hamlet of Immokalee, about 20 miles northeast of Naples.
The town is designed to enrich student life by having students and teachers live as close to campus as possible.
No Action AGAPE PRESS, Nov. 20—Cynthia Maughan, an Anglican graduate student, has sued the University of British Columbia, claiming she was accused of being a religious terrorist and mentally unstable for refusing to attend a required Sunday class, reported the Protestant news service.
The university took no punitive action against those who carried out the harassment, including a class member who circulated an e-mail that included comments such as, “I fondly remember a time when Christians were stoned.”
Brian Rushfeldt of the Canada Family Action Coalition said he was alarmed that the religious harassment, once made known to the university, generated no formal response.
Activist Faculty NEWSDAY, Nov. 19—The Long Island daily reported that students in the region are paying close attention to a possible war in Iraq, terrorism and events in the Middle East.
“Students are suddenly tremendously interested,” said Raymond Russo, who has been teaching a course on the Arab world for 17 years at St. Joseph's College in Patchogue, N.Y. “I have sisters and teachers asking, ‘Can I sit in on your class and listen to what's going on?’”
The newspaper also wondered if a peace movement is on the horizon. Russo said there has been an increase in campus activism, though he acknowledged, “it still has to be promoted and prompted by teachers.”
Bonzo Education
SAN MATEO COUNTY TIMES, Nov. 20—Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, Calif., has decided to offer an animal-related bachelor's degree.
Animals in Human Society will give students a chance to major in sociology with an emphasis on the frequent bond experienced by some human beings and animals.
With tongue in cheek, the newspaper goes on: “But Notre Dame's novel plan begs one key question: Who will lecture? Will it only be homo sapiens? Or will some of the members of the more articulate animal species get a chance to strut their stuff?”
Changing Culture
ST. BONAVENTURE UNIVERSITY, Nov. 20—The university announced that it has received a Lilly Endowment grant of nearly $2 million to support its Journey Project to help inspire students to pursue religious vocations.
One of the program's goals is “changing campus culture” to effect a “campus-wide culture shift toward a greater appreciation of the university's Franciscan values and how those values affect the lives of both individuals and institutions.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Thomas Aquinas College On the Rise DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:SANTA PAULA, Calif.—Teresa Moses has seen a lot of change since she first came to Thomas Aquinas College.
Her freshman class comprised just 85 students; the number now hovers at 102. A new men's dormitory and lab building are completed and occupied, and construction is planned for a new faculty building and a dorm that will house 76 women.
Far from being a seasoned alumna, Moses has been at Thomas Aquinas just four years. The senior from Michigan is witness to the fastest growth ever at the California college, which will continue to increase in size until it hits its goal of 350 students in 2006.
That was the number originally set more than 30 years ago when a group of educators and philanthropists founded the school using St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., as the model for its “great books”-based curriculum.
Recently, a lack of space, buildings and faculty has kept the college small. But in the beginning, just 33 students made up the first freshmen class in 1971. As more classes were added, the size slowly grew.
“By 1979 we had crept up to 100,” said Tom Susanka, director of admissions and a former student. “It remained around 107 from '79 until '86. It might have grown a tiny bit, but not much. In '86 we decided that we were ready to do this.”
Thus commenced a concerted effort to increase student body size. Following several years of steady increase, in 1990 the college reached a bottleneck. It was out of dorm space, and finding teachers committed to Catholic liberal education proved difficult. The college wasn't willing to sacrifice the small community feel for a larger student body.
“We've always thought we can't grow any faster than we can find unique faculty for our programs,” said Dr. Thomas Dillon, college president.
At the same time, inquiries and applications were coming in faster than ever. “Over the last five years, we've been unable to take all the students who want to come here,” Susanka said.
Administrators can give plenty of reasons for the increase in interest. A thriving summer program for high school students introduces students to the school's rigorous curriculum, community atmosphere and high expectations. U.S. News & World Report has consistently ranked Thomas Aquinas College among the Top 40 “Best Values” of national liberal arts colleges.
But prayer has also played a large role—fitting for a college that holds three daily Masses and incorporates theology, philosophy and the Catholic view into its entire curriculum.
Six years ago there was a significant lull in admissions, so a staff member suggested that they gather each day to pray the Divine Mercy chaplet.
“By the end of the year we had recruited more students than we needed, and they were just the right kind of students,” Susanka said.
The “right kind of student” is a broad definition, but students at Thomas Aquinas have an average SAT score of 1292, are expected to participate in class discussions and understand that the college does things differently. There are no lectures, no textbooks and no majors, minors or electives. Teachers are “tutors” and classes are “seminars.” The college relies on authentic texts, the Socratic method and a broad and integrated vision of the whole life and learning.
The real challenge with all the new students will be preserving the close-knit community, something tutors are already addressing. Even with enrollment increasing, the school will retain a student/faculty ratio of 10 to 1.
“As the school has grown larger, it's become more difficult for tutors to have quite the same intimacy with all the students we used to have,” said Dr. Mike McLean, a tutor at Thomas Aquinas for 24 years. While all tutors once taught all students, McLean admits he doesn't know all students by name anymore.
“What helps is that all students take the same classes,” he said, “so even if I don't have a student in class, I can still sit down with that student at lunch and have a conversation about a certain subject. Our common curriculum and program is really the unifying principle and enables us to maintain friendships even when you might not know a student.”
Moses can attest to that. “We have tutors at every single meal time. Sometimes it seems like every conversation turns into a philosophical or theological discussion,” she said.
Besides dining with students, tutors invite students to their homes for dinner. The college also holds social events such as formal dinners that encourage interaction. The campus itself, according to McLean, is designed partly to foster community.
In coming years the campus will grow along with the student body. A $75 million fund-raising campaign launched last year will provide for the chapel and several other new buildings.
“We're overcrowded,” Dillon said. “We've got to build right away.”
It might have taken 30 years, but simple supply and demand is pushing the college toward its original goal.
“We saw that there was a greater and greater demand for this kind of education,” Dillon said, “and it is better for the Church and the community and the country the more students we educate.”
Dana Wind writes from
Raleigh, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Wind ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Scripture for Couples to Chew On DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:FAMILY MATTERS: A BIBLE STUDY IN
Marriage and Family by Michaelann and Curtis Martin Emmaus Road Publishing, 2002 105 pages, $8.95 To order: (800) 398-5470 or www.emmausroad.org
Sometimes a good casserole is just as satisfying as a multi-course meal. Think of this book as the family-enrichment equivalent of a good casserole.
The Martins use personal experience, Scripture and the Magisterium to help couples study and discuss 10 major areas of Catholic married life. Each chapter frames an issue, explains the Catholic perspective on it, gets couples to read the Bible together by asking them what specific passages say about that issue (“Personal Applications”), offers points for discussion (“Talk Tips”) and ends with one or two resolutions the couple could apply in their lives (“Action Points”). The subjects run the gamut of married life: mutual prayer, time and communications, sex, child rearing, money matters and the marital vocation.
What sets the book apart is its personal, couple-to-couple style. The Martins liberally refer to their own successes and failures in married life, using this lived perspective as the launching point for talking about what the Church teaches. One unexpected benefit of this approach: its ability to trump the oft-heard charge that ecclesiastical teaching on marriage and family is suspect because it's formulated by celibate priests devoid of experience in what they're talking about.
“We have learned that it is so important to keep our marriage alive and well,” the Martins write. “Just as we feed our souls with prayer and our bodies with food, we need to feed our marriage. The type of food is what's different. We had a good friend tell us that the best way to spell love is t-i-m-e.”
The Martins always manage to reconnect their own experience with the Word of God. Their “Personal Applications” invite couples to read the Bible together, seeing how Scripture can light their way. What does the Bible say about lovers wanting to spend time together (Song of Songs 2:8-10)? What does it say about the good wife (Proverbs 31)? What about women who experienced problems with infertility (1 Samuel 1-2)?
A certain type of modern biblical scholar might disapprove of such a way of reading Scripture, but the Bible is not just a time-bound book primarily to be grammatically dissected. It is primarily to be where “the Father, who is in heaven, comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them” (Dei Verbum, No. 21). The Martins are simply inviting us to listen with ears trained specifically on what God says about marriage and family.
Given the range of topics and the brevity of the book, the Martins are, on the whole, smashingly successful. The only disappointment, for the Grondelskis at least, was the chapter on “Money Matters.” In it, the Martins urge families to live debt-free. They talk about the hidden costs of mortgages and car loans. They rightly note that most cars depreciate faster than buyers can pay off car-loan creditors. They even tell how to save more than $26,000 in five years. But they spend much time considering how much work you'll need to do to avoid borrowing money at—pardon the pun—all costs.
Two supplementary chapters round out the book. “A Leader's Guide” provides answers to biblical questions commonly raised to leaders of Bible-study groups. “Additional Resources” is a useful guide to materials for further reading, arranged topically.
Few books can give as much to chew on in 100 pages as this one. The conversations it should stimulate can be even more enriching. A meaty, recommended meal of a book.
John M. Grondelski writes
from Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: An Advent Primer DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Advent is a time to look back at the events leading up to Christ's arrival in the humility of a manger. In doing so, we prepare our hearts for the time when he returns in the glory of eternity.
It is time to prepare for the future by remembering the past that families turn to the symbols and traditions of our forebears.
What do some of our most cherished Yuletide customs mean?
The Advent wreath is more than just a glorified countdown tool. It is an excellent opportunity to catechize. “What is the symbolism of this circle of evergreen?” we ask the children. “It reminds us that our souls will last for eternity,” they respond. “And why do we add the candles?” “Because Christ is the light of the world!” Three candles are of royal purple, emphasizing our need of the Savior and our longing for his return, and a single pink candle is reserved for the joy of the third (Gaudete) Sunday of Advent—a sign that the great feast is almost here.
An Advent calendar to mark off the days until Christmas can be especially fun. Children of all ages look forward to opening another door each day, revealing a verse of Scripture, a picture or, in some cases, a festive treat. In lieu of a calendar, some families create a colorful paper chain, counting one link for each day of Advent. A Bible passage or a special deed to be performed might be written on the inside of each link. As the links are ripped off each day, the shrinking chain adds to our anticipation of Christ's birth.
The Jesse tree is a representation of that first long Advent, which lasted from the fall of man until the Incarnation of Christ. A non-descript tree branch, a banner or a simple tree drawn on poster board represents Isaiah's “stump of Jesse” (Isaiah 11:1), from which sprang the lineage of Christ. Each day, Jesus' ancestors are brought to life as stories are read and symbolic ornaments hung on the tree—an apple for the story of Adam and Eve, a rainbow for Noah, a ram's horn for the sacrifice of Isaac. Some christen their Christmas tree as a Jesse tree, reserving the ornaments to be hung on Christmas Eve. (See www.domestic-church.com for more information.)
The Christmas crib inspires us to look for occasions to be good and charitable. An empty crib is set up in the home. Throughout Advent, every time a good deed is accomplished, or if temptation is overcome in a heroic way, a piece of straw is laid in the crib.
A Christmas box for Jesus will bring home the true reason for the season. Each family member makes a card for Jesus. They write within, “Dear Jesus, I will show my love to you by …” Here, you fill in a simple act of charity. The cards are signed and placed in a box, which is gift-wrapped and placed under the tree. On Christmas morning, the letters are read aloud, accompanied by a prayer of thanksgiving.
Letters to the Christ child, in some cultures, are placed on each child's windowsill. During the night God's angels (disguised as parents) take the letters and deliver them to the Divine Infant.
Best wishes for a blessed Advent and a holy Christmas!
Caroline Schermerhorn
writes from Newark, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Caroline Schermerhorn ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Our Lady's Seat in San Diego DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Step into San Diego's Church of the Immaculate Conception and you're instantly insulated from the hum of tourists strolling up San Diego Avenue from the city's famous Old Town section.
You're also in good company. A steady stream of Catholics flow into this place; there's almost always someone here kneeling to pray or sitting to contemplate the striking crucifix behind the altar. Nor will you have to wait long before curious tourists stumble in, mistaking the church for one of the historic pit stops that dot the neighborhood. Once inside, they, too, pause to silently admire the bright interior, illuminated by long, pastel-tinted windows and the sunny mural behind the altar.
The tourists aren't completely in the wrong. This is, indeed, a historic structure—and not only because of its great age (great, at least, in terms of California history). Immaculate Conception is also connected to Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel Ramona, one of the best-known fictional accounts of old California.
And it's the place to be in far-southern California on Dec. 9, feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Dedicated in November 1858, this church dedicated to the Blessed Mother under that very TITLE is the oldest parish church in California: It was the first church established after the missions were secularized in the 1830s.
A prominent resident of the pueblo, Don Jose Aguirre, purchased a small adobe house with the proceeds of a lawsuit he'd won. This house was converted into a church, in which he was later buried. The mission's statues, vestments and four bells were transferred to Immaculate Conception.
Father Antonio Ubach, the second parish priest, had big dreams for San Diego—including a grand, Gothic parish church. Before 1870, the bishop of the Monterey-Los Angeles Diocese had laid the cornerstone for the new church on the site where Immaculate Conception now stands.
But as the area's population shifted and the funding began to dwindle, the brick walls only rose a few feet off the ground. It wasn't until 1914 that Father Joseph Mesney was able to pick up where his predecessor had left off—and, then, not before he undid some of the work that had already been completed. The bricks had stood exposed to the elements for 45 years, after all. He tore down the walls and had the bricks cleaned, then used them to build the soaring white church that stands today. This was dedicated by Archbishop John Cantwell, Los Angeles' first archbishop.
When the new Immaculate Conception opened for worship in 1917, it did so with the statues, bells and paintings of its old adobe predecessor.
Later these items were sent to other churches in California and Arizona, but Immaculate Conception still has tangible ties to San Diego history; two of Mission San Diego's original bells hang again at the mission, but a third one hangs in Immaculate Conception's bell tower. Meanwhile the façade, two pairs of elegant curves flanking the section on which hangs the Cross of Christ, recalls the façade of the mission.
Inside, even the windows draw visitors' thoughts back to the history of California's first non-native settlement. One bears the inscription, “In Memoria: Fr. Junipero Serra, by Friends.”
How fitting that the founder of California's first mission, San Diego de Alcala, should be memorialized in this San Diego church, which also holds an important place in California history.
The Real Ramona
In the parish garden, a kneeler rests behind a statue of St. Juan Diego, canonized by Pope John Paul II this past summer. Visitors can kneel here with him before a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appeared to him more than five centuries ago.
As for the original Immaculate Conception, it stands just a short walk from the “new” church. Now that California has designated it a historical landmark, its entrance is barred so that visitors can look inside but not enter.
After the new church opened in 1917, the adobe chapel was used as a kindergarten. In 1922, 14 years after it was boarded up, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles transferred ownership of the chapel to the city of San Diego to allow its restoration under the Works Progress Administration. The chapel was rededicated in 1937 by Bishop Charles Buddy of the brand-new Diocese of San Diego and was used as a chapel by the Columbian fathers from 1938 to 1970, when the San Diego County Historical Days Association took over custodianship.
The humble place of prayer, with its thick walls and eight small pews, seems a church in miniature compared to Immaculate Conception. It's a fitting place for the couple who inspired Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona to marry.
Speaking of which: Who married the real-life “half-breed” Ramona and her Luiseño Indian husband, Alessandro? Father Ubach, of course—it was he who provided the inspiration for Jackson's fictional Father Gaspara.
Something tells me, as I pray among the visitors here, that the real Father Ubach is, even now, praying for all those who come to this place seeking God.
Elisabeth Deffner writes from
Orange, California.
----- EXCERPT: Church of the Immaculate Conception, San Diego ----- EXTENDED BODY: Elisabeth Deffner ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Q
Is Privacy a Kid's Right?
A
Do you think children have a right to privacy concerning their room and personal belongings?
The right to privacy. It may make for good constitutional debates, but it makes for real bad parenting. A mother called my radio show upset that, while cleaning her teen-age daughter's room, she had come across a letter describing her daughter's sexual behavior with her boyfriend. Part of mom's distress was guilt over having “snooped,” however unintentionally, and the fear of confronting her daughter, whom she knew would immediately hammer her with “You have no right to look through my things!” (As an aside, if such were her daughter's first response—rather than embarrassment, guilt or some display of conscience—then she would be telling mom much about her view of sexual conduct.) The overall tone of the call was mom's struggling more with her own psychological correctness than with her daughter's moral incorrectness.
Making bad decisions is innate to humans, even the most mature of us. When those humans are only partway mature, as is even the most mature child, the odds of moving down self-destructive paths go up dramatically. So God gave children gatekeepers—parents—who are wiser, usually, and can help steer them away from bad paths or close those paths altogether. If those gatekeepers surrender some of their God-given duty to guide and protect because of some trendy, silly, “democratic” notion of family, who is left to guard the child? The child is not capable of guarding himself.
Of course, most parents don't do a mattress search of their kids' belongings in the absence of any evidence of trouble whatsoever. I'm not advocating such. What I am advocating is that children know from day one—at whatever age you decide that day falls—that you will act resolutely at any time in any way to head off any trouble at first sniff of it.
The “right to privacy” has an honorable sound to it. It seems so respectful of a child's emotional boundaries. Yet it is dramatically superceded by another right: the right to safety. Far over and above any need to have secrets is the need to be protected from the results of those secrets. A parent's foremost duty is to guide a child to adulthood in good moral shape. Where that duty collides with a child's wants, the parent must win—for the sake of all of the child's rights.
Dr. Ray Guarendi is a
psychologist and an author.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The National Catholic Register's Clip-Out and Pass-On Guide for Advent—Week 2 DATE: 12/08/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 08-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Reason 1
The presence of sin can easily lead to depression and anxiety.
Step 1 Examine your conscience … using the Ten Commandments or an available guide.
Reason 2 Mortal sin, unconfessed, “causes exclusion from Christ's Kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices forever, with no turning back” (Catechism, No. 1861).
Reason 3 As they leave the confessional, people smile a smile of freedom.
Step 2 You have the choice of facing the priest (if he offers the option) or speaking through a screen.
Step 3 There are no special words you need to say. Greet the priest, and tell him how long it has been since your last confession. If it's been a while, he'll help you.
Reason 4 You will grow in sincerity, humility and self-knowledge.
Reason 5 Because love means having to say you are sorry to the one you love.
Step 4 Be concise, clear, complete and contrite. You have to confess mortal sins and give a sense of how often. Don't be embarrassed. You're not going to tell the priest anything he hasn't already heard.
Reason 6 You shower to show respect for those around you. Cleansing your soul makes you better to be around, too!
Reason 7 Mother Teresa thought she had to go. Frequently.
Next Week: Return to Prayer
Reason 8 Hoping to convert on your deathbed? That's not very likely. Most likely, you will die as you lived.
Reason 9 It is itself a serious sin to go to Communion if you have serious sin on your soul and have not asked for forgiveness in confession.
Confession Definition
“For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: ‘Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1857).
Concerns & Answers
Can't I talk to God directly, not a priest, to get forgiveness?
Not according to the Bible. Read John 20:21-23; 2 Corinthians 2:10; and 2 Corinthians 5:18.
If God knows everything we do, then how come we have to go to confession?
You may know your younger brother broke your CD player, but wouldn't it be aggravating if he knew you knew, but still didn't say “I'm sorry?”
Doesn't God forgive no matter what?
If we think of sin as merely breaking rules, it is hard to & understand why God can't just “look the other way.” But sin is real; it hurts us and makes us distant from him—and unable to enter heaven. We can only be restored if we confess.
Confession just gives people the idea that it's all right to sin as long as you're sorry later.
If a man is confessing drunkenness while he has plans with his buddies to go barhopping and get drunk again the coming weekend, he can't be forgiven. He has to have decided to stop. Confession stops sins; it doesn't start them.
Step 5 The priest won't scold you. In fact, if you've had a tough confession, he'll show you extra care.
Reason 10 Don't be scared to death of confession. Be scared of death without confession.
Step 6 Then you'll make an act of contrition. Look in a prayer book for a longer one, or simply say: “Jesus, I am truly sorry for my sins and, with your grace, I will try to sin no more.”
Reason 11 Be strong. Face your sins, deal with them and move on.
Step 7 Do your penance right away, before leaving the church if possible.
Your penance won't be harsh.
Step 8 Christ has forgiven and forgotten your sins and the angels are having a party to celebrate.
Reason 12 Make sure there are no unpleasant surprises at your particular judgment or at the Final Judgment.
Reason 13 The priest will listen to your sins and will never tell a soul on pain of losing his soul. Priests even learn to forget what they hear.
----- EXCERPT: How (and Why) to Return to Confessiond ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: 'Choice on Earth' Fuels Bad Will This Christmas DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:WASHINGTON — “Peace on Earth,” a quote from the Gospel account of Christ's birth, is a favorite Christmastime greeting. But Planned Parenthood Federation of America has put a new twist on the greeting: cards and T-shirts that say “Choice on Earth.”
The cards and T-shirts are advertised on Planned Parenthood's Web site and in published materials the agency sends out to supporters. Planned Parenthood is the largest single abortion business in the United States.
“Choice on Earth” products have scandalized Christians and other pro-life advocates, and pro-life organizations are calling on Congress to slash some of the $151 million Planned Parenthood receives in federal funds.
“We're not talking pie in the sky here. We went after their funding in 1995 and it was close — about 20 votes short,” said Ed Szymkowiak, national director for STOPP International, a branch of the American Life League dedicated to putting Planned Parenthood out of business.
“Consider the fact that Republicans control both houses of Congress at a time when we have a Republican president,” Szymkowiak said. “Republicans are much more likely to be pro-life, and they are much more interested in keeping taxpayer money from going to the benefit of institutions that are insulting to the culture.
Szymkowiak urges anyone who finds the “Choice on Earth” holiday products offensive to contact their congressional delegation and complain about the amount of public money spent on Planned Parenthood. In all, the organization receives $202.7 million from federal, state and local governments.
Federal funds to Planned Parenthood are hidden in programs such as Medicaid, the Social Services Block Grants program and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.
“Planned Parenthood has a right to free speech, and we have a right to go after their funding,” Szymkowiak said. “If this organization wants to launch an annual attack on Christianity to celebrate the birth of the Christ child, then Christians can decide not to keep giving them money. If Planned Parenthood had its way, there wouldn't be kids around to celebrate the Christ child. It would be a world of graveyards and empty playgrounds if Planned Parenthood had its way.”
One new member of Congress said he cannot wait to take office and begin looking into the funding of Planned Parenthood. Rep.-elect Bob Beauprez, R-Colo., expressed disgust at the “Choice on Earth” holiday products.
“It blasphemes the Christ Child — the very essence of what Christians hold as life eternal,” Beauprez said. “Christ is the source of peace on earth, and their definition of ‘choice’ is anything but peace.”
Beauprez, an orthodox Catholic, survived an intense smear campaign against his pro-life views and won by less than 200 votes in this year's elections.
“I believe I won because of their attacks on my pro-life views,” Beauprez said. “They thought it would benefit them, and I think it backfired. I think their ‘Choice on Earth’ holiday message will backfire as well. The American public now understands what abortion is really about, and Planned Parenthood no longer can enjoy making it look like a harmless matter of ‘choice.’ I think it's changing because of the sonogram and other technology. There is simply no question in anyone's mind in this day and age that an unborn child is really a human life and nothing else.”
Nancy Carew, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said she could not comment on the “Choice on Earth” products or any of the criticism surrounding them. Carew also declined to comment about STOPP's desire to see the organization's federal funding slashed.
An official statement by Gloria Feldt, president of the federation, said “recent anti-choice attacks on Planned Parenthood's ‘Choice on Earth’ holiday card are absurd.” She said the greeting is intended as an “inclusive seasonal message for people of all faiths.”
The controversy, Feldt explained in the statement, has so energized Planned Parenthood supporters that “Choice on Earth” T-shirts were printed. Feldt said STOPP has generated controversy about the slogan only because the organization “serves no redeeming purpose” and exists only to shut down Planned Parenthood.
“We serve no redeeming purpose?” Szymkowiak asked rhetorically. “She's right about one thing: It is our goal to shut them down. However, that is a redeeming purpose.”
The Factor
In a letter to Bill O'Reilly, who discussed the cards on Fox News Channel's “The O'Reilly Factor,” Feldt claimed that the “Choice on Earth” slogan is a “popular sentiment that expresses some of the highest values of our democratic society: respect for diversity, without which there can be no peace, for example.”
Feldt also referred to a letter to O'Reilly written by a Congregational minister who is a member of Planned Parenthood's Clergy Advisory Board. She said O'Reilly's staff rejected the minis-ter's appearance on “The O'Reilly Factor” and said that “a member of the clergy is far better able than I to articulate the sacredness of choice.”
The Planned Parenthood executive also mentioned that O'Reilly's show helped the organization sell out of its cards.
Mark O'Malley, the senior marketing manager for a Fortune 500 information technology company, said Planned Parenthood might be enjoying the controversy surrounding its holiday greeting marketing campaign.
“Ironically, in marketing, any kind of news is sometimes good news,” O'Malley said. “A controversy such as this raises awareness for Planned Parenthood and its so-called cause. The people who support them are not likely the kind of people who would be offended by this card. The people who find it offensive are already offended by the other things Planned Parenthood does, such as passing out condoms in schools.”
O'Malley said examples abound of controversies involving moral faux pas that benefit the person or organization at the center of the scandal. Boycotts of offensive TV shows, he said, typically boost the show's ratings and result in long-term benefits for the network.
But money talks, Szymkowiak said, and Planned Parenthood won't be heard from again if its funding dries up.
Beauprez said people who are offended by the “Choice on Earth” message shouldn't keep quiet about it. He said they should express their feelings to anyone who sends them a card with the message and should speak out if confronted by someone wearing a T-shirt.
“Christians must stand firm in their beliefs,” Beauprez said. “I got blasted during the campaign for being pro-life over and over again with every other commercial my opponent ran on TV. I stood firm, and people did what his ads told them to do. They called my office. Most of the callers, however, expressed outrage at what he was doing, and they said ‘God bless you’ for standing firm. If you're outraged by the message someone is conveying, tell them you're outraged.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Planned Parenthood Affiliate Uses Teens to Recruit Peers DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:While teen-agers are choosing sexual abstinence in droves, as reported in a recent issue of Newsweek, one chapter of Planned Parenthood is paying youth to recruit their peers as consumers of contraception and abortion.
Planned Parenthood of North Central Ohio, in Mansfield, will receive government funding in 2003 so teen-agers can be paid to recruit their friends to come in for contraceptives and abortions.
Some say this bounty program is evidence as to why the 108th Congress should seriously consider defunding the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which secures federal funds for local and regional branches such as Planned Parenthood of North Central Ohio.
In an application for funds from Morrow County Job and Family Services — an agency that distributes federal, state and local tax proceeds — Planned Parenthood officials said they would pay teens $100 each to be trained as “out-reach workers.” Once trained and paid, the outreach workers will be paid a bounty for each new recruit.
The application says: “The teen outreach workers will be paid a stipend of $100 for attending the training and meeting the terms of their contractual work as well as $5 for each patient up to 20 patients that they recruit and [who] show up for an appointment at our Cardington Clinic.”
The bounty program has led the Family Research Council, based in Washington, D.C., to criticize Planned Parenthood for what the organization says is a cash promotion of sexual promiscuity among teens.
“The Bush administration is on the right track by promoting abstinence-only education,” said Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council. “Why then are we using tax dollars to promote Planned Parenthood's culture of abortion and so-called safe sex?”
After repeated efforts, the Register was unable to reach Cindy Biggs, director of Planned Parenthood of North Central Ohio, or the agency's spokeswoman, Leslie Stauffer, for comment.
In her application for funds, Biggs tells county officials Planned Parenthood opted to avoid traditional advertising for its new clinic in Cardington, Ohio, because too many people in the community opposed the clinic and Planned Parenthood's practices. Instead of billboards, newspaper ads and other forms of commercial advertising, the application says, Planned Parenthood officials decided to proceed “quietly” with referral cards, agency brochures and fliers to area schools, guidance counselors and social service agencies.
“Planned Parenthood has known for years, in surveying our patients, that most patients who come to us are a personal referral from a friend or family member,” the application says. “In order to take advantage of this ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising, Planned Parenthood would like to recruit outreach workers to find patients to utilize the clinic services.”
“Under no circumstances should taxpayers be forced to subsidize Planned Parenthood's efforts to promote teen sex,” Connor said. “The idea of paying teens to recruit other teens into Planned Parenthood's grasp is unconscionable; doing it with taxpayer dollars is outrageous.”
— Wayne Laugesen
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: From Genesis To Revelation: Jews Become Catholics DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:YPSILANTI, Mich. — For David Moss, the year 1979 has significant meaning.
It was the second year of Pope John Paul II's pontificate, the year Discalced Carmelite Father Elias Friedman founded the Association of Hebrew Catholics and the year Moss became a Catholic.
Raised Jewish in Brooklyn, N.Y., Moss abandoned his faith at about age 15 and set out on a spiritual quest that eventually led him to the Catholic Church. In 1979, while in a state of despair, Moss “cried out” to know if God existed, and God answered.
“I can't explain it,” Moss said. “He took me out of myself. I knew at that moment that there was a God. And to my great surprise, I also knew that Jesus was the Messiah. That moment changed my life.”
Moss, who is now president of the Association of Hebrew Catholics, based in Ypsilanti, Mich., said there are grave emotional challenges for many Jews who consider converting to Catholicism.
According to Moss, many Jews consider a Jew's conversion to Catholicism to be a betrayal of the Jewish people.
“[Jewish converts] have different experiences but a sense of betrayal is a common thing,” Moss said. “[The betrayal of the Jewish people] is a major obstacle for those [Jews] who would consider the claims of the Catholic Church.”
Rosalind Moss, a Catholic apologist who works for San Diego-based Catholic Answers (and who is David Moss' sister), is herself a convert from Judaism but by way of evangelical Protestantism. She recalled the effects her Catholic conversion had on her family and relatives.
“Our parents had difficulty accepting us,” she said. “I had some cousins in Brooklyn who physically spat at me and have shut me out of their life. They sent me a note that read, ‘May G-d curse you.’”
But she also encountered tolerance. “I've gained respect from some Jewish friends since becoming Catholic. I've found that the Catholic Church is much more respected among Jews. They see it as the closest thing to Judaism.”
Although the Moss' parents never converted to Catholicism, they did become Christians. “Our parents came to believe in Christ,” she said. “They became Baptists before they died. They're Catholic now — in purgatory or heaven.”
David Moss noted the theological challenges Catholicism presents are not so difficult for a Jewish convert to surmount, but “there are a number of issues that have to be dealt with.”
Some of those issues include the doctrines of the incarnation, the Trinity and Jesus' atonement for sin. He said the idea of God becoming man — the incarnation — is ludicrous to some Jews because “Jews have a high, pure notion of God, a transcendent God.”
The doctrine of the Trinity — the interrelationship of three persons in one God — can also be difficult to accept as many Jews are used to hearing, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord your God is one!”
Jesus' atonement for sins is difficult to accept because, in general, Jews do not believe the atonement of their sins can take place vicariously.
Rosalind Moss, who described her own conversion to Catholicism as “a holy shock,” also wrestled with theological difficulties.
“My last two stumbling blocks were the sacramental nature of the Church and the nature of the Mass,” she said. After resolving her doubts, she became fully initiated into the Church at Easter Vigil 1995.
The Church's history of antiSemitism, however, never posed a problem in her decision to become a Catholic.
“The history of anti-Semitism in the Church grieved me, and still does,” she said, “but it did not affect my entering or staying in the Church.
I became a Catholic because God brought me to him. It was truth that mattered.”
David Moss added that although the “terrible treatment of Jews by Christians” throughout history can be another obstacle for Jews, it was not an impediment for him.
“While many Catholics — even some members of the hierarchy — aided and abetted Hitler and were anti-Semitic, the Church did much to save Jews,” he said regarding the Holocaust. “Pius XII has nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, many Jews heaped praise upon Pius XII after the war. Pinchas Lapide in his book Three Popes and the Jews estimated that 800,000 Jews were saved. Rabbi Israel Zolli, the chief rabbi of Rome, converted after the war and was so impressed with Pope Pius XII that he took the name of Eugenio [the birth name of Pius XII] as his Christian name.”
Father C. John McCloskey, director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., who has helped a number of people in their conversions from Judaism to Catholicism, said he is “very impressed” with many Jewish converts' intellectual honesty in seeking the true Church.
“The great majority of Jews who have become Catholic are not troubled by things like the Inquisition, Pius XII or the Nazis,” Father McCloskey said. “They think, ‘If I'm going to convert to Christianity, it's going to be to Catholicism. This is the real thing.’”
In fact, he said, he enjoys more often interacting with secular Jews than Protestants. “[Jews] are people of the Book,” he said. “They're really looking for the truth. Jews have the advantage. They may have prejudice against Christ but not prejudice against the Catholic Church, per se. Jews — secular and orthodox — recognize that the Catholic Church is the real thing.”
Father McCloskey encourages Catholics to pray not only for Jewish converts but also for the Jewish people.
“[Jews] should be the first fruits of our Lord's resurrection and ascension,” Father McCloskey said. “The three people we love most are Jews: Jesus, Mary and Joseph. We must have a great love for the chosen people. They are still the chosen people. God does not break covenants. They are a great part of salvation history past and future.”
Hebrew Vocation
Just how the chosen people who have converted to Catholicism now fit into salvation history is what David Moss and the Association of Hebrew Catholics are currently addressing. While many ethnic ministries and communities thrive within the Church, Moss noted that there is no visible Hebrew Catholic community.
“I can live out my Christian vocation,” he said, “but not my Israelite [Hebrew] vocation.”
Moss said the association's goal is to preserve the Hebrew vocation and heritage by working toward the establishment of a community of Hebrew Catholics.
“There were 1,500 years of Israelite development before Christ,” he said. “Jesus didn't reject that. He didn't come to destroy the Law but to fulfill it. All the richness of the culture of Israel could come back to the Church. There would be great benefits to knowing and experiencing the Jewish roots of the Church.”
“The Church could provide means for Hebrew Catholics to preserve their heritage and customs as long as they don't conflict with the Catholic faith,” he added.
Moss said there may be Jewish converts “who might want to continue living the spiritual disciplines that the Torah prescribes” such as keeping kosher or celebrating Passover. He emphasized that maintaining these spiritual disciplines would be voluntary for the Jewish convert as they are unnecessary for salvation. He also noted that Catholics already preserve the Jewish heritage to some degree by praying the Psalms.
Although God's plan for the chosen people — Jewish and Catholic — is unclear, it seems Jewish converts have taken their first step in fulfilling that plan by becoming Christians.
“God showed me that to become Catholic is the most Jewish, the most Christian thing a person can do,” Rosalind Moss said. “Catholicism is the fulfillment of Judaism and the full measure of Christianity. I'm in love. I'm home forever. There's no place else to go.”
Martin Mazloom writes from Monterey Park, California.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Martin Mazloom ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'Catholic' Thriller DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:MINNEAPOLIS — The Minneapolis theater goes dark and The Two Towers begins. Huge on the screen, the evil Balrog free-falls into a seemingly endless cave with Gandalf the wizard falling in pursuit. The battle for Middle Earth has begun.
The opening scene sums up the two elements of the movie that attract both religious people and the general public: It's a battle between good and evil, with other-worldly creatures and plenty of action.
A precious few have already seen the film. Mark Dittman, parish administrator at St. Jude of the Lake Church in Mahtomedi, Minn., was among the crowd at the preview in Minneapolis.
While he said he thought The Two Towers took some liberties, it largely followed the book and was what he expected.
His assessment was similar to those who saw the first film in this fantasy adventure quest tale. In three parts, director Peter Jackson is telling the tales of The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). More than 75% of respondents to a Time magazine poll said part one, The Fellowship of the Ring, was true to the book.
“The movie is never going to be the book,” said Al Benthall, professor of literature at Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Mich., “but it is a success.”
“It's one of the better things going in Hollywood,” he said. “Jackson's intentions are noble and that comes across. It works as a film.”
Continuing precisely where Fellowship of the Ring left off, the film follows the journey of Frodo and Sam, two hobbits who have come into possession of a mysterious ring that is sought by the evil forces of Sauron and Saruman. In part three, they must try to destroy the ring in the dreaded land of Mordor. In The Two Towers, the film builds to the 50-minute Battle of Helm's Deep, where 10,000 Uruk-hai warriors have gathered to destroy the civilization of men.
An early review of The Two Towers by John Hiscock, writing for the U.K.'s Daily Mirror, described it as “more cutthroat than its predecessor.”
Director Jackson said it “definitely isn't as cute [as Fellowship]. It has a much more gritty kind of edge to it.” Indeed, the film features grotesque creatures, decapitations and death.
Catholic Moments
How Catholic is the movie? “I was really taken with Jackson's use of religious symbolism in the first film,” said Bradley Birzer, professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., and author of the recently published J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle Earth (ISI Books).
While Tolkien resisted any comparisons of his story to formal allegory, Birzer said that in his letters Tolkien describes the story as a Catholic work with many fundamental allegorical symbols. As examples, Birzer noted several scenes from the extended-DVD version of the first film.
“There were a number of times where [Frodo's friend] Aragorn gives a primitive sign of the cross. There is Frodo carrying the ring as the suffering servant,” he said. “Gandalf standing on the bridge declares that he is a servant of the secret fire, an allusion that Tolkien told a friend was the Holy Spirit. And there are a few statues that look very Marian. Also, when Arwen the elf finds Frodo wounded, she prays, saying, ‘What grace is given me, let it pass to him.’”
“Such moments offer something transcendent in the movie,” Birzer said. “I went to the movie to hate it and ended up loving it.”
Such moments also appear in The Two Towers.
“When Gandalf returns as Gandalf the White he is hidden in a blinding light and has three witnesses. It's very much a transfiguration scene,” Dittman said. “There is also a scene of exorcism when Gandalf the White exorcises the possessed King Theoden, and the film explores the possibility of redemption for all, even for Gollum who has murdered his cousin and covets the ring.”
Dittman is referring to one of the film's most poignant scenes. In it Gollum, who has been corrupted by the evil power of the ring, argues with his conscience about whether to trust Frodo. He temporarily succeeds in casting off his dark side.
“The film makes me aware of my own daily struggles with evil,” Dittman said. “They take a different form for me than battles and Orcs. It's the daily grind, the temptations I face and the choices I make. What these characters face is symbolic of what I face.”
“While Tolkien would say that he didn't intend it, his Catholicism was a part of him and therefore came out in his stories,” said Dittman, who is a graduate student in the Catholic Studies program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.
The high point for Dittman in The Two Towers was Samwise Gamgee's speech to Frodo near the end of the film.
Sam asks Frodo whether he remembers the stories that really mattered.
“They were full of darkness and danger and you didn't want to know the end,” he explains. “But in the end you realize that it's a passing thing and a new day will come. Those are the stories that stayed with you and meant something. The folks in those stories kept going. They held onto something.”
“What are we hanging onto?” Frodo asks.
“That there is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for,” Sam responds.
Of the scene, Dittman said, “We're all on the road to sainthood. We want people to tell stories about us someday. Isn't that the kind of legacy we want to leave? I think it's significant that a movie can raise that question. Very few contemporary films can do that.”
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
------ EXCERPT: The Two Towers Offers Symbols of Faith ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Safe for Kids? DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:A father of nine, Raleigh, N.C., attorney David Guin tried taking his 8- and 10-year-old boys to the Fellowship of the Ring, the 2001 movie which began the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Two Towers, which opens Dec. 18, is the second movie in the series.
“They had heard the audio version of the book but asked to leave about halfway through the film because they were frightened,” Guin recalled. He was able to return with his sons at a later date and described any potentially frightening scenes before they appeared on-screen.
Mark Dittman, parish administrator at St. Jude of the Lake Church in Mahtomedi, Minn., said the violence was comparable to that found in the first film. While his 7-year-old son has seen that film, Dittman doubted whether he would take him to see The Two Towers.
“Gollum was scary to me, even more so than the Orcs,” Dittman said. “He looked very unpleasant. I think he would be frightening to young children. However, if they have read the books it may soften the harshness.”
“Parents should be warned that there are depictions of Orcs,” said Tolkien scholar Joseph Pearce of Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Mich. “They are ugly, aggressive and violent. That's what they are. If a parent feels that their children are not old enough to cope with those images, then they should not let them go watch it.”
He did, however, encourage parents to read their children the books as soon as they are able, saying, “No harm can come from reading The Lord of the Rings.”
— Tim Drake
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Silent After Alleged 'Hate Crime' DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:CHICAGO — A Catholic woman challenged a homosexual man to change his lifestyle. He told police he snapped and killed her.
And now media critics wonder: Is there a double standard in the national coverage of crimes involving homosexuals?
After Mary Stachowicz attended Mass at St. Hyacinth on the city's northwest side Nov. 13, she walked across the street to her part-time job at a funeral home. Above the funeral home is Nicholas Gutierrez's apartment.
In his apartment, an argument ensued. When Stachowicz asked him why he had sex with men instead of women, he pulled out a knife and stabbed her. After suffocating her with a plastic bag, he hid her body. Two days later he turned himself in to police.
The Chicago Tribune noted the crime in the newspaper with an obituary. Four additional pages included condolences. Local TV stations, such as ABC-affiliate Channel 7 and NBC-affiliate Channel 5, also covered the news.
But Rich Noyes, spokesman for the Media Research Center, said national media exposure was nonexistent. The media silence was completely different from the coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard, a homosexual man killed by two men, he said.
“The only place we've seen it covered is when [Bill] O'Reilly interviewed [National Review columnist] Rod Dreher on Fox News,” Noyes said. “I guess there's been some local coverage in Chicago, but I haven't seen any national coverage.”
A Lexis-Nexis search determined that in the 17 days following Stachowicz's murder, media outlets had printed a total of 13 stories of her murder. A similar nationwide search of stories about Shepard yielded 313 stories only five days after his murder.
But Wayne Besen, spokesman for the homosexual lobby group Human Rights Campaign, said criticism of the Stachowicz coverage is not driven by compassion for her alone.
“I think the conservatives were badly damaged by Matthew Shepard,” Besen said.
He said that a torrent of anti-homosexual messages immediately preceded Shepard's death and this led to sympathy for Shepard after his brutal murder in 1998.
Shepard, 21, was lured by two men at a bar to a remote field outside Laramie, Wyo., where he was tied to a fence and beaten to death.
“In the summer before this, Reggie White spoke out against gays, Trent Lott compared gays to kleptomaniacs and full-page ads in major papers encouraged gays to change their lifestyle,” Besen said.
He also said that the murder of Stachowicz was immediate, whereas Shepard was murdered hours after the initial encounter with his eventual killers.
“It's not like this guy went into a church to find someone,” said Besen of Gutierrez's killing of Stachowicz.
William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said the murder of Stachowicz demonstrates the futility of hate-crime legislation.
“The FBI says that for an act to be dubbed a hate crime it must be determined that hate speech accompanies intimidation in the commission of a crime,” Donohue said. “It is clear to nearly everyone that such determinations are highly subjective and open to serious abuse.”
“The fact is she was murdered for having a Catholic-formed conscience,” he said.
The alleged killer is being prosecuted for a capital offense but not for a hate crime.
“It's the state's attorney's call on whether to charge someone with a hate crime,” Officer JoAnn Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department, said to the Washington Times.
Noyes is skeptical of hate-crimes legislation and especially its enforcement, but he focused on the media coverage of these two murders.
“If two white guys kill a gay guy, the media covers it because there's a lesson America needs to learn,” he said. “If a gay flies off the handle and kills someone, there's no lesson that America needs to learn. So the media don't cover it.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Church Police Chief DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Kathleen McChesney, 51, was the third highest-ranking member of the FBI before she left her position in November, answering a call to help the Catholic Church.
In her FBI position she was charged with coordinating the post-Sept. 11 security efforts of the nation's 18,000 law enforcement agencies and the FBI's bureau operations in 44 countries. She began her new job Dec. 2 as the first executive director of the Office for Child and Youth Protection, established by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to carry out its new sexual-abuse policies.
During her second day on the job, McChesney took time out to speak with Register correspondent Wayne Laugesen about her plans for her new position.
As executive director of the Office for Child and Youth Protection, what would you most like to accomplish?
First, we'd like to make certain that we have safe environments and that no child is victimized under any auspices of our Church. Second, we'd like to enforce the accountability the bishops said they wanted through their creation of the norms.
The important thing about all of this is that the charter and the norms are the product of the bishops. They are the ones who said, “Here is what we want: We want studies, we want audits, we want safe environments.” The role of this office is to help the bishops implement those things.
Why did you accept this position and leave behind one of the top positions in federal law enforcement?
It wasn't difficult to leave the position to come and do something that is so important to literally millions of people in the United States. I think the FBI has an incredible responsibility and mission, and I had the great fortune to be part of helping it move toward its goals. This gives me another opportunity to help another institution and the people in it to make a better place for young people and to restore trust in the institution where it may have been lost.
What made you interested in a law enforcement career?
I was inspired by friends who were police officers and friends who were students in police science. When I was in college at Gonzaga University and later at Washington State, I had friends who were in the police department in Seattle and I was very intrigued by their real-life work and service to the public.
What was your first job out of college?
It was with the King County Police in Seattle. For a short time I worked in the jail, fingerprinting and photographing prisoners. During my 31 years in law enforcement, I've done a lot of different kinds of police work.
Did your Catholic upbringing influence your law enforcement philosophy or affect the way you conduct your career today?
Your spirituality intermingles with your law enforcement career in that it affects the way you relate to people. It has an effect on how you serve other people and how you get through seeing some of the horrible things law enforcement officers see, in terms of what people do to each other. But you also see how, through victimization, people use their spirituality to get through very difficult situations.
Has the sexual-abuse scandal in the Church tested your faith at all? If so, how?
No, it has not. It has caused me great sadness, but I don't think one stops believing in the Lord simply because some people in an institution have done bad things.
The original sexual-abuse policy that was drafted in Dallas came under harsh criticism for diminishing due process for priests. How important is due process for the accused?
Having worked in the criminal justice system for the past 31 years, I believe it's very important, not only on the civil side — meaning the law enforcement side — but also with regard to laws of the Church. There's an excellent parallel there between the two systems.
In both, it's important that victims are recognized and assisted, and that the accused are assisted, provided counsel and given due process. Where there is finding of guilt, it's important that there be accountability, punishment, action and correction.
Having respect for due process, did you concur with the criticism of the Dallas policy that was levied by the Canon Law Society of America and others?
Clearly there was an issue with due process, and it had to be addressed. I think it has been addressed through the modifications to the norms — recognizing, of course, that these modifications have not been fully recognized by the Vatican. So there's still a ways to go, but it appears that some of the issues regarding due process have been addressed.
Do you think the new policy, devised at the most recent bishops' conference in Washington, D.C., can be effective?
Yes, I do believe the policies will work for a number of reasons. One is that so many people are working together to make them work. It's not just the job of this office, but also the responsibility of the members of the various parishes — the lay people.
It's the responsibility of the clergy, the responsibility of this office and the responsibility of the review boards, the bishops and the employees of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Everyone has to work together. We are all so committed to this goal that I have no doubt whatsoever that we will accomplish all the things we intend to accomplish.
As an administrator, are there changes you'd like to see to the latest version of the sexual-abuse policy that would help you do your job?
That remains to be seen. We have to hear back from the Vatican to know whether we even have a document yet that the Vatican will fully accept. But I think it's a historic and very workable document.
Gov. Frank Keating, who heads the national review board, has been criticized for having too much prosecutorial zeal, if you will, in his approach to the sexual-abuse scandal. Some worry that your federal law enforcement background might lead to an approach that's also too punitive — an approach that ignores Catholic teachings on redemption. What's your reaction to this type of speculation?
I think any zeal that comes to this office should be directed at obtaining the goal of safe environments for children, the goal of providing care and therapy to people who have been victims, to making sure that reporting has been done to civil authorities.
The problems we're talking about in the Church are crimes. It's important that the Church conducts its investigations and takes its actions in accordance with canon law.
As for prosecutorial zeal, I wouldn't use that terminology at all. What you see is a commitment to getting the goals we've discussed accomplished. Prosecution isn't a function of this office.
Please explain your views on redemption and forgiveness toward perpetrators of crimes, as a Catholic and a law enforcement officer.
Our criminal justice system demands accountability for your actions, including a range of punishments inflicted on a person who is found guilty of committing a criminal act. In conjunction with that, our criminal justice system has a corrections aspect to it, offering rehabilitation services, educational services and other types of correctional activities.
On the religious side, the issues of redemption and forgiveness are very personal and they are between the victims and the offenders — that's one dynamic — and the other is between the offenders and God. All of that is woven together, if you will.
There's not just one way of looking at it. You have to look at the whole perspective. While we are spiritual people, we also live in a society of man-made laws and systems, and we have to be able to deal with both.
How has your most recent assignment — working as liaison with the nation's 18,000 law enforcement agencies and bureau operations in 44 countries — helped prepare you for your new job?
All of my positions in the FBI have prepared me for this task. I know how to get disparate groups to work together. We made a lot of progress in the FBI in enhancing our relationships with law enforcement agencies. What I've also recognized is that where the relationships are most key is on the local level.
So what I bring to this is that the relationships between the bishops and their various parishes and parishioners in their diocese is the most critical thing. The improvements won't be made in a Washington, D.C., office building, they'll be made out there where people and their families go to church.
Keating addressed that in his own special way. He said if a bishop isn't properly responding to sexual-abuse allegations, parishioners should consider attending Mass in another diocese and perhaps stop writing checks to the Church. What do you think of that type of advice?
I'm not familiar with those statements, and I don't know what context they were made in, so it would be difficult for me to comment on that.
What advice do you have for parishioners who wish to help solve this problem?
I would hope parishioners would recognize the efforts of the bishops since Dallas. I would hope parishioners would work with us and their ministers to create safe environments. I would encourage them to not be afraid to report incidences of abuse. I would hope that they would recognize that the bishops have agreed to a public accountability that's unprecedented.
The bishops have put in their charter that they want an annual report to be generated by the national review board with the help of this office that will identify those dioceses that are not in conformity with the provisions of the charter. That is as accountable as it can get.
You were given your most recent FBI assignment because of the attacks of 9/11. Now you've been called upon to help with the Church scandal. Do you have a history of getting called upon for crisis management?
I have dealt with a number of crises in my FBI career. I hope that because of my experience in various situations, I will be able to bring some value to the Church by establishing this office, by preparing the reports, by implementing the programs and by helping the national review board do its job.
Institutions other than the Catholic Church, such as public school districts and other religious organizations, have sexual-abuse problems that have been exposed, but without the fanfare that has surrounded the problems in the Church. Do you think the Church has been singled out for unfair scrutiny?
No, I don't think the Church has been singled out. The fact is there have been very egregious cases around the country involving priests. Parishioners, Catholics around the country have a right to know that. More importantly, they have a right to know what the Church is doing about it.
But what about other institutions? Shouldn't society be concerned about all sexual abuse of children?
There's no doubt that pedophiles and other abusers exist in all walks of life, in all occupations. I wouldn't single out any particular one as being more fraught with the problem than another.
We're going to do a study, which the bishops have commissioned, that will talk directly about the magnitude of the problem in our Church. We're doing two studies, in fact. One is to talk about the magnitude of the problem in the Church and the other is to try to identify causation.
What are your thoughts on causation? Have some bishops been too lenient, for example, in allowing homosexuals into seminaries?
I can't speculate on that, and it would be dangerous to do that. The data just isn't available yet, and that's something we're trying to do — to professionally collect the data that will give us some information with which to form theories about causation.
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ------ KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Demonstrators Still Tussling Over Elected Pro-Abortion Parishioners DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:PLYMOUTH, Mich. — It's been nearly eight months since a group of pro-life advocates started staging weekly demonstrations outside Our Lady of Good Counsel parish here to draw attention to the fact that governor-elect Jennifer Granholm claimed to be pro-abortion and Catholic. And although Granholm prevailed in the November election, the demonstrators have no plans to stop.
“Our goal all along has never been political,” said Dr. Monica Migliorino Miller, director of the Stop Granholm Church and Truth Project and associate professor of theology at St. Mary's College in Orchard Lake, Mich. “We were never just opposing her as a candidate. The issue is abortion, and that issue is still as real and viable as it ever was.”
The group of 15 to 20 people will continue to demonstrate through the end of the year and then bow to the cold weather. In the meantime, they have another target: the Mass traditionally said by the bishop for the inauguration of the governor and the legislature.
Their letters to Bishop Carl Mengeling of Lansing, Mich., ask that he not hold a Mass for Granholm, and if he does hold one for the legislature in general that he not allow Granholm to have any sort of liturgical role. They also appeal for a pro-life message in the prayers of the faithful or the homily. They have not received an official answer.
“She's wrong when she says a Catholic can be ‘pro-choice,’” said Matt Bowman, an Ave Maria School of Law student and pro-life advocate. “Now her public scandal is magnified.”
Their request is the latest installment in a saga where several priests publicly defended Granholm's pro-choice views as compatible with the Catholic faith. Granholm has said that while she is personally opposed to abortion, her view, as a matter of faith, should not be imposed on others. Her office did not return phone calls from the Register.
The pro-life demonstrators hit a snag in July when police confiscated their signs displaying images of aborted fetuses. Through the Thomas More Law Center the picketers filed a federal lawsuit and obtained an injunction forbidding the police from interfering with their First Amendment rights.
George Stephens of Madison Heights attends an Eastern Orthodox parish but began picketing when he heard that pro-abortion Granholm was an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist, lector and a regular communicant in good standing with the Church. He said the bishops of Michigan should “exercise tough love, if necessary.”
“We're calling upon the bishops to execute a judgment,” he said.
No one has publicly questioned whether Granholm should receive Communion. But pro-life advocates say they will be watching closely for Granholm's first anti-life legislative action.
“We will take these issues to the bishop,” Miller said. “The bottom line is: Are there consequences for Catholic legislators who promote or allow abortion?”
Although Catholic governors Jennifer Granholm of Michigan and John Baldacci of Maine won their races in November, they still face opposition from Catholics on their pro-abortion positions.
Trouble in Maine
Elsewhere, pro-life demonstrators are running into even chillier receptions. In Bangor, Maine, Dr. Terrence Hughes has been accused of harassment and child abuse because he stands across the street from St. John Church each Sunday holding signs and praying the rosary.
He originally demonstrated in response to a flier he saw advertising a spaghetti dinner at the parish that would be cooked by U.S. Rep. (and now Gov.-elect) John Baldacci — another “pro-choice Catholic.”
“To me this seemed like a desecration of the church,” Hughes said, noting that the dinner would be held directly underneath the area containing the tabernacle. Politicians such as Baldacci, who support abortion, should be barred from using Church facilities for fundraisers and political events, Hughes said.
Although not a parishioner there himself, Hughes notified others and contacted the priests and bishop. He received no reply.
“Having tried to do it quietly, I decided something more public was necessary,” he said.
On May 11, two weeks before the dinner, he faced the congregation prior to Mass and explained that Baldacci, with a 100% abortion-rights voting record, would be hosting a dinner at the church for political gain. He then held up a picture of a baby aborted at 10 weeks. Father Jerry Gosselin, pastor of St. John's, escorted him out.
The following Tuesday, Hughes, a University of Maine professor, received a notice from police saying he was banned for life from the church. That's when he started demonstrating on the public property across the street, an action for which he and others were charged with violating the town parade ordinance. The issue is currently in court.
The signs are a mixture of phrases and graphic images, and it's the latter that was deemed offensive by members of the parish and Father Richard McLaughlin, who has replaced Father Gosselin as pastor. Parishioners were recently denied in their attempt to obtain a protection-from-harassment order against Hughes.
Father McLaughlin did not return phone calls, but in an interview with the Bangor Daily News he said he objected to the photos, not the signs themselves. In fact, he found them so offensive that he filed child abuse complaints because of the traumatic effect the photos were having on children.
But Hughes said it was his 11-year-old son who was grabbed and threatened by a Knights of Columbus honor guard while taking pictures of a group of Knights forming a human line to block parishioners from seeing the images.
Hughes has filed his own protection-from-harassment suit because of the anger directed at his demonstrations. He doesn't deny his signs are graphic or that they arouse emotions because, he said, that's exactly what makes them necessary. “I'm allowing these babies to testify the only way they can.”
Dana Wind writes from Raleigh, North Carolina.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Wind ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Tribunals Not in Place Yet for Abuse Cases
These tribunals, which consider cases where priests protest their innocence, will be made up of three priests who act as judges. The paper said basic questions still exist about how the system will work and when it will start to judge the many cases that piled up after American bishops adopted a “zero-tolerance” policy in the summer, which was later revised by the Vatican.
“We don't know all the ins and outs yet, and I'm not sure when we will,” Father Vincent Grogan told the Journal News.
Father Grogan, a canon lawyer, serves on the New York Archdiocese's Metropolitan Tribunal, which mostly resolves annulment proceedings. Such tribunals are often overworked already, and it is unclear whether American bishops will employ them to resolve abuse cases or perhaps set up regional or national tribunals specially trained to deal with priests accused of abuse.
Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford, Ill., told attendees at the fall bishops' conference that it might take a year to 18 months for a policy to be in place.
The First Amendment at Work?
The statue was temporarily removed for repairs, and now an Alabama resident is suing to keep it out of sight.
The Birmingham News reported that Carl Dykes filed a lawsuit claiming the expenditure of city money to restore the Vulcan statue is an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion — in this case, Roman paganism.
As a Christian, Dykes is offended. He wants the statue kept out of the public park where it has resided, and he seeks $1 each in punitive damages from Birmingham, Jefferson County, Alabama and the National Park Service.
Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against Vatican
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Nov. 29 — Abuse victim Rick Gomez, 29, formerly of Tampa, Fla., reported that a Salesian brother victimized him repeatedly when he was 14 years old. To seek redress, he filed suit against the brother, the Salesians, the Diocese of St. Petersburg and the Vatican, according to the Associated Press.
Gomez accused the Holy See of fostering an international cover-up of sexual abuse by clergy and sought unspecified damages.
Circuit Court Judge John Lenderman threw out the case against Rome, pointing out that the statute of limitations on the 1987 case had run out.
The AP reported the St. Petersburg Diocese had previously been released from the lawsuit because it did not have direct oversight of the school run by the Salesians.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Nothing Secret as CBS Airs Racy Prime Time Fashion Show DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:NEW YORK — CBS television uncovered too much, according to critics, when it aired the Victoria's Secret fashion show in late November.
The lingerie fashion show ran this year during prime time Nov. 20 on CBS affiliates nationwide and featured near-nude models — sometimes adorned with angels' wings — displaying the high-priced wares of Victoria's Secret, a lingerie producer and vendor. Eleven million people tuned in to the show, which has become the latest flash-point in the debate over indecent programming on network television.
ABC aired the lingerie show last year but dropped it when, according to published reports, its corporate parent, Disney, decided to take cover from critics and became concerned about its image in the wake of protests over the show.
After receiving complaints about the ABC show, the Federal Communications Commission investigated and ruled in March that the show had not been indecent.
Complaints again poured into the FCC over CBS November show, and organizations as diverse as the Concerned Women for America, Morality in Media and the National Organization for Women protested the airing. The next morning FCC Commissioner Michael Copps called for a review of the agency's indecency standards.
“It's time for the commission to change its definition of indecency. Too many indecency complaints from consumers and too many truly indecent programs are falling through the cracks,” Copps said in a statement the morning after the show aired.
Despite the timing and the complaints filed with the FCC, Copps' comments were not specifically directed at what CBS had run the night before, said Alex Johns, a spokesman for Copps' office.
“He's been thinking about these issues for a long time,” she said.
According to Johns, Copps sees one of two problems. “Either the definition [of indecency] is incorrect or it's being applied incorrectly,” she said.
Robert Peters, president of the New York-based Morality in Media — a watchdog group founded in 1962 by Jesuit Father Morton Hill to fight for decency in the media — agreed with Copps' desire to review the FCC's definition of indecency.
He said current indecency rules are far too narrow and called on the agency to expand its definition to cover depictions of “nudity and partial nudity,” in addition to simply “sexual or excretory organs.”
Peters said to his knowledge the FCC has not filed an indecency violation against a network-syndicated program or special.
“It's incomprehensible that in the past 30 to 35 years there have been no indecency violations [in network programming],” he said. “The [FCC] definition is a joke.”
Peters described the Victoria's Secret special as “borderline soft-core pornography.”
“Victoria's Secret has a reputation of almost being [at the level of] Playboy magazine,” he said.
Peters said he was worried that in the future television programs will be even worse. He added that if such programming were run after 10 p.m. — the “safe harbor” time for indecent programming — instead of during prime time, there would be no legal issue and less likelihood that children would see such a program.
Regular Programming
Not everyone saw the show as worthy of the criticism it generated. Conservative pundit and talk show host Michael Medved opined in a column in USA Today that those calling for FCC action were advocating censorship. He called on his readers to pursue what he saw as more worthy causes.
“It's hard to see why the partial nudity and exhibitionism of the Victoria's Secret show should represent a greater threat to public decency than the promiscuity, adultery, group sex, prostitution and fetishism regularly portrayed on prime-time series and reality shows,” Medved wrote.
Professional photographer Thomas Serafin agreed with Medved that much of what is on television is far worse than this particular fashion show.
Serafin, a Catholic who works in Los Angeles, has photographed the Miss USA and Miss World pageants as well as ads for Fredericks of Hollywood — Victoria's Secret's competition. He said he found the CBS show mild in comparison to much of what is shown on television.
He said in many cases provocative dating and talk shows are run in the afternoon before most parents return home and are often watched by children. He also decried previous seasons' shows like Fox's “Temptation Island” as being much more sexually tempting than CBS's lingerie show.
And cable TV — for which the FCC does not apply indecency rules — is even worse, in Serafin's view. Accusing “The Osbournes” of being “a nuclear family meltdown,” and Britney Spears and MTV of being “directly targeted toward tempting the youth,” Serafin said CBS fashion night was mild by comparison.
Peters said he sees the Victoria's Secret show as a step in the wrong direction.
“It's just a matter of time,” he said, “before network television shows us people with [nothing] on.”
CBS Defends Show
Despite the widespread criticism, the network maintains that the show was decent.
Declining to comment on either FCC commissioner Copps' comments or on the controversy over the show being broadcast in prime time, CBS spokesman Chris Ender said: “We are confident that the Victoria's Secret special was completely within acceptable boundaries for broadcast television.”
Ender also declined to comment on whether a similar swimsuit show was planned but did say in an e-mail that the CBS show was “less risqué than the ABC edition [last year].”
“Does CBS even know what decency means?” Peters asked in response. “These people don't have any limits.”
While there is debate over what programs are worse, Pope John Paul II has warned Catholics of the risks of a variety of inappropriate television programming.
In his message for World Communications Day in 1994, the Pope said: “Television can also harm family life: by propagating degrading values and models of behavior; by broadcasting pornography and graphic depictions of brutal violence; by inculcating moral relativism and religious skepticism … [and] by carrying exploitative advertising that appeals to base instincts.”
Copps, the FCC's lone Democrat, said there needs to be “something other than the lowest common denominator that some advertiser can find to exploit.”
He called on other FCC commissioners to support this cause.
“You can't tell me this is what the pioneers of the great broadcast industry had in mind when they brought radio and TV to us,” he said. “I surely hope my colleagues will join me in addressing this problem.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Matt Talbot Miracle Falls Through
TOTALCATHOLIC.COM, Nov. 29 — The beloved Matt Talbot, a Dublin alcoholic who reformed his life and led hundreds of others to sobriety and sanctity, is up for beatification. But his case was set back last week when the Vatican's Congregation for Sainthood Causes rejected a cure that had been attributed to his miraculous intervention.
TotalCatholic.com, a U.K.-based Web site, reported that Pope John Paul II has often expressed his admiration for Talbot and said he might visit Ireland for his beatification.
Devotees of Talbot have asked the Pope to set aside canon law and beatify Talbot anyway because of the importance of his example in a time of widespread substance abuse.
“We were all very optimistic that we had finally found a cure that would allow Matt's beatification,” said Father Philip O'Driscall, a leading promoter of Talbot's cause. “Our hopes have been dashed. We will just have to continue praying. But the Pope has the authority to sidestep the canon law rules that require a miracle. It is his prerogative.”
John Paul Writes to Orthodox Patriarch
VATICAN INFORMATION SERVICE, Nov. 30 — As is customary each year to mark the Nov. 30 feast of St. Andrew, patron of Constantinople, a delegation from the Holy See visited this year as well, according to the Vatican Information Service.
Conversely, a delegation from the patriarchate comes to Rome each year for the June 29 feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. At the end of the Nov. 30 liturgy, Cardinal Walter Kasper presented Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I with a special message from Pope John Paul II.
The Holy Father wrote, in part: “The brotherhood of the two Apostles, Peter and Andrew … invites us to seek together, day after day, full communion so as to realize our common mission of reconciliation in God. … Our contacts, conversations and collaborative experiences are all oriented toward one goal: unity, the essential condition indicated by Christ that must mark relations between his disciples. For its part, the Catholic Church is engaged with conviction in this process.”
Vietnam Prime Minister Meets With Vatican Officials
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Nov. 29 — Only a few days after Pope John Paul II appointed two new Vietnamese bishops, that country's prime minister met with top Vatican officials for talks meant to improve relations between the Church and Hanoi.
Deputy Prime Minister Vu Khoan met with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Holy See's secretary of state, and with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican's foreign minister.
“In addition to topics of international politics, we had an exchange of views over the economic and social developments under way in Vietnam,” said Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls.
Vietnam and the Vatican do not have diplomatic relations. Vatican officials have made visits to Vietnam for the last several years in an attempt to ease tensions.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: A Plea for Mercy and Forgiveness DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II met with 5,000 pilgrims in Paul VI Hall for his general audience on Dec. 4. He offered his reflections on verses 12-16 of Psalm 51. “Every week Psalm 51, the famous Miserere, is repeated during morning prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours,” he noted. He described the psalm as a “majestic plea for forgiveness.”
The first part of the Psalm, the Holy Father pointed out, describes the dark prison that sin creates in the souls of men and women. However, this part — the second part — describes the joy of experiencing God's forgiveness as sinners acknowledge their sin and ask God to create pure hearts within them. He noted that the word “spirit” occurs three times in this portion of Psalm 51, and the Church Fathers saw in these prophetic words a reference to the gift of the Holy Spirit, who sets us free from sin, makes us a new creation and enables us to live in truth, justice and love.
Pope John Paul II noted that this passage from Psalm 51 ends with a commitment to proclaim God's justice — but not in a punitive sense. “God derives no pleasure from the death of the wicked,” he said. “He wants him to turn from his evil way so that he may live.”
Every week Psalm 51, the famous Miserere, is repeated during morning prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours. We have already reflected on parts of it on other occasions. Now we will examine a section of this majestic plea for forgiveness — verses 12-16 — in a special way.
First of all, it is worth noting that in the original Hebrew the word “spirit” is repeated three times and is seen as a gift from God that his creatures, who are repentant of their sin, welcome: “Renew in me a steadfast spirit … do not take from me your holy spirit … sustain in me a willing spirit” (verses 12, 13, 14). Borrowing a liturgical term, we could almost speak about an epiclesis, a threefold invocation of the Spirit, who hovered over the waters during the creation (see Genesis 1:2) and who now penetrates the souls of the faithful, giving them new life and raising them from the realm of sin into a heaven of grace.
The Fathers of the Church see the effective presence of the Holy Spirit in the “spirit” to which the psalmist refers. Thus, St. Ambrose is convinced that it refers to the one Holy Spirit “that was fervently at work in the prophets, that [Christ] breathed into the apostles and that was united to the Father and the Son in the sacrament of baptism” (Lo Spirito Santo, I, 4, 55: SAEMO 16, p. 95). Other Fathers expressed the same opinion, such as Didimus the Blind of Alexandria in Egypt and Basil of Caesarea, in their respective treatises on the Holy Spirit (Didimus the Blind, Lo Spirito Santo, Rome, 1990, p. 59; Basil of Caesarea, Lo Spirito Santo, IX, 22, Rome, 1993, p. 117f).
Moreover, St. Ambrose, observing that the psalmist speaks about the joy that pervades his soul once he has received God's generous and powerful Spirit, makes this comment: “Gladness and joy are fruits of the Spirit and this Sovereign Spirit is the one upon whom we have been established above all. Therefore, those who have been renewed with this Sovereign Spirit are not subject to slavery, cannot be slaves to sin, cannot be indecisive, do not roam here and there and are not indecisive in making choices but stand firmly on the rock with feet that are steady” (Apologia del Profeta David a Teodosio Augusto, 15, 72: SAEMO 5, p. 129).
A New Creation
After having described the dark prison of guilt in preceding verses, Psalm 51, with this threefold reference to the “spirit,” examines the luminous area of grace. This is an important turning point that is comparable to a new creation. Just as God breathed his spirit into matter and gave birth to the human person at the beginning of time (see Genesis 2:7), likewise this same divine Spirit now re-creates (see Psalm 51:12), renews, transfigures and transforms the repentant sinner, embraces him once again (see verse 13) and makes him a participant in the joy of salvation (see verse 14). At this point, man, to whom this divine Spirit gives life, sets off on the path of justice and love, to which another psalm refers: “Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. May your kind spirit guide me on ground that is level” (Psalm 143:10).
After having experienced this inner rebirth, the psalmist is transformed into a witness; he promises God to “teach the wicked your ways” of goodness (Psalm 51:15), so that they will be able to return to the Father's house like the prodigal son. Likewise, St. Augustine, after having experienced the dark path of sin, later felt the need to witness to the freedom and joy of salvation in his Confessions.
God's Witnesses
Those who have experienced God's merciful love become his ardent witnesses, especially to those who are still entangled in sin. Let us recall Paul, who was struck by Christ on the road to Damascus and who became an untiring missionary of God's grace.
For one last time, the psalmist looks at his dark past and cries out to God: “Rescue me from bloodshed, God, my saving God” (verse 16). The “blood” to which he refers has been interpreted in various ways in Scripture. This allusion, when attributed to King David, refers to the killing of Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, the woman who was the object of the king's passion. In a more general way this invocation indicates a desire for purification from the evil, violence and hatred that are always present in the human heart with a gloomy and harmful force. Now, however, the lips of the faithful are purified from sin and sing out to the Lord.
This passage from Psalm 51, on which we commented on today, ends precisely with a commitment to proclaim the “justice” of God. As is often the case in biblical language, the word “justice” does not actually describe God's punitive action in confronting evil. Rather, it indicates the sinner's rehabilitation because God manifests his justice by justifying sinners (see Romans 3:26). God derives no pleasure from the death of the wicked; he wants him to turn from his evil way so that he may live (see Ezekiel 18:23).
(Register translation)
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Chilean Bishops Confront Sex Abuse Cases and Media Pressure DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:SANTIAGO, Chile — In early October, the Chilean bishops were enjoying a peaceful ad limina visit (one made every five years by heads of dioceses to report to the Pope and Vatican departments) in Rome when news suddenly came from Chile that a very popular priest in Santiago, Father José Andrés Aguirre Ovalle, had admitted to accusations of sexual abuse.
Since the sex-abuse scandals broke in the United States, the Chilean media had been after similar cases in Chile, and until early October, they were able to discover only few old cases.
But when the Father Aguirre case broke, some local press announced that they were pursuing “credible clues” leading to what they promised would be “many more cases” of priest sexual abuse.
All of a sudden, the Chilean bishops were confronting a situation that threatened to turn into an America-like scenario.
Details of Father Aguirre's case dominated the front pages for weeks. In fact, the 45-year old priest had been for 15 years the flamboyant, motorcycle-riding chaplain of some of the best private girls schools in Santiago.
The press revealed that early in May, without the knowledge of his bishop, a 16-year-old student accused Father Aguirre of fathering her child.
By mid-October, after the accusations were made public, Father Aguirre was accused of seven counts, including two statutory rapes, and was held in custody without bail.
The Chilean bishops' conference reacted immediately by issuing a brief document repeating the words of Pope John Paul II: “There is no place in the Church for child abusers.”
But, in the words of Father Joaquín Alliende, spokesman for the bishops' conference, the press was in “hunting season.”
Unsubstantiated allegations and speculations were brought up on TV talk shows along with discussions of ending priestly celibacy and ordaining women, he said.
According to the priest, “some media were mixing the few current cases with old cases and mere allegations in order to create the sense that there was an avalanche of sexual abuses from the clergy, something similar to what is happening in Argentina.”
In Argentina, the case of one priest, Father Jorge Grassi from Buenos Aires, has sparked a wave of attacks against priest celibacy.
The media coverage in Chile skyrocketed with reports that retired Bishop Francisco José Cox of the Diocese of La Serena, next to the Archdiocese of Santiago, had to leave his post in 1997 because of accusations of sexual misconduct.
Despite the fact that there was no legal case against the bishop, several young men came forward to tell the media stories of sexual harassment.
A source in the diocese confirmed that, in fact, the early retirement of Bishop Cox was due to sexual misconduct but his fellow bishops strongly encouraged him to resign in order to prevent further damage or scandal to the faithful. The media traced Bishop Cox to a parish in Bogotá, Colombia, where he had been serving as a parochial vicar for two years without any incident.
Nevertheless, once the scandal broke in Chile, Bishop Cox announced his retirement to a monastery in Germany, where he would “devote the rest of my days to prayer, reflection and penance.”
Reacting to the increasing media pressure on the Chilean bishops to follow their North American brothers and issue a “zero-tolerance” policy, Cardinal Francisco Ja-vier Errázuriz Ossa of Santiago, president of the Chilean bishops' conference, said “zero tolerance” is an “ambiguous term” with “deep flaws.”
“The bishop is the shepherd of both the people and the priests, and as such he cannot either protect a priest to the detriment of the people or abandon him even when he is a source of pain and scandal,” he said in a TV interview in early November.
The Chilean bishops have been very aware of the two issues — the problem of child abuse and the attempt by anti-Catholics to undermine their credibility.
Days before the general assembly the Chilean episcopate held at Punta de Tralca on Nov. 18-22, Bishop Juan Camilo Vial, secretary general of the bishops' conference, announced that the bishops would work on a national policy “as a matter of common sense and not as a consequence of the media frenzy.”
Year of Vocations
At the end of the assembly, the Chilean bishops' conference released a document TITLEd “A Voice of Alert and an Urgent Call.” In it, they admitted that “the failures of the members of the Church, especially of the shepherds, are a painful scandal for Christians and the community.”
Nevertheless, the bishops sent encouragement to “the countless number of priests and religious admired by their communities for their friendship with God and the way they spend the best of their energies at the service of the Christian community and the needy.”
The bishop also addressed “the grave responsibility the media has in the process of renewal of individuals and institutions in our nation.” Choices in presenting the news “must be made from an ethical and professional perspective, ensuring the reliability of their sources and acting with respect for the truth and the honor of individuals.”
The bishops ended their assembly with a proactive move: They declared 2003 the “Year of Priestly and Religious Vocations” and announced spiritual and pastoral initiatives to encourage vocations among the young.
They also announced a new national policy with criteria for the enrollment and the adequate formation of priest vocations. The document was approved during the assembly but not made public. The source at the Chilean bishops' conference said it “clearly proposes banning candidates with known homosexual tendencies from entering the seminary.”
Alejandro Bermúdez is based in Lima, Peru.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Berm˙Dez ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:The War on Christmas Continues
The Swinburne University of Technology has opted for a gift-giving clown, according to spokeswoman Jenni Austin.
“As a university, we have to be sensitive to the views of minority groups,” she told the paper.
Interestingly, the leader of the Australian Arabic Council, Roland Jabbour, objected to the move.
“Santa's part of the Australian way of life,” he said. “We don't know how such a thing could be offensive.”
The Right Box of Bones?
Catholic Web sites lit up with questions about the authenticity of the box and speculations about the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. Now it seems that the box is probably not an archaeological link to Christ, according to experts quoted in The New York Times.
At least part of the finding appears to have been a forgery. The ossuary is indeed as old as was advertised, but the inscription is probably a later addition made by two different hands in radically divergent styles.
“To say the least, I have a very bad feeling about the matter,” Dr. Eric Meyers told The Times. He is an archaeologist and scholar of Judaic studies at Duke University.
The ossuary was discovered by looters and bought at auction, facts that also raise questions about whether it might have been altered to increase its commercial value.
Blair to Stick With Protestants-Only Law
In recent years, British Catholics have agitated for this law to be repealed and received encouragement from Prime Minister Tony Blair, who called the law “plainly discriminatory” while on the campaign trail.
But now Blair has cancelled plans to change that law, according to Scotland's Sunday Herald.
Blair has changed his position and now says that constitutional legislation should only be changed when there is “a clear and pressing need. … There are 20 members of the royal family in the line of succession after the Prince of Wales, all of whom are eligible to succeed and have been unaffected by the Act of Settlement. The act therefore has no discriminatory impact today.”
The Herald called Blair's reasoning “bizarre.”
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Editorial DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:The Register was recently “Drudged.” That's a verb that means “overwhelmed with Internet Web visitors after being featured on the mega-popular ‘Drudge Report’ Web site.”
Visitors clogged up our cyberspace to see our story about who was and who wasn't pro-life in the Louisiana runoff race (see the link to the right). It slowed down the Web version of the paper. It also brought us into contact with new readers, and gave us the opportunity to talk about the faith to people who aren't accustomed to doing so.
One e-mail dialogue follows:
“That's why we regulate capitalism, right? Not because we're anti-choice, but because we know that an unregulated marketplace ‘chooses’ to do bad stuff.”
We consider that a good day's work — and a good start on one soul's journey to the pro-life position, we hope.
***
The National Catholic Register isn't the only Catholic press presence that turns 75 this year. The International Catholic Union of the Press does, too. That's lucky, because the 75th anniversary of the union occasioned Pope John Paul II to give his opinion of what the Catholic press should look like.
And it should look like … the Register, according to what he said at a Union of the Press celebration.
What does it mean to be a professional journalist who is Catholic? “It means having the courage to seek and report the truth, even when the truth is inconvenient or is not considered politically correct,” said the Pope. “It means being sensitive to the moral, religious and spiritual aspects of human life, aspects which are often misunderstood or deliberately ignored.”
“It means reporting not only the misdeeds and tragedies that take place, but also the positive and uplifting actions performed on behalf of those in need: the poor, the sick, the handicapped, the weak, those who are otherwise forgotten by society,” continued the Holy Father. “It means offering examples of hope and heroism to a world that is in desperate need of both.”
The Register is happy to see the two elements of its editorial philosophy stated so eloquently by the Pope — and we hope to take to heart his next admonition, also:
“Quite simply, it means being a person of integrity, an individual whose personal and professional life reflects the teachings of Jesus and the Gospel,” he said. “It means striving for the highest ideals of professional excellence, being a man or woman of prayer who seeks to give the best that they have to offer.”
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Panetta's Problematic Post
In Matthew 23:1-3 we read: “Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying, ‘The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice.’”
Sadly, Jesus' instruction to the people and his condemnation of the religious leaders of his time applies in the United States in 2002. The U.S. bishops in their 1998 document Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics said: “We urge those Catholic officials who choose to depart from Church teaching on the inviolability of human life in their public life to consider the consequences for their own spiritual well being, as well as the scandal they risk by leading others into serious sin. We call on them to reflect on the grave contradiction of assuming public roles and presenting themselves as credible Catholics when their actions on fundamental issues of human life are not in agreement with Church teaching. No public official, especially one claiming to be a faithful and serious Catholic, can responsibly advocate for or actively support direct attacks on innocent human life.”
We have, then, from the bishops' own instruction that those public officials who support abortion — as Leon Panetta did as a member of the Clinton administration when he supported the barbaric partial-birth abortion — are not “faithful Catholics” and they are leading others into serious sin.
But Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, appointed him to the bishops' review board for sex-abuse monitoring and said he was a “faithful Catholic” (“Panetta a ‘Faithful Catholic?’” Dec. 1-7).
The failure of other bishops to publicly condemn the appointment of Leon Panetta signifies their complicity in this hypocrisy. Jesus, as always, was right: Do what religious leaders say, not what they do.
FRANÇOIS L. QUINSON Gaithersburg, Maryland
Panetta in the Pew
Call this letter “Judge Not.” You keep publishing letters — for instance, one from J. Fritz, in the Dec. 1-7 issue (“Panetta a ‘Faithful Catholic?’”) — slamming Leon Panetta and saying he's not a “faithful Catholic.”
I have never agreed with Panetta on anything except how to spell his name. However, I do see him at 12:30 Sunday Mass, receiving Communion.
JAMES COONEY Carmel, California
Re-Making MOMS
I have to agree with the letter to the editor TITLEd “MOMS Harms” (Nov. 24-30). We used this program, Mothers of Minstry Sharing, last year. Most of the participating women (ages 22-40) could not relate to the New Age “feel-good” terminology used in the lessons. As a facilitator, I found myself extremely uncomfortable with the material and the manner in which it was presented. Language such as “God, who is Mother and Father of us all” (to quote one of the prayers from the member's journal) just turned us off.
This year, our group switched to Women of Grace, a married woman's Bible study by Michaelann Martin published by Emmaus Road. We have found this book to be much more helpful in our spiritual journeys as Catholic women of faith. I've heard good things about two other women's Bible studies also published by Emmaus Road, Courageous Love and Courageous Virtue, both by Stacey Mitch. We hope to use those studies in the future.
By the way, we kept the acronym MOMS and changed to TITLE to: Mary, Our Mentor Society.
JOAN STROMBERG Ellettsville, Indiana
Father Jozo Fan
I am writing to comment on a news brief that you recently published regarding the barring of Father Jozo Zovko from speaking and saying Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. (“National Shrine Bars Medjugorje Priest,” Dec. 1-7). According to this article, the bishop of Mostar-Duvno stripped Father Jozo from his “priestly faculties”; as a result he was constrained from speaking at the shrine.
Unfortunately, we do not have the space to tell the complete Father Jozo story. Suffice it to say that he is a very holy man — a very saintly man whose love for the Blessed Mother and the Eucharist make him a favorite target for those who want to silence his messages of peace and reconciliation.
I first heard him speak at the Shrine of the Assumption of Our Lady in Siroki Brijeg, Bosnia-Herzegovina. And again, just a few weeks ago when he brought his message to the people of Chicago. I have heard many priests speak during my lifetime. I have attended many retreats, missions and days of recollection. But I have never heard a man who had such a profound effect on me as Father Jozo. He has a charismatic gift of speaking directly to your heart and soul.
He received an apostolic blessing from Pope John Paul II. He travels with certifications from the Vicar General of the Order of Friars Minor and from the provincial of his community. Prior to visiting this country he concelebrated Mass with the bishop of Mostar. It is reported that the representatives of the shrine now say they have misspoken. It is terribly unfortunate that he was not allowed to speak at the National Shrine. We need to hear his messages loud and clear throughout all of America.
Let us pray for those who kept him from sharing his gifts with the people of Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area. It was an arrogant, impolite way to treat this man of God who came here out of love for all Americans. It is his wish that we turn toward Jesus in the Eucharist and live the messages of Medjugorje: conversion, prayer, fasting, penance and confession. Thank you, Father, for coming to America. May God continue to bless you and your mission.
PAUL D. JOYCE Gladwin, Michigan
Scholastic Hope
Your article on Msgr. Matthew Smith and development of the Register was a much-deserved tribute (75th anniversary issue, Nov. 10-16). Two particular words stood out for me: scholastic philosophy.
As part of my educational experience at Holy Cross, those two words and all that they imply have helped guide me these many years. Unfortunately, that is not the case at Holy Cross today. It is just another secular college. Through prayer, sacrifice and leadership, hopefully we will again be considered a Catholic college.
Thank you for all the good news in the Register.
DON BARTON Jacksonville, Florida
On Your Knees, Please
I really see red every time National Catholic Register recommends merely bowing to the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ before receiving Him in Holy Communion (“How and Why to Return to Sunday Mass,” Dec. 1-7). Despite the fact that the U.S. bishops recommend it, bowing seriously undermines belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. When we give precisely the same gesture of “respect” to the Son of God that we give to a mere object, the altar, how can the end result will be anything other than the complete destruction of the faith?
In my parish, the confusion of gestures only completes the agenda initiated by moving the tabernacle off to a darkened, uglified corner. The altar has consistently been given superiority over the Real Presence of Christ! The parade of extraordinary ministers, servers, musicians and readers endlessly bowing to the altar every time they approach it gives the impression that the bowing gesture of communicants is merely respecting the altar before which they are standing when they receive.
The Catholic religion calls for genuflecting, kneeling or prostrating before the Divine Presence of Christ. Until the bishops, please God, get some sense, it would be helpful if you would remind Catholics that genuflecting at least is permitted for Holy Communion.
MARY P. ANDERSEN Columbia, Missouri
Different Take on Just War
Regarding your editorial “Clash of Civilizations?” (Dec. 8-14), in which you state, “Christians aren't necessarily pacifists. … [T]here was really something noble about the Crusades …”:
The early Church Fathers — those who lived prior to the fourth and fifth centuries — did not allow Christians to fight even for the most noble causes. How can something that was not allowed before suddenly become okay?
We need to get away from the off-beam just war theology. We need to get back to the previous “separate camp” theology, where Christians formed a separate camp by fighting for the nation (the emperor) with their prayers, which defeat the demons who cause wars.
If you don't believe what I am saying about the earlier Fathers (and numerous later ones), please consult the article “Service Militaire” in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique. I think the article was written during World War II. It is not the result of fuzzy thinkers applying 19th-century pacifist principles. It is a result of reading the Fathers, pure and simple.
BROOKS ERICKSON El Paso, Texas
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Landrieu No Friend of Life DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:I read your article today about Mr. Ed Jeanfreau alerting the public to the fact that Mary Landrieu is not pro-life (“Who's Pro-Life: Louisiana Race Showcases Confusion,” Dec. 8-14).
Mr. Jeanfreau should be commended for making the effort to expose Ms. Landrieu. Her voting record proves that [she is pro-choice], even though during the debates and her campaign she tried to evade the truth.
The fact is that she voted No on maintaining the ban on military-base abortions and voted No on disallowing overseas military abortions. Also, she is endorsed by Emily's List of pro-choice women.
May God bless Mr. Jeanfreau for trying to protect our littlest citizens, our unborn children.
BERNICE WYNN Torrance, California
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: We Should All Get In the Trenches DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:New York it was not.
In the heat of the Indian subcontinent in 1959 I walked with opened eyes along streets of Calcutta as bruised humanity pressed in from every side and sight.
With me, step for step, was my friend and fellow Marine John Donovan. We had saved our military leave time and were now hitchhiking homeward from our former base in Japan. We would cross this part of Asia, pass through the Middle East and then into Europe. Our hope was to reach the United States in 40 days, before our authorized travel time ran out. But here in Calcutta we took in what travel agents never recommend. The vision of these streets and heavy smells of open sewers and other byproducts of poverty overwhelm the visitor.
We made it back to the States in time to take up new assignments. John went west; I went east. Then, as civilians again we went about our lives.
It was 10 years later when I first learned of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and her Missionaries of Charity order of nuns. And it was a full 20 years after two Marines passed those same teeming streets and kept walking that Mother accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in the name of the poor.
The Missionaries of Charity, like the Samaritan of the Gospel parable, remained in Calcutta while I passed by. It touches me deeply that so many young women surrender for life their own personal comfort to do what they do. Each sister says it is all for Jesus. This concept is not always understood by worldly audiences.
Yet this is what the sisters continue to do. Each Missionary of Charity sister has taken a vow of wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor. To Missionaries of Charity, the poor are Jesus in “his distressing disguise.”
While their Catholic faith embraces the full rich spectrum of Church teachings, one notes in these sisters a laser-like focus on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew. Chapter 25 of that book ends with the only biblical description of the Final Judgment that Christians believe is the last social event before eternity.
Says Jesus: “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me. I was ill and you comforted me, in prison and you visited me.”
We are sometimes pretty dense, as I was when wandering those hot Calcutta roads so many years ago, so one may ask: When did I do this or fail to do that?
I once asked Mother Teresa if I like so many others should go to Calcutta to help the poor.
Then Jesus assures us that as often as we did it in uncompromising love for the least among us, we did it for him. That's the way he said it, because that's the way he sees it.
And yet Mother Teresa and her sisters do not claim to have earned anything. They do not see this biblical passage as a payoff but as a demand by Jesus that he wants human beings to aid each other in need. It is a requirement, not an option.
That perspective imposes a downright serious obligation and should be done by each of us in acts of sacrificial love. Yet one must certainly base the specifics of commitment on personal and family considerations. We are not all called to be Missionaries of Charity, but we are all called to feed the hungry Christ. It is up to us to determine how best to do this. It may be through prayer, alms or service.
Until my current illness, I helped out in a Newark, N.J., soup kitchen. More than once, John Donovan visited with a large number of packages containing freshly butchered beef from his small herd in Hammondsport, N.Y.
He shared his bounty with the poor of Newark, and he remembers Calcutta and other needy areas we visited so long ago.
The fire of love for Jesus by Mother Teresa and her sisters has been long stoked and burns so intensely that they see only him in the disguise of the poor they embrace. “I do it for Jesus,” said Mother. Missionaries of Charity continue to say and live that.
Seizing a brief opportunity at an important ear I once asked Mother Teresa if I like so many others should go to Calcutta to help the poor. She looked at me quizzically and said: “Why? Are there no more poor here?”
We were the South Bronx at the time.
Mother Teresa has said: “When you want to help Jesus in the poor, look first into your own heart, and then your family. Then look around your neighborhood and community. You will find the poor.”
Now at least I didn't have to think about going back to the heat of India. Instead, I went back to Newark and helped to make some good soup for Jesus.
Drew Decoursey, author of Lifting the Veil of Choice, writes from Morristown, New Jersey.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Drew Decoursey ------ KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: The Hidden Anti-Terrorist Networks DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, seemed designed to sever the connections between America and the Islamic world.
The attacks struck at a financial center, representing the global economy, and even used the same airplanes that had helped people and products reach across the globe. The attacks seemed to verify Harvard Professor Samuel Hunt-ington's “clash of civilizations” thesis, in which the West and the Islamic world are locked in fitful combat — hostile, distant and implacably opposed.
Whether or not the United States makes war on Iraq (and I believe war would be a mistake), the shape of our wars in the Middle East doesn't matter nearly as much as the shape of the peace we leave behind.
If U.S. Special Forces catch and kill al Qaeda but our foreign policy does nothing to address the root causes of terrorism, more terrorists will take al Qaeda's place.
Al Qaeda and its allies are fighting a “networked war,” in which disabling one node of the network merely shifts its operations to another node. The United States is not fighting a nation-state, with an easily identifiable headquarters and leader; it is fighting a network. (Al Qaeda is merely one of the 35 foreign terrorist organizations identified by the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism.) And, ultimately, America is fighting an idea — an evil idea that accepts, and rests on, a “clash of civilizations” thesis but favors the Islamic side rather than the Western side.
Fortunately, America and Islamic societies are not as disconnected as our enemies think. There are numerous groups and individuals working — sometimes intentionally, often inadvertently — to connect our world, to draw us closer together and to prepare for a lasting peace. That peace must rest on the liberalization of the Islamic world: If we defeat our current enemies but leave behind societies ruled by tyrants, corroded by misogyny and mired in repression, we will simply have to fight again and again and again.
So who are these hidden peacemakers?
Often they do not even realize their own role in promoting liberalization and peace. Some of them have far more important goals in mind (as with Christian missionaries), goals which should not be subordinated to the immediate goal of liberalization.
Others have far less important goals (as with American businesses that operate in the Middle East), which can be sacrificed in the short term if necessary. However, I believe that the best interests and stated goals of all of these organizations and individuals promote liberalization — there is usually no dichotomy between their own goals and American foreign policy goals (although there are likely to be divergences on matters of foreign policy strategy).
Here are three categories of “hidden peacemakers”; there are many more:
Multinational corporations. These are unlikely heroes for the war on terrorism! And in countries where corporations have allied themselves with state terror (as with several oil companies in Nigeria), corporations act both wrongly and against American interests. Sometimes an influx of corporate investment can have short-term repercussions, as locals feel shut out and exploited by the newcomers. Some observers say that this resentment helped fuel anti-American sentiment in Kenya, where recent terrorist attacks highlighted growing support of radical Islam. The terrorist attacks have produced a backlash, though, with Kenyans crying in the streets, “We love America. Go away al Qaeda.”
Although globalization can bring problems, disrupting old traditions and creating new inequalities, in most cases it brings prosperity and a cosmopolitan awareness of Western culture.
The middle class is the class most likely to effectively resist tyranny; they have the resources that poorer subjects lack, and unlike the ruling class they are not benefiting from the regime as much as they would benefit from freedom. Corporate involvement often (though not always) serves to strengthen the middle class. This is, in fact, one of the best arguments against U.N. sanctions on Iraq: Critics of the sanctions have credibly charged that sanctions destroyed the nascent middle class that would have been the best basis for an internal Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein.
Religious-freedom monitors. Institutes like Freedom House (www.free-domhouse.org) and the Keston Institute (www.keston.org) promote liberalization in both direct and indirect ways. Directly, religious-freedom groups apply shame, challenging foreign governments to improve their human rights records or risk becoming a South Africa-like pariah state. The groups often pressure the U.S. government to make religious freedom a key factor in international negotiations and deals. Indirectly, but perhaps more importantly, the groups articulate an understanding of political life in which strong and heartfelt religious conviction need not entail theo-fascism.
Lawrence Uzzell, director of the Keston Institute, has been a powerful and theologically astute voice outlining an authentically Eastern Orthodox defense of religious freedom, despite Orthodoxy's tendency toward religious repression. Religious-freedom groups are beginning to seek out and publicize Islamic defenses of religious freedom (while not ignoring or whitewashing Islamic defenses of religious repression).
The Internet. The “information revolution” didn't die in the dot-bomb crash. It's not just about market share, corporate advantage or career planning. The information revolution is a man in Baghdad, who goes by the alias Salam Pax (Peace, Peace), using a tool called Blogger to create a Web site where he can post daily thoughts on the Iraqi elections, Bush's latest speech or the price of an AK-47 in the Baghdad marketplace. Americans and many other visitors stop by his site and leave comments on his posts. The Internet hosts a vibrant liberalizing Muslim community, from the Shi'a Pundit (shiapundit.-blogspot.com) to the “Muslim Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (muslimahya-ya.blogspot.com). Online news services like Iran Today and Pakistan's Daily Times also connect members of Islamic societies with the West, providing both theoretical (in their op-eds) and practical (in their news stories) support for the belief that religious and political freedoms can be justified under Islam.
The Internet works as a liberalizing force for several reasons: It's relatively inexpensive. It doesn't need to negotiate or sneak across national borders. It allows two-way communication, rather than the one-way communication provided by newspapers or radio, in which the audience is usually passive rather than responsive.
And it's extremely hard to censor. A common tech-head saying is, “The Internet treats censorship like damage and routes around it.” For example, if CNN.com is blocked by government censorship, it's easy to set up a “mirror” page that hosts all the CNN stories without using the blocked Web address. Countries like Saudi Arabia and China, which attempt to maintain strict control of the Internet, have to battle against a multitude of wily and tech-savvy free-speech proponents.
Some countries are simply too poor to take advantage of the Internet — Afghanistan is one of the least wired countries in the world — which is another reason the jobs and computer access provided by outside corporations can be helpful.
These three groups have one important thing in common: They seek to expand the areas of life that citizens of Muslim countries can control. They seek to strengthen individual Muslims and their communities rather than strengthening dictatorial regimes.
G.K. Chesterton noted, “You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”
In other words, people need to want liberty before they can benefit from it, and they have to have some experience with liberty before they can use it wisely. The hidden peacemakers, by preparing people for civil liberties, are preparing them for peace.
Eve Tushnet writes from Washington, D.C.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Eve Tushnet ------ KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Figuring Out Archbishop Rowan? Figure Again DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Sitting in jail after being arrested at a pro-life protest, a Pentecostal minister I know looked with disgust at the men around him saying the rosary.
He knew that real Christians did not use other peoples' words to pray, did not repeat their prayers over and over and definitely did not pray to Mary.
He knew that though these Catholics were pro-life, they needed to be saved. Even their pro-life work was just a matter of “works righteousness,” the attempt to be saved by being good enough. And then, he says now, he realized that all these unsaved Catholics were sitting in jail with him, while all his Pentecostal colleagues were home mowing the lawn or out at the golf course playing a quiet round.
That event began a reversal in his life that has brought him much of the way to the Catholic Church. He is not all the way home yet, but he is far closer than he would ever have expected, and he has gotten so far because he worked with Catholics in the pro-life movement.
This is, I think, the real mode of ecumenism in the future, as it has been for some time. We as Catholics will find our greatest friends among those who reject Catholic doctrine and spirituality, sometimes quite violently, but who hold firmly to the Christian moral teaching. These people will prove to be much greater friends than those who like Catholic doctrine and spirituality but reject much of the moral teaching we hold.
That is why I think my friend Dwight Longenecker has it wrong in his article, “Figuring out the New Archbishop of Canterbury” (Nov. 3-9). Dwight thinks the new Archbishop of Canterbury — the nominal head of the Anglican Communion — will be closer to Catholics than his predecessor, George Carey, and that Catholics will find “much that is agreeable in the new archbishop.”
Carey was an evangelical who tended to step on Catholic toes, as when he kept demanding intercommunion even when the Catholic bishops patiently explained why he could not have it. (He did remind me a bit of one of those louts in an old movie who keeps pursing his lips and sticking them in the face of the pretty girl and saying “C'mon, sweetie, gimme a kiss.”) He seemed genuinely oblivious to the effect that approving the ordination of women would have on relations with Rome and twice called those who objected to the innovation — the Pope, for example — “heretics.”
Rowan Williams is an Anglo-Catholic who will undoubtedly be more tactful than Carey and who is in some ways closer in theology to the Catholic Church. As Dwight noted, he “understands and loves Catholic spirituality.” He has recently written quite a good book on icons.
But I think Dwight underestimates the extent to which Williams' theology diverges from Catholic theology. He has a lower view of Scripture and less trust in the doctrinal authority of the ancient creeds than the Catholic. He is as strong an advocate of ordaining women as Carey. But the crucial difference is that he does not accept the Christian moral teaching at a significant and revealing point: its condemnation of homosexuality and its understanding of marriage.
Knowing this, I would want to ask how close Williams really is to the Catholic faith, Anglo-Catholic though he may be. How friendly to Catholicism can he be when he reads the New Testament to justify homosexuality and rejects the entire Catholic moral tradition?
Here I think Dwight is unfair to the evangelicals who have objected to Williams' appointment. (Their leadership includes the friend who heard me lecture, by the way.) Dwight writes that Williams “is reported to be soft on the homosexual question” and that evangelicals “consider [him] to be limp on sexual morality.” The fact is that Williams has openly expressed his approval of homosexual behavior and indeed ordained a man he knew was living (“in sin,” as it used to be put) with another man.
A lot of people “understand and love Catholic spirituality” but will ignore Catholic doctrine and morality when it suits them, yet they are the ones with whom ecumenical discussions have usually been conducted. At the end of the ecumenical day, you can have a cordial friendship with a man like Rowan Williams, but you will not get any closer to him theologically. He is committed to too much that is profoundly un-Catholic.
We will grow closest to those who reject Catholic doctrine but nevertheless live by it. I think that the truly effective ecumenism happens this way because with these people we see certain realities that no one else in the world seems to. We have a fellowship in reality, and in the sacrifices our shared vision requires, that irresistibly draws us closer to one another.
People united in the defense of certain realities the rest of the world fails or refuses to see will begin by tolerating each other for the good of the cause — every marcher helps, after all. They will soon begin to respect each other and then to admire each other, and soon they will discover, with joy, how deeply they are united, and in Whom.
David Mills' newest book, The Need for Creed, will be published by Sophia Institute Press in the Spring. Both he and Dwight Longenecker tell the stories of their conversions from Anglicanism in Surprised by Truth 3 (Sophia Institute Press).
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Mills ------ KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: In a Shepherd State of Mind DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:I was sitting in the pew in the middle of our church, immersed in the quiet of eucharistic adoration. I was focused on the gleaming golden monstrance with the host delicately framed within itwhen I heard from behind me a noise that I couldn't identify.
Shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap.
It was slowly making its way up the center aisle.
“Must be a handicapped person with a cane or an elderly person with a walker,” I thought to myself. I watched out of the corner of my eye to see this dedicated person who refused to let a physical impediment stop him or her from paying tribute to the King.
Shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap.
The sound was coming closer — right next to me now.
What I saw amazed me. It was not a handicapped person at all, but a thin, middle-aged Hispanic man. Dressed in plain, working-class clothes, hat in hand, head bowed, he was walking on his knees up the center aisle toward the altar. Shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap.
I felt myself barely breathing as my eyes followed him and my mind tried to anticipate what he was going to do next. I was in awe of his absolute humility; he didn't care who was around to see him. He was completely focused on his humble journey.
Slowly he progressed to the front of the church, never so much as looking up for an instant. Once there, he paused, motionless, still on his knees. His head hung. He prayed there, right in front of the Blessed Sacrament, for a long time. Eventually, he meekly tipped his head up, rose, walked to the side aisle and left the church. I sat there for another half an hour contemplating what I had just observed.
This man, with his reverence and simplicity, reminded me of the shepherds in Bethlehem who left their fields to pay tribute to the newborn King on that first Christmas. The shepherds were not dignitaries or wealthy merchants. Certainly they were not highly educated — I doubt they were even educated at all. They had to labor all their lives to scrape together a living for themselves, just as I suppose this man was.
Yet the angels appeared to them, inviting them to be the first outside of the Holy Family to experience the mystery of the Incarnation. Could it be that the same angels called this man?
What impressed me most about this man's manner was the way it reflected his relationship with Jesus. He certainly wasn't there for appearances, for he never once looked up to see if anyone was looking back. He was there to visit his Christ, to pay him homage in the most profound way in which he was capable.
He had set aside the worries and obligations of the world in order to seek out the desire of his heart. Perhaps he had just come from work or was on his way to work. Perhaps he was about to go to an appointment or run some errands. Whatever the case, he left his usual activity in order to honor Jesus. Just like the shepherds.
The man at our church had the shepherd mentality I desire for myself. He didn't put on any airs. He wasn't worried about what he had or didn't have. He didn't care about what others might think of him. He was there for one purpose only. He approached the Almighty slowly, determinedly and reverently. He offered the King the best he could — his plain, old, loving self in body, mind and spirit. He put aside all else in order to pay tribute to the King.
Marge Fenelon writes from Cudahy, Wisconsin.
------ EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Marge Fenelon ------ KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: A Canadian Christmas Carol DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Montreal has a welldeserved reputation as a vibrant, cosmopolitan community in the forefront of Canada's entertainment, fashion and art world.
Yet, for the Catholic visitor, the city is also a veritable treasure island of beauty, spiritual inspiration and religious history — a sort of living museum showcasing the Church's early days in North America. And never is Montreal's spiritual core as invitingly displayed as it is at Chris-tmastime.
In 1642, at the age of 36, Jeanne Mance and her associates stepped onto the near-deserted island of Ville Marie. The first Mass ever on the island, located in the St. Lawrence River, was celebrated. On the site visited by Champlain on an earlier voyage, they built a fort, houses, shops and a small dispensary. In July the first baptism — a group of Algonquin Indians — took place.
During the next few years, the tiny infirmary served as a haven for both colonists and native groups wounded in intertribal wars. A larger infirmary, Hotel Dieu, was built outside the fort. In 1651 the Iroquois broke their peace treaty, forcing settlers back into the fort. Eventually Jeanne took three perilous voyages to France, bringing back more colonists and helpers. She never ceased working for the sick until her death. In her will, she entrusted everything to her nursing sisters and the poor. Though close to the end, she participated in the blessing of the first stones for the new Notre Dame Church. Jeanne died in 1673, having given consent for her heart to be placed in the Hotel Dieu Chapel. The officials of New France acclaimed her as the city's soul.
Today, the three-story Museum at the Hotel Dieu Hospital (201 Pine Avenue) pulls the threads of her life together. When entering, visitors first encounter a magnificent 17th-century winding oak staircase, from the Hotel Dieu in France, where the Hopitalieres were founded. The museum takes us on a journey through Jeanne Mance's life, the development of the city of Montreal and the part played by the nursing sisters in that development.
Notre-Dame-De-Bonsecours is an appropriate site for a follow-up visit. Situated in the city's recently renewed Old Port section, it has long been a source of solace to sailors. In fact, so grateful were they when they saw the glow from its lighted dome once they entered Montreal Harbor, they hung small models of their ships from the ceiling in thanksgiving to Our Lady for keeping them safe. This is how the church became known as “The Sailors' Church.”
Under the instruction of St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, Montreal's first teacher, the original wooden structure was built in 1675. Destroyed by fire in 1754, it was rebuilt in 1773. It contains the tiny oak “miraculous statue,” which Margaret received from a patron in 1672. There is a spectacular view from its tower of the St. Lawrence River and Old Montreal. A sight and sound show there explains the dangers of Atlantic crossings from the 17th to the 20th century. St. Marguerite, a native of France, has exerted a lasting influence on education in Canada. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982.
Don't miss the church's other treasure — a nine-room museum containing more than 5,000 items recovered in the foundations of the old chapel. Some date back 2,400 years and include Amerindian fire pits. A professional theater troupe performs here in the summer.
One of Montreal's premier pilgrimage sites is the majestic St. Joseph's Oratory on the mountain-side towering over the city. Erected in memory of the saintly Brother Andre, who died in 1937, the oratory has been the scene of many miracles, physical as well as spiritual; millions visit each year. Built in Italian Renaissance style, it boasts a dome marking the highest point in Montreal. Towering 406 feet above its base, it's in a league with St. Paul's in England (365 feet) and St. Peter's in Rome (435 feet). The inside is vast, with a great hall, concrete pillars, oversize wooden images of the Apostles carved by a famous French artist, life-size crucifix and image of Christ in his tomb at the altars and bas-relief Stations of the Cross. Its magnificent stained-glass windows depict events in Canadian history as linked to the country's patron, St. Joseph, to whom Brother Andre had a lifelong devotion. Beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982, Brother Andre lived in three simple rooms (now reconstructed). Also on the grounds is his original chapel.
Bernini en Quebec
Sitting in the heart of the city is the impressive Mary, Queen of the World Basilica, a miniature replica of St. Peter's in Rome. This was built in the 1890s to symbolize the union between the Church in Canada and the Holy See. A witness to the place of religion in the marketplace, it is a focal point among high-rise business towers and hotels. Its green dome, imposing columns and life-size figures of saints lining the roof reflect its close ties to the mother church.
The neo-baroque canopy over the main altar, shimmering with a rich gold hue, carries a reproduction of Bernini's famous Baldacchino in red copper and gold leaf. There are two side chapels. On the left are the relics of several Canadian papal Zouaves, representing the 507 soldiers recruited by the church's founder, Bishop Bourget, in 1868 to go to Italy to defend the church against seizure of the Papal States by Victor Emmanuel. A second chapel contains the remains of Bishop Bourget and other clergy. The arches of the transept and side aisles are decorated with dramatic portraits about the founding of Montreal. At the rear of the church stands a statue of the church patroness, Mary Queen of the World. The basilica, a favorite site for business people to attend noonday Mass, welcomes visitors.
Last is the Basilica of Notre-Dame, viewed by millions on TV every Christmas as the locale of Luciano Pavarotti's famous Christmas TV Special. It's impossible to put into words the splendor of its interior. I felt my breath taken away the first time I viewed it in all its dramatic lighting. A masterpiece of neo-Gothic architecture, the architect was an American Protestant, James O'Donnell, who eventually became a Catholic. Built between 1825 and 1829, it has two towers. The eastern one, “The Temperance,” holds a 10-bell carillon; the western one, “Le Gros Bourdon” contains an enormous bell. The basilica's poly-chrome interior has outstanding woodwork, both painted and gilded. At the back of the basilica is a peaceful chapel to the Sacred Heart (SacreCoeur Chapel) and a museum.
What a wondrous city this is to stop, pray and say: “Joyeux Noel!”
Lorraine Williams writes from Markham, Ontario.
------ EXCERPT: Rich in Catholic history, Montreal shines in December ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lorraine Williams ------ KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: In the Footprints of the Blessed Mother DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:First came Peter. Now make way for Mary.
In “Mary: The Mother of God,” Catholic convert and apologist Stephen Ray continues his videotaped journey through the places and times of the key people in salvation history.
The trek — a planned 10-part series TITLEd The Footprints of God: The Story of Salvation from Abraham to Augustine — got underway last spring with at look at our first Pope, “Peter: Keeper of the Keys.”
This time he guides us to Israel, Turkey and Greece, tracing the tracks of the Blessed Mother. Produced by St. Joseph Productions and distributed by Ignatius Press, the tapes combine travel-ogue, apologetics and devotions, all held together by Ray's enthusiasm and light, at times comic, touch.
First stop: Jerusalem, where the limestone buildings gleam in the hot sun. Here the Church of St. Anne, built on the traditional birthplace of Mary, the heroes of our faith were flesh-and-blood people. In the city Jesus wept over, our intrepid tour guide unpacks the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which asserts that Mary was conceived free of original sin in preparation for her role as the Mother of God. To illustrate the concept of sin, Ray trips and falls into a muddy puddle. My 13-year-old son got the point loud and clear.
Inside the Basilica of the Annunciation, Ray supplies cultural context by highlighting ancient Jewish betrothal customs. He demonstrates everyday tasks of Mary's time, such as winnowing wheat, drawing water from a well and using a donkey for transportation. Such visual details help bring the Bible alive.
At the Church of the Visitation just outside Jerusalem, Ray prays Elizabeth's greeting, “Blessed are you among women,” and reminds us that the rosary is a Gospel prayer. In Bethlehem, we view the cave revered as Jesus' birthplace. At Cana, we see the site of the wedding feast where Mary, acting as Queen Mother of the King of Kings, introduced her son's public ministry.
Ray takes us along the Way of Sorrows, the winding path through the Old City of Jerusalem on which Jesus carried his cross. Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Ray kneels to touch a rock from Calvary. We see the Upper Room, where Mary prayed with the disciples for the Holy Spirit, and her house in Ephesus, Turkey, where the Apostle John took her to live.
Then it's back to Jerusalem to consider that this may be the place from which Mary was assumed, body and soul, into heaven. Finally, we witness Ray, his wrists in iron shackles, stumbling along the rocky shore of the Greek island of Patmos, where the aged, exiled Apostle John saw his vision of the woman clothed with the sun described by him in the Book of Revelation.
As for production values: Given the ambitiousness of the undertaking and the relative modesty of the budget, the outing could have come off like a well-choreographed home movie. But, like its predecessor on St. Peter, it's an accurate and authoritative documentary. The camera work is polished and professional throughout; the soundtrack of classical music and traditional hymns adds depth and dimension. And Ray hits just the right note of wonder and discovery to make learning fun for families.
Speaking of which, the video comes with a 14-page study guide written by Ray. Entertaining, enlightening, inspiring — and, yes, educational (don't tell the kids) — “Mary: The Mother of God” is one Footprint not to miss.
Una McManus writes from Alexandria, Virginia.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Una Mcmanus ------ KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Monthly Catholic Tape Picks DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:The remains of the home built by the Apostle John for the Blessed Mother when they lived in Ephesus, Turkey, were discovered in 1894 by archeologists working from the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German mystic who died in 1824. Mary's House, a video production of Mary's Media Foundation, takes us into the rebuilt, cruciform, one-level stone house nestled high in the hills outside Ephesus. Even on videotape, the serenity of the place is remarkable. Many people share their experiences of Mary's healing touch at this house where a tradition says she lived the last nine years of her life. To order, call Ignatius Press at (800) 651-1531 or visit Ignatius.com on the Internet.
In Hail, Holy Queen, Scott Hahn explains the scriptural and theological foundations of Marian dogmas in his energetic, captivating style. Based on his book of the same name, this set of three videos, divided into 13 30-minute segments, introduces the viewer to the interpretive principle of “typology.” A “type” is a person, event or thing in the Old Testament which prefigures a reality in the New Testament. The Ark of the Covenant, the Daughter of Zion, the Queen Mother — all prefigure the Virgin Mary. Hahn explains how. To order, call Ignatius Press at (800) 651-1531 or visit Ignatius.com on the Internet.
St. Joseph Communications has three audiotape series well worth a listen for those who want to better explain the Blessed Mother to non-Catholic (or poorly catechized Catholic) friends and family members. In All Generations Shall Call Me Blessed, Tim Staples, former Baptist minister and now Catholic apologist, explains Marian dogmas in everyday language. He presents the Biblical roots of our beliefs about Mary, which are helpful to know when talking with Protestant friends.
Jewish convert Bob Fishman, in Mary: Our Ultimate Jewish Mother, relates dozens of stories and analogies that reveal the Blessed Virgin Mary and her maternal relationship with us. “How can Mary be the mother of us all?” asks Fishman. “How can she possibly hear every single person praying the rosary? She wouldn't have the time! That's the answer! There is no time in heaven.”
And in Treat Her Like A Queen, Scott Hahn teaches how to interpret Biblical signs about the Virgin Mary according to the Church's teachings. “Where do you find Mary in the Bible?” he asks, echoing a common question of non-Catholic Christians. “I say, everywhere! As long as you know how to read the Bible.”
To order any of these audiotapes, call St. Joseph Communications at (800) 526-2151 or visit saintjoe.com.
— U. McManus
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: U. McManus ------ KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002)
George Lucas wants to use the second prequel to his original Star Wars trilogy to explore two important questions: How a democratic republic can degenerate into a repressive empire, and what makes a hero turn bad. Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christiansen) is a Jedi knight under the supervision of Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). They're bodyguards for Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman), a senator leading the opposition to the Republic's creation of a clone army to defeat separatist rebels. But Anakin is unwilling to sublimate his personal desires to the higher good. This rebellious streak suggests the interior darkness that will follow when he becomes the evil Darth Vader in later episodes.
The film is not on par with the first three in the series — at times it resembles a video game more than the modern re-creation of classic myths Lucas intends. Still, the action sequences and special effects are excellent, and the story's moral code has a clearly defined idea of good and evil. Warning: It could be too intense for smaller chidren.
Gulliver's Travels (1996)
Jonathan Swift's famous novel combines imaginative fantasy and hard-edged social satire to telling effect. The TV miniseries, inspired by this 1726 classic, retains enough of the book's spirit and content to enthrall both children and adults. Lemuel Gulliver (Ted Danson) is lost at sea for eight years and returns to his wife (Mary Steenburgen) in England a changed man. But most people consider him insane, and he's placed in an asylum.
After a shipwreck, Gulliver is thought to be a giant in the land of the Lilliputians, who are led by their eccentric emperor (Peter O'Toole). However, he's only 6 inches high compared to the giants in the land of Brobdingnag, which falsely perceives itself to be a utopia of freedom and equality. Next stop is the island of Laputa, whose scientist inhabitants are too brilliant to be practical. Finally Gulliver visits a place populated by gentle horses called the Houyhnhnms and the bestial cave-dwelling Yahoos.
Nothing But A Man (1964)
Most movies about the civil-rights era focus on the political struggles and their leaders. This entry dramatizes the difficulties faced by ordinary blacks in rural Alabama during that period. Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) is a young black railroad worker who marries Josie (Abby Lincoln), a preacher's daughter. She learns that her husband has responsibilities from his past he doesn't want to face up to.
Duff gets a job at a sawmill, but refuses to ingratiate himself with its racist white owners. He's called a troublemaker and fired. The unjust persecution puts strain on his marriage, which he handles badly. The filmmakers show how social injustice can damage personal lives and unsentimentally chronicle Duff's attempts to put his family back together.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ------ KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, DEC. 15
Small Town Christmas
Home & Garden TV, 8 p.m.
Come home for Christmas with this heartwarming visit to small-town celebrations such as Las Posadas (the inns) in Goliad, Texas, a traditional Catholic re-enactment of the Holy Family's search for shelter in Bethlehem on the first Christmas Eve. Also shown at 11 p.m., then repeated Friday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
SUNDAY, DEC. 15
Christmas at the White House
Home & Garden TV, 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.
The White House Christmas 2002, at 9 p.m., follows decorators, artisans, volunteers and the White House chief usher, chief florist and executive pastry chef as they beautify the executive mansion for Christmas. Modern Masters: White House Artisans, at 10 p.m., shows gifted artisans making ornaments for the White House Christmas tree. Both shows will repeat, in reverse order, on Friday at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.
MONDAY, DEC. 16
Life Is Worth Living
EWTN, 2 p.m.
The late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen's topic in this show is loneliness — a heavy cross that many people carry, and one that can be especially heavy in the holiday season. Rebroadcast Tuesday at 2 a.m. and Friday at 9 p.m.
TUESDAY, DEC. 17
The Christmas Truce
History Channel, 8 p.m.
Peace broke out along the Western Front on Christmas Eve, 1914, after German and British troops began singing Christmas carols. This moving two-hour special tells the true story of soldiers who befriended each other for Christmas and even prayed over their dead together. For days, men on both sides refused to resume killing one another.
WEDNESDAY, DEC. 18
The Death of the Red Baron
Discovery Channel, 9 p.m.
The Red Baron wasn't only Snoopy's pretend foe in “Peanuts” — he was the real-life Manfred von Richtofen, whose 80 credited kills made him Germany's dead-liest air ace of World War I. This “Unsolved History” enlists ballistic analysis, laser range-finders and computerized flight simulators to probe the Red Baron's last flight on April 20, 1918.
THURSDAY, DEC. 19
The Shroud of Turin
History Channel, 8 p.m.
This program details doubts about the disputed radiocarbon dating tests of 1988.
FRIDAY, DEC. 20
The World Over
EWTN, 8 p.m.
A special Christmas edition of the popular show hosted by Raymond Arroyo.
SATURDAY, DEC. 21
A Christmas Homecoming
PBS, 9 p.m.
The local symphony and choirs give a lovely Christmas concert in the Quad Cities, Mississippi River towns opposite each other in Illinois and Iowa.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ------ KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Running a School in a War DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Christian Brother Vincent Malham had completed five years as head of the Christian Brothers' St. Louis province, was studying Spanish and taking a sabbatical in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1995 when he received a call from Rome.
The superior general of the Christian Brothers asked Brother Malham to be seated before proposing he consider an unexpected assignment — moving to the Holy Land to take leadership of Bethlehem University, the Vatican-affiliated institution that has sometimes found itself caught in the cross fire of the Middle East conflict.
Brother Malham discussed administrating Bethlehem University amid the situation in the Middle East with Register correspondent Tom Tracy in this second of a two-part interview.
What is Bethlehem University all about?
The Vatican founded the college following many years of discussions after realizing many Christian sons and daughters [from the Holy Land] were going abroad. It started in 1973 with 112 students. Now we have more than 2,100 students. The school is really a unique place, with faculties of arts, business, education, nursing and science, and an institute of hotel management. It is first and foremost a place of education for Palestinian Christians and Muslims.
The university really serves another purpose: It's a social center where people get together to relate, where prejudices are broken down. It's a hub for the Christian community even though we have two-thirds Muslim students. Two-thirds of the staff are Christian.
Some say we are a little island of stability in a sea of turmoil. You step onto the campus and you can breathe fresh air. One of my beliefs is that to study you need an atmosphere of peace, quiet and beauty, especially for our students who come from the camps where they have no space. It should be restful, attractive and serene.
What changes have you made since arriving there?
We are the first Palestinian university to embark on a strategic plan. We started a five-year planning process a few years ago called, “A New University for a New Palestine in the New Millennium.” It will conclude next year. We are reviewing all academic programs, quality assurance in all areas, trying to improve campus facilities and the quality of student life as well as addressing other needs of the university. We are trying to provide a first-rate education to our students and to do our part through education in preparing for a new Palestinian state.
The first summer I was there I had a fountain built; in a country where water is so scarce it was significant for the students to be near water and enjoy its calm, soothing effects and the richness of its symbolism.
Before 2000, we exerted strong appeals to try to arrange a short stopover of the Pope to campus [during his visit to the region]. He didn't come but did say a beautiful thing about the university when he visited a nearby camp in Bethlehem: “The Catholic Church is … happy to serve the noble cause of education through the extremely valuable work of Bethlehem University.”
How do you deal with the role of university ambassador/principal fund-raiser? Where does the support come from?
I genuinely like people, and I believe so strongly in our university and the need of it for our people, so I don't have to be a salesman. The Congregation for Oriental Churches is our major funder, giving annually about 15% of our budget; student tuition constitutes about 30%, with much of that being subsidized through financial aid; the Palestinian Authority is supposed to give 7%, or more than $1 million annually. This year we have gotten not one shekel from them. To make up the difference, we fund raise all over the world.
The German Knights, among many other groups, have been most generous to us. We also try to raise funds in the United States, Europe and in the Gulf. We are being challenged by our international board to get more money from the Arab world because the West is at present bearing primary responsibility for keeping the institution open and running.
How is that effort going?
We are hoping if ever there is a Palestinian state there could be some way of getting some money from the Palestinian Authority, because they are forcing us to keep tuition low but are not [currently] helping. There is a financial crisis in all of the Palestinian universities. Because we are Catholic and sponsored by the Vatican, many people have the misconception that the Vatican can underwrite us any time there is a crisis, and that is not the case.
In 1998 you told a reporter the university was weighing the possibility of adding graduate-level programs. Have you ruled that out?
We made the decision that we want to offer programs of excellence in undergraduate education. As part of our strategic planning process, we are considering two new programs: public administration and computer science, and information technology. We believe both programs could help in the development of the country.
How is your hospitality program doing in light of the collapse of tourism there?
We train students the best we can. We try to do internal things — departmental parties and things to give them training. We added a fourth-year program in conjunction with the French government, and the French are furnishing chefs. They want to promote French language and culture. It is still early in the formation. The economy is at an all-time low. Hotels are closed, restaurants are largely closed, souvenir shops. It is a very sad scene. An intercontinental five-star hotel was set for Bethlehem, in the old Jasser Palace. They opened up but had to close a year and a half ago.
Tom Tracy writes from West Palm Beach, Florida.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom Tracy ------ KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: The Little Flower Continues to Bloom DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:WITH EMPTY HANDS: THE MESSAGE OF ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
by Conrad de Meester, OCD Inst. of Carmelite Studies, 2002 160 pages, $14.95 To order: 800-832-8489 or www.icspublications.org
How important is the little French girl who entered the Carmel of Lisieux at age 15 and remained cloistered there until her death from tuberculosis just nine years later?
The Church has declared Thérèse of Lisieux a saint and proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church as well as, along with St. Francis Xavier, the universal patron of the missions. Father Conrad de Meester, a Belgian Carmelite priest, thought Thérèse so significant that he made the interpretation and exposition of her life and thought his life's work.
With Empty Hands is a substantial revision and a new translation of Les Mains vides, Father de Meester's 1972 book about Thérèse, which, although eventually translated into English, has long been unavailable. His hope for the new book, which incorporates all the latest findings, is that it might be a source of enlightenment for all who seek to love and be loved by God. He writes, “Some of my opinions had matured [since 1972], and I wished to look more closely at Thérèse's psychology, the influence of her family environment, the development of her faith, her relationship with the various members of her family, her prayer life and so on.”
This close look resulted in a moving account of the Little Flower's “hidden life with God” from birth to death. Father de Meester's gift seems to be his ability to skillfully blend scholarly ruminations with passages of childlike delight. He presents Thérèse's contemplative insights as spiritual guidance capable of changing lives. By quoting from Thérèse's journals, letters, poetry and plays, then adding explanation and background, Father de Meester charts, step by step, her sublime interior development.
Thérèse family's influence is particularly interesting. In writing to her sister Céline, Thérèse describes their beloved father's confinement in a psychiatric hospital as “the most bitter and most humiliating of all chalices.” Father de Meester adds: “It would not be too fanciful to say that Thérèse drank from that same chalice, and to the very dregs. … Jesus ‘learned obedience through his sufferings,’ and Thérèse learned to mature in the same ‘crucible.’ Rare flowers can emerge from a swamp. In Thérèse's case, flowers of humility, detachment, confidence and abandonment were sure to blossom in that good ground.” Indeed, Thérèse later wrote of her father's hospitalization: “Papa's three years of martyrdom appear to me as the most lovable, the most fruitful of my life; I wouldn't exchange them for all the ecstasies and revelations of the saints.”
After their father's death, Céline also entered the order, bringing with her “a small notebook … destined to play a significant role in Thérèse's life.” It contained an anthology of passages from the Old Testament, which the young Carmelites were not permitted to read in its entirety. “Not long afterwards, and certainly before the end of the year,” Father de Meester writes, “Thérèse made a brilliant discovery while meditating on the texts in Céline's notebook. She had found her famous ‘little way.’”
From there, Father de Meester describes the deepening and refinement of Thérèse's ideas and, ultimately, in a section TITLEd “En Route to Life,” he chronicles — based on her writings — her final hours of earthly life.
With Empty Hands is without disappointment. One only wonders why, in his discussion of St. Thérèse's “formidable prophetic awareness” of her need to carry out a mission to the world, Father de Meester doesn't mention the millions of pilgrims who have visited the saint's relics during their worldwide tour honoring the 100th anniversary of her death. For them, and for those who regret having missed the relic tour, this book will be a welcome expansion of the Little Flower's place in the Church — and in our hearts.
Ann Applegarth writes from Eugene, Oregon.
------ EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ann Applegarth ------ KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Baptist to Catholic School
The college, renamed Ave Maria College of the Americas, retains the school's status as an institution accredited in the United States in which classes are taught in English.
Following a turbulent transition in which some charged that the college would become “an outpost of the Vatican,” the Chronicle reported that the “the 430-student college appears calm.”
The administration has set as one of its goals to live up to the ideals defined for Catholic higher education by Pope John Paul II in his 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
Underreporting Charged
A former director of public safety at the college has claimed that the college does not accurately report its sexual assaults and alcohol-related incidents.
“While we cannot comment specifically on the details of any case,” said St. Mary's president, Christian Brother Craig Franz, “I sincerely regret that any sexual assaults have occurred and find each and every incident appalling and unacceptable.”
‘Facilities Race’
STANDARD & POORS, Nov. 27 — In an unusually blunt assessment of the financial problems facing private colleges and universities, the rating agency predicts that institutions might “consolidate in large numbers or close as they struggle against stagnant levels of financial resources and substantially higher levels of debt.”
The debt is attributed mostly to facilities expansion undertaken by colleges in order to keep up with their competitors.
Though considered a secondary problem, most colleges have had two successive years of investment losses, said Standard & Poors, with endowments contributing less to operating budgets.
On Schedule
CHRONICLE.COM, Nov. 27 — Santa Clara University in California has raised more than $150 million in a capital campaign to raise $350 million by 2006, reported the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
More than $100 million is slated to support need- and merit-based scholarships as well as scholarships for athletes and graduate students at the Jesuit university. Some $32 million will be used for endowed faculty chairs with most of the remainder going to support new construction and facilities improvements.
New President
Abene replaces William Shustowski, who resigned earlier this year to accept a position at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Ind.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ------ KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: A.M. or P.M. for 'Quality Time'? DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Q I work long hours. Generally I have some flexibility about whether I go in late and stay late or go in very early and come home early. I enjoy having breakfast with my kids and ushering them into their school day, but then I often come home so late that I don't see them in the evening. Which part of the day do you think is more conducive to “quality time”?
A I've heard it said that there are actually people out there who have breakfast with their kids, come home for lunch with their kids (if they are home schooled) and are home for dinner. I've never actually met anyone who does that, but I've heard that such folks exist. I believe there was a sighting in the Midwest of such a family.
Most of us are in the jeopardy that you describe. Like you, I often prefer the civility of a nice breakfast, wishing the kids a good day as they head to the bus stop or talking with them as I drive them into school. This means I arrive a bit late for work but with some good family-encounter time under my belt. That's what I like.
But I'm not sure that's best for my spouse and kids. I think that they (and my wife) may need me more in the evenings when homework hell begins, when crankiness sets in as they (we) all get tired, when the “oh yeah, I forgot to mention that my science project, which I haven't started yet, is due tomorrow” is disclosed.
This is not an easy issue. We are probably kidding ourselves, however, and hurting our kids if we are never or rarely home in the evenings. As much as we hate to admit it, our kids — who are, after all, kids — need our help in meeting their developmental tasks. Children need lots of parental interaction to succeed.
At some fundamental level, we must realize that Christ has called us to support our families and to be an actively involved parent in our families. We know that he wants us to have it both ways. So even if the equation seems unsolvable, it generally isn't. This may cue you to get into spiritual direction to try to resolve this dilemma.
If you have to work the swing shift or do a lot of overnight travel, you have a call to conscience. You need to engineer a way to be home on some evenings to help your kids with their discipline and studies. Plus you get a bonus: There's nothing like a homemade dinner — at home.
Art Bennett is director of Alpha Omega Clinic and Consultation Services in Vienna, Virginia.
------ EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art Bennet ------ KEYWORDS: Cultute of Life -------- TITLE: How (and Why) to Pray DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Quick Tip God likes to converse with you the way you like to converse with others: He doesn't want you to rattle on and hardly notice him.
Quick Tip Prayer is made of ACTS.
A-Adoration,
C-Contrition (sorrow for sins),
T-Thanksgiving,
S-Supplication (your requests of God).
Reason 1 If you had the chance to talk to Mother Teresa, wouldn't you? Christ is infinitely greater, and you have the chance every day.
Reason 2 Don't you talk frequently and for significant amounts of time to those you love?
Reason 3 As a baptized person, you are the representative of Christ's love at home, at work and in social situations. You will only represent him well if you've prayed.
Quick Tip Kneel when you pray, or sit respectfully. Your body and soul are one. The way you carry your body is important.
Reason 5 Prayer will transform your day and make it fruitful and fulfilling.
Reason 6 Only God can make you truly happy. Not your spouse, not your body, not your intellect. Know him.
Reason 7 Do you want to go to heaven? Then get ready with habitual prayer.
Quick Tip Start by remembering God is present and telling him in your own words why you believe in him, hope in him and love him.
Reason 8 Read Luke 10:38-42: Jesus says there is “only one thing necessary.”
Quick Tip If you get “stuck,” you can slowly repeat the words of a simple prayer like:
“My God, I adore your divine greatness from the depths of my littleness.”
Reason 9 Mental prayer is the only thing that will soften your heart besides suffering.
Quick Tip Read a brief passage from the Gospels, and picture it happening. You can even imagine Christ sitting with you.
Reason 10 Christ doesn't want you to pray because you have to. He wants you to pray because he loves you and likes talking to you.
Reason 11 Faithful prayer can give you in a moment what otherwise takes years of experience to gain.
------ EXCERPT: Next Week: Basics of Catholic Living ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: Cultute of Life -------- TITLE: Life of Friendship With God DATE: 12/15/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: December 15-21, 2002 ---- BODY:Knowing Christ … will lead to love. Read: Father Alban Goodier's The Public Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ and The Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Frank Sheed's To Know Christ Jesus, or Fulton Sheen's Life of Christ.
Morning meditation. Review your morning routine. When can you pray? Spend 5 minutes a day the first week, 10 minutes a day the second week, then 15. In two weeks it will be a habit, and much easier to do.
Daily Rosary. Get daily contact with Mary in this “summary of the Gospel.” Find out how to pray it at www.ncregister.com.
Gospel Reading. The first four books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) recount what Jesus actually did and said, how he reacted to situations, what he asked. Meet Christ there for 5 minutes a day.
Examination of conscience. At bedtime, make it a habit to review your day before God.
Weekly Eucharistic Adoration. Christ is truly present — body, blood, soul and divinity — in the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle of every Catholic Church. It is easy to pray in Christ's presence. A Holy Hour is enormously beneficial.
Annual retreat. See the New Evangelization Events calendar online at www.ncregister.com for dates and locations of spiritual exercises. Here you'll meet Christ deeply.
Is this too much? It probably will be, at first. Start with the daily meditation or rosary, then add what you can.
------ EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ------ KEYWORDS: Cultute of Life -------- TITLE: Groups Take on Super Sunday Sleaze DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:PASADENA, Calif.— Parents seeking television family fare on Super Bowl Sunday should beware: In an effort to steal viewers during Fox's Feb. 3 airing of the game between the St. Louis Rams and the New England Patriots, NBC plans to feature six Playboy playmates on their reality-based “Fear Factor” program during halftime.
NBC's plan is to start the special hour-long edition of “Fear Factor” precisely when the football game, carried this season on the Fox network, breaks for the half. The show will interrupt a repeat and run for the 20 minutes of halftime, which will fall in the heart of Sunday evening prime time. When the game resumes, NBC will go back to the repeat and then pick up the remainder of the program at 10 p.m. EST when NBC has calculated that the game will be over.
Parents are dismayed by NBC's programming maneuver. “The Super Bowl has become a family tradition with my two sons. Our 10-year-old is anticipating watching the game with Daddy,” said Lisa Hendey, founder of CatholicMom.com of Fresno, Calif. “I'm deeply saddened that NBC would consider featuring Playmates during what has traditionally been a family viewing event … We'll turn the TV off at half-time.”
Leslie Graves, a Madison, Wis. mother of three, said she was astonished to hear of NBC's use of centerfolds. “Our 15-year-old daughter is a Packer fan and will probably be watching television with her dad,” she said. “I'm concerned about the message this sends to teenage girls. It's degrading and demeaning to women.”
On “Fear Factor,” contestants compete for cash by performing menacing and often stomach-turning stunts, such as dangling from bridges or having their bodies covered with squirming bugs or worms. NBC has not said what stunts the centerfolds will be performing.
The Feb. 3 “Fear Factor” episode is a stark departure from NBC's promise to provide family-friendly programming. Three years ago, Scott Sassa, NBC's West Coast president, told a meeting of the Television Critics Association that the network would have more family programs and less sexual content.
“We have obviously gotten the word out to producers that sex for sex's sake is not going to be a good thing,” Sassa was widely reported to have said. “Because we deal with adult-themed programming, there will be sexual content [on NBC], but it's going to have to be germane to the story line and not gratuitous.”
But following the network's reported lack of success with family programs such as “Daddio,” family fare is no longer a priority. “We don't see them as really the kinds of shows that are in our wheelhouse,” Sassa said Jan. 9, Associated Press reported. “They don't have the upscale demos that we want that would allow us to keep them on the air.”
Sassa stated that NBC is working instead to attract mature viewers with adult-oriented themes and dialogue, in the vein of HBO's “Sex in the City.” In December, NBC also became the first network to allow hard liquor ads.
‘Pornography’
Ed Vitagliano, director of research for the Tupelo-based American Family Association, said parents should be outraged by NBC's action. “For a TV network to basically ally itself with a producer of pornography is reprehensible,” he said. “Parents really need to make the effort to do whatever they can to try to encourage networks and advertisers to begin to draw back instead of rushing headlong into an ‘anything goes’ mentality.”
Said Robert Peters, president of New York-based Morality in Media, “It's one more proof that the television industry on the whole is morally and creatively bankrupt.” Vitagliano and Peters view such programming as the mainstreaming of pornography. “Playboy, without any question, is a major distributor of hardcore pornography,” said Peters. “They make most of their money from hardcore videos and cable.”
Playboy disagrees. “I don't think that NBC approached it with the intention that they are now in favor of X-rated material,” said Bill Farley, national director of communications for Playboy Enterprises. “Our name and logo are one of the best-known. Playboy has at least 10 million readers per month, so there is a built in audience.” He added that playmates have appeared on other programs like “Sex in the City,” NBC's “Just Shoot Me,” and “Family Feud.”
Playboy argues that since the playmates are not appearing on “Fear Factor” nude, it poses no problem. “Playmates are not pornographic and the program will not be pornographic in any way,” said Elizabeth Norris, director of public relations with Playboy. “They will be appearing on the show like any other contestants. Naturally, they are attractive and there will be a large male audience.”
By showing the playmates NBC obviously hopes to carve a piece out of the traditionally huge Super Bowl TV ratings, but the network has indicated it is even more concerned with creating a buzz. “If we don't get a rating it doesn't matter. We're going to be talked about,” said NBC Entertainment president Jeff Zucker, the New York Times.
Vitagliano says that television has been sliding downhill since networks quit regulating themselves in the late 1960s, and that the trend has increased dramatically in recent years.
“We have really seen an acceleration of the kinds of language, the kinds of explicit sexuality and sexual talk and even nudity— we've seen an acceleration of it that's almost beyond belief.”
Indeed, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation's “Sex on TV: Content and Context” study found that programs with sexual content increased from 56% of shows in the 1997-1998 television season to 68% in the 1999-2000 season. And an American Academy of Pediatrics study reported that “family hour” (8 to 9 p.m.) now contains more than eight sexual incidents per hour, four times as many as in 1976.
Cyberspace Protests
In response, Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association is encouraging viewers to contact sponsors and encourage them not to advertise on morally questionable shows. The organization has launched an e-mail campaign featuring two separate Web sites— one for moms and one for dads. The goal of the two sites, OneMillionMoms.com and OneMillionDads.com, is to recruit parents who will send one e-mail message per week to a sponsor, holding the company responsible for what it supports.
Parents who register at the Web sites will receive an e-mail once a week concerning a problematic program. The message will include a review of the program and an e-mail address that can be used to register a complaint.
Anti-pornography groups aren't the only ones concerned by TV's broadcasting of sleaze. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps believes that broadcasters have an obligation to decency.
Speaking before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Jan. 9, Copps said, “Every day I hear from Americans who are fed up with the patently offensive programming coming their way. When it comes to the broadcast media, the FCC has a statutory obligation to protect children from obscene, indecent or profane programming. I take this responsibility with the utmost seriousness,” he said. Copps added that he's concerned with the increase in sexually explicit and profane programming on radio and television, and the detrimental effects on children. “Our nation has enacted laws, constitutionally sanctioned laws, to protect young people from these excesses,” he said.
Pro-family advocates regard NBC's Super Bowl Sunday airing of “Fear Factor” as a prime example of marketing sex to youthful audiences. “The big audience isn't going to be football fans turning over to see this,” said Morality in Media's Peters. “Unfortunately, it will be kids and teens. They're the ones that are likely to turn the channel.”
Added Peters, “NBC is teaming up with a hardcore porn distributor to deliver up some softcore porn for America's teens and children. Hopefully the plan will fail. Beer, babes, and ball may be a great combination for a subset of football fans, but I don't believe most football fans are meatheads.”
Tim Drake is managing editor of catholic.net
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope Gathers Religions To Pray for World Peace DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:ASSISI, Italy— It was reminiscent of previous peace gatherings at Assisi. Gatherings which some say helped end the Cold War and tear down the Berlin Hall.
“Never again violence! Never again war! Never again terrorism! In the name of God may every religion bring upon earth justice and peace, forgiveness and life, love!” said Pope John Paul II in the name of the many religions' leaders who met Jan. 24.
The Holy Father called together over 200 world religious leaders to the birthplace of St. Francis to pray for peace. Protected from the wind and rain under a large scaffolding-and-canvas tent in lower St. Francis Square, the leaders were gath ering for the third such meeting convened by John Paul. While the novelty of the first such meeting in 1986 has worn off, the fact that this meeting was called in response to the terrorist attacks and subsequent war added a new dimension.
Cardinal Edward Egan of New York was present in Assisi, and was specially greeted by John Paul as the archbishop of “the city so terribly affected by the tragic events of Sept. 11.”
“We proclaim before the world that religion must never become a reason for conflict, hatred and violence, like that seen once more in our days,” said Cardinal Francois Xavier Van Thu!ân, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, as he opened the meeting.
Van Thuân, who spent 13 years imprisoned by the Vietnamese communists for being a Catholic bishop, speaks with a certain authority when he calls for reconciliation and a renunciation of violence.
John Paul wanted this meeting to make clear that religion is not a cause of violence but rather a force for peace.
The Assisi meeting was held in the same week as a meeting in Alexandria, Egypt, chaired by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, which convened Christian, Jewish and Islamic leaders to work for peace in the Holy Land. Catholic participants in that meeting included the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah and Melkite Archbishop Pierre Mouallem of Haifa. The Alexandria meeting was co-hosted by Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi of al-Azhar University in Egypt, the spiritual leader of the world's Sunni Muslims.
Both Carey and Tantawi, unable to be present in Assisi, sent messages that were read by their representatives.
In Assisi itself, the Holy Father was joined by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, leader of the world's 200 million Othodox Christians, and two other Orthodox Patriarchs; Dr. Konrad Raiser, Secretary-General of the World Council of Churches; as well as leaders of 14 other Christian denominations and 11 other religions, including Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and African animists. A commitment to peace was read by 10 different leaders in 10 different languages.
“We commit ourselves to proclaiming our firm commitment that violence and terrorism are incompatible with the authentic spirit of religion and, as we condemn every recourse to violence and war in the name of God or religion; we commit ourselves to doing everything possible to eliminate the root causes of terrorism,” said Raiser, reading the first part of the pledge in German.
Muslim Participation
After Sept. 11, it was clear that the over 1,000 journalists who gathered were eager to hear what the Islamic world would say.
While the presence of senior Muslim clerics and scholars was a testimony in itself, the address of Sheikh Tantawi was less robust than many hoped. He stressed the universal brotherhood of all peoples and the divine plan for peace, but unlike the Christian and Jewish leaders present, opted not to specifically condemn violence in the name of religion.
He struck a strangely off-key note in “paying tribute to the Vatican for its honorable support of the Palestinian people.”
“We don't know whether Osama bin Laden is a good Muslim, because we only know him from television, but I must say that certainly the terrorists are not good Muslims, because God does not want violence,” said Dr. Ali Wahby El Samman, speaking to reporters en route to Assisi aboard the papal train. Dr. El Samman read Sheikh Tantawi's address.
A similarly curious mix of defiance and hope came from the Jewish representative, Rabbi Israel Singer, secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress.
For ostensible reasons of brevity, he chose not to read the parts of his prepared remarks which recalled how the “Bible is replete with God's injunctions to the Jews to do battle against their enemies when necessary,” wars which are to be fought “ruthlessly and without mercy.”
He did, however read that part of his address which stressed that no religion commanded its adherents “to kill indiscriminately, and those who have taught otherwise have done so by hijacking and distorting the religions in whose name they speak.”
“You should tell your people and we should tell ours, all of us— all of us— to question whether land or places are more important than people's lives and, until we learn to do that, there will be no peace,” Singer added obliquely, leading many to wonder whether he was referring to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Peace is too important to be left to the generals.”
Common Witness
Several leaders joined John Paul in stating the importance of a common witness, across religious boundaries, of prayer for peace. It was clear that John Paul wanted to use his singular authority to provide a forum in which Christians, Jews and Muslims would together condemn violence in the name of religion.
“Only you could make this happen,” said Rabbi Singer, addressing John Paul. “Only you could do it, and we have to help you do it.”
But beyond the immediate world conflict, the meetings at Assisi are part of the Pope's continuing effort to show that the history of the world is not only the stuff of politics and economics, but is primarily the story of the human spirit, that real but invisible realm in which God's providence is at work.
“The coming together of so many religious leaders to pray is in itself an invitation to the world to become aware that there exists another dimension of peace and another way of promoting it which is not a result of negotiations, political compromises or economic bargaining,” John Paul said about the first Assisi meeting. “It is the result of prayer, which, in the diversity of religions, expresses a relationship with the a supreme power that surpasses our human capacities alone.”
“As men of religion, we commit the sin of excessive modesty,” said the Chief Rabbi of Paris, Samuel-Renè Sirat, agreeing that the religious dimension of peace is often neglected by religious leaders themselves. “We have the responsibility to take strong positions, to say that we will not tolerate that the name of God be used for violence, for war, for destruction and for assassination.”
The Spirit of Assisi
There were differing views about what could concretely by expected from the Assisi initiative.
“I find it encouraging that persons of different religions are making this trip to Assisi,” said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger aboard the papal train. “I like this dimension of pilgrimage very much, that we are journeying together, and together we are searching for peace. We do not wait for immediate results, but all of us wish to know the one God, and to work for peace.”
Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Sant'Egidio movement, was also on hand. “In 1986 the world was enmeshed in the cold war,” he said. “But we did not pray in vain at Assisi and in the spirit of Assisi!”
Since 1986, the Sant'Egidio community has held annual commemorations of the first Assisi meeting, and Riccardi believes that what happened afterwards on the world stage was not merely coincidental.
“We have seen how prayer unleashes new energies for peace,” he said. “Epoch-making changes have taken place: peaceful transitions from Communism in Eastern Europe, victories of peaces in Central and South America, and is Asia. I have seen first hand the return of justice in South Africa and of peace in Mozambique. New energies of love prepare the way for peace.”
In the church of St. Francis, a few yards from where the Christians gathered for ecumenical prayer, the Christmas nativity scene was still standing— fittingly enough, because it was St. Francis who made the first Christmas crèche. And there, in bold letters, was the message from the heavens, carried by those spiritual messengers, the angels: Et in terra pax. And on earth, peace.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: NEWS -------- TITLE: Who's Afraid of the U.S. Bishops? Theologians And the Mandatum DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON— When presidents of Catholic colleges and universities gather here this weekend, their discussions are certain to include the hot-button issue of the U.S. application of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which requires theologians to apply for a Church sanction to teach at Catholic institutions.
The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities is meeting Feb. 2–4 to consider the Catholic intellectual tradition in the public square. But at a business meeting Feb. 4, many of the college administrators will be swapping stories about their relationship, and that of the theologians at their institutions, with the local bishop.
The U.S. bishops, at their meeting in June 2001, approved guidelines to be followed by theologians applying for the man-datum— a statement from the local bishop that a Catholic professor of theology is teaching in accord with Church doctrine. The mandatum is required by Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church), Pope John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education.
The bishops' guidelines specify that it is the obligation of the professor, not the university, to apply for the mandatum. A bishop also has the right to offer it on his own initiative.
“In most cases, it's being done discreetly and low-key,” said Monika Hellwig, executive director of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.
“Some theologians won't apply for it because it will harm their standing among their academic colleagues.”
The association believes that it would be legally risky to incorporate the mandatum into hiring contracts or constitutional documents of the university.
Professors have until June 1 to obtain a mandatum. “After a year or two, we'll see people not applying for it,” predicted Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, which seeks to promote Catholic identity at Catholic universities. “And we'll be vocal about that.”
While Ex Corde incorporated the man-datum requirement, it was based on the earlier 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law. Canon 812 of the revised Code states, “It is necessary that those who teach theological disciplines in any institute of higher learning have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority.”
Many observers agree that the mandate is a vital component in beginning to clear up the confusion among students about Catholic faith and morals, to which many college theologians have contributed by promoting teachings contrary to the magisterium of the Church.
Regarding the trend among universities sponsored by his own order, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, superior general of the Society of Jesus, recently commented that secularization is rampant in Jesuit universities.
“For some [Jesuit] universities,” he told Father Richard John Neuhaus during the Special Assembly for America of the Synod of Bishops in Rome in late 1997, “it is probably too late to restore their Catholic character.”
No Overnight Changes
“It will take time,” said Father Matthew Lamb, a priest of the Diocese of Milwaukee who teaches theology at Boston College. “It's not something you can change overnight. The key element of Ex Corde Ecclesiae is establishing the important point that any institution calling itself Catholic cannot treat the ordinary as an agent extrinsic to the institution.”
Father Lamb sees hope in the fact that many younger theologians regard their vocations in the service of the truth and the Church, not in dissent.
Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl said he has gotten a “steady stream” of requests for the mandatum from professors in the three institutions in his diocese: Duquesne University, Carlow College and La Roche College. He feels the process is going smoothly because he began meeting with presidents and faculty of the universities there and the major superiors of the religious orders that sponsor them soon after the 1990 publication of Ex Corde, laying out a structure for dialogue and review of the institutions' mission.
When the U.S. bishops eventually approved an American application of Ex Corde, Bishop Wuerl said, “we gathered all the faculty that required a mandate … and agreed that we'd use the materials put out by the bishops.”
Bishop Wuerl, who is chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Education, said that in dioceses where the mandatum is “presented as one more credential” that a professor needs, there are few problems in acceptance of the requirement.
He also said that because the work of devising guidelines is finished, a committee of bishops and college presidents can take up other issues, such as strengthening the Catholic identity of the colleges through such means as increasing the presence of campus ministry and offering more information on religious vocations.
“There is a variety of things we can do,” said the bishop. “Here in Pittsburgh, each of the Catholic colleges begins the year with a Mass of the Holy Spirit, and I go to each campus. It's a way to say, ‘This campus approaches life differently.’”
Focus on Students
That is what the Newman Society would also like to foster, not only through periodic events like a yearly Mass, but also through attention to elements of daily campus life. “Our concern is that there has been very little attention paid to student life outside of class, where students are even more affected in their spiritual life,” Reilly said.
For example, too many Catholic college campuses are little different from their secular counterparts in their loose attitude toward sexuality, he said. Consequently, the Newman Society wants to help college administrators design residence hall policies and programs to discourage sexual activity.
The society was disturbed by a report last year by the pro-abortion lobby, Catholics for a Free Choice, that a significant number of Catholic colleges provide contraceptives and abortion referrals to students. (Catholics for a Free Choice has been repeatedly denounced by the U.S. bishops for misrepresenting itself as an authentically Catholic group). To remedy that situation, the Cardinal Newman Society is offering help in developing on-campus education programs that promote Catholic teaching on the dignity of life and the human body and encourage chastity and responsible dating.
This broader attention to Catholic identity is a central theme of Ex Corde Ecclesiae. “Catholic teaching and discipline are to influence all university activities,” the document states in its section on General Norms. Later in that section, it states, “The education of students is to combine academic and professional development with formation in moral and religious principles and the social teachings of the Church.”
Adds the document, “If problems should arise concerning this Catholic character, the local Bishop is to take the initiatives necessary to resolve the matter.”
That Catholic character seems to be contradicted by the presence of campus organizations that espouse views contrary to Church teaching. Reilly wants to focus attention on such clubs, citing as one example a “Gay and Lesbian Law Association” that has existed for years at Fordham Law School in Manhattan.
The Hoya, the Georgetown University newspaper, reported on two demonstrations Jan. 22, the 29th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Twenty-one students stood throughout a Mass celebrated at the university by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington to draw attention to their efforts to establish a homosexual “resource center” on campus. The same day, a pro-abortion student group hung coat hangers in classrooms across the campus.
Reilly said his organization promotes the position of Ex Corde that any official action or commitment of the university, including those of authorized student groups, must accord with its Catholic identity. Said Reilly, “Access to facilities and funding [of clubs] comes under that.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Nazi 'Master Plan' to Get Church Is Revealed DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:CAMDEN, New Jersey— The Catholic Church and other Christian denominations suffered significant persecution under the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s, according to a document released last month through the collaboration of Cornell (N.Y.) University and Rutgers University Law School in Camden, N.J.
The document, “The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches,” was published online Jan. 9 in the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion.
The document, which is stamped “confidential” and dated July 6, 1945, was compiled by Franz Neumann, a Jewish expatriate, for the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS — the forerunner of the CIA— as part of the preparation for the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
“The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches” was originally part of the collection of Nuremberg-related documents in the collection of Gen. William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the OSS. The collection was gifted to Cornell University Law Library in 1998.
The document begins, “This study describes, with illustrative factual evidence, Nazi purposes, policies and methods of persecuting the Christian Churches in Germany and occupied Europe.” The document states that attacks “against the Christian Churches were an integral part of the National Socialist Scheme of world conquest,” and adds that, “National Socialism by its very nature was hostile to Christianity and the Christian Churches.”
Among the listed targets for Nazi abuse were Catholic bishops and priests, Catholic newspapers, Catholic schools, seminaries and religious orders, both in Germany and in occupied territories. The OSS document also describes the “murder of a large number of Catholic priests” in Poland.
The Jesuits were especially targeted. The OSS document quotes a 1935 bulletin, published by the Bavarian Political Police, that said, “The Jesuits are instigating systematic and far-reaching activities in Bavaria to undermine the Reich and bring contempt even on [Hitler] himself.”
These accusations provoked a harsh crackdown: “The political police ordered, therefore, that statements injurious to the State be ruthlessly punished by ‘protective custody’ (i.e. the concentration camp).”
The document also addresses the controversial “Concordat” between the Catholic Church and the Nazis that guaranteed the Church freedom from several types of government interference — a document for which the Church has been often criticized: “By 1937 it had become clear the Nazi state was not to be appeased by Catholic efforts to accommodate the Church and State in the form of the Concordat … Convinced, therefore, that the Church had been in error, in the face of the irreconcilability of its teachings with those of National Socialism, in abandoning its earlier opposition to the movement, the Church resumed its controversy with Nazi doctrine while continuing to suffer from Nazi practice.”
Opposition to the treatment of Jews was central to the conflict between Christians and Nazism. “[T]heir doctrinal commitments could not be reconciled with the principles of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of the Church to [the] State,” the OSS document says.
Julie Seltzer Mandel is a law student at Rutgers-Camden and the editor of the school's Nuremberg Project, which includes the document on Christian persecution. Mandel, whose grandmother survived Auschwitz, said that the persecution of Christian churches by the Nazis “is lesser known to the general public” than some other Nazi atrocities.
Mandel said that she believes the evidence contained in the “Nazi Master Plan” document is “definitely compelling.”
Jesuit Father Vincent Lapamarda, director of the Holocaust Collection at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. and author of The Jesuits and the Third Reich, said that to true Holocaust scholars, the information in the OSS document “is an old story” documented in the files of Jesuit Father Edmund Walsh, the founder of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, as well as his own book.
Despite this documentation of the Nazi hostility, the picture of an anti-Church Nazism is not undisputed. Books continue to claim that the Church was sympathetic to Nazis during the war (See Vatican News, page 4).
But Catholic scholars believe the newly released document will help dispel public ignorance about the actual situation with regard to the Church and other Christian denominations. “I am glad the word is getting out,” said Tom Nash of Catholics United for the Faith.
Nash said he was hopeful that critics who have ignored similar evidence from Catholic historians will be persuaded this time because the historical evidence is from a non-Church source. It has clearly attracted plenty of interest; the day it was first posted on the Internet the volume of surfers accessing the site “shut down the server,” Mandel reported.
Hitler's Hidden Hatred
Hitler's positive remarks towards Christianity on March 23, 1933, are sometimes quoted as alleged proof of mutual sympathies between the Church and Nazis. Nash, however, cites a 1983 article by Jesuit Father Lothar Groppe, quoting Hitler's comments made in private only two weeks later that revealed the Nazi leader's true feelings.
“There is no more future with the churches,” said Hitler, “whether this one or that one, it's all the same. At least not for the Germans. Fascism may make its peace with the Church in God's name. I will do that too. Why not? This will not keep me from exterminating Christianity from Germany root and branch. One is either a Christian or a German. One cannot be both.”
The “Master Plan” document reinforces this evidence that Hitler hid his very real hostility toward Christians. It states that “considerations of expediency made it impossible … for the National Socialist government to adopt this radical anti-Christian policy officially.”
Sums up Rutger's Mandel: “It makes sense that the ideology of the Christian churches would be in conflict with the Nazi ideology.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: This Star Wants Heaven DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:After a critically acclaimed breakthrough performance in the Vietnam War film, The Thin Red Line, he landed a starring role opposite Jennifer Lopez in Angel Eyes. He can currently be seen in theaters as Edmund Dantes in the major studio release based on the Alexander Dumas classic, The Count of Monte Cristo. He spoke recently with Barbara R. Nicolosi for the Register.
Where did you grow up, and how did you get into acting?
I was born and grew up in Mount Vernon, Wash. I went to Catholic grammar schools, Catholic high school, and eventually to Bellevue College and played basketball. After an injury that kept me on the bench, I got involved in acting. One day a talent agent saw me do a monologue and then one thing led to another.
I understand that early on some Hollywood agents told you to change your name?
They did indeed. They said, no one will be able to say it and I said, “Well, you've learned to say Schwarzeneggar.”
What kind of role did faith play in your life growing up?
We always went to Mass. How true it is that, “The family that prays together stays together.” Many other Christians emphasize the importance of choosing to believe at some later point in life, but the fact is, you can be born into something. I was born into a climate of faith and it has made all the difference in my life.
Is it true you say the rosary every day?
Mary has always been there for me. Mary is there to grab her son's hand and our hand and put them together. People don't understand the power of the rosary. There is a different kind of sight, a spiritual sight. When you pray the rosary, whatever is covering your eyes is taken away. There is a reason why our Blessed Mother in all her apparitions on earth keeps insisting that we pray.
There was a point in my life when I got tired of being mediocre. I was tired of all the pain in my soul. So I started praying the rosary really from my heart, not just lip service. The next day I went through this horrible darkness inside. It was very painful, like a purging process. It's something I had never gone through before. After I went through it, I said, if this is what will be necessary to get closer to God I will go through it.
You are a successful Hollywood actor with a demanding career, but you still make time every day for personal time of prayer. What is the principal gift that prayer brings to your life?
St. Maximilian Kolbe said, “Lucifer is so clever he can blind any man.” Unless you pray you can't see the patterns of sin in your life, the areas that are in need of transformation. Also, when you pray from your heart you receive more grace. You make sin more rare in your life. We have the words of Jesus calling us to, “Be perfect as my father is perfect.” This starts to come to life when you pray.
What do you see as the greatest challenge to the Church today?
Most of us don't aspire to holiness. Indifference is the biggest sin of this current age. Indifference practically means there is no difference, in the way we think, in the way we handle difficulties. Few Catholics have a zeal for holiness. To attempt to boldly go to a deeper place in their spiritual journey with every passing year. The people of the world do not believe because we are not setting an example for them of lives transformed by the love of God. People can only aspire to what they see.
In your new film, The Count of Monte Cristo, your character Edmund Dantes goes on a pretty dark spiritual journey.
He becomes a walking Lucifer. There is no such thing as a void in human life. If you get emptied of one thing, something else will rush in. So when Edmund loses everything that matters to him, everything that he loves, including his faith in God, hatred and the desire for vengeance fills him up. But it weighs heavily on him. He can't escape the love of God that pursues him.
There is a scene in the prison in which Edmund and the Abbe Faria, played by Richard Harris, argue about faith. My character says, “I don't believe in God” to which the Abbe responds, “That's okay, he believes in you.” You can disagree with gravity on the way to the ground, but eventually every knee must bow.
Working in Hollywood brings with it a lot of spiritual temptations. What kind of advice would you give young Catholics who feel called to be actors?
Whatever walk in life you pursue, you are always going to be put to the test. Go to Mass. Receive the sacraments seriously. It seems to me that as regards the journey with God, you can have a ripple effect in the water, or you can really move into the deep.
If you want to move into the deep experience of God, you have to move away from sin. You have to be a soul in motion and sincerely want to become a saint.
----- EXCERPT: James Caveziel is one of the most sought after young actors in Hollywood. ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Caveziel ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Nashville Dominicans' Vocations 'Problem': They Need More Space DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Better known for the guitar-twang and high lonesome sound of country music, Nashville is also home to the Sisters of St. Cecilia.
No, they're not a new country music band. But on one of the hills overlooking this musical town, a visitor can hear them as often as three times a day singing the divine office to the strains of traditional chant at the motherhouse, of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation.
Young women are being drawn here to take part in a religious life steeped in prayer and apostolate. And the flow of vocations is as strong and steady as these female voices lifting their melodious prayers to God.
According to Dominican Sister Catherine Marie, vocations director there, this past year has seen 17 new postulants, as well as 17 novices returning to further discern their calling to religious life.
On Feb. 2, the Feast of the Presentation, the sisters will recommit their vocations to Christ.
Over the past 10 years, the Sisters have received an annual average of 15 postulants— 22 in the year 2000. For this 140-year-old congregation located deep in a notch of the Bible Belt, the median age of its members dropped to 36-years-old.
One hundred and ninety-three sisters strong and with no signs of slowing down, the Sisters of St. Cecilia currently have a teaching apostolate in seven states, including Tennessee, Ohio, Alabama, Colorado, Virginia, Maryland and Illinois.
Found in 22 schools (17 elementary, four high school and one college), the sisters are teaching approximately 8,000 young people around the nation.
A high school literature teacher at St. Cecilia Academy in Nashville, Dominican Sister Anna Laura, remembers she was first attracted by the community's emphasis on the Blessed Sacrament and devotion to the Blessed Mother. But she wondered if her love of study would be a significant part of her religious life. Today, Sister Anna Laura laughs at such a worry as she sees her love for learning magnified through her love for Christ.
“When you join this order,” Sister Anna Laura observed, “you don't become less but more of who you actually are.”
Beating the Trend
The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate reported that between 1965 and 1998, the number of religious sisters nationwide fell 53% while the current average age of a religious sister is 69.
In addition, the same report indicated that only 6% of Catholic school teachers are sisters— down from about 75% in 1950.
Why are things so different for the Nashville Dominicans?
“The bottom line is we're growing because God is sending us these vocations,” Sister Anna Laura pointed out.
“Our contribution to the new evangelization,” said Mother Rose Marie, Prioress General of the congregation, “is made in the classroom and convent by both our prayer and our work. We want to make Christ present in the world, and believe that in the youth of our day, the message really can be heard.”
Bishop Edward Kmiec of the Diocese of Nashville, observed that the Sister's devotion to their original charism and mission remains constant.
“I believe that fidelity to their traditions and vows,” Bishop Kmiec said, “has led them to this grace-filled moment in their history. The fact that more young women than ever before are seeking to join their community requires them to seek the support of those who believe deeply in religious life and Catholic education.”
One downside of the congregation's growth: It is running out of space.
Said Sister Anna Laura, “God has blessed us— and has blessed us so much that we're now growing outside our walls.”
According to Sister Catherine Marie, renovation and building are crucial to accommodate the present numbers and to ensure that the momentum can continue.
In the fall of this upcoming school year, as well, the sisters are extending their mission to a school in Stillwater, Minn., in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
They have hundreds of such requests pending and a deep awareness of the need to spread religious witness. While initial efforts in fundraising to build on to the mother-house have been successful, Sister Catherine Marie said an additional $10 million is needed.
“It is our hope,” Sister Catherine Marie said, “that Catholics across the nation will give not only to further the impact of Catholic education but as a pledge of support for religious life.”
Joseph O'Brien writes from La Crosse, Wisconsin.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph O'brien ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:New York Mayor to March With Eye on Change
“The mayor believes the best way to change an organization is to do so from within,” said his press secretary.
New York's Cardinal Edward Egan will lead the March 16 parade, which is dedicated to the “Heroes of 9/11.” Many of the firefighters, policemen and rescue workers killed on Sept. 11 were Irish-American Catholics.
Catholic League president William Donohue called Bloomberg's interest in marching so he can change the will of the parade's organizers “manipulative.”
“If he wants to march … fine. But he should do so by respecting the house rules of the parade's organizers,” Donohue said in a statement. Homosexuals “are treated the same way pro-life Catholics are treated: both are banned from marching under their own banner but neither is excluded from marching, per se.”
ACLU Calls for Abortion in Catholic Hospitals
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 22— A renewed call for Catholic hospitals to allow or provide information on abortion and contraception is a thinly disguised attempt of pro-abortion organizations to press their agenda, said Father Michael Place, president of the Catholic Health Association.
Father Place was responding to calls from the American Civil Liberties Union and an Albany, N.Y.-based group called MergerWatch to ease restrictions on emergency abortions and contraceptive procedures for rape victims.
“Their ultimate objective is that abortion be on demand in every hospital in the United States,” Father Place told Associated Press. “They will pick whatever method will contribute incrementally to that goal.”
The ACLU and MergerWatch issued reports urging politicians to threaten Catholic facilities with funding cutoffs, saying many patients are covered by Medicaid and Medicare.
Father Place countered, “There's no rule that any hospital that receives government funds should provide every service.”
Pro-Life Leader ‘Furious’ About Ad Denial
AMERICAN LIFE LEAGUE, Jan. 22— American Life League president Judie Brown was “furious” that The Washington Times “caved” to a legal threat from Catholics for a Free Choice if the paper ran a League ad criticizing the pro-abortion group.
According to a league press release, the Washington daily initially approved the ad, scheduled to run Jan. 22. But after the league unveiled it, lawyers for Catholics for a Free Choice threatened legal action against the paper and the league.
“I find it amazing that a fanatical fringe organization such as Catholic for a Free Choice could intimidate The Washington Times, which— until now— had consistently deflected countless liberal challenges to its mission of presenting the truth,” Brown said.
The Free Choice group recently sponsored ads in Washington's Metro and bus system criticizing Catholic bishops for the Church's opposition to condom use.
Kidnap Case Leads to Call to Boycott Yahoo
The girl was found tied up but unharmed in the bedroom of Scott Tyree, a divorced computer programmer from Herndon, Va., the Virginia daily reported.
The American Family Association, in a press release, called for a boycott of Yahoo, saying the Internet service provider has refused to eliminate pornography clubs even after a similar case last year involving a Yahoo club. Yahoo also has an online group called Satan's School for Girls.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Youth Contingent Evident Everywhere at 2002 March for Life DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON— The March for Life is becoming an annual pro-life Woodstock as the crowd becomes increasingly younger.
At least half of the 100,000 marchers appeared to be under 25 as scores of school buses brought students from colleges and high schools from every corner of the United States.
“We just all are strongly pro-life and we need to be a witness,” said Chad Koehnke, 19. He is co-president of St. Louis University's pro-life club, which sent 75 students to the march. “This is a peaceful way to do this.”
Jessica George, 19, brought along 54 fellow students to the march from Belmont, N.C. “Our motivation is to save babies. This death has overwhelmed our nation,” she said.
For some students, the March for Life started years ago.
“I've come every year with my family,” said Carrie Klinker, a student at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. “And I just wanted to see if I could get students from JMU to come with me.”
Several organizations assisted the students in expressing their passion for the pro-life cause.
Knights of Columbus, American Life League and National Right to Life all produced thousands of placards with similar pro-life messages. The World Youth Alliance supplied “Culture of Life” stickers to thousands of young students.
Pro-Life Rocks
Rock For Life appeared to be the favorite choice of the young people. In addition to holding concerts in the days preceding the march, the organization's clothing articles, depicting an unborn baby jamming on a guitar, were seen on thousands of teen-agers.
“Every year, more and more young people come to Washington, D.C. on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling to stand up against the slaughter of our generation,” said Bryan Kemper, director of Rock For Life. “Twenty-nine years ago the Supreme Court declared war on a group of people. The very persons who survived the Roe decision come here to protest the pro-death Supreme Court and pray for those justices and our nation.”
Comments from spokesmen for pro-life policy organizations were focused less on the activity of marching and more on the legislative progress of the pro-life cause.
“We are awaiting with bated breath for President Bush to zero out UNFPA [the United Nations Population Fund] funding,” said Ken Connor, head of Family Research Council. UNFPA, which funds government-run programs in China, has been accused by human rights activists and pro-lifers of complicity in forced abortions and other coercive practices carried out under China's one-child population control policy.
“That would be an important statement not just to this country,” he said, “but to the world that UNFPA has been used as a ruse to promote forced abortions in China.”
But last year's announcement barring taxpayer support for overseas abortions was not matched this year with a policy statement by Bush on UNFPA, or anything else on the life issue.
Genevieve Wood, vice president for media at Family Research Center, said that Bush had distracted media attention away from the pro-life march.
“He's holding a press conference in West Virginia promoting tax cuts,” said Wood. “Why would he draw media attention to an event outside of D.C.?”
Bush did place a phone call of support from Charleston, W. Va., to March for Life organizer Nellie Gray during the march (see story below).
Some insiders speculated that the Bush administration wanted to distract media from the event because it was widely believed that Gray would criticize the president's policy on stem cell research during her remarks, as she did when he announced it in August.
However, Gray didn't criticize the administration when she addressed the crowd near the Washington Monument before the march.
Pro-Abortion Anger
In contrast, abortion activists were highly critical of Bush during their own Roe v. Wade event.
“Bush's anti-abortion agenda could completely tip the scales of justice against women's rights,” said Kim Gandy, president of National Organization for Women, which organized supporters at the Supreme Court hours after the pro-life march finished. “We aren't going to allow that to happen, and we're not going to stop organizing until abortion is safe, legal and accessible for every woman in the United States.”
Mark DeYoung, director of the New York-based North American Youth Alliance, which works to foster a culture of life, defended Bush against attacks from both camps.
“It would have been 100% support if he had sent someone from the White House,” said DeYoung. “But we understand that that his attention is also focused on other culture of life issues, addressing terrorism and handling economic concerns.”
At the steps of the Supreme Court, as she watched the conclusion of the March for Life, Gray said that the crowd, which she estimated at 100,000, was an impressive turnout for a weekday.
“It is amazing with all the obstacles, with 9/11, with anthrax hitting our own post office [in Washington], that the people came,” Gray said. “And here we are, an hour and half later and they're still coming.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bush to Marchers: 'You're Affirming a Culture of Life' DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Here is the text of remarks by President Bush in his telephone call to participants at the annual March for Life Jan. 22 in Washington. Bush called March for Life president Nellie Gray from Charleston, W.Va.
President Bush: Nellie, thank you very much. I want to thank you very much, and I want to wish everybody a good afternoon. Iapos;m calling from the state of West Virginia.
I want to begin, Nellie, by praising you and your dedication to the cause of human life. For almost 30 years, Americans from every state in the Union have gathered in the Washington Mall in order to march for life. This march is an example of an inspiring commitment and of deep human compassion.
Everyone there believes, as I do, that every life is valuable; that our society has a responsibility to defend the vulnerable and weak, the imperfect and even the unwanted; and that our nation should set a great goal that unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law.
Abortion is an issue that deeply divides our country. And we need to treat those with whom we disagree with respect and civility. We must overcome bitterness and rancor where we find it and seek common ground where we can. But we will continue to speak out on behalf of the most vulnerable members of our society.
We do so because we believe the promises of the Declaration of Independence are the common code of American life. They should apply to everyone, not just the healthy or the strong or the powerful. A generous society values all human life. A merciful society seeks to expand legal protection to every life, including early life. And a compassionate society will defend a simple, moral proposition: Life should never be used as a tool, or a means to an end.
These are bedrock principles. And that is why my administration opposes partial-birth abortion and public funding for abortion; why we support teen abstinence and crisis pregnancy programs; adoption and parental notification laws; and why we are against all forms of human cloning.
And that is why I urge the United States Senate to support a comprehensive and effective ban on human cloning, a ban that was passed by an overwhelming and bipartisan vote of the House of Representatives last July.
We are a society with enough compassion and wealth and love to care for both mothers and their children, and to seek the promise and potential of every single life. You're working and marching on behalf of a noble cause, and affirming a culture of life. Thank you for your persistence, for defending human dignity, and for caring for every member of the human family.
May God continue to bless America. Thank you very much.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Pope and the Shoah: Getting the Facts Straight DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:In recent decades, “the silence of Pius XII” joined Galileo and the Inquisition among the stock arguments against the Catholic Church. That Pius XII helped facilitate the Holocaust by failing to protest the Nazi persecution of the Jews is a commonplace not only among journalists but among scholars who ought to know better. There has been a torrent of books and articles depicting Pius as indifferent to the plight of the Jews, many of them written by the sort of anti-Catholic Catholic— Gary Wills, John Cornwell, James Carroll— who is always available whenever an editor of a glossy magazine is in need of a scurrilous distortion of Catholic history.
Hardly anyone enters the debate over Pius' role in the Holocaust with pure objectivity. Pius' detractors have the sharpest ax to grind and seldom give him the benefit of the doubt. They make selective use of the evidence and are not above peddling falsehoods. Pius' defenders have a much stronger case, but they sometimes confuse loyalty to the magisterium with a pietistic approach to history which can obscure certain discomforting facts, such as Pius'failure to criticize the brutally fascist (and Catholic) Croatian Ustasha regime during the war.
Jos´ M. Sánchez's Pius XII and the Holocaust is an honest effort to sort through the evidence. This brief scholarly book is so dispassionate and evenhanded that, even though it mostly supports their side, Pius' defenders will become impatient. Professor Sánchez appears to enter the controversy with no emotional commitment one way or another. His purpose is to get the facts straight and not score debating points. The book is well done, although many Catholics, understandably exasperated by the attacks on Pius, will close it as I did with a fierce craving for the high octane polemics of Ralph McInerny's recent The Defamation of Pius XII.
It is a fact— inconvenient to the Pope's detractors — that Pius XII went to great efforts to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. He ordered Italian monasteries and convents open to Jewish refugees; he harbored thousands of Jews both in the Vatican and his summer residence; he took personal responsibility for the children of deported Jews, spent what was left of his personal family fortune to help Jewish refugees, and directed papal nuncios to do whatever they could to save Jewish lives. While the figure of 860,000 tallied by the Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide may be high and is, in any case, not strictly verifiable, there is no question that Pius was responsible for saving many more Jewish lives than were justifiably celebrated figures like Oskar Schindler.
If it is true, as Cornwell and Carroll assert, that Pius acquiesced in the Holocaust, why did so many Jewish leaders, including Chief Rabbi Zolli of Rome, praise him for his efforts on behalf of the Jews? In 1945, Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Jerusalem sent a special blessing to the Pope “for his lifesaving efforts on behalf of the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Italy.” Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote on Pius' death: “With special gratitude we remember all he had done for the persecuted Jews during one of the darkest periods of their history.”
The roll call of gratitude toward Pius expressed by prominent Jews is impressive. And it was not limited to public figures. A priest I know who worked in the chancery of the New York Archdiocese tells me that at the time of Pius' death in 1958 scores of letters arrived from survivors of the Holocaust thanking the Church for what Pius had done. To assert, as historian Susan Zuccotti does, that all these Jews suffered from “benevolent ignorance”— in other words, were stupid— amounts to a species of antiSemitism.
Sánchez's account of what Pius actually did for the Jews is guarded and inadequate. His book is much more helpful in analyzing the “silence” itself. First, it is not true that Pius was silent. He condemned the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews on many occasions. For example, Pius' Christmas message in 1942 de-cried the fact that hundreds of thousands were being persecuted “solely because of their race or ancestry.” The German ambassador to the Vatican complained that Pius was “clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews.” A New York Times editorial on Christmas Day, 1942 praised Pius as “a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent.”
But, say his critics, these statements were too general; he did not specifically mention the Jews. Part of the problem, Sánchez argues, is Pius' unspecific and convoluted manner of expressing himself, a product of his diplomatic training. More to the point, as Pius affirmed on many occasions, he could not speak out more forcibly, because to do so would only provoke the Nazis to a more brutal treatment of the Jews.
Pius' critics fail to address the fact that in 1942 the Catholic hierarchy of Amsterdam did exactly what they fault Pius for not doing: It spoke out publicly against the Nazi treatment of the Jews. The Nazi response was a redoubling of roundups and deportations. Both the International Red Cross and the World Council of Churches came to the same conclusion as the Vatican: Relief efforts for the Jews would be more effective if the agencies remained relatively quiet. Yet, you never hear anybody attacking the Red Cross for its “silence” about the Holocaust.
Like most people on the left, critics like James Carroll and Gary Wills seem to view public posturing as an end in itself. Pius, however, was concerned with saving Jewish lives. The documents show that he decided that speaking out publicly would endanger the lives of thousands of Jews while not having the slightest effect on Hitler. Stalin's famous remark that the Pope has no divisions is perhaps relevant here.
Any book about Pius XII and the Holocaust ought to mention (as this one does not) that few during the war made heroic efforts to save the Jews. There were obviously many, Catholic and non-Catholic, who could have done more and didn't. Franklin Roosevelt's refusal to let more than a handful of Jewish refugees into America was inexcusable, as was David Ben-Gurion's making the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine a higher priority than rescuing European Jewry from destruction. But to single out for opprobrium a Pope who, despite being in a difficult and dangerous situation, saved thousands of Jews from the camps is a misguided exercise in selective indignation.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Sim Johnston ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Jewish Leaders Hail Work on Scriptures
“The difference consists in the fact that for us, He who will come will have the same traits of that Jesus who has already come,” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote in an introduction.
Jesuit Father Albert Vanhoye, a member of the commission, said the project sees Scripture as a link between Christians and Jews and the New Testament as a continuation of the Old, though also divergent.
Rabbi Alberto Piattelli, a professor in Rome, commented that the work recognizes the value of the Jewish position regarding the wait for the Messiah.
Though released in November, the book received widespread attention only recently, after an Italian news agency published a small report on it, the New York daily said. Some Jewish leaders felt that the work had been deliberately kept low key, but Vatican officials said publication was not announced because the study is intended for theologians.
Theologian Says Pius XII Tried to Exorcise Hitler
DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, Jan. 23— Pope Pius XII believed Adolf Hitler was possessed by the devil, and he tried several times to perform an exorcism on the Nazi leader in absentia. Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, postulator of the cause of canonization of Pius XII, spoke to the German news agency in response to accusations that the wartime Pope failed to speak out against the Nazi Holocaust.
During the exorcisms, Pope Pius tried to “invoke God, so that he may liberate that person from the diabolical influences that he experienced and which formed the basis of his actions,” said Father Gumpel. He added that the Pope had publicly denounced Nazi Germany's plan for a “New Order” during a 1942 Christmas radio message.
Roman Exorcist Complains About New Rites
Father Amorth, 75, also said, “It's not all that bad” if children see “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone” with their parents. He had earlier told an Italian news agency that the devil was behind the Harry Potter books.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Assisi Illustrates Differences While Bringing Religions Together DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:ASSISI, Italy— The city of St. Francis has become a powerful symbol of unity and cooperation between the different religious traditions. And while the focus of attention has often been on how the different religions can hold joint meetings without lapsing into syncretism, equally interesting is what such meetings reveal about attitudes toward unity and cooperation within the Christian world itself.
The danger of syncretism— i.e., treating all religions as equally valid— has been avoided at Assisi by the formula “coming together to pray,” which does not mean “praying together,” as Vatican officials will emphatically insist. The different religions went to different rooms of the convent of the Franciscan Friars to pray at the same time, but not together. The Franciscans removed the crucifixes from the vaulted rooms where the different leaders went to pray and provided prayer carpets for the Muslims. The Buddhists, however, had to contend with a large nativity scene in their room, as it was affixed to the wall and could not be moved. The Christians all held an ecumenical prayer service together in the Basilica of St. Francis.
Those concessions to interreligious hospitality were mild compared to the measures taken the next day in Rome, where the participants were invited to lunch at the Vatican. The Holy Father welcomed them to “my home” and served them a vegetarian meal without wine— unheard of in the land of veal and vino.
“Respect for God and the divine and the desire for God or the divine,” responded Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, when asked what united the different religions “coming together to pray.”
“[There is also] respect for life and the desire for peace with God or the divine, and for peace among peoples and peace in the cosmos,” he said.
Differences were not only evident among the religions, though; Christian leaders themselves indicated that unity within the Christian Church is not as easy as it sometimes appears in Assisi.
Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, Major Archbishop of Lviv of the Ukrainains, spoke of how his Catholic flock was not enthused about his presence together with the Orthodox, at whose hands they were persecuted during the communist era.
“In my country the people have suffered for being Catholic, and for them this is not an easy thing,” said Cardinal Husar aboard the papal train. “When I am with an Orthodox priest or bishop, they criticize me. They say to me: We have suffered for the faith, and now you betray us. It is not easy.”
On the other side, the absence of the Orthodox of Greece was notable— especially given that three Orthodox patriarchs, including the Ecumencial Partriarch Bartholomew, were present. The refusal of the Greek Orthodox to send a delegation was an indication of how difficult ecumenical relations are in Greece.
“The archbishops and metropolitans want to cooperate with the Catholic Church, but they also have a responsibility to their faithful, many of whom are not yet prepared for dialogue,” Orthodox Bishop Athanasios of Achaia, the Orthodox representative to the European Union, told the Italian newspaper Avvenire, suggesting that the bishops could only go so far. Contrasts were also evident in how different Christians spoke about the path to peace.
“God's peace is offered to those who are reconciled with God through Jesus Christ and who truly demonstrate their fellowship with him through love, virtue and complete faith and trust in him,” said Patriarch Bartholomew, indicating that he was not about to dissemble on Christian claims.
“We must repent and turn back to God in full awareness of his holy will and in complete obedience to it,” he continued, offering interior conversion as the Christian contribution to peace. “Only then will God hear our prayers and grant us and all mankind true peace on earth: for he is not a God of war and conflict but a God of peace. If, however, we persist in sinful passions, evil behavior, greed and self-interest, the tumult of war will increase and disaster will strike the earth and all mankind.”
A different note was struck by the message of the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, who referred to Jesus Christ as the “inspiring leader of all Christians”— a formulation rather weaker than what the Orthodox and Catholics would opt for. The Anglican address stressed that “our concerns must be practical as well as prayerful and prophetic,” and emphasized the social justice aspect of peace.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Appointments & Meetings DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Appointed
Saturday, Jan. 19
E Father Gerardo Zerdin Bukovec as coadjutor of the apostolic vicariate of San Ramon, Peru.
E Father Jose Luis Escobar Alas as auxiliary bishop of San Vicente, El Salvador.
E Father Genesio Tarasco as bureau chief of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
Tuesday, Jan. 22
E Assented to the election by the Synod of Bishops of the Armenian Catholic Church of Archpriest Kevork Khazoumian as bishop of Jerusalem and Amman.
Wednesday, Jan. 23
E Father Jose Song Sui-Wan as bishop of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira, Brazil, following the resignation of Bishop Walter de Azevedo, who reached 75, the age limit.
Friday, Jan. 25
E Msgr. Domenico Calcagno as bishop of Savona-Noli, Italy.
E Bishop Carlito J. Cenzon as apostolic vicar of Baguio, Philippines.
Met With
Saturday, Jan. 19
E Four members of the bishops' conference of Vietnam on their ad limina visits, which heads of dioceses make every five years to review their diocese with the Pope and Vatican officials.
E Top officials of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
E Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.
Monday, Jan. 21
E Five members of the bishops' conference of Vietnam on their ad limina visits.
Wednesday, Jan. 23
E Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
Friday, Jan. 25
E Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.
E Greek Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius IV Hazim of Antioch and all the East.
E Catholicos Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV of the Assyrian Church of the East.
E Archbishop Anastas of Tirana, Durres and all Albania.
E Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk and Juriev, Russia.
E Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Register Summary DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:God “sides with the victims” of violence and oppression, and stirs “the conscience of the evildoer so as to lead him to conversion,” John Paul II said Jan. 23.
When meeting with some 4,000 pilgrims at the midweek general audience, the Pope used the canticle of the Jewish sage Sirach, written between 190 and 180 B.C., to offer an intense description of divine justice and mercy.
“The God of the Bible is not indifferent to evil,” the Holy Father said. “Even although his ways are not our ways and his times and his plans are different to ours, he sides, never-thelrss, with the victims and is portrayed as a harsh judge of the violent, the oppressors, and those who are victorious yet have no mercy.”
“However, his intervention does not seek destruction,” the Pope explained, because his power when demonstrated in love leads to repentance.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Plea for Justice and Mercy DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:The book of Psalms is not the only official prayer book of the People of God in the Old Testament. Canticles, hymns, psalms, supplications, prayers and pleas to the Lord are scattered throughout the pages of the Bible in response to his word. In this way, the Bible reveals itself as a dialogue between God and humanity, a meeting that takes place under the seal of Godís word, his grace and his love.
This is the case with the petition that we just addressed to the “God of the universe” (verse 1). It is contained in the book of Sirach, the reflections, advice, and songs that this wise man gathered together, probably between 190-180 B.C., at the beginning of the epic of Israelís liberation under the guidance of the Maccabee brothers. In 138 B.C. the grandson of this wise man translated his grandfatherís work into Greek, as he himself tells us in the forward to this book, in order to make these teachings available to a wider circle of readers and disciples.
The book of Sirach is called Ecclesiasticus in the Christian tradition. Although it was not included in the Hebrew canon, this book, together with some others, have all the characteristics of the so-called veritas christiana. Thus, the values that this learned work set forth became part of Christian education in the patristic age, especially in monasteries, where it served as a kind of practical manual for how the disciples of Christ should conduct themselves.
Appeal for Salvation
The prayer found in chapter 36 of Sirach is included in a simplified form as a prayer during Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours, and develops along some thematic lines.
We find, first of all, a plea for God to intervene on Israel's behalf against the oppression of foreign nations. In the past, God revealed his holiness when he punished the faults of his people by delivering them into the hands of their enemies. Now, the believer asks God to show his greatness by suppressing the arrogant power of his oppressors and establishing a new era with messianic overtones.
This plea certainly reflects Israel's tradition of prayer and is actually reminiscent of other passages in the Bible. Certain verses might be considered as a model for prayer to be used in the time of persecution and oppression, as was the case when the author lived, under the rather harsh and severe dominion of foreign Syrian-Hellenic sovereigns.
God's Show of Power
The first part of this prayer begins with an ardent appeal to the Lord to have mercy and to come to the aid of his people (verse 1). Immediately, though, our attention is directed toward Godís action, which is exalted through a series of very evocative verbs: “Come to our aid. … Put all nations in dread of you. … Raise your hand. … Show your holiness. … Give new signs. … Work new wonders. … Show forth the splendor of your right hand and arm."
The God of the Bible is not indifferent to evil. Even though his ways are not our ways and his times and his plans are different from ours (Isaiah 55:8-9), he sides, nevertheless, with the victims and is portrayed as a harsh judge of the violent, the oppressors, and those who are victorious yet have no mercy.
In the Bible, the lament of those who suffer never ends in desperation, but is always open to hope.
However, his intervention does not seek destruction. By showing his power and his faithfulness in love, he can also stir the conscience of the evildoer so as to lead him to conversion. “Thus they will know, as we know, that there is no God but you” (verse 4).
Restoring God's People
The second part of the hymn begins on a more positive note. In fact, while the first part asks God to intervene against enemies, the second part no longer speaks of enemies but asks God to bless Israel and implores his mercy for his chosen people and for his holy city, Jerusalem.
The dream of the return of all the exiles, including those of the Northern Kingdom, becomes the focus of this prayer: “Gather all the tribes of Jacob, that they may inherit the land as of old” (verse 10). Thus, a request is made for the rebirth of all of Israel, as in those joyous times when it occupied the entire Promised Land.
In order to make the prayer more urgent, the writer emphasizes the relationship that binds God to Israel and Jerusalem. Israel is described as “called by your name,” the one “whom you named your firstborn"; Jerusalem is “your holy city … your dwelling place.” The expressed desire is that the relationship become even closer and thus more glorious: “Fill Zion with your majesty, your temple with your glory” (verse 13). By filling the Temple of Jerusalem with his majesty, the Lord, who will gather all nations to himself (Isaiah 2:2-4; Micah 4:1-3), will fill his people with his glory.
The Lord, Our Hope
In the Bible, the lament of those who suffer never ends in desperation, but is always open to hope. It is based on the certainty that the Lord will not abandon his children and will not let those whom he made fall from his hands.
The passage selected for the liturgy has stopped short of including an appropriate expression for when we pray. It asks God to “give evidence of your deeds of old” (verse 14). From all eternity God has a plan of love and salvation for all his creatures, who are called to become his people. It is a plan that St. Paul recognized as “revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit … according to the eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Ephesians 3:5-11).
(Zenit and Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Meeting Jesus in the Internet Age: Bishops Launch Mass Media Campaign DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:MIAMI — Bishops, archbishops and cardinals from throughout South, Central and North America, in conjunction with lay Catholic communications leaders, launched an aggressive mass media effort at the inaugural conference of the New Evangelization of America organization Jan. 9-12.
The organization was created in response to Pope John Paul II's 1999 apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America (The Church in America), in which the Holy Father called for “one Church, one America” while acknowledging the cultural differences between the region's countries.
A key aim of New Evangelization of America is to remedy the shortage of dynamic evangelization and proper catechetical instruction that has led to a massive exodus from the Catholic faith among the people of Latin America over the past several years.
“In Mexico, entire villages have gone fundamentalist,” said Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas, president of New Evangelization of America.
However, Latin American dioceses have a strong presence in the media that can be used as an important catechetical tool. Most have access to radio networks, a few own television stations and the bishops of the Dominican Republic have a 6-year-old television network, Televida.
“There can be no effective evangelization without effective use of mass communication,” underscored Cardinal Nicolás de Jes˙s LÛpez RodrÌguez of the Dominican Republic, honorary chairman of New Evangelization of America.
Foremost among the initiatives outlined at the Miami conference was Televida International, a Pan American expansion of Cardinal RodrÌguez's television network.
It will broadcast primarily in Spanish, with some programs in Portuguese.
“This is a huge project for the entire Western Hemisphere,” said Cardinal RodrÌguez. “We are connected with Mother Angelica's satellite. Now we will expand this Catholic television programming and evangelization effort for all the countries, stretching from Alaska to Chile.”
Jesuit Father Edward Dougherty, president of a large Brazilian television production center called Associação Do Senhor Jesus, will become general manager of Televida International. He said the expansion would get underway shortly with the opening a Televida International office in Miami.
“We, through mass media, can be instruments of the blessing of God,” said Father Dougherty. “One of the key things needed for the Church for these blessings to happen is a well-designed integration of Catholic mass media efforts, including television, radio, Internet and video-on-demand.
Said Father Dougherty, “We're designing a spiritual revolution; to enter through their [the listener or viewer] doors and leave through God's.”
U.S. Situation
Conference participants agreed the United States should learn from the efforts under way in other countries.
Of the 15,000 commercial radio stations in the United States, about 10%, or 1,500, are Christian radio stations. Only 50 are Catholic, said Doug Sherman, president and founder of Immaculate Heart Radio network, which now has five stations in Nevada and California.
“We have probably the worst communications network there is. The South American countries are way ahead of us,” Bishop Grahmann said.
Even though the Church in the United States has the greatest financial resources, he added, “we have never been able to pull off a national Catholic mass media campaign.”
Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said that the Catholic media presence in the United States was woefully inadequate.
Noting that the Catholic radio station in Portugal is the country's most popular, and that the one in Spain is the second most popular station there, Archbishop Foley called it a disgrace that air space on mainstream U.S. networks was no longer made available for religious programming. This reflected “thinking only of the bottom line and not at all about people … about the spiritual and human needs of the human person,” he said.
Archbishop Foley called for credible Catholic public relations efforts to help regain the inclusion of religious programming and news coverage on mainstream U.S. radio and television networks. “As Christian communicators, we should be actively contemplating, ready to share ourselves with the world and others,” said Archbishop Foley.
He also outlined a practical action plan to become an effective Catholic communicator. It includes a minimum of 15 minutes or more of daily personal prayer; the daily rosary; daily Mass and Communion, or a spiritual communion for those who are unable to attend Mass; weekly confession; and a daily personal examination of conscience.
Other Plans
Other Catholic initiatives discussed at the Miami conference included the Pan-American expansion of the Florida-based Catholic Radio Association, which was co-founded several years ago by three Catholic groups to share expertise, experience and resources. Various Internet-related ideas were also considered, including Internet-satellite-radio transmissions being used by Miami-based Pax Catholic Communications, which is heard throughout Latin America.
Other successful Catholic programs were represented, such as the Bogata, Colombia-based El Minuto de Dios, which has been on air since 1950; Hollywood-based Family Theater Productions which was founded by Father Patrick Peyton in the 1950s; the 24-hour, free satellite downloadable television and radio programs in Spanish and English of EWTN and EWEN; and the U.S. bishops' production of “The Face of Christ in Art.”
Also noted was the work of Catholic movie writers and producers such as Barbara Nicolosi and Leonardo Defilippis. Defilippis is slated to release Saint Luke Production's first full-feature film to theaters late this year, a film on St. Th´rèse of Lisieux.
Emphasized Bishop Grahmann, “The goal of NEA is not to have meetings, but to have concrete results.”
Karen Walker is based in San Juan Capistrano, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karen Walker ----- KEYWORDS: World -------- TITLE: Missionaries Deliver Aid to Congolese Volcano Victims DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:GOMA, Congo ó Religious missionary communities in Congo have mobilized to distribute aid to the victims of the volcanic eruption that partially buried the city of Goma.
Caritas International and Caritas-Goma are assessing the number of people who have lost their homes in the wake of the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo on Jan. 17.
U.N. officials estimated that 45 people were killed when the volcanic eruption sent up to 6 feet of lava flowing in a path that overran several villages before cutting through Goma. The eruption filled the air with ash and released toxic gases, polluting water supplies.
A Jan. 21 gasoline station explosion set off by hot lava added to the Goma disaster; witnesses said as many as 60 people might have died.
Antonina Lo Schiavo, a lay missionary who has spent 30 years in Congo helping Xaverian missionaries, said that “by covering the central part of the city, the lava has cut Goma in half, engulfing everything it found in its path.”
Damage is considerable. More than 80% of the buildings have collapsed or are seriously damaged. U.N. officials have described it as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
“Aid is arriving,” Lo Schiavo added. “We are creating teams of people to distribute it, in order to avoid plundering and lynching.”
U.N. offices in Geneva estimate that $15 million in emergency aid is needed immediately. Food and water are lacking and people are threatened with infections.
Aid from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees has left Ngara in western Tanzania. It includes food, blankets and plastic tents for 15,000 families.
Thirty tons of aid of the U.N.'s World Food Program has arrived in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. The aid comes from Italy and Norway.
Pope John Paul II has urged humanitarian aid for the more than 300,000 Congolese left homeless by Africa's worst volcanic eruption in 25 years.
A telegram sent in the Pope's name to Church leaders in Goma said he was praying that those deprived of shelter, food and water would receive the necessary assistance from international agencies.
The telegram called the eruption a “terrible drama” for people of the region.
At a noon blessing Jan. 20 from his apartment window above St. Peterís Square, the Pope said, “I assure you of my spiritual closeness to the populations stricken by the Nyiragongo volcano ... which in recent days has resumed its activity with unheard-of violence.
“Our concrete help should not be lacking to those suffering the effects of this great calamity,” he said.
Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ international relief and development agency, said the need for safe drinking water was the No. 1 priority, because the risk of cholera was high.
Aid workers outside of Goma were trying to set up food and water distribution points for the displaced after molten lava literally divided the city and swept through homes Jan. 17. The city's cathedral was destroyed by the flow.
But the aid agencies also had to deal with an unexpected reverse exodus as many of the homeless returned to pick through the ruins in Goma, braving tremors and new eruptions in the hope of salvaging something. Some of the refugees said they were not comfortable remaining in neighboring Rwanda, which has given aid to Congolese rebels.
Congo, formerly Zaire, has been torn by civil strife since 1998.
Said Lo Schiavo, “Now that the eruption has ended, people are returning to the city, because they say it is better to die in oneís country than in Rwanda, a foreign country.”
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: World -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Slovaks Told to Stop Sunday Shopping
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 20— Catholics should keep the Sunday Mass obligation and spend time resting and enjoying family meals rather than shopping, Slovakia's Catholic bishops said in a letter read in the nation's churches.
The bishops said that supermarkets, entrepreneurs and other institutions do not observe the commandment to keep the Lord's Day holy, and “our society, our families and individuals suffer because of it.”
Believers should “stand up against such a trend, which makes us only tools and slaves of [businessmen's] financial interests,” said the letter, which was also released to the media in the predominantly Catholic country of 5.4 million people.
Archbishop Jan Sokol of Bratislava told Associated Press that many people are “slaves” of the shopping chains, as they have to work over the weekend and thus are deprived of the possibility of going to Mass and of a work-free Sunday. He said the Church has sought support among political leaders for a law banning Sunday shopping.
Separately, the Slovak news agency TASR reported that a new labor law, which takes effect April 1, states that employers should ensure two days of rest a week and that these should be Saturday-Sunday or Sunday-Monday.
New Archbishop Concerned About Scottish Sectarianism
THE INDEPENDENT, Jan. 16— Pope John Paul II appointed Bishop Mario Conti of Aberdeen, Scotland, to succeed the late Cardinal Thomas Winning as head of the Glasgow Archdiocese. Archbishop Conti, 67, has often spoken out against abortion and cloning, the London daily reported.
The archbishop said he believed his rural experience in Aberdeen could be of value in Glasgow, Scotland's largest diocese, particularly in attempting to combat religious sectarianism.
Archbishop Conti also said that his main challenge would be to address the crisis of faith within the Church, and to encourage Catholics to return to regular attendance at Mass.
Church Stands Up for Maids in Hong Kong
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST, Jan. 17— The Catholic Church in Hong Kong has said that a cut in the minimum wage of foreign domestic helpers would be “unfair and unjust,” the Hong Kong daily reported.
The Hong Kong Employers of Overseas Helpers Association has asked the government to lower the minimum salary for maids by 14% to help employers in the economic downturn.
“During an economic downturn, it is so shameful if we do not protect the interest of laborers who live on low incomes, but make their problems even worse,” said a Catholic Commission for Labor Affairs spokesman.
About 67% of the 235,000 maids in the Chinese special administrative region of Hong Kong are Filipinos, most of whom are Catholic.
Some employers have been extending the contracts of their domestic helpers for a maximum of three months in anticipation of a wage cut, according to a Filipino counseling office.
The Catholic commission also criticized a rule that requires domestic helpers to leave Hong Kong 14 days after their contracts are terminated. He said maids have to pay up to $3,850 to recruitment agencies to find another job.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: World -------- TITLE: EDITORIAL DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Legal abortion turned 29 Jan. 22, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. In that time, were more than 38 million legal abortions in the United States— more than a million a year since 1978, nearly a million a year before that.
The age and productivity of the American abortion industry mean that there are literally millions of adults missing from today's society. We've seen the results in the worker shortages, particularly on the East Coast. But there are other, unseen consequences of so many men and women “missing in action”.
In the movie It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey gets a chance to see what the world would have been like had he never been born. It's not a pretty sight.
In place of his Bailey Park, a community built on Bailey Brothers Building and Loan's principles, which combine altruism and business sense, the town has become Pottersville, a cold, consumerist place that has unleashed its inhabitants' worst tendencies by allowing pure profit to decide all the important things.
We could very well look at America today and see Pottersville writ large— a place where 25% of cable-TV revenue comes from pornography, a place closer to Ayn Rand's theories than to Christ's heart.
One can't help but wonder if perhaps modern America was sent a George Bailey of its own— and we aborted him.
Or maybe the thousands who marched on Washington Jan. 22 are our George Baileys.
Despite the gloom of three decades of abortion, there are signs of hope in Pottersville. The hope comes not primarily from politicians (for instance, while Bush's words on abortion are wonderful, we'd like to see more actions) but from the American people.
The mothers. Today, abortion's “other” victims, the mothers, are rising up as never before. We can expect that the trickle of protests from mothers today will become a raging river in a short time. Mothers who have had abortions know the truth in their hearts— and, increasingly, they are willing to share it. They know that they killed their children. And they know that abortion supporters weren't interested in giving them “choices;” they were interested in giving them abortions.
The kind of devastation of spirit that Project Rachel and other post-abortion syndrome experts are dealing with now touches scores of women and their families. This is a ticking time bomb of protests, lawsuits and public outcry against the abortion industry and those who harbor it.
The new evangelization. The prayers of so many in the Jubilee year, and the efforts that have begun to rechristianize society, won't go unrewarded. The bottom-line truth is that Christ is the Lord of history. He gives human beings freedom— a freedom powerful enough to leave the world in ruins. But he also responds powerfully when men use that freedom to promote virtues of justice and truth.
And God answers prayers.
This year, as in previous March for Life crowds, Our Lady of Guadalupe was featured prominently. Pro-lifers are wise to put the situation in her care each year. She transformed America once before, said Pope John Paul II, and she can do it again.
A new openness. After Sept. 11, there was a great resurgence of religious faith and of interest in patriotism and time-honored virtues. Some have pointed out that the initial signs of a spiritual reawakening have faded. But it is really too soon to tell.
Perhaps there was a superficial return to churches early on after the attack. But there will likely be a more authentic reordering of priorities as the threats that exist in the world continue to dawn on us and convince us to look inward for what really matters. That deeper process will take more time.
In the end, we know that God delights in bringing great good out of great evil. If we cooperate with him, and persist in our prayers for peace in the world and peace in the womb, we will be surprised at the size of the good he will bring from the evil of abortion.
----- EXCERPT: Aborting George Bailey ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Looking for Balance on Boston
I was disappointed to read the Catholic News Service article regarding Cardinal Law's handling of the priest/pedophile case involving former priest John Geoghan (“Cardinal Law Declares Zero Tolerance for Sex Abuse,” Jan. 20-26). The article parrots several of Cardinal Bernard Law's self-serving statements, including his declaration that “John Geoghan was never assigned by me to a parish without psychiatric or medical assessments indicating that such assignments were appropriate.”
It is well known by all media representatives, including CNS, that the referenced psychiatric and medical assessments were performed by a local general practitioner with no background in psychiatry, and a psychiatrist with no background in pedophilia. It is also well known that, in 1985, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (then the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference) received a 92-page report on a study conducted by a cross section of experts who concluded: “The recidivism rate for pedophilia is second only to exhibitionism, particularly for homosexual pedophilia.”
According to a report in the Boston Globe, the authors of the report also stated there was “no hope at this point in time for a cure” for priests who habitually molested minors. In light of that report, Cardinal Law's claim of naivet´ or ignorance regarding the devastating effects of Geoghan's retention into the mid-'90s reflects disingenuousness if not outright dishonesty. As CNS is under the patronage of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, I can almost understand their desire to whitewash the story, but I expected a more balanced presentation by the National Catholic Register.
M. W. RYAN Canton, Massachusetts
Bishops on Film
The letter “‘Vaporous’ Opinions …” (Jan. 20-26) mentioned the bishops' review of The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, noting that the bishops rated the movie “A-III— adults.”
I've disagreed with the [bishops'] ratings more than once, and reserving this film for adults is positively absurd. We live in a time where we are wont to substitute the term “nonviolent” for “peaceful,” often to the detriment of our society. The idea that an adolescent would be unable to deal with the images of evil and violence in this film is absurd beyond defense. The idea that an adolescent should be shielded from these things is also absurd.
Our society is obsessed with “peace” at all costs. The platitude that “violence solves nothing” is rebuked by the blood of countless soldiers who died defending the lives and rights of their wives and children. The Lord of the Rings makes violence somewhat scary. Good. Violence is scary, and children should know it. They should also know it is sometimes necessary.
I believe the bishops' rating is a symptom of our obsession with the non-Catholic agenda of modern peace. The bishops do not enjoy infallibility regarding the reviews and, though their opinions carry weight, they do not carry the force of doctrine.
JOHNNY PETERS Houston, Texas
Sept. 11 and Pornography
Karl Keating's commentary “Getting Rid of Pornography: All We Lack Is Will” (Dec. 16-22) would make more sense if it offered a complete analysis of the “hatred underlying the Sept. 11 attacks.”
There are other reasons for that hatred linked to the economy of the United States and Americans' lifestyle that he omits. His piece is actually the only article I remember that seriously isolates those particular explanations for that hatred. I completely agree with Mr. Keating in saying that America's “cultural decay” is another source of resentment. His solution, however, is atrocious.
When in history has any book-burning frenzy or confiscation of private property [provided] a long-lasting solution to any problem? The weakness of his proposition can be found in Mr. Keating's own words: “…authentic conversion.” As faith cannot be taken away, so conversion cannot be forced upon people. St. Thomas Aquinas repeatedly emphasizes that man needs to will change. In his discussion on grace, Summa, Vol. 29, he explains that, first, one needs to be willing to behave well. For that, one needs the gift for grace “as a lasting disposition.” But grace may sit dormant in a man's life because “man must be willing to receive this gift of grace-as-disposition.” This is a very solid concept in the tradition of the Church, so much that it is the basis for the differences in the treatment of disbelievers as distinguished.
Long before modern psychology addressed the issue, St. Augustine advocated tolerance of some evils if greater harm could ensue, as he warned: “Forbid prostitution and lust will turn everything upside down.”
DENIS MONBUREAU Stockton, California
Reading, Writing and Social Skills
It is sad to me that an article like “All This and Socialization, Too” (Jan. 20-26) has to be written to prove that home schoolers are well socialized. I can't tell you how many times we as home schooling parents have had to answer that question from neighbors, friends and even family.
In an age where the family is being torn apart and attacked by so many forces in the world, it seems that the only logical place for a child to be properly socialized is within the family. The Church has spoken out forcibly about the importance of the family and [its] role in society. Yet so many people still question home schooling as a valid option in raising well-adjusted children.
How can a school outside the home possibly provide a better socializing experience than a home? What better directors of a child's life could there be than his or her own parents? How can a child be better socialized by peers and teachers who aren't even part of [the child's] family?
The real question, then, is not whether or not home schooled children are being properly socialized. Rather, one should ask the question as to whether or not it is possible to be better socialized outside of the home environment. According to the Church, highly doubtful.
MARK A. KWASNY Ashburn, Virginia
How Catholic was the Conference?
Regarding “Mother Teresa's Birthday Rose” (Inperson, Jan. 13-19), the interview with singer Danielle Rose, who “saw singer Jaci Velasquez perform at the National Catholic Youth Conference and dreamed of one day doing the same”:
Why did Jaci Velasquez, a non-Catholic, headline a national gathering for Catholic youth and Catholic youth ministers? Why doesn't the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministers support Catholic musicians? It's really an insult to the hundreds of Catholic artists and Catholic youth that a “Catholic” event won't even support its own.
TERI SEIPEL Riverside, California.
The writer is a Catholic radio broadcaster at KUCR FM radio station.
“By and large, modern culture has replaced the splendor and wonder of existence with cheap thrills. The Potter series is a full-blown orgy of cheap thrills, dipped in a little pseudo-morality. The morality is thin; the corrupt messages, both overt and subliminal, are overwhelming.”
So says Michael O'Brien (“Michael O'Brien: Beware the Danger of Harry Potter,” Dec. 16-22).
I do not deny that modern culture is chock-full of pseudo morality, dipped in a nice sugar-coating— to please parents, of course. I have found the Harry Potter stories to be filled with evil. Real, terrifying, unwholesome, evil. However …
J.K. Rowling does not glorify it. Indeed no. She shows, equally, the forces of good. The joy and power of innocence, the holiness of human life, and the absolute love in self-sacrifice. Here is a bit of O'Brien's “pseudo morality”:
“‘Harry Potter, do you know what unicorn blood is used for?’ ‘No,’ said Harry, startled by the odd question. ‘We have only used horn and tail in potions.’
“‘That is because it is a monstrous thing to slay a unicorn,’ said Firenze. ‘Only one that has nothing to lose and everything to gain would commit such a crime. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even an inch from death, but at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenseless to save yourself, and you will have nothing but a half life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.’ Harry stared at the back of Firenze's head, dappled silver in the moonlight. ‘But who'd be that desperate?’”
Some may look at that and think, “Hey, do I see some pro-life undertones in there?” Others: “Did Harry say potions? Lord help us!”
My point? The truth often hides in the secular world. Exercise caution and take everything with a grain of salt, but not to the point of paranoia. Comparing J.K.'s fairy-tale magic to satanism is like calling The Wizard of Oz diabolical.
On the other hand, you have to know your child; make sure he/she is mature enough to discern Harry's pretend magic from the real Wiccan arts. (Shouldn't we be burning “Goosebumps” instead?)
ANNE MARIE SOHLER, age 14 Merchantville, New Jersey
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: The Real Mary-Kate Tracy DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:A misleading editing error found its way into last week's story “Boston Archdiocese Creates Child Advocate Position for Annulments” (Jan. 27-Feb. 2).
A quote was wrongly attributed to Boston child advocate Mary-Kate Tracy. It implied that she has been personally involved in an annulment as a mother. This is not the case.
The Register regrets the error. For a corrected version of the story, visit www.ncregister.com.
— Editor
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: The Cross and the Crescent DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:“History,” an elderly friend once said to me with a smile, “is always more interesting than the theories that explain it.” Finally, 30 years later, I know what he meant.
People and their motives are always more complicated than history's broad strokes suggest. Nothing proves this more persuasively than two very different (but equally compelling) books I've recently read.
In From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East (Henry Holt and Company, 1997), I learned how, in the year 587, the Byzantine monk John Moschos set off with a companion to gather the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. His journey took him in an arc around the eastern Mediterranean, the birthplace of Christianity and at that time a Christian lake surrounded by provinces teeming with monasteries, churches and centers of Christian learning and culture.
Unfortunately, his life coincided with the aftermath of Justinian the Great's failed attempt at imperial revival. The world Moschos knew had begun to unravel. A century after his travels, much of what he observed had already been overrun by Muslim invaders. The power of his account, however, endured. And 1,400 years after Moschos first set out, his words drew another writer, William Dalrymple, to retrace his steps in From the Holy Mountain.
Dalrymple has an eye for the human ironies that underlie the dilemmas of the Middle East. Surveying the human landscape from Turkey, to Syria, to Lebanon, Israel and Egypt, he captures the daily life of Christians living in the embers of a dying culture. But he never pities them. On the contrary, what he finds again and again are people determined to hang onto their identity, hope, courage and humor— and even their friendships with Muslims. In the words of a Coptic monk in Upper Egypt, where some of the region's worst anti-Christian violence has occurred: “What is Christianity without the cross?”
Anxious ‘People of the Book’
As Dalrymple discovers, the current condition of Christians under Islam can vary greatly from country to country and century to century. Under Syria's late President Hafiz Assad, criticized in the West as a sponsor of terrorism, Christians did remarkably well, accounting for perhaps 20% of Syria's total population. In fact, at various times, five of Assad's seven closest advisers were Christians. In Lebanon, too, a large Christian population enjoys significant influence, even after the civil war.
By contrast, Muslim Turkey, officially a “secular” state and a NATO ally of the United States, has systematically strangled its Greek and Armenian Christian minorities for 80 years. The Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople (Istanbul) - one of the most revered Sees in Christendom - is now on the brink of extinction. Barely 2,000 faithful remain in its jurisdiction.
Dalrymple shows that tolerance between Christians and Muslims— even something approaching affection — is possible. In fact, at the personal level, the level of daily life, it is not uncommon. At the Shrine of Our Lady of Seidnaya in Syria, he watches Christians and Muslims pray side by side to a miraculous icon of Mary. He also captures the cost of Islamic fundamentalism for Muslims themselves. In Egypt he interviews an academic couple— happily married, both with doctorates, both professors at Cairo University and both practicing Muslims— who are forced to divorce by outsiders who regard the husband as an apostate. When extremists attack and burn an Egyptian church, the pastor receives numerous calls of support from his shocked Muslim neighbors. But, thanks to fear, nobody visits in person.
Unfortunately, what we in the West perceive as “fundamentalism”— a kind of mental virus that periodically sweeps the Islamic world— may be more inherent to Islam than anyone wants to admit. At least, so say Islam's critics. And that anxiety won't be relieved by a reading of Bat Ye'or's The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996).
Unlike the easy travelogue style of Dalrymple, Ye'or, an Egyptian ´migr´ turned British citizen, approaches her material as an academic. Her focus is historical scholarship. Specifically, she documents, in extraordinary detail, the experience of dhimmitude from the seventh through the 20th centuries.
For Muslims, the dhimmis are the “people of the Book”— the Jews and Christians of conquered territories whose religious practice was tolerated if they paid a special tax. In the early centuries of armed Islamic jihad, subjugated pagans had a choice between conversion to Islam or execution. But “the people of the Book,” in theory and often in fact, had a third choice: political disenfranchisement and economic penalties, in return for the right to exist as religious communities.
Today's secular scholars like to contrast this perceived Islamic tolerance with the allegedly bigoted record of the Christian West. But, as with so much about the past, people see what they want to see. In the case of many secular scholars, their work implies an instinct against Christianity that traces itself back to the Enlightenment. In any event, the sins of Christians throughout history are well-documented. Repentance for those sins played a big role in the theology of the Great Jubilee. Unfortunately, few other religious communities have had the courage to review their own histories with equal honesty. Ye'or shows that Islam urgently needs the same examination of conscience.
While respect for the “people of the Book” was indeed official policy in most Muslim-dominated societies, its practical application inevitably sought to marginalize and humiliate the dhimmis. Political power was reserved for Muslims. Direct persecution of Christians and Jews did occur. More frequently, however, the law worked to make life for these communities less and less bearable— in effect, a slow strangulation.
Nonetheless, as Ye'or shows clearly by quoting entire Muslim documents, Muslim treatment of Christians over the centuries often included enslavement, harassment, seizure of lands and the abduction of children. (In the case of Turkey's large Armenian Christian minority in the early years of the 20th century, it also included genocide.)
Moreover, the impulse to aggressive jihad has no real parallel in Christianity (the Crusades, whatever their sins, were a reaction to jihad) and, as the great French thinker Jacques Ellul suggests in his fore-word, the recourse to armed expansion is arguably part of Islam's basic thought structure.
So where do these two books leave us? Just here: Memory has power. Pope John Paul II has an unusually keen understanding of how history— our memory of the past— can shape both the present and future. This is why he has asked us again and again to seek a “purification of memory.”
As the International Theological Commission said in its statement “Memory and Reconciliation” in 1999: “[The purification of memory] aims at liberating personal and communal conscience from all forms of resentment and violence that are the legacy of past faults, through a renewed historical and theological evaluation of such events.”
In other words, by looking at the past— our own past and the common history we share with Islam and other religious traditions— and by judging it honestly and rigorously, but without fear or rancor, we serve the truth that makes us free. We “contribute to the path of reconciliation,” however difficult that might be.
Christians and Muslims have traveled a rough road together over the centuries. It does no good to ignore that. But history is made by people, and people have the capacity to learn from history without being imprisoned by it.
People can change. People can forgive. People can love. In reading and reflecting on these two extraordinary books, we may find a way to learn the lessons of the past … without being limited by its mistakes.
Francis X. Maier writes from Denver.
----- EXCERPT: Christians, Muslims and the road long traveled ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Look What They've Done To My Desert, God DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:From the East-West Highway, I turned south onto a narrow paved road, then west onto a rutted and rocky dirt road. This ended at a small parking area. No one else was around.
There was no trail to follow, so I went up a dry wash, hiking three miles over an alluvial fan and another three into a deep canyon. Here I had to scramble over dry falls and through boulder fields. My goal was the rare elephant tree, which is neither a tree nor elephantine. The guidebook said 100 specimens of the bush could be found at the head of the canyon.
I had made a late start and did not reach my goal by nightfall. I pitched the tent on level sand and cooked ramen as darkness enveloped me. I ate quickly, eyeing the canyon walls, looking for an ominous silhouette. On the way in I had seen human tracks, but they were old. The newer tracks were large, round and clawless: mountain lion. I did not want to remain outside the tent any longer than necessary.
My hunting knife gave only modest comfort. I figured I could win any fight, but at what cost? I knew a big cat would not bother me if I were in the tent.
Throughout the night, I kept the flap open for ventilation.
Periodically I woke to watch the stars and to listen. Nothing. No wind, no footsteps, no howls. At first light I broke camp and headed down the canyon, deciding not to climb the extra mile for a look at the elephant trees. They would be there next time.
Back at the car, I changed clothes and washed as best I could with a wet cloth. Refreshed and relaxed, I headed for the highway.
The spell of the wilderness was broken as I came upon choking clouds of dust and mechanical roars.
I was passing through the Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area, a large tract of desert land reserved for dirt bikes and dune buggies. On this holiday weekend, there were thousands of them. On either side of the road, set back 50 and 100 yards, were encampments of RVs, trailers and pickups, gathered in circles like the old wagon trains. The encampments stretched to the horizon.
For each street-legal vehicle, there were one or two off-road ones, and they all seemed to be in motion at once. Most were driven by children or teen-agers wearing helmets and garishly designed riding outfits. Some were driven by adults.
As I drove down the paved road at 50 miles per hour, keeping pace with me on the soft shoulder on the opposite side was a middle-aged man in a dune buggy.
He and the other riders were in a mad crisscrossing rush across the desert floor, dodging one another and the creosote bushes and making incessant noise. They were stirring up sand clouds and leaving deeply rutted trails.
I found it depressing.
The desert is a fragile place. Drive on a beach at low tide, and your tracks will be gone by morning. Drive on the desert, and your tracks will live longer than you will. It is said that a desert jeep trail, if left fallow, still will be drivable a century hence, so slow is the obliteration caused by natural forces in the land of little rain.
That was part of my complaint: the destruction of the land.
But it was more than that. I also was annoyed at the off-roaders for preferring what they were doing over the quiet and stealth of a hike, much as I would be annoyed at someone frolicking and making noise in church. Certain places call for reverence and silence.
I have never considered myself an environmental-ist, partly because so many people who use that label think the best way to preserve the environment is to get rid of people through contraception and abortion. Does that make me a conservationist instead?
Hard to say. I acknowledge that God gave man dominion over the earth (“fill the earth and subdue it”— Genesis 1:28), but, just as every right has a correlative duty, so that dominion puts limitations and responsibilities on man.
Can a Catholic, in conscience, defend all uses of the desert— or must he oppose some?
The Lord asked Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4).
Do I do well to be angry at the off-roaders?
Am I right in sensing there is something profoundly un-Catholic about their use (or abuse) of the desert?
Job thought things over under his bean plant. Perhaps I will think this over under an elephant tree.
Karl Keating is founding director of Catholic Answers in El Cajon, California.
----- EXCERPT: I wanted to get far from the madding crowd, so the day after Thanksgiving I lit out for Anza Borrego Desert State Park, two hours from San Diego. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Karl Keating ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Will the Next Surgeon General Please Stand Up for Life? DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:His resignation, announced several months ago, takes effect this month.
By moving on, Satcher, who was appointed to the office by President Bill Clinton in 1998, will be opening a key sub-cabinet position in the federal government. Reporting to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the surgeon general wields much influence in shaping the way America deals with its most serious health issues.
One of the most significant moments in Satcher's tenure came last June, when he released his controversial “Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Behavior.” The report speaks volumes about his approach to the promotion of healthy bodies and morals in America.
What to make of the surgeon general and his “Call to Action”? It is enough, almost, to consider what others have made of it.
“We applaud Surgeon General David Satcher for releasing his long-awaited [report],” said Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood and one of the nation's most prominent defenders of unlimited abortion on demand. Her statement is by itself just about enough to make the idea of Dr. Satcher's resignation something to look forward to.
Feldt called the report “vital” and praised its author's “courage.” She called on the nation's “politicians, community and religious leaders, educators, and parents” to hear its message and take heed.
In the report, Satcher encouraged Americans to get over their hesitance to discuss sexual issues. (One wonders if he paid any attention at all to the newspaper headlines during the two terms of the president who appointed him.) Satcher called for wide-ranging sexuality programs in schools to simultaneously encourage abstinence and teach the proper methods of birth control.
When asked about his promotion of contraception in school programs, even as his new boss, President Bush, has been publicly promoting programs that clearly favor abstinence, Satcher commented, “I have to be realistic.”
His figures, at any rate, were that. The report offers a litany that is disturbing: 12 million Americans a year infected with sexually transmitted diseases; 800,000 to 900,000 Americans living with HIV, with one-third of them unaware that they are even infected; an estimated 1.36 million abortions in 1996; and an estimated 104,000 children becoming victims of sexual abuse each year.
But is Satcher realistic? The report he published encourages the use of contraceptives, even as it acknowledges that they are sometimes ineffectual. It lectures that Americans need to learn to “respect the diversity of sexual values” in our communities, failing to note that it's that very diversity of values, already “respected” quite well, that produced a culture capable of racking up the frightening statistics just cited.
Being realistic, it seems, is going to have to mean moving beyond the status quo. Despite calling his report a “Call to Action,” Satcher proposes little that is not already being done.
What is in store for the Office of Surgeon General at this dramatic moment of American history? Who will President Bush propose for the position of the nation's top doctor?
Well, it is a new year, and one can hope.
Imagine a surgeon general who is indeed courageous in promoting the sexual health of all Americans, making clear exactly what it takes to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.
Imagine a surgeon general who is realistic enough to acknowledge that 1.3 million abortions a year are disastrous to the health of exactly that many young American children, and damaging as well to the physical and emotional well-being of their mothers.
Imagine, too, a surgeon general who recognizes that the crisis in American sexual health began just about the time the promoters of American sexual freedoms began making great headway in our law and culture, and that the way to fix this difficult situation is to acknowledge they were wrong, that we were all wrong for taking them seriously.
All of this is not to say that the surgeon general of the United States must be a defender of Catholic moral values, at least not because they are Catholic. Rather, he ought to be what the surgeon general's official Web site says the surgeon general is: “dedicated to protecting and improving American health.” And the values and choices that do that, those which prevent the disease and death addressed in Satcher's report, are those that just happen to be Catholic.
This is not coincidental, of course. Catholic morality comes from God, the same God who designed and built our bodies and minds. He gives us moral law not only to keep our souls, but also our bodies, clean and healthy.
The Web site, www.surgeongeneral.gov, tells us that Satcher “would most like to be known as the Surgeon General who listens to the American people and who responds with effective programs.”
But of course, he was not sworn in to his position because we needed a good listener. What we need is a good doctor— one who is able to realistically recognize our symptoms, diagnose our problem, and prescribe a treatment that is truly effective. What we need in a surgeon general is a teacher— one who is more concerned about our healthy bodies than our wounded feelings when we're told the dangers of how we're living.
Will we get a surgeon general like that?
Well, it is a new year, and one can hope.
Barry Michaels writes from Blairsville, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: The surgeon general of the United States, Dr. David Satcher, is about to step down. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Philadelphia's Pristine Chapel DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:The Central Association of the Miraculous Medal in the Germantown section of Philadelphia— “Mary's Central Shrine,” as it's known — opened on Sept. 27, 1927.
Pilgrims have been arriving here, at the site of St. Vincent's Seminary (built in the 1870s) ever since.
The faithful who come here to pray the Perpetual Miraculous Medal Novena jam the pews every Monday, when no fewer than 1,600 people make their way through the front doors.
Masses and various religious services run periodically throughout the day and evening. City residents and guests greet the Vincentian priests and brothers who operate the site, taking advantage of chance meetings on staircases, hallways and aisles in a place known for its hospitality. It's also known for its creative, reverent images in marble, glass, metal and other artistic mediums.
The stone building rises several stories into the sky; you can see it from a few city blocks away. When a local tells you “you can't miss it,” he isn't exaggerating.
Step inside the front foyer, and you're greeted by the figures of St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louise De Marillac, an apparition from the Rue de Bac of the Blessed Virgin and St. Catherine Laboure, as well as St. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a stouthearted atheist and, later, a priest and a fierce promoter of the Miraculous Medal.
As you walk from there into the chapel, your glance is drawn upwards, toward the inlaid mosaic ceiling. There you're mesmerized by a tryptich of scenes from the Annunciation, Nativity and Assumption. Their splendor, size and radiant colors complement a beautiful painting of Mary, Mother of the Church, which spans a substantial portion of the shrine's main dome in glorious red and gold tones.
Giant columns of green marble from the Swiss Alps line the walls. “The Holy Agony Shrine” at the front left reveals a wall-size mural of the crucified Christ over a white-stone tabernacle and altar; nearby, two life-size figures of Our Lady seated on a blue velvet chair with St. Catherine kneeling beside her always attracts a large throng. A replica of the original chair remains on display in the Parisian Rue de Bac Chapel with the saint's incorrupt body in a glass sarcophagus under the altar.
Marian Magnificence
On the opposite side of the church, above a full-scale statue of St. Catherine Laboure, is a massive mural of the martyrdom of St. John Gabriel Perboyle, a Vincentian missionary-martyr of China. Underneath this, petitioners crouch at St. Catherine's feet to implore her inter-cession. At the statue's left, the stunning altar to the Blessed Virgin of the Miraculous Medal draws the pilgrim's attention back to the ceiling, from where Mary watches over the sanctuary, assisted by St. Vincent de Paul on one side and St. Louise de Marillac on the other.
The altar of Pavanazzo marble displays a statue of Mary with her arms open to a fallen world; the front and reverse sections of the Miraculous Medal are inset in the altar sidings. Marble abounds on walls, flooring and columns, accented by two standing gold chandeliers. A decorative and story-like altar, the bottom shows bas reliefs of the first Paris apparitions, a center section which reads “Virgo Potens” and the Virgin of the Globe. The railing is crowded with scraps of paper crammed into every niche, on the floor, or anywhere that a pilgrim can leave a written petition for Our Lady to consider. (I couldn't resist adding my own petitions to the plethora of paper slips in one corner.)
The shrine's lower level possesses its own points of interest, particularly its “crypt,” a small mausoleum room. The shrine's director, Vincentian Father William O'Brien, guided me toward the end of a long corridor to view the burial spots of many Vincentian priests and brothers. The vaults can be seen through the glass entrance.
Apparently, the “crypt” is very well-frequented amongst Philadelphians; a man stopped me after my “tour” to be certain I had visited this hallowed ground. Near the gift shop, a metal wall lists the names of Philadelphians and others associated with the shrine who died during World War II. This is complemented by a succession of gold-framed, multihued wall tableaus illustrating St. Catherine's visions.
Spanning the Globe
While the medal was struck and disseminated during St. Catherine's lifetime, no one knew the sister who saw the Virgin. Only at the end of her life was St. Catherine Laboure revealed as the privileged soul given this special mission, whereas the saint always preferred to remain behind the scenes in silence, solitude and fidelity to her duties as gardener and portress.
Below the main chapel, a prominent niche highlights a statue of Mary, who raises a golden globe to heaven. Many flock to this railing in a contemplative mode. At this alcove, the faithful congregate and more petitions accumulate. Father O'Brien smiled as he remarked that these scribbled appeals will turn up just about anywhere a pilgrim can tuck one.
During the vision of “the globe” on November 27, 1830, Our Lady remarked to St. Catherine: “This globe represents the entire world, including France, and every person.” With this message, Mary revealed that she carries humanity in her motherly arms, with the golden ball symbolic of the active presence of God in the hearts and lives of everyone.
Many are familiar with the “little yellow novena booklet” of the Miraculous Medal that has its origin at Mary's Central Shrine. I've prayed with it myself at a local Vicentian church at the Monday Night Miraculous Medal Novena. Now it has spread to France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Ireland and South America.
In St. Catherine's words, “Now it must be propagated,” we find prime evidence that Mary's intercession radiates from this Philadelphia shrine to all parts of the world where the novena is perpetually recited— and the Miraculous Medal is worn around the neck, as Our Lady requested.
Regina Marshall lives in Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Mary's Central Shrine is a Germantown jewel ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Traveller -------- TITLE: Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Virtual Snow ... DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:For many people, e-mail has become an important part of a busy daily routine.
And, for many of those, the technology has proven a mixed blessing.
Here's an example that illustrates my point. Recently I received a e-mail that said: “Hello. I e-mailed you for prayers and guidance while I was depressed prior to Christmas and never got a response. Fortunately, I was able to weather my low moments but was surprised to not receive any words of encouragement. Please take these kinds of e-mails seriously in case someone really is looking forward to some spiritual comfort from you.”
This person was presuming his e-mail had reached me when, in fact, I never saw it. Did he make a typographical mistake with my e-mail address? Was my mail server temporarily down? Did the message get accidentally deleted? Did another brother respond, but the transmittal failed to go through? There are many possibilities; the bottom line is, this person who needed help had— unfortunately— presumed absolute e-mail reliability.
I maintain a mailing list called “Companions of the Holy Eucharist.” It goes out to about 500 people roughly once a week. Every time I send out a message to the list, around 10 come back to me. They're accompanied by a message from the system TITLEd: “Undeliverable.”
Why does this happen? Sometimes a person has exceeded the number of e-mails they are allowed to store on their mail server. Another might switch to a new e-mail service and forget to inform people of the change of e-address. Others have their e-mail accounts cancelled due to lack of activity. Sometimes I am informed that the first try of the e-mail didn't go through, but more attempts would be made automatically. Several days later I'm then informed the e-mail was undeliverable in a number of attempts.
How can you be sure somebody has read your e-mail?
There is no foolproof verification system available. However, most e-mail programs, such as Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express packages, feature a “Request Read Receipt” function under the “Tools” menu. You can check off a box when you compose or reply to an e-mail. AOL users have a similar “Return Receipt” option they can check off as well (but it only works for e-mail sent to other AOL members). When you select this option, the person receiving your e-mail will see a message pop up when they open your e-mail message. Then they have the option of immediately sending you a “read receipt” e-mail reply to let you know that they have received your message.
For urgent messages that demand an immediate reply or attention, sometimes a little e-mail trick can work. When composing or replying to an e-mail with Outlook or Outlook Express under “Message” on the menu, go to the “Set Priority” option. This can be set to Low, Normal or High. When I have an urgent message I usually select “High” priority. This does not effect how fast an e-mail is delivered, but it does mark the e-mail with a red priority flag. The person receiving the e-mail may notice it's a priority and give it swift attention.
Because e-mail delivery is almost instantaneous to many parts of the world, people have come to expect an almost instantaneous response. Even low-priority e-mails not replied to on the same day received may get a follow up e-mail from the sender saying: “Did you get my e-mail?!!!” or “I'm offended because you didn't respond.” A vocational candidate recently e-mailed us asking, “I just wanted to follow up my e-mail. … Since you have not responded, can I assume that the response to my inquiry is negative?” Only four days had gone by.
Now some Catholic organizations and individuals use what is called an “autoresponder” to take care of this problem. Any e-mail messages received get an automatic reply from them. Then, at a later time, they may or may not respond to the e-mail personally. Given the number of e-mails an organization or popular individual may get in a given day, sometimes this is a necessity.
That takes care of the major reliability concerns. What about security?
Unfortunately, private information shared in e-mail is not always so private. Be sure to check your e-mail provider's user agreement for their policy on privacy. Of course, the recipient's e-mail provider has a privacy policy, also. And your e-mail is temporarily stored on other computers on its way to its final destination. Governments, plus those sharing the cable connection, could intercept it if they wanted to.
As Microsoft Corporation found out, e-mail messages can even be used as evidence in court. And, if you are sending the e-mail from work, you can be almost 99% sure your company is monitoring it. So how can you send a private e-mail with sensitive personal information? The answer is encryption.
Outlook and Outlook Express have an “Encrypt” option under the “Tools” menu. Encryption scrambles your e-mail in such a way that only the recipient can make sense of it. Send a 128-bit encrypted e-mail and even the FBI won't be able to break it!
In order to encrypt an e-mail, you will need to purchase a “digital ID.” In order to learn more about digital IDs, go to verisign.com/client/about/-index.html.
It will cost you about $15 a year to have your own digital ID. If you want to ensure your private e-mail information remains private, it is well worth the cost.
E-mail is a fast and cheap way to communicate. It's just not a foolproof or absolutely private one. Keep those points in mind— and wonder how you ever got along without it.
Brother John Raymond, co-founder of the Monks of Adoration, writes from Venice, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: How reliable, and how secure, is your e-mail? ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Monthly Web Picks DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:This month we'll look at e-mail mailing lists.
The Catholic Information Network hosts 46 public mailing lists, covering a broad range of topics, at cin.org/mailman/listinfo. The network also hosts a number of unadvertised lists.
CatholiCity Crosstalk, at catholicity.com/crosstalk/, hosts 15 mailing lists. While lists are monitored, CatholiCity does not screen messages before they are posted. They do take action against anyone who posts offensive, uncharitable or heretical messages.
Yahoo hosts 526 mailing lists under the Catholic category at http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/R eligion___Beliefs/Christianity/De nominations_and_Sects/Catholic.Although I wouldn't agree with Yahoo listing the Catholic faith under a Christian denomination or sect, you still may find some good Catholic lists here. You'll find a short description of the list, the number of members and archived messages for public lists.
MSN's 578 mailing lists are, fortunately, listed directly under the Christianity category at http://communities.msn.com/browse.msnw? catid=366. You will find a description of the list, the number of members and an activity meter for each list.
To order Catholics on the Internet by Brother John Raymond, call Prima Publishing at (800) 632-8676
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:David Copperfield (2000)
The works of Charles Dickens have remained perennial favorites since their initial publication almost 150 years ago.
Each new generation rediscovers the rich characterizations and sharp social observations which unfailingly grab our hearts.
These virtues are fully on display in this PBS miniseries based on David Copperfield. Shot on location in England, it's written by Adrian Hodges and directed by Simon Curtis.
The young David (Daniel Radcliffe) has it rough. After his father's death, his mother (Emilia Fox) marries the paranoid disciplinarian Murdstone (Trevor Eve), who sends him to a cruel boarding school run by Mr. Creakle (Ian McKellen) and then off to work in a London sweatshop. Only his old nanny, Peggotty (Pauline Quirk) and the profligate debtor, Mr. Micawber (Bob Hoskins), are kind to him.
As an adult, David (Ciaran McMenamin) is re-united with his eccentric Aunt Betsey (Maggie Smith) and must outwit the unctuous Uriah Heep (Nicholas Lyndhurst), who tries to swindle them.
This novel was Dickens' “favorite child” as the hero's coming-of-age adventures mirrored the author's. But you needn't be a Dickens fan to admire this video.
Midway (1976)
Many Hollywood war movies feel the need to improve on history (Pearl Harbor).
Midway sticks to the facts of real-life combat engagements.
Six months after the Japanese destroyed the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the maverick Comdr. Joseph Rochefort (Hal Holbrook) cracks the enemy's code and learns that they're planning to seize our naval base at Midway Island, an excellent jumping-off point for an invasion of Hawaii.
Admiral Chester Nimitz (Henry Fonda), Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance (Glenn Ford) and the legendary Admiral William “Bull” Halsey (Robert Mitchum) lead the Americans to a surprise victory over the Japanese Navy, commanded by Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto (Toshiro Mifune), even though we're outnumbered four to one.
Director Jack Smight and screenwriter Donald Sanford recreate the mechanics of how military operations are put together better than almost any other filmmakers.
Actual combat footage is skillfully mixed with well-staged battle scenes.
Less compelling is the personal soap opera involving Capt. Matt Garth (Charlton Heston), who intercepted some of the first Japanese communications, and his son (Edward Albert).
Peter Pan (1953)
James Barrie's Peter Pan has been presented countless times on stage, screen and television. Walt Disney's animated, musical version is one of the best.
The stern Mr. Darling (voice of Hans Conreid) disapproves of the stories his daughter Wendy (Kathryn Beaumont) tells her two brothers about a mythical boy named Peter Pan. When the older Darlings take off one evening, Peter (Bobby Driscoll) magically materializes in Wendy's bedroom with his attendant, the fairy Tinker Bell.
Peter and Tinker Bell can fly. With a sprinkling of Pixie Dust, Wendy and her brothers soar with them across the evening sky to the wondrous Never Never Land, where Peter lives with the Lost Boys. Wendy and her companions are captured by the pirate Captain Hook (also Conreid), but Peter saves them before they're forced to walk the plank.
Hook is devoured by his long-time enemy, the crocodile who's swallowed a ticking clock. Wendy returns to London with a new understanding of the meaning of growing up. Both kids and adults will enjoy the movie.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, FEB. 3
Franciscan University Presents
EWTN, 7 p.m.
This show's lively roundtable discussions, filmed on the Franciscan University campus in Steubenville, Ohio, offer sound Catholic intellectual perspective on many topics. To be rebroadcast Thursday, Feb. 7, at 1 p.m. and Friday, Feb. 8, at 3 a.m. and 10 p.m.
WEEKNIGHTS
Alan Keyes Is Making Sense
MSNBC, 10 p.m.
Catholic pro-lifer Alan Keyes, a former Reagan-administration official and twice a presidential candidate, analyzes current affairs in this new hour-long talk show. The program is broadcast live, so the 10 p.m. Eastern starting time means 7 p.m. Pacific Time.
MONDAY, FEB. 4
The Mummy Road Show
National Geographic, 9:30 p.m.
This episode, “Incas Unwrapped,” visits the ancient buried city of Tucume in northern Peru to investigate mummies that might be a tribal chief and more than 20 attendants.
TUESDAY, FEB. 5
NOVA: Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies
PBS, 8 p.m.
Turns out there were hundreds of Soviet agents inside the U.S. government in the 1940s and '50s— more than even security-conscious Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) knew. Declassified Communist and U.S. documents prove that spies funneled atomic, military, diplomatic and industrial secrets to the U.S.S.R. from senior positions in FDR's White House, the Office of Strategic Services, the Manhattan Project, the State Dept, etc. Some of the best evidence is in the Venona files, which the National Security Agency released in 1995 to show how U.S. counterintelligence broke “unbreakable” Soviet code and read thousands of telegraphic messages that Soviet agents were sending to Moscow.
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 6
Expedition Journal
National Geographic, 6 p.m.
Tonight's show, “Above the Clouds,” follows around-the-world expeditions of balloonists Colin Prescott and Bertrand Picard, in separate segments.
THURSDAY, FEB. 7
The Woman Clothed with the Sun
EWTN, 3 a.m. and 10 p.m.
June Keithley Castro discusses the miracle of Lourdes, France and its attraction to the sick, handicapped and despairing.
FRIDAY, FEB. 8
2002 Winter Olympic Games: Opening Ceremony
NBC, 8 p.m.
Bob Costas and Katie Couric, joined by Jim McKay, anchor this event from Salt Lake City. NBC, promising fewer features and more news, will provide 168 hours of coverage (110.5 original), tonight through Feb. 24. Its cable outlets, CNBC and MSNBC, will have another 207 hours (131 original).
SATURDAY, FEB. 9
Lourdes
EWTN, 8 p.m.
This “EWTN Global Showcase” offering examines the rich theology behind Mary apparitions at Lourdes.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: What More Could We Have Done? DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Less than two weeks after Cornell (N.Y.) University and Rutgers University Law School in Camden, N.J., released the 1945 document, “The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches,” author Daniel J. Goldhagen wrote a cover story in the Jan. 21 issue of The New Republic enTITLEd “What Would Jesus Have Done?”
In the article, Goldhagen denounces the actions of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII during and after the Holocaust.
Wrote Goldhagen: “For centuries the Catholic Church, this pan-European institution of world-hegemonic aspirations, the central spiritual, moral, and instructional institution of European civilization, harbored anti-semitism at its core, as an integral part of its doctrine, its theology, and its liturgy.”
Goldhagen concluded his article by referring to the question in its TITLE: “And no matter what a person's response to the question of what Jesus would have done, each answer leads to another unavoidable question: What should be the future of this Church that has not fully faced its antisemitic history and still has anti-semitic elements embedded in its doctrine and theology, and still claims to be the only path to salvation?”
Leading Catholic and Jewish scholars of the Holocaust both agree that Goldhagen's attack has little historical substance.
One problem: The recently released “Nazi Master Plan” document, compiled in 1945 by Jewish expatriate Franz Neumann for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services as preparation for the Nuremberg war crimes trials, comprehensively substantiates earlier documentation of Nazi persecution of the Church.
Jesuit Father Vincent Lapamarda , director of the Holocaust Collection at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., took issue with Goldhagen's argument that the Church would have resisted the slaughter had it been of Christians rather than Jews. “He implies that the Church would not have remained ‘silent’ had the Nazis, as in the case of the Jews, decided to kill millions of Christians,” said Lapamarda. “In fact, if you study what he is saying and what happened at that time, you can … turn the tables on Goldhagen and point out how evenhanded was the way in which the Pope approached the challenge arising from the threat by the Nazis to both Christians and Jews.”
Dr. Eugene Fisher, director for Catholic-Jewish Relations for the U.S. bishops' conference, said that Goldhagen had gone so far in his attack that “[he] is going to be blasted primarily by Jewish scholars.”
Michael Marrus, dean of the School of Graduate Studies and professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, disputed Goldhagen's analysis in an e-mail sent to Tom Nash of Catholics United for the Faith.
Marrus served on the six-member commission set up in 1999 by the Vatican and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations to study the Vatican's archival material relating to the wartime activities of Pius XI and Pius XII. (The committee suspended its work last summer after Marrus and its two other Jewish members complained the committee was not getting sufficient access to relevant archival material.)
Marrus, who is often critical himself of Catholic policy and Pius XII, wrote that Goldhagen's piece was “an unrelieved, bitter attack on his subject, a sneering disparagement of other analysts for moral equivocation, a dismissal of most contemporary scholarship, and a hunger for the black-and-white, the simplest of historical explanations.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic College Students 'Focus' on the Faith DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:University of Illinois senior Carly Thomas admits that the word “evangelization” often carries a negative connotation in the minds of college-age Catholics.
However, since joining a Bible study sponsored by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students— or “Focus” — and attending the movement's national conference in Lincoln, Neb. Jan. 11-13, Thomas says she has experienced firsthand a method capable of reversing such perceptions.
Instead of producing Catholic speakers to inspire large crowds, Focus, the 4-year-old college out-reach based in Greeley, Colo., trains recent college graduates to spend their time with student leaders on university campuses.
Rather than preaching, Thomas said Focus missionaries use a mentor relationship called “disciple-ship” to instruct, encourage and challenge students in their faith. Through a combination of this oneon-one leadership program and small-group Bible studies, leaders are trained to do the same with their fellow students.
Focus was originally launched in 1997 at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., with two missionaries and 24 students. In 2002, Focus includes eight full-time campuses (plus four part-time), with 40 missionaries and almost 1,000 students.
Focus sends four recent college graduates — two men and two women— to a college campus to conduct small group Bible study, one-on-one leadership training through personal mentor relationships and large group events called “Prime Times” (a combination of skits, testimonies, teaching and social activities).
“We want to reach the multitudes by investing ourselves in individuals,” says John Zimmer, Focus' director of U.S. campus ministry. Mathematically, he said, the person who spends ordinary time sharing his life and faith with two others and equips those two individuals to, in turn, influence two others each is more effective over time than a “superevangelist” who brings 1 million people to Christ every year.
“The method was designed by Christ himself,” Zimmer says. “He preached to multitudes, but he also spent time with 12 men— and three specifically (Peter, James and John)— who went out and changed the world.”
To follow Christ's example, Focus works in conjunction with Catholic chaplains and Newman centers on university campuses.
“There's no place in our culture that gathers key leaders better than colleges and universities,” says Curtis Martin, Focus president and founder. “Right now the leaders of our culture for the next generation are on college campuses, and they're trying to decide what their fundamental values are.”
Martin says it's imperative that graduates have the vision of Catholic teaching and the power of God's grace in the sacraments as they enter the next years of their lives.
At Focus' annual national conference in Lincoln, more than 400 students, campus ministers, religious and clergy from San Francisco to New York encountered both.
The three-day event, which has doubled in size each year, featured a concert by nationally known Catholic band Crispen and talks on heroic generosity, building virtue and sharing the Gospel through conversation. Its theme was “Dig Deep. Live Deeply.”
Smaller workshops covered topics like apologetics, building community, leading a Bible study and time management, and students received the opportunity for eucharistic adoration and the sacrament of reconciliation.
For Marie Rakel, a sophomore at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., the conference provided much-needed fellowship with other Catholics.
“We tend to get a little isolated at the academy,” she says. “It's great to be out here in Nebraska with hundreds of other students from other states and discover our faith.”
For Gerard Carisio, who also attends the Air Force Academy, discussion with students from “normal” colleges and universities provided the encouragement he needed to commit to sobriety and chastity— two standards vital to Focus leadership.
“Because we live a restricted, regimented life, there's a feeling among some cadets that we're missing out,” says Carisio. “So on the weekends, I'll drive up to Denver and look for a party just to blow off steam.”
Carisio says the chastity and sobriety workshop challenged him to re-evaluate the way he spends his free time.
The gathering gave Michelle Choutka, a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, the confidence to put what she's learned into practice even after graduation.
“It makes it a whole lot easier,” she says, “to go out into the world and enter medical school knowing that I've been equipped [spiritually].”
Kimberly Jansen wrote this for Catholic News Service.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kimberly Jansen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Living-Room Lectures
Xavier: No. 1
Reverse Crusades?
Students at one school even pretended to be warriors fighting for Islam. “We could never teach Christianity like this,” said one parent who is part of a group that filed a complaint with the local school board.
“A lot of it is a desire to overly compensate in the name of political correctness and sensitivity,” said Brad Dacus, the lawyer that is representing the parents. “It's outrageous.”
Catholic Urban Flight
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 17 — The number of urban Catholic elementary and secondary schools across the nation has been steadily shrinking, while suburban and rural schools have increased, reported the wire service.
Most of the 54 new Catholic schools that opened last year were in suburban areas, while most of the 61 that closed or consolidated were in urban areas, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.
“Catholic officials blame the declines on the fact that white, working-class Catholic families have moved to the suburbs,” says AP. The trend began as early as the 1960s, but has become more noticeable in recent years, school officials suggested.
‘Devoted Witness’
Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit said Madonna University would be an enduring tribute to Sister Van de Vyver's “humble and devoted witness of faith.”
Ivory Tower Leans Left
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF POPULAR CULTURE, Jan. 15— Ivy League professors are out of touch with the American people, according to a poll commissioned by the Anti-Political Correctness Organization.
The poll found that, issue by issue, the faculty holds views that are far to the left of the American people.
For example, even though the country was almost perfectly divided in the 2000 presidential election, only 9% of the professors said they voted for President Bush.
The professors oppose school vouchers 67% to 26%, while Americans support vouchers 62% to 36%.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Weekly Book Pick DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:JOSEPH PRONECHEN
MEET PADRE PIO
by Patricia Treece Charis, 2001 144 pages, $9.99 To order: (800) 458-8505
Looking to make the acquaintance of one of the Church's most beloved and recognizable saints-in-waiting? Adults and youth will find an agreeable and satisfying encounter in Meet Padre Pio.
With the skill of a perceptive storyteller, author Patricia Treece turns our meeting into an absorbing overview of Padre Pio's life. Weaving together incidents, letters and anecdotes spanning his entire life, she shows how graced with sanctity he was— virtually all his days (1887-1968).
Ordinary people can take heart from these eyewitness accounts. The colorful portrait of Pio that emerges— from when he was little Francesco Forgione to his days as a stigmatic priest whose other extraordinary gifts included bilocation and reading souls— conveys that he was “cheerful and down to earth, retaining his love of pranks and telling jokes.”
“All his life Padre Pio was known among his friends as a man with a good sense of humor,” Treece writes. “Playing pranks on his sister and fellow novices, and later making his Capuchin brothers laugh by telling innocent little jokes and stories during recreation, Padre Pio fulfilled the paradox that a follower of Christ must both ‘pick up [his] cross and follow me’ and be filled with ‘the joy of the Lord.’”
Some of his simple jokes made me laugh out loud. Francis de Sales once observed, “A saint who is sad is a sad saint.” Pio wasn't sad.
On the other hand, well-chosen examples from Pio's voluminous letters of spiritual direction to his spiritual children “reveal Pio as a man steeped in the Scriptures, totally dedicated to Jesus Christ and exquisitely sensitive to the subtlest spiritual currents of the soul.”
His spiritual direction was uncompromising, yet gentle and full of love. The priest for whom Jesus and Mary were everything speaks to the heart on how and why to avoid spiritual dangers like vain-glory, and to bear crosses as a sign of loving God and accepting his will.
Although intended for specific individuals, the letters are so universal as to apply to any one of us. We can take this spiritual direction as if Padre Pio wrote it only for us.
The letters include a fascinating account the padre wrote about his trip home after his medical discharge from the WWI army. It combines his sensitivity, good cheer and down-to-earth observations with strong hints of supernatural intervention through unwavering trust in God.
Directly or indirectly, Padre Pio always told people to trust in God. The book recalls how he healed one young man on crutches who feared he'd fall without them. “At last, urged on by Pio, he dropped the crutches, but clutched fearfully at the wall to support himself,” writes Treece.
“‘Come on, walk,’ Pio laughed. Something in the confident laugh caught the crippled man's soul. He let go of the wall. He walked. His foot, mangled in an accident, had been healed.”
Treece has done a fine job selecting incidents that illuminate Pio's extraordinary gifts, his superhuman love for people, his chosen role from God— in short, the wonders of a great Christian soul.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Getting to Know Blessed Padre Pio ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Between Christmas and Easter DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Between Christmas and Easter — this time of year is for many the most depressing, a time when the darkness and cold of winter seep within the bones, and drag the soul earthward.
Such might seem to be the proper reaction to the natural rhythms of the seasons. Winter is the time of barrenness and death, when life itself retreats beneath the surface and leaves only the white and gray of old age. The holidays only serve to make the winter gloom even more dense and penetrating. After the frantic sparkling of Christmas is gone and the tinsel is put away, there is only the long, grim wait until spring.
Perhaps our dreariness is largely self-inflicted. Perhaps it doesn't have to be this way. To understand why not, we need to look both backwards to Christmas and forwards to Easter.
Christmas, the Christmas which took so much of our time in decorating, shopping, wrapping, visiting, and feasting, which dominated our attention for so long but disappeared so quickly after weeks, even months of preparation, and was devoured in a matter of minutes— where is it now? Why does it not sustain us?
Maybe if we find out what went wrong with Christmas, we shall understand why the time after Christmas is so dull and leaden. Maybe if we find out what went wrong with Christmas, we can better prepare ourselves for Lent and Easter.
I believe the problem with Christmas is both simple and severe. We try to have Christmas without Advent, and hope to turn a holy day into a mere holiday.
But Christmas was never meant to be a mere holiday. A holiday is a slurred and secularized form of holy day, not just etymologically but culturally. A holy day feeds and strengthens the soul. A holiday, at best, merely feeds the bodily senses.
The holy day of Christmas was meant to prepare the soul, faced with what appears to be unremitting darkness, to long for the Light. The core of our error about Christmas, then, is that we cannot skim the true joy of Christmas off the surface, and leave behind the deep drink from which the bubbles of joy actually arise.
The joy of Christmas is of an afflicted people who have finally been delivered, who have endured the darkness and been suddenly, unexpectedly flooded with light. The darkness that now tends to afflict us after Christmas should actually be our companion before Christmas. It is the dark and cold into which the Christ was born. When we try to skim off the joy and skip the darkness, the darkness will come back tenfold to haunt us once the lifeless bubbles of the holiday die down.
The phone rang on the day before Christmas eve while we were visiting family. A friend of my mother-in-law, diagnosed with cancer, was slipping away fast. Probably wouldn't make it until Christmas. How could such a thing happen, especially during the Christmas holiday?
But that is what Christmas is about. The darkness is real. The cold is real. Death is real. Christmas is not exempt from darkness, cold and death. Christmas is the answer to these afflictions, but an answer only heard in a heart prepared by Advent, by a holy season, not a holiday season.
The proper spirit of preparation, then, is not giddy jolliness and gibbering busyness. The soul longing for God must have peace. Peace is the home of contemplation. Contemplation is the hearth of prayer. In the glowing embers of prayer, the Christmas Light is born.
If only hope had been born in our hearts this last Christmas, the Light that shatters all darkness, the child destined to destroy death, would be with us now, when the dark and cold of the season threaten to envelop us in despair.
What about Easter? Sadly, Easter as a holiday is an even greater and more insidious mockery of Easter as a holy day. As a culture of death, we do not feel the natural pagan stirrings of spring in the desire for new life. Fertility, for our society, is an affliction to be cured.
On a deeper level — the true level of Easter— we have lost the great joy of the resurrection; and the problem, again, is that we have tried to clasp the bubbles of Easter joy without the proper preparation, without Lent's deep, dark drink of denial and death. We do not spend the 40 days dying to our petty wants and disentangling ourselves from our persistent sins. We do not look, with unblinking eye, at the true state of our souls. We do not face the crucifixion on Good Friday. Such is the preparation of Lent. No wonder our Easter can fit in a basket of candy.
As with Christmas, so with Easter. The better our Advent, the more blessed and joyful our Christmas; the better our Lent, the more blessed and joyful our Easter.
There is a natural beauty to this time of year, between Christmas and Easter. It is best appreciated by those who realize that the natural rhythm of the seasons is a reflection of a much deeper supernatural rhythm. Like the seasons, we move from the birth of spring all the way round to the death of winter. If we try to sustain ourselves by a mere cycle of holidays, we shall face our own deaths with nothing stronger than Santa Claus in an Easter basket.
So let us make the most of this Lent, and plan right now, to have a most blessed Advent next year.
May all your holidays become holy days.
Benjamin Wiker writes from Hopedale, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:My twin sons are 20 months old and thoroughly enjoyable. Everyone is warning me that the terrible twos are just around the corner. I'm getting nervous.
The terrible twos, in my opinion, are close to a developmental myth. There are a few bits of truth to the notion, but there's also much psychological junk. Yes, somewhere in the general vicinity of this age, most little ones make a quantum leap in willfulness, embrace “no” as 57% of their vocabulary and start to assert their way of doing things as superior to yours.
It's not true, however, that the twos (plus or minus a year) are an unavoidably ugly phase of life.
First of all, by temperament some kids never become a terrible two. They are naturally cooperative or docile, and the twos present nothing more terrible than some sporadic bouts of feistiness. The fact that Harmony never enters a real challenging stage is not— as one well-known expert implies— evidence of psychological stunting that could manifest itself at age 17 in an emotional calamity. It's evidence of her overall sweet nature, at two or 10— or 20.
Second, some children enter the terrible twos at 18 months and some at three years. Many is the parent who thought she passed through the terrible twos pretty much unscathed only to be shell-shocked by the fiery fours. My wife (who is raising 10 children— eleven, counting me) maintains that peak preschool brattiness emerges well after two. Compared to the calculated opposition of a 3- or 4-year-old, the twos were relatively benign.
Third, every age of childhood has its own particular phases, problems and patterns. The twos are not unique in this sense. The complexity of later ages can make the twos look like a developmental piece of cake.
Our youngest, Samuel, just turned 3. I learned never to say, “Sammy's in his terrible twos” because I could easily hear back something like: “What's the matter? He won't eat his carrots? My son wants purple hair with a ring through his nose!”
Someone once told me, “Sixteen is the terrible twos times eight— plus a driver's license.”
So, how nervous should you be about what's heading your way in the next year or so with your sons? Not much. They may not pass through anything “terrible”— like temper tempests or bedtime badtimes— until they're 4. So why fret now?
Then again, maybe these adorable cherubs will start to believe as soon as next week that they know more about life than you do, and will start to challenge your heretofore acceptable limits and rules. That's okay. It's real parenthood time. If you deal with your son's newfound obstinacy, unruliness, or whatever, it most likely won't mushroom into worse stuff over the years. Most of it will pass, though some of it will evolve into different, more sophisticated rowdy kidhood.
Dr. Ray Guarendi is a clinical psychologist and author.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Terrible Whats? ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:Condon to Spitzer: Desist!
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 14 — South Carolina's pro-life attorney general is calling on his pro-abortion counterpart in New York state, Eliot Spitzer, to drop an attack against New York crisis pregnancy centers.
Attorney General Charlie Condon of South Carolina said he believes the centers provide “outstanding” assistance to women facing unplanned, unwanted or difficult pregnancies.
“The centers soothe the pain, relieve the suffering and ease the trauma of women who are hurting,” Condon said in a letter to Spitzer.
Embryo Destruction on Hold
CNSNEWS, Jan. 18 — A Virginia research laboratory involved in stem cell research has decided to stop creating human embryos that would be destroyed in research.
Last summer, the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, a division of the Eastern Virginia Medical School, created an uproar when it announced it would pay donors of human eggs to be used for creating embryos as a source of stem cells.
The Washington Post quoted William Gibbons of the medical school saying that pro-life pressure was an element in the decision. “The uproar was part of it,” he said.
Parents' Right to Spank
LIFESITE DAILY NEWS, Jan. 15— The Ontario Court of Appeal upheld Canada's law permitting parents to use spanking as a form of discipline in a recent ruling.
Justice Stephen Goudge, speaking on behalf of the Court, pointed out that “the legislative purpose of S.43 is to permit parents and teachers to apply strictly limited corrective force to children without criminal sanctions, so that they can carry out their important responsibilities to train and nurture children.”
According to REAL (Real, Equal, Active for Life) Women of Canada national vice president, Gwen Landolt, “This decision not only upholds the parents' right to determine how they will reasonably discipline their children, but also importantly, prevents interference in family life by social workers invading the privacy of the home to investigate and second-guess parental decisions in regard to discipline.”
Jury Award for Abortion Death
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 16 — Jurors awarded $2 million dollars to the 5-year-old son of a woman who died following a 1997 abortion at the Delaware Women's Health Organization near Stanton.
The panel found that Mohammad Imran's negligence led to Gracealyn Harris' death.
The jurors also found the facility negligent, but did not find that Imran's actions amounted to wanton misconduct. In addition, jurors awarded $250,000 to Harris' estate and $2,000 to her parents for funeral expenses.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Pro-Life Conspiracy ... of Prayer DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:MEDFORD, Mass.— When Mary Ann Harold attended a convention at the March for Life in Washington D.C. in 1998 she saw a video depicting babies found in dumpsters, and it seemed to her that one of those babies gazed at her.
“I never did anything with pro-life,” Harold confides. “I didn't want to be radical. But when that baby looked at me, I knew I had been very delinquent. I felt like I had committed a sin of omission. I went to the ladies room and couldn't stop crying.”
At that aching moment, Harold resolved to do something for the unborn.
She returned to her home in Medford, Mass., and during a prayer to God for discernment, realized the United States had no collective movement of prayer for life.
To fill that gap, on Feb. 14, 1998, Harold founded a non-profit organization called Prayers for Life, whose goal is to unite people in prayer to stop abortion.
Harold consulted with volunteer Mary Jo Ridge who had taught quilting for many years and worked at a quilt shop in Cambridge, Mass. Together the women developed an idea: if people would pledge to pray 50 rosaries for the pro-life cause, their names would be put on a quilt.
The idea was not popular in the beginning. Harold explains, “It was difficult in the first year. It was hard to ask people to pray 50 extra rosaries. We only had 1,800 rosaries pledged after months of promoting the idea.”
Ridge and Harold put off designing the quilt for a year. Ridge remembers, “We went for a whole year just thinking of the form for the quilt. We wanted to get a feeling for how many names would go on the quilt, there were not that many.”
Some rays of hope began to shine, however. When Cardinal Bernard Law saw one of their pledge forms, he told Harold that he wanted his name to be on the quilt.
Things started to change. As news of the quilt spread more and more people signed up to pray the rosary. The time had come for the quilt's creation.
Two weeks before the March for Life in 1999, Ridge, with her 5-year old twin boys scurrying around her, sat down to sketch a design.
She decided it would be 93 by 93 inches, and the central image would be a rosary. The quilt would have the following message displayed prominently. “We believe the way to end abortion is to pray the rosary.” Two vertical columns would flank this main message, one to the left saying, “Prayers for life,” one to the right, “Quilt of prayer.”
A separate patch, 1.5 inches high and 6 inches wide would be made for the name of each person who'd pledged 50 rosaries. The patch would be cut, the name would be ironed onto the fabric, and then sewn into the quilt.
They had 130 names at the time, and Ridge had only two weeks. She admits that she was still sewing at 3:00 in the morning on the day of the march. But, she met her deadline and the banner was carried for the first time at the March for Life in 1999.
Ridge then contacted Cardinal Law, asking if he still wanted his name on the quilt.
He responded with a beautiful letter, dated Feb. 15, 2000, in which he said he would be delighted to be included.
Cardinal Law quoted the Pope John Paul II in his letter, “The Holy Father in the Gospel of Life exhorts us, ‘A great prayerful life is urgently needed, a prayer which will rise up throughout the world.’ The quilt of life is a wonderful response to this call for prayer.”
With joy, Ridge carefully stitched Cardinal Law's name patch on the top left column of the quilt.
The program picked up steam.
In January 2000 the Quilt of Prayer went to the March for Life in Washington D.C. for the second time, but Harold and the others decided not to parade it. Chances of damage by inclement weather were too great.
Instead, the quilt hung for three days in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, outside the crypt church.
In the summer of 2000, the quilt's batting and backing were added. Ridge knew that was a painstaking chore, and sought someone to do a random machine quilting, but every professional machine quilter was booked up for a year.
Ridge realized she had to do the job by hand. At the same time, there was a big space at the bottom of the quilt that needed to be filled. Ridge prayed for help one night, and assistance came at once. She recalled, “The minute my head hit the pillow, the fifteen mysteries of the rosary came into my head. I realized I could put them right under the rosary beads. There was a space there 60 inches wide and 30 inches high.
I could break that up into 15 rectangular pieces 10 by 10, and the mysteries of the rosary would fit perfectly in the space.”
By August 2000 the mysteries had been added to the quilt and that October, it hung at the Respect for Life Mass in Boston.
The Diocese of Boston lauded the quilt idea. Barbara Thorpe, the Pro-Life Director for the Archdiocese of Boston, comments, “It is very exciting when people who work in parish pro-life work … through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and their own creativity come up with a marvelous idea and share it with others.”
Those with names affixed to the quilt were praying more rosaries. It was decided that, for each additional set of 50 rosaries prayed, a rose would be sewn next to the name. This stirred more enthusiasm. One woman, Marian Batas, has 11 roses on her patch.
By the year 2001, the number of names on the quilt had grown to 480. Ridge explained, “We had an avalanche of rosaries, and now we need to make decisions about where to put the names. We might make an extra panel that would hang side by side with the quilt.”
In Fall 2001, the quilt traveled from parish to parish in the Worcester Diocese. Many people noticed its impact. Maria Flores, Associate Director for Pro-Life Activities for the Diocese of Worcester, was one of them. “The quilt is a way to really approach people who might feel a little bit defensive, or who might have certain pre-conceived notions of what the pro-life movement is,” she observed.
The quilt has inspired other groups to make their own version. For example, Leo and Roberta Gauthier, Respect for Life chair-couple at St. Augustine Church in Millville, Mass. made a Parish Quilt of Prayer, after their church hosted a display of the national quilt in February 2001.
Individual states, too, at the encouragement of Prayers for Life, have begun to make their own quilts of prayer. Currently 12 states are participating: Arizona, California, Oregon, Illinois, Hawaii, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas and New Hampshire.
J e a n m a r i e Phillips, Respect Life Coordinator for St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church in Altadena, Calif., used her vacation time to start the California State quilt of prayer.
She finished that quilt in Italy this past December where she joined Prayers for Life state and national coordinators from across the country for the general audience with Pope John Paul II on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Dec. 12. After that audience, the Holy Father blessed the quilts that had been brought there, three times using his crosier.
Now, with the Holy Father's blessing behind them, all the leaders sponsoring the national and state quilts have set a new goal for 3 million rosaries. Harold says, “If we get each state to do a minimum of 60,000 rosaries. We'd have a total of 3 million.”
Word is spreading so quickly, chances are they'll reach that goal by next year's March for Life.
Mary Ann Sullivan writes from New Durham, New Hampshire.
Barbara Bartley of Port Arthur, Texas, also contributed to this story.
----- EXCERPT: How Quilts and Rosaries Can Change the World ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ann Sullivan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 02/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 03-09, 2002 ----- BODY:SEVENTY-ONE PERCENT of American adults were taken to church by their parents when they were children. They are now more likely than other adults to hold an orthodox view of God, to pray and read the Bible, and to still attend church.
Adult church attendance
Taken to church as children
61%
Not taken to church as children
Source: Barna Research Group, Nov. 2001
----- EXCERPT: KIDS AT CHURCH ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Mandatory Contraceptive Coverage - Is Abortion Next? DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:BOSTON — Every state in the nation may one day mandate insurance coverage for contraceptives for women, with little or no possibility for religious groups or individuals to opt out on moral grounds.
And pro-lifers worry that's only step one in a campaign, with the next push coming for mandatory insurance coverage of all abortions.
In Massachusetts, acting Governor Jane Swift has expressed her willingness to sign a mandatory contraceptive coverage bill that cleared the Massachusetts House Jan. 30. And in New York, the Senate, whose Republican leadership had fought for a conscience clause that the Assembly version lacked, passed the Women's Health and Wellness Bill Feb. 5.
Both bills, which also mandate the coverage of screenings for breast cancer, cervical cancer and osteoporosis, contain conscience clauses that would allow dioceses and parishes to opt out — but not Catholic hospitals, social service agencies, universities and non-diocesan schools.
The bills are part of a trend that troubles pro-life advocates. Of the 17 states that already mandate coverage for contraception, five lack any conscience protection and six have only narrow exemptions. Without a vote by the legislature, Washington state put an insurance rule into effect Jan. 1 requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives.
In December 2000, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that exclusion of prescription contraceptives by health plans constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex and pregnancy.
Other states where the issue is moving to the front burner include Utah, Arizona and Oregon.
“There seems to be a nationwide push by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood,” said Cathleen Cleaver, director of planning and information for the U.S. Bishops Committee on Pro-Life Activities. “We believe their true goal is to set the stage for mandated coverage of all so-called reproductive services, including abortion.”
William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, agreed. He predicted that if Gov. George Pataki does not veto the New York bill, it will “set the stage for forced coverage of abortions — the goal of [the National Abortion Rights Action League], this bill's prime backer.”
Abortifacients
While some of the contraceptive drugs and devices can and do act as abortifacients, Cleaver said, advocates are pushing them as “basic health care.”
During a debate prior to the Massachusetts House vote, for example, Gale Candaras of East Longmeadow said that allowing any religious institution an exemption would harm workers’ rights, including thousands of employees who work for Church-run human services organizations with a state contract.
With the nationwide trend heating up and a push for a federal law mandating coverage, there is a need for conscience protection written into federal law, Cleaver said.
Contraceptive mandates have been fought largely on religious freedom grounds, not as opposition to contraception itself. And, mandate opponents say, religious-freedom must apply to health plans of workers at religiously run organizations, like hospitals and schools, not just to people directly employed by churches.
“If legislators look at religion in a more narrowly defined sense, as acting only within the sanctuary, that would be a slippery slope of failing to recognize the ministries of the Church,” said Richard Barnes, executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference.
The California law upon which the New York Senate's bill is based is being challenged in that state's supreme court, and Barnes said it is likely the New York Catholic Conference would challenge the New York bill, should it become law.
The New York Senate Republicans, whose leader, Joseph Bruno, introduced the bill, explained in a statement that religious organizations would get a waiver if the employer's main mission is religious and it primarily employs and serves people of that religion. Employees must, however, be provided access to contraceptive coverage through lower-cost group rates.
The bishops of New York state, led by Cardinal Edward Egan, denounced the bill as a “clear and unprecedented violation of religious liberty.”
“By providing a religious exemption for parishes while forcing Catholic education, health and human service ministries to violate the teaching of our faith, the Senate is legislating what is and is not Catholic,” the bishops said in a statement Feb. 5.
Cardinal Edwad Egan calls the bill a ‘violation of religious liberty.’ N.Y. Senate GOP leader Joseph Bruno offers an exemption, with a catch.
Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre on Long Island said the narrow exemption would lead to a “confrontation of conscience.”
“How can we be true to our calling and our convictions when the Senate tries to impose on us their definition of ‘religion?’” he asked in a statement Feb. 5.
The Senate and Assembly are working to iron out differences in their versions of the bill. The Catholic Conference will continue trying to “change their course,” said executive director Barnes, and will be lobbying Gov. Pataki.
But, Barnes said, “We think it's doubtful the governor has an inclination to veto the legislation.”
The New York bishops expressed their support for other provisions of the bill, dealing with screenings for diseases, but said those issues are “being used as a pawn by abortion and contraception advocates to limit the influence of religious organizations in public policy and to drive the Church out of the business of education, health and human services.”
Massachusetts
In Massachusetts, Dan Avila, associate director of that state's Catholic Conference, said that if the bill hammered out by the House becomes law, it might force Catholic institutions to “consider dropping employee benefits altogether, unless they are able to devise their own insurance plans.”
The bill would shield only chancery offices, parishes and diocesan-run schools. An amendment offered by Rep. Elizabeth Poirier to broaden that exemption was defeated. The amendment also would have allowed individual employees to purchase special riders if they did not want their premiums to support the contraceptive coverage included in the plans offered by their secular employers.
The Massachusetts legislation also prohibits insurance companies from selling employee health plans without the contraceptive coverage to conscientiously opposed secular businesses.
More than 70% of the members of the Massachusetts House identify themselves as Catholic.
“Politics are directly affected by the moral fabric of the nation,” said Judie Brown, president of American Life League. “And what is more moral than the Church's teaching?”
But the moral issues involved in the legislation have become a “matter of opinion” among Catholics, Brown said, adding that the situation might never have reached this point if they had been taught their faith better.
Said Brown, “That's at the bottom of our struggle to stop these bills.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Ch·vez Targets the Church and Loses the People DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:CARACAS, Venezuela — The capacity of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías to generate antagonism was on display Feb. 4. That day, despite warnings from political moderates and pleas from the Catholic Church, he “celebrated” the 10th anniversary of the failed military coup he led as an Army colonel.
Chávez’ s move further divided an already polarized country. One part joined in the official celebrations that were broadcast by the national radio and TV networks, while the other protested in the streets and marked a national “day of mourning and rejection” of Chávez’ s leftist policies.
In the middle is a Catholic Church trying to prevent an even deeper division of Venezuelan society.
Polls show that support for Chávez has plummeted from 80% to around 35%, BBC reported Feb. 9, since he was elected president in a 1998 landslide, promising political and economic reforms.
The depth of opposition was highlighted in December by a nationwide strike. The protest was supported not only by the Venezuelan Workers Confederation, but also by the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and the nation's major newspapers.
The unusual labor-management alliance was formed in protest against new laws that critics contend will choke off foreign investment, threaten private property rights and stifle job creation, The Wall Street Journal reported Dec. 6. Chávez “is attempting to introduce Marxist, socialist concepts at a time when these points of view and manners of doing things are in the past,” said Antonio Herrera-Vaillant, vice president of the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce.
Catholic leaders don't lack their own reasons for opposing Chávez. Despite being the only institution to request that his political opponents give Chávez a chance to implement his political agenda, the Church quickly became a favorite target of the former paratrooper.
Church-State Showdown
Early in January, Chávez brought matters to a head by attacking the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop André Dupuy.
On Jan. 9, Archbishop Dupuy celebrated Mass in Caracas for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Blessed Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. At the end of the Mass, the nuncio asked the assembly to “take a look of faith at the current historic events imposed upon us.”
“In the midst of the current crisis, we are invited to bear witness of Christian hope, no matter what is the political or ideological regime imposed on us by the leaders of the nation,” he said. “We have to act knowing that their action will not escape the judgment of God. They may fool humans, but will not fool God. I hope that those who have received a political responsibility from the Venezuelan people may never forget that.”
The next day, Chávez exploded, accusing the nuncio of “irresponsible interference in Venezuela's sovereign affairs.”
The Venezuelan bishops’ conference immediately sided with Archbishop Dupuy. In response, Chávez on Jan. 26 compared the Church to a “tumor,” saying it opposed his reforms “without helping the country's poor.” He also accused the archbishop of Caracas, Cardinal José Ignacio Velasco, of siding with his political opponents.
That weekend, the Catholic Church suffered a spree of attacks in several Caracas parishes that included vandalism, graffiti and the placement of posters accusing priests of being “Pharisees and hypocrites.”
Then, after having left the bishops on hold for a meeting for almost three years, on Jan. 28 Chávez suddenly invited the Venezuelan bishops’ conference to meet him at the presidential residence.
Speaking on behalf of the bishops, Cardinal Velasco declined. The current climate made dialogue practically impossible, he explained. “Every day we have been turning another cheek. I have no cheeks left because every day there is a new insult.”
After the bishops rejected the meeting with Chávez, other church es suffered acts of vandalism, and three pastors received anonymous death threats.
“The Church in Venezuela does not evade the dialogue with the president, but a true dialogue requires more than just a formal invitation to meet,” Archbishop Baltazar Porras, president of the Venezuelan bishops’ conference, told the Register. “The lack of a previous, common agenda, plus the recent insults without apologies of the president make it impossible to expect reasonable results from the eventual conversation.”
Feb. 4
On Feb. 4, Chávez started his cel ebrations for his failed 1992 coup by bringing flowers to the National Pantheon and calling on the military to be “proud and happy of being here, celebrating the unity between the army and the Venezuelan people.”
The president then attacked a “group of Venezuelans” who were allegedly “lying to the country and trying to oust me, who nonetheless will not succeed.”
Later that day, Chávez suspended a press conference because he said journalists were asking “confrontational questions.”
Meanwhile, several groups of protesters kept vigil in different squares in Caracas until the evening, when they lit candles and performed a cacerolazo protest featuring the clanging of pots and pans.
Responding to a request from a group of retired military personnel not allied with Chávez, the vicar general of Caracas, Msgr. Francisco Monterrey, celebrated a Mass at the cathedral to pray for those who died in the coup.
“This is a moment of faith and recollection free of confrontations and resentment, in which we pray for peace, unity and reconciliation in our country,” said Msgr. Monterrey during his homily.
At the conclusion of Mass, the vicar general requested that the assembly leave the cathedral by the side doors, thus avoiding a potential confrontation with Chávez’ s followers in the Simón Bolívar square.
“When peaceful Mass-goers have to leave a cathedral by the side doors, you ask yourself if you are living in a country where true democracy reigns,” said the former governor of Zulia, Oswaldo Alvarez Paz, who attended the Mass.
Added Alvarez Paz, “The climate of confrontation he has created with his permanent verbal harassment has created a climate that has no electoral way out.”
Francisco Arias Cárdenas, a pop ular former military leader who supported Chávez in his coup attempt 10 years ago, said that the president “has never attacked the Catholic Church as an institution, because he himself is a Catholic.” Said Arias Cárdenas, “He has only pointed out the un-Christian attitudes of some Catholic leaders who are eroding the revolution for selfish reasons.”
Arias Cárdenas, who once ran as a candidate against Chávez but now has become a key supporter, also said that accusing Chávez of attack ing the Church is “a disproportionate statement, motivated by ignorance, if not ill intention.”
Adolfo Salgueiro, a political analyst for El Universal, countered that Chávez “has no hesitation in attack ing anybody, absolutely anybody, if he perceives it as not completely loyal to his political project.”
“And that includes the Church, because Chávez is more a ‘Chavista’ than a Catholic,” Salgueiro said. By attacking the Venezuelan bishops, “Chávez has shown his lack of polit ical intelligence and self-restraint, which has been a major source of tensions and problems with almost every other existing institution, including political parties, unions, entrepreneurs and media.”
On Feb. 1, Acción Democrática, Venezuela's largest opposition party, demanded the Supreme Court dismiss Chávez as “mentally unfit.”
Waving a banner reading “Out With The Madman,” a large group of demonstrators, including clowns and a Chávez impersonator wearing a straitjacket, presented the demand based on reports from two teams of psychiatrists who have allegedly confirmed the former colonel is a “lying, authoritarian megalomaniac.”
The Church continues to shun that sort of rhetoric.
“We don't go as far as to call the president crazy,” said Archbishop Porras. “But definitely he has a tendency to an aggressive behavior that he must change if he really wants to pull Venezuela out of its crisis and enter into history.”
Alejandro Bermúdez is based in Lima, Peru.
(Zenit contributed to this story.)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: 'Axis of Evil'Fight Is No Crusades, Say Historians DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — The Crusades are in the news, 1,000 years after they started.
Western leaders have tried mightily to distance the war on terrorism from the Christian attempts to retake lands that had been captured by Muslim invaders.
But those skirmishes from the 11th and 13th centuries (and lasting into the 15th) are very much on the minds of the West's Islamic foes in the war on terrorism.
President Bush's State of the Union reference to an “axis of evil” helped revive crusades talk. He placed Iran and Iraq on the axis along with North Korea, which isn't a Muslim country. The strong words led Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb 7 to criticize less-fervent Islamic countries. “Because of their lethargy and the fact that they are not united,” he said, they are threatened with a “crusade.”
But what were the Crusades? Were they acts of aggression, as the ayatollah suggests?
Some historians, like Boston University's Richard Landes, think so. “[W]hen the defense reaches into other people's lands,” he said, “then it looks a lot like aggression to me.”
But many scholars of the Crusades say the evidence exonerates the West.
Thomas Madden, chairman of the history department at St. Louis University and author of several books and articles on the Crusades, says they have been misunderstood.
“The Crusades don't really fit the mold [of Christian aggression] at all,” he said. In fact, they were a defensive war, not designed to force Christianity on people, but rather to “liberate Christians under Muslim rule.”
He pointed out that after the Crusaders won a territory, they allowed Muslims to worship freely.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, professor of ecclesiastical history at Cambridge University in England, is the scholar Madden called the “dean” of Crusades scholars. Riley-Smith too, said the Crusades were defensive battles.
“Christian ideas of warfare are quite different from Islamic ideas,” said Riley-Smith. “All Christian ideas of force require that the force is reactive. Christians can't fight a war to spread the faith, only to defend the faith, only to recover” what was theirs. In contrast, “jihad was originally about spreading Islam by force,” he said.
Landes disagrees. “[T]o argue that somehow the Christians were nicer and more moral on crusade than Muslims on jihad is slicing the baloney so thin,” he said, “that it seems like moral regression, not only in terms of modern values of civil society, but in terms of what historical understanding can offer our dynamic and unstable experiment with global cultural interaction.”
But Riley-Smith pointed out that the lands being contested in the Crusades “had been part of the Christian Empire.” The Crusaders “were not trying to extend [into areas] where Christianity had never been.”
Madden added that, at the time of the Crusades, “two-thirds” of Christian territory had been lost to the Muslims. Islamic strongholds like Morocco, Egypt and all of Asia Minor were Christian before they were Muslim.
Riley-Smith disagrees with Western leaders who have called bin Laden's behavior uncharacteristic of Islam.
While there is “an element within Islam that is uneasy with the use of force,” he said, bin Laden “comes in a long tradition of Islam — often a majority position.”
Both Madden and Riley-Smith noted that in Pope John Paul II's frank and thorough Jubilee year mea culpa prayer seeking forgiveness for historical wrongdoing by Catholics, the Pope didn't mention the Crusades.
Said Riley-Smith, “no less than six general Councils” including “the Fourth Lateran Council and Second Council of Leon” supported Crusades, as did “numerous papal letters from the 12th century onwards.”
He also pointed out that a great many saints were active supporters of the Crusades, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Bridget of Sweden and Dominic.
Riley-Smith said no apology is needed because the Crusades existed in “a different moral climate,” and because, “when someone is threatening you with a Kalashnikov [AK-47 rifle], it does little good to apologize for the fact that your ancestors attacked his ancestors with bows and arrows.”
Apologetics
The Crusades has another group of dedicated researchers: apologists who want to explain this chapter in Catholic history in order to answer the objections of potential converts.
Author and lecturer Patrick Madrid dedicated a chapter of his book Pope Fiction to dispelling some of the popular myths of the Crusades.
Said Madrid, “Muslim expansion was always at the point of a sword,” while Christian converts were generally gained through “peaceful” means.
Professor Landes answered Madrid's claim with a list of atrocities. “Surely the rampaging Crusaders of Emicho of Leiningen in 1096, the slaughtering Jews, men, women, and children, or the followers of the Master of Hungary in 1251, the slaughtering Jews, clerics, and rich people, were religious extremists by any definition,” he said.
Madrid added the sack of Constantinople to the list, and admitted that such atrocities did occur, but said they were rare. They also happened alongside Muslim atrocities like the slaughter of knights at the Horns of Hattin.
In fact, the Crusades were preached “because the Pope was alarmed” both by the Muslim violence against Christians, and by the fact that Muslim conquerors would “sell into slavery those who were able-bodied.”
Muslim regimes have long practiced slavery, said Madrid, and “still do in the Sudan.” Because Christians were being massacred, Madrid called the Crusades “offensive for defensive purposes.”
Professor Madden said it is instructive to imagine what the world would be like if the Crusades had never occurred. Though he warned that such thinking was “speculative,” Madden said he believes that “had there been no attempt to slow the spread of Islam, it seems logical that the world we live in would be radically different.”
Thanks to all the Crusaders’ efforts, Madden notes that “Europe very narrowly escaped invasion in the 16th century.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Pope's Call to Arms for Lawyers: Combat 'Divorce Mentality' DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Pope John Paul II's recent challenge to civil lawyers not to accept divorce cases was an invitation to help combat a “divorce mentality” in the culture and not a new teaching, said the canon lawyer who is president of The Catholic University of America.
Father David O'Connell said that, despite the brouhaha generated by the Pope's comments in some circles, especially the media, a careful reading of his annual talk to the Roman Rota, a Church marriage tribunal, reveals “some nuances” but otherwise no new instruction.
Much of the Holy Father's Jan. 28 talk centered on his concern with the “divorce mentality,” a mentality Father O'Connell said it is difficult not to be affected by in a nation where virtually one out of every two marriages ends in divorce.
“Statistics indicate that the rate is not significantly different for Catholic couples. That is the reality to which the Pope refers in his address, a mentality that takes exception to the indissolubility of marriage with steadily increasing ease.”
In his talk to the Rota, John Paul refers to the indissolubility of marriage as a truth “addressed to the men and women of every time and place” and as “a necessary condition for the existence of the family.”
“Its absence, therefore, has devastating consequences that spread through the social body like a plague … and that have a negative influence on the new generations who view as tarnished the beauty of true marriage,” he said.
In addressing professionals in the field of civil law near the end of the talk, Father O'Connell said, the Pope did reach beyond his audience of Church personnel, calling them to consider the indissolubility of marriage as an inherent natural human good as well as a sacrament for those who are Catholic. But, Father O'Connell said, “This is not a new idea or exhortation, although it is certainly a boldly worded challenge.”
The Holy Father's statement that lawyers “should always decline the use of their profession for an end that is contrary to justice” should be self-evident to anyone in the legal profession, Father O'Connell said. “That he includes ‘divorce’ as an example, no doubt, is unsettling not only to Catholic lawyers but also to all who have suffered its trauma in their lives. Our first responsibility, however, should always be to resolve a marital crisis, not to give in to it by immediately abandoning a marriage.”
Lawyers’ Experiences
Tom Weisenburger, a Catholic lawyer who has practiced for 40 years in Toledo, Ohio, said although he no longer handles divorce cases, he began accepting them some years ago in good conscience in the interest of providing a Catholic point of view to clients seeking divorces. He was concerned, he said, that other lawyers might be less likely to encourage couples to seek counseling and remind them of their obligations, especially to children.
Nonetheless, he eventually gave up divorce work because he found it less and less satisfying. “I like closure and divorce work is never finished,” he said.
But Charles Testa, a Catholic lawyer from Oregon, Ohio, who has been in practice 60 years, said he simply stopped taking divorce cases years ago because he became convinced it was the right thing to do. “It's a choice you have to make between the conscience and the practice,” he said, adding that his practice did not suffer substantially because of his decision.
“It could have been increased, but who cares about an increase, really? It has been a practice to keep me comfortable,” he added.
Despite his policy against taking divorce cases, Testa tells clients he is still willing to talk with them about their marital problems. “People come to me for advice and I have no hesitancy about giving it to them. And I never send them a bill,” he said.
He knows of at least four marriages he has saved, but suspects there may have been more that he hasn't heard about.
Weisenburger said he had some difficulty with the Pope's comments because of the provision that a Catholic in the United States cannot even seek a Church annulment without first obtaining a civil divorce.
“So how can the Church say you can't have a civil divorce if it is requiring people to have a civil divorce?”
Father Marvin Borger, a canon lawyer and judge on the marriage tribunal of the Toledo Catholic Diocese, said such rules are in place because a tribunal has to protect itself from civil litigation alleging it is breaking up a marriage.
Pope John Paul did not say that a Catholic lawyer could never accept a divorce case, noted Jane Adolphe, a professor of law at Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor, Mich. What he did say was that lawyers must look at the intent of the client.
If the intent is simply to dissolve the marriage, they should not take the case. But the Pope allows for divorce if it is sought for a “civil effect,” such as protecting children.
Said Adolphe, “It seems to me that you've got to go on a case-by-case basis and see if you are promoting the divorce mentality or not.”
The Pope's comments should not be construed as discouraging Catholic lawyers from practicing family law, Adolphe added. But lawyers who have built an entire practice around divorce, making their living from it, will have to look at what the Pope is saying: “They're in a difficult situation,” she said.
Father O'Connell said lack of understanding about the Church's marriage annulment process has contributed to the problems many people have had with the Pope's comments.
“There are so many myths and misconceptions about what it is and is not, as well as its effects, that people find the ideal at odds with the reality,” he said. “Another contributing factor is the great number of Catholics who avail themselves of this process, often in a very public way. It has become, in the minds of many, ‘Catholic divorce.’”
Summed up Father O'Connell, “The Pope's address to the Rota each year is designed as a caution to the Church's legal practitioners not to let it become that [Catholic divorce]. Indissolubility is not simply a legal burden; it is the human truth and divinely intended reality for spouses. And in the sacramental context, marriage brings with it the support of divine grace.”
Judy Roberts writes from Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: From Altar Boy to Capital Cardinal DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:As archbishop of the nation's capital he has entertained the president in his home, helped comfort the nation after terrorists attacked America and tended to the spiritual needs of the families of those killed.
On Feb. 21, he will have been a cardinal for one year. But he has been on the American — and international — Church scene for decades. Cardinal McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, D.C., spoke with Register staff writer John Burger from his office.
How did you decide to become a priest?
I was a member of the generation where every altar boy thought he had vocation. All of us at Incarnation Church in Manhattan thought that. On a Sunday morning, the priest sometimes asked, “How many of you boys are going to become priests?” and everybody raised his hand. That was our Catholic culture.
I was known by my classmates as a “late” vocation. I was already 21 when I went into the seminary, after two years of college.
I had some studies in Switzerland between high school and college. My best friend at Fordham Prep [in the Bronx] was from a Swiss family, and when he went back, they invited me to go with him to study there and live with them. They paid for my transportation overseas.
When I was turning 20, I made a retreat at a Carthusian monastery in Switzerland and had chance to think and hear the Lord say to me, “You ought to go study to be a priest.” It was at the Chartreuse of ValSainte. The quiet and the sense of totality were always appealing. These guys held back nothing for themselves. They gave everything for the Lord. They were hermits and lived just for the Lord. It was so challenging. I see that as a real entrance into holiness. I found it extraordinarily powerful and magnetic.
Did you want to be a monk?
I was very tempted. But the retreat director said, “You don't make a decision on just one retreat. Go back and get a good spiritual director.” And I did, and my spiritual director in New York said I'd be more suited serving people in an active ministry.
But I haven't accomplished the things I dreamed of doing — being a holy man or a man for others.
What has most influenced your work?
Every time you meet a holy person, every time you hear a confession, it has an influence on you. Every time you hear a great homily or are challenged to preach one, the Lord is present in your life. Every time you read the breviary and find more wonderful expressions of God's beauty.
I don't think there's a day I've lived that hasn't challenged me to be a good person. I haven't always done it. More than anything it's the experience of great priests who have formed my life. I think of the Servant of God Terence Cardinal Cooke, who was my friend in the seminary. Later I was his secretary. I was so impressed that he never got mad. He was so close to the Lord that nothing really troubled him. He was able to handle problems of the job and maintain an extraordinary equilibrium. I never heard him say a mean word about anyone. He couldn't say the same thing about me.
What has it been like being a cardinal?
You still do the same things you did as before. The basic job description is archbishop: You try to take care of your people and work with your priests. I still try to visit the parishes almost every day. I still spend too much time at my desk and get cranky with my secretary. I have the same faults as before.
To a certain extent you have greater influence. People believe you have more authority, and they listen. The media have been very good to me; they've invited me to come talk on so many occasions. Speaking through the media means I can reach so many more people than if I'm speaking in the Basilica of the National Shrine.
Have you had any interesting meetings with the Pope?
I had one great visit with the Pope last December when I was in Rome for some meetings. He was nice enough to invite me for supper. I figured there'd be a good crowd there, but when I arrived I found out I was the only one, aside from his secretaries.
I was distracted and let the sister who was serving the food fill my plate. Everyone else had only a salad.
The Pope asked me, “How is Washington?” I talked, and they ate, and soon everybody finished. I said, “Holy Father, I'm sorry I've done all the talking,” and he said, “No, eat, eat.” They very patiently waited until I finished.
He's always been extraordinarily kind to me. He sat there and waited, smiling, while I ate until I couldn't eat anymore and had to say to the sister, “Rescue me.”
I told them that it's a great gift being able serve here in Washington. It's a beautiful Church with great people.
As bishop of the nation's capital in what ways have you been able to promote Catholic values in the public square?
By speaking out, constantly trying to proclaim the Gospel, talking about things that are important with people in government, from the president on down, making sure they know the position of the Church. As a bishop here I'm always conscious of the fact that my voice should be another voice raised in communion with the bishops of the United States. But I try to use my personal contacts to get the word out.
The president came to dinner here in our house soon after he was inaugurated. We talked about the poor, the problems of life, human dignity. I'm always talking about what the Church is talking about.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Cardinal Theodore McCarrick ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----- TITLE: Scalia Defends Death Penalty DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Justice Antonin Scalia, a Catholic and one of the Supreme Court's most conservative members, said Feb. 4 that Catholic judges who oppose the death penalty should resign.
Speaking at Georgetown University, Scalia said he strongly disagrees with recent Church teachings against the death penalty and argued that the Church historically has supported capital punishment.
“No authority that I know of denies the 2,000-year-old tradition of the Church approving capital punishment,” he said. “I don't see why there's been a change.”
Scalia, a father of nine, including a priest, attended Georgetown as an undergraduate and later taught there as a visiting professor.
Asked to reconcile his Catholic faith with his support of the death penalty, Scalia said a Catholic judge with concerns about the death penalty should resign because he or she would not be upholding the laws judges must swear to protect.
“You couldn't function as a judge,” he said.
At a forum in Chicago on Jan. 25, Scalia said judges who refuse to enforce capital punishment are “ignoring duly enacted constitutional laws and sabotaging the death penalty.”
In recent years Pope John Paul II has spoken repeatedly against capital punishment, and the Church's magisterium has insisted that recourse to the death penalty should be only as a last resort when there are no other ways for society to defend itself.
In fact, the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” doesn't totally rule out recourse to the death penalty.
No. 2267 says: “Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”
The catechism continues: “Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself — the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically non-existent.’”
(From combined news services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Miramax Uses Lent to Make Sex Film ‘Cute’
THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE, Feb. 5 — The Catholic League is asking Disney chairman Michael Eisner and Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein to reschedule the opening of “40 Days and 40 Nights” until after Easter.
The Miramax film, which is scheduled to open March 1, the middle of Lent, is about a Catholic whose pledge to give up sex for Lent is tested by his ex-girlfriend.
“To show a film which parodies Lent in a most vulgar way is bad enough,” League president William Donohue wrote to Eisner and Weinstein. “But to show it during Lent is outrageous.”
The Miramax film is rated R for “strong sexual content, nudity and language” and is noted for its “vulgar sex gags,” according to a news release from the Catholic League. Disney is the parent company of Miramax.
Donohue said the film's publicist told the League that Lent is used in the film as a vehicle for the character to give up sex, to “make the story cute.”
Asked Donohue, “But wouldn't it have been just as cute to portray the character as a Muslim who gives up sex from sundown to sunset during Ramadan and is tempted during the day?”
Bush Team Makes Porn Purveyors Nervous
The $10-billion-a-year business grew significantly with the former administration's relaxed attitude, say pornographers Larry Flynt and Danni Ashe. And some former Justice Department officials say that corporate America felt it was safe to enter the trade. AT & T, Westin and Marriott profit from the business, PBS reported.
But that may change. Internet service provider Yahoo, for example, backed out of having a virtual sex shop after an anti-porn campaign waged by the American Family Association.
Baltimore Vocation Ad Runs During Playoffs
But there has been a lot of talk about the ads, and a lot of instances where it led people to talk up the priestly vocation with single young men.
The archdiocese, which ordained six priests last year and has 36 seminarians, figured the best place to reach young men in large numbers were the NFL playoffs when the hometown Ravens were still competing. The Catholic Communications Fund paid $17,500 for the 30-second ad.
Wisconsin Student Buried With Baby
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 4 — The pastor of a church where a young mother was buried with her newborn urged mourners to learn from the past, the news service reported. Father Al Jakubowski said at the funeral of Karen Marie Hubbard and her infant daughter, Julianna Marie, that prayer, support and compassion, not blame, are needed at such a time.
Hubbard, a 19-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin, died after giving birth in her dormitory in Eau Claire, Wisc. She and the baby were found in a bathroom stall. The baby died later from complications of being deprived of oxygen around the time of her birth.
No one knew Hubbard was pregnant.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Fetal Surgeries Provide Evidence of the Humanity of the Unborn DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. — A raised fist is often used as a symbol of anger or defiance. But in Samuel Armas’ case, his raised fist proclaimed to all the world that children in the womb are people too.
Two and a half years ago, a startling photograph of little Samuel's fist, poking out of his mother's womb on an operating table, made headlines around the world. At only 14 weeks gestation, a routine medical exam showed Samuel had a severe form of spina bifida, a condition in which the spine is exposed, possibly leading to brain damage and profound physical handicaps.
His parents, Julie and Alex, from Douglasville, Ga., agreed to have Samuel undergo an experimental operation — at an unprecedented 21 weeks, while he was still in the womb — to help correct the problem.
Today Samuel is a healthy young boy, with only minimal physical handicaps due to spina bifida. But Samuel's condition isn't the only positive outcome of the landmark surgery. His world-famous fist was seen by many as undeniable proof of the humanity of the unborn children.
And medicine continues to provide more evidence.
In fact, medical treatment for children in the womb is not new. The first “open fetal surgery” (such as Samuel's operation, in which the uterus is temporarily removed from the mother while the child is operated on) was performed at the University of California at San Francisco as far back as 1981.
Today, the main centers for fetal surgery in the United States are Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, and the University of California at San Francisco. But Dr. Lillian Blackmon, chairman of the Committee on the Fetus and Newborn of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that “to a fair degree” fetal surgery of any kind is still considered experimental.
Blackmon explained that there are five major categories of open fetal surgery currently being practiced. These procedures treat cystadenomatoid malformations of the lung, urinary tract obstructions, congenital diaphragmatic hernias, spina bifida, and sacrococcygeal teratomas (tumors on the tailbone). The last three procedures are among those still considered experimental.
Risks
Because fetal surgery often carries a high risk to both mother and child, some pro-lifers have questioned certain operations, in spite of the value of fetal surgery in the public debate over abortion. The operation to correct spina bifida, for example, is life-threatening, while spina bifida itself is not.
Julie and Alex Armas, who are pro-life, never considered aborting Samuel when told of his condition. They agreed to allow the operation to be photographed and to speak to the media in part because they felt Samuel's story would serve the pro-life cause.
But Julie told Focus on the Family Magazine, “We've been asked several times, ‘How can you say you wanted your child to live no matter what, then risk his life for this surgery?’”
Julie's response was simple: “How could it be an ethical dilemma for us to make his life better?”
This reflects a very delicate situation parents like the Armases find themselves in. Although there is no clear requirement for it, there appears to be no ethical principal that would forbid such high-risk surgery. It can even be considered praiseworthy, apart from the possible benefit to the child, inasmuch as it may advance medical science and help others in the future.
Dr. Edward Furton, director of public affairs of the Boston-based National Catholic Bioethics Center, said that while an operation like Samuel's “goes beyond what is morally obligatory,” there is no definitive Catholic position against high-risk procedures in such cases.
“Those who make use of [experimental procedures] are advancing the science of medicine on several fronts … not only the cure of spina bifida but also the whole area of intra-uterine surgery. I don't think Catholics should take any different moral stance on this than the rest of the community. We should be as much a part of looking for cures … as anyone else.”
While the wisdom of an individual operation may sometimes be subject to legitimate debate, there is little dispute about the impact fetal surgery has in countering pro-abortion arguments. Mo Woltering, assistant director of public policy of the American Life League, said that advances in fetal surgery make it harder to deny the truth about abortion.
Said Woltering, “Everything in science points to the human embryo, fetus, neonate — right from the beginning of conception, everything points to its being a human person…. [Fetal surgery] certainly helps reinforce the fact that we have a human subject living in the womb and that subject deserves every kind of protection as well as medical benefit available.”
Powerful Images
The moving photograph of Samuel's fist was used powerfully in the congressional debate over partial-birth abortion — a gruesome late-term procedure often carried out on children at about the age Samuel was at when he underwent surgery in utero.
Commenting on the picture, Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, told The New York Times last year that such dramatic evidence “does make our job harder, because the images are very powerful.”
David Curtin writes from Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Curtin ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Moscow Visit Said to Be Remote Preparation for Pope
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Feb. 1 — Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, will meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II Feb. 21-22 to try to heal the rift between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The French news agency reported Vatican sources saying that Cardinal Kasper could try to convince the patriarch to consent to the first papal visit to Russia.
According to Orthodox sources, Pope John Paul II met with a delegation sent by Alexei to the interfaith world day of prayer for peace in Assisi. The Pope reportedly declared his intention of bringing the icon of Our Lady of Kazan to Moscow. The Vatican declared a decade ago that it holds the icon, believed to date from the 16th century, which disappeared from Russia during the confusion of civil war and two world wars.
Pontifical University to Hold Slavery Forum
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 2 — The Pontifical Gregorian University will hold a conference on prostitution, child labor and other kinds of “21st century human slavery,” said James Nicholson, U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. The conference, a U.S. initiative, will be open to the participation of other nations that have diplomatic relations to the Holy See.
The forum will tackle the issues of women pressed into prostitution and of children into slave labor conditions. Many of those people are immigrants who fall into traps, Nicholson told the wire service.
Philippines Prepares to Hold Family Meeting
The Philippine Catholic Bishops Conference is charged with conducting an intensive formation campaign for the event, which will focus on the role of Christian families in evangelization. It has designated special festivals on March 19 for fathers, the second Sunday of May for mothers, Oct. 2 for children and all of December for families.
“Maybe it was because of our faith and the value that we give to our families that the Holy Father chose the Philippines to host” the meeting, said Msgr. Ding Coronel, secretary-general of the bishops conference.
Cardinal Martini Submits Retirement Letter
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Feb. 6 — Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan offered his resignation to the Pope as he prepared to turn 75, the normal age for retirement of bishops and priests.
The French news agency described Cardinal Martini wishfully as a “liberal long seen as the most likely successor to Pope John Paul II.”
It is up to the Pope whether to accept the resignation or ask that the cardinal continue to serve.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Vanier Speaks on the 'Handicapped' Pope for Lent DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — “He's never been more beautiful,” said Jean Vanier, founder of the international network of L'Arche (The Ark) communities in which volunteers live full-time with the mentally handicapped.
He was speaking of Pope John Paul II, 81 years old and stooped with age, shuffling along with his cane, unable to stand for long periods, and who on occasion now drools uncontrollably and slurs his speech.
“It is a blessing to have someone so fragile — he is an incredible sign for the world,” added Vanier. “He is teaching an incredible lesson in assuming his disability, his fragility and trusting in St. Paul's words: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
Vanier was in Rome to address a press conference releasing the papal message for Lent 2002, but his spontaneous remarks on his experience of living 37 years with the mentally handicapped eclipsed the event itself. There were no complaints though, as his witness was the most eloquent summary of the message possible.
“After such a beautiful testimony it is difficult to speak,” said Father Ciro Benedettini, vice-director of the Holy See Press Office, as an unusual silence settled over the normally talkative reporters.
The annual message for Lent took as its theme this year, “You have received without paying, give without pay.” It was presented by Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes, President of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum,” which coordinates the charitable initiatives of the Holy See.
The message focused on the obligation of Christians to give of themselves to others in the usual forms of charity, but stressed the need to appreciate life itself as a gift, and to welcome it always as a gift, even when weak or handicapped.
“It is also worth repeating here that not everything that is technically possible is morally acceptable,” said the document, taking up a pro-life theme. “Scientific work aimed at securing a quality of life more in keeping with human dignity is admirable, but it must never be forgotten that human life is a gift, and that it remains precious even when marked by suffering and limitations. It is a gift to be accepted and to be loved at all times, received without pay and to be placed without pay at the service of others.”
“There is a great mystery around people with disabilities,” said Vanier. “It is a scandal, and we cannot underestimate the pain. The most oppressed people in the world are those with disabilities — in France, 96% of women who find out that they are carrying a child with disabilities will opt for an abortion. The disabled are often made to feel guilty for existing.”
“It is scandalous, but it is the same scandal as the Cross,” continued Vanier. “Many handicapped children cry out: “My God, my God, why have I been abandoned?” It is the same cry from the Cross. This is the mystery — those who appear to be less human teach us to be human and those who are most rejected are those who heal us.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Longing for God's Holy Temple DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II said believers who are overwhelmed by evil and suffering in the world could look forward with joyful hope to God's ultimate victory.
Even when God seems distant, he never forgets those who trust in him in the midst of their trials, the Pope said Feb. 6 at his weekly general audience.
The believer “still finds himself in contact with evil and suffering, but he knows with certainty that the destination of life's pilgrimage is not the void of death, but rather a saving encounter with God,” he said.
The Pope focused on Psalm 43, a poetic prayer for deliverance and perseverance in the midst of suffering. He was continuing a series of reflections on the psalms used in the Liturgy of the Hours.
In a general audience a while ago, we spoke about the psalm that precedes the one we just heard and said that it was closely related to the psalm that followed it. Psalms 42 and 43 actually form a single song, divided in three parts by the same refrain: “Why are you downcast, my soul? Why do you groan within me? Wait for God, whom I shall praise again, my savior and my God” (Psalm 42:6,12; Psalm 43:5).
These words are like a soliloquy and express the psalmist's deepest feelings. He finds himself far from Zion — the reference point for his existence since it is that special place where God dwells and where the faithful worship him. He feels, therefore, a loneliness that stems from a lack of understanding and even aggressiveness coming from the faithless people around him, which is aggravated by his isolation and God's silence. However, the psalmist reacts against his sadness with an invitation to trust that he directs to himself and with a marvelous affirmation of hope: he is counting on being able again to praise God, “his savior.”
Instead of talking only to himself as in the preceding psalm, the psalmist turns to God in Psalm 43 and begs God to defend him against his adversaries. Repeating almost word for word a cry that is foreshadowed in the previous psalm (Psalm 42:10), the psalmist actually directs his cry of distress to God this time: “Why then do you spurn me? Why must I go about mourning, with the enemy oppressing me?” (Psalm 43:2).
Light in the Darkness
Nevertheless, he feels by now that the gloomy interval of his distant separation is about to end, and he expresses his certainty that he will return to Zion and find God's dwelling place once again. The Holy City is no longer his lost homeland as it was in his lament in the preceding psalm (see Psalm 42:3-4). Instead, it is the joyous goal toward which he is journeying. God's “fidelity” and “light” (see Psalm 43:3) will be the guide for his return to Zion. The Lord himself will be the ultimate goal of his journey. He calls upon God as his judge and defender (see verses 1-2). He uses three verbs as he begs God to intervene: “grant me justice,” “defend me” and “rescue me” (verse 1). They are like three stars of hope that light up in the dark sky of the time of trial, signaling the imminent dawn of salvation.
St. Ambrose's reading of the psalmist's experience is significant because he applies it to Jesus praying in Gethsemane: “I do not want you to be amazed at the prophet saying his soul was shaken, given that the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘Now my soul is troubled.’ For he who took upon himself our weaknesses, took our sensitivity too, and that is why he was sad to the point of death, but not because of death. A voluntary death, on which the happiness of all men depended, could not have caused sadness. So, he was sad to the point of death, as long as that grace had not been carried to its fulfillment. His own testimony proves it, when he says about his death: ‘There is a baptism with which I must be baptized: how anxious I am until it is accomplished!’” (Le rimostranze di Giobbe e di Davide, VII, 28, Rome 1980, p. 233).
The Lord's Guidance
Going back to Psalm 43, the solution the psalmist so ardently longs for is about to open before his eyes: his return to the source of life and of communion with God. “Fidelity” (the Lord's loving truth) and “light” (the revelation of his goodness) are portrayed as messengers that God himself will send down from heaven to take the faithful one by the hand and lead him toward the goal he desires (see Psalm 43:3).
The sequence of stages in the journey to Zion and its spiritual center is very meaningful. First to appear is “the holy mountain” (the hill where the Temple and the citadel of David stand). Then “the place of your dwelling” enters the picture (the sanctuary of Zion with all its different buildings and spaces). Then comes “the altar of God” (where the entire people's sacrifices and official worship take place). The ultimate and decisive goal is the God of joy and his embrace — a renewed intimacy with him who, at first, was distant and silent.
Joyous Festivity
At this point, everything becomes song, gladness and celebration (see verse 4). The original Hebrew text speaks of the “God who is the joy of my jubilation.” This is a Semitic form of speech used to express the superlative degree: the psalmist wishes to emphasize that the Lord is the source of all happiness, supreme joy and the fullness of peace.
The Greek Septuagint translation apparently adopted an equivalent Aramaic term that means youth and translated it as “the God who gives joy to my youth,” thus introducing the idea of the freshness and the intensity of the joy that the Lord gives. The Latin Vulgate translation of the Book of Psalms, which is a translation made from the Greek, says therefore, “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” The psalm used to be recited in this form at the foot of the altar, in the eucharistic liturgy formerly in use, as an invocation leading into the encounter with the Lord.
Persevering Hope
The initial lament of the refrain of Psalms 42 and 43 resounds for one last time at the end of the psalm (see Psalm 43:5). The psalmist has not yet reached God's Temple, and he is still undergoing the darkness of his trial. But by now the light of his future encounter is already shining in his eyes and his lips are already intoning the strains of a joyful song. At this point, his cry is mainly marked by hope. So commenting on this psalm, St. Augustine observes: “One whose soul troubles him will tell his soul to ‘hope in God.’ … Meanwhile live in hope. Hope that is seen is not hope; but if we hope for what we cannot see, it is through patience that we wait for it (see Romans 8:24-25)” (Esposizione sui Salmi I, Rome 1982, p. 1019).
Thus, the psalm becomes the prayer of someone who is a pilgrim on earth. He still finds himself in contact with evil and suffering, but he knows with certainty that the destination of life's pilgrimage is not the void of death, but rather a saving encounter with God. This certainty is even stronger for Christians, to whom the letter to the Hebrews proclaims: “You have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering, and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect, and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel” (Hebrews 12:22-24).
(Translation by Zenit and Register)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Holy Land's Father Vasko: 'A Crisis in the Cradle of Christianity' DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Father Peter Vasko is president of the Holy Land Foundation, which assists Christians in Israel and the Palestinian territories with housing, education and jobs. He spoke to Register staff writer John Burger while touring the United States Jan. 14 to Feb. 6. He also reported to bishops on the situation in the Holy Land.
How have recent world events impacted Christians in the Holy Land?
Father Vasko: Christians are a minority within a minority in the Holy Land. There are 3.9 million Muslims in Israel, including the occupied territories; there are 4.7 million Jews. And there are 165,000 Christians. There's been a steady decrease in the number of Christians in the Holy Land. A lot has to do with the birthrate. For Christians it's 2.2%; for Muslims,
4.8%, and for Jews 3%. The majority of young Christians are leaving, so it's likely the growth rate will become smaller. By 2020, the growth rate of Christians will be 0% if it continues like this. These figures are from a 1999 study, “Why the Christians are Leaving,” by Bernard Sabella, a leading sociologist at Bethlehem University
Why
In Israel, not including the occupied lands, they're leaving first of all because of the Islamization influence. Fringe groups, radical Muslims, are coming in. Secondly, there's an economic factor.
To encourage them to stay, we have a scholarship grant, and if someone wins one, he promises to stay in the Holy Land for four years. We then try to secure them employment.
But because of the second intifada, the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been closed off to many principal Israeli cities to keep terrorists from entering — although we've seen over the years that there are all sorts of ways to get in.
But what price do you extract to punish a nation because of a dozen or so criminals? They're stereotyping the average Palestinian who has to have a job to feed his kids and pay for their education. They've made things impossible.
We just finished a 13-unit housing facility in Beit Hanina. Couples will be paying a symbolic rent, living with other Christian couples — and not emigrating. We're very proud of that. Because we're such a minority, they feel safe with other Christians around them.
For the last four or five years, Christians have been asking, if there is a Palestinian state, will there be discrimination against them in jobs and housing because they're Christians?
Why is it important to stem the flow of Christians from the Holy Land?
If we don't have a sense of who we are as Christians, of our religious roots and heritage, how can we call ourselves followers of Christ? This is where Christianity began. Its founder was born here. Abraham was born in Iraq; Mohammed in Mecca. The Church is not an external facade but a living community. If we don't do something about this there will not be a living community, but a collection of empty monuments.
What is the Muslim attitude toward Christians in the Holy Land?
At this point, there is basically a good rapport. But for the last four or five years there's been an under-current of fundamentalism coming from Algeria, Sudan and Egypt, making the road bumpier. In Nazareth, there were no problems between Muslims and Christians. But at the end of 1997 members of the Islamic Movement came in and took over a plaza outside the Basilica of the Annunciation, which the municipality had designated as a public square for the many Jubilee Year pilgrims. There was to be an information center there and a dropping off point. The Muslims squatted, put up a huge tent and said, “We're not leaving.” The local police did nothing, and the Israeli government looked the other way.
Without impunity, the Muslims have been attacking the Christians going into the Basilica. In 1998, they burned Christian-owned shops, and the police simply looked on. Now they're building an illegal mosque in spite of a court injunction. Once again, law enforcement has looked the other way.
On Jan. 9, we, along with the International Coalition for Nazareth, protested, and construction came to a temporary halt. But it's not permanently stopped. If the mosque is built, it will be a permanent source of extreme tension between Christians and Muslims, Jews and Christians and, in the end Muslim and Jewish relations. This radical group doesn't represent moderate Muslims in Nazareth. Israel is very well aware of them, that their publications are anti-West and anti-Israeli. It will have a very detrimental effect on Christians’ trust in Israel, which promised to protect them and their places of worship.
The basilica is now under siege. Stones are thrown at worshipers as they go in. There will be further Christian emigration from even Israel proper if this mosque is allowed to be built there. The Islamic Movement leaders have said, “If the mosque is not built, the Christian leaders and Israel's leaders will pay the consequences.” A week later they indicated that there would be a bloodbath.
This is why this thing has to stop. If not, they will have created a vacuum of power that is considered very dangerous, with volatility against citizens and violence in a city that never before experienced violence.
We're not opposed to Islam, but we are opposed to violence and intimidation, to squatting on public property. Under [former Prime Minister Ehud] Barak they received government approval but had to wait for a building permit. We're asking [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon to take away that approval and go back to the original plan.
There are 11 mosques in Nazareth. Why do they need to build one under the Basilica of the Annunciation?
Saudi Arabia, King Faisal and Yasser Arafat are against it. president Bush and the Pope asked them not to build there. Faisal offered $10 million for them to build it anywhere else in Nazareth, and they said no. It's more than, “I want to build it here.” It's a statement that they are here to stay and people will be under the control of their understanding of what government is instead of a democracy.
How would you characterize Israel's response to the plight of Palestinian Christians?
There's a general indifference on the part of officials and a majority of the population. They don't identify you as a Christian or a Muslim but as a Palestinian. And as a Palestinian you are the enemy. There's an advantage for the Israeli government to keep Christians here — it's the connecting link they have with the rest of Christianity, and Christianity exists mainly in the Western world. Israel is the cradle of Christianity. The Jews are our elder brothers; they have to take care of their younger brothers — but there's no great interest to do so.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:British Clergy Getting Self-Defense Lessons
THE PRESS ASSOCIATION, Jan. 22 — Responding to an increased threat of violence against members of the clergy, an advocacy group has begun offering self-defense classes to priests, vicars and rabbis, the national news agency of Great Britain reported.
Tae kwon do lessons were being organized by the Amicus union for skilled and professional people.
The union reported last year that Church workers were more vulnerable to physical attacks than doctors or probation officers. The research showed that one in eight had been assaulted in the previous two years.
Australian Archbishop Laments Abortion of Handicapped
Archbishop Hart complained that the law in Victoria, which prohibits abortion unless a doctor believes it is necessary to protect a woman from serious danger to her life or mental health, seemed to permit ever-widening boundaries for abortion, the Melbourne daily said.
A spokesman for coroner Jacinta Heffey said the aborted baby, at 32 weeks gestation, was stillborn and that the coroner's court only has jurisdiction over reportable deaths. Since there was no birth, there was no death, the spokesman said. Archbishop Hart called that a “serious misjudgment.”
Said the archbishop, “If it is true that our laws do not protect children in such cases — indeed do not even allow a full coronial inquest — there is something seriously wrong with our laws.”
Messianic Groups Reaching Out to Russian Israelis
The Bible had been given to a student by Jewish Christians who believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
The Post reported that there are an estimated 1,500 adult, Russian-speaking immigrants who belong to messianic congregations. The number of messianic groups in the country has more than tripled in the decade since mass Soviet Jewish immigration began, it said.
A Conservative rabbi who leads a Russian-speaking congregation said that one of the key factors attracting Russian immigrants to messianic groups is the social distance between them and native Israelis.
The U.S. State Department reports that evangelical Christian and other religious groups have complained that police in Israel are slow to investigate incidents of alleged harassment, threats and vandalism committed by an anti-missionary organization.
Ban Abortion, Cardinal Tells South African Government
SOUTH AFRICA PRESS ASSOCIATION, Feb. 5 — Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban, South Africa, said the government should suspend abortions as a gesture of its seriousness in calling for a moral renewal in society, according to the South African news agency.
Cardinal Napier made the appeal in the Church newspaper Southern Cross. Commenting on President Thabo Mbeki's request to religious leaders to help address the nation's “moral decline,” especially in terms of violence, crime and corruption, the cardinal said suspending abortions would demonstrate the government's seriousness about the value of life.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Scalia's Dissenting Opinion DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Justice Antonin Scalia deserves admiration for his pro-life convictions and much of his Supreme Court work. He should stick to being a jurist. As a theologian, he isn't as successful. Scalia spoke twice recently about his support for the death penalty — once at the University of Chicago Divinity School and once at Georgetown University.
Unfortunately, his remarks will do more harm than good. He said that, since the Pope's teaching on capital punishment in Evangelium Vitae did not come ex cathedra, i.e., with formal infallibility, he is not obligated as a Catholic to accept it, only to give it “serious consideration.”
He has a point. There is legitimate space for scholarly dissent on some matters of doctrine. And one can hardly fault Scalia for voicing his dissent in Chicago, in an academic forum that was set up specifically for scholars to debate such things.
But Justice Scalia must realize that the kind of public dissent he voiced at Georgetown — in answer to a student's question after Scalia's personal testimony for Jesuit Heritage Week — wasn't an example of appropriate dissent.
It was an example of a powerful man persuading a crowd of people that the Church is wrong — and obscuring the obligations of Catholics in the process.
Scalia's comments had several things in common with the words of the Massachusetts lab scientist who recently created the first clone. The scientist also claimed a deep Catholic faith; he was also dealing with a teaching that wasn't defined ex cathedra (there is, of course, much more to the magisterium than the two dogmas that have been given that special treatment) and he also selectively quoted St. Paul.
And, like the clone-maker, Scalia was wrong.
“I have given [Evangelium Vitae] careful and thoughtful consideration and rejected it,” Scalia said. “I do not find the death penalty immoral.”
Neither does the Church. The 1995 encyclical — The Gospel of Life — spells out in great detail what makes the death penalty just. If instead of supporting the death penalty Scalia had wanted to ban it altogether, he would have had just as much trouble assenting to Evangelium Vitae as he does now.
But, in the encyclical, the Pope isn't interested in the death penalty as a merely abstract concept. He's concerned with what Catholics should do to help reverse today's culture of death, and how best we should love our neighbors as ourselves. And so he teaches that the cases where the death penalty must be used are extremely rare, practically nonexistent.
That's why scholars like Thomist Steve Long (who set out to write a critique of the Pope's position but ended up adopting it), theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles (who points out that the Church's teaching hasn't been reversed, but merely applied to new circumstances) and Law Professor Charles Rice (who calls the teaching on capital punishment “conservatives’ Humanae Vitae“ because it is difficult for them to accept) are supportive of the Holy Father's teaching. It's a teaching, after all, that has been incorporated into the catechism and so deserves more than “serious consideration.”
Scalia rightly points out that Church teaching has consistently held that the state has the right to execute criminals. That teaching has been voiced by popes, saints and doctors of the Church around the world. But how does that teaching apply in a situation like the one we face in today's West?
Today's judicial community (as Scalia has noted) acts as though it has jurisdiction over the right to life — as though the state can simply give people “permission” to abort children or to commit various types of euthanasia.
This is completely contrary to the view of legal authority and just penalty that the Fathers and Doctors of the Church had.
If a state denies a transcendent moral order and denies that its authority over life is delegated from God, how can it justly apply the penalty? Would St. Thomas Aquinas look at the Supreme Court Scalia sits on and blithely hand it more power over life? Not likely.
Aquinas said, “It is permissible to kill a criminal if this is necessary for the welfare of the whole community.” He would probably agree with the catechism's teaching that when non-lethal means better serve the common good, then that's what judges should use.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Simply Mad at the Mouse
Regarding “Disney at 100: Not Quite So Wonderful” (Jan. 27-Feb. 2):
Sometimes, when the Mickey Mouse Movie Company tries to do the right thing, they still mess it up.
I teach Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo to my freshman English class and was eagerly awaiting the movie. I was thoroughly disappointed to hear the tale as told by Disney from many of my students who saw it on the opening weekend.
I admit to having a purist streak when it comes to making movies of novels, but, in this case, Disney took out the most meaningful, and the most Christian, aspect of the novel. In the book, the count becomes distraught when his quest for vengeance unexpectedly results in the death of the child Edouard. He realizes that he has gone too far and, in response, he allows his third (for in the book there are many villains) enemy to live.
In news reports about this movie, Disney spokespersons said they had eliminated much of the violence contained in the book. The lead actor, Catholic James Caviezel, said his primary problem with the movie was that the remaining violence still seemed rather gratuitous. If Disney had stayed more true to the story, it would have been able to depict a clear example of repentance.
It is Dantes’ quest for revenge that often appeals to ninth-grade readers, but it is his recognition of the evil he has done and his repentance that lead me to teach it each year. Disney chose to skip that part.
CHRIS MOSMEYER Temple, Texas
The writer teaches at Holy Trinity Catholic High School.
Wicca Watch
Regarding “Catholic College Hires Pagan Witch,” Inbrief, Feb. 3-9:
That witch hired to lecture at the Jesuits’ Heythrop College of the University of London isn't just any old pagan witch. Vivianne Crowley is a long-time leader of British Wicca. She is reported to be a woman of considerable charm, and a highly gifted speaker and writer.
Among the things she'll probably tell her audiences is her theory that Wicca, like many other religions, is a “homeward journey” to reunite with the ultimate source of spirit. Her lectures are almost certain to leave a more positive and creditable view of paganism with her hearers.
So what did the Jesuits think they were doing when they invited her to speak?
But, after all, she did once perform a pagan ritual in public at Canterbury Cathedral.
SANDRA MIESEL Indianapolis
A Tolkien Purist Speaks
Thank you for printing John Prizer's review of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (“Frodo Lives!,” Jan. 6-12).
I enjoyed the review and agree with a lot of it, but I would change the article's subhead to say the movie “does Tolkien almost right.” The Middle-Earth of the movie is a more pessimistic one than the book's For that reason, I would urge anyone who sees the movie to also read the book, or at least volume one, before drawing final conclusions about Tolkien's world.
I enjoyed the movie more than I expected to. The film makes some improvements in order to convey the story to a modern audience, but still shows the disappointing limitations of translating into a movie any book that deals with an interior struggle.
The book is brightened by the gentle, yet strong characters of the leprechaunish Tom Bombadil and his wood-nymph wife Goldberry. The ring has no power over them. Because there's no poetry in the movie (one of my favorite aspects of the book), we can't hear Sam sing the “Song of Gil-galad.” The bad guys in the book are less exteriorly repulsive and more inwardly corrupt: Orcs are not superhuman monsters. They are corrupt gnomes. The Black Riders don't need to be the movie's sword-wielding fencers. They scare people by the very evil that's in their hearts, even before they are seen physically. And where is Glorfindel, the elf lord whose horse can easily outdistance the Black Rider's and at whose glorious manifestation of his true nature they flee into the river in terror? Actually, the larger role played by Arwen is a nice touch. The book is a bit too masculine.
Prizer is right to highlight the shocking, momentary transformation of Bilbo into a vampire-like creature when, in Rivendell, he sees the ring again. I have a different take on this from the review. This is the only place that I felt that the movie betrayed the book. If you read this passage, you'll see that Bilbo does not physically, literally transform. Instead, Frodo momentarily sees Bilbo as a covetous, orc-like creature. The director could have handled this better without sacrificing any excitement.
The flight choreography could have been improved by slowing it down a bit. Jackson's slashing cuts with the angle of the camera are more deadly than the swordplay they depict.
There were ways that the movie improved on the book for a contemporary audience. Arwen adds some feminine balance. The hobbit characters are particularly well-cast. Seeing hobbits played by humans made me identify more with them than with the outwardly homely creatures described in the book, as did the more accessible Gandalf and Aragorn. The heavier emphasis on Aragorn's kindly nature gave the movie a more contemporary political tone. It would be nice to have leaders who don't pursue office for its own sake, but to serve.
MARK OSBORNE Montgomery Village, Maryland
Crisis in New York
Regarding “New York Targets Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers” (Jan. 20-26):
New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, with the endorsement of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), are initiating convoluted legal allegations to eliminate all pro-life crisis-pregnancy centers. These esteemed personages allege that such centers are engaging is misleading advertising, and the unlicensed practice of medicine. It should be noted that they turn a blind (politicized) eye to the sordid lucrative abortion industry.
Nationwide, on a daily basis, 4,000 innocent unborn children are aborted. Our taxes end up in the deep pockets of abortionists. This is compounded by the fact that better specimens of aborted babies are “recycled” and their body parts sold for profit. All other aborted babies are unceremoniously thrown in dumpsters or shredded in garbage disposals. Compare this daily loss of life to the Twin Towers disaster.
Last year, in California, Planned Parenthood alleged that a major abortion-clinic chain was guilty of “unethical business practices.” In reality it was a turf fight by (human?) vultures fighting over the profitable bodies of aborted unborn children.
Thank God that, in New York, the American Catholic Lawyers Association, the American Center for Law and Justice and the American Family Center for Law and Justice, along with others, will defend all pro-life crisis-pregnancy centers. They will defend and reiterate the fact that all human life is a gift from God.
STEPHEN J. CONWAY Banning, California
Three Wise Readers
I thoroughly enjoyed Tim Drake's wonderful article on G.K. Chesterton, Frank Capra and Charles Dickens (“Our Three Wise Men,” Dec. 23-29) in the Register. He is such a fine writer.
Our family have become old movie buffs since we turned off the TV years ago and decided we'd rent or buy the oldies that had a story to tell without the sex, profanity, vulgarity and violence. Frank Capra films are always our favorites and now we know why after reading “Our Three Wise Men.” Oh that more families would turn to these oldies — they are so much more entertaining, and often leave viewers with a good moral lesson for life.
MARY ANN KUHARSKI Minneapolis
I apologize for the tardiness of this compliment on your fine article (“Our Three Wise Men”) in the Dec 23-29 Register. I receive the Register from a friend who is kind enough to let me enjoy a very well thought-out Catholic newspaper. This article kept to the point and brought out its meaning clearly and precisely. Not having heard or read anything by Frank Capra, I feel I have missed something in not having viewed his films, or if I have, not knowing the credit belonged to a man of humble and conscientious fidelity to the two great commandments.
In bringing the article to an end, I thought of Chesterton, when he said “It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.” Then I remembered the “Yes” that would bring man back, and forever open the way for him to return, from whence he came, through the new Eve, Mary's freely said Yes to God.
I hope I get the opportunity to enjoy more of Drake's writings.
THOMAS JORDAN Seekonk, Massachusetts
To paraphrase Frank Capra, “It's a wonderful article.” We loved it.
LOUISE AND GUIDO PINAMONTI
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Jim Caviezel's a Class Act DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:While you are undoubtedly flooded with letters commending the interview with actor James Caviezel (“This Star Wants Heaven,” Inperson, Feb. 3-9), I'll add my gratitude for his public witness. I particularly appreciated Mr. Caveziel's insight as to “indifference” being a most challenging sin for us as Catholics today.
Not only has indifference affected some of us laity, but it has also threatened to suffocate many religious orders, and some Catholic publishing concerns, too. Thankfully, the Register, an inspiring, truthful, and non-indifferent publication, is fulfilling Jesus's statement: “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!” (Luke 12:49).
Mr. Caviezel's personal emphasis on prayer as the antidote to the sin of indifference, as well as for the deepening of the soul's love for, and eventual union with, God, is a treasure to be not only stored but put to immediate practice. We can begin by praying for Jim Caviezel and so many others (including the Register) who bring Christ's fire to the earth in word and action, as there are those whose lukewarm, watery lives attempt to douse Christ and his Church at every opportunity.
Count me with you, in just adoring God and in gratitude for fervent followers.
JOAN MCCLURE Huntington, Indiana
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: U.S., Strengthen Your Friends To the South DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:During the 1980s, left-wing organizations in Central America frequently referred to El Salvador as “another Vietnam.”
This was part of their ploy to deter the United States, which sought to prevent the Marxist guerrillas of the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (FMLN) from taking control of the government.
We all know what happened next. El Salvador never came close to becoming “another Vietnam.” Instead, thanks to U.S. intervention, the FMLN failed in its attempt to take power and a peace agreement was signed. All that — and the fall of the Soviet Union, too.
In a very similar way, there are not serious chances of Nicaragua becoming “another Afghanistan,” the contrary claims by some notwithstanding. This small Central American nation will never become the harbor of anti-United States terrorists.
Unlike Afghans, most Nicaraguans — indeed, Latin Americans in general — like Americans. When expressing their solidarity with the United States after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Latin Americans were unambiguous in their support as well as in their condemnation of terrorism. Unlike some countries which the United States considers “strong allies,” there was no emphasis on ideas such us “understanding the root causes behind the bombing” or on any other kind of “counterbalance” to an adamant condemnation of the attempts.
Unfortunately, since the countries of greater Latin America do not count for much economically and militarily, the United States in general cares very little if these countries are supportive or not to its policies. The call of the poor cousin is never as urgent as the call of the rich neighbor.
This approach lacks vision.
When Pope John Paul II called for a Synod of the Americas in 1997, he was making a very specific choice, one with geopolitical consequences as well as religious ones. The Holy Father saw that the United States and Canada had more in common with Latin America than with other Western countries. That is why he did not call for a synod of western nations or one of highly developed countries.
Despite the obvious differences, as the secretary for the General Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Jan Schotte, said: “Latin America and North America share a common Christian identity and both share a vibrant concern for keeping that identity … and make it evident not only in private life but in the public square.”
To the Bush administration, led by a man who lives Christian values to the best of his understanding, Nicaragua, for example, represents a good opportunity. The Bush administration could show its concern in building not only a political or military alliance, but a moral friendship as well among nations willing to defend freedom of religion, the right to life from the moment of conception to its natural end and the monogamous married family as the key cell of society.
Nicaraguan President-elect Enrique Bolaños is a strong pro-lifer, and he has shown his willingness to fight for life at international forums. At the United Nations, for example, he has faced down those who would bring contraception and abortion to Nicaragua. Unfortunately, Nicaragua is a debt-ridden country and its weak economy makes it vulnerable to the kind of economic pressure Northern European countries and the United Nations use to enforce birth control and anti-life policies.
In this scenario, an international policy consistent with Christian principles should lead the United States to invest in a “moral coalition,” by helping Nicaragua to be capable of standing firm to its principles. In the case of Nicaragua, it would be a fairly inexpensive investment.
In fact, Nicaragua's international debt is currently around $6 billion, less what the United States plans to invest in the recovery of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, this amount is completely unreachable for Nicaragua, since it is equivalent to 10 years of its trade surplus.
The idea is not to have the United States paying the bill of corruption or ill administration in Central American countries. It is, instead, to launch a morally inspired version of the Marshall Plan, which brought prosperity and strength to Western Europe in the wake of World War II's devastation.
Why did the United States invest in the Marshall Plan? Because a strong Western Europe had a practical, measurable value for America. By comparison, investing in more than regular food-aid in Latin America seems not to have a “practical” value, or a short-term benefit, for the U.S. foreign policy.
The United States, especially under the new administration, cannot make the mistake of asking how much military or economic might Nicaragua has — or Honduras, or El Salvador — as it evaluates ways to strengthen the hemisphere and keep it safe for freedom and democracy.
This time, the United States would pay a much smaller price than it did after its victory in the Second World War. And it would send a clear and inspiring message to the world: Our only superpower is willing to pay what it costs, and do what it must, to bring Christian values and virtues to the public square.
Alejandro Bermudez, the Register's chief Latin America correspondent, writes from Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Lent Has Always Been Counter-Cultural DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Christian, recognize your dignity and, now that you share in God's own nature, do not return to your former base condition by sinning. Remember who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Never forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of the Kingdom of God.”
These magnificent words of Pope St. Leo the Great begin the third part of the “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” “Life in Christ,” where we Christians are taught how to become good. They are, accordingly, magnificent words with which to begin Lent, reminding us not only that we have been snatched from the jaws of death and darkness, but also that our Lenten goal is to rise to the light of Easter.
Nearly two millenniums ago, the first great catechetical manual, the Didache, warned the earliest converts from paganism: “There are two ways, the one of life, the other of death; but between the two, there is a great difference.” Today, living amid a culture of death, Christians find themselves having to make that same stark choice. For, between the culture of death and the culture of life, there is a very great difference.
In order to understand that difference more clearly, we return to the pagan world in which Christianity arose, the moral world of the Roman Empire, of Emperors Augustus Caesar and Tiberius. In doing so, we will see something both startling and quite illuminating for our own moral situation.
When we visit this pagan world, and examine its characteristic views of the moral life — as it was actually lived, not as it existed in the books of a few moral-ists — we find that it looks all too familiar. The pagan way of life, which the Didache called “the way of death,” seems suspiciously like our contemporary culture of death. Different time, much the same battle.
Where Are the Children?
If we look at sexuality, for example, we find that, for the Romans, erotic pleasure was the defining goal. Given pleasure as the goal, obviously sex was not confined to marriage; marriage was simply one more place where sex occurred.
As a result, other avenues of sexual pleasure were freely explored and gradually became part of the ordinary social fabric. Married men had concubines and visited prostitutes; men courted young boys; masters had their way with slaves. The socially defining restriction was not set in terms of male and female, but active and passive, superior and inferior. It was good to be a social superior in a sexual relationship — a man rather than a woman; a man rather than a boy; a master rather than a slave — and bad to be the passive inferior. Given this view of sexuality, it is not difficult to see the results in regard to marriage, contraception, abortion and infanticide.
Marriage, for Romans, was merely the locus of bearing legitimate children.
Concubines were therefore quite common. Having children by one's concubine was not frowned upon. Such children simply lacked any claim to the rights and estates of the familial household. Thus, marriage entailed no sexual exclusiveness except on the part of the woman (and the higher the woman in social ranking, the more inclined she was to act with the same sexual freedom as her husband).
Defining sexuality in terms of pleasure had another important effect. When we look back over the records of the Roman Empire at the number of children born to the upper classes, we invariably find that most had only one or two, and many none. Indeed, the situation became so bad that the emperors themselves felt called to urge the aristocracy to bear more children. The cause of such small families? The prevalence of contraception, abortion and infanticide.
Having been snatched from the jaws of death and darkness, our Lenten goal is to rise to the light of Easter.
At the other end of human life, we find that euthanasia was also a part of Roman culture. For the Romans, it was not a question of whether euthanasia, or suicide, was bad or good, but of the reason one committed suicide. To end one's life rather than submit to an enemy or a tyrannical emperor was honorable. Avoiding unbearable pain or the ravages of old age, while less heroic, were also legitimate reasons to take one's life. But killing oneself to avoid mild humiliation or debt, or killing oneself impulsively, were considered shameful.
Enough has been said about the moral views of the Romans for us to see this obvious point. In regard to sexuality, marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, we are not altogether in a foreign land when we visit ancient Rome — the Rome into which Christ and Christianity were born. It was converts from this pagan way of life which St. Paul reminded, “once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8).
We live in a culture today that seems to have been, for whatever historical reasons, re-paganized. Of course, western culture could not have been re-paganized if it had not been first Christianized. Such is the history of the first 1,000 years of the Church as it spread over Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa. During this time as well, for Christians, becoming good meant shedding pagan ways, the ways of death — and accepting Christian ways, the ways of life. Essential to this conversion was the embrace of the Christian view of sexuality and marriage, and the rejection of contraception, abortion, infanticide and suicide.
As Christianity's hold on society became more firm, the views of sexuality and marriage — and the prohibitions against contraception, abortion, infanticide and suicide, which existed in the Church's penance manuals and canon law in the first 1,000 years of the Church's history — found their way into civil law during the second millennium. The historical lesson should be clear. Such civil laws against sodomy, divorce, contraception, abortion, infanticide and suicide in the West exist only because of this long period of Christianization. (Perhaps it is better to say “existed,” since almost all of them have already been struck down.)
That such laws have been removed is the surest sign that, to a great extent, the West has already been re-paganized, a process that began all the way back in the Renaissance. The Christians who now remain are, by a strange historical irony, in nearly the same situation as the first Christians, facing a culture defined, in large part, by a revived paganism treading the way of darkness and death.
To say the least, such an analysis should add a sense of urgency to every Christian's quest to become good. Christianity has lost its hold on the minds and hearts of much of Europe and America, and been displaced by the very alien way of life into which it had originally been born, and from which it sought to rescue its converts. We have come full circle: from dark, to light, to dark again.
Old Light, New Darkness
If we really understood how dark our times are, we would most likely be paralyzed. And then, not just for this Lent, but for once and for all. But for Christians of any time, all the way back to those first converts, despair is a sin. Hope, its contrary, is the virtue we must embrace when faced with such darkness.
The most hopeful words for us now are those trumpeted by Pope John Paul II: “Be not afraid!” By this, the Pope does not mean that there is nothing to fear, or that the culture of death will slip away of its own accord, but that we must have the same courage as the first Christians.
The first Christians had the courage, by grace, to seek goodness as defined by Jesus Christ himself. “It is in Christ, Redeemer and Savior,” the catechism tells us, “that the divine image, disfigured in man by the first sin, has been restored to its original beauty and ennobled by the grace of God” (No. 1701).
Such is the goodness that we, as Christians, properly seek. Such is the goodness that shall lift us from the culture of death. And such is the goodness after which we should strive this Lent, so that we may approach Easter “rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of the Kingdom of God.”
Benjamin Wiker teaches philosophy of science at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Culture of Death Stands No Chance Against 'Feminine Genius' DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Mary Cannon could have taken on any number of stimulating challenges in the heady political world of “inside-the-beltway” Washington, D.C.
In years past, Cannon served as a top political advisor to former congressman and presidential candidate Jack Kemp, then as a high-ranking political appointee in the elder George Bush's administration, then as a corporate executive. She's got a husband, two children and a résumé to envy. Venturing into the working world again with remarkable political expertise and credentials, as well as corporate experience, opportunities for wealth and position were wide open for her.
Such opportunities for place and prestige might appear irresistible from a worldly perspective. But a different perspective motivates Cannon. She wants to do what most needs doing.
Last year, she resolved to take on an immediate, almost hidden and yet eminently menacing threat to the culture.
So it was that she accepted the decidedly unlucrative challenge of serving as director of the Bioethics Project.
Cannon and many women like her, while they may not get the media attention they deserve, are stepping up to the plate. They are sharing the responsibility with their male counterparts, diagnosing threats to human dignity and entering into public life to address problems strategically.
Cannon noticed that there were many organizations doing good things to defend the human person against threats to human dignity. But, because of the extreme and insidious nature of biotechnology's threat to human life, Cannon sees this issue as a top, single-focus priority. She sees that there is a need for one group, focused solely upon informing public opinion and building a diverse coalition of citizens opposed to the specific threats cloning and stem cell research pose. Cannon became an organizational entrepreneur in order to accomplish just that.
She and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol teamed up and gathered a group of national leaders to found the Bioethics Project.
The group of intellectual and political heavyweights includes former education secretary William Bennett, Robert George of Princeton, Leon Kass of the University of Chicago, Kate O'Beirne of National Review, Adam Wolfson of The Public Interest, Gilbert Meilaender of Valparaiso University and Wesley Smith, author of Culture of Death. (Dr. Kass has since left the board of the Bioethics Project to serve as chairman of President Bush's advisory council on bioethics.)
It's a formidable team of high achievers, all united behind the idea that science should serve humanity rather than the converse.
The group secured seed money from a grant-making foundation and is now focusing its efforts upon the issue of human cloning. They're pushing hard to get media outlets to cover the story fairly. They are successfully building a broad base of liberal, conservative and diverse religious groups who disagree on many issues while agreeing that “we must draw a bright line between a better human world and a new inhuman one,” as Cannon puts it.
This past July, Cannon, Kristol and other Bioethics Project leaders and allies were instrumental in influencing public opinion to the extent that the U.S. House of Representatives passed an outright ban on human cloning. Prospects for success in the Senate, where the bill is due to be considered early this year, are less certain.
But Cannon understands pressure politics. She has strong words for the biotech industry: “They entice people with promises of miracle cures and confuse them by redefining terms — for example, they no longer use the word cloning; instead they call it ‘nuclear transplantation.’
They want the American people to conclude that these issues are so complex and technical that they are better left to the scientific ‘experts.’ But the truth is that this debate isn't really about science at all; it's about what it means to be a human being, created in the image and likeness of God.”
Such “global thinking” assumes the complementary talents of men and women. Thus is Cannon an example of the feminine genius at work. Participating in the “mystery” to which the Holy Father alludes, she is bringing her unique talents to bear against a serious threat to human life.
I know Cannon personally, and can bear witness to the fact that her impressive political credentials and management expertise are matched by her sincere modesty. This unique combination makes her a standout among successful Washington women. But, more importantly, it is humility — the ability to know one's place in relation to God — that allows the feminine genius to thrive.
Mary could have chosen the road most traveled. Yet she, like so many unsung women in our time, has turned her “feminine genius” to combating the culture of death.
As a woman of faith engaged in politics, Cannon shows the possibility of following Pope John Paul II's clear call to women to bring what he calls the “feminine genius” to bear on cultural ills. Speaking to women preparing for a 1995 conference on women in Beijing, he said: “Politics … geared as it is to promoting the common good, can only benefit from the complementary gifts of men and women.”
Such contributions from women are “proving particularly significant, especially with regard to the aspects of politics that concern the basic areas of human life,” the Holy Father continued. Since the beginning of his pontificate, he has explained how cultural activity calls into question the human person as a whole, in the two-fold complementary sensitivity of man and woman. Offering Mary, the Mother of God, as the ultimate example, he praises woman's ability to see the whole person with wisdom and sensitivity.
The lesson: The culture of death can best be countered by a team that includes both men and women, each responding to their unique calling.
The culture of death should be scared. It should be very scared.
Marjorie Dannenfelser writes from Arlington, Virginia.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Marjorie Donnenfelser ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Positively Polish, Faithfully Franciscan DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:New England may be known for its Irish and Italian character — but its three basilicas (all in Massachusetts) aren't
Two have strong Polish roots. One of them is the Basilica of St. Stanislaus.
It was with that equation in mind that I headed off for Chicopee, a small city next door to Springfield, for “St. Stan's”
I soon learned that Chicopee had attracted many Polish immigrants who came to work in the area's booming mills in the late 1800s. (Neighboring Holyoke was the first planned industrial center in the country.) They founded St. Stanislaus parish in 1891 to help keep alive their spiritual and ethnic identity, naming it after their cherished saint, the principal patron of Krakow and the symbol of Polish unity.
By 1908, this grand brownstone edifice became the focal point in a residential neighborhood located a short walk from Chicopee's downtown. Driving within sight of the Baroque Revival structure, with its soaring twin towers, I marveled to think how much the immigrants must have sacrificed to build such an impressive church. It turns out the structure was designed and built by the Franciscans of the Order of Friars Minor after the local bishop invited them to administer the parish.
Powerfully Polish
The friars remain a strong presence here to this day. When Pope John Paul II raised the church to a basilica on July 7, 1991, St. Stanislaus became one of 19 basilicas staffed by the Conventual Friars throughout the world. Two orders of nuns — the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Assisi and the Franciscan Sisters of St. Joseph — are also very active in a variety of parish duties, especially in the parish's large school.
In the basilica's vestibule, a life-sized crucifix gave me cause to pause before I entered the nave. But three sets of glass doors, etched with symbols of the sacraments, through which unfolded an enticing “preview” of the wonderful interior, bid me enter.
Completely renovated in the last decade, this majestic sanctuary is an inspiring place to pray and worship, as the 3,000 families registered here know quite well. Yet all the splendid liturgical art must lead to something beyond admiration alone. And so it does here.
Overall, the interior struck me as unmistakably Polish, distinctly Franciscan and powerfully reverential.
A beautiful San Damiano crucifix is centered on the reredos, above which is a riveting icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Queen of Poland. The Polish revere Mary in this TITLE as a central part of their spirituality.
The basilica's rector, Franciscan Father Michael Kolodziej, explained to me that the icon was painted in Czestochowa, touched to the original, and blessed in Rome by Pope John Paul II. The Black Madonna, as the icon is also called, wears a crown made from donated jewels. The crown was placed by Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, the current archbishop of Krakow and direct successor to St. Stanislaus. Bishop Joseph Francis Maguire, Spring-field's bishop at the time, was present for the crowning.
From above the icon on this restored original altar and reredos, which shines with a marbleized finish replicating the real Sienna marble found elsewhere in the church, the statue of St. Stanislaus, the basilica's patron, looks over the congregation. It was hand-carved in Italy, as were all the statues in this upper basilica, including Sts. Peter and Paul on the main altar, the Sacred Heart above the tabernacle of reservation and the Virgin Mary with the Child Jesus.
Marian Might
So many rich helps to contemplation, so little time! The magnificent Stations of the Cross pulled me like a magnet to walk with Jesus to Calvary. Each sculpted station is detailed in very high relief and painted in the same way; the figures are about one-third life-size. Like all the basilica's statues, windows and paintings, the figures of the stations are very Franciscan in that they depict a very earthy, human Christ.
Two added stations surprised me. The one in front of the 14 usual stations depicts the Last Supper. The one after the regular 14 portrays the Presentation of Mary in the Temple. Time has erased the reason for adding them. I speculated their position on the walls close to the sanctuary might be the key. They relate to the sacrifice of the Mass and to the honor given Mary in this basilica.
Along the nave, 16 massive, yet delicately decorated, Corinthian columns of light yellow Sienna marble, each 20 feet tall, aren't just architecturally striking — they also draw our gaze toward stories of Jesus and several saints. First, the arches spanning the columns outline the big, stained-glass windows. Then, as we look up to see the glistening blue and gold capitals of the columns, our attention is directed into the lofty, curved ceiling that's covered by wondrous murals.
Two of these are outlined by ornate frames that seem to open into cerulean skies with puffy clouds. They're “bookends” for the central mural: St. Stanislaus glorified in heaven. Admiring angels and the four Evangelists surround this 11th-century martyr, while people pay homage. Blue and gold rosettes in relief vivify the colorful scene.
Below Stanislaus along the clerestory, other Polish saints and blessed — men on one side, women on the other — are highlighted in several stained-glass windows. Humansized angels and ornate pastels of urns cascading with flowers turn the entire clerestory into a heavenly garden.
On the first level, the original stained-glass windows from Mayer in Munich captured my attention with richly detailed scenes of events and parables like the Prodigal Son, the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The strong devotion to Mary in the basilica shines even to the very top of the apse high over the altar, where the Immaculate Heart is honored in a brilliant, half-round window. Nearby, in a mural in the apse dome, tall angels attend Our Lady of Czechtochowa.
In the lower basilica, Mary appears as Our Lady of Guadalupe in a reverent painting done by Mexican Carmelite nuns. The lower basilica is the site of daily Masses, confessions and morning exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. And a collection of more than 60 first-class relics.
Like other visitors and parishioners, I was drawn to contemplate them. They include the True Cross, several Apostles, Sts. Paul, Stephen, Luke, Martha, Mary Magdelene, Anthony, Francis, Joseph of Cupertino, Sixtus, Clement, Augustine and, of course, the Polish saints Maximillian Kolbe, Faustina, and Stanislaus. In this basilica, Polish heritage is a special blessing to every nationality.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
Stanislaus was born of noble parents on July 26, 1031, near Krakow, Poland. He was educated at Gnesen and was ordained there. He was given a canonry by Bishop Lampert Zula of Krakow, who made him his preacher, and soon he became noted for his preaching. He became a much sought-after spiritual adviser. He was successful in his reforming efforts, and in 1072 was named Bishop of Krakow. He incurred the enmity of King Boleslaus the Bold when he denounced the King's cruelties and injustices and especially his kidnapping of the beautiful wife of a nobleman. After Stanislaus excommunicated the King and stopped services at the cathedral when Boleslaus entered, Boleslaus himself killed Stanislaus while the bishop was saying Mass in a chapel outside the city on April 11. Stanislaus, long the symbol of Polish nationhood, was canonized by Pope Innocent IV in 1253 and is the principal patron of Cracow. His feast day is April 11.
— Catholic OnlineSaints (http://catholic.org/saints)
----- EXCERPT: Basilica of St. Stanislaus, Chicopee, Mass. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: Get CCD on a Music CD DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:He rocks for Jesus.
As the first cradle Catholic signed by a major contemporary-Christian record label, Tom Franzak has spent nearly 20 years singing rock and pop songs that inspire and challenge his listeners to respond to God's call on their lives. He spoke with Register correspondent Dana Mildebrath.
What has it been like for you as a Catholic in the contemporary-Christian music world?
Where I grew up (in Nazareth, Pa.), all the different churches cooperated and did a lot of things together. I didn't experience any prejudice because I was Catholic. When I signed with Word Records in 1983, it brought to the fore different opinions on the Catholic presence in that market. Some people were very affirming and said, “It's really great that Catholics are using contemporary music to evangelize and teach.” Others had a hard time accepting that Catholics could be, in their terminology, “saved,” or that the company should even be engaged in helping Catholic artists for that reason. I'm not so sure that, even all these years later, that community has gotten beyond that conflict.
How did you get started?
On my mom's side of the family, everybody could sing. My grandparents would always sing to me when I was small, and my mom and I would sing together in the kitchen. On my dad's side, there were a lot of musicians. So, when my parents got married, it was the merging of the singing family and the playing family.
I'm an only child and, when I was very young, my parents owned a music store. I was doomed, because I'd go in and see all those instruments hanging on the wall, and I'd want to play every one of them. I knew from a very young age that I would not be able to escape music. I was just engrossed by it.
I was playing rock ‘n’ roll in nightclubs when I was 16 and, by the time I was 21, I was living in southern California and hadn't been to church for at least three years. My manager was a former Benedictine nun, and she encouraged me to make a retreat. That experience blew me away. The hardest part was when I realized my talent wasn't mine — that it was a gift — and I was responsible to use it in different ways.
I walked away from music and was trained as a youth minister in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I started writing songs again as a way to make the lessons with my kids a little more special. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a contemporary-Christian music industry.
Your first four albums weren't explicity Catholic. Why did you choose to go in such a specifically Catholic direction with your current album,
The great thing about the Church is that it has survived with a large body of believers lumbering along for 2,000 years. Some things become anchors for which we are grateful because they are solid and have a history. The saints are like that. The accounts we have of some of these people are an awesome testimony and legacy that are important for us to celebrate in any age. Whether you can relate to all of them or not, there's someone there that everyone can relate to. It represents the vast diversity and richness of our tradition.
What advice do you have for young Catholic musicians who want to “make it” in contemporary Christian music?
I usually just tell people to sing as much as they can and pray as much as they can, and let God take it wherever he wants to.
If “making it” means becoming the next Amy Grant, and you're Catholic, that carries a lot of challenges. If you encounter resistance or prejudice because of your Catholicity, you're faced with the challenge of standing up to that and convincing people that, yes, you can indeed have a deep, profound relationship with Jesus Christ within the Catholic tradition.
Unfortunately, what I see some very talented young Catholic artists choosing to do is play down their Catholic faith. My encouragement for young people would be: “Don't play down your faith to the point where you lose the wealth of your Catholic identity.”
There's so much that we can explore in our own Catholic experience, and then share with others, that I'm at a loss to understand how someone would feel that they wouldn't want to do that, unless of course if “making it” means simply having economic success and whatever fame and recognition that brings.
What do you have in mind for future projects?
I'm looking at doing another show that, like Saints, will have a cohesive theme, with a focus and shape to it. I'd also like to devote some time to developing a venue for Catholic artists to be able to get their music out there in live performances and on recordings, and be able to see the time when there is more access to radio air play and a more visible presence in the contemporary-Christian music market.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Matthew (1997)
Christian joy is one of the delights experienced by believers as they walk with God. This blessed sensation animates Matthew, a four-hour version of the Gospel produced for video release by the Dallas-based Visual Entertainment, a Protestant company. It is the first installment of an ambitious effort to film every word in the Bible. In the bottom right-hand corner of every frame is the chapter and verse of the passage being dramatized.
Jesus (Bruce Marchiano) is neither the ethereal, detached figure of Italian paintings nor the serene stoic of later great-master characterizations. Instead he's presented as a warm, earthy personality who laughs with children and rolls up his sleeves to play with the disciples. Peter and Andrew are persuaded to leave their nets by the simple radiance of his smile. South African director Reghardt van den Bergh depicts Jesus’ miracles as real occurrences, expressions of his great energy and joy. The pain of the cross and the glory of his resurrection are realized with equal sincerity and conviction.
The Longest Day (1962)
Recent World War II films (Saving Private Ryan) and TV miniseries (Band of Brothers) have highlighted the Allies’ June 6, 1944 landing at Normandy. The most epic presentation of this decisive event is The Longest Day, based on Cornelius Ryan's compilation of interviews and produced as a labor of love by golden-age mogul Darryl Zanuck. The action is divided into three segments. The first chronicles the Allied preparation for the invasion and the wait for the weather to break; the second presents the massive movement of ships across the English Channel and the behind-the-lines maneuvers of paratroopers and commandos; and the third dramatizes the landings and assaults themselves.
The movie has a documentary feel, with few personal stories that are not directly related to the combat operations. Particularly outstanding are the sequences that feature: Col. Benjamin Vandervoort (John Wayne), a paratrooper who hobbles through D-Day with a broken ankle; Brig. Gen. Norman Cota (Robert Mit-chum), who leads his troops onto bloody Omaha Beach; and Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt (Henry Fonda).
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)
Flashing sword-play, witty dialogue and breathtaking royal balls are the staples of golden-age Hollywood swashbucklers about courage, honor and true love.
The Prisoner of Zenda, produced by David O. Selznick (Gone With the Wind) and based on Anthony Hope's novel and Edward Rose's play, is the genre at its best. Major Rudolf Rassendyll (Ronald Colman) is a straight-arrow Englishman who travels to a mythical Balkan country to hunt game. There he's drawn into a dangerous court intrigue that requires him to pose as his dissolute cousin Prince Rudolf (also Colman), who's been poisoned by his enemies.
The perpetrators of these crimes are the dastardly villains Black Michael (Raymond Massey), the prince's wicked half-brother, and the suave Rupert of Hentzau (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), who schemes to take the throne away from Rudolf. There's also a romance with the beautiful Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll) and a foul kidnapping of the ailing Rupert to the sinister Zenda dungeon. If viewed in the right spirit, this is still great fun.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, FEB. 17
American Icons: Structures of Glory
Travel Channel, 9 p.m.
This new two-hour, two-part special travels to many of America's most cherished structures and explains their design, construction and lasting significance.
MONDAY, FEB. 18
Stealing the Superfortress
History Channel, 9 p.m.
In this new documentary we learn how the U.S.S.R. in the late 1940s was able to design and build the TU-4, a virtual copy of the B-29, a giant U.S. bomber. B-29 crewmen whom the Soviets imprisoned provide insights, as do U.S. and Soviet designers.
TUESDAY, FEB. 19
Bulletproof
History Channel, 10 p.m.
This new documentary tracks scientists’ progress in developing bullet-stopping materials for use in body armor, vehicle armor plating and wall layering.
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 20
Places for All-American Animals
Travel Channel, 9 p.m.
This new special looks at the habitats of 10 popular American animal species.
THURSDAY, FEB. 21
Justice and the Generals
PBS, 10 p.m.
Communists murdered untold thousands of Catholic priests and religious in the 20th century; this 90-minute documentary deals with religious and a laywoman murdered by other hands. Sisters Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan were raped and murdered in Dec. 1980 during El Salvador's fight against communist guerrillas. When two generals from El Salvador retired to the United States, they became liable to civil lawsuits by the victims’ relatives. In 2000, a U.S. jury found the generals not responsible for the crimes, for which five Salvadoran national guardsmen were convicted earlier. The generals’ case is on appeal, and they face a separate suit by torture victims. Advisory: Exhumation scenes and accounts of torture.
FRIDAY, FEB. 22
Super Saints
EWTN, 5 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.
“I have set thee as an example for sinners,” Jesus told St. Margaret of Cortona (1247-1297), “that in thee they may behold how My mercy awaits the sinner who is willing to repent.” After living with a nobleman out of wedlock until his murder, St. Margaret, whose feast day is Feb. 22, did heartfelt penance, joined the Third Order of St. Francis, founded an order of nursing sisters and got her Tuscan town of Cortona to build a hospital for ill poor people. Jesus gave her locutions and revelations from 1277 on.
SATURDAY, FEB. 23
Firefighter School
A & E, 8 p.m.
In this exciting installment of “Behind Closed Doors,” Joan Lunden joins rescue, emergency and firefighter recruits in training exercises at a huge mock city whose practice facilities include houses, refineries, a ship and an airplane.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: How to Acquire Self-Esteem The Old-Fashioned Way DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:One of the most dominant articles of faith pervading the modern curriculum is the notion that children can't achieve and won't succeed unless they have high self-esteem.
In parochial as well as public schools, in reading and writing, in health class and on the sports field, making students feel good about themselves has become a foundational goal in the modern classroom.
Yet thousands of psychological studies have failed to demonstrate that high self-esteem reliably causes anything — or, at least, anything desirable. In fact, some researchers are even suggesting that the “I love me” movement has done real harm to kids, families and education in general. Having seen the effects at close hand, I tend to agree.
So does Paul Vitz, professor of psychology at New York University, the most authoritative Catholic voice on the new psychological faiths. With regard to self-esteem, Vitz believes educational psychology has the cart before the horse.
“Self-esteem should be understood as a response, not as a cause,” he wrote in Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship (Eerdmans, 1994). “[L]ike happiness, and like love, self-esteem is almost impossible to get by trying to get it. Try to acquire self-esteem and you will fail — but do good to others and accomplish something for yourself, and you will have all the self-esteem you need.”
In the Catholic school where I taught for seven years, our staff regularly commented on the fact that, every new school year, the kids coming in seemed less able to work in a sustained and concentrated manner and, by and large, exhibited poorer self-control and less civility. Because of this, teaching was becoming more difficult — class-management and behavioral problems were stealing a larger and larger amount of time and energy from instructional time. In addition, a number of previously unheard-of problems were cropping up.
Probably the most difficult of these was that of “problem parents.” In previous times, parents almost always supported teachers in their administration of discipline. Now, more and more, parents were raising strong objections to the entirely appropriate and relatively mild disciplinary efforts of teachers and administrators to bring unruly children into line.
One didn't have to listen long to realize that the natural instincts of parents were being overridden and corrupted by the ideology of self-esteem. Parents of some of the worst-behaved kids we had were insisting that their child's acting out was the result of poor self-esteem and required not discipline — what in a saner age was called “tough love” — but more support, encouragement and “understanding.”
As anyone who works with kids will tell you, it doesn't take long for some kids to figure out the lay of the land and begin working the system.
I remember one little girl I had in grade four. Let's call her Shelley. Despite the fact that Shelley was blessed with above-average intelligence and ability, she had failed two tests in a row in social studies. I watched her response as I handed back her third test — also with a failing grade marked on it. Without a word, tears filled her eyes and Shelley ran into the cloakroom, crying. I went after her, spoke to her gently and, after a minute or so, led her back into class. I told Shelley I wanted to speak to her and her mother during the lunch period.
After the bell rang, Shelley stood with me outside my classroom as the girl's mother walked up and greeted me warmly. Shelley was still upset as I explained to her mother what had happened.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Mom asked her daughter.
“I don't know what to say,” said Shelley. “Somehow I just don't feel good about myself these days. I don't seem to like myself anymore.”
“That's a bunch of nonsense,” said Mom. “You didn't study.”
A parent with proper perspective — what a relief! “Your daily work hasn't been up to the standard I know you're capable of,” I said when the mother turned to me as if giving me permission to continue her point. “If you had felt good about yourself even though you hadn't done your job I would say you have a serious problem. Now why don't you get down to business, do the job you're capable of, and get a good mark on the next test?”
Good teachers and good parents show their love by caring enough to use discipline and by telling kids the truth. That's what kids need and that's what kids ultimately want. That's also why, in many high schools, the most-admired teachers, and the best-respected, are the athletic coaches — the authority figures who expect performance and rarely worry about self-esteem.
With a Godly context, a little “reality therapy,” some encouragement and the firm refusal of both her mother and her teacher to let her off the hook, I believe Shelley learned an important lesson that day.
I remember her looking excited and a little anxious as I handed back her fourth test. Then Shelley looked up at me from her desk, beaming and proud, as she saw the mark and realized she'd “aced” the test. Her good work had resulted in a natural sense of pride in her hard-earned accomplishment — in other words, a rightly ordered sense of heightened self-esteem.
J. Fraser Field is executive officer of the Catholic Educator's Resource Center (www.catholiceducation.org)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: J. Fraser Field ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: The Lion That Contemplated Christ DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope Pius XII once called Dietrich von Hildebrand “our 20th-century Doctor of the Church.” More recently, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger referred to him as “one of the great Catholic philosophers of the 20th century.”
Although his numerous books have been highly regarded in Catholic intellectual circles, little has been written about von Hildebrand's inspiring and courageous life. Until now: Alice Jourdain von Hildebrand, Dietrich's widow, has written a marvelously evocative biography covering the first five decades of the man's life. Von Hildebrand was born in 1889 into a loving, artistically gifted and thoroughly secular family in Florence, the only son and youngest of six children born to Adolph and Irene von Hidebrand. His father was a renowned sculptor; he and Irene often entertained such artistic notables as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Henry James.
Dietrich was only 15 when he determined to pursue philosophy as his life's work after reading Plato's dialogues and realizing “that he had an innate talent for detecting errors and equivocations in arguments and for unraveling a confused line of reasoning, and he set his mind to develop this gift.”
At Munich University, he met the brilliant but thoroughly undisciplined Max Scheler, who became his close friend. From the moment they met, Scheler's limber mind and dazzling personality captivated von Hildebrand. But he was indebted to Scheler above all else for the latter's intricate Catholic analysis of philosophical and theological questions, which eventually convinced von Hildebrand that the Church had received, and still retained, the fullness of revealed truth.
Mrs. von Hildebrand insists that her husband's conversion to the Catholic faith in 1914 was the most important and the most decisive moment of his life. “Every time he mentioned this event his face lit up with joy,” she tells us. “Beautiful and rewarding as his life had been … he was now entering into a radically new world, the world of the supernatural whose radiance, sublimity, and beauty were such that all his previous experiences paled by comparison. He was overwhelmed by a light, the existence of which he had never suspected previously. He could not learn enough; he could not read enough. Every day brought new discoveries; every day was more uplifting than the preceding one. Every instruction was received with attentiveness and gratitude.”
Purely philosophical questions continued to interest von Hildebrand, but he delighted much more now in meditating on the transformation that occurs in one's life when thought is illuminated by revelation. This spiritual transition became the theme of his masterwork Transformation in Christ, first published in 1940 under the pen name Peter Ott, because the publisher could not market the book in Nazi Germany under von Hildebrand's own name, since he had been sentenced to death in absentia.
Von Hildebrand had courageously denounced National Socialism from its earliest days. Much of the second half of Soul of a Lion concerns his terrifying flights and repeated narrow escapes from his Nazi pursuers in Germany, Austria and France until, at the book's conclusion, he and his wife arrive, at last, in New York. They were greeted on the pier by a fellow refugee from Nazism, Msgr. John Osterreicher, with the welcome news that a professorship awaited von Hildebrand at Fordham University.
One reservation: The book ends too soon. Von Hildebrand was only a little over 50 when he landed in the United States in 1940; he continued to live a productive and eventful life until his death in 1977. Much detail is excluded from the present, excellent work. Where are the firsthand insights on his distinguished career at Fordham, his marriage to Alice Jourdain following the death of his first wife, Gretchen, and his founding of the Roman Forum? One hopes that Mrs. von Hildebrand is at work on a second, equally absorbing, volume.
Carroll McGuire writes from Wayne, New Jersey.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carroll Mcguire ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:School Role Models
The curriculum is “best described as meat and potatoes,” says the Monitor’s Craig Savoye.
The newspaper reports that a church-school organizer in St. Louis was receiving more than a dozen calls per day “from groups that want to duplicate the effort in their communities.”
“Similar church-inspired schools already are taking shape in states from Georgia to California,” says the Monitor.
Nice Gift
‘Coercive’ Prayer?
VMI says it will appeal the ruling, which was rendered in response to a suit brought by the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
PC in NJ
TOWNHALL.COM, Jan. 31 — Columnist Suzanne Fields reports that the New Jersey Legislature recently nixed a requirement for students to daily recite the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Civil-liberties groups questioned the phrase “unalienable right” to life, suggesting it was a sneaky euphemism for “anti-abortion” sentiment; one legislator objected to the word “creator” because it would force students to accept a “state-sponsored religion.”
Vineyard Workers
An annual practice at the school through the 1960s, the tradition had faded. Parents who remembered the event brought it back three years ago and hope to restore it as a tradition.
Church-State Charters
Some accuse religious groups of advancing non-sectarian charter schools in the inner cities because it is “their only means of obtaining public education dollars,” writes the Times’ Richard Fausset. Advocates say religious groups can be ideal sponsors because they have classroom space, provide social services, and have “a strong sense of community and mission.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: When You Can't Agree DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Q Recently my husband and I reached a stalemate over which house to buy. Disagreement seems to be a recurring theme in our marriage. Could you offer ideas for resolving our differences?
A Conflict is a familiar foe to anyone who has been married for more than five minutes.
One good way to begin dealing with it is adopting Ephesians 5:21 as a family motto: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Put aside the desire to win every argument. The guiding question must be: “What is best for my family?”
It can be helpful, for example, to defer to each other in areas of recognized expertise. One couple we know agreed that the wife would have final say over decisions about the interior of the house, while the husband would have final say about the exterior. Of course, each of them consults the other and carefully considers whatever is said.
Because we're so comfortable with our spouse, it's easy when arguing to lash out or be short — treating our spouse in ways we'd never dream of treating a friend or co-worker. We cannot allow ourselves to be grumpiest toward the person we love the most.
Even if we get these basics in place, however, and even if we add prayer, there can be times when we don't reach a meeting of the minds. These can be some of the hardest parts of married life.
Ephesians 5 offers more guidance, first to the wives: “Be subject to your husbands as to the Lord” (verse 22). When deadlocked, it may be time for the wife to defer to her husband. It's not that the wife isn't an equal partner; rather, she acknowledges that God has given him a role of leadership for the family. Every corporation needs a CEO, a place where the buck stops. The husband is like that — the family's CEO.
For the husbands, Ephesians 5 continues: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (verse 25). The family CEO doesn't spend all day golfing, and he'd be crazy not to listen to his closest partner in the firm. Husbands instead are called to make great sacrifices for the family. So while the wife bears the cross of submission, the husband too bears a cross of headship, often dying to his own wishes.
We know it's tough. Early in our marriage, Caroline supported Tom through graduate school. Near the end of his coursework, when doctoral exams were looming, Tom considered postponing them for several good reasons. Caroline was bitterly opposed; it meant she would have to teach another year. The debate seemed endless, but finally Caroline resolved to defer to Tom's leadership.
“God blessed me for that decision,” Caroline now says, “I had my best year of teaching ever.” Tom made a special sacrifice too. When it was time for the next round of exams, he had pneumonia. He was sorely tempted to throw in the towel, but knew it would be devastating to Caroline. So he completed the three-day ordeal for the good of his wife — and thankfully passed!
Tom and Caroline McDonald are family life directors for the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom And Caroline Mcdonald ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:WHO's MOST LIKELY to respond to President Bush's Jan. 29 State of the Union request for more Americans to serve as volunteers?
According to one survey at a Catholic university, those with a stronger commitment to religion were more likely to participate in an intensive volunteer program.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bush's Volunteers ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Patriotism Nationalism DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Thomas Spence, a Dallas publisher and father of eight, didn't use to be very patriotic. “I was pretty disillusioned, particularly as a Catholic, as a Christian, with the American experiment,” said Spence. “All of the things that critics of America say I guess I was believing to some extent; I do believe it still.”
Then, “just a few days after Sept. 11 we went to a concert of the Dallas symphony,” he said. “Andrew Litton was conducting and he opened with the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ It was very emotional. Then he went into the program, a Mozart violin concerto.
“I was sitting there, listening and thinking, we are fighting for Mozart just as surely as we are fighting for McDonald's franchises around the world or Coca-Cola. We have all these flaws; our popular culture is so debased. But if anybody is going to defend Mozart, it's America. I have tried to impart to (my children) a sense of that.”
In days of flag-waving and stadium chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Catholic parents and teachers are looking for ways to properly express — and morally deepen — patriotism.
Gratitude
Jacquelyn Dudasko has a way. The home schooling mother of three in Richardson, Texas, leads her children in singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and the pledge of allegiance before morning prayers.
“God has blessed our country,” Dudasko tells her children. “We have many sins in our country, but look at everything we have, the bounty. Walk into the grocery store.”
That message is a concrete example of what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches about patriotism and gratitude, in No. 2239: “The love and service of one's country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity.”
For Patty Donovan of Plano, Texas, whose four sons attend Catholic schools, “America the Beautiful” helps form her patriotism message.
“One phrase from ‘America the Beautiful’ sums up, for me, America's ideal: ‘liberty in law,’” she said. “We find our freedoms within our laws, including the freedom to worship.”
Donovan said the primary source for her gratitude is America's commitment to religious freedom, which Pope John Paul II has called the fundamental freedom.
“We're so very fortunate — and we remind our children often of this — to live in a country that not only tolerates but encourages religious freedom,” she said. “I've felt especially thankful since the September attacks that our children's school is also a place of prayer.”
Respect for Authority
Donovan raises the other dimension of patriotism mentioned in the catechism — the responsibility to ensure that a nation's laws accord with God's laws:
“Those subject to authority should regard those in authority as representatives of God, who has made them stewards of his gifts,” teaches the catechism (No. 2238). “Their loyal collaboration includes the right, and at times the duty, to voice their just criticisms of that which seems harmful to the dignity of persons and to the good of the community.”
But how does one respect a system of laws that is sometimes terribly unjust?
Indeed, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, if a law is not in harmony with God's law, it is no law at all, said Father Stephen Zigrang, pastor of St. Andrew Church, Channelview, Texas.
“All authority has its authority from God,” he said. As such, the catechism teaches that while Catholics are bound to offer prayers for and obedience to those in authority, if civil authority conflicts with moral demands, “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
“On the one hand we [in America] do the right thing,” said Father Zigrang. “We have democracy, we let people decide the leadership. But then it comes to issues of human rights — the elderly, the disabled, the unborn — the strong win out. It's financially motivated.”
Many Catholics, who have felt that they live in a kind of exile within a materialistic culture, nevertheless see the need to rally behind their country, which is still, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “the last, best hope of earth.”
Even the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, sounds as patriotic as the most red-white-and-blue American in many of his statements, including this on Dec. 31, 1999: “The discovery of America, which opened a new epoch of the history of mankind, was, without any doubt, the most important element in the balance of the past millennium.”
Yet the Pope never misses the opportunity, when addressing this nation, to call it to live out its own ideals, especially in regard to the sanctity of life: “America will remain a beacon of freedom for the world as long as it stands by those moral truths which are the very heart of its historical experience. … If you want justice, defend life” (Evening Prayer at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, January 27, 1999).
Patriotism, Not Nationalism
Brad Birzer, a Catholic father and an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan, agreed that America is the best guardian for the West, from which it has received “a sacred trust.” But, he cautioned, there is a difference between being a patriot and a nationalist, and that as a Catholic he can be one and not the other.
“I have a real loyalty to what the country stands for, such as republican virtue, doing these things for the common good. It's a Catholic understanding, that we're really one body,” he said. “But I think there's a danger in holding too much to ‘Well, I'm an American and therefore …’ I don't like the sound bites and the knee-jerk reaction. We need to have a long discussion about it.”
Some schools are paying special attention to Catholic patriotism. One is Providence Academy, a pre-K through grade 9 Catholic school that opened its doors this year in Minneapolis.
“In its proper form American patriotism ought to be associated with ideas; it's something other than blind patriotism,” said headmaster Todd Flanders. “Americans have the opportunity to go deeper than this, and certainly Catholic Christian Americans do. [There] are interesting ways to bring our civic history and our patriotic involvement into conversation with larger themes of our religious commitments.”
For example, he said, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, students examined how, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, King used the American propositions of equality, liberty and justice to advance greater opportunities for all.
“There's something in the way our country was founded, our founding principles, that help us [Catholics] make our argument in the public square,” he said. “We Catholics unabashedly talk about a right to life. That's language that was first used in the Declaration of Independence.”
Alongside love of country, its history and its ideals, Catholics are also finding a newfound respect for their fellow countrymen, Flanders said.
“My heart is filled with hope,” he said. “We have seen what the soul of our fellow citizens can rise to. Not in my lifetime have I seen a time when there seems to be such a broad understanding of the possibility of good in our people and in our principles.”
Ellen Rossini writes from Richardson, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 02/17/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: February 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Lawmakers Want Ultrasounds
Abortion rates in Wisconsin dropped by more than half after the state offered the so-called look-and-listen option, officials said.
The Indiana Senate Health Committee currently is considering the proposal.
Protests Move Speech
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 19 — New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey, a Catholic who supports abortion, moved his first public town hall meeting from a Catholic university after pro-life Catholics objected to his plans.
McGreevey moved the meeting from Seton Hall University to Montclair State University. Pro-life advocates were angered not only because McGreevey was going to have the town hall meeting at the Catholic school, but also because it was scheduled for Jan. 22, the 29th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Abstinence Funding
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 30 — The Bush administration is asking Congress for a 33% increase in funding for sexual abstinence education programs. In the budget the president proposed a total of $135 million for abstinence-only programs, an increase of $33 million over this year.
The request fulfills a pledge Bush made while campaigning for president — to spend as much promoting abstinence as some have calculated the government spends educating teens about contraception.
Teen Promotes Unborn Bill
Smith is arranging to address Idaho legislators in favor of a law protecting children from people who would hurt or kill them before they're born.
The Idaho teenager was starting her ninth month of pregnancy when she was attacked July 8 in her home. Hit, kicked and stomped, Smith sensed the beating had hurt her baby and was rushed to the hospital. Noah was stillborn.
Pain Relief Discovery
In the latest finding, Dr. Khem Jhamandas of the department of pharmacology and toxicology at Queen's University, concluded that tiny doses of opioid antagonists — drugs normally used to block the toxic effects of opioids — actually enhance the pain-killing qualities of morphine.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Will Her Successors Be Loyal to Rome? DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:LONDON — As Elizabeth — queen of the United Kingdom and head of the Anglican church — celebrates the 50th anniversary of her coronation, the legal ban on Catholics becoming the British monarch has received a fresh challenge in Parliament.
Kevin McNamara, a member of the ruling Labor Party, made a fresh attempt Feb. 11 under the 10 Minute Rule Bill, a procedure that allows individual Members of Parliament to propose their own law.
His bill has challenged, what has been called “Britain's grubby little secret,” and once again posed the intriguing question — will Britain ever have another Catholic Monarch?
Although Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose wife Cherie is Catholic, is said to be privately sympathetic, there is little sign his government is willing to repeal the 13 discriminatory laws that must be overturned to allow a Catholic to be either ruling monarch or consort. A Catholic king would also pose a formidable conundrum for the Church of England, since the ruling monarch is its titular leader.
McNamara's 10 Minute Rule Bill follows closely on moves by the liberal/leftist national newspaper The Guardian, which is challenging the anti-Catholic provisions under the U.K.'s human rights legislation. It also follows last year's call by Cardinal Cormac Murphy o'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, for repeal of the legislation.
The cardinal's comments came a few weeks before he made history in mid-January as the first Catholic Cardinal since the Reformation to lead a service for the reigning monarch, when he gave a homily at Queen Elizabeth II's country home of Sandringham.
And as the nation prepared to mourn Princess Margaret, the Queen's younger sister who died Feb. 9, it received a reminder of how far Catholic-royal relations have moved. Obituaries recalled how the young princess received almost universal criticism for having an audience with Pope Pius XII in 1949.
Historical Hostility
Distrust of Catholics, historically seen as “fifth columnists” — disloyal — led to the Act of Settlement 300 years ago when William (popularly known as King Billy) and Mary replaced the Catholic King James II. The act ensured a Protestant succession on the English throne, by automatically excluding the offspring from any marriage to a “Papist” from the line of succession.
In fact, until quite recently anti-Catholicism was as British as a belief in the Empire. Joanna Bogle, a Catholic writer with close connections to several Catholic European royals, explained, “Sixty years ago we ruled India and the establishment had great prejudices about the Roman Catholic Church.
“We no longer rule India and the fact is now we have a cardinal, with a very Irish sounding name, preaching to the Queen at Sandringham and it is seen as normal,” Bogle said. “There would have been demonstrations years ago.”
In recent years the Duchess of Kent, whose children are in the line of succession to the throne, converted to the Catholic faith, as did Lady Frances Shand-Kydd, mother of Diana Princess of Wales. But Bogle admitted there are few Royal converts on the horizon.
But, she added, “The prejudices of the establishment have disappeared — this is very significant.
There are still prejudices against the Catholic Church but they are those of the secular liberal elite, or those voiced by ex-Catholics such as John Cornwell.”
Cornwell is author of Hitler's Pope a scathing — and, critics point out, shoddily researched — critique of Pius XII.
Her argument is supported by historian Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's Peerage, the official publication that lists the line of succession. Brooks-Baker said that ecumenism, and events such as Pope John Paul's visit to England and the fact that the Queen even attended Vespers three years ago at Westminster Cathedral, are all signs of a significant thaw.
Yet the legal bar remains the sticking point. Said Brooks-Baker, “For example, if Prince Charles had married a Catholic they would have had to renounce their faith.” And, he noted, in 1979 the Catholic Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg was widely rumored to be a marriage candidate for then-unmarried heir to the throne. “We don't know whether she was willing to convert to the Church of England and or whether she still wanted to remain a Roman Catholic.”
The lineage expert thinks that sort of dilemma may never confront Charles' own son, Prince William.
“I don't think it will be the case for much longer. It is an anachronism. It is a ridiculous law, “ said Brooks-Baker.
“People in the Palace do not think it is a sensible law. The only thing I can see that prevents change is the situation in Northern Ireland. Both Mr. Blair and Her Majesty have enough on their plate not to incur the greater wrath of Ian Paisley and his people,” said Brooks Baker.
Another urging change is Ian Bradley, Church of Scotland minister and former London Times journalist, in his new book, God Save The Queen – the Spiritual Dimension of Monarchy.
“I think it is a question of when, not if, this will come,” said Bradley, “Tony Blair is not in favor of the ban, and if we are to believe the memoirs of Paddy Ashdown [former leader of the Liberal Democrat Party] neither is Prince Charles. It would be a case of when the government could get around to dealing with what would be a complex legislation.”
Anglican Fears
However, the Church of England fears any lifting of the ban would erode its privileged position as ”the Established Church.” Anglican constitutional spokesman, Bishop Michael Scott-Scott-Joynt of Winchester, has argued it would create a domino effect eroding what Christian influence remains in British society.
Bishop Scott-Scott-Joynt wrote in 2000, “I don't believe that any other body, in today's circumstances, would take the place of the Church of England — a constant pointer to the ultimately Christian character of government in this country. The result would be a state that was, in principle, secular.”
The Anglican bishop told the Register that even an imperfect Church-state link was preferable to no link at all, warning, “I believe a secular state would be far more intolerant than the one we have now.”
Bishop Scott-Scott-Joynt added that whether a Catholic king or queen could rule “depends significantly on ecumenical developments in the coming years, and especially in the extent to which the R.C. [Roman Catholic] Church moves in relation to the Anglican Communion; because the R.C. Church shares responsibility with the Church of England for the present situation” of division between the two Churches.
But Catholic writers such as Bogle counter that Britain — a Catholic domain for a millennium prior to the Reformation — is heading slowly but surely back to its Catholic roots as the Church of England, which until recently has remained relatively close to the Church liturgically, evolves into a fully Protestant sect following its vote to ordain women in 1992.
“The Anglican Church never held total sway over the British people,” Bogle said. “Until the ordination of women they had maintained a certain intellectual strength. There had been people such as C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot and that intellectual rigor remained until the 1980s.”
As a result a of the vote for priestesses, however, there has been a flight into the Catholic Church of leading Anglican intellectuals such as the former Bishop of London, Graham Leonard, and former cabinet minister John Gummer.
Rome's Appeal
Bogle speculated that, in the future, only the Catholic Church will be able to supply the gravitas, intellectual coherence, and institutional solidity that the institution of the monarchy needs.
“You can't see Prince William joining some happy-clappy house church — the media would accuse him of joining a cult,” Bogle said. However, he could avoid that criticism by following the lead of his maternal grandmother and another distinguished relative on his mother's side, Father Ignatius Spencer, a 19th-century convert from Anglicanism whose cause for sainthood is due to be sent to Rome.
Continued Bogle, “I think Prince Charles for all his difficulties is a man very much steeped in the English Christian tradition especially with his love of architecture. He is very much affected by the heritage of English Christianity, which is essentially Catholic.”
The qualities of duty, self-sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering that Catholicism fosters are particularly suited to the monarchy, Bogle suggested.
“In one way a princess such as Marie Astrid would have been a better match than Diana,” she said. “Her sister and she knew how to behave as royalty. They were brought up with Catholic standards. While Fergie and company were going to nightclubs, Marie Astrid and her sister were in Calcutta working with Mother Teresa's sisters.”
Brooks-Baker also believes change will come. “Prince Charles was certainly interested in the idea of converting but that is unofficial,” the lineage authority said. “He was very interested and at one stage wanted to attend a special Mass in the Vatican celebrated by Pope John Paul II but the Palace did not allow it.”
Added Brooks-Baker, “I think there will be a Roman Catholic on the throne in the future. Look at Princess Michael of Kent, a Catholic who is married to a member of the royal family. Although she is Catholic an exception was made to allow her children, who were brought up as Anglicans, to be in the line of succession.”
Nobody expects a reversion as dramatic as Henry VIII's break with Rome, though. Predicted Bogle, “In a sense the monarchy go with the flow, and in a few years time the flow could well see the Catholic Church becoming the central Christian Church in Britain — a Church of the nation in waiting.”
Paul Burnell writes from Manchester, England.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Burnell ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Pope on Vocations Shortage: More Priests, Not Lay Ministers DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN — Catholics must not accept the argument that a scarcity of priests is a blessing in disguise because it increases the involvement of lay people in the church, Pope John Paul II said.
“We all know how necessary vocations are for the life, witness and pastoral action of our ecclesial communities,” the Pope said Feb. 14 during his annual meeting with pastors of Rome parishes and representatives of the city's clergy.
The Holy Father said a decrease in the number of vocations to the priesthood and religious life frequently is the “consequence of a lessening of the intensity of faith and spiritual fervor.”
“Therefore, we must not be content with the explanation that the scarcity of priestly vocations will be compensated by the growing commitment of the lay apostolate,” the Pope said, “or even less that it could be desired by providence in order to favor the growth of the laity.”
Among those who have suggested that the priest shortage is an opportunity for a more active laity was Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles. In a Holy Thursday letter in the year 2000, he called the priest shortage one of the “fruits of Vatican II” and called for expanded lay roles.
“It has taken the shortage of priestly and religious vocations to awaken in us an appreciation of a broadly based shared ministry and a realization that it is in the nature of the Church as the Body of Christ to be endowed with many gifts, ministries and offices,” he wrote in a letter that called for a archdiocesan synod on expanding lay roles.
“What some refer to as a ‘vocations crisis’ is, rather, one of the many fruits of the Second Vatican Council, a sign of God's deep love for the Church, and an invitation to a more creative and effective ordering of gifts and energy in the Body of Christ,” he added. “This is a time of great challenge and opportunity in the Church, not least of all because the gifts of the lay faithful have been flourishing in unprecedented numbers and in unforeseen ways.”
Cardinal Mahony was not able to be reached by press time for comment on the new address by the Pope.
This isn't the first time the Holy Father has said that dioceses should keep their emphasis on finding more priests in answer to the vocations shortage. John Paul and the heads of eight Vatican curial offices have told the Church in America and elsewhere that the overuse of lay people in priestly roles has got to stop.
The Vatican's 1997 Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of the Priest includes some surprises for many dioceses. It says:
— A strategy that puts lay people in ordained roles because of the shortage of priests “can only lead to precarious consequences” (No. 3). Later, it links the misuse of lay roles with the decline in vocations to the priesthood.
— Lay workers in parishes are not to be called names proper to pastors, such as “chaplain,” “coordinator,” “moderator” or “minister.” “Extraordinary minister” can sometimes be used (Article 1).
— Lay people can never give the homily at Mass (Article 3).
— Parish councils have only “a consultative vote”; council decisions are “invalid, and hence null and void” when not presided over by a parish priest (Article 5).
— Lay people who distribute Communion are to be called extraordinary ministers of holy Communion. They may do so at Mass “only when there are no ordained ministers present” or when deacons or priests “are truly unable” to do so (Article 8).
— Extraordinary ministers must not receive Communion apart from the rest of the faithful, as if they were concelebrants (Article 8).
Pope John Paul II said that the Instruction is necessary to correct misunderstandings about the vocations of lay people and ordained ministers.
In remarks to the bishops of South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota during their ad limina visit to Rome in June 1998, the Pope decried the confusion of priests and laity in the United States. He said, “It is an inadequate understanding of the role of the laity which leads lay men and women to become so strongly interested in Church services and tasks that they fail to become actively involved in their responsibilities in the professional, social, cultural and political field.”
To clearly delineate priestly and lay roles, the Holy Father urged U.S. bishops to pay closer attention to the Vatican's 1997 Instruction.
“Based on the will of Christ himself,” he said in his 1998 ad limina remarks, “there is a fundamental distinction between the ordained ministry arising from the sacrament of holy orders, and the functions open to lay people, and founded on the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and, for most, matrimony.
“The intention of the Holy See's recent Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of Priests has been to reaffirm and clarify the canonical and disciplinary norms regulating this area, by putting the relevant directives in relation to the theological and ecclesiological principles involved.
“I urge you to ensure that the liturgical life of your communities is led and governed by the grace of Christ working through the Church, which the Lord intended as a hierarchical communion.”
But how can the Church reverse the vocations shortage? In his Feb. 14 remarks this year, Pope John Paul offered some suggestions.
Because a vocation flows from God, it is not enough for a diocese to have a good recruitment plan, he said.
“The first and principal commitment for vocations cannot be anything but prayer,” he said.
“Praying for vocations is not and cannot be the fruit of resignation, as if we think we already have done everything possible with little result and therefore there is nothing left to do but pray,” the pope said.
“Prayer, in fact, is not delegating something to the Lord so that he will do something in our place,” he told the priests. Rather, he said, praying for vocations means trusting in God, “putting ourselves in his hands so that he, in turn, will make us trusting and open to carrying out the works of God.”
Pope John Paul also told the priests that their good example is essential in helping young people accept the vocation God has in mind for them.
“If teens and young adults see priests busy with too many things, easily upset and complaining, careless in their prayer and in the tasks proper to their ministry, how can they be fascinated by the life of the priesthood?” he asked.
“If, instead, they experience in us the joy of being ministers of Christ, generosity in serving the church, ready to take responsibility for the human and spiritual growth of those persons entrusted to us, they will be prompted to ask themselves if perhaps this would be the ‘better part’ for them, the most beautiful choice for their young lives,” the pope said.
Speaking off-the-cuff at the end of the audience, the Holy Father said the local seminary is the “pupil of the eye of the bishop,” because through the seminary “he sees the future of the church.”
“I say this with the experience I have had of being a bishop for many years,” he said. “First in Krakow, then in Rome: in Krakow for 20 years and in Rome already for 24 years.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Bush Plan: Tax Credits, Not Vouchers DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Students in failing schools will be eligible for as much as a $2,500 tax credit to help them find a school of their choice, if President Bush's recommendation becomes law.
Catholic leaders have welcomed the proposal as a first step toward granting families more options on how to school their children, but caution that it falls far short of what is really needed in terms of educational choice.
Bush's provision is refundable so low-income parents who pay no income tax would still receive the credit.
“President Bush's budget demonstrates his continued commitment to meeting the needs of disadvantaged children. The president's proposed investments stretch from early childhood education through college and beyond,” Secretary of Education Rod Paige said. “They not only will help us ensure every child has access to a quality education, but also will help us keep our economy sound and our homeland strong.”
A spokeswoman for the U.S. bishops’ conference said that while the bishops support education choice, this measure would only help a limited number of students.
“The bishops are very much in favor of education choice,” said Sister Mary Ann Walsh. “The bishops’ conference is pleased that the president's budget includes tuition tax credits. It would need modification if it were to benefit a broader number of parents and students.”
She said the tuition tax provision as it stands is “barely a step in the door” because it only helps parents of students already in public schools.
“It provides no help to lower and middle income parents who are currently struggling to pay for their children's Catholic education,” said Sister Walsh.
Although unhappy about last year's education bill, which contained no voucher provision in a concession to Congressional Democrats, most family organizations are happier about this education budget.
“This is a nice step for a limited number of parents and children,” said Jennifer Marshall, director of family studies for the Family Research Council. “We'd like to see this opportunity given to all American families for choice in education.”
She added, “Hopefully [Bush's approach] will be politically effective because who will say that you have to stay in failing schools?”
The president's proposal also includes other education initiatives:
E $50 million to research school choice
E $200 million to promote the growth of charter schools
E $100 million to improve current charter schools
E $25 million for grants to help states and local school districts to establish public-school choice programs.
E $400 tax credits to teachers who pay out-of-pocket for classroom expenses.
But it's the tuition tax credits that have the anti-school choice National Education Association most upset.
“With that money you could provide math and reading help to 3.7 million low-income children or fund 20,000 teachers and that would reduce all classroom sizes,” said Denise Cardinal, a spokeswoman for the educators group.
But Cardinal acknowledged that her organization opposes the tax credit proposal on principle.
“We stand by public education. Public education will be key to healthy democracy and economic security,” she said.
Some education reformers suggest that the NEA has lost the proper focus.
“Bob Chase [head of the NEA] was pretty quick at denouncing the proposal,” said Mary Kayne Heinze, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Center for Education Reform. “He's looking at money, we're looking at children.”
She noted that according to estimates by the Department of Education, 4.5 million children would be eligible for the program immediately.
“This really gives a little muscle behind ‘leave no child behind,'” she said, referring to Bush's slogan for his educational policy.
Larry Callaghan, senior education consultant for Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Washington, praised Bush's proposal.
“I've always been in favor of parental choice. I meet with low-income parents and they just don't have a choice,” said Callaghan.
He noted that under the president's proposal, even those parents who don't file income taxes would still be eligible for the tuition tax credit.
“I know people who would attend alternative schools, if they could afford it. I think this will help them reach their goal,” he said.
Callaghan is convinced that this program will pave the path to education freedom.
“I'm very optimistic,” he said. “Some day all parents will have that same opportunity.”
A More Ambitious Proposal
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-NJ, wants to give more families bigger assistance than the president's proposal.
His House bill would provide tax credits of $2,500 per child per year for elementary school expenses and $3,500 per child per year for secondary school expenses. The legislation would cover families who send their children to public, private, charter, Catholic and those who home school, said Smith.
“Parents who send their child to a Catholic school already pay twice for their child's education: once through their taxes, and a second time for the tuition. Without federal support, many parents struggle — and in some cases forgo — a Catholic school education, or any education in a spiritual setting because the costs are so high,” Smith said.
The law would provide assistance for 5 million to 6 million families nationwide, Smith estimated. He called the proposal “an idea whose time has come.”
Bishop John M. Smith, of Trenton, attended St. Raphael's Elementary School in Hamilton, N.J., where Rep. Smith announced the plan Feb. 4. Bishop Smith predicted the legislation “will touch the lives of every child in the United States.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: A Different Kind of Olympian DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:He has been to 11 Olympic Games but has never competed for a medal.
The soft-spoken, gray-haired priest was in Salt Lake City as chaplain for the Austrian Olympic delegation. Since Austria is a predominantly Catholic country, most of the team is Catholic and Father Maier made the rounds of Olympic venues to be with the team. He spoke in Park City, Utah, on Ash Wednesday with Christopher Gunty.
How many people do you provide guidance for during the Olympic Games? What are your duties?
There are about 100 athletes, plus that same number of coaches, medical people and officials.
I had Eucharist in the Olympic Village in Salt Lake City where the athletes stay Saturday and Sunday. And I had Mass at Snow Basin [Ski Area, in Huntsville, Utah] for the Alpine Team members Wednesday before the Games opened.
Now, I visit. I look for contact with the team. It is very important to invite them to Eucharist.
How did you become chaplain for the team?
When I was just in the Salesians, my superiors gave me the duty to study sport and theology. So I studied theology and sport sciences. I became a teacher in schools. This was my specialty — philosophy and ethics of sport. So I teach the fairness and ethics of sport in the coach-formation schools. It is important to teach this because fairness is a central virtue to sports. There are many sports schools in Austria. This became my bridge to sports because I got to know the people.
Then the original chaplain died and the bishops of Austria went to my superiors in the order to ask if I could be assigned as the chaplain for sport.
So this is your full-time job?
My main vocation is as headmaster at a Catholic school, Don Bosco Gymnasiums. It has about 550 boys and girls from 10 to 18 years old. All the free time I have from this main job, I devote to work with athletes.
I go to football games, soccer, all over. I am on the Olympic Committee for Austria. Since for 20 years I have been chaplain for sport, the athletes, the coaches, the people — they know me. It has been wonderful to marry them and baptize their children. I often visit many of them who are hurt, you know, in accidents.
Also, many are killed in sports. About 20 or more I have buried — last year alone, there were four: a football [soccer] player, first class; a former Alpine skier, who won a gold medal, drowned; also, a coach from the luge team. … That is also a job for the chaplain — to be with them in the sad times.
How long have you been a part of the Olympics?
I began in 1984 at Sarajevo [Yugoslavia, now in Bosnia Herzegovina] and Los Angeles. I hope I can reach these [2006 Winter] Games in Turin, Italy. For me, a Salesian of Don Bosco, to be at the Olympics in the city where he built the Basilica of Mary Help [of Christians] from 1864 to 1868 and where he is buried, it would be wonderful. It would be — how do you say it? — a high point in my life.
Christopher Gunty is associate publisher of The Catholic Sun, newspaper of the Diocese of Phoenix, Ariz.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bernhard Maier ----- KEYWORDS: inperson ----- TITLE: Former Opera Singer's Healing Ministry Cures Body and Soul DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:LONGMONT, Colo. — In the 1950s, Joe Dalton was a world renowned opera star, traveling the globe to sing in French, German, Italian, Russian and English.
Then he found Jesus, who had other plans for the Irish operatic sensation: Today, Dalton travels the world proclaiming a message of healing and reconciliation.
Hundreds are said to have been cured of physical problems, and thousands more have been inspired by his message of God's faithful love.
“I don't heal anyone,” Dalton says. “I lay my hands on people and Christ heals all sorts of conditions.”
At Dalton's healing services, which are held in various U.S. parishes and parishes abroad, believers in that healing power are easy to find.
“Healing is a combination of God's power, our faith in God, and God's grace,” said Jim Dorsey of Longmont, whose wife Frances claims to have been healed while Dalton prayed. “Some people are graced with a healing from God, and many are not. I don't know why, but God has his reasons for everything.”
Frances Dorsey had lived for 35 years with chronic pain. She'd had scoliosis as a child, resulting in major back problems. She had one leg that was significantly shorter than the other.
Life seemed like one long doctor's visit, as she spent a fortune consulting neurologists and other specialists. “Nobody had any answers,” said her husband.
In March 1997, the two were on a Marian Conference cruise in the Caribbean. So was Joe Dalton.
They watched him in the ship's auditorium, laying hands on people and praying over them.
The next night, while out for a walk, they encountered Dalton. Frances explained her dilemma.
Dalton asked her to sit on a chair and hold her feet out. Dalton held both feet in his hands and began to pray.
“I stood there and watched the shorter leg extend some two and a half inches,” Dorsey says. “It was immediate. She was out of pain and she no longer needed the shoe lift.”
Frances has been free of pain ever since.
A Healer Healed
Dalton says Christ delivered him from a life of pain too. Although a successful opera singer, he was severely depressed and spent decades contemplating suicide as a consequence of being molested in a theater at age 12.
“I felt unclean. I felt defiled. I felt damned,” Dalton explained. “And the depression set in at that stage and lasted for 31 years.”
On a train in 1975, Dalton noticed a man with a silly grin reading religious books. He'd seen the man before, and was annoyed by his joyful attitude.
“He used to make me sick, just looking at him,” Dalton said. “All I wanted to do was clobber this fellow once.”
Finally, Dalton sat down to discuss the “nonsense” the man was reading. Dalton told him religious beliefs were fine for the “emotionally immature, but not for a grown adult.” But Dalton agreed to read one of his books, Prison to Praise.
“That book changed my life,” Dalton said. “Because, you know, I was weaned on fear [of God] …
But, this man said God is love and that God's love is totally unconditional and that God does not love us because we deserve it. He loves us because we're his children made in his image and we need his love.”
No longer afraid of God, Dalton fell to his knees in the front room of his Ireland home on Dec. 15, 1975.
“I cried out and said, ‘Jesus, I'm in a mess. I've been trying and failing. No matter how hard I try I can't succeed. Now you're my savior. You've paid the price already so I'm asking you to forgive me, and come and clean up this mess. Take anything you need and take and change me to the way you want me to be. Take my life, my wife and children, the house, the job, the music, anything. And I promise you I'll never complain again as long as I live, if you'd just change me to the way you want me to be.’”
The room filled with light.
“It was a cloud of light that totally enveloped me,” Dalton said. “Everything disappeared — the walls, floors, ceilings — and I was totally enveloped in the cloud and it went right through every fiber of my being, cleansing me from my head to my toes.”
His depression was instantly gone, and has never returned.
Dalton began attending Catholic prayer meetings, and was asked to share his testimony.
“And when I'd finished speaking this very tall man stood up and said ‘While Joe was sharing three people were healed in this hall,'” Dalton said. “And I thought to myself, ‘Another nutcase.’” But those who were healed stood up and offered confirmation.
Word spread, and people started coming to Dalton for healing prayers. Much to his surprise, they sometimes worked. He prayed over one man who had been paralyzed in a wheel chair for six years, and the man climbed a mountain later that day. Another, who was deaf, regained his hearing.
It's Grace That Hears
Father Joe Hartmann, pastor of St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Loveland, Colo., has known Dalton for years, and recently traveled with him for healing sessions in Ireland and Bosnia.
Father Hartmann describes Dalton as a humble man, who puts himself in the Lord's hands, fasting and praying much of his life.
“Some people come to Joe Dalton, thinking he has some kind of healing powers,” he said. “He always says he can't heal a pair of shoes, and that it's God's grace that heals.”
Father Hartmann acknowledged that some people misunderstand the central meaning of Dalton's healing services. “One of the problems he faces is that people have such a huge focus on the healing, rather than on the conversion of heart that Joe hopes the healing will bring about,” the priest said. “Joe Dalton has a great love for the Church, and I mean the whole spectrum of the Church — the Scripture, the hierarchy, the sacraments, the Blessed Mother … In his ministry he tries to encourage listeners to open their hearts to the Holy Spirit. He encourages a life in the spirit.”
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued “An Instruction On Prayers for Healing” in October 2000. It states that healing prayers have an ancient and honored tradition in the Church, and that they may be offered within church sanctuaries so long as they respect relevant liturgical norms.
The instruction stresses that any cures that result cannot be credited to the individuals who lead such prayers: “Consequently, in prayer meetings organized for asking for healing, it would be completely arbitrary to attribute a charism of healing to any category of participants, for example, to the directors of the group; the only thing to do is to entrust oneself to the free decision of the Holy Spirit, who grants to some a special charism of healing in order to show the power of the grace of the Risen Christ.”
Dalton has received a stamp of approval from the Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin Martin Drennan, who wrote, “I am very happy to provide this letter of recommendation for Mr. Joseph Dalton who lives in my area of the Dublin Diocese.
“Fourteen years ago Joseph gave up a lucrative post in order to devote his life to spreading the Gospel. Through his ministry of prayer and teaching he has brought healing and hope to countless people in several countries. He has been in demand in many parts of the world because of his integrity and giftedness. His prayer and convictions are those of a man who is deeply committed to the Church and to her teaching.
“Through his seminars on Life in the Spirit many have been led to new depth in their spiritual lives. Because of the quality of his ministry Joseph is highly esteemed here in Ireland and in many places beyond our shores.”
Stateside, Father Chris Hellstrom, spiritual director of St. John Vianney Seminary at the Archdiocese of Denver said of Joe Dalton, “What I like about him is that he is not at all a high profile charismatic. He's very gentle, and very seasoned in his faith and devotion to the Church. His gifts are genuine. He doesn't advertise, he doesn't ask for money, and he lives a very simple lifestyle.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Don't Blame Celibacy for Clergy Shortage
“For years, Catholics attributed the shortage to the fact that the priesthood is limited to celibate men,” noted staff writer Joan Kern. “But when Catholics learned that Protestant churches also had shortages, they realized something else was going on.”
The article comes at a time when some commentators are suggesting that the problems of sexual abuse among priests, as well as the priest shortage, can be traced to the discipline of celibacy.
Protestant clergymen offered a number of reasons for the lower numbers in their seminaries, including poor pay and less esteem for pastors, less encouragement of the young to study for the ministry and an erosion of respect for authority figures.
Tower of Babel Story Found at Trade Center
“After more than 93 days of fires, a skinny little frail page from the Bible survived,” photographer Gary Gere told the New York daily. It's “a sign that from God that he is still watching over us.”
Gere is documenting rescue and recovery efforts at the site and found the page during the recovery of the body of a civilian near where the south tower stood.
Fertility Procedures Show Big Two-Year Jump
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 7 — Fertility procedures in the United States jumped by 27% in two years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of procedures, not including artificial insemination, increased from 64,724 in 1996 to 81,899 in 1998, the wire service reported.
The numbers caused concern among CDC about risks for mothers and children. The procedures done in 1998 led to only 20,000 live births, and there were multiple babies 56% of the time. Officials point out that women with twins, triplets and higher numbers of children are at higher risk for pregnancy complications, and the babies are at risk for low birth weight and long-term disability.
That state of affairs would seem to encourage so-called “fetal reduction” —making room for healthy babies in the womb by killing babies who are less likely to survive. But the Church teaches that artificial reproductive technologies are in themselves profoundly immoral.
According to the revised Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by Father Peter Stravinskas, every child has the right to be the result of marital love, not a product of technology. The Encyclopedia explains, “Interventions which supplant sexual love with masturbation or which join sperm and egg outside the nest of the womb” are illicit.
Courage Web Site Taken Over by Pornographers
CATALYST, January-February — Courage, the Church's outreach to homosexuals who are trying to live chastely in accordance with Church teaching, has changed the domain name of its Web Site to CourageRC.net after a Russian-owned pornography company grabbed the old name.
The registry company handling the old site failed to notify Father John Harvey, director of Courage, that the domain name was about to expire, according to the monthly newsletter of the Catholic League. The Russian company quickly took advantage of the situation.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Illinois Hospitals Cautious About New 'Emergency Contraception' Law DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Hospitals like Loyola-Chicago have to juggle Catholic protocol with the new Illinois law.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — “The devil's in the details,” the old saying goes, and that certainly seems true in the case of a new Illinois law requiring hospitals to tell rape victims about so-called emergency contraception.
Senate Bill 114, which came into effect on New Year's Day, requires all hospital emergency rooms — including Catholic ones — to offer information about the potentially abortifacient drug commonly known as the “morning-after pill.”
What that means in practice depends on how an individual hospital chooses to implement the law, and whether the Illinois Department of Public Health accepts the hospital's plan. The law requires every applicable hospital to have a “protocol” on the matter ready for approval by the department by the end of April.
Dr. Philip Karst, executive director of the Illinois Catholic Health Association, said that his organization has developed a model protocol for Catholic hospitals to comply with the law, and that the Department of Public Health has indicated during debate that the protocol is acceptable.
Said Karst, “That is part of the history of the legislation, that the Catholic-approved, Catholic-developed protocol meets all of the needs of the state's desire to ensure that a woman receives the best possible care” after a sexual assault.
The Catholic protocol, which was approved by the Illinois bishops, allows Catholic doctors to administer contraceptive drugs to women who have been raped, if it can be determined through specified medical tests that the drugs will not have an abortifacient effect.
What abortion and contraception advocates refer to as “emergency contraception” is basically two high doses of the common birth-control pill. The drug inhibits the movement of sperm, suppresses ovulation, and renders the womb temporarily incapable of sustaining pregnancy. Because of this third function, the drug causes an abortion if it is administered after an egg has been fertilized.
Legislative Struggle
Doug Delaney, executive director of the Illinois Catholic Conference, said that the bishops “withdrew opposition” to SB114 when a more objectionable bill passed the state House of Representatives and made its way to the Senate. But they also sought assurances that the Catholic Health Association protocol would meet the approval of the Department of Public Health.
“We made the best of a situation that could have been a lot worse,” said Delaney. “We tried to explain to legislators that in some instances we can't do this, and it really got to the point of whether or not the Catholic Church would have to be civilly disobedient if this legislation was passed, and so we got the agreement that they would accept our protocols.”
The House bill would have required all hospitals to inform rape victims about “emergency contraception,” and to provide the drug on request. The Senate bill required hospitals to provide information on the drug, “and a description of how and when victims may be provided emergency contraception upon the written order of a physician.”
Many observers interpret this to mean that the new law requires Catholic hospitals to refer women to doctors who will provide the drug.
But Karst said that under the Catholic protocol, “we do not provide a referral to where [a patient] can get the drugs.”
Karst added that staff at the Department of Public Health “appear to be very aware of where we draw the line … and have not at this point challenged that line.”
The Catholic protocol states that all rape victims should be referred to an obstetrician-gynecologist for a follow-up visit, but that if the woman has been refused “emergency contraception” at the hospital, the obstetrician-gynecologist will also refuse if he is employed by a Catholic institution.
Catholics might also be concerned about the fact that the law requires doctors to tell women about the drug in the first place, since under certain circumstances that would be another form of cooperation in abortion. A doctor following the Catholic protocol, however, would be informing the patient about the drug in order to determine whether it can be used to prevent conception, which in the case of rape has been ruled morally licit by the Illinois bishops.
The woman might be tempted to obtain the drug outside the Catholic hospital, knowing that it could cause an abortion, but that would not be the fault of the doctor.
Pro-Life Concerns
Still, some pro-lifers are uncomfortable about the new law. Bill Beckman, executive director of the Illinois Right to Life Committee, said he fears that the Department of Public Health might not keep its end of the bargain when it comes to approving Catholic hospitals’ protocols.
“It's really a question of who's in charge and who's running the show in the Illinois Department of Health as to whether these things will stand up over time,” Beckman said. “As far as the initial compromise, they get their foot in the door, and it's possible that down the road they'll say … this isn't working, we need to do more.”
Delaney responded, “We have a health care right of conscience in Illinois, and basically what that does is it protects an institution from [being forced to do] anything that's against its mission statement or against its conscience.”
Discomfort about the new law among Catholics and pro-lifers stems partly from the fact that it was the result of lobbying by Planned Parenthood. Some felt it was designed to put Catholic hospitals in an impossible situation in which they would either compromise their beliefs or be pushed out of certain areas of health care.
But Dr. Edward Furton, director of publications for the Boston-based National Catholic Bioethics Center, said that the Catholic protocol appears to be based on earlier models which were not developed in response to political pressure, but simply out of concern about how to offer the fullest possible treatment to rape victims.
“There have been protocols around like this for some time,” he said, citing one developed several years ago by St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill., that is essentially the same as the Catholic protocol approved by the Department of Public Health. “It already has come up within the Catholic community prior to any external pressure simply because rape is recognized as an act of violence and the woman has the right to prevent herself from becoming impregnated by the advancing sperm which is still part of the act of aggression.”
Added Furton, “The Catholic way of looking at this would be [to prevent] conception in the case of a woman who has been raped, and would be very careful not to prevent implantation or dislodge an implanted embryo once it had been implanted.”
David Curtin writes from Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Curtin ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope Offers Chinese New Year Greetings
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, Feb. 10 — Pope John Paul II sent greetings to Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese citizens for the lunar Chinese New Year, wishing them “peace, prosperity and spiritual growth,” the French news agency reported.
The Pope told pilgrims gathered in St. Peter's Square that the Asian people are “particularly dear to me.”
He said that the visit of bishops from Asia to his ecumenical world day of prayer meeting in Assisi last month “gave me the opportunity to feel closer to the populations there, populations which are always present in my thoughts and in my prayers.”
Jesuit Archives Point to Existence of El Dorado
Mario Polia, an archeologist from the University of Lima, wrote in the Italian journal Archeo that the archives include a 16th-century report to the Pope by the Jesuit father general, reported the London daily. The report said the missionaries were planning to construct a cathedral “made of gold blocks” to dedicate the city to God. It identified the site as Rio Madre de Dios in the foothills of the Andes in southern Peru. The report urged secrecy of the discovery lest it lead to mass hysteria.
Polish explorer and author Jacek Palkiewicz, who gives courses teaching survival skills in extreme conditions, was to make a reconnaissance mission to the area earlier this month.
Cardinal Cassidy Voices Concern Over Refugees
The week before, Australia's ambassador to Ireland and the Holy See, in an interview with the Melbourne daily, revealed details of Pope John Paul's disquiet over the issue. The bishops’ conference of Australia and Archbishop George Pell of Sydney also have voiced concerns over the treatment of asylum seekers and conditions in detention centers.
Last month, illegal immigrants from Afghanistan began a hunger strike at the Woomera detention center in southern Australia and some threatened suicide to protest conditions and the government's decision to freeze visa applications after the fall of the Taliban.
Vatican Euro Found Circulating Before Debut Date
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 8 — A Vatican euro coin was found circulating in Italy illegally, raising concerns over security at Italy's national mint, where the coins are being minted along with Italian ones.
Police said a Vatican two-cent euro coin was being used as change in a store. Like each of the 12 countries using the new currency, the Vatican has been allowed to stamp its own design on one side of the coin. It bears the image of Pope John Paul. But it is not supposed to circulate until March 1.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Charity in a World Obsessed by Profit DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II, opening the penitential season of Lent, said Feb. 13 that almsgiving and acts of charity are needed more than ever “in our world where often a logic prevails that is characterized by the quest for profit and earnings at all cost.”
The Holy Father urged Catholics to give generously during the 40 days of fasting, prayer and charity leading to Easter.
“That same God, who created us out of his immense love for us and who likewise has destined us out of love to full communion with himself, awaits the same generous, free and conscious response from us,” John Paul told some 4,000 pilgrims attending his weekly general audience on Ash Wednesday.
A special spirit of prayer, reflection and repentance characterizes today's general audience on Ash Wednesday. Together with the whole Church, we begin 40 days of preparation for Easter with the austere sign of the imposition of ashes, together with Christ's exhortation, “Repent, and believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15). Thus, every human being is reminded of his sinful condition and the need for repentance and conversion.
Our Christian faith reminds us that this urgent call to reject evil and to do good is a gift from God, who is the source of all that is truly good for man's life. Everything has its origins in this freely given initiative from God, who created us for happiness and steers all things towards that which is truly good. He anticipates our own desire for conversion by giving us his grace, and supports our efforts to fully accept his saving will.
Love Freely Given
In my Lenten message this year, which was published a few days ago, I wanted to highlight for the entire Catholic world the theme of the gratuitousness of God's initiative in our life, an essential element that spans all of biblical Revelation. Lent is a “providential occasion for conversion,” especially since “it helps us contemplate this wonderful mystery of love,” in light of Jesus’ admonition: “Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give” (Matthew 10:8). Thus, our Lenten journey is revealed in its deepest reality as “a return to the roots of our faith, so that by pondering the measureless gift of grace which is redemption, we cannot fail to realize that all has been given to us by God's loving initiative” (Message for Lent, L'Osservatore Romano, Feb. 6, 2002, p. 5).
With words that are both incisive and timely, the Apostle Paul described the gratuitousness of God's grace, which has reconciled us with him through love. Indeed, he reminds us that “only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7-8). That same God, who created us out of his immense love for us and who likewise has destined us out of love to full communion with himself, awaits the same generous, free and conscious response from us.
We are faced with the widespread feeling that every choice and every act must be dominated by this logic of the market's buying and selling.
Our Response
The road to conversion, which we confidently undertake today, fully corresponds to this original context of love and of gratuitousness. Are not almsgiving and acts of charity, which we are especially invited to carry out during this penitential season, a response to the gratuitousness of God's grace? If we have freely received, we must freely give (Matthew 10:8).
Today's society has a deep need to rediscover the value of gratuitousness, especially in our world where often a logic prevails that is characterized by the quest for profit and earnings at all costs. When faced with the widespread feeling that every choice and every act must be dominated by this logic of the market's buying and selling and that the law of the greatest possible profits must prevail, our Christian faith proposes once again the ideal of gratuitousness, based on an individual's conscious freedom, which is inspired by genuine love.
Let us entrust these 40 days of intense prayer and penance to the Virgin Mary, the “Mother of Fair Love.” May she accompany us and lead us to a celebration worthy of the great mystery of Christ's Passover, the supreme revelation of the heavenly Father's merciful and freely given love.
May you all have a good Lent!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Australian Archbishop Sets Divorce Record Straight
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, Feb. 10 — Claims that Pope John Paul II imposed a blanket prohibition on Catholic lawyers from taking part in civil divorce proceedings were an exaggeration, Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, Australia, wrote in the Sydney daily.
The media misunderstood the Pope, he said, in part because of a “clumsy (and somewhat misleading) English translation of a precise, technical Italian passage” and “by some journalists’ enthusiasm for the unexpected, for a scandal.”
Pope John Paul, in his annual address to the Roman Rota Jan. 28, said that Catholic judges and lawyers must avoid being “personally involved in anything that might imply cooperation with divorce, a ‘plague’ that had devastating consequences for society.”
“Lawyers, however, often have to help tidy up the consequences of human weakness,” Archbishop Pell wrote. He said that Catholic judges and lawyers can participate in divorce proceedings to help ensure the legal rights of all participants.
Fast Like the Muslims, Australian Suggests
THE MERCURY , Feb. 8 — A priest and former Australian justice minister has invited Christians to adapt a Ramadan-style fast during Lent, the Tasmanian daily reported.
Father Michael Tate, who was also once ambassador to the Holy See, suggested fasting from sunrise to sunset on Fridays as a gesture to promote tolerance, reconciliation and solidarity with Muslims.
Father Tate also blamed Australia's restrictive asylum policy as being based on a fear of Islam that is “entrenched in Western culture.”
Father Tate was to launch the fasting initiative outside Parliament Feb. 9, a Saturday, with the help of the Catholic Social Justice Network in Tasmania. The event was to feature the sharing of pancakes, Latin chants and Islamic prayers.
Nuns, Doctors Save Abandoned Palestinian Girl
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, Feb. 9 — Amid almost daily suicide bombings and retaliations and the shooting of Palestinian youth, Catholic nuns and Palestinian and Israeli doctors collaborated to save the live of an abandoned Palestinian girl,whom the nuns named Salaam, Arabic for peace.
Abandoned at birth in a war zone, Salaam was rescued by Palestinian doctors, nursed by Sisters of Charity and given medical care by Israeli doctors, the London daily reported.
The sisters, who run the Holy Family Creche in Bethlehem for abandoned children, raised over $11,000 from Catholic charities in Europe to pay for surgery in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem to correct three defects in the girl's heart.
Priests Fired Upon in Papua New Guinea
THE PAPUA NEW GUINEA POST-COURIER, Feb. 6 — In the latest of a string of violent attacks against Catholic priests
and religious in Papua New Guinea, a bishop and priest were fired at by gunmen as they drove through the capital of Port Moresby, the Papua New Guinea daily reported.
Auxiliary Bishop John Ribat of Bereina and Father Casinuiro Duffey, a French national who serves in the country, were unharmed, though seven bullet holes were left in the side of their car.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Catholic Lawyers and Divorce DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:There has been much misunderstanding about what Pope John Paul II said about lawyers and divorce in his Jan. 28 address to the Tribunal of the Roman Rota. The Key passage follows.
The Church and every Christian must be the light of the world: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Mt 5,16). Jesus’ words have a special application today to the indissoluble nature of marriage. It could perhaps seem that divorce is so firmly rooted in certain social sectors that it is almost not worth continuing to combat it by spreading a mentality, a social custom and civil legislation in favor of the indissolubility of marriage. Yet it is indeed worth the effort! Actually, this good is at the root of all society, as a necessary condition for the existence of the family. Its absence, therefore, has devastating consequences that spread through the social body like a plague — to use the term of the Second Vatican Council to describe divorce — and that have a negative influence on the new generations who view as tarnished the beauty of true marriage.
9. The essential witness to the value of indissolubility is given through the married life of the spouses, in their fidelity to the bond, through all the joys and trials of life. However the value of indissolubility cannot be held to be just the object of a private choice: it concerns one of the cornerstones of all society. Therefore, while all the initiatives that Christians, along with other persons of good will, promote for the good of the family (for example, the celebrations of wedding anniversaries) are to be encouraged, one must avoid the risk of permissiveness on fundamental issues concerning the nature of marriage and the family.
Among the initiatives should be those that aim at obtaining the public recognition of indissoluble marriage in the civil juridical order. Resolute opposition to any legal or administrative measures that introduce divorce or that equate de facto unions-including those between homosexuals- with marriage must be accompanied by a pro-active attitude, acting through juridical provisions that tend to improve the social recognition of true marriage in the framework of legal orders that unfortunately admit divorce.
On the other hand, professionals in the field of civil law should avoid being personally involved in anything that might imply a cooperation with divorce. For judges this may prove difficult, since the legal order does not recognize a conscientious objection to exempt them from giving sentence.
For grave and proportionate motives they may therefore act in accord with the traditional principles of material cooperation. But they too must seek effective means to encourage marital unions, especially through a wisely handled work of reconciliation.
Lawyers, as independent professionals, should always decline the use of their profession for an end that is contrary to justice, as is divorce. They can only cooperate in this kind of activity when, in the intention of the client, it is not directed to the break-up of the marriage, but to the securing of other legitimate effects that can only be obtained through such a judicial process in the established legal order. In this way, with their work of assisting and reconciling persons who are going through a marital crises, lawyers truly serve the rights of the person and avoid becoming mere technicians at the service of any interest whatever.
I entrust to the intercession of Mary, Queen of the Family and Mirror of Justice, the heightening of everyone's conviction of the good of the indissolubility of marriage. To her I also entrust the zealous work of the Church and of her children, together with that of many other men and women of good will, in this cause that is so crucial for the future of humanity.
With these wishes, as I ask divine assistance on all your activities, Prelate Auditors, Officials and Advocates of the Roman Rota, I warmly impart my Blessing to you.
----- EXCERPT: FROM THE HOLY FATHER ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Prosecute Predatory Priests DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:In response to your editorial “The Abuse Crisis” (Jan. 20-26), I would first like to say that this letter is not meant to disparage good clergy. I fully understand the media greatly overplays the problem of abuse in the Church when it does surface and I certainly don't agree with their tactics. I also appreciate the effort the Vatican is making in order to clamp down on priests who are abusive.
Unfortunately, the abusers are only part of the problem. What makes these problems doubly egregious is the fact that those priests/bishops/cardinals around the abusers have often covered for them.
They ignore complaints until there are so many that they can't ignore them any more. At that point, they make sure the abuser is moved to another parish. Often, this is not a one-time move, but the abuser ends up being moved several times.
It is nice to think that perhaps the practice of moving an abuser from parish to parish will finally stop, in favor of these priests being defrocked. But abuse is a secular crime as well as a moral one and it deserves to be prosecuted in a court of law. Any clergy who become aware of such abuse from one of their brothers should turn them in to the police.
Those who covered for them also need to find ways to make amends to the victims and families they have betrayed by their silence and lies. A spoken, heartfelt apology is a start, but it should not be the end.
The only way the Church will truly be seen as changing for the better in regard to this problem is to treat it like everyone else does — as a crime that needs to be prosecuted. The Church must not leave it up to the victims and families alone to ensure that prosecution happens.
DEBORAH SULLIVAN Leominster, Massachusetts
True Confessions
Imbedded in your article “A Farewell to Candy: Kids and Lent” (Feb. 10-16) was an insert, “Confession for Children.” This is a wonderful start for an examination of conscience.
I am sure many of your readers will share this with their children, but adults need this as well — even more so.
I have mentioned numerous times to priests that, although they do include the word “reconciliation” as part of their homilies on occasion, only once have I heard a priest brave enough to stand there and slowly read the Ten Commandments, along with sins under each one. He read from A Primer for Confession by Father Frederick Miller, S.T.D. He minced no words, and it was awesome.
Adults need to be reminded, especially those who have been away from the confessional for some time.
The Church might hope that Catholics will refer to the Catechism of the Catholic Church for an examination of conscience. A few people might, but just think how many more will get the message if it is heard from their priest. Please give us an adult version of this article. We all need to be reminded.
If anyone is interested, the Primer mentioned above is pamphlet #4005 and can be ordered by writing to The Faith Guild, St. Martin de Porres Lay Dominican Community, New Hope, KY 40052.
As an added note, the priest who read the Ten Commandments to us at Mass is the only priest I have ever heard admit that he goes to confession. What a great role model.
DEANNA CHARVES Marlborough, Massachusetts
Caviezel Fan
Thank you for your “Inperson” interview with James Caviezel, a young actor I had never heard of until I received my Feb. 2-9 issue (“This Star Wants Heaven”). As someone who almost never sees movies or television, I generally only glance at the feature celebrity interview each week, but this one caught my attention.
Even devout, practicing Catholics, famous and not-so-famous, speak of their faith as something that helps them live each day and prosper in some material, physical or psychological ambition. Caviezel is the kind of Catholic I have seen more often in recent years: young, devoted to Mary and the Church and, above all, striving for holiness through prayer and the sacraments. They long for holiness, which is nothing less than union with Christ.
What a wonderful future the Church has! P.S. The Harry Potter controversy letters from young readers show enormous sophistication and reasoning ability. Are all Register readers so articulate and intelligent?
CAROL TUTTLE Falls Church, Virginia
Right Warrior, Wrong War
Barbara NicolosI's interview with actor James Caviezel is both refreshing and moving. However, the introductory paragraph describes The Thin Red Line, in which Caviezel gives a masterful performance, as a Vietnam War film. Actually the film is about Guadlcanal in 1942 — a major island battle in the Pacific during World War II.
GEORGE GRAF Hartford, Connecticut
Thanks, Father
Thank you Father McNair for raising questions about Islam in an honest and
rational way. We will never have peace if we are not honest.
M. E. GILLSON Charlotte, NC
Holy Harry?
In Anne Marie Sohler's letter to the editor, “Potter Paranoia” (Feb. 3-9), she says that J.K. Rowling shows the “holiness of human life” in the Harry Potter books.
I can't help but wonder just where that sanctity is exemplified. In book two, the entire story line revolves around solving the mystery of who is turning people into stone, and the only remedy for their revival is a potion made with the root of the mandrake plant. The root of the mandrake plant is a human baby! Throughout the story, they are waiting for the roots to mature. When they do, they are cut up, the potion is made, and the stone people are restored.
It sounds a lot like embryonic stem-cell research and cloning — growing an embryo (“It's not a human being yet,” they argue) in order to heal someone else. There is no evidence that Ms. Rowling is showing the “holiness of human life” as Miss Sohler says, nor is she consistent in showing the “joy and power of innocence.” While the unicorn is seen as being innocent, pure and defenseless, and it is seen as a terrible crime to slay one, there is no such concern over cutting up an innocent, pure and defenseless human baby to make a potion.
Even in an imaginary, magical world, a human baby, even if it is portrayed as being the root of a plant, ought to get at least as much respect as that of an animal. To claim pro-life undertones when dealing with the unicorn, while omitting the obvious degrading of human life in the image of the mandrake plant would be disingenuous, or at least misleading. Miss Sohler says, “The truth often hides in the secular world.” What “truth” is hiding here?
The book is one more thing that is forming children's views on life issues. When an animal — pure and defenseless as it may be portrayed — is held in higher esteem than a human baby — especially portrayed as a plant root, it is not the truth about the dignity of human life that is being proclaimed, nor is it the culture of life that is being built up.
COLLEEN CHANCE Utica, Illinois
Heartening News
Your issue of Feb. 10-16 was excellent. From pharmacists who will no longer dispense abortion drugs, to Catholic doctors who will not prescribe contraception; from teen-agers who are unafraid to voice pro-life opinions, to the success of adoration programs for small children: The future of our Church and society is full of hope.
MELANIE POSER South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: National Bodoh Register DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:I would like a copy of the National Catholic Register that has a picture of the sisters from the Dominican Order of St. Cecilia at Nashville, Tenn. (“A Good Vocations Problem,” Feb. 3-9).
My daughter, Dominican Sister Suzanne Bodoh, is pictured on the front cover and my grandson, Tommy Bodoh, is on the back cover [in Baby Mugs].
THEODORE J. BODOH
Necedah, Wisconsin
Editor's note: What an amazing coincidence. We've sent a copy of the paper — and a subscription card — to Mr. Bodoh. ----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Racism Rises ó And Falls ó Over Cornflakes DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:
It was terrifying.
This morning, over corn flakes and juice, my son informed me that he was “glad there aren't more African-American kids at my school.” He was calm, rational, matter-of-fact, no different than he ever is while getting ready for another day at school.
I choked. Literally. We've worked so hard to present to our young the great blessings of diversity, to warn our children away from the evils of racism. I thought we'd made sure there was plenty of ethnic diversity in their orbit. Obviously, I was wrong.
“Honey, why on earth would you say such a thing?” I asked, slack-jawed.
“I had to watch the news for homework. They interviewed these kids in jail and they were all black,” he said, shoving another spoonful of flakes in his mouth.
“But … but …” I sputtered, praying silently for guidance, vowing to myself that the TV had to go.
“I know it's not their fault,” he continued. “Jack at school says the black people do most of the crime because they're mad at us. But I didn't do anything to them, so nobody should be mad at me.”
“You are doing something to them, to all God's children, when you form an opinion on a whole race by the actions of some of its individuals.”
“Come on, Mom,” he moaned. “Remember when we went on vacation and we were at that swimming pool, and that black boy pushed me off the slide for no reason? That proves it.”
In our home, there are chats and then there are talks. Suddenly, we were about to have a talk.
Who had taken my sweet son while I wasn't looking and replaced him with a casual racist? Instantly, I launched a mission to get my boy back. I jumped up and started clearing the table, starting with his breakfast dishes.
“Hey!” he said. “I wasn't done with those!”
“Oh yes — you're done all right,” I said with bluster as I set the dishes aside. “We need to talk.”
“Sorry,” he said, eyes wide. He knows better than to argue when Mom sounds like that, knows what a mid-meal table-clearing means.
“OK, Let's start with the one African-American kid who ever pushed you in your whole life,” I said, re-taking my seat. “I assume there were no others, correct?”
“Right,” he said. “Just the kid at the pool.” “Just that one. And how many white kids have pushed you over the years?” I demanded, staring into his brown eyes. “Ten? Twenty? Or too many to count?”
“I guess … yeah, too many to count,” he said. “I mean, I never thought about counting.”
“So it would be more correct to say that you only noticed the push you got on vacation because it happened to come from an African-American. Now let's talk about your friend Jack's assumption about anger and crime.”
When did my son become a racist?
I had to pick my strategy carefully here. Adolescents are not known for their long attention spans. Did I want to discuss movie stereotypes? Racism equals unemployment and unfair housing, equals poverty, equals despair, equals crime?
“We worry about school shootings all the time, don't we?” I said. “Remember when we lived in Colorado? How scared we were when Columbine happened? Who did the shooting there — black kids or white kids?”
He remained silent, but nodded slowly. I could see the lights of his more thoughtful side starting to come on.
“Let me ask you this,” I said, taking his hands across the table. “The people who killed Jesus — were they white or black?”
“I don't … We don't know for sure,” he admitted. “And how about the Lord himself? The Lord and his disciples. What color was their skin?”
“We don't really know that either,” he said. “Why do you think it is that the writers of the Gospels, who we believe were writing down exactly what God prompted them to write, left out details about who was white and who was black and who was brown and who was anything else?”
“I guess they didn't think it was important,” he said.
“Right. Thank you. It isn't important.” I said. “Race is not to be a factor in the working out of our salvation, or in the way we deal with one another. What if Jesus had said, ‘Well, men crucified me, so I'm only going to save women.’ Where would you be then?”
Silence and blinks. My good boy had come back, and I knew that, at school today, old Jack was going to get an earful. Hopefully, Jack would take this new perspective home and spill it at his dining room table.
I remembered a Scripture passage that had always resonated with me, from childhood, and I paraphrased it for my son:
“Whoever says they love Jesus yet hate their brother is a liar. When we separate ourselves from other human beings, we separate ourselves from Christ, our best and most unfailing friend.”
My boy nodded again and, after a moment, solemnly asked if he could have his breakfast back. I suggested it might be better for both of us to stay hungry the rest of the morning so that we could remember the talk through the day, to let the emptiness of our stomachs remind us of the emptiness hatred can cause in our hearts.
He agreed, gathered up his school books and said: “Thanks, Mom.”
Thanks be to God!
Susan Baxter writes from Mishawaka, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Susan Baxter ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: THE 'LEt'S ROLl' PRESIDENCY DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:We sometimes forget the importance of words, words backed by content. We forget the need we have for public events to be explained to us, of our need to understand what is going on. We are a country that claims to live by persuasion, but we are also a country that needs to live by the truth of things. For example, the temptation right now is to think that the incidents of Sept. 11 were a kind of one-shot affair — that they will not happen again, so we can get back to our “normal” lives. But, as President Bush reminded us in his remarkable State of the Union Address on Jan. 29, time is not on our side. “I will not wait on events while dangers gather,” he said. “I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer.”
The president has insisted that the danger continues, that the war will be long. One of the purposes of his address was to explain, in the light of what we now know after the Afghan war especially, just what these further dangers are. He lists them. There have been efforts or plans formulated against nuclear power plants, water supplies, embassies and public buildings. Thus far these have been prevented. Part of this prevention was the resolve that the president himself has shown in facing the wide scope of this danger. He has proved to be a man of action, of careful analysis of what causes the dangers and what must be done about them. He is a realist. He noted that the American people themselves seemed to change after Sept. 11. Many came forward in acts of great generosity and courage; many died. We were beginning to think that we were irredeemably decadent, but the aftermath of the attacks revealed depths of character that we had ignored or even disdained.
The president was tender, even poignant, when it came to acknowledging some who suffered personal losses — the wife of a Marine, the father of two fire-fighters, the boy who brought a football for his lost father. He acknowledged his own gracious wife. We have a sense that we have here a man whose character is not out of proportion to the dignity of his office or the demands of the times. He shows a humble respect for the military and its accomplishments — something that we have had to wait too long to see. And he gives credit to others. “Our progress,” he said, “is a tribute to the spirit of the Afghan people, to the resolve of our coalition, and to the might of the United States military.”
Evil for the Opposing
Pope John Paul II, in his Jan. 10 address to the Papal Diplomatic Corps, remarked: “The legitimate fight against terrorism, of which the abhorrent attacks of last September 11 are the most appalling expression, has once again let the sound of arms be heard.” President Bush has carefully tried to explain the range of this “legitimacy” to the world, however much many insist on thinking that we are arrogant or hypocritical in the process. Still, the president affirmed, “those of us who have lived through these challenging times have been changed by them. We've come to know truths that we will never question: Evil is real, and it must be opposed.” If many elements of our culture try to teach us that evil is either relative or nonexistent, still we have a political leader willing to call things by their proper names.
The president talked of the economy, the budget and homeland defense — all of which are now intimately tied up with the war, a very expensive war, as he noted. “We have spent more than a billion dollars a month, over $30 million a day,” he said. He spoke of voluntary service and of the need to relate jobs and accomplishment. He did not relate this all to the condition of the family or a concept of the economy that placed the family more at the center of what we want or need. His comments on volunteerism are welcome. Whether government-sponsored initiatives, such as the Peace Corps, are the best way to go might be wondered about. But there's nothing wrong with trying. “The time of adversity offers a unique moment of opportunity, a moment we must seize to change our culture,” said the president. “Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness, I know we can overcome evil with greater good.” These words, of course, stem primarily from our religious tradition, whose fruits we can talk about without mentioning their origins.
— President George W. Bush
One of the most remarkable passages in the Jan. 29 address was almost right out of Cicero or something we have read in various encyclicals since Pope Leo XIII. Here the president touched upon the universal notion of human purpose that America has associated with itself from its beginnings, but a notion that goes back to our classical and revelational origins.
“America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and unchanging for all people everywhere,” said the president. “No nation owns these aspirations and no nation is exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture, but America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits of powers on the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice and religious tolerance.”
Re-Birth of the West?
We might wonder whether we do all these things, and whether what is meant by each might need to be spelled out, but the fact is that, here, the president did associate himself with an ancient purpose.
Let me cite, for comparison, Cicero's famous statement about “true law,” if only to remind us that what the president affirmed has a long history:
“True law is reason, right and natural, commanding people to fulfill their obligations and prohibiting and deterring them from doing wrong. Its validity is universal; it is immutable and eternal. Its commands and prohibitions apply effectively to good men, and those uninfluenced by them are bad. Any attempt to supersede this law, to repeal any part of it, is sinful; to cancel it entirely is impossible. Neither the Senate nor the Assembly can exempt us from its demands; we need no interpreter nor expounder of it but ourselves. There will not be one law at Rome, one at Athens, or one now and one later, but all nations will be subject all the time to this one changeless and everlasting law.”
It is often said that the American founders were indeed influenced by this part of the Roman republican tradition.
Finally, let me comment on the president's awareness of the moral condition of the culture, something spelled out in graphic detail, I think, in Patrick Buchanan's new book, The Decline of the West. The president seems to be aware of this issue, though his approach to it is indirect.
“None of us would ever wish the evil that was done on Sept. 11,” noted the president, “yet, after America was attacked, it was as if our entire country looked in a mirror and saw our better selves. We were reminded that we are citizens, with obligations to each other, to our country, to history. We began to think less of the goods we can accumulate and more about the good we can do. For too long our culture has said, ‘If it feels good, do it.’ Now American is embracing a new ethic, a new creed: ‘Let's roll.’”
That latter phrase, of course, referred to the courage of the young businessman on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept.11, the man who realized from a cell-phone call from his wife what the terrorists were up to and decided to do what he could.
There is much to reflect on in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 2002. It reveals an awareness of the condition of our culture, an awareness of the nature of real enemies. It is also a statement of principle and of persuasion. Words as well as deeds, lives, and buildings make a nation. These are noble words; we should, I think, acknowledge their power and good sense.
Jesuit Father Schall teaches political science at Georgetown University. Read more of his writings at www.moreC.com/schal
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: James Schall, SJ ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: The Future's So Bright, You'll Need Sunglasses in Toronto DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Through the Christian discipleship of an 80-year-old man, the Catholic faith inspired more than 2 million young people to make a Roman pilgrimage in the year 2000.
No other faith in the world can attract that kind of a crowd. The Circus Maximus was filled with more than 200 confessionals. The major basilicas were open until 11 every night and still the confessional lines ran long and deep.
If you didn't make it to Rome for the last World Youth Day, you may want to start making plans to be in Toronto this coming July for the next one.
The signs that Toronto ‘02 will be every bit as exhilarating as Rome ‘00 were evident in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 22. At this year's March for Life, held each January on the anniversary of the infamous decision that legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade, it was estimated that at least half the 100,000 or so marchers were under 25. As reported in the Register, “scores of school buses brought students from colleges and high schools from every corner of the United States.”
My point? Take heart, older generations. All is not lost with the young — we are inheriting your mantle of faith and fortitude.
Some of us actually did listen to our parents and teachers. Lots of us, in fact. In some ways, we're even taking the faith a step further than it seems to have been in recent times. Following the lead of Pope John Paul II, the only Holy Father we' ve known, we're becoming less defensive and more fearlessly assertive about engaging the culture around us with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
But don't take it from me. Take it from a few “Gen-Xers” — make that members of the “JPII generation” — who are working hard for the pro-life cause.
Jason Evert, a 26-year-old representative of Catholic Answers, the apologetics organization in San Diego, travels around the country encouraging young people to practice chastity. To date, he has spoken to more than 55,000 teen-agers. He says his greatest reward has been the comments he regularly gets from members of his audience, who frequently express their appreciation for his part in changing their lives for the better.
Twenty-somethings Anna Halpine and Mark DeYoung head the World Youth Alliance, a global coalition of young people dedicated to promoting the dignity of the person at international events such as U.N.-related conferences. When the United Nation's other youth representatives clamor for so-called “reproductive rights,” and claim to speak for the youth of the world, the WYA responds with unambiguously pro-life messages. Before joining with WYA, Anna worked at the European Parliament and Mark co-founded Why Life?, a national youth organization dedicated to life, and a monthly teen publication called Reality Check.
Edel Finnegan, 33, moved to Washington, D.C. at the end of 1991. She wasn't sure what she was going to do, but she knew she wanted to volunteer at a crisis-pregnancy center. In 1996, after working for the marketing department of a local trade association, she became director of A Woman's Choice, the center where she had been volunteering. Convincing women to give birth to their babies is only part of her work. Edel explains: “Ultimately, our society as a whole may not want to hear our message, but individual women will. That is what will make the difference.”
While pursuing a master's degree in theology, 31-year-old Mo Fung Woltering also headed the Cardinal Newman Society, a group dedicated to restoring the Catholic character of our universities.
In his current work as assistant director of public policy at American Life League, he analyzes various pieces of life-issues legislation and prepares relevant pro-life responses, including peaceful demonstrations.
Michelle Powers, also 31, a partner of the Virginia public-relations firm Tarne Powers & Associates, works with various pro-life groups and bioethics specialists. She was at the center of the two major bioethics events: Aug. 9, 2001, when President Bush announced the stem-cell research decision, and Thanksgiving weekend, when she spearheaded the organization of Sen. Sam Brownback and other leaders for a news conference after Advanced Cell Technology's cloning announcement.
Half of the staff members at Priests for Life in New York are under 35. Elisabeth Townsend, the organization's youth-outreach coordinator, is working to unite them with other young pro-life leaders from various other faith traditions. In spring 2003, there'll be a Generation Life event in Washington, D.C. More than 100,000 young people will gather to stand against abortion and for chastity.
Young people all, young people whose hearts are open to, and hungry for, what only the Catholic faith can give them.
You saw the youngest of the JPII generation in Rome two years ago; you see them building a culture of life and a civilization of love every day.
And, come July, you'll see the next ranks joyfully embracing their assignment at World Youth Day Toronto, for which, by Jan. 29, more than 92,000 young pilgrims from 114 countries had already registered. Go to www.wyd2002.org and see the celebration of faith, hope and love taking shape even now.
Duc in altum!
Pia de Solenni, a theologian based in Washington, D.C., welcomes e-mail at adsum00@yahoo.com.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Pia de Solenni ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Surfing With Grace ó and Faith ó in California DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:DANA POINT, Calif. — Say “missionary” and 13-year-old Neil Murphy does not necessarily think of men who centuries ago crossed the sea on rickety boats to spread the faithh in foreign lands. He is more likely to think of a surf camp he went on last Summer. On the beaches of the Pacific, some evangelists have found a novel means of getting across their message — the California Surf Camp.
The camp, which began last year along the California coast, provides surfing instruction (and autographs) from professional surfers like Dave Pinto, a Catholic, along with daily religious instruction from chaplain Father Juan Gabriel Guerra and seminarian Brother Joseph Freymann.
“It was fun,” Neil Murphy said from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., about the week he spent last year at the surf camp. “We would have Mass and breakfast and then go surfing.”
In fact, it was the religious component that was most attractive to Neil. His mother, Sandra, explained that she and her son had just joined the Church last Easter. “Neil got me to church,” she explained, noting that it is usually the other way around.
Then, when a family emergency interfered with the family's original summer plans, Sandra wanted to do something special for Neil. “He had always wanted to go to surf camp,” she recalled. Then one Sunday at her parish in Scottsdale, she opened her bulletin, “and there was a surf camp.”
Though at first she was “kind of nervous about sending [Neil] off,” Murphy said the parish youth minister “told me that he knew the people running [the camp].” That endorsement, and Neil's positive experiences, “made all my worries go away,” she added.
And while their kids were away, parents could even check California Surf Camp's Web site, which was updated throughout the week, to see photographs of them riding the waves.
Leading the surf camp were Father Guerra and Brother Freymann, members of the Legionaries of Christ. This summer they will be working with Msgr. Lawrence Baird of St. John Vianney Parish, celebrating Mass and conducting Stations of the Cross for the campers at his beautiful chapel.
Neil was excited by the camp. “The religious part was really cool,” he said. “Father [Guerra] got us into the Mass by asking us questions during the sermon,” he explained, adding “Father was pretty good at [surfing]” too.
The surfing instruction was solid as well. Each surfer was provided with his own equipment and averaged five hours per day surfing. “When we started we were all pretty bad,” Neil said, but the students learned quickly. “I went back to California over fall break, and I could still do it.”
Another 13-year-old, Matt Corbalis of Saratoga, Calif., was also enthusiastic in his praise for the camp. “I always wanted to surf,” he said. “It was a lot of fun.”
In addition to boys from California and Arizona, some came from as far away as Maine and even Mexico for the experience.
The group rented campers and drove along the coast, stopping at a series of top surfing sites. “I liked Ventura [an hour north of Los Angeles] and La Jolla [near San Diego] the most,” said Matt, who plans to spend a second session at the camp this summer.
Spiritual Activities
Brother Freymann assisted Father Guerra with the spiritual element of the camp. Said Brother Freymann, “The campers enjoyed seeing Father Juan and me out there now and again riding the waves with them. I guess it changed their ideas a little.” Brother Freymann said daily Catholic activities included Mass, the rosary, daily talks on Christian virtues, Gospel reflections, and spiritual direction. “The boys were attentive and responded well to [the religious] activities,” he said. “Two of them learned for the first time how to say the rosary, and all grew in their friendship with Christ and knowledge of his love for them.”
Last year's camp was such a success that camp director Miguel Fernandez will oversee three sessions this year for kids aged 9-15 -two for boys (the first from June 23-30, and the second from July 28 - August 4) and perhaps one for girls from July 21-28.
Unlike last year's inaugural camp, which had no home base, the camps this year will be based at Southern California's Dana Point, a well-known surfing Mecca. But like last year, the campers will also sample other Southern California surfing spots between Newport Beach and San Clemente.
Neil Murphy highly recommends the experience to other kids. “It was s-o-o-o-o fun,” he said — with an almost perfect surfer accent.
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: St. Patrick's Cathedral's 'Big' Sister DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Every day, nearly 20,000 people step inside St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Few know it's not the original Catholic heart of Manhattan.
That distinction belongs to St. Patrick's Old Cathedral — the oldest cathedral in the entire Empire State.
Old St. Pat's graciously stepped to the back in 1879, becoming a simple parish church so its replacement uptown could step to the fore. Its Mott Street neighborhood, bordering Chinatown, would later grow to be known as Little Italy. The narrow streets in this part of old Manhattan are reminders of the days when this section of the city teemed with multitudes of poor, Catholic immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Italy.
Earlier, when the cathedral's cornerstone was laid in 1808, this part of town was considered a safe distance from the well-settled lower part of Manhattan; it was considered too wild and remote even for a park.
Today the neighborhood is made up of small shops, trendy boutiques and unique eateries, plus apartments and Little Italy's restaurant row on Mulberry Street The cathedral itself seems to straddle the eras that have passed before it — its stately humility is timeless.
Old St. Patrick's dignified, 19th-century presence comes complete with an ancient churchyard and a stately wall surrounding the property. Yet from the church's moderate size and rather plain facade, I surmised people wouldn't immediately guess it was once a cathedral.
Humble Visage
Major physical change came to the church after a devastating fire in October of 1866 destroyed everything but the outer walls. The architect chosen by Archbishop John McClosky to rebuild the church designed a decidedly unostentatious fa¸ade of smooth brown stucco. The sides of the cathedral remain in their rough, 200-year-old stonework.
Once the rebuilding project was completed, the archbishop rededicated “Old (new)” St. Patrick's in 1868, appropriately on the feast day of its patron saint.
Then, in 1875, four years before the move uptown, this grand first cathedral saw thousands packing the nave, the grounds and the streets to attend Archbishop McClosky's elevation to cardinal — the first American raised to the honor.
So too was St John Neumann, America's first male saint, ordained here — on June 28, 1836. He went on to become bishop of Philadelphia.
Across the street, St. Patrick's Old Cathedral School is the first and oldest parochial school in New York. Founded in 1822 by the Sisters of Charity, the school grew out of the first Catholic orphanage started on the spot in 1817 by Mother Elizabeth Seton, their founder and our first native-born American saint.
In 1826, the original school-orphanage was replaced by the handsome, federal-style brick building standing today that is also looking spiffy as its exterior is being restored. Until recently, the Sisters of Charity still ran the vibrant school of nearly 500 students, which has continuously served generations of immigrant families.
And before the remains of Venerable Pierre Toussaint were moved to St Patrick's uptown, this former black slave, whose cause for canonization is being studied, was buried in the churchyard next to Old St. Pat's in 1853, although he attended St. Peter's further downtown.
With its saints and potential saints, the old cathedral proved to be a Catholic melting pot for New York.
Most of its parishioners were immigrants, mostly Irish, plus Italians and Germans, then a smattering of other nationalities when this St. Patrick's was dedicated on the feast of the Ascension, May 4, 1815, as the seat of a diocese that extended north to Albany. Today, that immigrant tradition continues with Dominican, Hispanic and Chinese immigrants in the parish melting pot.
A Mighty Fortress
The parishioners of the 1830s and ‘40s had to endure the anti-Catholic outbreaks plaguing the city. One unfriendly group marching toward old St. Patrick's turned back when they learned the men of the church, well organized by Bishop John Hughes, were ready to protect the cathedral. As an additional safeguard, the bishop added the brick walls that still remain around the property.
In 1866, an accidental fire spread though the neighborhood and devastated the edifice. After it was reconstructed, the plain façade hid a splendid new interior distinguished by clustered piers, gothic ribbed vaults and arches. A century later, the 1970 restoration and renovations carefully melded updates into these original gothic lines.
Generations of worshipers since the 19th century have admired the original gold-leafed and ornately carved wood reredos behind the large marble altar. Statues of the Apostles, carved of wood, line both sides of it.
In the center of the reredos, I was immediately drawn to the magnificent painting of the Resurrection of Christ. Jesus gloriously bursts forth from the tomb. It looks like a work by one of the great masters of the past. But it really dates to 1970, when the church commissioned one of its own parishioners, an artist, to paint it.
Along both sides of the nave, the tall, vivid stained-glass windows in Gothic style framework give everyone a variety of spirit-stirring scenes.
Jesus and Mary are honored in individual windows. Jesus also appears as the Good Shepherd and again with children admiring him. Mary is glorious in her Assumption.
In another handsome window, as part of a display of the Holy Family, St. Joseph lovingly holds the child Jesus.
Sts. Anne, John the Baptist, Anthony — and, of course, Patrick — are memorialized, too. Beneath these windows, fine life-sized monochromatic statues of Our Lord, Our Lady and more saints have replaced the original side pews.
Weekends, the 1870s Urban organ, one of only a handful of such magnificent instruments left in the city, is used for liturgies. When today's visitors hear this unmodified organ's original sounds, they can make a spiritual and tangible connection with 19th-century congregations and decades of worship-pers.
Visitors to this landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, should find, as I did, that the church still keeps the old “cathedral “ air about it. I treasured this beauty, with its great reverence for God and its aura of sanctity, and the grand way the church preserves the history of the Catholic faith in New York City.
St. Patrick's Old Cathedral is unquestionably the old, but ever new, “heart of old New York.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, New York City ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: Chaste, Christian - and Cool DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:It's difficult to be a committed Christian and a teen-ager in today's culture.
No matter how deep and sincere your faith is, you're still under immense pressure to come across to your peers as “cool.” It seems essential to your survival that your tastes in music, movies, clothes and friends imply at least some level of rebellion against parental authority and values. Even more important is a knowing, if not downright cynical, attitude toward established institutions like schools and churches.
Most present-day Hollywood youth films (American Pie, Scream, Scary Movie, Road Trip, etc.) pander to this point of view, adding to the mix an implicit encouragement of permissive sex and drug use. The industry strives to make films that are edgy enough, and have a bad enough attitude, that the kids who first see them will buzz about the experience — using it to reinforce their cool credentials — and thus put pressure on their peers to follow suit.
In these kinds of movies, Christians, if they're depicted at all, are either weird fanatics or cloying Pollyannas. Either way, they're totally uncool.
A Walk to Remember, based on Nicholas Sparks’ novel, boldly flies in the face of these conventions. It's the first overtly pro-Christian youth movie to be released by a major Hollywood studio since the 1950s. (Omega Code, Spitfire Grill and Left Behind, the other recent films to propagate these kinds of values, were all financed by independent companies committed to a religious point of view.)
Remember, like most mainstream Hollywood product, works within an established genre. In this case, it's a romance between two teens, one of whom is part of the “in-crowd” and the other who's a social leper. What makes this film so unique and honest is that the outcast is a Christian.
The action begins with a typical Hollywood-style “in-group” ritual. A small clique of North Carolina high-school kids gathers at night at the local cement factory, where a newcomer, Gephardt (Matt Lutz), is hoping to prove himself by diving from a great height into a shallow pond. All of this is against the law. The leader of the pack and the coolest of the cool is Landon Carter (Shane West), who has just broken up with the group's beauty, Belinda (Lauren German).
Gephardt hurts himself badly in the dive, and the kids are unexpectedly faced with a moral choice. They must decide whether to help him and risk being busted by the cops or to run away and keep their records clean. Everyone flunks the test except for Landon, who pauses to help the injured boy and, consequently, is arrested.
Gephardt adheres to the cool teen's code of silence and Landon isn't charged. But school authorities wisely mandate that Landon participate in the school play and a tutoring program for younger kids so that he'll be forced to associate with students not in his clique.
Prominent in both these activities is Jamie Sullivan (Mandy Moore), the daughter of the local Baptist minister (Peter Coyote). She's shunned and mocked by Landon's friends because, among other things, she dresses modestly, wearing long dresses, baggy sweaters and no makeup.
Even worse, Jamie is labeled a “Bible-hugger” who does more than just echo her father's beliefs. She has worked out her own relationship with God and is unapologetic about it. “I have faith,” she says to Landon. “Don't you?”
Jamie helps Landon learn his lines for the play. But, in front of his friends, he pretends not to know her. Jamie is attracted to Landon but refuses to be his “secret friend.” Unlike the Hollywood stereotype of a Christian, she stands up for herself, using a quick verbal wit to fight back.
These conflicts make Landon realize he loves her, and they become a couple, which makes her a target of abuse from his ex-girlfriend and the rest of his clique. Landon is forced to choose between Jamie and the “in-crowd” and, when he sticks by her, he too is ostracized. Through all of this, Jamie remains true to her principles and, because she believes in remaining chaste until marriage, their romance has a sweet innocence rarely seen in Hollywood films since the 1940s.
Jamie's father, a widower, is afraid that Landon will be a bad influence on her. Landon must make his case to the minister. “I'm just asking you to do for me what you preached to us every day in church,” he says. “To have faith in me.” The older man relents.
Landon has other issues that may have pushed him into hanging out with the wrong crowd. His father (Robert Treveiler) has abandoned him and his mother (Daryl Hannah), and the teen must cope with the anger he feels.
The first two-thirds of the movie are intelligent in their observation of teen life and inventive in their characterizations. The final section takes a sentimental turn that may bring tears to your eyes, but it's a come-down from the originality of what went before. Among other things, all the characters who have been behaving badly have a change of heart, a plot twist that's too pat and predictable.
Parents sould be aware of occasional profanities and ugly sexual references that Landon's friends utter. These will unsettle some. Unfortunately, it's true-to-life for that kind of crowd. Director Adam Shankman (The Wedding Planner) and screen-writer Karen Janszen skillfully counterpoint the clique's foul language with Jamie's refusal to swear and, as Landon draws closer to her, those words are dropped from his vocabulary, making an effective dramatic point.
Whatever happens, Jamie never wavers in her faith. Her example transforms all those around her — particularly Landon, whose life is given new meaning. This is a message rarely found in contemporary popular culture.
A Walk to Remember is well worth seeing, especially for late teens and young adults who are no strangers to the dreadful movies usually aimed at their demographic. It won't single-handedly undo the damage those entries have wrought, but it makes a strong counter-statement to them. Best of all, it pulls this off while sustaining the sense that it's a cool film to have seen.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: A Walk to Remember is a mainstream teen-film breakthrough ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Acts (1997)
The spreading of the Gospel by Jesus’ Apostles after his resurrection and ascension is a story key to our understanding of how to be his disciple today. Acts, a four-hour dramatic interpretation of the New Testament text, was produced by Visual Entertainment, a Dallas-based Protestant company. It is narrated by an elderly St. Luke (Dean Jones), who makes his chronicle of these events part of his evangelical mission as he voyages on a Roman trade ship years after they've happened.
St. Paul (Henry Arnold) is, of course, the central figure. Director Reghardt van den Bergh and screen-writer Joyce Marcarelli depict him as a forceful and sometimes angry personality who displays great healing powers and a profound capacity for love.
His persecution of St. Stephen (Francesco Quinn) and conversion experience are believable and emotionally involving. St. Paul's missionary journeys, his subsequent arrest and sojourn in Rome are presented as suffused with both suffering and joy. The filmmakers also show St. Peter (James Brolin) at work baptizing, preaching and healing.
The Train (1965)
Most Hollywood action films don't make you think, and few war movies raise issues beyond those of bravery and the struggle at hand. The Train, based on Rose Valland's novel and directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate), asks whether the preservation of works of art is worth a human life. Set in 1944 during the German retreat, it's the story of how a Nazi officer (Paul Scofield) supervises the transportation by train of a collection of masterpieces from Paris to his homeland.
The paintings’ curator (Suzanne Flon) persuades resistance leader, Labiche (Burt Lancaster), to stop their theft by describing them as “the soul of France.”
Frankenheimer mounts a breathtaking action-thriller about Labiche's mobilization of blue-collar railroad workers (Michel Simon, Albert Remy and Charles Millot) to risk their lives for creations of beauty they have never seen.
The mechanics of railway operations are recreated with gritty, documentary-like realism. But the fights and chases are more than just visual set pieces. They force the audience to get involved with the issues at stake.
Northwest Passage (1940)
The French and Indian Wars are an often forgotten part of American history. The attacks against colonial territory under British control were savage and so were the reprisals. Northwest Territory, based on Kenneth Roberts’ novel and directed by King Vidor (The Big Parade), focuses on the adventures of a young New Hampshire mapmaker, Langdon Towne (Robert Young), who's been kicked out of Harvard, and his roughneck buddy, Hunk Marriner (Walter Brennan).
In 1759, they join up with a troop of Indian War veterans under the command of the fearless Maj. Robert Rogers (Spencer Tracy). Their mission is to neutralize the French-backed Abenaki tribe, which has been terrorizing the British settlers in the Ohio Valley and western New York.
Rogers’ Rangers must battle the dense forests and untamed rivers before reaching the enemy. Both the French and the Indians try to wipe them out, and they retaliate in kind. Vidor and screenwriters Laurence Stalling and Talbot Jennings capture the rigors and hardships of frontier life with a majestic but bittersweet beauty.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, FEB. 24
2002 Winter Olympic Games: Closing Ceremony
NBC, 8 p.m. live
Tune in and bid the Winter Games farewell. The telecast is live, so the 8 p.m. EST start means airtime an hour earlier in each time zone (for example, 5 p.m. PST).
MONDAY, FEB. 25
16 Days of Glory
ESPN2, noon
This day-after show will recap the Salt Lake City XIX Winter Olympics.
TUESDAY, Feb. 26
The Lamb's Supper
EWTN, 10:30 p.m.
Convert Scott Hahn continues his informative and inspiring exposition of references to the Mass in Scripture, especially in the Book of Revelation (the Apocalypse).
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 27
Egypt's Golden Empire
PBS, 9 p.m.
This 2-1/2-hour special's first segment, “The Warrior Pharaohs,” takes us back to 1570-1400 B.C. and the reigns of Ahmose, the female pharaoh Hatshepshut and her son Thutmosis III. Next, “Pharaohs of the Sun” covers Amenhotep III and his Sudan-to-Syria empire; Akhenaten and Nefertiti; and the close of the Ahmose dynasty with the death of Tutankhamen. Then, “The Last Great Pharaoh” examines Ramses II.
THURSDAY, FEB. 28
The Monster That Ate Hollywood PBS, 9 p.m.
Movie-industry analysts say that giant multinational corporations’ purchase of major film studios has intensified Hollywood's focus on profits. It has also forced filmmakers to make heavily formulaic blockbusters that lend themselves to merchandising tie-ins, foreign release and cross-publicity in the parent company's TV and print venues.
FRIDAY, Mar. 1
Uncommon Knowledge
PBS, 2:30 p.m.
Host Peter Robinson characterizes the guests on his talk show as “creators and innovators of ideas” in government, politics, popular culture and religion. Robinson, an author, was the White House speechwriter who penned the immortal challenge that President Ronald Reagan boldly made in Berlin in 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
SATURDAY, MAR. 2
The Shrine of St. Joseph: The Church for Miracles EWTN, 8 p.m.
More than a few people testify that miracles happen at the Shrine of St. Joseph in St. Louis, Mo. This beautiful Baroque church was built in 1843-1844 and modified in 1865 and 1881. Recently it underwent restoration. Its Altar of Answered Prayers carries the Latin message, Ite ad Ioseph (Go to Joseph). Catholics also venerate the shrine's relic of St. Peter Claver, SJ (1581-1654). He is the patron saint of African-Americans because, although unable to abolish the slave trade in Cartagena, Colombia, he ministered to newly arrived slaves there for decades and baptized 300,000.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Middle-Earth Bubbles Up At Marquette University DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:MILWAUKEE — For both long-time readers of J.R.R. Tolkien and those who became fans by seeing the film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, a chance to catch a glimpse of the creativity of Middle-earth's creator is as close as Marquette University.
An extensive collection of the author's words and work — including the original manuscripts for both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit— can be found in the J.R.R. Tolkien Collection in the Jesuit-run university's Memorial Library.
The movie has attracted media attention to Marquette, said Matt Blessing, an archivist at the university. Attendance at the library's small display of Tolkien material has risen from about 500 to 1,000 visitors annually, Blessing estimated.
Some of the material in Marquette's collection — including various editions of the Catholic author's works, master theses, artists’ illustrations, phonograph records, posters, and scores of fantasy fiction periodicals or “fanzines” from around the world — started accumulating in the 1980s, donated by Tolkien scholars and collectors.
But credit for the collection's primary foundation, which includes more than 11,000 manuscript pages, goes to the late William Ready, who came to Marquette as library director in 1956. He was expected to go out and aggressively pursue new acquisitions, as he had done at California's Stanford University and McMasters University in Ohio, according to Blessing.
“Ready was a collector of first editions as a hobby,” Blessing told the Catholic Herald, newspaper of the Milwaukee Archdiocese. “He was Irish, but raised in Wales, and he had contacts in the rare book trade in London.”
Working through one of those contacts, Bertram Rota, in 1956, Ready was able to approach Tolkien, and negotiate a price for manuscripts of both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Additionally, he obtained two other Tolkien manuscripts: Mr. Bliss, a children's story complete with Tolkien's own ink and watercolor illustrations that was written in the mid-1930s but went unpublished until 1983; and a novella, Farmer Giles of Ham, published in 1949.
At the time, no other institution had expressed an interest in the manuscripts, and Ready purchased the collection for 1,500 English pounds, then valued at $4,700 but the equivalent of about $37,000 today. “It was a significant buy,” Blessing said. “In hindsight, it looks like a great bargain.” The archivist declined to put a current value on the collection, but called it irreplaceable.
It was Ready's great instincts that led him to Tolkien, Blessing believes. “He read Lord of the Rings in 1956 and identified it as a masterpiece.”
Interestingly enough, Tolkien had agreed to speak at Marquette in 1957 and 1959, but because of family concerns had to cancel both times.
Late last year, Marquette's department of special collections and archives received a bequest from the estate of Madison native Richard Blackwelder, an entomologist and zoology educator, who wrote three books on Tolkien. Blackwelder had amassed by his retirement what is believed to be one of the largest Tolkien collections, and it was turned over to the university in 2001.
A longtime benefactor of Marquette's special collections, Blackwelder established the Tolkien Archives Fund in 1987 to provide support for the acquisition and preservation of Tolkien research material.
The collection was microfilmed in the 1970s because of the fragile nature of the material. Tolkien, a college professor, wrote many of the manuscript pages on the back of student exams because there was a paper shortage during World War II, Blessing said.
Beyond the wealth of information which the original manuscript collection offers researchers, the archivist sees the construction of the Rings trilogy unfold in its pages — and a personal portrait of the author.
“Although Tolkien had started constructing Middle-earth years earlier, The Hobbit was sort of a digression, it grew out of bedtime stories that he told his children,” Blessing said. “But over Christmas vacation in 1937, he set out, on the advice of his publisher, to write a sequel to be called The Magic Ring.
“I enjoyed the early drafts because, having read Tolkien's biography, I think that for a father of the 1930s, he was an involved parent, as well as a dedicated scholar and teacher,” Blessing added.
“He wrote his books late at night, after the kids had been tucked in, the next day's lecture written, and term papers graded,” he said. “In the early drafts, there are even illustrations as to what a particular tower or gate looked like. I picture him at his home in Oxford, in his den, doing something for himself because he enjoyed it. That's what I enjoy about the collections.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Margaret Plevak ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: The Bearable Lightness Of Being DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:ON THE UNSERIOUSNESS OF HUMAN AFFAIRS: TEACHING, WRITING, PLAYING, BELIEVING, LECTURING, PHILOSOPHIZING, SINGING,DANCING
byJames V. Schall ISI Books, 2001 250 pages, $24.95
“I want to provide a way of seeing and speaking about the highest things,” writes Jesuit Father James V. Schall, Register columnist and Georgetown professor. And so it is that he posits, in this engaging treatise, that the closest we come to contemplating God is when we play.
According to Father Schall, play and other forms of lightsomeness are activities with which we need to be engaged if we truly seek the truth, which is God. The book's rather odd subTITLE hints at the kinds of “unseriousness” he believes we need to cultivate.
Some of these endeavors will come naturally to the people of our times; others may seem a bit exotic. Father Schall contends, with G.K. Chesterton, that activities like dancing are worth doing, even if done poorly: We need to start somewhere.
Applying a conversational and informal approach, as though he were teaching an informal class, Father Schall marshals a range of authorities and challenges the common wisdom in the process. Plato, St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis and Flannery O'Connor are cited. Peanuts cartoon characters Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt have their say. He observes, with Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, that the only time that really counts is the time we “waste” with friends. It's clear this eclectic cast of people and characters has become Father Schall's close friends and helpful teachers even though he has never met any of them personally.
The book is divided into chapters dealing with such topics as teaching, truth, intellectual poverty, political philosophy and the importance of essays and letters. Between them the author offers meditations and short essays on themes like incarnation, redemption and “last things.”
The work's greatest strength is its ability to prompt its readers to question their assumptions on a wide range of subjects. For example, Father Schall points out that online bookstores, for all their flash and technical impressiveness, are vastly inferior, in many ways, to used bookstores — “in which, for a couple of hundred dollars, one can still find, with some diligence, the essential books of our culture, from the Bible to Shakespeare to Plato, Augustine and Pascal.”
Somewhat obscure essays and letters are some of Father Schall's favorite sources of inspiration.
For example, he shares leisurely, generous anecdotes and quotes about “the perfect day” as described by James Boswell, an under-appreciated Scottish writer.
If the book has a weakness, it's Father Schall's tendency to drift into tangents that are well removed from the paths he sets out on. Also, a careful reading reveals a number of redundancies that ought to have been edited out.
Then again, those are the very qualities that make this work vintage, stream-of-consciousness Schall. And what an erudite, curious — and joyful — consciousness it is. Readers will not go wrong “wasting” the time it takes to cavort with the eternal truths presented, with such an enervating spirit of fun, in On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs.
Wayne A. Holst writes from
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne A. Holst ----- KEYWORDS: Books ----- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Sept. 11 Scholarships
COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS, Feb. 6 — The Jesuits’ Worcester, Mass., college has announced that alumna Heidi Brake Smith has created a scholarship fund to provide a Holy Cross education to children of firefighters, police and rescue workers who graduated from the college and were killed or permanently disabled during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Seven Holy Cross graduates were killed in the attacks.
Schools Reopening
While new Catholic schools tend to locate in growing suburban communities, the reopened schools will “allow us to continue to expand Catholic education not just in the inner city but throughout west Tennessee,” said Memphis bishop J. Terry Steib.
Fostering Vocations
FAIRFIELD UNIVERSITY, Feb. 5 — The Jesuit university in Connecticut announced that it has received a Lilly Endowment grant of close to $2 million to help foster vocations. The grant will support a program for selected sophomores designed to deepen their understanding of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions, live in community, take part in a small reflection groups and special events.
Four other Catholic colleges, including the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., Marquette University in Milwaukee, St. Louis University in St. Louis and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., are among 28 U.S. colleges and universities sharing in $55.3 million in grants from the Lilly Endowment Inc. as part of its ”Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation” initiative.
More Prayer
The survey, reported in the higher education trade publication, found that 32% percent of students are praying more, 24% are spending more time volunteering and 22% are studying more.
Tolkien Mania
AVE MARIA COLLEGE,
Feb. 8 — Following a mock trial, a jury of 12 students has found that film director Peter Jackson was not guilty of desecrating the work of Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, said a press release from the Ypsilanti, Mich., college.
In a “very tongue-in-cheek” program, Jackson was defended by Tolkien biographer Joseph Pearce, and prosecuted by Henry Russell, who argued that the director, in his movie version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, cheapened Tolkien's intent in the classic trilogy. Both are Ave Maria professors.
In a separate development, attendance at Marquette University's display of Tolkien material on its Milwaukee campus — including the original manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings — has risen from some 500 to 1,000 visitors annually, according to the an announcement by the Jesuit university.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Flextime Fears DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:As a manager, I believe that a set work schedule is most productive, so I want my employees to work 8-5. I understand the reasons employees want to come in earlier or leave earlier, depending on personal schedules. But they don't seem to see the downside and, frankly, I know many employees would take unfair advantage of a flexible schedule.
You might first ask yourself what's the most important aspect of the jobs you manage. It's probably making sure that a certain amount of work gets done well in a certain amount of time. If that's the task, then it might not be crucial that folks work 9-6, or 8-5, or even 10-7.
It may depend, however, on how much interaction is necessary between your workforce. Your 6-3 person, who wants to see his son's 4:00 game, would still have five hours of overlap with the guy who works 10-7. Would that be enough for them to be able to work together?
If you're able to make this kind of daily flextime work, you may have better morale, quality and retention. Studies at Boston College have shown that flextime is the most appreciated schedule option for employees. Why? It allows employees the best opportunity to succeed not only at work, but also at home — to be with their families for important events, for example. It thereby improves overall morale and improves employees’ relationships with supervisors.
A positive relationship between supervisor and employee is another key indicator of workplace success. A Carleton University study showed that a supportive manager has more impact on employee productivity than any other program or policy.
Being supportive means the boss displays respect for his employees, is sensitive to their needs, asks about employees’ health and gives positive feedback.
Another way to look at this is that managers who interact supportively with their employees and allow some scheduling flexibility will have a better workforce and increased productivity.
Looking at it from a Catholic point of view this makes perfect sense. As Pope John Paul II has written in his encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), work is for man, man is not for work. We all have to work hard, but the work we do should not dominate us.
If you fear that being flexible or supportive could undermine your authority and the performance of your employees, then tell them about your fear: “I really want to allow you guys to have more flexibility on this job. On the other hand, I'm concerned that some things won't get done on time and that I won't be able to monitor things appropriately. Can we talk about how to be flexible, but still be accountable?”
This puts their needs and your concern in the open. My guess is that all parties can come together to everyone's satisfaction. Besides, if this works, it might give you more flexibility in your hours as well.
Art A. Bennett is a licensed marriage, family and child therapist.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art A. Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Family Friendly Students DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:CATHOLICS MAKE up about 25% of the U.S. population; and more college freshmen in the 2001-2002 class are Catholic (30%) than any other religion. (Next closest are Baptists at 12%.) College freshmen also tend to come from two-parent families and want to raise families of their own.
College freshmen 2001-2002
Source: American Council on Education and University of California Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art A. Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Confessions, Past and Present DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Fifty years ago I made my first confession. I can still picture the event. It happened in the parish church in the small town in Ireland where I grew up. Because the weather that day in 1951 was hot, by Irish standards, Father O'Doherty announced that he preferred to hear confessions in the pews rather than in the stuffiness of the confessional. So I, along with the other boys in second grade, took a turn kneeling beside father in the pew. And after my confession, I received absolution in full view of my classmates.
That was an auspicious beginning to my experiences with the sacrament of confession. But it was only a beginning. In the intervening 50 years, God has seen to it that various people have taught me an increasing appreciation of the Sacrament.
In the early days, my mother would help me with the examination of conscience. Before each confession, she would sit in the big chair in our living room near a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I would kneel at my mother's feet, and she, by means of a series of gentle questions, would lead me through the examination. When it was complete, she would send me on my way to the church.
My father helped me to appreciate confession by his example. On Saturday evening, he would close his store at 9p.m., and walk to the parish church to join the lines of people still waiting for confession. Standing in line with my father, I would see other people I knew: my uncle who owned the town newspaper, our local senator, and teachers from my school.
By the time I was a teen-ager, I did my own examination of conscience. Nevertheless, the image of kneeling beside a mother was reinforced for me when our family went on a pilgrimage to France.
In Paris, in a convent on the Rue du Bac, we visited the site where Our Lady had appeared to St. Catherine Labouré. The main purpose of those apparitions in 1829 had been to reveal the Miraculous Medal. But the aspect of the apparition that impressed me most was the way in which Our Lady related to St. Catherine. During the apparitions, Our Lady would sit in a chair in the chapel and St. Catherine would kneel beside her with her hands on Our Lady's lap.
I found this image strikingly reminiscent of the way my own mother had treated me when I first started going to confession. It is an image that stays with me to this day when I pray to Our Lady.
A number of priests in Ireland and America have taught me over the years to value confession, mainly by exercising a shepherd's heart towards me in the confessional. But there was one occasion on which some priests taught me a lesson of unique significance.
At the 1976 Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, one event involved an all-night prayer vigil in a stadium. During the course of the night, it was announced that priests would be available for confession. At this, several dozen priests walked onto the field and set up pairs of folding chairs. Each priest would occupy one chair, and leave the other for a penitent.
For an hour or so, people came streaming down the stadium aisles, walking across the field to an empty chair, and sitting or kneeling to go to confession. Eventually, everyone in the audience who wanted to had received the sacrament and returned to the seats. For a while, there were again vacant chairs beside the priests down on the field.
No one quite knew what to expect next, but then something amazing happened; one of the priests rose from his chair, walked over to another priest nearby and knelt down at the penitent's chair. Here was a priest going to confession in full view of everyone in the stadium!
Soon, a second priest rose and walked over to another empty chair, and went to confession also. By the time the evening was over, dozens of priests had gone to confession. I had never seen anything like it before and I have never seen the like since.
It impressed me so much at the time that, although I had decided early in the evening I would not go to confession in such a public forum, I changed my mind. I thought that if a priest could be humble enough to go to confession in public, then the least I could do was to follow suit.
By the time of that eucharistic congress, my mother had died and my wife and I were raising a family of our own. I hoped my own children would learn to appreciate confession. Taking the lead from my parents, I helped the younger ones with their examinations of conscience, and I made sure my children would see me waiting in elapse between confessions. This was especially true when the older children reached mid-teenage years. I wondered if there was anything that could be done to get the children to attend confession more often.
Eventually, a saying of Jesus began to sound relevant: “I tell you, there will likewise be more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over 99 righteous people who have no need to repent” (Luke 15:7). When my wife and I read this to the children, we could picture the angels celebrating in heaven every time someone repented. So why should we not have some sort of celebration here on earth after going to confession?
This led us to decide that after confession, we would go out to dinner together as a family. And it would not be just fast food; we would go to a “real restaurant” despite the expense.
In order to make it easier on the teen-agers, we would sometimes go to confession in another parish, where the priests would not recognize us. The children who were too young to go to confession would come to church with the rest of us; they would stay in the pews and say some prayers while the older ones went to confession. In that way, the whole family could take part in going to church, and then going out to the restaurant afterwards.
Cynics may criticize certain aspects of bribery in this approach, but all I know is that it worked for our children.
It worked especially well for our oldest son who later studied confession in some detail. Recently he taught me a valuable lesson based on Christ's famous phrase: “The gates of hell shall not prevail against [the Church]” (Matt. 16:18).
When a person is in mortal sin, my son told me, it is as if that person is already in a certain sense in hell, where the devil would want to keep him forever. But in the sacrament of confession, it is as if the priest goes down into hell, takes the person by the hand and leads him out of hell.
Of course, the devil tries mightily to resist this process of liberation, by shutting tight the fearful gates of hell. In a struggle with a priest of Christ's Church, however, the devil loses the battle: the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church. The priest pushes the gates aside and leads the sinner back into freedom.
Now, when I think of my parish church on a Saturday afternoon, a powerful image comes to mind. According to the world's way of seeing things, it appears as if very little is happening in our quiet town. But in my mind's eye, I see the priests, during confession, pushing aside the gates of hell and leading me and my fellow parishioners back to God.
Dermott Mullan writes from Newark, Delaware.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dermott Mullan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: Teens at the End of Their Road Find a Home DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:MEDFORD, Ore. — A new southern Oregon project welcomes pregnant teens who need the transforming power of good family life.
Magdalene Home, aiming to prevent abortions, has won support from civic workers, elected officials and Church leaders alike.
A cozy house, firm rules, the camaraderie of other women — these changes could help the youths decide against abortion and choose adoption or motherhood instead. That is the reasoning of the founders, many of whom are members of nearby Sacred Heart parish. The five-bedroom house is located in Medford, a city of about 60,000.
A year ago, people in the city noticed a problem. The local St. Vincent de Paul Society was seeing many pregnant girls with no resources. School officials and bemoaned the lack of housing for the teens in trouble. Attempts at safe houses had foundered.
Then Father Liam Cary, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish, got a letter. “I am seven months along, and I have a 1-year-old girl,” said the note from a homeless girl. “Please help us. We need a chance.” The priest was discouraged because he did not know what to do. He and a team of parishioners prayed and searched for answers; Magdalene Home was the result.
“We decided that it was work God wanted us to do,” Father Cary says. “What we want this to be is a home for these women and their children. They need good order and deserve it.”
Organizers are gathering a large corps of private supporters and fund-raisers to keep the home running. They say that plenty of people are willing to write checks to further the pro-life cause.
Serving, Not Marching
“I am just deathly against abortion,” says Dolores Harmon, a key volunteer at the home. “But I am not a marcher or an activist. This project said to me, ‘Let's not march; let's not holler; let's get down to the nitty-gritty and do what we can to save a few babies.’” Harmon, 70, thinks of the home as a place for the young women to heal and face the consequences of poor decisions.
“The girls have done some crazy things. They know it before anyone else does,” she says. “They don't need to be told. This home is really a sanctuary. The girls who accept it as such are going to be okay.”
Named after the follower of Christ with a checkered past — but who was the first to see him risen — the home opened in September. Of the five girls who now live there, three are expecting and two have babies. For the most part, the young women were ejected by their ashamed families. Girls may stay a year or longer at Magdalene Home if directors judge that would mean progress. If the girls receive public aid, they pay nominal rent.
Religion is not a requirement. That might scare away some girls in need, organizers say. But the décor and daily life leaves no doubt that this is a Christian residence.
Four paid housemothers take turns staying in the home to make sure the place is nurturing. But they run a tight ship.
The girls need to hit the books, working toward diplomas or GED certificates. They take turns cooking meals, and everyone must be present at the dinner table. Curfew is 8 p.m. Swearing is taboo. Although there is round-the-clock supervision, no housemother stays all the time. That helps the girls take ownership of the home and form bonds with each other. So far it has worked. Residents have been calling each other “sister.”
Because the high schools offer childcare, the girls can study during the day. Their grades are going up.
“They say that they never got A's and B's before,” says Kathy Morgan, a member of Sacred Heart Parish who has volunteered to direct the project. “This stability helps them to achieve what kids can in any decent family.”
Krystal, 17, moved in to Magdalene Home early in November. Pregnant, she was banished from her home in Central Point because her parents objected to her fiancé.
“They kicked me out in the middle of the night,” she says. Magdalene Home has proven hospitable for Krystal, who plans to finish school, get her own apartment and get married. “It's a gorgeous house,” she explains. “I really like the fact that they don't treat us like little kids. We can do what we want — within reason. It feels like home. It makes it so you aren't all that lonely all the time.”
Many of the girls seem to have regained enough inner strength to reach out to others in trouble. One of the young moms noticed a girl at school who had only a single set of clothes. She returned to her room at Magdalene, put together a small wardrobe and a collection of makeup and brought the things to her friend.
A Life Saved
Magdalene Home has already played a role in explicitly halting one abortion. State counselors were working with a young woman who planned to abort. The counselors called the house to book a room while she recovered. Housemothers had to explain that such an arrangement would contradict the home's principles.
“Then we got a call and she had changed her mind,” explains Morgan. “She is with us here now and is looking forward to the baby. Maybe she will opt for adoption or maybe she'll be a mom.”
Social workers and community leaders may or may not sympathize with Magdalene Home's position on abortion. But all appreciate the mere presence of a smooth-running haven for pregnant girls.
“Magdalene Home is something we have been praying for,” says Katie Rozzana, the state's teen parent caseworker for the region. “The structure of the program is excellent. The teen moms are told when they go in there that Catholicism is not something they have to embrace. Yet that faith dimension is very peaceful. It's a nice touch.”
Rozzana, who is now working with 65 teen parents getting state aid, would like to see a few more homes established. The young moms who are waiting for space to open are “pretty much couch-surfing,” she says. Ruth Chittock, head of the teen-parent program at North Medford High School, has placed two students in the home and has more waiting. Some years, as many as 80 of North Medford High's girls have been pregnant.
Those numbers are about the same at the other public high school in town. Many of the girls who end up pregnant come from homes with trouble. Their parents — who often were teen parents too — tend to abuse drugs and abuse children.
Chittock, who is not Catholic, is comfortable with the religious framework of Magdalene Home.
She characterizes it as a “non-judgmental” faith. “What has happened at the home is that the girls’ attitude changes,” Chittock says. “A lot of these girls often don't feel wanted. They don't have a high self-esteem. At this home, their self-esteem improves and they start to believe in themselves because there are people around who care about them and show that.”
Sue Kupillas, a Jackson County Commissioner who oversees teen pregnancy prevention, sees the home as a haven where teen mothers can map out a decent future.
“I think it's wonderful that the girls can really have laid out for them some alternatives so they can make the decisions they need to make,” says Kupillas, a Democrat. “What you wish, and what I think Magdalene Home can offer, is that they have a sense of responsibility for the pregnancy so that they are looking toward the future a bit more.”
The home has been a welcome boost for Catholics in a region where the faith is sometimes derided. Just north of Medford, a fringe Seventh-day Adventist congregation a year ago posted a billboard calling the Pope the Antichrist. The massive sign is still up just off Interstate 5. Anti-Catholic mailings appear occasionally in mailboxes here, accusing the Church of plotting such schemes as undermining the U.S. Constitution.
“I think the home has been a very powerful witness to the Catholic viewpoint on respecting life, and not just words but a putting into action,” says Dominican Father Raymond Finerty, head of the Archdiocese of Portland's southern Oregon vicariate. “It speaks volumes to the people down here; it's not just a parade.”
Ed Langlois writes from Portland, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ProLife ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ed Langlois ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 02/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: February 24ñMarch 2, 2002 ----- BODY:Red Cross Rejects Money
The decision suggested that stem-cell research has become so controversial that some major institutions might be scared away.
The government cleared the way for scientists to receive federal money for embryonic stem cell experiments this year.
The National Institutes of Health announced the morning of Feb. 7 that the Red Cross research was the first award to be approved. That afternoon, however, the Red Cross said it had decided not to accept the grant.
Golden Pages: No Abortion Ads?
IRISH INDEPENDENT, Feb. 5 — Advertisements for abortion businesses in Britain may be dropped from the next edition of IrishGolden Pages because of fears they are breaking the law.
The commercial telephone directory is one of the main sources of information for women in Ireland who may travel to England for abortions.
A spokesman for Golden Pages Ltd, jointly owned by Eircom and VNU Publishers, said that after a comprehensive review, legal advisors believe the publication of the ads may be in contravention of 1995 legislation.
A spokesman said the publishers are awaiting legal advice.
More Ultrasounds
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 1 — Convinced that a look inside the womb would dissuade many pregnant women from abortion, pro-life advocates hope to provide ultrasound equipment to hundreds of pregnancy centers.
Backers of the initiative want to reduce abortion, but say their strategy is non-coercive — they're simply giving women more information.
“When they get the information to make an informed choice — once they see the ultrasound — the majority of women chose to carry the pregnancy to term,” said Tom Glessner, president of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates.
Abortion/Breast-Cancer Victory
LIFESITE DAILY NEWS, Feb. 7 — Pro-abortion groups are admitting defeat in their attempt to have regulators declare inaccurate an ad presenting scientific evidence of the link between abortion and breast cancer.
In October, the Pro-Choice Action Network filed a formal complaint with Advertising Standards Canada about the abortion-breast cancer ad of Surrey Delta Pro-Life.
Pro-Choice Action's February newsletter reveals that in late December, the standards board declined to review the ad any further. The board said there are “serious and noteworthy considerations in dispute,” but they are “complex” and “beyond [our] resources” and “expertise” to evaluate.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Women in Combat: Should U.S. Draw a Line? DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Operation Enduring Freedom is involving women in ways not seen before in American warfare.
American women fighter pilots are dropping bombs on Afghanistan; women are working on Psychological Operations campaigns designed to convert Taliban soldiers to American allies; women officers captain Navy ships and serve as military police; and female soldiers in camouflage fatigues and toting M-16s are among the National Guard who are monitoring airport security nationwide.
Some feminists at the Pentagon would like to see the women on front lines, also, including direct line-of-fire combat positions. But critics say such a move could risk lives of service men and women by reducing the combat effectiveness of U.S. troops, and add to the problems that women, especially those with children, routinely encounter in military life.
Christine Camara is one such soldier. A captain in the Oregon Air National Guard reserve, her life changed radically on Sept. 11 when her telephone rang a few hours after the massacres at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The mother of two sons, a 3-year-old and a 10-month-old, found herself suddenly working 16-hour shifts commanding the security force at the Guard's Portland air base.
“One day I'm with my kids 24/7,” she told the Oregonian newspaper. “All of a sudden I'm lucky if I see them an hour a day.”
And life for her husband, Stanley Camara, a furnace repairman, changed too. “It's kind of goofy that the husband is staying at home and the wife is out there defending the country,” he told a reporter. “But that's the way the ball rolled. I'm very, very proud of her.”
Camara said she was excited about being deployed somewhere further off, perhaps the Middle East.
But, “this isn't the way I intended it,” the 27-year-old told a reporter. “After having kids my goals changed. My ideas changed.”
Under the Clinton administration, many personnel policy changes were made including, in 1994, retraction of the “Risk Rule,” designed to exempt women from especially dangerous missions. The definition of “direct ground combat,” from which women remained excluded, was restricted to mean “being exposed to hostile fire and to a high probability of direct physical contact” with hostile forces and to being situated “well forward on the battlefield.”
According to Maj. James Cassella of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, with these changes, “over 90% of military fields became open to women.”
Today there are more than 200,000 women in the nation's armed forces (14.7% of all active-duty personnel) but they do not serve in the direct combat arms of the Army and Marines — including infantry, armor and field artillery. There are no female soldiers among the Rangers, Green Berets and Delta Force troops currently in Afghanistan, and they do not fly Black Hawk helicopters on Special Operations missions.
There are some, however, who would like to see women on the most dangerous assignments. A Pentagon panel, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, known as DACOWITS, consisting of 33 mostly female civilian members, has recommended women be allowed to fly Special Operations helicopters.
Cassella said the Special Operations Command declined to have women flying Black Hawks because the operations entail close coordination with ground troops and a high risk of hand-to-hand combat. A DACOWITS recommendation that women be deployed in submarines was also turned down by the Navy this year, on grounds that it would be too costly to retrofit submarines to accommodate women's privacy.
Other DACOWITS recommendations concern expanded on-base childcare and gynecological services for women. “Women have served proudly ever since the Revolutionary War,” said DACOWITS spokesman Cassella. “We think it enhances readiness and it also has the additional benefit of opening women's career opportunities.”
Problems
“So much of this debate focuses on individuals and career goals,” said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness in Livonia, Mich. “Individuals don't go to war. Units go to war.”
Donnelly cites lower physical standards, high attrition rates among women, and decreased discipline, morale and cohesion among mixed-gender troops, as reasons that women ought not to be allowed into direct combat positions.
Indeed, while no one doubts women's intelligence or patriotism or devotion to duty, critics of women in combat cite data on women's lesser physical capabilities. The U.S. Army has found that the average female recruit has 59% of the upper body strength of the average male recruit, and 72% of lower body strength.
The British service's “Combat Effectiveness Gender Study” concluded this summer that women should continue to be barred from serving in “direct-fire close-combat roles” after finding that 70% of women, in contrast to 20% of men, were unable to carry 90 pounds of artillery shells over a fixed distance.
And 48% of females failed a test requiring a 12.5-mile march, with 60 pounds of equipment, followed by target practice simulating conditions under fire, compared to only 17% of males. Other British field tests found that women soldiers under fire were unable to dig into hard ground.
“Women do not have an equal opportunity to survive or to help their fellow soldiers survive,” said Donnelly, adding that feminist social engineering efforts have lowered the bar for physical requirements of recruits, and reduced war-fighting capacity. “There is no gender norming on the battlefield,” she stressed.
Cassella insists all the services “have standards and we expect those standards to be met.” But “gender norming” or “gender integration” has affected physical training in at least some military fields. The Washington Times reported in August that the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in Latin America, canceled a mandatory weekly training run because a female officer complained it was “demeaning” and that slower runners like herself were ridiculed.
Southern Command's Commander Kelly Spellman told the Register the matter was still “under investigation” and the command had not yet reinstated the training run.
At the Infantry Officers’ Basic School at Fort Benning, too, mixed gender exercises had reportedly been canceled in November, allegedly due to rain.
Another concern is deployment. “Women are 3.5 to four times more non-deployable as men,” said Donnelly, and those figures rise during war. During Desert Storm the USS Acadia was dubbed “the Love Boat” because 36% of women on board were non-deployable due to pregnancy. Most of them were not replaced.
Some feminists want women's roles in the army to expand, even if most women don't want them to. Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen recently advocated that America step out of its “time warp” and force women to register for the draft. Women's exemption from combat is “an astonishing anachronism, really” she wrote.
Archbishop O'Brien
Archbishop Edwin O'Brien of the Archdiocese of the Military Services, USA, said he is unaware of any specific Catholic teaching regarding women's role in the military.
“The Church's instinct will favor whatever will protect the dignity and rights of the individual human beings,” he said. “The general rule in moral theology is not to automatically categorize. Women should not be penalized or pre judged where they show themselves equally capable.”
That said, Archbishop O'Brien added, “I don't think our experience as a country, as a culture, has seen an identical role for women in the work force, and especially in the military.
Women in combat would not be in the framework of that culture. The idea of forcing a draft on women is not just unjust but a great disservice to our country and a step backwards for our culture.”
Archbishop O'Brien said the military should reconsider its “come one, come all as long as you're 18” policy, and respond instead to the full dignity of men and especially of women, who often have abortions or defer having children altogether to pursue military careers.
Women should be encouraged to think long and hard before enlisting, the archbishop continued. He has seen so many struggle under “tremendous strain” when they are posted abroad without their children for lengthy absences. “What does that do to the children?” he asked.
Marriages are strained too, and the military is put in a difficult position to accommodate women and their children. Concluded the Archbishop: “We also have to consider what is best for the strength of the future of our family here.”
Celeste McGovern writes from Portland, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Celeste McGovern ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The New Mother Teresa Tapes Show Her Legacy DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:SYLVANIA, Ohio — For most of the 20-plus years Father Angelo Scolozzi worked with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, he made it a point to see that a tape recorder was running while the tiny Albanian nun was talking with small groups of priests or nuns.
Now his low-tech effort, which preserved a side of the Missionaries of Charity foundress rarely heard by the public, has been used to produce a new audio series that shares her teachings with a larger audience.
Lou Tartaglia, an author, speaker and retired psychiatrist from Sylvania, Ohio, who narrates the series, said it will give people who really want to know what Mother Teresa taught a chance to sit at her feet and listen to her teach.
“Thirsting for God: The Spiritual Lessons of Mother Teresa,” was produced by Nightingale-Conant Corp., a Chicago-based publisher of personal and spiritual development audio programs. Although the project was somewhat outside the company's normal product parameters, Dan Strutzel, director of new product development, said the firm agreed to take it on at the urging of Tartaglia, who had learned of the existence of the tapes through his work with Father Angelo and Mother Teresa.
The series is being presented by the Universal Fraternity of the Word, Third Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a lay association Father Angelo helped Mother Teresa start. Seventy-five percent of the proceeds from its sale will go toward developing a center to preserve Mother Teresa's manuscripts, letters and other memorabilia.
Tartaglia, who also wrote the script outline for the audio series, said he broached the idea with Nightingale-Conant in part because he knew they had the resources to draw the best material out of Father Angelo's 120 tapes.
It turned out to be a daunting challenge.
Initially, Strutzel recalled, he wasn't sure the tapes would yield any usable material. Then, near the end of a three-day listening session, the group working on the project happened on 12 tapes that seemed perfect for the series.
“It was almost like the fourth quarter in a football game,” Strutzel said. “There was no light, then a guy throws a ‘Hail Mary’ pass for the touchdown. I really felt, and Father and Lou feel, that Mother had her hand in this from afar and wanted it to be out there.”
Tartaglia said culling quality material from the tapes was difficult because Mother Teresa said the same things again and again, never deviating from her themes. The challenge thus was to find those tapes that best stated her teachings.
“I've listened to tapes from the 1970s and read her diary excerpts from the 1940s. She's so consistent; she never changed a bit. Anything she said, she said over and over again. One of the nicest things she said was, ‘Holiness is not the privilege of the few, but the duty of the many.’ It really comes home to you when you listen to her speak.”
Words From the Heart
Tartaglia said the tapes convey the passion and love of the woman best known for her care of the poor. It was in them, she said, that she saw Christ “in the distressing disguise of the poor.”
“There's this incredible emotion that you feel when you listen to her voice because she's so warm,” Tartaglia said. “She's not an intellectual. She's not lecturing. She's talking from her heart to yours.”
To make the tapes into a series, Father Angelo's recordings of Mother Teresa speaking had to be stripped of background noises like clanking dishes. Her words, arranged around such themes as “Only All for Jesus,” “The Consolation of Suffering,” and “Something Beautiful for God,” were then interspersed with commentary from Father Angelo and Tartaglia, who identified ways to apply her principles to everyday life.
Strutzel thinks the tapes are being released at an important time in light of reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“Mother's message is such a universal message that everyone can relate to, yet at the same time, she delivers a very countercultural message. … Very few people could have spoken about the things she spoke about — the right to life, the call to radical obedience and humility. Those are themes that don't necessarily sit well with our culture. They're not typically American, yet …[Mother Teresa] has so much respect out there. People are willing to hear her out. Very few people can speak with the authority she has and have people take her words to heart.”
Tartaglia said the theme of the series is that of being a contemplative in the world.
“Mother believed in actions, not words, results, not promises,” he said. “For her, becoming a contemplative in action is a spiritual principle that will give you the freedom to love others fully. It will help you overcome those periods in your life that are frustrating.”
Adopting the Pope
One of Tartaglia's favorite vignettes from the series involves a meeting during the 1970s between Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, Sister Nirmala, who eventually became her successor, and Father Angelo.
“Mother says to the Pope as he is getting ready to leave, ‘By the way, we've started a new thing where each of the nuns has adopted a priest to pray for during the adoration.’ The Pope says, ‘Well, I'm a priest, too. Would somebody adopt me?’ She turns to Sister Nirmala and says, ‘Would you adopt him, please?’”
Strutzel, who is Catholic, said the project was especially significant to him because of the role his faith has played in his life.
Usually, he said, he doesn't see a project all the way through to final production. “But this one, I did because I felt so personally connected to it.”
Judy Roberts writes from Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Thoughts on the Parish Pope DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:John Paul II's visit to a Roman parish on Dec. 16, the 300th of his pontificate, reveals interesting elements of this pontificate, says historian Andrea Riccardi.
The founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio, told Zenit: “I remember the first visit he made to a parish in the Garbatella neighborhood 23 years ago. … When the Pope passed us, we called to him and he had the car stopped,” he said.
“He got down, came over, and sat down on one of the children's little chairs at the day-care center. He said to us: 'Tell me, who are you?’ … He was a bishop who wanted to know his people.”
What is the significance of these 300 Sunday parish visits in John Paul II's pontificate?
It was custom that had already begun with John XXIII and was continued by Paul VI, except that up until then, these meetings had a symbolic character.
With John Paul II, instead, they have become a systematic contact of the Pope with his diocese. During these visits, he acts like a bishop, and he is very open to hear what [the people] have to say. It is not a ritual visit.
This is also seen in the planning of these appointments: On the eve, he first meets with the priests who work in the parish; he usually invites them to dinner. Then he visits the community.
As the Pope who visits a parish?
He is not the Pope of oceanic multitudes. He really wants to meet with the people and have the people be with him. He stops to talk with the elderly, he lets the children ask him questions. He wants to know the movements. He does not enter the church and speak as Pope, as happened with Pope John's visits.
Wojtyla is a bishop who submerges himself in little things. He knows that these are his people, his folk. One might ask: “Why does the Pope waste so much time with these people?” The answer is that for him it is not a waste of time. He is the man who questions: He asks, he wants to know.
It is precisely his great human interest that becomes a communion with the people. It is not an abstract but an affective communion. The same communion that is expressed later in the liturgy: During the Mass, this Pope who spends himself in the midst of the people of the neighborhood, is known as a man of prayer.
But what remains after the Pope visits a parish?
The memories of those who met him remain — the fact that in the future many can say: “I have seen him. … My mother placed me in his arms when I was a child.” It is a direct contact, a sense of family that makes you realize that the Pope is in Rome. I think this is a special stamp of our Catholicism.
Then, of course, there are the words: the instructions of the Pope from these visits. Keeping in mind, however, that John Paul II is not obsessed with giving a directive in every situation. His real concern is that we be Christians together. It is to reinforce communication of the Gospel. Precisely because of this, after meeting him, many communities have returned to the mission.
The Pope underlines the ties that link these parish visits to his universal ministry.
I have always been impressed that all over the world Wojtyla always appears as the Bishop of Rome. In the ecumenical vein, this is a most important fact: It explains well that he is not a super-bishop, but the Bishop of Rome who exercises his primacy. And John Paul II did not want it to be simply a title but an effective and affective reality.\
Over these years he has truly acted as the Bishop of Rome: 300 visits are 300 half-days, 300 meetings with priests. Then there is his relation with the city: He often makes this play on words “Roma/amor” [Rome/love]. And the people feel this.
He is not the Pope who descends to the parish to give himself to the masses, as if it were a pious exercise. He really wants to meet with his own, with a tone that has nothing solemn about it.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrea Riccardi ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Author Says That Saints of Varied Styles Show How Sanctity Is Attainable DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:ROME — The Church shows its wisdom by honoring such diverse models of holiness as Josemaría Escrivà, Padre Pio da Pietrelcina and Juan Diego. So says Alfredo Cattabiani, who has written a number of works on saints in an interview with the Italian magazine Avvenire.
John Paul II has often said that the variety of saints has a specific objective: to show that holiness is not an unattainable goal but a concrete possibility for every Christian. Last week he approved decrees for miracles attributed to Opus Dei founder Escrivà, mystic Padre Pio and Guadalupe visionary Juan Diego, opening the way for their eventual canonization.
Padre Pio and Escrivà are two figures with great popular following — but profoundly different. How do they fit into this great design intended to propose holiness as an “ordinary” goal for all the faithful?
In a certain sense, they are two canonizations preceded by great popular devotion: two saints who succeeded in attaining the same goal, an exemplary Christian life, on different paths. They have given a highly effective example, as demonstrated by the thousands upon thousands of devotees and admirers they have in the world. Of course, in speaking of Padre Pio and Escrivà, I must admit my own emotional involvement.
Like millions of others, you have also invoked the friar of Pietrelcina?
Yes, in a very painful circumstance of my life. I was in eastern Gargano in 1967 with my wife and 6-month-old son.
All of a sudden, the baby developed a high fever. He was taken to the hospital of San Giovanni Rotondo, but the doctors expressed pessimism immediately.
“Prepare yourself, because your son is dying and we cannot understand the reason,” they said. I left the hospital and, looking at the basilica, I entrusted myself to Padre Pio, who at that time was still alive.
About 10 minutes later I returned to the hospital and I saw the same doctor coming toward me. “I don't know how to explain what has happened. We haven't done anything but the child is better, I would say he is out of danger.” I had the precise feeling that Padre Pio's supernatural intervention had been decisive.
What is your impression of Escrivà?
I think he anticipated Vatican Council II as regards his intuition on the sanctification of daily life. In this connection, his message is especially effective for us, the laity. It is very concrete but also very spiritual. He loved talking with his friends after dinner, but invariably at 10 p.m. sharp, he would bid everyone farewell, saying he had a most important appointment. It was time for evening prayer.
But next to a hero of the prodigious, such as Padre Pio, don't you think that a figure like Escrivà, who was appar ently less inclined to supernatural manifestations, confirms the thesis of the various ecclesial charisms directed toward a common objective?
Yes, Padre Pio is the answer to those who seek a totally rational faith, characterized strictly by intellectuality. Instead, by proclaiming Padre Pio's sanctity, the Pope shows us that the dimension of mystery cannot be ruled out.
Moreover, Escrivà underlines another aspect: that of a very “lay” spirituality, very active, characterized by a style that is not just tinsel. St. Francis of Sales also affirmed that correction is the first rung of sanctity.
We have said that there is no model of sanctity that is valid for all, but who is the saint who is closest to your sensibility?
I think that examples, such as Pier Giorgio Frassati or the Beltrame Quattrocchi spouses are especially effective for us laity. Then I especially like the Piedmontese social saints, such as Don Juan Bosco, who were the only ones who really knew how to defend the poor in the liberal but profoundly unjust society of the 19th century.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Doctor Assisted Suicide Hangs in the Balance in Oregon DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:PORTLAND, Ore. — Despite the ruling by the Justice Department in early November that seemed likely to end legal physician-assisted suicide in Oregon, the practice remains legal, for now. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the state of Oregon are locked in a court battle over whether or not the Justice Department's interpretation will be allowed to apply to Oregon.
In early November, the Justice Department announced that it would hold Oregon doctors to the same reading of the Controlled Substances Act as doctors in other states, meaning Oregon physicians would no longer be allowed to prescribe drugs to euthanize their patients.
Oregon responded by seeking a moratorium on enforcement of the Justice Department's ruling. On Nov. 20, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones extended an interim moratorium on the Justice Department's guidelines until he passes final judgment on Oregon's challenge. No decision is expected until May or June, and the case may wind up in the Supreme Court, according to those familiar with it.
Dr. Gregory Hamilton, the spokesman for Physicians for Compassionate Care, an Oregon-based group opposed to doctor assisted suicide, told the Register that he disagrees with Oregon's position, and the Court's ruling, saying that he thinks Ashcroft's guidelines are “very good.”
Said Hamilton, “Controlled substances should not be used for assisted suicide.”
Hamilton's group has filed an amicus brief in the court case in support of the federal government, and the doctor remains confident that Ashcroft and the Justice Department will prevail.
“The assisted suicide people don't have much of a case,” he said, because “no state can unilaterally exempt itself from federal law.”
Ryan Ross of the Hemlock Society, the nation's largest pro-euthanasia group, disagrees. Said Ross, “It's a fundamental liberty to be able to go to the statehouse and change the way states deal with medicine.” Ashcroft's policy, he added, “precludes state action on physician-assisted dying.”
However, the American Center for Law and Justice, a Virginia-based pro bono legal group that specializes in pro-family, pro-life and religious issues, said Ryan's arguments will not prevail. The center has also filed an amicus brief in support of Ashcroft's decision. “It seems to be a not very difficult case,” said the center's chief counsel, Jay Sekulow. Since the regulation of drugs “clearly falls within the Drug Enforcement Act,” the use of drugs in doctor-assisted suicide is a federal issue, Sekulow said, and therefore should be over-seen by the Justice Department.
Sekulow added that even under the Clinton administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration wanted to enforce the law by laying charges against Oregon doctors who participated in suicides, but “[former Attorney General] Janet Reno vetoed them.”
National Implications
Sekulow said the American Center for Law and Justice had become directly involved because “only one state has licensed the taking of life in this way,” and “we don't want to see this become a trend.”
The Hemlock Society, in contrast, is lobbying for just such a trend. “Polls consistently show that two-thirds of Americans support physician-assisted suicide,” Ross said.
Ross argued that people “in extreme pain” should be allowed to be prescribed “barbiturates” to induce death when their suffering is unbearable. But Dr. Hamilton countered that such rhetoric is a “scare tactic” that distorts the medical reality, that modern palliative care eases patients’ physical discomfort in virtually every case. Said Hamilton, “99.9% of people in Oregon die [painlessly] without assisted suicide, and the other .1% could too, if they had a better doctor.”
According the brief filed in court by Physicians for Compassionate Care, “each year national experts have reassured doctors, nurses and hospice workers that no patient needs to die in unrelieved pain. In fact, not one patient during the first three years of assisted suicide in Oregon listed actual untreatable pain as the main cause of their suicidal wishes. Instead, those individuals who were given lethal overdoses in Oregon were anxious, depressed, or had other subjective psychological and social concerns.”
At least 70 people are known to have committed suicide with doctors’ help since the law went into effect in 1998.
Ashcroft has made it clear “aggressive pain management” will be protected whatever happens with assisted suicide, Dr. Hamilton said.
Ross claimed that the only reason more states have not passed assisted suicide laws is because “the opposition is well organized and well-financed.” He cited especially the “bishops of the Catholic Church” as leaders of the opposition to the passage of such laws.
Catholic leaders in Oregon concur that the Church has strenuously opposed every initiative seeking to legalize assisted suicide. “We have opposed this since it was first introduced … and we continue to do so,” said Robert Castagna, general counsel for the Oregon Catholic Conference.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable. Thus an act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded” (No. 2277).
The Catechism also specifies that “Intentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is murder. It is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator” (No. 2324).
Pope John Paul II also condemned assisted suicide in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). “Intentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is murder,” the Holy Father stated, adding that it is a “perversion” of mercy. True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another's pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:N.Y. Mom Told ‘Nutcracker’ Too Religious
The mother, Kristina Lindbergh, is president of the board of the Westchester Ballet Company, based in Ossining, N.Y., and her two daughters are members. She did not identify their school, but in an account she wrote in the New York daily, she said the head of the school told her, “We can't send student because 'The Nutcracker’ is about Christmas, and we can't patronize anything even slightly religious.”
Lindbergh said her appeals, including the argument that the only “Christmassy” element in the holiday favorite is a Christmas tree, went unanswered. Describing a performance of the ballet for another school group, she asked, “Were they watching something religious? Perhaps, in its reverence for beauty and excellence, and with its goals of honoring the enormous gifts we've been given, and of inspiring and lifting the spirits of its audience.”
Nebraska State Senator Makes Anti-Catholic Comments
“You all know that the Catholic hierarchy and Church walk through here like a monster in seven-league boots, tromping on the senators, calling them to task, letting them know that their soul may be at stake if they don't do exactly what they're told to do, exactly as they're told to do it,” said Sen. Ernie Chambers Nov. 5, as quoted by the Omaha daily.
Chambers made the remarks on the floor of the state senate. Despite the urging of the Catholic League, Nebraska lawmakers say they have no plans to seek their colleague's censure.
Chambers said he treats the Church like any other opponent, aiming at its political involvement rather than individual believers.
Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns, a Catholic, said he just doesn't pay much attention to Chambers. “This time it happens to be Catholics, next time it will be real estate agents,” he said.
Chambers, who once had portraits of Washington and Lincoln removed from the legislative chamber on the grounds that they were “racists,” also condemned President George W. Bush's war on terrorism.
Boston Archdiocese Offers Low-Cost Funeral Packages
The discounted packages are designed to compete with cremation's lower costs, the Boston daily said.
Church leaders, including Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, have voiced concern that Catholics are choosing cremation as a simpler, less expensive option than a funeral with the body present at Mass and buried in a grave or put in a vault.
The Globe said that about 10% of Catholic deceased in metropolitan Boston were cremated last year.
The archdiocese is making about 200 burial packages available, starting at about $1,400. Most traditional funerals average more than $4,000, and cremation is usually no more than half that.
The Church now accepts cremation as an option, but prefers burial as a better expression of Christian faith in the resurrection and as a sign of respect for the human body.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Canadian Chaplains Barred from Offering Christian Prayers at Public Ceremonies DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:OTTAWA — The furor over a new Canadian military chaplains’ policy on interfaith prayer has revealed the depth of animosity between some Canadian Christians and their country's secularist Liberal government.
The military's new Policy on Public Prayer advises Canada's military chaplains — all of whom are Christians — in effect to avoid Trinitarian formulas and the name of Jesus Christ in prayers offered during public services. It was approved in July by the Interfaith Committee of the Canadian Military Chaplaincy, a body chaired by Catholic bishop Donald Theriault, but did not attract public attention until Remembrance Day on Nov. 11.
The policy was on display that day, when Canada honors soldiers who gave their lives for their country. Expressions of nationalism and non-specific references to “God” and “Creator” were welcome at public ceremonies, but specifically Christian expressions of remembrance were excised, even though Canada remains a country where more than 80% of residents identify themselves as Christians.
Herman Goodden, a journalist and playwright in London, Ontario, quietly excused himself before the end of Mass at his parish church Nov. 11, when the choir director led the congregation in singing O Canada, the national anthem. In a subsequent London Free Press column, Goodden explained his spontaneous gesture as a protest against what he sees as a growing anti-Christian prejudice on the part of the government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
Earlier, there was widespread indignation among Christians over the government's decision to exclude any mention whatsoever of God — Christian or otherwise — in the official national memorial service on Parliament Hill shortly after the Sept. 11 atrocities. And in 1998, the government instructed a United Church minister officiating at a memorial service for the victims of the Swissair Flight 111 disaster not to use specifically Christian prayers, while representatives of other religions were left free to speak according to their beliefs.
Iain Benson, a constitutional legal expert and executive director of the Ottawa-based Center for Cultural Renewal, said that the interpretation of “pluralism” animating such policies is “nonsense.”
“I think what we need is to expand the corps of chaplains to include robust representatives of all the different religions in numbers proportional to the membership of the armed forces,” said Benson. “Christians should be able to be Christians, Jews should be able to be Jews, Muslims should be able to be Muslims, and if their membership in our armed forces requires it, they should all have their spiritual needs tended to [according to] what they believe, not in some kind of dog's-breakfast theology.”
The Canadian Forces chaplain branch says that numbers do not yet warrant the hiring of non-Christian chaplains. Bourque said that while a few major national events involving prayer and the military, such as the dedication of a new Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa, will include representatives from various faiths speaking according to their specific beliefs, the “norm” for local events is to have a sole military chaplain presiding in an “inclusive” way.
Chaplain's Perspective
Father Ron Bourque, the chief Catholic chaplain of the Canadian Forces and director of chaplain policy for the Canadian Forces chaplain branch, told the Register that dealing with the fallout from the interfaith prayer policy “has been an experience.” He said some churches have organized postcard campaigns in protest, and that he has been called a “bigot” and “Christophobic” for supporting the policy.
The policy is not an official policy of the Canadian government or of the Department of National Defense, although government representatives have defended it in Parliament. “It's basically guidelines for chaplains from chaplains,” Bourque explained, speculating that the policy has been associated with the government because of the government's controversial handling of religion at public events in the recent past.
Like those controversies, the row over the military's Policy on Public Prayer indicates a deep divide among Canadians on the proper understanding of “pluralism” and the place of religion in the secular realm.
The Canadian Forces chaplain branch sees the policy simply as a matter of “inclusiveness” in a “multi-faith” and “multicultural” society. Father Bourque said he perceives no conflict between what the policy advises and his own calling as a Catholic priest.
“From the chaplains’ perspective [this] is not a difficult issue. My opinion is it's been blown way out of proportion,” he said. “When I'm the only one representing various faith groups at a service then I can make a prayer that is holy, that is uplifting, that is comforting, that speaks to the heart and soul of people, without a specific reference to my personal beliefs.”
Added Father Bourque, “The difference between saying … ‘I make this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ’ … and ending the prayer to almighty God with the word ‘Amen,’ for me personally makes very little difference.”
Insensitive to Christians
Tom Langan, president of Canada's Catholic Civil Rights League, said the military chaplains’ approach is actually exclusive of the majority of Canadians, and insensitive to the beliefs and feelings of Christians. In a pluralistic society, Langan said, “We have to develop a sense of courtesy, and that courtesy has to be extended to the founding majority.”
Without a proper sense of pluralism, Langan warned, Canada could “easily degenerate into a relativistic mish-mash which will end up producing just the lowest common denominator, which will be just a mindless materialism.”
Canadians’ confusion about pluralism is exacerbated by a widespread misunderstanding of the concept of separation of church and state, said Benson. While that separation is not established constitutionally in Canada as in the United States, Benson says the principle itself, properly understood, is correct: “It's [simply] a jurisdictional statement. The church has no competency to run the state, and the state has no competency to run the church.”
But, he added, that's not how secularists interpret church-state separation. “They mean the separation of all public aspects of the state from religion, which means that the only people who really have a place comfortably to be themselves fully in the public realm … are those who are atheists or agnostics — and that's not proper, that's not just or fair,” Benson said.
The Sept. 11 memorial on Parliament Hill “was a perfect celebration, if God doesn't exist,” Benson continued, “but it wasn't the kind of approach to transcendence that could have ever built a country like Canada or could ever sustain one. It was very much a procession with somebody at the front carrying a huge question mark.”
David Curtin writes from Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Curtin ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Russian Rights Commissioner Hails Vatican Ties
INTERFAX, Dec. 15 — Increasing relations between Russia and the Vatican are shaping up in the areas of protecting the family, health-care and culture, a spokesman for Oleg Mironov, the Russian human rights commissioner told the Russian news agency.
The Russian Ministry of Labor and Social Development and the Pontifical Council for the Family have been cooperating in protecting the family, women and motherhood, the spokesman pointed out, adding that Russia has received over $15 million worth of humanitarian aid from various charity organizations.
The Vatican also is showing interest in the development of contacts with Russia in healthcare. For example, the children's medical center in Blagotsentr in Moscow was built and equipped at the expense of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers. And Catholic organizations fund the treatment in Italy of children who suffered from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and orphans from various regions in Russia.
Cultural ties are also expanding. Vatican museums regularly promote exhibits of masterpieces held, in particular, by Russia's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.
Major Vatican Exhibit to Accompany World Youth Day
A significant part of the exhibit will be Jewish religious objects, such as a 15th century Bible.
“I wanted to reach out to the multi-faith, multi-cultural aspect of Toronto, and one particular aspect of that is the Jewish community here,” Father Thomas Rosica, director of World Youth Day, told the Toronto daily. The Jews are “our elder sisters and elder brothers.”
Canadian Ecumenical Leaders Make Pilgrimage to Rome
The bishop, who initiated a Lutheran-Anglican-Roman Catholic interfaith committee several years ago, concelebrated Mass with Pope John Paul II in the Pope's private chapel as the Rev. Michael Pryse, bishop of the Kitchener-based Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and the Rt. Rev. Ralph Spence, bishop of the Anglican Church of Canada's Diocese of Niagara, prayed in the front pew.
As they entered the chapel, the visitors found the Holy Father already on his knees in prayer. For the next 15 minutes, Pryse gave thanks to be alive at a time in history when a Lutheran churchman can pray with the Pope in Rome.
“I think it's a very hopeful sign,” he told the Kitchener-Waterloo daily.
Though the Protestant guests could not receive Communion, they were able to exchange a sign of peace with the Pope during Mass. Pryse clasped the Holy Father's trembling hands and looked into his eyes, which he said were “very alert and very penetrating.”
The interfaith committee will lead their congregations in an annual renewal of Baptismal vows on Jan. 13, the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: The Christ Child, Key to Peace for Mankind DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Here is a translation of John Paul II's Christmas message “urbi et orbi” (to the city and the world), given at midday on Christmas day from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica.
“Christ is our peace,” “Christ is our peace; he has made the two into one people” (cf. Ephesians 2:14).
At the dawn of the new millennium, which began with so much hope but is now threatened by dark clouds of violence and war, the words of the Apostle Paul which we listen to this Christmas are a powerful ray of light, a cry of trust and optimism.
The Divine Child born in Bethlehem brings in his little hands as a gift the key to peace for mankind. He is the Prince of Peace! This is the joyful news which echoed that night in Bethlehem, and which I wish to reaf-firm before the world on this blessed day.
Let us listen once more to the words of the angel: “I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).
Peace On Earth
On this day the Church echoes the song of the angels and repeats their astonishing message, which first amazed the shepherds on the hills above Bethlehem.
“Christ is our peace!” Christ, “the babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in the manger” (Luke 2:12), is indeed our peace. A helpless Newborn Child in a lowly cave restores dignity to every life being born, and brings hope to those overcome by doubt and discouragement.
He has come to heal life's wounds and to restore meaning to death itself. In that Child, meek and defenseless, crying in a cold and bare cave, God has destroyed sin, and planted the seed of a new humanity, called to bring to fulfilment the original plan of creation and to transcend it through the grace of redemption.
Turn to Christ
“Christ is our peace!” Men and women of the third millennium, you who hunger for justice and peace, accept the message of Christmas, which today rings out around the world! Jesus was born to strengthen the bonds uniting individuals and peoples, to make them all, in himself, brothers and sisters.
He came to break down “the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14) and to make one family of all mankind. Yes, we can repeat with certainty: Today, in the Incarnate Word, peace is born! Peace to be implored, for God alone is its source and guarantee. Peace to be forged in a world in which peoples and nations, burdened with so many and such varied difficulties, hope for a new humanity united not just by economic interests but by the unceasing effort to bring about a society that is more just and supportive.
Child of Hope
Let us hasten like the shepherds to Bethlehem, let us pause in adoration in the cave, and gaze upon the Newborn Redeemer. In him we can recognize the face of every little child who is born, of whatever race or nation: the little Palestinian and the little Israeli; the little American and the little Afghan; the child of the Hutu and the child of the Tutsi … whoever the child is, to Christ each one is special.
Today my thoughts go to all the children of the world: so many, too many are the children condemned from birth to suffer through no fault of their own the effects of cruel conflicts. Let us save the children, in order to save the hope of humanity! This is what we are urgently called to do by that Child born in Bethlehem, the God who became man, to give us back the right to hope.
Pray For Peace
Let us beg from Christ the gift of peace for all who are suffering as a result of conflicts old and new. Day after day, I bear in my heart the tragic problems of the Holy Land; every day I think with anxiety of all those who are dying of cold and hunger; every day there reaches me the desperate cry of those who, in so many parts of the world, call for a fairer distribution of resources and for gainful employment for all.
Let no one lose hope in the power of God's love! May Christ be the light and support of those who believe and work, sometimes in the face of opposition, for encounter, dialogue and cooperation between cultures and religions.
May Christ guide in peace the steps of those who tirelessly devote themselves to the progress of science and technology. May these great gifts of God never be used against respect for human dignity and its promotion!
May God's holy name never be used as a justification for hatred! Let it never be used as an excuse for intolerance and violence! May the gentle face of the Child of Bethlehem remind everyone that we all have one Father.
Unlock Your Hearts
Christ is our peace! Brothers and Sisters, who are listening to me, open your hearts to this message of peace, open your hearts to Christ, the Son of the Virgin Mary, to the One who became “our peace”! Open them to the One who takes nothing away from us except our sin, and who gives us in return the fullness of humanity and joy.
And You, the Child of Bethlehem whom we adore, bring peace to every family and town, to every nation and continent. Come, God made man! Come to be the heart of the world renewed by love! Come where the fate of humanity is most in peril! Come and do not delay! You are “our peace” (Ephesians 2:14)!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatcican -------- TITLE: India's Low Caste Participate in Mass Conversion to Buddhism DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW DELHI — “We are Hindus no more, and inferior to nobody,” declared Ramkumar, a low-caste Indian from the northern Indian state of Utter Pradesh.
Ramkumar, a bureaucrat in the state government, traveled to New Delhi from his remote village to participate in the mass conversion ceremony held in the Indian capital city Nov. 4. At the ceremony, an estimated 20,000 low-caste Dalits renounced Hinduism for Buddhism.
The Dalit conversions provoked outrage among Hindu nationalists, who accused Christians of orchestrating them in order to advance their own religion. Catholic leaders in India reject such charges, but defend the right of the Dalits to convert to the religion of their choice.
Ramkumar's post-conversion remarks reflect the plight of hundreds of millions of low-caste people in India. Although a low-level government employee, he is expected to remain physically removed from upper-caste colleagues in his office. As well, he said, “In our village tea shop we have to sit on the floor to drink tea and we are not allowed to use any public facilities with the upper castes.”
By converting to Buddhism, “At least our children should be saved from this shameful existence,” Ramkumar said.
According to some historians, the caste system originated in India around 3,500 years ago as an aftermath of Aryan invasion. Aryans from Central Asia invaded the original inhabitants of the land and destroyed their culture. Some of the defeated withdrew to the forests, while others submitted to the conquerors and became the low castes.
The roots of the caste system can also be seen in Hindu scriptures, which divide society into four varnas, or tiers: the Brahmin, or priestly class; the Kshatriya, or warrior class, the vaisha, or trading class; and the sudra, or serving class. Beneath the sudra are the untouchables, who in traditional Hindu society were required to follow menial and degrading occupations like scavenging and removal of carrion.
The untouchables were not permitted to enter temples, schools or any public places and could not withdraw water from public wells. Forced to live in dirty huts outside of villages and cities, they were required to remain at least 32 yards from caste Hindu to prevent the latter from being “polluted.” Hindus consider the caste system to be hereditary in nature.
In the last century, as Indian society became more democratic, Mahatma Gandhi rechristened the lower caste as Harijans, which means men of God. Now they call themselves Dalits, which means “oppressed, “ and they remain socially and economically disadvantaged despite their theoretical emancipation when India became independent in 1948.
According to government data, around 900 types of low castes exist among India's 1 billion residents, comprising more than 250 million people.
Liberation at Last?
Leaders of the Nov. 4 conversion ceremony say it is only the beginning.
“We will not allow the upper castes to exploit us any more,” said Ram Raj, chief organizer of the ceremony. “We, the oppressed millions in the country, started a new movement and will organize mass conversions throughout the country.”
Raj, who is chairman of a confederation of low-caste organizations, was rechristened as Udit (“having risen”) Raj at the Nov. 4 ceremony. He is a senior officer with the Indian government's taxation department who has been on leave since becoming involved with the movement to improve the circumstances of the low caste.
It was the third such mass conversion of Dalits. The first, involving about 500,000 people, was held in 1956 by B.R. Ambedkar, the founding father of the Indian constitution and a low-caste leader, at Pune in the state of Maharashtra.
In 1981, entire villages in the state of Tamil Nadu abandoned Hinduism for Islam, a move that generated communal tension in South India.
The latest mass conversion to Buddhism drew international attention after Hindu organizations publicly opposed the ceremony.
India's federal government, which is controlled by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, took measures to obstruct the ceremony. Organizers said government officials blocked buses and trucks, preventing thousands of Dalits from attending. As well, local police withdrew permission to hold the function at the allotted venue just before it began, forcing organizers to scramble to find a replacement site.
Said Raj, “They tried all the options to disturb the function, only because we belong to the low castes.”
Two days before the event, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, held a press conference charging that it was a Christian conspiracy.
Hindu extremists have carried out a series of violent attacks on Christians in recent years in India. The extremists claim that Christians, who comprise less than 3% of the Indian population, are seeking to convert the entire country and destroy its Hindu heritage.
Ashok Singhal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's international president, told the Register that Christian leaders had raised money from abroad for the event. Said Singhal, “The ceremony was anti-national and politically motivated.”
Venkaih Naidu, the secretary general of the Bharatiya Janata Party and a government minister, supported the council's charges and said that the government is investigating the allegations.
Charistian Support
In fact, some Christian leaders, including Joseph D'Souza and John Dayal of the All India Christian Council and K.P. Yohannan of Gospel for Asia, were present at the Buddhist conversion ceremony. Explained Dayal, “We were there to declare solidarity with millions of oppressed.”
But the Catholic bishops of India denied any direct involvement in the mass conversion.
“We extended our support to the conversion only because it is the fundamental right of each citizen to choose any faith of his preference,” said Archbishop Oswald Gracias of Agra, the secretary general of the bishops’ conference.
Father Donald de Souza, the conference's deputy secretary general, said the conversions are a call to the government to examine the plight of the low castes. He said Dalits prefer to convert to Buddhism, rather that Christianity, because they can retain their constitutional rights to “reservations.”
The reservation policy in the constitution provides certain economic and social privileges to the low caste people, such as government jobs and university places. The rights are lost if they convert to Christianity.
“We have fought to get reservation rights for converted Christians for the last 50 years, but the government has turned them down fearing a flow of low castes to Christianity,” Father de Souza said.
The chairman of the federal commission on low castes, Dilip Singh Bhuria, agreed that their living conditions remain poor. “Millions of low castes are still living under bondage, even after 53 years of independence,” he said.
Conversion may not result in immediate improvements, Udit Raj admitted. But it would give the Dalits confidence and grant them the inner strength to fight for their rights, he added.
Lakshmi, a low-caste housewife from a remote Central Indian village, has already been emboldened by her Buddhist conversion. “We don't need the Hindu temples or their gods any more,” she said. “We will construct a temple for Lord Buddha in our village.”
Bindu Milton writes from New Delhi
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bindu Milton ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Northern Ireland Catholic Joblessness Still High
Despite having higher qualifications and holding down a higher proportion of professional jobs, Catholics had an 8.8% unemployment rate in 2000. The rate for Protestants was 5.2%.
The news was not all bad for Catholics, though. In 1993, unemployment was 18.1% for Catholics and 9.4% for Protestants. And among the unemployed, a higher proportion of Protestants than Catholics had been unemployed for one year or more, the report said.
But a spokeswoman for Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, said the report showed evidence of anti-Catholic discrimination. “A telling statistic is that Catholic representation is highest in small sized work-places but lowest in large workplaces,” Dara O'Hagan told the Irish daily. “What is clear is that despite years of fair employment legislation and a focus on this issue that there has not been enough progress.”
Catholics in Uganda Seek Return of Schools
The priest spoke during the launch of a book, “Catholic Schools 2000: Issues and Challenges,” which offers guidelines to teachers and administrators on running Catholic schools.
Archbishop Christopher Pierre, apostolic nuncio to Uganda, addressed the gathering, urging Catholics to consider organizing themselves and having dialogue with the government to solve their grievances.
Cuban Bishops Lament Family Separations
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Dec. 17 — Cuba's bishops made an end-of-year plea for family unity, saying they were saddened that many of the island's families are separated by divorce and exile, the news service reported.
“There are so many families divided, separated by divorce,” the Cuban Bishops Conference said in the bishops’ annual Christmas message, read in churches on the fourth Sunday of Advent. “It is a minority of children and adolescents who can sit down with mama and papa on the night of the 24th, Christmas Eve, to eat Christmas dinner.”
For many years in communist Cuba, which was officially atheist from the early 1960s until 1992, Christmas was just another day on the calendar. The government declared it an official holiday again in 1998, fulfilling a request of Pope John Paul II, who had visited the island earlier that year.
The bishops also took note of families with relatives who left the country. “For not a few this will be the first year that a brother, a daughter, a grandchild, a husband or a mother are absent,” they said. “For many others, this is an old experience that they have never grown used to.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Why Lapsed Catholics Skip Mass DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:There's good news, bad news and — in one strong sense — no news in the new extensive poll of Catholics in America.
We'll look at the “no news” first.
Imagine a poll that found 12% of nonsmokers regularly smoke Marlboro cigarettes. Commentators would spot the silliness of the statement immediately and ignore the poll. If anyone pushed them further, they would point out the flaws in the polling: Pollsters only surveyed people who identified themselves as nonsmokers in earlier polls; the subjects felt no contradiction between their smoking and their identity as nonsmokers.
A bit of the same thing has happened with the Zogby poll of Catholics that was commissioned by LeMoyne College, a Jesuit school in Syracuse, N.Y. The only people polled were those who had told past pollsters that they were Catholic. Many of them are simply lapsed Catholics: They are not in communion with the Church, and may have no intention of ever being in communion with the Church.
Yet newspapers didn't catch this simple distinction.
The Chicago Tribune headline was: “Poll finds division among Catholics.” What would the headline of our fictional poll have been — “Poll finds division among nonsmokers over brands”?
The Associated Press ended its story about a woman who was recently “ordained” to the priesthood of the “old Catholic” church, by reporting the Zogby poll's show of support for women's ordination. Using our fictional poll, we doubt the wire service would have ended a story about the tobacco wars by reporting, “yet surprising new statistics show that even many non-smokers love Marlboros.”
One objection to this analysis that will be raised is that being Catholic is a permanent condition. There's something to that — but perhaps little. A poll of people who fill in the blank “religion” with the word “Catholic” and ascribe no meaning to it, isn't meaningful whether they have the right to use the word or not.
So, how can such “no news” bring both “good news” and “bad news”? Because, even if these people have only a remote affinity to the Church, the poll gives us a snapshot of American views.
First, the good news.
Americans don't reject Catholic authority. There has been a sneaking suspicion in some parishes that the hierarchical nature of the Church is a flop. Not according to the numbers, it's not. In the poll, 90% feel Pope John Paul II is doing a good job; 85% feel the U.S. bishops are doing a good job.
Americans don't reject Catholic identity. In many corners of the Church, Catholics sometimes feel they need to be more like the world to be popular. Particularly in our universities, Catholics often have an inferiority complex about their Catholic identity, which they deny or hide. The poll shows they needn't. In it, 89% said their identity as Catholic is important to them; 71.5% of American Catholics consider it very important to stand up for and live according to their Catholic values.
The bad news is that there's a terrible lack of formation among these gungho Catholics. Only half think in vitro fertilization is wrong (or is the number surprisingly high, given the lack of discussion of this topic?). Only 28% think that extramarital sex is wrong; even 54% of weekly Mass goers have no problem with artificial contraception.
But this “bad news” comes with a challenge and hope.
The challenge: In 21st century America, it is up to the laity to evangelize the society — and to re-evangelize the Catholics of this poll. Even if bishops, priests and nuns redoubled their efforts, they wouldn't reach many of this group of people who rarely go to Mass.
But won't bishops and priests have a lot to answer for because of the state of today's Church, shown in polls like this? That's not for us to say, but it's clear that today's laity will have a lot to answer for if they don't respond to the pervasive problems this poll points to, problems which, given the situation, the laity can best solve.
That brings us, last, to the great hope that the poll should give us.
Beyond showing how receptive people are to hearing and “standing up for” their faith, it shows that bringing people back to Mass seems to bring them a long way toward accepting authentic Catholic doctrine.
And bringing people back to Mass is something we all can do. Right away.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Will the Real Harry Potter Please Fly Away DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Harmless Harry
Regarding “Mainstreaming Witchcraft? Parents Assess Harry Potter” (Dec. 2-8):
Your writers clearly show that they believe the Potter books are dangerous, and that kids will take the books seriously and start to show interest in practicing magic.
Harry Potter is virtually harmless children's fiction. There are other children's books out there that are far more dangerous, like Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, for instance, where violence is glamorized and glorified and made to look honorable.
In the Harry Potter books, good moral lessons are always taught, and the magic should be seen as a backdrop and not as a primary influence. While it is true that the books teach some lessons that are wrong (cheating, stealing), they are kept at a sustained minimum, and children know better than to follow them. I also find it interesting that most of the anti-Harry Potter people I know have never even read the books.
WILL GROSS, age 14
Boise, Idaho
Burned by Wicca
I was disappointed at your “open-minded” treatment of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Do we Catholics have such short memories that we forget the disaster “open-mindedness” wreaked upon the post-Vatican II generation?
My young life was a casualty of lack of proper catechesis, which included absolutely no warning about the occult. Therefore, as a Girl Scout, I became deeply involved in the occult. I played with ouija boards and participated in séances, levitation sessions and attempts to imitate witchcraft. My leaders and mother were aware of this, and failed to advise us against it. Fortunately, the grace of God prevailed, but not until I lost most of my 20s to worldly conduct.
The appeal of certain aspects of Harry Potter is where the danger can be found, blinding even good mothers (like my own) to the insidious influence of the occult. Children near adolescence crave power over their own lives and even over the lives of others. Witchcraft (including astrology) seems to offer that.
Those who think it a reach to connect Harry Potter to interest in the occult should hear Steve Wood, president of St. Joseph's Covenant Keepers, speaking on this subject on EWTN. As a Protestant pastor, he was often involved with teens seduced into satanic activity. He says that the police, in investigating a satanic-type crime (animal or human slaughter with ritualistic markings, for example), would first go to the library and see who had taken out books about the occult to work up their list of suspects.
What began my interest in the occult? Do you remember the TV program “Bewitched”?
LETICIA C. VELASQUEZ
East Moriches, New York
Non-Denominational Hobbits
In your Dec. 9-15 article headlined “The Hobbits Are Here: Catholics Hope the Movie Lives up to the Book,” you wrote, “Tolkien, a noted British scholar of myth, wrote the trilogy in part to communicate to his readers the Christian understanding of a fallen creation, where good struggles against evil and ultimately triumphs.”
But Tolkien had no intent of conveying any message at all in his books.
In his introduction to The Fellowsip of the Ring he specifically says, “As for any inner meaning or ‘message‘, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical.”
He goes on to say, “Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have always done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
I think that in your eagerness to have the trilogy be allegorical and Tolkien be a good Christian author, you extended his intent and achievement a little too far.
This might reinforce the stereotype of a narrow-minded Christian to others who might chance to read that article.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
Papillion, Nebraska
Bravo, Mass Guide
I gladly read the National Catholic Register weekly. The Dec. 2-9 issue has a marvelous catechetical aid on page 18 about the Mass. I teach in a Catholic school and work with 170 junior high students. I look forward to sharing this with my religion classes so they can better understand and appreciate the Mass. Thanks for this, and for your paper as a whole.
BROTHER EDWARD KESLER
Cincinnati, Ohio
The writer is a member of the Brothers of the Poor of St. Francis.
Communion on the Tongue
For years I have heard raves about your paper. I finally received first issue yesterday and agree it's a wonderful resource for faithful Catholics.
I'm writing to bring something to your attention which needs addressing.
On page 18 of the Dec. 2-9 issue is a “How (and Why) to Return to Sunday Mass” guide. I was pleased to see its Quick Tip about how it's proper to “show a sign of respect before receiving Communion” by bowing, as suggested by the bishops.
However, what disappoints me is that the idea of Communion in the hand was promoted as the single way to receive Our Lord. This situation further saddens me, as I know the “norm” — or preferred way — is to receive the host on the tongue, not the hand. Too few Catholics are aware of this, as evidenced by the push in today's average parish to make Communion in the hand the “norm.”
Funny how Martin Luther pushed for this, too, as a way to decrease belief in the True Presence.
What solution do I have? If possible, for future editions of this guide perhaps you could let readers know that, although receiving via both methods is approved by bishops, the Church Herself prefers reception via Communion on the tongue.
LISA BASTIAN
San Antonio, Texas
Thanks for Two Thanksgiving Articles
Your Thanksgiving issue (Nov. 18-24) carried two excellent articles that we found very uplifting and inspiring. “How to Explain 'Spiritual’ Relatives to Kids,” by Jim Fair, hit the nail right on the head.
Yes, it seems popular to say, “I'm a spiritual person, but I don't believe in organized religion.”
Pride came before the fall, and the devil (who is also spiritual) has blinded many nowadays into thinking that it matters not in who, or what, you believe, as long as you believe in something. Jim Fair not only pointed out the stupidity of such nonsense, but pointed to Jesus Christ, who said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). St. Peter, speaking of Jesus, said, “Neither is there salvation in any other” (Acts 4:12).
We hope that Jim Fair continues to write articles in the future which will draw people to Jesus Christ and his one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, which Jesus established.
The “Inperson” interview “What He's Fighting For” shows Mark MacKenzie's authentic and inspiring Catholic faith and his trust in God as he serves us in the military during these dangerous times.
We were glad to see that Mark MacKenzie believes and promotes tithing, the giving of 10% of one's earnings for the Lord's work.
Unfortunately, this biblical truth is neglected in our Catholic Church, and instead we scandalize many Catholics and other Christians by having bingo, Las Vegas nights, etc., to raise money for our parishes and schools.
Perhaps you will in the future publish articles encouraging Catholics to be more generous financially, supporting ministries in the Church which promote authentic doctrine.
MR. AND MRS.
C.N. SANTOS
Atascadero, California
Children of God
Thank you, Marilyn Boussaid, for calling attention to the often-misused statement “We are all children of God” (Letters, “All God's Children?” Nov. 18-24) when referring to non-Christians. I have actually heard this from the pulpit. In a discussion group, when I attempted to define “children of God,” as stated in Scripture and as you have so eloquently done, I was told to be careful of “exclusivity.”
All Catholics need to know who we are in Christ and the precious gift he has given us. All are called, but not all respond.
SUSAN R. RAMPACEK
Rochester, Minnesota
The Real First Immaculate Conception Cathedral
Joseph Pronechen's fine article on Albany's Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception was just a tad wrong in calling it “the first cathedral in the United States dedicated to Mary under her title of the Immaculate Conception.”
The Diocese of Mobile was established in 1829, and the parish church — dedicated to the Immaculate Conception in 1781 — was then officially designated the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The cornerstone for the present structure was laid in 1839, and it was consecrated for public worship in 1850. Come see us sometime!
(By the way: just now the old building — a minor basilica since 1962 — is receiving what should be, if the plans go as indicated, a great face-lift. That may be a story for you down the line.)
DON DORR
Coden, Alabama
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Did the Slippery Slope of Embryonic Cloning Just Get Greased? DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:The scientists at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) of Worcester, Mass., who recently announced their plans to clone human embryos, say they want to grow the embryos only to the point where stem cells can be extracted.
This will require an embryo of at least a few hundred cells from which stem-cell lines can be created.
In cloning, scientists mechanically replace the nucleus of an egg with DNA from another cell. The reconstructed egg is then treated to make it divide and grow into an embryo. The firm thinks it will be able to pull this off within six months. The cloned embryos, which are the exact genetic duplicates of the donor of the DNA, will supply stem cells, the master cells that give rise to all other cells in the body.
The scientists hope that, from these primordial cells, they will be able to grow rejection-free body parts, create designer medicine and cure hundreds of diseases.
Those who are promoting this research want the public to believe that therapeutic embryonic cloning is morally justifiable because of the benefits that will be derived. Dr. Michael West, president of ACT, and others favoring the research claim that an embryo is merely “a ball of cells that could sit on the head of a pin.”
What they cannot say, however, is that, in the most scientific sense, anyone who knows how to read DNA would identify the embryo as human. To do so would be to acknowledge the truth — that they are talking about creating human life to harvest body parts and then destroying it.
To assuage people's sense of moral outrage over such a proposition, pro-cloning politicians and scientists are quickly coining obscurantist phrases such as “nuclear transplantation,” “therapeutic cellular transfer,” “activated egg,” “cleaving egg” and “ovasome.”
This is an example of utilitarian ethics, which teaches that the end justifies the means. It is a philosophy that threatens the very foundation of society because it effectively says that we are willing to sacrifice one life in order to improve or save other lives.
Once we cross this line, we submit to the notion that some human beings are more valuable than others. The reasonable person would then have to ask: Why stop at using only stem cells? Why not allow the clone to develop until its organs can be harvested? By trying to stamp out disease by any means necessary, we risk beginning the “compassionate” project of killing the diseased themselves, something which has already begun with selective abortion by parents of undesirable embryos.
Why stop at using only stem cells? Why not allow the clone to develop until its organs can be harvested?
The next step beyond therapeutic cloning is genetic enhancement. Some scientists hope to do this by adding other genes in the DNA before it is placed in the emptied egg to create “super” stem cells. This technology could very well change what it means to be human since we would not be the same creatures we were before. According to Francis Collins, who heads the Federal Human Genome Project, this could lead to the engineering of people without the variations humans have now, a possibility he calls “chilling.”
Cloning embryos and destroying them for therapeutic purposes denies the inherent worth and dignity of every human life. It has far-reaching consequences that attack the foundational belief of our society: the right to life and the freedom not to be used like slaves by an elite whose members can afford expensive therapies. Any benefits that may come from these experiments are far outweighed by the evil caused in their procurement.
We should never forget that Nazi scientists routinely experimented with human beings and perpetrated this century's most horrendous abuse of human dignity. To permit therapeutic embryonic cloning will so cloud our ethics and moral reasoning that we will effectively be taking up where the Nazis left off. Once we start down the road to creating life for utilitarian purposes, there is no bright line that separates the permissible from the unthinkable.
A society is often defined not so much by what it does as by those things it refuses to do. Since all enacted law is based on a moral idea, even bad law has a moral basis in false morality. Thus, it is vital that Congress ban cloning altogether. Although the House of Representatives passed a ban on human cloning in August, the Senate is not likely to take action until February or March of 2002. Sixty votes will be needed to allow a temporary ban.
All Americans should encourage their senators to support legislation outlawing human embryonic therapeutic cloning. Allowing the experimentation and murder to continue threatens us all.
Father Michael Orsi is chaplain of, and a research fellow at, Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael Orsi ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Islam: The Appeal and the Peril DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Islam, along with Judaism and Christianity, is one of the three great Semitic religions. The fact that they share certain roots, especially in the Old Testament, gives them a certain affinity with each other. Every one of the 99 attributes of God mentioned in the Koran is also mentioned in the Bible. In both books, God's mercy is cited 10 times more often than his judgment. The Koran refers to Mary 34 times and is the only woman it names. Mohammed, Islam's founder and prophet, originally directed his followers to face Jerusalem when they prayed.
The commonality Islam shares with the other two Semitic religions is also borne out in what is called its “Five Pillars": 1) Declaration of Belief; 2) Prayer; 3) Fasting; 4) Almsgiving; 5) Pilgrimage to Mecca. These fundamental requirements of Islam also point to its simplicity and its appeal.
Islam is, at the present moment, out-pacing Christianity in the United States as the fastest growing religion. Recently, and for the first time in history, the number of Muslims throughout the world has exceeded the number of Catholics. No doubt, the simplicity of Islam together with the intense devotion shown by its members helps to explain its appeal. Peter Kreeft suggests, in his book Ecumenical Jihad, that “Islam is growing faster than Christianity in America because Muslims want to be saints more than Christians do.” And, of course, the amount of abortion, adultery, fornication, contraception, sterilization and euthanasia practiced in so-called Christian countries is a scandal.
Pope John Paul II reminds us, in his international best seller Crossing the Threshold of Hope, of words that appear in the Vatican Declaration Nostra Aetate concerning those faithful to Islam: “The Church also has a high regard for the Muslims, who worship one God, living and subsistent, merciful and omnipotent, the Creator of heaven and earth.” He goes on to state that, as a result of their monotheism, “believers in Allah are particularly close to us.” Moreover, he adds, “It is impossible not to admire their fidelity to prayer.” In fact, he suggests that the Muslims’ devotion to prayer is a “model” for Christians who have “deserted their magnificent cathedrals, pray only a little or not at all.”
The ethico-religious significance of the word Islam is the “entire surrender of the will to God.” The participal form (Muslim) refers to “those who have surrendered themselves.” A Muslim, therefore, is one who has surrendered himself to the will of God (Allah). In comparison with Christianity, it may be said that Mary's fiat is also her islam.
Mohammed founded Islam in 611 A.D. after receiving a succession of what he declared to be divine revelations given to him through the angel Gabriel. The most important of these revelations is that there is but one God, Allah. At the time, his people were worshipping 360 gods, one for each day of the Arabian year. The worship of one God was effective in unifying the various tribes of Arabia that otherwise had little basis for unity. At the same time, Mohammed realized that non-Arabs, especially Jews and Christians, were anything but willing subjects for conversion. Ultimately, Mohammed spread his teachings through military conquests.
Herein is the peril of Islam.
Unjust Jihads
The intensely controversial Jihad, mentioned in the Koran, refers to a “Holy War” fought against unbelievers. Mohammed himself led Jihads against alien people. When tribes did not pledge their allegiance to Allah, they were often put to the sword.
Some Muslim scholars, such as Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, have interpreted the concept of a Holy War, or Jihad, as a personal striving for righteousness. Nonetheless, the incident of violent Jihads throughout history, especially against Christians, is cause for deep concern.
On Oct. 7, 1571, one of history's most important naval battles took place, a fierce encounter known as the Battle of Lepanto. An armada of some 300 Muslim ships had been poised to invade and overrun Italy. At that time, St. Pope Pius V had called upon each citizen of Europe to pray the rosary. Despite great odds against it, the Christian fleet, which some historians have characterized as a “pickup group of Catholic ships,” soundly defeated the Muslims. 25,000 Muslims died in the skirmish, as did 8,000 Christians. But an estimated 15,000 Christians, who had been taken captive in Muslim ships, were liberated from slavery. The liturgical celebration of that victory on Oct. 7 is celebrated on that day as the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.
An interesting story centers on one of the Christian soldiers involved in the Battle of Lepanto who fought gallantly and received three gunshot wounds, one permanently maiming his left hand. Sometime after the fray, he was captured and enslaved by Muslims and taken to Algeria. Having failed several attempts to escape, he was finally freed when his ransom was paid. He returned to his native Spain and wrote the classic Don Quixote. We are referring, of course, to Miguel de Cervantes, who remains to this day the supreme master of the Spanish tongue.
In addition, the village of Fatima, Portugal, where Our Lady appeared, is named after a Muslim princess who took the name of Mohammed's daughter, Fatima. On the occasion of his daughter's death, Mohammed said, “She has the highest place in heaven after the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
Nasty Surprises
In 1981, on May 13, the date of the first Marian apparition at Fatima, a Muslim by the name of Mehmet Ali Agca made an assassination attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II. Writing in the Washington Post six days later, Joseph Kraft remarked that “the root of this terrorist attempt against the Pope is a turbulent Islamic society, pregnant with nasty surprises.”
That turbulence, most unfortunately, has continued to rear its head in various parts of the world. In May of 1996, the Muslim Groupe Islamique Armé faction slew seven Trappist monks in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria. Their “crime” was “evangelizing.” The emir stated: “Monks who live among the working classes can be legitimately killed.” A journalist by the name of Ahmad Kamal writes about two people from Jerusalem who were stoned to death on the road to Mecca. After they were dead, their passes were found to be in order. But the deceased were fair-haired and had cameras. It was easy to assume that they were infidels.
On Dec. 8, 2000, the Australian newspaper The Age reported that 93 Christians were slaughtered in the Moluccas by Muslim extremists. Christian refugees from East Timor who fled to West Timor a little more than a year ago continue to be harassed and even killed by Muslim militants. Saudi Arabia grants no religious freedom whatsoever to its 400,000 Catholic Philippine workers. No one Catholic church exists in that country. Religious meetings in the privacy of one's home are prohibited. This and the possession of religious literature are punishable with imprisonment.
During the 15-year-long war of the Sudanese Muslim government, an estimated two million Christians have died. Iran has arrested and tortured people who have converted from Islam to Christianity. The list goes on and on.
If all sons and daughters of God understand the Holy War (Jihad) as a personal fight against sin within the self, then we can all regard each other as brothers and sisters and live in peace and work together to build a better world. But externalizing this attempt at purification — “ethnic cleansing” as it is sometimes called — is not the work of God, but the work of the devil. The inner Jihad leads to purification and peace; its exterior counterpart brings about discrimination and war.
Don DeMarco teaches philosophy at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Don DeMarco ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Banishing Santa Will Be a Tough Ebenezer Act to Follow DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Last month we once again awarded, for lack of a better word, the recipient of the Becket Fund's annual Ebenezer Award.
The Ebenezer, you may recall, is each year bestowed upon the perpetrators of the silliest affront to Christmas or Hanukkah. Named after the Dickens character, Scrooge, the award itself is a specially designed Christmas stocking filled with lumps of coal. It is delivered along with a certificate most unsuitable for framing.
The 2001 awardee richly deserved its Ebenezer. Its “accomplishment": banning Santa Claus from the town's holiday celebrations. Yes, the competition was tight, but in the end it was the Kensington, Md., town council that walked away with the December dishonors.
Traditionally, Santa arrived in Kensington on a fire truck and helped the mayor light the town Christmas tree. This year, however, two families said Santa is a religious symbol and that, as such, his presence would make them feel “uncomfortable.” Never mind that various federal courts have held it is the very presence of Santa Claus as a secular symbol that makes the presence of religious symbols such as a Nativity scene permissible. The town council disinvited Santa anyway.
Then, when the move drew an avalanche of angry phone calls and e-mails, they behaved like typical bureaucrats and changed Santa's status from “disinvited” to “uninvited” — as if that would please anyone.
Dishonorable mention went to the City of St. Paul. There, officials banned red poinsettias from their holiday presentation, saying there had been complaints that the plants were a Christian symbol. Never mind, once again, that courts often note that the presence of poinsettias as a secular symbol makes possible the inclusion of other, religious ones. The county bureaucrats yanked the poinsettias anyway.
There is a very serious point in all this nonsense. Kensington and St. Paul are perfect illustrations of a common misunderstanding of religious liberty. Each transformed the right of religious freedom from a freedom to search for God and to live and express one's faith, into a freedom not to see and not to hear anything that worsens one's angst. For them, having faith is like smoking. It's a dangerous habit. Consenting adults can believe in private, but believing in public is a bad thing to do. The bureaucrats think it's the government's job to protect you from other people's religious belief every bit as much as it's the govern-ment's job to protect you from other people's cigarette smoke.
They are, of course, wrong. There is no discomfort clause in the Constitution, no legal right to ban Santa or a poinsettia or anything else simply because it makes you feel bad. There is an Establishment Clause, which quite properly prevents the government from proclaiming an official religion. But the courts and common sense are unanimous that simply celebrating Christmas is a far cry from proclaiming an official religion
So the bureaucrats in Kensington and St. Paul have it wrong: Santas and poinsettias are not unconstitutional religious symbols. But the federal courts that think so-called secular symbols are necessary to sanitize religious ones like Nativity scenes and menorahs get it wrong, too.
First of all, Santa Claus, who started life as St. Nicholas, and poinsettias, which became Christmas flowers because of a Mexican legend that they were once given as gifts to the Christ Child, really aren't entirely secular. In fact, it is very difficult to find a truly secular symbol of Christmas. Candy canes began as symbolic representations of the shepherd's crooks, holly wreaths were woven to prefigure the Christ Child's eventual crown of thorns and the star on the tree is, of course, the Star of Bethlehem. So, whether such symbols are secular or not depends on who's looking at them.
Second, and more importantly, there is no reason they have to be wholly secular. The government celebrates Christmas and Hanukkah as normal parts of our culture, just as it celebrates St. Patrick's Day and Martin Luther King's birthday. Nobody imagines that King's birthday is an unconstitutional racial preference, or St. Patrick's Day an ethnic one. We don't entertain lawsuits by anglophiles seeking to enjoin parades on March 17, or by klansmen trying to block events on January 18.
The reason is simple. The government celebrates everything from National Catfish Day to National Jukebox Week. (No, I'm not making that up.) Given the wide variety of government events throughout the year, no one could seriously think that a St. Patrick's Day parade was an evil plot to establish Irish supremacy.
The same is true for Christmas and Hannukah. They are religious holidays that naturally feature religious symbols. When the government celebrates them, it shouldn't have to bend over backwards to pretend otherwise. It is everything else that the government celebrates throughout the year that puts a Nativity scene or menorah — or even a Santa — in context, not the secular or religious nature of the foliage that accompanies it.
It will be interesting to see what the anti-religion contingents cook up to contend for the next Ebenezer Award. That is to say: Let the 2002 competition begin. And may the worst group win.
Kevin J. Hasson is president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C. (www.becketfund.org)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kevin Hasson ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Our Lady's Lodgings in Jolly Olde England DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, in Norfolk, East Anglia, is the National Shrine of Our Lady in England.
It has been a place of pilgrimage since 1061 and had been considered one of the four most important pilgrimage sites in the Middle Ages, on a par with Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela. I visited there recently with my family to see for myself this holy place that came to be known as “England's Nazareth.”
We arrived, providentially, in time for noon Mass in the large, barnlike Chapel of Reconciliation. The strong smell of disinfectant was in the air as the shrine is in the midst of sheep country and the threat of foot-and-mouth disease was still high. It was spring, and the lambs were happily romping in the fields near their mothers, oblivious to the threat. Our eight children piled out of our two cars and filed into the church after walking on the obligatory disinfectant mat.
We were welcomed into the church by a group of elderly people and noticed that the only other visitors seemed to be a group of senior citizens on a bus tour. The Mass was quiet and subdued, much like the shrine itself.
After Mass, we ate our picnic lunch on the grounds outside the 14th-century Slipper Chapel, which is the only ancient part of the shrine. It was a beautiful sunny day and we were able to enjoy our lunch under blue skies with plenty of room to explore. There was also a tea room nearby. We visited the bookshop and found, to our delight, several used books which now grace our shelves, among them a biography of Ronald Knox by Evelyn Waugh. Outside the bookshop is a holy-water fountain; we were encouraged to take a bottle of the water home.
We then visited the small chapel of the Holy Spirit, which has a small area for prayer and a beautiful modern Pentecost mosaic. The Slipper Chapel next door was surprisingly tiny. It houses a modern version of the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, the original having been destroyed in the Reformation. This statue was venerated by Pope John Paul II when he visited England in 1982. The chapel is too small for daily Mass, but a daily rosary is prayed there.
Like many things modern and British, the shrine is understated in its simplicity. There is nothing remarkable about the architecture of the buildings, which are a conglomeration of medieval and modern. The real beauty of the shrine lies in its story; how it came to be and how Our Lady is using it to ignite the flame of faith in England once again.
Wondrous Construction
During the reign of St. Edward the Confessor, in 1061, a pious widow named Richeldis de Faverches said Our Lady had appeared to her and taken her, in spirit, to Nazareth. There, the Blessed Mother asked Richeldis to build a replica of the Holy House of the Annunciation in England. Richeldis hired workmen to build the house to her specifications. When they reported having difficulty with the foundation, she spent the night in prayer. The next morning, Richeldis found the Holy House not only completed, but also situated about 200 feet from the construction site.
In 1150, Augustinian canons built a priory beside the Holy House. Pilgrims soon began flocking to see “England's Nazareth.” During its heyday in the Middle Ages, when the Muslims had control of the Holy Land, pilgrims flocked by the thousands to the shrine at Walsingham. Among the throngs were many English monarchs. Henry VIII made several trips to the shrine and became its greatest benefactor.
The priory at Walsingham has the dubious distinction of being one of the first religious houses in England to sign the Act of Supremacy in 1534, making King Henry VIII head of the Church in England and renouncing the supremacy of the pope. Four years after signing the act, the priory and its church were both ransacked, looted and demolished. A beloved statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was taken to Chelsea and burned, while the gold and valuables went to fill royal coffers.
All that remains of the original Holy House and priory are the east window of the massive stone church that once surrounded the house and the gatehouse of the priory. These are now part of a museum and there are sometimes processions to the ancient site. They are located in the village of Little Walsingham.
Also located in the village of Little Walsingham are the Anglican shrine to Our Lady of Walsingham, the Anglican replica of the original Holy House, and the pilgrim bureau for the Roman Catholic shrine which handles accommodations for pilgrims.
Off With Their Shoes
The Catholic shrine is located about a mile from Little Walsingham and is centered around the medieval Slipper Chapel. This chapel was used by pilgrims on their way to the Holy House in Walsingham and was fortunate enough to escape the destruction that took place in Walsingham in 1538. It is popularly believed that the name refers to the practice of pilgrims who would remove their shoes — or slippers — at the chapel to walk the last mile of their pilgrimage barefoot. It may be that the term comes from the old English word “slype,” meaning “something in between,” because it comes between Walsingham and the rest of the world.
During the Catholic persecution in England, the Slipper Chapel was used for various purposes, among them a stable for animals. In 1863, an Anglican, Miss Charlotte Boyd, wanted to purchase the Slipper Chapel and restore Benedictine monasticism to the Church of England. After several years of difficulty, she was finally allowed to purchase the chapel. In the intervening years, Miss Boyd became Catholic. Shortly after purchasing the chapel, she donated it to Benedictine monks as a place of prayer for unity in England.
The first post-Reformation pilgrimage to the Slipper Chapel and Walsingham took place in 1897. In 1922, the Anglican vicar of Walsingham began to promote Anglican devotion to Our Lady of Walsingham. In 1934, the Slipper Chapel was declared the National Catholic Shrine of Our Lady for England and Wales. Exactly 400 years after the canons signed the ill-considered Act of Supremacy, Walsingham was returned to Our Lady.
Our Lady of Walsingham attracts large numbers of Anglican and Roman Catholic pilgrims to their respective shrines. The Catholic and Anglican bishops have jointly composed a prayer for unity, invoking Our Lady of Walsingham.
Last Sept. 24 marked the first time Our Lady of Walsingham has been granted her own feast day on the Church calendar in England. It is a sign of hope and renewal for the Church in England. Father Michael Rear, a priest assigned to the shrine at Walsingham and a convert from Anglicanism, reminded his congregation of the words prophesied by Pope Leo XIII: “When England goes back to Walsingham, Our Lady will come back to England.”
“Through this Feast,” said Father Rear, “England is coming back to Walsingham.”
Debbie Nowak writes from Ripon, North Yorkshire, England.
----- EXCERPT: Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Norfolk, East Anglia ----- EXTENDED BODY: Debbie Nowak ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Frodo Lives! DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:The holiday season just past was a time of magic and wizards in movie theaters around the globe.
Hollywood gave us Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to munch on with our Thanksgiving turkey and stuffed our Christmas stocking with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
The Sept. 11 attacks and the follow-up U.S. military action have created a climate in which tales of fantasy about good and evil seem to have special relevance. The Fellowship of the Ring, based on the first of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy of novels, dramatizes this subject with a moral precision lacking in Harry Potter because Ring's creators understand the nature of evil.
Director Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures) and coscreenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens achieve this by remaining faithful to the book in two important ways. First, they have fashioned a majestic epic that captures the transcendent dimensions of the conflict.
Second, they realize that evil is also an interior moral battle. The temptation to do evil is universal, and most of their major characters struggle with it. Once a person succumbs, the forces of darkness take over and use him to wreak havoc.
Through an individual act of creative intelligence, Tolkien, a devout Catholic, produced a new mythology comparable to folklore that took centuries to evolve. This was part of his genius. The film-makers have the imagination to find visual equivalents for his sublime achievement. The fantastic universe they conjure up seems authentic in its physical details and psychology.
Unlike many of their contemporaries, Jackson and company make no attempt to ironically deconstruct the genre in which they're working. Their sincere belief in Tolkien's message and method inform every frame of the film. But the viewer doesn't need to have read the book. The movie works as a dramatic spectacle in its own right. The necessary changes from the novel are in keeping with the spirit of the original.
The action takes place 7,000 years ago in Middle-earth, a land populated by men, hobbits, elves, dwarfs and wizards. These different species have long struggled against the dark lord Sauron (voice of Sala Baker), who wants to conquer them. His physical presence isn't human. He looks like a huge, flaming, dis-embodied eye of a cat.
Protected from much of this warfare is the race of hobbits. These midget-sized, pastoral creatures have human sensibilities and hairy, pan-like feet. They live in the Shire, a place that resembles pre-industrial England.
Their idyllic way of life is threatened when Sauron invades the Shire with his ghostly, black-clad, equestrian Ringwraiths. A scholarly, eccentric hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) has a golden ring which the dark lord wants to recover because its possession would give him supreme power.
Gandalf (Ian McKellen), a wise wizard, knows the ring's history and insists that Baggins give it to his nephew, Frodo (Elijah Woods). This totemic object was forged ages ago in the volcano Mount Doom and must be returned there and destroyed to save Middle-earth from Sauron.
The ring brilliantly dramatizes the temptation of power and how it can lead to evil. Those who wear it acquire potent magical powers. But, even if they try to use these powers for good, the object always corrupts them — its wearers find themselves wanting to dominate and harm others. “There is only one lord of the ring who can bend it to his will,” Gandalf warns. “And he does not share power.” That, of course, is Sauron.
One of the movie's most chilling moments is the sudden, visual transformation of a jovial, cuddly hobbit into a demonic being when we see him coveting the ring's powers. This only lasts a few seconds, and then he resumes his usual friendly persona. But its horror matches that of Sauron's various armies of terrifying ghouls.
Gandalf goes for guidance to a more evolved wizard, Samuron the White (Christopher Lee). But his mentor has lost his own interior moral struggle and gone over to the other side, using his superior intelligence to aid the forces of darkness. This fallen wise man turns his tranquil, monastery-like dwelling into a turbulent inferno that seems lifted from Brueghel.
Frodo and Gandalf travel to Rivendell, where a pan-species fellowship of seven others is formed to escort them to Mount Doom. Three resemble medieval warriors: the moody Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), heir to the throne of Gondor; the hot-headed Boromir (Sean Bean); and the elf-archer Legolas (Orlando Bloom). Comic relief to their more traditional heroic conflicts is provided by a courageous dwarf (John Rhys-Davies) and three decent but bumbling hobbits (Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd).
“Even the smallest person can change the course of history,” they are instructed. Rivendell itself is an enchanting mountainside community that seems like a series of preRaphaelite drawings come to life.
The quest to return the ring is a dangerous, picaresque journey on which the fellowship encounters a variety of fantastical environments and ever more menacing minions of Sauron. Jackson stages a series of suspense-filled action scenes as thrilling as those in Gladiator or the Star Wars series. At two hours and 58 minutes, there's perhaps one battle too many. The violence, while never exploitative, is too intense for kids under 12.
Tolkien repeatedly pointed out that The Fellowship of the Ring is not a Christian allegory. But he also maintained that his Christian faith guided his imagination throughout his career. As Jackson has clearly gone to great lengths to faithfully reproduce Tolkien's vision, the film is grounded in a Christian world-view most Hollywood movies have cast aside for the last four decades. The grandeur of its intentions, the depth of its characters and the excitement of its action will stimulate your mind and elevate your spirit.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring does Tolkien right ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, JAN. 6
Out There: Angel Falls
National Geographic, 10 p.m.
Imagine a waterfall 15 times higher than Niagara Falls! Flying over remote jungle highlands in southeastern Venezuela in 1935, U.S. adventurer and bush pilot Jimmy Angel (1899-1956) discovered the 3,212-foot cataract that now bears his name. To be rebroadcast on Monday, Jan. 7, at 1 a.m. and on Saturday, Jan. 12, at 4 p.m.
MONDAY, JAN. 7
No Greater Joy: Sidewalk Counseling
EWTN, 1 p.m.
Come along with prayerful pro-life sidewalk counselors as they brave society's wrath by offering compassionate alternatives to pregnant moms outside abortion sites.
TUESDAY, JAN. 8
Sound and Fury
PBS, 9 p.m. Check local listings
This moving documentary follows two brothers (one deaf, one hearing) and their families for two years. Each family wrestles with whether their deaf children will have more opportunity and happiness in life by remaining members of the strongly supportive deaf community or by having hearing-restorative cochlear implant surgery.
WEDNESDAY, JAN. 9
A Twentieth-Century Testimony by Malcolm Muggeridge
EWTN, 1 p.m.
English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) often stood alone in pursuit of truth. He punctured the 20th century's worst ideologies, refusing to cover up Soviet mass murder, gradually abandoning leftism and rejecting contraception and abortion as anti-life. After meeting Mother Teresa, Muggeridge introduced her to the West. She helped him and his wife Kitty along the road to Catholicism, which they embraced in 1982. To be rebroadcast on Thursday, Jan. 10, at 3 a.m. and 10 p.m.
THURSDAY, JAN. 10
Mysteries of the Deep
National Geographic, 9 p.m.
On a secret mission in the Mediterranean in 1997, a U.S. Navy team was looking for an Israeli submarine that had vanished three decades earlier. But the search turned up an archaeological surprise – the second-oldest sunken ship ever found. Now, undersea explorer Robert Ballard investigates the ancient shipwreck site.
FRIDAY, JAN. 11
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly
PBS, 5 p.m. Check local listings
Reporter Fred de Sam Lazaro compares secularist and practicing Moslems in Uzbekistan, a country long occupied by the Soviets and still dominated by Soviet types. Note: Program content is subject to change in case of sudden news developments.
SATURDAY, JAN. 12
East-West Shrine Game
ESPN2, 1:30 p.m.
Many of college football's most talented seniors seek to impress professional scouts in this annual all-star contest in San Francisco.
SATURDAY, JAN. 12
Handyma'am with Beverly DiJulio
PBS, 3:30 p.m. Check local listings
This episode, “Making Waves: Water Projects,” shows us how to construct a decorative fountain and how to install a back yard pond complete with fish and plants.
— Dan Engler
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engle ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:The Princess Diaries(2001)
Despite the populist trappings of our culture, many young girls still fantasize about being born of royal blood. The Princess Diaries turns Meg Cabot's novel on the subject into a female-empowerment fairy tale that cleverly dissects some of the components of this dream. But director Gary Marshall (Pretty Woman) and screenwriter Gina Wendkos emphasize laughs rather than social commentary. The curly-haired, coltishly awkward 15-year-old Mia Thermapoulos (Anne Hathaway) is a child of divorce. She's been raised by her non-conforming artist mother, Helen (Caroline Goodall), and has never known her father. But his sudden death makes this very Americanized teen-ager the heir to the throne of the independent, Monaco-like principality of Genovia.
Mia's grandmother, the Queen Dowager (Julie Andrews), supervises her royal training. This formal, elderly woman becomes a female authority figure who gently provides the girl with a kind of interior moral structure previously lacking. Mia learns that inner changes mean more than outer ones and that serving others is more important than popularity.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
The Crusades were once perceived to be a time of great heroism, and the virtues of its leaders were thought to have inspired the citizens of Christian nations to demand equivalent justice at home. The Adventures of Robin Hood is an exhilarating, old-fashioned swashbuckling yarn that quietly preaches that message. When the much-admired Norman warrior King Richard the Lion-Hearted (Ian Hunter) returns from the Crusades, he's kidnapped by the Austrians and held for ransom. In his absence, the evil Prince John (Claude Rains), also a Norman, proclaims himself ruler of England and organizes the Norman lords to exploit the Saxon peasants.
Sir Robin of Locksley, a Saxon nobleman nicknamed Robin Hood (Errol Flynn), still holds to Richard's ideals and resists Norman oppression. He's driven into Sherwood Forest, where he and his followers rob rich Normans to feed the Saxon poor and raise money for Richard's ransom. The movie features such colorful characters as Friar Tuck (Eugene Pallette), Little John (Alan Hale) and the lovely Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland).
Lawrence of Arabia(1962)
Much Islamic fundamentalism springs from the warring tribes of the Arabian peninsula, home to Osama bin Laden. Lawrence of Arabia provides a crash course in some of the region's history and politics. Director David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai) and screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson craft an epic character study of the eccentric British hero who united the Arab tribes in a successful revolt against the Ottoman Turkish Empire during World War I.
Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) feels out of place in Edwardian England and reinvents himself as a desert warrior. His victories serve Britain's wartime purposes. But that nation also has its own colonial ambitions, and they force him to break his promises to his allies (Sir Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif) about Arab independence. While emphasizing Lawrence's charisma and military leadership, the filmmakers also explore his dark side.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: A Catholic Think Tank Grows in Washington DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Few options exist for scholars who want to analyze contemporary events in light of the teachings of the Catholic Church. A new think tank in Washington, D.C., is working to change that.
Called the Intercultural Forum, this new hub for Catholic intellectuals was launched in March 2001 on the third floor of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., under the leadership of Dominican Father Joseph Augustine Di Noia.
The Intercultural Forum has a unique relationship with its host institution. “We are to the John Paul II Center somewhat [as] the Woodrow Wilson Center is to the Smithsonian,” says Father De Noia.
In other words, the JPII Center is an interactive museum open to the public, and the Intercultural Forum is its exclusive, scholarly research branch.
The primary mission of the forum is to bring together pre-eminent scholars from throughout the world to research, discuss and publish materials related to the teachings of John Paul II. “The impact of John Paul II is monumental,” says Father Di Noia. “We can proceed down some of the paths that he has opened up.”
An example of the forum in action: At a series of lectures it presented last fall, Cardinal Avery Dulles, widely regarded as the dean of American Catholic theologians, addressed an audience of around 200 people — half of them bishops — on “The Church and Contemporary American Culture.”
“It is important to understand that Catholicism is a revealed religion that comes to the culture from outside rather than just growing out of the culture,” says Cardinal Dulles, commenting on his lecture.
“The dominant culture of the United States was established at the time of the Declaration of Independence. It was a sort of cross between a biblical religion and a rationalistic form of deism.
“Catholicism prospered in that kind of culture, but part of the modern problem is that the culture has been rapidly transformed by contemporary popular culture, which is largely shaped by electronic media, and that culture tends to be focused on instant satisfaction, pleasure and utilitarianism. It is difficult for the Church to assert itself in contemporary American culture because [the culture] does not respect any moral absolutes or the obedience to God and to revelation.”
Cardinal Dulles says he has been asked by Father Di Noia to participate in the Intercultural Forum's planning process, and hopes to do so in 2002.
Meanwhile, two other speakers from the fall-lecture series, Prof. Kenneth Schmitz, emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, and Dominican Father Benedict Ashley, professor at the Center for Health Care Ethics at St. Louis University, have been invited by Father Di Noia to help formulate a growth plan for the forum.
An important part of the plan will be the establishment of chairs to oversee research in 10 defined areas.
These include the culture of life, Jewish-Catholic relations, Eastern Christianity, science and faith, and religion and the arts.
Scholars will be able to spend up to three years working on specific projects in these and related subjects.
“There is great potential for addressing topics of urgent interest to the Church and to the public,” says Father Di Noia.
The chairs will be selected by an advisory board and will have a doctoral or equivalent degree in philosophy, theology, history or a related field.
The appointments are expected to be announced beginning around September 2002, said Father Di Noia.
One promising side development already in evidence: the Intercultural Forum's growing relationship with one of its Washington neighbors, the Catholic University of America.
“Both institutions are fortunate to have each other as neighbors and, in a sense, partners in this new evangelization,” says Vincentian Father David M. O'Connell, Catholic University president.
“The university studies questions and issues that impact and contribute to the advancement of human cultures from the Catholic perspective. The Intercultural Forum, in turn, takes the fruit of that Catholic scholarship and tests it against the realities of the world, drawing important conclusions that contribute to the evangelization of cultures that has been the enduring vision of Pope John Paul II.”
The Intercultural Forum recently conducted a 10-week seminar on the thought of Pope John Paul II, accredited at the Catholic University and attended by 20 students.
That seminar, conducted by Schmitz and Father Ashley, explored the major writings of John Paul II, with special emphasis on his social documents, his letter to artists and the Church's inter-religious dialogues.
Schmitz says he is enthusiastic about the future of the Intercultural Forum and acknowledges that, shortly before the issue of human cloning reached the papers, scholars had been discussing stem-cell research at the Intercultural Forum.
“Prior to the most recent developments, we had a discussion on stem-cell research in which we had some geneticists, philosophers and theologians discussing the issue together, informing one another and hearing one another's views,” he explains. “We very much want to be part of the cultural debate on these things.”
Mary Ann Sullivan is based in New Durham, New Hampshire.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ann Sullivan ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: The Battles of Knox, Newman and Belloc DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Before television, people read a lot more than they do today. Instead of watching sit-coms, they would read short stories. In the absence of panel-discussion shows and talk radio, they followed current debates on the pages of magazines. One very popular subject was “the intelligent discussion of religious differences.”
Register columnist Karl Keating has selected eight chapter-length readings, most of them from the heyday of Catholic apologetics in 1930s Britain. Authors like Msgr. Ronald Knox and Hilaire Belloc argue in print with scientists and skeptics about the truths of the faith. Keating introduces the opponents and the issues, provides notes to explain topical references and then lets the controversialists speak for the Church's teachings.
The result is one heady book. A sample of Belloc, taking to task the Anglican Dean Inge: “The Faith, you say, is foreign. Certainly it has been alienated by force and fraud from the English [by Henry VIII, etc.] — but since how long?… You are a man cultured and acquainted with the sources. You know well enough that England only is [i.e., exists today] because the Church made England after the chaos of the fifth and sixth centuries.”
The training in logic and debate that was part of British university education is very much in evidence, together with a marvelous sense of fair play. The writers often go to considerable lengths to be gentlemanly while trouncing their opponents. Aware that the reading public is “listening in,” they can also be wryly entertaining.
Keating shows how Cardinal John Henry Newman's magnificent testimonial, Apologia pro Vita Sua, actually began with a response to a snide remark in a magazine. An Anglican clergyman had implied that Newman (and Catholic priests in general) were so involved in casuistry that they had abandoned the truth. Newman challenged his accuser to prove the allegation by citing a text. When no concrete evidence was forthcoming, Newman spelled out his adversary's innuendoes, the better to refute his “method of disputation.” The excerpt is an intricate tour de force, an impressive demonstration that precisely a love for truth had brought Newman into the Catholic Church from Anglicanism.
In another chapter, Herbert Thurston, a Jesuit scholar in his 80s, wagered that he could find a dozen substantial errors in as many pages written by an anti-Catholic “medievalist.” He won the bet, with errors to spare.
Though sometimes technical, most of Controversiesis in a genial, conversational style. Arnold Lunn, the adversary in an early chapter, returns as a Catholic convert for three of the later ones. He challenges C.E.M. Joad, a professor of philosophy (and former fellow Oxford student) on his evolutionist views. “The paragraph I have quoted from your work is full of unanswered questions: 1. How would you define ‘life’? How did ‘life’ originate? … 4. Whence did ‘life’ obtain [its] motive power? 5. How did ‘life’ acquire purpose? … This sort of thing, my dear Joad, imposes a greater strain on our credulity than the first chapter of Genesis.”
An American professor teaching a survey course used to say that the history of philosophy is worth studying because it deals with “perennially disputed questions.” Karl Keating's new book proves that good apologetics, like fine wine, improves with age because of perennial Catholic answers.
Michael J. Miller writes from Glenside, Pennsylvania
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael J. Miller ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Tolkien Bequest
MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY, Dec. 1 — The Jesuit university has received the bequest of what is believed to be the single largest body of secondary sources on the author J.R.R. Tolkien available. The vast collection of Tolkien material and research came from the estate of Richard Blackwelder.
Blackwelder, who died earlier this year, worked as an entomologist and zoology educator, and devoted much of his retirement to building and organizing the collection. He began turning over his collection to the university in 1982. The university maintains the J.R.R. Tolkien Collection of original drawings and galleys with the author's handwritten corrections. The library has a permanent exhibit on view devoted to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's best-known work.
Free to Protest
TOWNHALL.COM, Dec. 24 — The shouting-down by students of a commencement address critical of the Bush administration, delivered by Sacramento Bee newspaper publisher Janis Heaphy, at California State University Sacramento in early December was regrettable and rude. So says Debra Saunders in a column that was picked up by the opinion Web site. It also prompted the columnist to take note of an apparent double standard: “When audiences criticize publishers, they're hecklers. When they drown out conservatives, they're ‘protesters.’”
Humanitarian Institute
FORDHAM UNIVERSITIY, Dec. 10 — The Jesuit university in New York has formed the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs to train people to work in crisis negotiation, human rights and health and human service issues.
The center is a joint effort of Fordham and the Center for International Health and Cooperation whose president, Kevin Cahill, will direct the Fordham program. Cahill, a New York physician active in many church-related activities, served as personal physician to New York Cardinals Terence Cooke and John O'Connor. Fordham's new institute will take an active role in forging partnerships with relief organizations, publishing books and hosting symposia related to humanitarian aid issues.
Pennies from the Poor
“We appreciate what you have done. … We love you,” said Damba Koroma, 9, whose left arm was cut off by rebels. “May God bless you.” The effort, which began as a Lenten outreach program three years ago, was assisted by the nonprofit Friends of Sierra Leone.
Selling Darwin
“A recent Gallup Poll found that 45% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years,” says the Chronicle, “and 39% believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is not supported by evidence.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Fear Not! He Has Vanquished the Power of Evil DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Here is a translation of John Paul II's homily at Christmas Midnight Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.
Populus, qui ambulabat in tenebris, vidit lucem magnam — “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:1).
Every year we listen again to these words of the Prophet Isaiah in the moving context of the liturgical re-evocation of Christ's Birth. Every year these words take on new meaning and cause us to relive the atmosphere of expectation and hope, of amazement and joy typical of Christmas.
To the people, oppressed and suffering, who walked in darkness, there appeared “a great light". A truly “great” light indeed, because the light which radiates from the humility of the crib is the light of the new creation. If the first creation began with light (cf. Genesis 1:3), how much more splendid and “great” is the light which inaugurates the new creation: it is God himself made man!
Christmas is an event of light, it is the feast of light: in the Child of Bethlehem the primordial light once more shines in humanity's heaven and dissipates the clouds of sin. The radiance of God's definitive triumph appears on the horizon of history in order to offer a new future of hope to a pilgrim people.
Light in Our Darkness
“Upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone” (Isaiah 9:1).
These joyful tidings, proclaimed just now in our assembly, are also meant for us, the men and women of the dawn of the third millennium. Throughout the world the community of believers gathers in prayer to listen to it once again. Amid the cold and snow of winter or in the torrid heat of the tropics, tonight is a Holy Night for all.
Long awaited, the splendor of the new Day at last shines forth. The Messiah is born, Emmanuel, God-with-us! He is born, who was announced by the Prophets of old and long invoked by all “who dwelt in the land of gloom.” In the silence and the darkness of the night, the light becomes a word and message of hope.
But does this certainty of faith not seem to clash with the way things are today? If we listen to the relentless news headlines, these words of light and hope may seem like words from a dream. But that is precisely the challenge of faith, which makes this proclamation at once comforting and demanding. It make us feel that we are wrapped in the tender love of God, while at the same time it commits us to a practical love of God and of our neighbor.
His Love Conquers
“The grace of God has appeared, offering salvation to all” (Titus 2:11).
Our hearts this Christmas are anxious and distressed because of the continuation in various parts of the world of war, social tensions, and the painful hardships in which so many people find themselves. We are all seeking an answer that will reassure us.
The passage from the letter to Titus which we have just heard reminds us that the birth of the Only-begotten Son of the Father has been revealed as “an offer of salvation” in every corner of the earth, at every time in history. The Child who is named “Wonder-Counsellor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:5) is born for every man and woman. He brings with him the answer which can calm our fears and reinvigorate our hope.
Yes, in this night filled with sacred memories, our trust in the redemptive power of the Word made flesh is confirmed. When darkness and evil seem to prevail, Christ tells us once more: Fear not! By his coming into the world he has vanquished the power of evil, freed us from the slavery of death and brought us back to the banquet of life.
It is up to us to draw from the power of his victorious love by appropriating his “logic” of service and humility. Each of us is called to overcome with Christ “the mystery of iniquity,” by becoming witnesses of solidarity and builders of peace. Let us go then to the cave of Bethlehem to meet him, and to meet, in him, all the world's children, every one of our brothers and sisters afflicted in body or oppressed in spirit.
Tell the World
The shepherds, “once they had seen, made known what had been told them concerning this child” (Luke 2:17).
Like the shepherds, we too on this wonderful night cannot fail to experience the desire to share with others the joy of our encounter with this “child wrapped in swaddling cloths,” in whom the saving power of the Almighty is revealed. We cannot pause in ecstatic contemplation of the Messiah lying in the manger, and forget our obligation to bear witness to him. In haste we must once more set out on our journey. With joy we must leave the cave of Bethlehem in order to recount everywhere the marvel which we have witnessed. We have encountered light and life! In him, love has been bestowed upon us.
Receiving Christ
“A child is born to us…” (Isaiah 9:5).
We welcome you with joy, Almighty Lord of heaven and earth, who out of love became a Child “in Judea, in the city of David, which is called Bethlehem” (Luke 2:4).
We welcome you with gratitude, new Light rising in the night of the world.
We welcome you as our brother, the “Prince of Peace,” who “made of the two one people” (cf. Ephesians 2:14).
Fill us with your gifts, you who did not hesitate to begin human life like us. Make us children of God, you who for our sake desired to become a son of man (cf. Saint Augustine, Homilies, 184).
You, “Wonder-Counsellor,” sure promise of peace; you, powerful presence of the “God-Hero"; you, our one God, who lie poor and humble in the dim light of the stable, welcome us around your crib.
Come, peoples of the earth, open to him the doors of your history! Come to worship the Son of the Virgin Mary, who descended among us, on this night prepared for down the centuries.
Night of joy and peace.
Venite, adoremus!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Time Out
Q What's an appropriate length of time for a preschooler to spend in time out? I've read that one minute per year of age is a good rule of thumb.
A By “time out,” I assume you mean placing your preschooler in a chair, a corner, her room, or some other semi-isolated place for a period of time as a way of dealing with misbehavior. In the old days, it was called going to your room, or visiting the corner. These days we've given it an air of psychological respectability: time out
Time out has fostered many relatives: the quiet chair, thinking time, the cool down rug, the sitting place. Whatever means is used, it essentially means removing Harmony from one scene — where the action, fun or trouble is — and placing her in another — where it's quiet, boring and trouble-free.
Because time out is standard preschool discipline, parents wrestle with its length. How long is long enough to let the lesson settle in? The rule of one minute for each year of age is based on the developmental notion that little kids aren't readily capable of spending much time in one place. Making Patience stay put beyond a few minutes is pushing her past the limits of her attention span and endurance.
Here are some ideas that are more workable:
E One quiet minute per year of age. Time doesn't begin until Paul is quiet, and time starts over if he starts over. In effect, Paul can shorten his time if he accepts it well.
Will this stress him beyond his developmental limits? No. There's nothing unhealthy about stretching his limits. He is learning to sit a little longer than he'd prefer to. That's what discipline by boredom is all about. He's not going to be stunted emotionally because he had to stay in one place four extra minutes.
E Link the amount of time out to the seriousness of the infraction. It only makes sense to link longer stays with whatever's at the top of your hierarchy of problem behavior — whether it's throwing temper tantrums or tormenting siblings or showing disrespect. At the top of the list put whatever you find more serious or whatever you want to teach your children more quickly.
E Make time out boring. The more dull the location, the less time needed for Grace to simmer down. If she sits on a dining room chair with a panoramic view of family life, she can watch her surroundings to entertain herself. If she stands with her back to the action, she's more likely to be bored.
A caution: Every parent has to balance the need for supervision with the need for boredom. Sometimes it may be better to keep Sigmund close by to avoid the trouble he could create behind your back.
One mother used her stairs creatively. Time out on the first step was a five-minute stay. If her son squawked, he earned the second step, also worth five minutes. If he was quiet for five minutes there, he could move back to the first step for five minutes. Last I heard, mom was adding a fifth floor to her house.
Dr. Ray Guarendi is a clinical psychologist and author.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: The Crown Jewel of Christmas DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:Bavarians know how to do Christmas. I should know. My maiden name is Beingessner.
One thing they know about Christmas is that it should last longer than one morning of frantic unwrapping.
Traditionally, of course, Christmas has 12 days — starting Dec. 25 and ending on King's Day, Jan. 6. That's the feast of the Epiphany. Or, if you prefer, “The Adoration of the Magi” or “The Manifestation of God.” At one time, it was called a “second Nativity.” The idea is that Christ was born on Christmas day, but his significance was revealed on Epiphany.
That's when the kings came and knelt next to him, the wise men from far away, the gentile magi acknowledging the power of the newborn baby who came to save all people from sin — even them.
Pope John Paul II is no Bavarian, but he understands the lesson of Epiphany well.
He said that the feast of the Epiphany doesn't merely mark one historical event — it celebrates the journey of faith that we all complete when we follow the star of God's light in our consciences and human reason.
“The three personages from the East followed this light with certainty even before the appearance of the star. God spoke to them with the eloquence of all creation: he said that he is, he exists; that he is the Creator and Lord of the world,” he said in one Epiphany homily, “The Magi responded with faith to that inner Epiphany of God.” We are meant to do the same.
My husband and I are trying to make this awe-inspiring feast day a true “event” in the lives of our children. The trick is to deliver the meaning of the day in a package made for kids. The solution: Make sure you use all of their five senses. Here are some ways we have celebrated the Epiphany in our home.
E Traveling nativity scene figures. The three kings of our nativity set don't make it to the manger until Jan. 6. Before that, they are stationed far away, and move a little closer every day. The kids love it. Make sure they know that the magi long to see the baby Jesus and wish they didn't have to wait!
E Epiphany dress-up and give-away. The three kings sound like a friendly ghost, a Harry Potter creature and a Swiss theologian. But they're not. According to an old Christian tradition, they are named Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. Each quite a splendid figure in himself. Our kids like to dress up like the three kings.
We ask them each to pick a toy or book they have enjoyed over the last year that they can give to the poor. In costume, they place their gifts in front of the manger scene in our house.
E King Day gifts. This one takes some of the sting off the Epiphany give-away. There is always gift-giving for the children on Epiphany. Just as St. Nicholas delivers small gifts on Dec. 6, the wise kings drop off a present or two on Jan 6.
E Dismantle the tree. All good things, alas, must end. The Christmas season traditionally ends on Epiphany. Take down the Christmas tree on Epiphany and put it out. But tell the kids that this just means that they have to live Christmas in their hearts!
E King Cake. If there's lingering sadness over the loss of the Christmas tree, perhaps some cake will put the memory to rest. Make it in a ring mold that can be decorated like a crown, and bake a ring, coin or other metal object into it. Then, the lucky family member whose piece produces the hidden treasure will get a prize.
Besides providing an exciting end to the Christmas season, King Cake bears all the winning trademarks of good Catholic family traditions : It combines kids and cake, hidden treasures and candy jewel decorations, hunting and finding, and a special prize.
This is highly appropriate for Christmas. Think of it as a birthday party for the baby Jesus, and a little taste of the greatest journey of all — following the star of God's light.
----- EXCERPT: Five ways your family can celebrate 'King Day' ----- EXTENDED BODY: April Hoopes ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:N. J. Abstinence-First Bill
The bill passed by a 25-11 vote and needs only acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco's signature to become law. A DiFrancesco spokeswoman declined to say whether he would sign it before he leaves office Jan. 8. But he voted for the bill in his role as a senator from Union County.
Pro-Life Sign Permitted
THOMAS MORE LAW CENTER, Dec. 15 — Thomas More Law Center, located in Ann Arbor, Mich., has won the first round of a pro-life lawsuit on behalf of Ann Norton, a pro-life activist.
Federal Judge David W. McKeague signed an order temporarily restraining Michigan's attorney general and several other state law enforcement agents from using a state statute to prevent Norton from displaying a sign depicting the image of an aborted child in front of a Kalamazoo Planned Parenthood facility.
Planned Parenthood Cut Off
The state health department announced it's going to cut off this year's $381,956 of taxpayer funds to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains because an audit of the nonprofit organization found it is subsidizing rent for the separate Planned Parenthood arm that performs abortions.
Stem Cell Transplants
ANANOVA, Dec. 12 — Researchers have found a type of adult stem cell that could repair damaged organs without any chance of being rejected by a patient's immune system. The mesenchymal stem cells, or MSCs, don't carry markers on their surfaces that lead to rejection.
If MSCs live up to their promise there may be no need for the controversial harvesting of embryonic stem cells.
European Youth Alliance Declares Respect for Life
LIFESITE DAILY NEWS, Dec. 12 — Nearly two hundred young leaders representing nine countries gathered for a World Youth Alliance conference. They released a statement Dec. 1, called the Bratislava Youth Declaration, which said in part: “We call upon the governments and citizens of Europe to reaffirm the recognition … of the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of all, including the inviolable right to life, as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in Europe.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 01/06/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 6-12, 2002 ----- BODY:OVERPOPULATION myths continue to grab headlines — and continue to be wrong. For instance, from 1900 to 2000, world population went from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion. Yet, real gross domestic product increased about 30 times, allowing the world not only to sustain the larger population, but also to do so at vastly higher standards of living.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Baby Boom ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Comic Book Hero for the New Millennium DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:LONDON — Watch out, Superman and Batman — there's a new caped crusader in comic-book land!
Just over a year ago, the Register reported that Pope John Paul II's life was published in comic-book form in Italian. At the time, “We desperately need an English edition,” said Chris Erickson, spokesman for Catholics United for the Faith, echoing a wish shared by many.
That wish has been granted. The Society of St. Paul recently published an English version of Karol Wojtyla: The Pope of the Third Millennium. The book marks the second time during John Paul's pontificate that he has been immortalized in comic book art.
“I can't wait to get hold of it and read it to my kids,” said Erickson, who is the father of seven children, ages 1 to 13. “Now they'll have a real live hero to emulate, a valiant warrior with vulnerable flesh and red blood who really is conquering the world.”
Young readers agree. Ten-year-old Andrew Jensen, of Duelm, Minn., said he has read Charlie Brown comic books, Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and he has seen Cactus Game Design's Archangel religious-based comic books, but he's never seen anything like this.
“I like that it's about a real-life hero, the Pope,” said Andrew. “It's interesting to learn about him as a boy and about his life. I didn't know that his name was Karol Wojtyla or that he was involved in World War II.”
Originally published in a series of four in Il Giornalino (The Little Newspaper) Italian children's magazines, the comics were well received throughout Italy. The Society of St. Paul, which publishes Il Giornalino, “saw an increase of 25% in the magazine's circulation and gained an additional 1,000 subscribers,” said publicist Maria Re. News of the original release was reported by Time, CNN, the BBC, and the New York Times.
Father Sebastian Karamvelil, managing director of St. Paul's bookshop in London, was impressed with the Italian publication and decided to commission an English edition.
Five thousand copies were published, which first released in the United Kingdom in October and is being distributed through St. Paul's International. The comic book has also been published in Korea, France and Poland.
Unusual Format
“The [comic] book format is unusual for the U.K.,” said David Chapman, manager of the Westminster Cathedral store, “but the more people examine the book, the more likely they are to buy it. An examination of the text shows that while it has its lighter moments, it is a serious attempt to show something of the life and achievements of Pope John Paul II in an easily accessible way.”
In the book, readers encounter the events in the Holy Father's life as narrated by a grandfather to his grandchildren. It begins with the Holy Father's infancy and childhood in Wadowice, Poland, and includes his youth, when he played soccer and was an actor on the stage.
The narrative includes moments of anguish, such as his mother's death when Karol Wojtyla was 9 years old, and the death of his only brother two years later. It ends with images of the Pope on Christmas Eve 1999, at the beginning of the Great Jubilee 2000.
In addition to the story, the book also contains an introduction by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, general secretary of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, and appendices.
The appendices consist of numerous color photographs of the Holy Father, a list of the Pope's travels, a timeline of the most important moments from the life of Karol Wojtyla, and a list of the Holy Father's encyclicals.
The book was written by the late Tony Pagot, and illustrated by Sergio Toppi, one of Italy's most popular illustrators. Editor Anthony Tarzia presented a copy to the Pope last year.
According to Maria Re, Pope John Paul responded, “You have done a good job. I hope that children appreciate it. Bravi!”
Karol Wojtyla is not the first time that the Holy Father's story has been presented in comic book art. Marvel Comics released the first English version of The Life of Pope John Paul II in 1982. Unlike that version, Karol Wojtyla is bound with a hard cover. Il Giornalino similarly bound the Society's Holy Bible in comic book form.
Books by and about the Holy Father have been quite popular. Another children's story about the life of John Paul II, although not a comic book, was published by Pauline Books and Media in the United States Titled Karol of Poland, that book has already had several print runs, said Sister Patricia Edward Jablonski.
Mutual Affection
“Many books have already been written on the Pope,” notes Cardinal Sepe in the comic book's introduction, “so it gives me even more pleasure to see that the editors have chosen ... a comic book, aimed specifically at the younger reader. The Holy Father — as we saw again during the World Youth Day and in his encounters with children — has a particular affection for the young, which they return equally.
“Comic books are exciting and get to the point, and in this life of the Holy Father, Sergio Toppi and Tony Pagot help us to get to know the present Pope: his spontaneity, his burning desire to meet all peoples and every person and to invite them to be not afraid to open their hearts to Christ, his forgiving of the man who shot him, his considerable contribution to peace and to the dialogue between religions, his defense of life and protection of its dignity, his countless words of faith and hope.”
Concludes Cardinal Sepe, “My wish is that all readers of this volume, both young and old, might draw inspiration from it to live and give witness to their own faith in Jesus Christ.”
Tim Drake is executive editor of Catholic.net.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Settlement on Breast Cancer May Haunt Abortion Industry DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:MELBOURNE, Australia — In what is believed to be the first case of its kind, a woman in Australia has settled with an abortion practitioner she had sued because he failed to inform her of the research linking abortion with breast cancer. Both pro-life and abortion-rights advocates wonder if similar settlements might not follow suit in the United States.
A confidentiality agreement prevents details of the settlement, which was negotiated in September and just recently became public, from being released. But Australian legal precedent, said Australian attorney Charles Francis, requires doctors to inform their patients of any material risks of a recommended surgical procedure.
Francis said another suit involving the abortion breast-cancer link is also moving forward in Australia. “In a case to be heard in New South Wales shortly, ‘Mary’ is suing a hospital and an abortionist for failure to warn her of the increased breast-cancer risk,” he told the Register.
American pro-lifers hailed the news out of Australia.
“We're delighted with the settlement of an abortion/breast-cancer case,” said Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer. “The abortion industry and its medical experts know that it will be far more challenging for them to lie to women about the abortion/breast-cancer research when they are called upon to testify under oath. Scientists know that abortion causes breast cancer but are afraid to say so publicly in today's hostile political climate.”
Dr. Chris Kahlenborn, physician internist in Altoona, Pa., and author of Breast Cancer: Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill, admitted that he was surprised by the Australian settlement. And while he said it was good news, he also questioned whether any U.S. courts will follow suit.
“Despite the hard evidence, my opinion is that the medical literature [downplaying the abortion/breast-cancer link] and the secular media are so strong that it would be very difficult to win a case like this,” Kahlenborn said. “I still think it will be more difficult to expect any kind of justice in this country. If Planned Parenthood allows a case to be settled or loses a case, they know it will be the beginning of the end.”
Patrick Gillen, an attorney with the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Thomas More Law Center, is more optimistic. “I am not at all surprised by the decision to settle given the strength of the scientific evidence showing that induced abortion causes an increased risk of breast cancer,” said Gillen. “For the same reason I think that similar lawsuits are virtually certain to be filed and won in the United States.”
U.S Cases Pending
In fact, two such cases are already pending. In December 1999, a case was filed against an abortion facility in North Dakota for false advertising. And last August, three California women filed suit against Planned Parenthood of San Diego and Riverside Counties and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The women, Agnes Bernardo of Chula Vista, Pamela Colip of Loma Linda, and Sandra Duffey-Hawkins of Sacramento, are being represented by Gillen, the lead attorney in the case. Kahlenborn has been asked to serve as an expert witness on the case.
The California complaint notes that Planned Parenthood touts the safety of abortion both in its printed materials and on its Web site. “Planned Parenthood dismisses the research that shows a connection between abortion and breast cancer,” said Gillen.
The National Abortion Rights Action League's director of communications William Lutz did not return the Register's phone calls, and a spokesman with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America said, “No statement will be made concerning the Australia decision.” However, Planned Parenthood Web site plainly states that “abortion poses no demonstrated health risks. PPFA believes that women deserve information that is medically substantiated and untainted by a political agenda.”
The Planned Parenthood spokesman referred the Register to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, known as ACOG.
“The ACOG does not comment on legal settlements,” said college spokeswoman Alice Kirkman. “In 1995, ACOG's Committee on Gynecologic Practice conducted an extensive review of the pertinent scientific literature on the perception of links between abortion and breast cancer. The committee concluded that ‘evidence is insufficient to support claims that induced abortion has an effect on the later development of breast cancer.’”
According to the ACOG statement, with respect to the numerous studies that have found a link between abortion and higher rates of breast cancer, “Some studies reported adverse effect, some no effect, and some a positive effect.” It goes on to state that “many of the case-control studies had methodological problems.”
However, Britain's Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists flatly disagrees with its American counterpart. In a March 2000 statement the Royal College warned British abortion providers that the abortion-breast cancer link “cannot be disregarded.”
The British newspaper The Observer reported Feb. 27, 2001, that “British women are harboring a breast cancer ‘time-bomb’ because of the high abortion rate and low number of children.”
To substantiate its claim that no cancer link exists, Planned Parenthood primarily cites evidence from the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the New England Journal of Medicine to argue that “the entire body of research [is] inconclusive.”
All three organizations, however, have since revised their positions to acknowledge that at least some linkage appears to exist. The National Cancer Institute, for example, now admits of “small elevations in risk.”
Causal Connection
Dr. Joel Brind, an endocrinolo-gist at Baruch College of the City University of New York, who has exhaustively analyzed the international research concerning an abortion/breast cancer link, said that a correlation between breast cancer and induced abortion was observed as long ago as a 1957 Japanese study. In the years since, a body of additional evidence has accumulated from around the world, lending credence to the abortion-breast cancer connection.
“Out of 37 independently published studies, 28 show a causal connection,” Brind said. “And of those, 17 provide positive associations that reach statistical significance suggesting a 95% certainty that this association is not due to chance. That is scientific evidence which simply cannot be ignored.”
Brind noted that research suggests the problem becomes more acute the earlier in life a women has an abortion. Kahlenborn agreed. “Dr. Janet Daling's 1994 National Cancer Institute study demonstrated that if a woman is under 18 and has an abortion, her risk of breast cancer increases by 150%. If she is under 18 and her baby is older than 8 weeks gestation, her risk increases up to 800%,” cited Kahlenborn.
Brind explained the physical process that, the studies indicate, causes the increased risk. “In the early stages of pregnancy, there is a dramatic increase in the level of estrogen, the female sex hormone. This estrogen surge causes an increase in the number of breast cells in preparation for nursing, which is why a pregnant woman's breasts tend to swell. In the last eight weeks of a full-term pregnancy, other hormones cause the increased tissue to stabilize into milk-producing cells. But at the early stage of rapid development, breast cells are in an undifferentiated state and highly vulnerable to mutations that can cause cancer.”
Abortion interrupts the natural process of preparing a woman's body to bear and nurse a child, Brind observed, cutting off the final part of the sequence that provides breast tissue with a significant measure of protection against cancer.
John Kindley, also an attorney with the Thomas More Law Center who is working on the California suit, has published an article on legal liability arising from failure to disclose the abortion-breast cancer link. Kindley listed some of the ways in which Planned Parenthood is alleged to have misled women about the health risks of abortion.
“It's their practice to make claims about the safety of abortion based on very incomplete data,” Kindley said. “At the same time, they attempt to discredit the very real scientific work which has been done showing an abortion-breast cancer link.
“For instance, they cite five studies that say the connection is unclear, while ignoring the overwhelming preponderance of the scientific evidence to the contrary. Then they assure their clients that the case for a connection is unproven. This is not only bad science, it's disingenuous to the point of being unethical.”
Kindley believes that the courts are required to resolve the dispute. Currently, only Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and Kansas require abortion providers to inform women of the possible abortion-breast cancer link. “Ironically,” said Kindley, “such laws give greater protection to the doctors, not the women, because the Louisiana law, for example, gives the abortionist immunity from prosecution if he complies with the requirements of the law.”
Agnes Bernardo, one of the plaintiffs in the California case, explained that she and her co-plaintiffs have a high degree of personal motivation.
“I have experienced abortion, and I have been treated for a non-malignant tumor,” Bernardo said. “I am very concerned about developing breast cancer as are most women. I strongly believe women should receive complete information about the studies linking induced abortion and breast cancer before making the decision to have an abortion.”
Tim Drake is executive editor of Catholic.net.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bush Urged to Halt UNFPA Funding Over Coercive Policies DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Pro-life activists are pressuring the White House to end all U.S. funding of the United Nation's Population Fund, known as UNFPA, after an investigation found the U.N. agency was complicit in rampant forced abortions in China.
“We sent a team of investigators into China,” said Steve Mosher, president of the Virginia-based Population Research Institute, which released its report in September. “We interviewed women who were forced to abort their children. One woman went into hiding and nine of her relatives were held in jail for four months.”
When Mosher's disclosures first surfaced early last fall, the appropriations process was well under way. The Senate voted quickly to increase funding to the U.N. agency to $39 million, up from last year's $25 million. The president's budget recommended spending the same as last year's budget. The House sided with the president's figure, but after a compromise with the Senate, the agreed-upon figure rose to $34 million.
But even though the appropriations process was well advanced, the House International Relations Committee opened up hearings in October into UNFPA practices in China.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., vice chairman of the committee, said, “Chinese population cadres conduct nighttime raids on couples suspected of having unauthorized children, and they keep detailed records on the sexual activity of every woman in their jurisdiction — so much for privacy. And to make the coercive regime complete, the ‘family planning centers’ have prison cells — with bars — to detain those who resist forced abortion or sterilization.”
Smith continued, “I think it is appropriate and necessary that today this committee, the Congress and the president revisit the issue of forced abortion in China to determine what has changed, if anything. We also must reevaluate our support of the United Nations Population Fund in the context of whether or not they support this most terrible human-rights abuse.”
Mosher is now teaming up with other pro-life activists on a campaign to encourage Bush to eliminate all funding. The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (a pro-life U.N. lobby) and the House Pro-life Caucus have joined the campaign.
“Thirty-four million dollars is a ceiling — [Bush] doesn't have to spend any of this,” said Mosher. “Bush can invoke Kemp-Kasten Amendment. It forbids any U.S. money from subsidizing an agency that supports a regime that has forced abortions.”
In 1986, Mosher noted, President Ronald Reagan cut off all funding to UNFPA. (Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, continued Reagan's policy until Bill Clinton became president in 1993.)
“We have some indication that [Bush] might do that. They have seen our report and we have heard that he might do the right thing,” said Mosher.
UNFPA Denials
According to UNFPA's Web site, the U.N. agency is currently funding a $20 million “country program,” begun in 1998, in conjunction with China's official population control program.
In response to the allegations made by the Population Research Institute, UNFPA sent its own investigative team to China, and then filed a report exonerating itself from any participation in coercive abortions or sterilizations.
In the report, UNFPA stated, “The team asked every official and reproductive health and family planning service provider it met during its visit if they knew of any such abuses. None did.”
The report continued, “The team also asked these officials and practitioners if such abuses were possible. They all said yes, such abuses were possible, but those responsible for them would be punished in accordance with the severity of the abuse in that Chinese law now specifically forbids such abuses.”
UNFPA's investigation is worthless, Mosher said.
“They organized an in-house team of their employees to go to China. Most of the time they spent talking with Chinese government officials,” said Mosher.
“They only spent a half-hour on house visits. If you visit a house with half a dozen Chinese government officials in tow, what do [the residents] say? Are you going to get complaints? No,” Mosher said.
He added that the Population Research Institute's interviews, conducted with women in private, were vastly more credible than those found in the UNFPA report.
UNFPA spokesman William Ryan would not answer questions regarding Mosher's allegations, but supplied a statement from UNFPA executive director Thoraya Obaid.
Obaid expressed confidence that U.S. funding to her agency would be set at $34 million.
“I am very grateful for the strong support the Fund has received from the United States administration and Congress — in effect, a vote of confidence in our work,” said Obaid.
“We hope this signals a return by the United States to funding levels of a decade ago. The United States has traditionally stood in the forefront of international donors in the population field.”
The White House did not comment to the Register on how much money the administration planned to commit to UNFPA. According to the appropriation bill passed by Congress, Bush can assign any figure between zero and $34 million.
John Cusey, spokesman for the House Pro-Life Caucus said that any funding for UNFPA would be devastating. Even worse would be an increase over last year's $25 million.
‘Zero Funding’
“We have evidence of forced abortions in China of the worst kind,” Cusey said. “It should be zero funding. These guys have been caught. They shouldn't be rewarded.”
Austin Ruse, president of the New York-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, agreed.
“Reducing UNFPA funding is a campaign that goes on every year. The good news is the investigations Mosher brought, as it has provided evidence of why the U.N. agency should be defunded,” said Ruse.
Ruse also criticized UNFPA's refusal to participate in the congressional hearings held in October to discuss the allegations of its involvement with coercive practices in China.
“They didn't even have the courtesy,” noted Ruse, “to send a representative to Congress to answer these charges.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Mother Teresa's Birthday Rose DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:As a high school senior, Danielle Rose saw singer Jaci Velasquez perform at the National Catholic Youth Conference and dreamed of one day doing the same.
A senior theology and music major at Notre Dame University, Rose recently recorded her first album “Defining Beauty.” In December, Rose got her wish. She performed before 27,000 youths in Indianapolis. She spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake about her music.
Did you grow up in a musical home?
I am the oldest of three children. My brother is a freshman at Gonzaga and my sister is in seventh grade. I was born in Colorado. Growing up, we moved several times. I now live in Duluth, Minn. My father is an ophthalmologist and my mother is a stay-at-home mom.
My mother loves to sing and my father plays guitar and mandolin. Music is somewhere in the genes. My great uncle, Blaz Arnic, was a famous symphony composer from Slovenia. They recently pictured him on a postage stamp.
When I was 5 years old I remember seeing Itzhak Perlman on Sesame Street and I begged my parents for two and a half years for violin lessons. So, I started when I was 7 years old. My father and I would play in various bluegrass contests. I would listen to tapes and teach myself fiddle tunes.
At 14, I started playing guitar. Most of my learning has been self-taught. In high school I started writing and performing original music with a band.
At the age of 17 you spent some time with the Missionaries of Charity in India. What was that like?
Before I was born my parents had been to India when my father had done some training for infectious eye diseases. During their time there they met Meenaxi, a woman who had founded an orphanage and hospital. During high school my mother's sister had adopted a baby from this orphanage, and my childhood dream to visit India was renewed. I offered to go assist Meenaxi during the summer after my junior year.
I went with the intention of helping Meenaxi, but when I got there all of the children had the chicken pox and nothing was working out. Frustrated at being unable to help I spent my time weeping and asking God why he had brought me there. I ended up helping the Missionaries of Charity.
I did my best to help feed children, sing for lepers, and visit the dying, but when my time was over, I felt as if I hadn't done anything. What changed me most was what these people were able to give me.
Although there was astounding poverty and suffering, the people have an incredible joy that we do not have here. When I returned home, a month later, I didn't want to be home. Somehow everything had changed and I looked at everything differently.
A couple of weeks after I returned home, I went to an All State Choir Camp.
I wanted so much to be able to give others my experience of India, but I was unable. At camp, I composed a song about my experience titled “India.” During the talent show, before hundreds of other teens, I played the song. Afterwards, there were all these people who came up to me crying and telling me how the song had opened them up to different things they had experienced.
Something had been moved in their hearts and I knew that it was not me. It was the first time that I had written something that was so much bigger than myself. It was a total gift and I knew that it couldn't possibly be explained.
Tell me how you came up with your stage name?
Before my trip to India I was trying to have absolutely no expectations, but I was praying that I might have the opportunity to meet Mother Teresa and be blessed by her.
During my time with the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa was visiting the Pope. I spent most of my time with about 200 orphaned children. While I could have stayed longer, I didn't feel it was the right thing to do. Before leaving, I left my Bible and some other things to be blessed by Mother Teresa and figured that I might meet her another time.
During my senior year, while having a conversation with someone, I learned that Mother Teresa had died. I'm normally a very joyful person, but when I heard this news I started sobbing. It was like all of the disappointment of not meeting her came back along with the memories of the children and my not being able to be there to love them and hold them. I could not stop crying.
When Meenaxi called she told me, “You have been blessed by Mother Teresa in a very special way.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but hoped that Mother Teresa had blessed my Bible. As it turns out, on Mother Teresa's birthday, just nine days before she died, she took the frosting rose from her birthday cake and gave it to Sister Joyce, saying, “Danielle, the girl who embraced the poorest of the poor and understood them: Give her this rose and tell her to be like this rose — to be pure and beautiful like each petal, and tell her that nothing will ever go wrong in her life.” I have no idea how Mother Teresa knew who I was.
Someone that was bringing an adopted baby to Minnesota brought the frosting rose with them for me. It is the rose that appears on my album.
My middle name is Rose, and my mother's name is Rosie. That's how I chose my stage name. It's both my vocation name and my real name.
How has that affected your music?
When you give someone a rose, it's a pure gift. I pray that my music can be like that — a rose offered to people who are listening, a little thing given out without any expectation.
Regarding the miracle of the rose, all I know is that God knew my heart's desire so clearly that he wanted to give it to me in a way that was more mysterious than any way I could ever imagine.
In this way, I was blessed by Mother Teresa and that has totally changed my life. The sisters taught me about spiritual poverty. There is this poverty of wanting God, but not being aware that this is what is empty inside of us. How can we possibly heal families if we do not have God? My mission with my music is to reach and feed the spiritually poor people of our Church, our nation, and our world.
How did your album come about?
At Notre Dame, I am involved in the Notre Dame Folk Choir. At the end of my freshman year the choir recorded a CD. Through that process I met Gary Daggle and presented him with a very rough tape of 10 songs that I had made in my friend's basement.
That summer, while I was eating dinner with my family, Gary called. I went down to Louisiana to record a demo and before we had even finished it, some folks from World Library Publications called to meet with me about recording a CD.
Do you have any favorite stories of how your music has affected others?
My mom has told me stories of people who have had little miracles happen in their hearts.
For example, a relative of mine had been singing some of my songs at her Church. After singing “Shelter Your Name,” apparently a man that had been very bitter toward the church felt healed of his bitterness.
Oftentimes, after I'm done playing, there will be people who will come up to me crying and sharing about their life. I can see that something has been moved in their heart and that some kind of healing has begun and I realize that that has nothing to do with me. My role is simply to be open with what God can do through these little songs and surrender it all to God. I am just trying to be a joyful messenger of the grace that God has brought to my life. I carry those people and their stories with me.
What do you hope to do after graduation?
My dream is to be a full-time performer, playing for high schools, Marian conferences, retreats and coffeehouses — speaking to people that might never listen to Christian music.
I feel that music is a good way to evangelize. It's such a part of our culture that people let their defenses down when they listen to it. My lyrics open people up to the message and the story. It's a good way to plant a seed. I want to share how God has worked in my life.
Tim Drake writs from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Cardinal Egan Will Lead St. Patrick's Parade
Cardinal Egan said at a news conference, “There's nothing that any of us would hesitate to do to honor those who lost their lives.”
Boston Priest Lands Media Post
Msgr. Paul McInerny, former secretary to Cardinal Bernard Law, follows in a mass media tradition begun by Cardinal Richard Cushing, who prayed the rosary over the radio.
Boston Catholic Television reaches some 3 million “parishioners of the airwaves,” many of them shut-ins who view the Mass broadcast each Sunday morning. That Mass, which began broadcasting Jan. 1, 1955, is believed to be the longest continuous-running live program in Boston, excluding the news.
“This is a ministry, not just a TV station,” said Msgr. McInerny, 55. The Catholic station, he added, is a way for the homebound, the sick and the elderly to “be connected to the Church, and most importantly to the Eucharist, the central act of the Church's life and, for Catholics, the source and summit of their faith.”
Broadcasts reach an estimated 500,000 homes. The station carries Cardinal Law's Sunday Mass from Holy Cross Cathedral and tapes of papal audiences.
Bishop Gregory Says U.S. War on Terror Is Just
“I believe that we as a nation are struggling mightily to follow as close a just approach as possible,” Bishop Gregory said on the PBS news program. “I believe that we as Americans are trying to be a just people, trying to protect our nation and to respect the dignity of all human life including those of people in Afghanistan and neighboring countries.”
Bishop Gregory and correspondent Ray Suarez also discussed the spiritual health of the nation since Sept. 11 and ecumenical and interfaith dialogue.
Citing Focus on the Family's criticism of Harry Potter, Boston Globe staff writer Michael Paulson notes that Christians have been wary of witchcraft for centuries, “viewing them as supernatural powers derived from evil forces.
“Protestant and Catholic countries persecuted people accused of witchcraft through much of Christian history,” Paulson wrote in the Boston daily. “Even today, the Catholic catechism warns that ‘all practices of magic or sorcery ... are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion.’”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Papal Christmas Carol Widely Distributed
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, Dec. 24 — Some 1.6 million copies of a recording of a Polish Christmas carol sung by Pope John Paul II were distributed in an edition of a Polish newspaper just before Christmas. The recording of “Little One, Little One” in a dialect from Poland's southern Tatra Mountains was made when the Pope met with a delegation of Polish pilgrims in the Vatican in 1981. The Pope wrote three new stanzas for the carol, one of his favorites, according to Gazeta Wyborcza, the newspaper that distributed the discs. The recording was recently rediscovered in the archives of a Catholic radio station in the eastern Polish city of Lublin.
Pope Appeals for Release of Priest and Other Hostages
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Dec. 23 — Pope John Paul prayed that the spirit of Christmas would inspire kidnappers to release their hostages, especially those being held for their faith.
The Pope, praying at his window overlooking St. Peter's Square on the Sunday before Christmas, mentioned Sacred Heart of Jesus Father Giuseppe Pierantoni. The priest has been held for more than two months in the southern Philippines by a Muslim gang known as Pentagon, the wire service said. Earlier in the day, police rescued a Canadian man being held for two months by Pentagon.
Star of Bethlehem Is Focus of Arizona Study
“The Wise Men would have been interested in astronomy and astrology,” he said. “By working backwards, one can deduce that Jupiter would have converged with the two other planets around the time of Christ's birth. That seems the most likely explanation to me of a bright, shining star over Judea.
“It would have been highly symbolic because Aries the Ram is considered a ‘ruler,’” he said. “The meeting of these three powerful planets under this sign could have been interpreted as a celestial signal of a great person's birth.”
Father Corbally and 10 other Jesuits make up the official Vatican Observatory team at Mount Graham, three hours southeast of Tucson. Taking shifts from sunset to sunrise, they work with a computer-guided telescope built in the early 1990s. The priest is conducting a survey of the 3,600 nearest stars to Earth and the data will go to NASA.
“We are looking for any which might support earthlike planets and, thus, earthlike life,” he said.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Pope Names Rector of Lateran University as Patriarch of Venice DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — On the first weekend of a year that will be marked by key personnel decisions, Pope John Paul II made a significant episcopal appointment in Venice and ordained 10 new bishops on the Feast of the Epiphany in St. Peter's Basilica.
It was announced Jan. 5 that Bishop Angelo Scola, current Rector of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, and President of the associated John Paul II Institute for the Study of Marriage and the Family, would be the new Patriarch of Venice, succeeding Cardinal Marco Cè, who retired at age 76 after 23 years of leading the historic diocese.
The archbishop of Venice is given the title “patriarch” and is almost always considered a possible pope. In the 20th century, three Venetian patriarchs were elected pope: St. Pius X, Blessed John XXIII and John Paul I. Now that Bishop Scola is in Venice, that talk will no doubt resume, given his polyglot capabilities and his scholarly background as one of the principal interpreters of the thought of John Paul himself.
Bishop Scola, 60, has been a rising star in the Italian episcopate and his promotion had long been expected, though it was uncertain where he might be assigned.
Several senior curial officials will turn 75 this year, meaning that they must submit their resignation, though it does not necessarily have to be accepted. They include Cardinals Angelo Sodano (Secretariat of State), Joseph Ratzinger (Doctrine of the Faith), Eduardo Martínez Somalo (Institutes of Consecrated Life), Jorge Medina Estévez (Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments) and Edmund Szoka, the American-born governor of the Vatican City State. Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, archbishop of Milan, will also turn 75 in February.
In addition, 10 cardinals will turn 80 in 2002, including such senior figures of the current pontificate as Cardinals Benardin Gantin, Roger Etchegaray and Pio Laghi, rendering them unable to participate in any future conclave.
“One year ago, on this feast of the Epiphany, at the conclusion of the Holy Year, I delivered to the family of believers and to the whole of humanity the apostolic letter Novo millennio ineunte, which opens with the invitation of Christ to Peter and the others: Duc in altum! Put out into the deep!” said the Holy Father in his homily during the ordination of bishops Jan. 6.
“Again I give this programmatic text of the new evangelization to each of you. I repeat to you the words of the Redeemer: Duc in altum! Be not afraid of the darkness of the world, because he who sends you is the ‘light of the world.’”
John Paul customarily ordains new bishops at Epiphany, including two years ago Bishop David Ricken of Cheyenne, Wyo. This year, the ordinations included five diocesan bishops — three from central Africa two Europeans — four apostolic nuncios and one curial official.
Given the length of the ordination rite, the Epiphany Mass is one of the longest ceremonies the Holy Father presides over each year — almost three hours in length. His stamina was evident as he rushed back to his apartment immediately following the Mass to deliver the Angelus address, but he was also unsteady on his feet, and almost fell ascending the step to the altar for the offertory. He was steadied by attentive ceremonial officials, whose efficiency and professionalism have become increasingly more important in minimizing the demands that ceremonies make on the Pope.
“I ask God for the strength to continue as long as he wishes in the service of the Church and the world,” prayed John Paul Dec. 31. The 81-year-old Pope will have to select in the next year or so a new team of senior officials to accompany him in that service. Along with the recent appointments of Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re (Bishops), Walter Kasper (Christian Unity) and Crescenzio Sepe (Evangelization of Peoples), Scola represents the next generation of senior prelates entering leadership positions.
“Bishop Scola is a great theologian, a man of great administrative skills, a man of dialogue between cultures and a deep sense of the Church,” said Bishop Marc Ouellet, Secretary for the Council for Christian Unity, a former professor under the bishop at the John Paul II Institute.
“I am very happy about his appointment because Venice has a long tradition of openness to the East, and as a meeting place between West and East. As Patriarch, he will be mindful of this vocation of Venice for the unity of the Church. He will also bring to a wider audience those issues we worked on together at the John Paul II Institute regarding marriage and the family — already as rector he has established Institutes on all five continents.”
Bishop Scola is one of the leading Italian theologians, having written several books on Christian anthropology, marriage and family, and ecclesiology. One of the leading proponents of John Paul's “theology of the body,” he has proposed a rethinking of all the principal themes of theology in the light of John Paul's vision of the nuptial meaning of the body.
His innovative theology is matched, according to many of his collaborators, by a keen administrative ability to get things done. Before his appointment in 1995 to the Lateran University, he was diocesan bishop of Grosseto for four years, where he put great priority on Catholic education, vocations (he reopened the diocesan seminary), formation of priests after ordination, the family and missions — opening a diocesan mission in Brazil.
While at the Lateran, he rein-vigorated the journal Nuntium and opened a pastoral institute with particular focus on the social doctrine of the Church, leading Cardinal Camillo Ruini, Vicar General for the Diocese of Rome, to speak of him as giving “great impulse” to the “deepening of the cultural dimension of university life and of the dialogue with society.”
“The decision of the Holy Father to nominate me patriarch of Venice fills me with trepidation,” wrote Bishop Scola to Cardinal Cè on the occasion of the announcement. “However, to this understandable fear of such a great duty is united the serenity which is born from obedience to the will of the Successor of Peter. ... Please tell those who live in our diocese that my desire is to give witness — together with the priests, religious and all the laity, in particular Christian families — that faith in Christ truly makes us free.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Appointments & Meetings DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Appointed
Saturday, Dec. 15
E Bishop Robert Muench as bishop of Baton Rouge, La.
Thursday, Dec. 20
E Archbishop Francisco-Javier Lozano as a member of the administrative council of the Vatican Television Center.
E Bishop Reinhard Marx as bishop of Trier, Germany.
Friday, Dec. 21
E Accepted the resignation of Bishop Elie Amsini Kisawaya of Sakania- Kipushi, Congo.
E Bishop Jean-Pierre Ricard as archbishop of Bordeaux, France.
E Ismar de Oliveira Soares, president of the International Catholic Union of the Press, as a member of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
Saturday, Dec. 22
E Father Gilberto Gomez Gonzalez as auxiliary bishop of Abancay, Peru.
Thursday, Dec. 27
E Coadjutor Archbishop Alfred Hughes became archbishop of New Orleans following the resignation of Archbishop Francis Schulte, who reached 75, the age limit.
Friday, Dec. 28
E Msgr. Kevin Farrell and Father Francisco Valer as auxiliary bishops of Washington.
Thursday, Jan. 3
E Coadjutor bishop Alfred Hughes as archbishop of New Orleans following the resignation of Archbishop Francis Schulte, who reached 75.
Met With
Thursday, Dec. 20
E Archbishop Alfio Rapisarda, apostolic nuncio in Brazil.
Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
Friday, Dec. 21
E Archbishop Jean-Paul Gobel, apostolic nuncio in Nicaragua.
E Marcello Pera, president of the senate of Italy.
E Cardinal Camillo Ruini, vicar general for the Diocese of Rome and president of the bishops' conference of Italy, with top officials of Italian Catholic Action.
E Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Saturday, Dec. 22
E Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
E Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.
Friday, Dec. 28
E Cardinal Edmund Szoka, president of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State and for the Governorate of Vatican City State.
Thursday, Jan. 3
E Leszek Miller, prime minister of Poland.
E Cardinal Ignace Moussa I Daoud, prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches.
E Cardinal Mario Pompedda, prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: The Coming of Christ, the Coming of Peace DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:During this first meeting of the new year, the day after the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God and the World Day of Peace, we want to thank God again for the countless blessings with which he enriches our life every day. At the same time, we continue our reflection on the great mystery of the Incarnation that we are currently celebrating and which constitutes a real turning point in the liturgical year.
Based on a phrase from John, “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14), the doctrinal reflection of the Church has coined the word “incarnation” to point out the fact that the Son of God fully and completely took on a human nature as the means in which, and through which, he accomplished our salvation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that faith in the true incarnation of the Son of God is the “distinct sign” of the Christian faith (No. 463).
This is what we profess, moreover, in the words of the NicenoConstantinopolitan Creed: “For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”
God With Us
In the birth of the Son of God from Mary's virgin womb, Christians recognize Almighty God's infinite willingness to make himself available to man and to all of creation. Through the Incarnation, God came and visited his people: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people, and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David” (Luke 1:68-69). And God's visit is never ineffective: he frees us from affliction, gives us hope, and brings us salvation and joy.
The poor and the humble of heart, to whom God manifests himself, are usually more willing to recognize him and welcome him.
In the account of Jesus' birth, we see that the glad tidings of the coming of the long-awaited Savior were first announced to a group of poor shepherds, to which Luke refers in his Gospel: “An angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds” (Luke 2:9). In this way, St. Luke, whom we can call in a certain sense the “evangelist” of Christmas, wished to emphasize God's benevolence and kindness for the poor and the humble of heart, to whom he manifests himself and who are usually more willing to recognize him and welcome him.
The sign given to the shepherds, the manifestation of God's infinite majesty in a baby, is filled with hope and with promise: “This will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12).
Such a message is immediately echoed in the humble and open hearts of the shepherds. For them, the word that the Lord has revealed to them is surely something real, an “event” (Luke 2:15). Without delay, they hasten to find the sign that was promised to them and they immediately become the first missionaries of the Gospel, announcing throughout the vicinity the good news of Jesus' birth.
Reconciliation and Peace
During the past few days we have heard once again the angels' song at Bethlehem: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased” (Luke 2:14). This song needs to ring out anew throughout the world at this time too — a world that is full of great hopes and extraordinary openness in every field, but which is also filled with much tension and great difficulties. Everyone needs to make a positive contribution so that humanity might proceed more quickly and more surely on the road to peace during the new year that has just begun.
This is why yesterday, the World Day of Peace, I chose to emphasize the link between peace, justice and forgiveness. Truly, “there is no peace without justice” and “there is no justice without forgiveness”! Therefore, a deep desire for reconciliation needs to grow within all of us, sustained by a sincere willingness to forgive. Throughout the year let us pray more forcefully and more insistently to obtain from God the gift of peace and brotherhood, especially in the more troubled areas of the planet.
Mary Our Model
So, let us confidently enter into the new year, imitating the faith and docility of Mary, who kept and pondered in her heart (Luke 2:19) all the wonderful things that were happening before her very eyes. God was bringing about through his only-begotten Son full and definitive salvation for all of humanity.
Let us contemplate the Virgin Mary as she welcomed Jesus in her arms, only to give him to all men. Like her, let us examine attentively and ponder in our hearts the marvelous things that God is doing every day in history. In this way we will learn to recognize in the course of daily life the constant intervention of divine Providence, who guides everything with wisdom and love.
Once again, Happy New Year to everyone!
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Register Summary DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Reflecting on the “distinct sign” of the Christian faith — belief in the incarnation of the Son of God — Pope John Paul II linked the coming of Christ to the need for peace in the face of today's many world tensions.
Speaking in the Paul VI Audience Hall to pilgrims bundled in scarves and bulky coats because of near-freezing temperatures outside, the Holy Father called on all Christians to make a contribution to peace.
He called for a year of forceful and insistent prayer to obtain God's grace of good will among men and women, especially in “more troubled areas of the planet.”
The Pope said Christians should imitate “the faith and docility of Mary,” who welcomed Christ into our world, and therefore welcomed salvation for all.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Argentinian Bishops Say Crisis Exposes Flaws in International System DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Few, if any, Latin American countries resemble the United States as much as Argentina. A country made mostly of descendants of European immigrants, it became the richest Latin American nation after World War II, thanks to a strong work ethic, a bountiful agricultural sector and a high level of literacy and culture.
That's why the fall of two presidents in 10 days after the country's Dec. 19 social explosion is something very few predicted.
But it became inevitable when the middle classes, being wiped out by recession and shrinking salaries, took to the streets. Their protests — often violent — didn't stop until President Fernando de la Rúa, who enjoyed a 70% approval rating after his 1999 election, resigned as one of the least popular leaders in Argentinean history.
What went wrong in Argentina? Since 1983, Argentina has switched from military dictatorship to democracy, ended chronic hyperinflation in 1991 by introducing a peso pegged to the U.S. dollar, and joined the Mercosur trade bloc with Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Chile to stimulate economic activity and attract foreign investment.
None of this was enough. Deeply affected by the slowdown of the U.S. economy, Argentina was forced by the International Monetary Fund to dramatically reduce the public deficit as a condition for an urgent $1.3 billion loan to avoid default on more than $130 billion of international debt.
There was only one way for de la Rúa's government to comply — cut state salaries, delay or simply stop paying social security or retirement salaries, and suspend almost any government purchase. But the consequences were inevitable: Hundreds of thousands of Argentineans lost their jobs or found themselves with reduced salaries.
Massive protests started Dec. 18 in several cities. The next day, after an unstoppable wave of protests during which police around the presidential palace in Buenos Aires exhausted their supply of rubber bullets and tear gas, de la Rúa resigned.
That dramatic move came after Congress, controlled by the opposition Partido Justicialista, rejected the president's appeal to share power.
‘International Usury’
Said Bishop Juan Carlos Maccarone of Santiago del Estero, one of the poorest Argentinian provinces, “The country exploded under the pressure of insensitive international usury and the insatiable voracity of local corruption.”
Like Bishop Maccarone, most of Argentina's bishops have criticized local corruption, but have especially targeted what Archbishop Carmelo Giaquinta of Resistencia described to the Register as “the stubbornness and stupidity of international organizations that were supposed to help us gain stability.”
Bishop Agustín Radrizzani of Lomas de Zamora said that “what the Argentinian people did on the night of Dec. 19 was a spontaneous act of decency and dignity.” Added Bishop Radrizzani, “The protest was not only healthy, but necessary to change course and light hope for the future.”
Others share the bishops' analysis. Frida Ghitis, a journalist, financial analyst and author of the book The End of Revolution, blamed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the crisis. “Clearly, fiscal discipline is a necessity, but IMF bureaucrats in Washington, and the governments that back them, should allow for some flexibility. Conventional wisdom has again proved wrong in Argentina. Stubbornly following its dictates will no doubt trigger a more painful crisis during the sweltering summer now just starting here.”
Immediately after de la Rúa's resignation, Archbishop Estanislao Karlic of Paraná, president of the Argentinean Bishops' Conference, issued a dramatic statement calling all political leaders to “a supreme moment of self-sacrifice and generosity” in order to “save the nation in this historical moment.”
Archbishop Karlic also asked Argentineans to stop violent actions and to “protect the structures of an authentic democracy, by living more than ever the social virtues of justice and solidarity.”
On Dec. 23, Congress elected Adolfo Rodriguez Saá, a politician lauded for expanding business during his tenure as governor of the desert province of San Luis, to rule the country for a period of at least 60 days.
As interim president, he quickly announced default on Argentina's international debt payments and pushed through a congressional bill authorizing the creation of the “Argentino” — a new currency slated to debut Jan. 15 alongside the peso that, unlike the old currency, could be devalued. And in a theatrical decision, he also cut his own salary to $3,000 a month and promised that no other public official would earn more.
Rodriguez Saá, however , did not reduce the banking restrictions imposed last month by de la Rúa, restricting withdrawals from accounts to $1,000 per month. Because of this, he faced a new wave of protests Dec. 29. The next day, support for his government having abruptly collapsed, he resigned.
Archbishop's Advice
With power reverting again to Congress, Archbishop Karlic told legislators on New Year's Eve that “the only way to rebuild our democracy on a rock foundation, and not on sand, is by heroically renouncing any personal ambition and by acting with prudence, wisdom and fortitude.”
Congress subsequently appointed Eduardo Duhalde, the runner up in the 1999 presidential election and a critic of free-market economics, as the new president until 2003.
In his opening speech, filled with criticism of the economic policies implemented over the last decade, Duhalde vowed to freeze debt payments and to use “the social doctrine of the Church as my guide.”
Like most Argentinean bishops, Archbishop Karlic has supported the decision to suspend debt payments. “Paying a debt is a moral obligation,” he said, “but never an obligation above the immediate needs of a people.”
For his part, Archbishop Giaquinta said he feels “great sympathy” to the idea of suspending debt payments. “We certainly have an obligation, as a nation, to pay the debt, but not to the international vultures,” he said in an interview released by the local Catholic news agency AICA.
“International organizations like the IMF have to understand that if a rich country of hardworking people falls down like this, it is not only because of internal reasons.”
Economic experts agree that in order to reactivate the economy, Duhalde and his successor must bring down the 20% unemployment rate, manage the overall external debt of $155 billion, and reduce a fiscal deficit of around $8 billion.
Argentinean Bishops' Conference representatives say that, because of the depth of the political crisis, financial institutions and creditor countries like the United States must pioneer a new, creative approach to help Argentina.
The bishops also believe that new general elections should be called, rather than having a non-elected president serve for up to two years.
Said one conference source, “The bishops agree that a general election ... would help restore public confidence in the country's political leadership.”
Alejandro Bermúdez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: World -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Beijing Bishop's Funeral Restricted to Villagers
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Jan. 2 — About 300 villagers attended the funeral of Bishop Mattia Pei Shangde of Beijing, who had been persecuted by the communist government for years, the French news agency reported. Authorities prohibited outsiders, including Catholic officials from the capital, from attending the funeral, held in the village of Zhangjiapu in Hebei Province.
Bishop Pei died of kidney failure Christmas Eve at the age of 83. When the communists came to power, he was forced to work in a drug factory, and he spent 10 years in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution. His appointment as a bishop in 1980 was rejected by Beijing, which named its own bishop.
In April, Bishop Pei was placed under house arrest, and police kept him under surveillance in the hospital.
French Catholics Urged to Give More Euros
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, Dec. 26 — The Church in France is hoping to offset a possible shortfall in Sunday collections by encouraging Catholics to put at least two euros in the basket. Officials fear that Mass-goers will put in only one euro, which looks similar to the 10-franc coin, a typical donation, but only a third of the value.
France and 11 other European nations replaced their currencies with the euro Jan. 1. The new coin is also likely to disrupt donations in Ireland, where it is worth 20% less than the Irish pound, the wire service said.
The Church in France, already cash-strapped because of slumping attendance, also conducted a drive to collect old French francs and other European coins that are being phased out.
Irish Protestant Hospital Supports Embryo Research
The hospital society also supports the screening of embryos for genetic abnormalities. The proposals were submitted to the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction, which is studying possible approaches to regulation of assisted reproduction.
In a statement, the Catholic Communications Office said, “It is of vital importance that embryos are never treated other than as human persons whose inherent worth and dignity are valued and vindicated.”
Hong Kong Bishop Criticizes Government Officials
The outspoken bishop, in an interview on Radio Television Hong Kong, said officials should not neglect the dignity of the people when making political decisions.
Bishop Zen was reacting to a government decision to bar 187 mainland children from attending local schools while awaiting the results of their right of abode applications. He has appealed to Church-run schools to defy the ban and accept the children. Five have agreed so far.
In the interview, the bishop said he doubted whether Catholics could hold senior government posts without compromising their faith.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: World -------- TITLE: Clip-Out and Photocopy DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:The four “Clip-out and Pass-on” guides you published on your back page in December were very well done and served a very useful purpose.
Although they were apparently published for Advent, it would be nice if you could publish these for various subjects throughout the year. As a further suggestion, perhaps you could present them in an 8 x 11 format so one could photocopy them for further distribution.
“JACK” DEMPSEY
Marshall, Minnesota
Editor's Note: The Advent Guides, which ran in our Culture of Life Section throughout December, can be found in an 8 and a half by 11 format at www.ncregister.com.
Under the icon, “How to Be a Catholic,” click Part 1, “How (and Why) to Return to Sunday Mass”; Part 2, “How (and Why) to Return to Confession”; Part 3, “How (and Why) to Pray”; or Part 4, “Guide to Catholic Living.”
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----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Yawning as Rome Teaches?
Regarding “Survey Finds Mass Attendance Affects U.S. Catholic Views” (Dec. 16-22):
As a former Protestant, now studying to enter the Catholic Church, I offer this reverse take on the poll results: U.S. (and any other) Catholic views are reflected in the regularity of attendance at Mass
Why? It is my perception, at this point, that many “cradle Catholics” are greatly unin-formed about their faith. Oh, they attended CCD, or maybe even Catholic schools, but, like Americans and their high-school civics classes, they viewed attendance in religion classes as an obligation to be met, not vital matters of faith to be learned.
And so, as the article points out, Americans mistake matters of faith as matters of majority rule, just as they misunderstand the nature of the rights enumerated in the Constitution of the United States as controlled by majority rule. They are equally ignorant, unfortunately, of the nature of both.
MEL PATRICK
Lennon, Michigan
St. Foy is a Star
Your travel-page account of the abbey church of St. Foy at Conques, France, is delightful and educational (“Medieval Magnificence in the Midi Pyrenees,” Nov. 25-Dec. 1). Are you aware of an outstanding book written about this very saint and her mid-Pyrenees village? Little Saint (now in paperback) by Hannah Green, Random House division: Modern Library, 2000, is truly a remarkable and beautiful spiritual encounter.
Ms. Green, a Protestant, was a widely acclaimed author who died in 1996.
MRS. PAT FLANEGIN
Pittsboro, North Carolina
Punting Potter
Regarding “Michael O'Brien: Beware the Danger of Harry Potter,” Dec. 16-22:
Thank you for your superb interview with Mr. O'Brien. This settles the Harry Potter question for me.
Mr. O'Brien points out: “By and large, modern culture has replaced the splendor and wonder of existence with cheap thrills. The Potter series is a full-blown orgy of cheap thrills, dipped in a little pseudo-morality".
Stating that the Potter books must be seen within the context of “the unprecedented power of the new media culture to reshape our understanding of reality,” Mr. O'Brien sees them as overwhelmingly full of “corrupt messages, both overt and subliminal.”
Most importantly, Michael O'Brien's message is a wakeup call about the “spiritual assault that is waged primarily through culture.” What do terrorism and Harry Potter books have in common? Satanic influences. We would do well to heed Mr. O'Brien's advice; most urgently, we must recognize that the nature of the spiritual war in which we are all immersed is changing rapidly, entering a new phrase of intensity.
DOROTHY BOYLE
Bristol, Connecticut
Harmful Harry
I am concerned about the 14-year old boy who wrote to say that Harry Potter is harmless ("Harmless Harry,” Letters, Dec. 16-22). I think he is very wrong because Harry Potter is like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Harry Potter is another one of Satan's tricks to suck everyone's mind into evil, but God will win always. I have heard people say that they can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but his is no fantasy. This is reality because children's minds and hearts are at stake. We should be spending our time focusing on Jesus and his way.
FRANCES PARSONS
Miami, Florida
Righteous Redwall
A letter in the Dec. 16-22 Register titled “Harmless Harry” states the following: “Harry Potter is virtually harmless children's fiction. There are other children's books out there that are far more dangerous, like Brian Jacques' Redwall series, for instance, where violence is glamorized and glorified and made to look honorable. In the Harry Potter books, good moral lessons are always taught, and magic should be seen as a backdrop and not as a primary influence.”
In Brain Jacques' Redwall series, the destruction of evil, not violence or battle, is glorified. The heroes of Redwall destroy evil, while the “hero” Harry Potter practices the occult.
If good moral lessons, as well as sorcery, are taught by Harry Potter's example and are grouped in the same category, how are the readers going to know the difference? How do they know that witchcraft is wrong if a hero who holds good morals and ideals practices it? It will only inspire the study of witchcraft among children.
SOPHIA BELLAVANCE, Age 12
Newbury, New Hampshire
D.C. Heroes
You are to be congratulated for your “American Catholic Heroes” issue. You even had a story about a man who died of anthrax.
There was, however, one glaring omission in your special edition (Dec. 30-Jan.).
There were four aircraft hijacked on 9/11. There were four aircraft that crashed on 9/11. Two were crashed into the WTC. One crashed into a Pennsylvania field. Another was crashed into the Pentagon. You had excellent coverage of the first three crashes, but you barely mentioned the Washington, D.C., incident. Why was that?
Certainly, Cmdr. Perez was not the only hero there.
BOB SKINNER
Memphis, Tennessee
The Pope and Bin Laden
It is despicable that anyone would compare Pope John Paul II to Osama Bin Laden, claiming he is a terrorist because he is opposed to homosexuality ("Columnist Compares Pope to Bin Laden,” Inbrief, Dec. 2-8).
Most homosexuals have a liberal agenda, especially of being pro-choice. This is the ultimate terrorism on our country. These people are hypocritical. Most of them are opposed to the death penalty; yet, these same people give no thought to killing unborn babies. It clearly states in the Bible that homosexuality is wrong.
This [columnist] for [the New York Press] has to shut his mouth. If he thinks this, do it in private.
Don't proclaim to the whole world what he thinks. I believe in freedom of speech; but not to bash the Pope. He is our religious leader. He is following what God teaches. I urge all Catholics to speak out against this [columnist], who is very misguided.
RITA BYLER-MAY
Richmond, Missouri
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Don't They Care? DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:What if an international organization was working to doom thousands of people — particularly women — to a (shortened) life of suffering from sexually transmitted disease, all the while dogmatically insisting that its position on condoms is the truth, no matter what science says to the contrary?
One is.
It's called Catholics for a Free Choice, and the group uses the name even though it has been repudiated by the U.S. bishops.
The group insists on promoting condom use despite the mounting scientific evidence that condoms are ineffective against venereal diseases.
A handy list of statistics compiled recently by the Family Research Council (at their teen site, www.ieteen.org) shows just how dangerous the condom campaigns of groups like Catholic for a Free Choice are.
The Institute of Medicine reports that approximately 12 million new [cases of] STDs, 3 million of them among teenagers, occur annually. An estimated 56 million Americans have an incurable viral STD other than HIV, such as genital herpes or human papillomavirus (HPV). That's more than one in five Americans.
Condoms, whether used correctly and consistently or not, do not prevent the spread of HPV, which has been linked to over 90% of all invasive cervical cancers, and is the No. 2 cause of cancer deaths among women, after breast cancer. The Medical Institute of Sexual Health (MISH) estimates that 33% of all women are infected with HPV.
Most people infected with HPV do not know it, because there are not always symptoms. In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, only 11% of teens aged 15-17 and adults aged 18-44 could name HPV as a sexually transmitted disease, and only 30% of them were aware that HPV is incurable.
Condom promotions actually increase the risk of such diseases, because they increase the amount of sexual activity. A study of adolescents taking part in a three-year condom promotion experiment in Switzerland showed that the proportion of girls under the age of 17 engaging in sexual activity increased by almost two-thirds — from 36% to 57%.
Catholics for a Free Choice and other groups promoting condoms ought to be spending their time warning women about these dangers. Instead, they are duping them into believing that condoms make them safe.
Better yet, if the group truly cared about preventing venereal diseases, it would preach against condom use and for abstinence — in other words, it would promote the teachings of the Catholic Church.
The world is crying out for just such a message.
A 1994 Roper Starch study found that 62% of sexually experienced high school girls (and 54% of all sexually experienced teens) say they “should have waited” to have sex. Similarly, when an Emory University survey asked 1,000 sexually experienced teen girls what they would like to learn to reduce teen pregnancy, approximately 85% said, “How to say No without hurting the other person's feelings.”
A 1994 poll by ICR Survey Research Group for USA Weekend asked more than 1,200 teens and adults what they thought of “several high-profile athletes [who] are saying in public that they have abstained from sex before marriage and are telling teens to do the same.”
Seventy-two percent of the 12- to 17-year-olds and 78% of the adults said they agree with the pro-abstinence message. Moreover, 44% of those under the age of 18 said “today's teen-agers hear too little about saying No to sex.”
The Church's way isn't just the healthy way — it's the happier way.
A 1991 review of longitudinal research by the National Center for Health Statistics and the University of Maryland found that women who save sex for marriage face a considerably lower risk of divorce than those who are sexually active prior to marriage. This finding holds true even after differences in maternal education, parents' marital status, religion and other measures of family background are taken into account.
But no. Catholics for a Free Choice dogmatically rejects such evidence. Instead, it is printing provocative ads on bus shelters in New York. “Catholic people care,” says the ad. “Do our bishops? Banning Condoms Kills.”
Yes, Catholic bishops care. That's why they've repudiated Catholics for a Free Choice. Thank God for the Church's refusal to compromise truth for fads and follies.
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Our Pilgrimage Of Prayer Ground Zero DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:As we crossed the Hudson River on the ferry from Newark, the morning sun danced on the waves and the clear blue sky framed the New York City skyline as it rose impressively before us.
It was the middle of October.
We were five sisters of the Third Order Regular of Penance of the Sorrowful Mother — Sisters Alexandra Marie Burghardt, Anne Marie Gill, Therese Marie Iglesias, Lilla Marie Lottinger and myself. We had just conducted a four-day mission on “Living Life in the Holy Spirit” at Notre Dame of Mount Carmel Parish in Cedar Knolls, N.J.
Shortly after the World Trade Center tragedy we had been given a copy of the now famous picture of the 20-foot steel-beam cross found by a workman in the debris. Our hearts were impassioned with the desire to pray at the site of the cross. Now here we were, watching the smoke rise in the distance between the skyscrapers.
Setting foot on the streets of Lower Manhattan, we walked toward the site of Ground Zero.
Many streets dead-ended on the fenced-in site. Police and military presence was considerable. Wending our way around to the first police barricade, we inquired about passes to enter the site. We were directed to another checkpoint. Several checkpoints and much walking later, we were advised to go to Pier 92, the Command Center that coordinates all Ground Zero operations.
The streets were barricaded outside Piers 92 and 93. IDs were required there and at several successive points of entrance. Pier 93 houses a huge operation providing chaplain services, Red Cross and various social services for surviving families of the tragedy, coordination of volunteer services, and a temporary mayor's office. A brief interaction there led us to continue to Pier 92.
At each required point of surveillance, we wondered if we might not realize our desired goal. We proceeded, trusting in divine Providence to open or close the doors. Accompanied by a police guard, we took the elevator to the main floor of the Command Center in Pier 92. Again, showing identification we repeated our request: “We would like passes to Ground Zero to pray at the cross.”
We were told to wait and a police officer would come out to talk with us. About 45 minutes later Sgt. Valentino Suarez came out to speak with us. “Sisters, there are dozens of crosses down there,” ... and, finally “I'll see what I can do.”
Sgt. Suarez arranged for picture-ID passes, hardhats, goggles and nose masks. Together with a young police officer, Stephen Brown, he drove us to Ground Zero.
One more security post, and there it was: a massive pile of twisted metal and gray ash several stories high. Two skeleton walls, fragments of concrete and steel, 10 or 12 stories high, one for each of the towers, stood leaning amid the rubble.
Smoke was still rising from one large area that still burned in what remained of one of the towers. It was so hot, we were told, that firemen couldn't get near it: Their boots melted.
We observed the holocaust from a raised wood platform constructed for families to view the final resting place of their loved ones. They come hoping for a semblance of closure. A woman near us sobbed, surrounded by her family. We prayed silently.
At a 30-degree angle to our left, about a block away, we could see the cross.
The workman who discovered it said it was standing almost erect in the rubble and he cried for 20 minutes upon finding it. On Oct. 3, workers hoisted it atop a 40-foot high concrete foundation, formerly a pedestrian walkway. Construction workers, firefighters and police officers stood quietly by as Franciscan Father Brian Jordan blessed it with holy water. Rescue workers have made pilgrimages to pray or meditate near the cross.
We were not able to pray at the cross for safety reasons, but our police escorts, Sgt. Suarez and Officer Brown, drove us by it. We stopped at the foot of the cross for a few moments, sobered and grateful at the realization that we were given the privilege to be so near it.
In Father Jordan's words, “Behold the glory of the cross at Ground Zero. It stands as our symbol of hope, our symbol of faith, our symbol of healing.”
We were then driven by the policemen to St. Patrick's Cathedral to attend evening Mass. We were grateful for the kindness shown to us by Sgt. Suarez and Officer Brown. Throughout the day we were often aware of little signs of caring, the courtesy and sensitivity of the people, military, firefighters, and most especially of the New York City Police. At every opportunity we spoke a brief word of encouragement.
“Thanks for a great job!” “We pray for you!” Sr. Alexandra Marie gave away Miraculous Medals with a smile and a gentle, “This is a reminder of God's love for you.”
The last lady we spoke with in the city told us, “New York has changed. Since Sept. 11, people are more courteous, more considerate, more concerned for one another.” We came away believing God has given hope for a renewed reverence for life to the people of New York City and our nation.
R
Grace Anne Wills is a Franciscan Third Order Regular sister in Steubenville, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sister Grace Anne Wills ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: The End Is Always At Hand DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:A new wave of books is already cresting. Attack on America: New York, Jerusalem and the Role of Terrorism in the Last Days is just one of the titles riding high. Indeed, Christian bookstores are reporting a big increase in sales of many end-time works. In the eight weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, sales of these titles increased by 71% compared to the eight-week period just before the attacks.
And it's not just publishing. Christian Web sites and chat rooms are full of heated debates over whether the end is near. The televangelists on cable TV can hardly get off the subject.
Since most of this speculation is occurring among our evangelical and Pentecostal brothers and sisters, our tendency as Catholics is to ignore it, make fun of it or quietly thank God that we're Catholic. Because of the numerous “false alarms” and truly irresponsible and unfounded interpretations of both Scripture and current events over the years from this segment of the culture, our responses are understandable.
The danger for us is certainly not irresponsible end-times speculation (although some of that does exists in the murky world of locutions, prophecies and apparitions). Our peril is in our potential, in our easy dismissal of the hysteria, to ignore a very important and very central truth of our faith — namely, the glorious return of Jesus to judge the living and the dead.
The truth of the Lord's return is deeply embedded in our faith and worship. Every Sunday at Mass when we recite the Creed we affirm: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” The Fourth Lateran Council reaffirmed the truth of the Lord's return as an article of faith.
After the consecration, we proclaim: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Scripture tells us that the Mass itself is celebrated in anticipation of the return of Jesus. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that the Our Father is fundamentally an eschatological prayer and that, when we pray for the Father's will to be done and his Kingdom to come, we are praying for the return of Jesus (No. 2771-2772). In the Mass, after we pray this prayer together, the priest offers this concluding doxology: “In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Eager Anticipation
Waiting in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ, is an integral part of what it means to live a truly Catholic life, and yet it is an element not often spoken about and consequently, poorly understood and lived.
If eagerly awaiting the Lord's return is important for our salvation, shouldn't we pay more attention to what Scripture and the Church teach about the Second Coming?
The teaching of Jesus and the apostles makes frequent reference to the importance of Jesus' return.
“Just as it is appointed that human beings die once, and after this the judgment, so also Christ, offered once to take away the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to take away sin but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him” (Hebrews 9:27-28).
If eagerly awaiting the Lord's return is important for our salvation (and this is the point of some of Jesus' best-known parables), then shouldn't we Catholics pay more attention to what Scripture and the Church teach about it?
Consider:
The Second Coming will happen. The redemptive plan of God won't be complete until Jesus returns in glory to judge the living and the dead. The first time, Jesus came as a lamb, a sacrifice for our sins; the second time, Jesus will come as king and judge, to reward those who have responded to his sacrifice and punish those who have rejected his sacrifice.
It will follow an order ordained by God. When Jesus returns, those who have died in the Lord will rise first, and then those who are alive and living in his grace will rise to join them. This will be the resurrection of the just to glory.
“The Lord himself will come down from heaven at the word of command, at the sound of the archangel's voice and God's trumpet. And the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).
The Scriptures seem to indicate that these events will all happen in close proximity to one another; the return of the Lord and the resurrection of the dead. Some evangelical Protestants posit a time delay between this meeting with the Lord in the air, which they term the “rapture,” and the Second Coming. The apparent sense of Scripture and the prevailing Catholic theological interpretation connect these events together.
Then will come the resurrection of the damned (John 5:27-29).
Business Not-As-Usual
The Second Coming will be preceded by certain signs. Even though we can't know the “exact day or hour” (Mark 13:32), there are nevertheless some indicators that Jesus and the Apostles give that will alert us to the true proximity of his coming. These include some type of corporate conversion of the Jews (Romans 11:25-26, Luke 21:24); the universal proclamation of the Gospel until the “time of the Gentiles is fulfilled (Luke 21:24, Matthew 24:14); a massive apostasy (2 Thessalonians 2:1-3, Luke 18:8); and the rise of the anti-Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:3-10.
We are exhorted to encourage each other with the truth of the Lord's return. Remembering that the Lord is returning is supposed to function as a source of strength and perseverance, a state of mind that will enable us to better love God and our neighbor right now, in the current circumstances of our lives (James 5:7-9, 1 Thessalonians 4:17, 1 Peter 1:13).
As we begin the New Year with our nation at war, we should not fail to examine our lives. The present conflict may not be a sign that the Second Coming of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is at hand. But, then again, as Jesus said: “Be ready!”
Ralph Martin, president of Renewal Ministries (www.renewalministries.net ), wrote
Is Jesus Coming Soon? A Catholic Perspective on the Second Coming (Ignatius).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ralph Martin ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Washington's 'Stimulus Package' Is Politics, Not Economics DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:I make no prediction about the final shape of this bill. Some people “don't do windows.” As an economist, I “don't do forecasts.” But I can tell you something about how to interpret the process.
The events of Sept. 11 demonstrate the folly of one of the old-fashioned theories about fiscal policy. The old-style Keynesian theory (based on the formulations of English economist John Maynard Keynes, who died in 1946) claimed that deficit spending, for any purpose, and funded in any fashion, would stimulate consumer demand and therefore stimulate the economy. It is a tribute to our common sense, if not our economic wisdom, that no one today claims that rebuilding the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will stimulate the economy by giving people jobs.
Some of the more doctrinaire Keynesians used to claim that the government could stimulate the economy by paying people to dig holes and fill them in again. The people employed in this useless task receive paychecks. They feel wealthier. They will spend the money, thereby stimulating consumer demand and keeping the economy rolling. No matter that no one placed any economic value on useless hole-digging and refilling. No matter that the taxpayers who implicitly paid for these holes feel less wealthy and thereby spend less. The Keynesians claimed that the mere act of spending government money would be good for the economy.
The most extreme and foolish version of this idea is the argument that war stimulates the economy.
Many people will still tell you, for instance, that World War II ended the Great Depression. But surely people would have preferred to have the government spend money on roads, bridges or dams than on bombs and tanks. It is true that the unemployment rate plummeted during the war. But a huge number of men were drafted into the military. It is no attack on their patriotism to observe that most of those conscripted soldiers would have preferred a job in the private sector to being drafted into a dangerous job with low pay and poor working conditions. The lower unemployment rate during the war was obtained in part by moving people out of the ranks of the unemployed and into the ranks of the Army.
Everyone can see that the terrorist destruction of Sept. 11 is just that: destruction. It represents a huge loss of wealth. Whether the public or private sector does the rebuilding, there is no question that we are worse off for having to face this massive reconstruction task. We have to rebuild, just as we had to fight the Nazis. But we would have been far better off in a world without any Nazis or suicide bombers. Coping with destruction is a loss, a necessary but unpleasant expenditure. It's never an economic gain.
This background is important for understanding the probable impact of the proposed economic-stimulus package. My opinion is that, after all the horses have been traded and all the logs rolled, the policy will not move the economy much one way or the other. The real question is whether the spending or tax cuts or reflect sound policies in and of themselves. If the tax cut wouldn't survive the light of day without the “stimulus” label hanging around its neck, then it is probably a bad idea. If the proposed spending would not pass critical muster during ordinary times, it is probably a bad idea in a recession, too.
You might be persuaded by the idea that, since people are hurting during a recession, the government needs to do something to help. That may well be true. But we already have a variety of insurance programs to cover the unemployed, the disabled and so on. Funding increases for existing programs are legitimate, but mostly automatic. A big, new spending program is not ordinarily necessary to keep existing programs funded.
The attempt to create new programs, specifically tailored to this particular recession, is likely to backfire. The National Bureau of Economic Research announced in December that the economy has been in a recession since March of 2000. The provisions of this bill will not take effect immediately. By the time they are actually enacted, and begin to have an impact on people's decision-making, the worst of the recession is likely to have passed. In other words, passing an economic-stimulus package would be like closing the barn door after the horse is out. In the worst-case scenario, the effects of the package could kick in after the economy has already begun to recover on its own. The additional stimulus could overheat the economy, causing excessive, unsustainable growth.
Economists have understood for a long time that tax and spending policies are blunt instruments for fine-tuning or even jump-starting the economy. So why are the politicians making such a big deal out of something that is not likely to affect the recession much, and may actually do harm?
You guessed it. Political posturing. It's never too soon to think about the next round of elections.
The recession is a convenient cover for pursuing political and philosophical agendas. The Democrats tend to favor government spending because their predisposition is that all the money belongs to the government. They want to collect it in taxes and decide how it will be spent. The Republicans tend to favor tax cuts because they believe that the money belongs to the people. They want to give as much money back to as many people as possible whether the economy is booming or busting.
This debate in political and economic philosophy is legitimate, and should take place in good times or in bad. How it is resolved does have long-lasting and important impacts on many areas of our lives. But don't let the politicians kid you: The length of the recession is not one of them.
Jennifer Roback Morse, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote Love & Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work.
----- EXCERPT: As I write, Congress and the president are haggling over an economic-stimulus package. ----- EXTENDED BODY: J. R. Morse ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Spirit of Cincinnati DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Cincinnati draws many tourists, few of whom come here looking for churches.
The many don't know what they're missing.
This Ohio city, together with its next-door neighbor, Covington, Ky., is home to nearly 250 churches. Many house beautiful collections of liturgical art and priceless pieces of history.
The first place to start on your tour of city churches is the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains, mother church for Cincinnati's 550,000 Catholics. Completed in 1845 under the guidance of Bishop Edward Fenwick, the cathedral (the second permanent one in the United States.) is considered one of the most handsome and monumental examples of Greek Revival architecture in the United States. Designed by Henry Walter, architect of the Ohio State Capitol, its special treasure is a gold processional crucifix designed by Benevenuto Cellini.
The cathedral served the archdiocese for more than 90 years, but eventually it — and the neighborhood — deteriorated, so much so that the rank of “cathedral” was turned over to another church. However, in the 1950s there was a huge movement toward urban renewal and, soon after his arrival in Cincinnati, Archbishop Karl Alter began the renovation of St. Peter's. After adding transepts, sanctuary, sacristy and rectory to the building, he allowed it to resume its status as a cathedral in 1957. Soon, downtown Cincinnati also experienced a rebirth.
Wherever you go in this magnificent building, you are greeted with splendor. As you enter the atrium, walls of black marble and shimmering gold surround you. Cream marble flooring is inlaid with deep green marble in the design of crossed keys, the symbol of St. Peter. A towering mosaic, composed of thousands of pieces of Venetian glass, is visible behind the altar depicting Christ giving the keys of the kingdom to Peter. This mosaic was designed in Germany in Byzantine style. The sanctuary carpet, hand-woven in the Netherlands, bears the coat of arms of Archbishop Alter.
Dramatic Marble
In the Archbishop's Chapel, paneled in rich mahogany, is a wooden tabernacle, sheathed in gold-plated bronze, a gift from Pope Leo XII to Bishop Fenwick. It rests on the former main altar, fashioned from carrera marble in Genoa, Italy, in 1845.
The baptistery (in the right transept) is graced by a bronze statue of St. John Neumann, a gift by Cardinal Joseph Bernadin, to commemorate the canonization of this saint who once served as a priest in this archdiocese. The baptistery also features a wall of stone tracery, dramatized by stained-glass panels with the theme of chains and crosses. Over the font is the bronze Risen Christ by artist Robert Koepnick. The font, constructed of marble and bronze, has a phoenix (a legendary bird which rises from its own ashes) on the base, symbolizing the resurrection from the dead.
The Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the left transept displays a dramatic use of black marble, accented by panels of pierced gold leaf woodwork. The inscription reads “Heart of Jesus Burning with Love for Us.” A tall, magnificent monstrance for exposition is situated behind the tabernacle.
To me, the most unique devotional feature of the cathedral is the Stations of the Cross in the form of eight murals inspired by Greek pottery paintings from 600-400 B.C. These life-size figures are richly rendered in the classical colors of black, white and gold on a brick-red background.
The cathedral has a museum, open only by appointment, containing magnificent monstrances, relics, vestments and historic Church documents. The theme of St. Peter in Chains is carried out by windows reflecting the “chain motif” both here and throughout the cathedral. Here one finds the explanation of the Archdiocesan Coat of Arms — a plow (standing for the Roman farmer Cincinnatus) between three crosses (in honor of the Trinity) in the colors of red and gold, which are St. Peter's colors.
The cathedral, which remains the oldest cathedral west of the Alleghenies still in use as a cathedral, well deserves its designation on the National Register of Historic Places.
Awe-Inspiring Acoustics
Old St. Mary's is another Cincinnati church well worth a visit. In the 19th century, German immigrants settled across the canal in a neighborhood still known as “Over-the Rhine.” In the 1840s these Germans built this church by baking its bricks in their own kitchens. They used elaborate decorations in the church and installed huge pipe organs to recall the churches of their native land. The church's clock tower is the oldest in the city.
The parish has a reputation for inspiring music, aided by the state-of-the-art acoustics of its wooden interior. The venerable Austin organ has been revitalized with spare parts taken from an old music hall organ. At its 9:15 Sunday Latin Mass, both Gregorian chant and Renaissance liturgical music are performed by choir members from the University of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music.
This parish has always had a special devotion to its patron, indicated by the various shrines to Our Lady, under numerous titles, throughout the church. Every May there is crowning of the Blessed Virgin. The Vatican designated Old St. Mary's altar as one with “privileged status,” and a reliquary in its base holds the relics of an unnamed martyr ("St. Martura") found in the catacombs in Rome.
The parish today still ministers to the old, the sick and the poor. In 1982 the parish school became the new home of St. Joseph Social Service Center, providing food, clothing, counseling and temporary housing for the homeless.
Old St. Mary's, the oldest standing house of worship in the city, is also on the National Register of Historic Places. Masses are celebrated in Latin, German and English. Parish gatherings are occasions for feasting on bratwurst. Come during Octoberfest and you'll meet Bavarians who come all the way from Munich just for the occasion.
Going to the top of the city to the section of Mount Adams, you'll find “The Church of the Steps” (real name: Immaculata Church). This parish has traditionally been the scene for votive offerings for the safety of men at sea during visits back to Europe. Perched atop the city and looking over the beautiful Ohio River valley, it is a popular Good Friday pilgrimage site. Visitors kneel and say two prayers on each of its 100 steps as they ascend.
Across the Ohio River stands the crown in the jewel of the Diocese of Covington — the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption. Built after 1895, it's a treasure-trove, both inside and out. Its central entrance features outstanding statuary and stone carvings by the famous American sculptor Clement Barhorn. At the summit of its twin-towered facade stand 26 gargoyles, keeping guard lest evil spirits enter. No wonder it has been described as a small-scale model of Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral on the outside and, with its pure arched Gothic ceiling, St. Denis on the inside.
The stained-glass window in the north transept represents the fifth-century Council of Ephesus, which proclaimed Mary as the Mother of God. It is the largest handmade stained-glass church window in the world — and the window has never been finished.
There are also two outstanding rose windows and 82 other stained-glass windows from Munich, Germany, representing mysteries of our faith and Christ's miracles. Stations of the Cross based on original oil paintings of a Bavarian religious are executed in tiny porcelain tiles numbering over 80,000. The murals, organs and statuary in the basilica deserve special mention as well.
The Cathedral Basilica's garden displays a fountain by the renowned liturgical artist William Schickel.
Here is a place to pray, meditate or just relax. The day I was there happened to be the feast of St. Francis of Assisi and the priest was carrying out the annual blessing of the animals, reading parts of Genesis as the animals — and their owners — patiently stood by. Another church of note in Covington is Mother of God, with its five large murals by Johann Schmidt, whose work is also displayed in the Vatican.
This is but a tempting taste of the churches in the Cincinnati area, today presided over by Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk. Come and see them for yourself. You'll go away with fond memories and renewed faith.
Lorraine Williams lives in Markham, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lorraine Williams ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Hell - and God - in the Antarctic DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:We all need heroes, but the nature of heroism is constantly being redefined.
Each culture and time period has its own slightly different understanding of the idea, and the virtues that a hero embodies change accordingly.
The 19th and early 20th centuries were the last great ages of discovery. Explorers and seafaring adventurers still captured the popular imagination. They were the celebrities of their era, and their exploits became instant myths.
The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Adventure, based on Caroline Alexander's book, is a feature-length documentary about the last great voyage made in this spirit. On Dec. 14, 1911, Norwegian Roald Amundsen became the first explorer to reach the South Pole. His party beat out by five weeks a British team lead by Robert Scott, who later perished during the trek back to civilization.
Sir Ernest Shackleton had been part of one of Scott's previous, unsuccessful expeditions. But he was determined to be the first to traverse the frozen continent from sea to sea on foot, a feat Amundsen had not accomplished. Director George Butler (Pumping Iron) carefully chronicles Shackleton's failed adventure, which the explorer transformed from a potential tragedy into a triumph of the human spirit.
It was 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, and most of the British public still lionized explorers in much the same way Americans celebrated astronauts in the 1960s and ‘70s. Five thousand would-be adventurers responded to Shackleton's newspaper ad: “Men wanted for harsh journey. Small wages. Bitter cold.”
The explorer chose 27 of them and, on Aug. 1, they left England for Antarctica. Their ship was named after the Shackleton family motto: “By endurance we conquer.” These sentiments were to prove prophetic.
Not everyone was enthusiastic. Winston Churchill, then Lord of the Admiralty, asserted that “enough life and money has been spent on this sterile quest.” But Shackleton hoped to make some scientific discoveries of importance.
On Dec. 5 the ship left the whaling port of South Georgia Island, the last settlement before the wilderness. In January the temperature dropped from 20 to 70 below zero, causing the polar ice to close in on the vessel. It became trapped there less than a day away from Antarctica's shore. “What the ice gets,” Shackleton wrote in his journal, “the ice keeps.”
The ship was stuck in that frozen vise for 10 months. Shackleton soon realized that the expedition was unlikely to achieve its intended objectives. Rather than go for broke, he showed himself to be a person of great moral character and decided that his primary mission was now to bring everyone back alive. Dealing with the elements was not the hardest job, he wrote. “Dealing with the human spirit is very difficult.”
Shackleton knew how to motivate and control the men under his command. He kept them busy playing soccer, staging plays and racing their sled dogs.
Nature was not kind. When the ice finally shifted, it crushed the Endurance. They abandoned ship, and it sank.
Shackleton made a series of decisions that appeared to make things worse. There was a brief mutiny that he put down without violence. The crew then laboriously dragged three lifeboats across the ice and rowed through stormy seas to the uninhabited Elephant Island.
Forced to endure a blizzard, some of the men went mad. Shackleton realized that their chances of being rescued before the food and supplies ran out were nil. To get help, he selected a handful of his best men and embarked on a 17-day, 800-mile journey in a 22-foot lifeboat to South Georgia Island. Somehow they overcame whales, primitive navigation equipment and a hurricane to reach their destination.
Their troubles weren't over. They had landed on the wrong side of the island, and only Shackleton and two others were healthy enough to undertake the sleepless, 36-hour trek across the mountains to the whalers' station. But these desperate, exhausted men were certain that they were not alone. Shackleton wrote that they sensed a fourth person — Jesus Christ — walked with them to safety.
The others were rescued from Elephant Island. Shackleton had achieved his almost impossible goal. Everyone had survived.
On Sept. 16, 1916, the crew of the Endurance returned to civilization and found that the world had changed. World War I had taken a terrible toll in young British lives, and Shackleton was told he was “the wrong kind of hero.” A more warriorlike set of virtues had understandably come into fashion.
Many of the Endurance's crew volunteered to fight in the trenches. After the war, Shackleton returned to South Georgia Island for a final expedition. There he died of a heart attack on Jan. 5, 1921, and was buried in the whalers' cemetery.
The Endurance's official photographer, Frank Hurley, had recorded the first half of the expedition on motion-picture film and the rest in stills. Butler combines these with present-day footage of the actual locations and discreet reenactments. To propel the narrative, interviews with the survivors' descendants are interspersed with actors' readings of the crews' journals and Liam Neeson's narration.
Shackleton emerges as a figure of quiet courage and perseverance, a person of religious faith who loved physical adventure for what it inspired in the human spirit.
The movie's greatest triumph is to get the audience to view the world through Shackleton's eyes. It's able to understand why he wrote: “We had seen God in His splendors. We had reached the naked soul of man.”
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Documentary The Endurance delivers the goods on the human spirit ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:The American President (2000)
The events of Sept. 11 remind us of the crucial role each president plays in shaping the direction of our nation. The American President, a 10-hour PBS documentary miniseries, was completed before the election of George W. Bush, but its focus on the relationship between the personal and the political during the terms of his 41 predecessors can help us better understand the significance of Bush's behavior and decisions.
Produced by journalist Philip Kunhardt Jr. and his two sons, Philip III and Peter, the series has wisely chosen a non-chronological structure.
Each one-hour segment picks four or five presidents from different periods and examines what they had in common.
For example, a segment titled “Happenstance” profiles five men who moved from the vice presidency to the White House upon the sitting president's death. “Family Ties” profiles four commanders in chief whose careers were jump-started by their powerful, influential families.
The voices of the presidents from pre-electronic media eras are provided by contemporary public figures like Colin Powell, the Rev. Billy Graham and Walter Cronkite.
Battle of Algiers (1965)
Does this sound familiar? A clandestine Arab political organization that uses a non-hierarchical, cell-like structure to plant bombs to kill innocent Westerners and whose leaders prefer death to surrender. The Battle of Algiers, winner of the Venice Film Festival's Grand Prize, is a passionate dramatization of the real-life rebellion of the FLN guerrillas against French colonialism in Algeria. The terrorists' motives back then were nationalist rather than religious, but their brutality and effectiveness still chill the blood.
It's 1957, and the local French commander, Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin), surrounds the apartment of terrorist leader Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) and asks him and his family to surrender or face death. The revolutionary ignores the warning and is killed. The action flashes back to 1954 as we watch Ali successfully recruit criminals and pre-adolescent boys to his cause. The methods used by the French to hunt him down are as disturbing as the violence he employs. The terrorists' eventual victory despite Ali's death may unsettle contemporary viewers. Australian nurse who challenged the medical establishment of her day. Elizabeth Kenny (Rosalind Russell) works in sparsely populated rural areas at the beginning of the 20th century. She finds a reliable way to rehabilitate polio victims before the discovery of the Salk vaccine. Her methods attract the interest of a big-city physician, Dr. Aeneas McDonnell (Alexander Knox), but the region's top researcher, Dr. Brack (Philip Merivale), initiates a campaign to discredit her. He believes that only doctors are qualified to make findings of that sort.
Kenny's primary concern is to help the physically handicapped children under her care.
She has no time for romance or anything else that will distract her from her cause. She eventually carries her battle to the United States where she gets proper funding and recognition. Her compassion and perseverance are inspiring. The production was a labor of love for its director, Oscar-winning screen-writer Dudley Nichols (The Informer).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: All This and Socialization, Too DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Home-schooling parents have long maintained that their children are not only academically accomplished, but also socially well-adjusted.
A new study puts some serious teeth on their claims.
The Fraser Institute, a public-policy think tank in Vancouver, British Columbia, released results from its study — “Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream” — last October. The study found that home-schooled children outperform their peers by four grade levels by the eighth grade.
It also found that home-schoolers are friendlier and have higher self-esteem than their public- and private-school peers.
According to the study, home-schooled students in Canada placed between the 82nd and 92nd percentile in reading and reached the 85th percentile in math. Overall, test scores for home schoolers placed between the 75th and 85th percentile. Public-school students scored at the 50th percentile, while private-school students' scores ranged from the 65th to the 75th percentile.
Home-schooled students also surpassed the national average on both of the major college-entrance tests, the ACT and the SAT, the research revealed.
In the United States, about 850,000 children are home schooled, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Not everyone is convinced by the recent spate of good press home schooling has enjoyed, however.
“I can take any sample of kids at my school and make it come out any way I wanted it to,” says Paul Young, principal of West Elementary School in Lancaster, Ohio. “I'm suspicious of these studies.”
A member of the National Association for Elementary School Principals, Young says he knows many home-schooled students who demonstrate poor social skills. He adds that, when he sees a student taken out of school and put into home schooling, he worries that the youngster's social skills will decline.
The principals' association, based in Alexandria, Va., has a document posted on its Web site stating that public schools need to work with home schoolers because many end up back in the public-school system.
The association also maintains that home schooling children may deprive them of important social experiences, isolate students from other social and ethnic groups, deny students the full range of academic experience and not permit effective assessment of academic standards.
Fringe Benefits
Mothers who home school say such concerns are both common and valid — but shortcomings are the exception rather than the norm.
Lori Brown, a mother of six who has been home-schooling for 10 years, says home-schooling parents are committed to making sure their children receive the best education both academically and socially. Her children are involved in a variety of activities outside the home, from church choir to Little League sports, that allow them to frequently interact with the community.
She also says that, if home-schooling didn't work, it would eventually show up in the grades.
“If you are too lenient on the grades, it will show up in the SAT and the college-entrance exams,” says Brown, of Springport, Ind. Her home-schooled son earned an academic scholarship to the University of Dallas.
And then there are the fringe benefits.
While religious education is usually taught one period per day at private Catholic schools, Brown says she can integrate the Catholic faith into all her children's studies, whether it's talking about Catholic history or stopping everything to call upon the Holy Spirit for help if one of her children is having trouble with an assignment.
“I'm here 24-7 with my kids and I can capture the teachable moments,” Brown says. “I realize that a [formal school setting] may not be able to do that. There are just too many students for each to get the one-on-one attention.”
Home-schooling mothers also say their children have plenty of opportunities to play with other children, including those from public and private schools, after school and on weekends.
Anne Welch, a mother of six from Greenwood, Ind., says her children interact with kids from all age groups — not just kids their own age. For example, her 14-year-old son is often asked to help his 5-year-old sibling with school work.
Welch points out that, in a formal school setting, students rarely interact with students outside their own age group.
Welch began home schooling her daughters due to academic pressures at their school. They seemed stressed about having to learn so much at once, she said. Now all her children are home schooled.
However, she doesn't blame the schools for not meeting the individualized learning needs of her children.
“I don't blame the teachers,” says Welch. “They have no other option. They are trying to teach 24 kids at once. I have the greatest respect for teachers. After teaching my own kids, I don't see how they teach that many or could give individualized attention like a home-school atmosphere can.”
Smart and Socialized
Principal Young doesn't dispute that home-schooled children get more individualized attention than their public-school peers.
Still, he believes that formal school settings provide skills that home schooling cannot. He said public schools provide a “silent service,” especially after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, by showing children what it means to be an American.
The National Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association declined to comment for this story, stating that they do not follow home schooling because it is not related to public schools.
Children who are home-schooled say they see no differences between themselves and their peers. Kristina Welch, 17, has been home-schooled since fifth grade. She has many friends who are in public or private schools; her younger brothers often play with the neighborhood kids.
While she agrees with most of the Fraser study, she doesn't think home-schooled children are more socially developed than their peers in the schools. “We're as socially developed,” she says.
Still, she is glad that she is home-schooled.
“If I had gone to a regular school, I would not have turned out to be the same person, because of peer pressure,” she says. “I would have turned out to be the person my friends wanted me to be, as opposed to who I really am. Home schooling saved me from all that.”
The Fraser study confirms not only the real-world experiences of home-schooling parents and children, but also a previous study. In 1994, a study by the Educational Resources Information Center in Bloomington, Ind., found that home-schooled children “gained the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to function in society at a rate similar to that of conventionally schooled children.”
Jennifer Del Vechio writes from Franklin, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jennifer Del Vechio ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: A Bishop's Bridge from Rote to Real Life DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Candid. Wise. Clear. Warm. Such are the words often used to describe Bishop Thomas Tobin, installed as bishop of the Diocese of Youngstown in 1996. Since then, Bishop Tobin has written a regular column, “Without Any Doubt,” for his diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Exponent. It has been both popular and celebrated, receiving special recognition from the Catholic Press Association in 1998. This volume is a compilation of 40 of those columns, accompanied (as an appendix) by his Pastoral Letter on the Centrality of the Eucharist, “The Eucharist: To Be Loved, To Be Lived,” a document that received national attention when it was released in February of 1998.
There is much to like in this collection of essays, and much to learn from it. Bishop Tobin explains that his articles are “meant to bridge the gap between the teaching of the Church and our lived experience; to offer some very practical observations about the consequences of our Catholic faith in the ‘real world.’” To that end he is successful, for his columns are masterful in their brevity, insight, pastoral wisdom and sound teaching.
There is hardly a wasted word in this book, which speaks to the clarity of the author's thinking and the focus he brings to his work as author and bishop. The topics of the columns range from golf ("Golf teaches how beneficial it is to stay on the straight and narrow") to the liturgy ("[L]et us resolve to receive Holy Communion often and to receive it well") to abortion ("Abortion continues to be the great moral pestilence of our time"). He takes on, with firmness and charity, the controversial issues of women's ordination, the death penalty and sexual morality, then offers delightful anecdotes from his life as a bishop: talking to school children, meeting the Pope and walking in a Hindu temple.
Bishop Tobin writes often of Pope John Paul II and he clearly patterns his thinking and pastorate after the Holy Father. Reoccurring themes include the importance of implementing Vatican II, studying Scripture, reading the Catechism, daily prayer, eucharistic adoration, devotion to Mary and self-denial. Like John Paul, Bishop Tobin demonstrates a keen insight into human nature, speaking with both love and concern about the many cultural, moral and religious challenges that confront the Catholic faithful.
In “Receiving Holy Communion,” he addresses the issue of non-Catholics receiving Eucharist in a way that is not only sound, but revealing.
“The most detrimental thing we can do to achieve legitimate Christian unity is to ‘paper over’ our differences with other religions,” he writes.
“It's somewhat akin to two people entering marriage before they've gotten to know each other, before they've resolved all their differences. A good marriage, in personal life or ecumenism, demands that differences have been courageously addressed and resolved, and that there be a true understanding and acceptance by each party. That's the solid foundation on which the union can be built.
“Experience has taught that couples who live together without the benefit of marriage have a higher divorce rate than those who are more patient with their plans. An important lesson for our ecumenical endeavors, I believe!”
This collection of articles is also full of practical advice about handling the challenges of being a Catholic, along with many concrete directives for spiritual growth. The book's weaknesses are minimal: The word “values” is used a few too many times, and the theological basis for the Church's stance on women's ordination could be stronger. But these are minor blemishes in a book that is heavy with literary and spiritual gems. It deserves a large and appreciative audience.
Carl Olson is director of catechesis at Nativity of the Mother of God parish in Springfield, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl E. Olson ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Darwinian Caution
CNN.COM, Dec. 26 — While the recently passed national education bill does not include a provision for vouchers that was originally sought by President Bush, it does give solace to critics of Darwin's theory of evolution for the origins of humanity, reports the Web site of the Cable News Network.
The bill cautions: “Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.”
The Discovery Institute of Seattle, which favors the theory that an intelligent mind created the universe, told CNN that the bill includes the “the right of students to hear honest accounts of the scientific disputes over Darwinian theory.”
Voucher Silence
After outlining the program's popularity and the academic success of the student-participants, Journal reporter Alan Borsuk noted that “several prominent critics of the school choice movement did not respond to telephone calls or declined to comment.”
Ties That Bind
The professor notes that “it has been decades since American institutions of higher education have asked young men to wear ties to class. Unless he went to Catholic school, the typical student has gone through life with a naked throat.”
Alternative Medicine
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, Dec. 10 — The university has received a five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to implement a program that incorporates alternative medicine into the School of Medicine curriculum.
A required course on “Mind-Body Medicine: An Experiential and Didactic Introduction” is believed to be the first such course to be required of first-year medical students in the United States.
Aviad Haramati, a professor of biophysics at the Jesuit university, said future doctors need to understand such practices as dietary supplements, acupuncture, herbs, homeopathy and therapeutic massage because of their increasing popularity.
Prepared Principals
Slated to start next fall, Neumann's current master's program in education will be expanded to cover issues specific to Catholic school administration such as fund raising and parish relations. Part of the two-year program, titled “Calling Forth Leaders,” will be spiritual formation so that the future principals will better know how to instill Catholic faith and values into the school community.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Insurance Assurance DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Q We are a couple in our late 20s, just starting a family. We're considering life insurance, but wonder whether that means we're showing a lack of faith in God. Is life insurance okay; and if so, should it cover me only, or my wife too? She has no formal job.
A While you won't find insurance in sacred Scripture, per se, you will find an abundance of teaching that encourages us to make effective plans to meet the needs of our family. For example, 1 Timothy 5:8 says, “If anyone does not provide for his own relatives and especially for members of his immediate family, he has denied the faith; he is worse than an unbeliever.”
In biblical times, society was based on an agrarian economy, with land being passed on from generation to generation. This acted as the equivalent of an insurance policy. When the economy changed to an industrial and information base, another form of safeguard became necessary. Insurance has filled this need, and is an appropriate tool for fulfilling 1 Timothy 5:8.
You ask whether to get policies for both spouses, or just yourself. In order to provide the greatest possible opportunity for a single parent to stay home fulltime to raise the children, it would be wise to purchase policies for both spouses. Otherwise, in the event of the sudden death of the homemaker, the wage earner would need to continue working full time. While you'll want to visit with an insurance agent or financial planner to determine what type of insurance is best for you, most young families choose term insurance because of its relatively low cost.
Another key question is how much insurance you need. No one answer fits every situation. Take into account your ongoing expenses and future major expenditures such as debt repayment, college tuition or the purchase of a new car. By comparing these needs to your existing resources, you can better determine the amount of insurance that is right for you.
Remember there are scores of companies that sell life insurance. While price is certainly important, consider the financial strength of the company you are dealing with. Look for a rating of A or better from A.M. Best, a company that evaluates the financial strength of insurance companies.
As with any purchase, comparison shopping results in great savings. It would be a good idea to obtain a number of quotes before making a decision. There are also a number of consumer organizations you can contact for additional helpful information, including price quotes.
God love you!
Phil Lenahan is executive director of Catholic Answers.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:One in four of those who go online use the Internet for religious purposes. Here are just a few of the faith interests that people pursue on their computers:
Seek information about their faith
67%
50%
Download religious music
34%
Buy religious items online
34%
Participate in religious listservs
27%
Download sermons
25%
Get ideas for celebrating religious holidays
Seek spiritual advice by e-mail
22%
21%
Seek a church to join
14%
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project, Dec. 23
----- EXCERPT: Religion On The Web ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: His Friends Remember Padre Pio DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Italy — Although he died in 1968, the popularity of Padre Pio — a stigmatist, reader of souls, mystic soon to be declared a saint — has grown over the years.
In fact, this simple Capuchin friar is so well known that more pilgrims journey to the small town of San Giovanni Rotondo every year than to Fatima, Lourdes, or any other shrine in the world except Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
While Blessed Padre Pio will be canonized sometime this year, the date of the canonization is still uncertain, said Charles Abercrombie, the English language editor of the Voice of Padre Pio, the official bimonthly magazine of the cause of Padre Pio published by the friary in which he lived in San Giovanni Rotundo. But he says the friars have asked for a date in May, and the date will be known in late January after negotiations between the Vatican and the municipal officials in Rome.
Blessed Padre Pio has become a “popular figure ... especially in Italy” since “because of his humble background, people can relate to him,” says Abercrombie. In the United States, too, Padre Pio is immensely popular, and Abercrombie sees that trend dating back to the 1940s when “many American soldiers during World War II came here and met Padre Pio.”
Capuchin Father Ermelindo runs the English-speaking office at the friary where Padre Pio once lived. He said that Padre Pio once told him, “After my death, I will get more attention than when I was alive.”
Added Father Ermelindo: “I was here then and now.” He noted that, even today, construction is under way for a new church near the shrine, which will be able to seat 10,000, since the current church is too small to accommodate the crowds.
He recalled with a smile that in 1958 when the then new church was opened, Padre Pio remarked that it was too small, saying, “What have you built me, a matchbox?”
Crosses to Bear
But Padre Pio did not always attract this kind of attention. He was born May 25, 1887, in Pietrilcina in southern Italy into the Forgione family, a family of poor farmers. In 1903, at the age of 15, he entered the Capuchin novitiate, and was ordained in 1910 at the age of 23. Between 1915 and 1918 Padre Pio was called up several times by the army, but was ultimately discharged because of his chronically poor health.
It was on Sept. 20, 1918, that Padre Pio received the stigmata — the wounds of Christ's crucifixion — while praying in the choir loft of the 16th-century church attached to the friary.
After this event, his fame grew, and by 1922 he had attracted the attention of many people — including the Vatican's Holy Office, which began an investigation. As a result of this investigation, which concluded that Padre Pio was not experiencing anything supernatural, the Holy Office attempted to transfer him to another monastery in 1923. An uprising of the people in San Giovanni prevented the move. Nevertheless, the friar was not allowed to say Mass publicly, or even to correspond with those who wrote him.
In Terlizzi, a small town near Bari, about two hours from San Giovanni, another Capuchin who knew Padre Pio said of him, “Knowing Padre Pio was like knowing Jesus Christ,” he said.
The key examples from Padre Pio's life he says, are “silence and obedience.”
Referring to the years when Padre Pio was suppressed, Padre Pancracio noted: “With one word he could have changed things, but he kept silent.”
It was not until 1934 that all of the restrictions on him were finally lifted and people began to flock from around the world to see him. Still, in addition to the stigmata, he had many crosses to bear. Some people spread vicious rumors about him, and Padre Pio reported that the devil himself came on many occasions to physically beat him.
This suffering allowed him to touch many souls, and he was especially sought after as a confessor. He is renowned for his ability to read souls and recount a person's sins in more detail than the penitent.
The stories of Padre Pio's advice in the confessional are numerous, and range from kind to stern. To one man who told the Padre that he did not believe in hell, Padre Pio replied: “You will when you get there.”
Countless people, even hardened atheists and agnostics, were converted while visiting Padre Pio, and because of his gift for reading souls he was also sought for his spiritual advice. People the world over consider themselves his spiritual children. Padre Pio was likewise sought out for physical cures — he was especially famous for curing the blind, and those with cancer. He cured countless people of a variety of other ailments as well.
Padre Pio used to say: “In heaven I can do much more for all of you than by being here on earth”; and according to Father Ermelindo people are still cured, and Padre Pio is still saving souls. “Many come to ask for [cures of] the body, but have a spiritual conversion and ask for confession,” explained Father Ermelindo.
And physical cures still happen as well. Padre Ermelindo cited the miracle approved for Padre Pio's canonization, the cure of Matteo Colella from what should have been a fatal bout of meningitis.
But it is the spiritual conversions that Father Ermelindo insists are the most important:
“People today have lost the faith,” he said “but they find in this saint the guide to God.”
Popular Prayer Groups
Many priests and lay people belong to “Padre Pio Prayer Groups,” which are formally registered at the House for the Relief of Suffering, the hospital built in San Giovanni through the efforts of Padre Pio. These prayer groups had their statutes approved by the Vatican in 1986, and by 1998 numbered over 2,100, with 50 in the United States.
Charles Mandina, who spent several months with Padre Pio during the 1960s, working as his English translator and correspondence secretary, was a member of one of the first U.S. groups in 1968 in Los Angeles. “The first group was in San Giovanni,” he recalled, and “was in response to Pope Pius XII's request that priests encourage people to pray more.”
Since then, the prayer groups have been administered by many different priests from many different congregations.
At the first prayer group in Los Angeles under Salesian Father Albert Negri, there “were over 700 people” who attended regularly, said Mandina.
Among the priests in Los Angeles who took charge of the group in later years was diocesan Father Jack McKenna, who gave up a chance to play with the New York Yankees after Padre Pio told him to be a priest during World War II. “You need a priest in order for the group to work,” explained Mandina.
At least four popes have been vocal in their support of Padre Pio: Benedict XV, Pius XII, Paul VI and John Paul II, who met Padre Pio personally before he was Pope.
In a May 3, 1999, speech to pilgrims who had come to Rome for the beatification of Padre Pio, Pope John Paul II said:
“The prayer groups and the House for the Relief of Suffering: These are two significant ‘gifts’ which Padre Pio has left us. ... As for the prayer groups, he wanted them to be like beacons of light and love in the world. He longed for many souls to join him in prayer: ‘Pray,’ he used to say, ‘pray to the Lord with me, because the whole world needs prayers. And every day, when your heart especially feels the loneliness of life, pray, pray to the Lord together, because God too needs our prayers!’
“It was his intention to create an army of praying people who would be a ‘leaven’ in the world by the strength of prayer. And today the whole Church is grateful to him for this precious legacy, admires the holiness of her son and invites everyone to follow his example.”
Andrew Walther wrote this story from Milan, Italy.
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 01/13/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: January 13-19, 2002 ----- BODY:Sept. 11 Baby Boom
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Dec. 26 — Doctors say more women will have babies next year, a reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In November, the Greenville, S.C., Hospital System's Women's Health Institute had a 10% increase in the registration of new pregnant patients, said administrator Dr. Robert V. Cummings.
Greenville obstetrician Dr. Michael R. Hoffman said so many patients were asking whether they should pursue pregnancy that he hung a banner in his waiting room with Carl Sandburg's quote: “A baby is God's opinion the world should go on.”
Adoption vs. In Vitro
AMERICAN LIFE LEAGUE, Dec. 19 — John Kurtz and his wife, Donna, of suburban Philadelphia, struggle with infertility. The Kurtzes found their answer in adoption, reported American Life League. “There's no need to go outside God's plan for procreation,” said Kurtz.
Over the course of 20 years, the Kurtzes have adopted 15 children from orphanages, prisons and foster care programs. Many of the children were rescued from abusive situations.
“In vitro fertilization automatically puts a selective mentality into raising a family, but adoption focuses on an already existing child who needs a loving home,” said Mrs. Brown. “The Kurtzes are heroic examples of what it means to appreciate children as gifts.”
The Pill and Heart Risk
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Dec. 19 — A Dutch study found that women who took second-generation birth control pills had two and a half times the heart attack risk of other women. But women who took third-generation pills had essentially the same risk as other women, according to findings published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Second-generation pills, which often carry the hormone levonorgestrel, date back to the 1970s. Third-generation contraceptives, which often contain desogestrel or gestodene, became available in the United States in the 1990s.
HHS to Investigate Grants
CYBERCAST NEWS SERVICE, Dec. 21 — The Department of Health and Human Services will investigate why a company devoted to cloning a human being got federal funding, according pro-life Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), a leading congressional opponent of human cloning.
Advanced Cell Technology announced Thanksgiving weekend that it had cloned a human embryo. A month prior to that announcement the company had received grants from the National Institutes of Health, courtesy of American taxpayers.
In a Dec. 20 letter to Pitts, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson said he has “asked the National Institutes of Health to inform me whether ACT had received any federal grants which might have been involved in this human cloning research.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Pro-lifers Disagree on Bush Researchs DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has given a green light to expand federal funding of research on cells from aborted babies — but some pro-lifers say that he had no choice.
In the past, the president has assured pro-life groups that he opposes public funding of research using tissue from “induced abortions” and the killing of human embryos for their stem cells. Nonetheless, federal funding of experiments that use human aborted fetal tissue has continued unabated under President Bush's government.
White House officials “quietly” in late May approved a $150,000 grant to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researcher John Gearhart for his work on stem cells derived from deliberately aborted fetuses, the Chicago Tribune reported July 7.
Judy Brown at American Life League termed the approval a betrayal of the pro-life cause. “The man broke a promise,” she said. “His deeds do not reflect his words.”
Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said Bush is constrained from doing anything about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decision by a 1993 act of Congress.
“The NIH reauthorization bill explicitly removed authority from the president and his appointees to block transplantation research using fetal tissue from induced abortions,” he said.
Earlier attempts to change that law have shown “there's no support in Congress to repeal that law,” Johnson added. “Once something is in federal law, it's much easier to defend it.”
Johnson said he believes that, while public support of research using “after-the-fact” tissue from aborted babies is unfortunate, the more pressing issue of cloning for research is more important.
Contacted by the Register, White House spokesman Dan Nelson would only reiterate an earlier official comment that the decision to fund fetal stem cell work “was based on long-standing law and guidelines.”
Stem Cells at Stake
Debate over fetal tissue research pits cutting-edge medicine against fundamental moral prohibitions.
Stem cells are versatile cells capable of transforming into many types of body tissue such as muscle, bone and nerve, and hence could be developed into transplant therapies for diseases such as Parkinson's and diabetes.
There are a number of sources of stem cells: adult tissue, umbilical cords of newborns, embryos and aborted fetuses. John Gearhart' team at John's Hopkins was the first, in 1998, to isolate stem cells from the developing ovaries and testicles of aborted babies between five and 11 weeks gestation, according to the published research. Working with funding from Geron Corp., a Menlo Park, Calif.- based biotech firm, he has since made more than 150 cell lines from fetal cells.
On May 20 the (NIH) awarded Gearhart's team $150,000 to continue work on two insulin-producing fetal cell lines with the potential to treat diabetes — a decision that is likely to be followed by further applications by other researchers for similar grants.
Wendy Baldwin, deputy director for extramural research at the NIH, was at the helm of the funding decision. The grant to Gearhart's team was merely the first time the Bush administration has funded fetal tissue research pertaining to stem cells, she explained.
“We've always supported fetal tissue research,” Baldwin said.
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. had prohibited federal funding to experiments involving the direct transplantation of fetal tissue into human patients, but numerous other fetal tissue experiments were under-written with tax dollars during their presidential terms and an undetermined number of experiments using victims of abortion proceeded with private funds.
When former President Bill Clinton took office, his first official act in 1993 was to revoke the limited ban proscribing funding for fetal tissue transplant experiments. At the time, fetal tissue transplants were viewed as a sort of “holy grail,” with the potential to cure many diseases, including Parkinson's.
Since 1993 the federal government has spent more than $120 million to support research projects dependent on abortion for experimental material.
In 1999 the Texas-based pro-life group Life Dynamics Inc. exposed a vast underground trade in fetal tissue in which “brokers” went between abortion clinics and researchers who paid cash for fetal body parts. Life Dynamics' hard copy evidence included requests by Johns Hopkins University researchers for fetal colons and kidneys from 22- to 24- week-old babies.
Other orders came from tax-funded universities, biotech firms such as Genentech, and pharmaceutical companies such as Zeneca and vaccine manufacturer Smith Kline Beecham, requesting everything from tissue sections to whole legs, brains and eyes from late-term unborn babies. Researchers at the NIH itself placed purchase orders for leg bones, spleens, livers and heart tissue from second-trimester babies.
Since then, however, fetal tissue transplants — once viewed as cutting-edge medical promise — have fallen from grace.
Last April, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center researcher Curt Freed finally published his long-awaited data from a large control study of fetal tissue implants into the brains of Parkinson's patients conducted with a $5.7 million federal grant. A neurologist overseeing some of the researcher's younger fetal tissue recipients, who were suffering from uncontrolled facial spasm and violent limb jerking, called the results “tragic, catastrophic” and declared, “no more fetal transplants.”
By then, medical research had a new rising star: stem cells. The distinction between embryonic and fetal cells has often blurred.
Bush's Promises
But George W. Bush has been adamant that any use of unborn life for experimentation would be off limits in his administration.
During his presidential campaign, then Gov. Bush answered a questionnaire from the U.S. Catholic Conference about embryonic stem cell research, saying: “Taxpayer funds should not underwrite research that involves the destruction of live human embryos.” He also volunteered: “I oppose using federal funds to perform fetal tissue research from induced abortions.”
Early in his presidency he reaffirmed his opposition to abortion-dependent research, saying: “I believe there's some wonderful opportunities for adult stem cell research. I believe we can find stem cells from fetuses that died a natural death. But I do not support research from aborted fetuses.”
And last Aug. 9, when President Bush announced his decision to deny public funding of destructive embryonic stem cell research on moral grounds and to limit funding of embryo stem cell research to 60 cell lines already derived from embryos, he noted the failure of fetal tissue experiments.
“Even the most noble ends do not justify any means,” he said.
The revelation that the Bush administration has opened the door to increased funding to fetal stem cell research surprised some pro-lifers. C. Ben Mitchell, senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, an international Christian organization, noted that if Americans oppose killing early human embryos for research purposes, they are even more likely to oppose the “cannibalization” of more recognizably human fetuses.
“The more developed the human being, the more troubled we are about it,” he said.
Mitchell was reluctant to cast the president's pro-life talk as “disingenuous,” but he admitted the funding decision comes in a string of revelations that are not encouraging to pro-lifers, including recently appointed NIH Director Elias Zerhouni's public espousal of cloning embryos for research and a divided mid-July report from the President's Council on Bioethics regarding human cloning.
Family Research Council President Ken Connor also criticized Bush's decision with strong words.
“Mr. President, fetal stem cells are taken from human fetuses who have been intentionally killed,” he wrote in a letter to Bush during the week of July 8 urging him to challenge the 1993 law as unconstitutional. “To permit researchers to benefit from their deaths creates a perverse incentive for additional abortions. It also serves, in the eyes of society, to ‘ratify’ the decision to have an abortion in the first place since the ‘remain’ can be ‘useful.’”
Connor urged Bush to reverse his decision and to mount a sustained campaign of public persuasion to have the 1993 law repealed and reminded the president of his earlier pronouncement that “human life is a sacred gift from our Creator.”
Pope John Paul II, speaking about medical therapies in a year 2000 address to the International Congress of the Transplantation Society, criticized experimentation on fetal and embryonic human tissue.
“[M]ethods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided. I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view to obtaining organs for transplants: these techniques, insofar as they involve the manipulation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when their proposed goal is good in itself. Science itself points to other forms of therapeutic intervention which would not involve cloning or the use of embryonic cells, but rather would make use of stem cells taken from adults. This is the direction that research must follow if it wishes to respect the dignity of each and every human being, even at the embryonic stage” (No. 8).
Celeste McGovern writes from Portland, Oregon.“
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Celeste Mcgovern ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Long Ago, Far Away Abuse May Close Canadian Schools DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Just weeks ago, Monica Conlin joined in celebrations for the 80th anniversary of Vancouver College, a prestigious Catholic school in the city's upscale Shaughnessy neighborhood. Now the mother of two Vancouver College students is praying that this year's graduation class won't be the last.
The all-boys school is one of two Vancouver-area Catholic institutions in the cross hairs of liquidator Arthur Andersen Inc., which hopes to lock the doors and sell the schools by September to help pay damages arising from decades-old incidents of sexual abuse.
The irony is that neither of the West Coast schools had anything to do with the abuse that occurred at Mount Cashel Orphanage thousands of miles away in the Atlantic province of Newfoundland. However, because the schools are administered by the Christian Brothers of Ireland in Canada — the religious congregation that operated the orphanage — they might now pay the price.
But they're not giving up without a fight. For five years a courtroom drama worthy of a John Grisham novel has pitted liquidators against legal teams for Vancouver College, the co-ed St. Thomas More Collegiate in nearby Burnaby and the Archdiocese of Vancouver.
As the complex legal challenges have wound through a succession of courts in British Columbia and Ontario, as well as the Supreme Court of Canada, and back again, parents are left biting their nails over the future of two prominent Catholic institutions and where their children will be going to school in September.
A few parents have pulled their children from the schools. A larger number suggest the archdiocese or the parents try to buy the schools, valued at tens of millions of dollars, from the liquidator.
But Conlin appeared to speak for most parents when she said, “There comes a time in life when you have to stand up for what you believe in.”
Everybody agrees the abuse at the Newfoundland orphanage was “terrible,” Conlin said. “Everybody is very concerned about those victims,” she said, “but that doesn't mean that we now have to create 1,600 more victims.”
The public, on the other hand, seems to know little and care less about the schools, and reaction was generally negative at the latest development in the long-running saga — the entry of British Columbia Attorney General Geoff Plant into the ring. Plant is taking the schools' side, arguing that the charitable purpose trust that led to their creation needs defending if provincial trust law is to mean anything.
Plant has compared the schools to a bank safety deposit box: When wrongdoing is perpetrated by a bank's operators, investors don't lose the coin collections they've left for safekeeping.
The liquidator sees it differently. Arthur Andersen was called in by the courts after the Christian Brothers of Ireland in Canada, whose members had abused children at the Newfoundland orphanage, decided to voluntarily liquidate their assets to compensate victims.
In the middle of the winding-up process, the liquidator noticed that the Christian Brothers were shareholders in the two Vancouver-area schools. Sensing the real estate potential of the two campuses, the company added Vancouver College and St. Thomas More to the congregation's list of real estate assets to be sold off.
“The position of the two schools is that the brothers don't own the schools beneficially,” said John Nixon, chairman of Vancouver College. “They hold shares in the two companies that operate the schools, but they do so as trustees, not as beneficial owners.”
The courts have tended to side with the Catholic position, but not unfailingly. After the legal arguments were bounced from Ontario (home of the Christian Brothers' head office) to British Columbia, where the schools are located, the matter plodded through the British Columbia Supreme Court, the British Columbia Court of Appeals, and in May to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The most important victory for the schools was a decision that the shares are held by the Christian Brothers, subject to a special charitable purpose trust for the specific purposes of operating each school, and not for the brothers' general purposes. As Vancouver Archbishop Adam Exner put it: “The resources to build these schools were provided by local families, parishes and the Archdiocese of Vancouver,” rather than donations to the Christian Brothers.
Unfortunately for the schools, the courts have also ruled that the brothers hold the shares on behalf of the congregation, which is now in liquidation. It was a disappointing decision, Vancouver College's Nixon said, one that a number of academics and charitable purpose lawyers have criticized. The schools suffered another setback in May when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear an appeal.
The schools' next hope is a July appearance in the original Ontario court, which will hear a petition by the British Columbia attorney general that since the schools are located in British Columbia, that province's law of trusts should apply.
The government will also argue that the operation of the school does not depend on the Christian Brothers. “There's no reason why the schools have to be wound up simply because the congregation is winding itself up,” Nixon said. “They're completely separate and independent charities.”
If the attorney general's petition is successful, the court will be asked to appoint new trustees, “ones that are determined to protect the trust rather than to destroy it,” Nixon said. If the petition fails, the repercussions could be massive. Why, he asked, would anyone put money into a trust that might not be maintained?
David Wingfield, a Toronto lawyer acting for the liquidator, said the attorney general's petition is merely an attempt to raise “the same issues that have been resolved previously.” As far as he is concerned, “the matter has been finally resolved.”
Wingfield cited the Ontario Court of Appeals ruling that “expressly rejected the argument that the attorney general is making.”
He further cited a 1999 Supreme Court of Canada decision on a similar case. In that decision, known as Bazley v. Curry, the Supreme Court said, “The suggestion that the victim must remain remediless for the greater good smacks of crass and unsubstantiated utilitarianism.”
Under that ruling, Wingfield said, “the public, who benefit from these charitable organizations, must lose when their interests come in conflict with the interests of private creditors.”
As for the attorney general's safety deposit box analogy, Wingfield preferred a different comparison: “If you own shares in General Motors, General Motors' creditors can't take your shares away. But your creditors can take your shares,” he said.
Wingfield said there are potential purchasers interested in the properties if he is victorious in court. As far as he is concerned, the schools can reopen in September if they are sold to someone who wants to operate them as schools.
“If we have to sell the assets to a purchaser who doesn't want to operate them as a school, then we'll do so, and that means the schools won't open,” he said. ‘No Blame Whatsoever’
Another source of consternation for the schools is the fact that the largest single claimant in the liquidation is the government of Newfoundland. Liable for much of the abuse that took place, it has settled with claimants for more than $10 million and now wants to recover some of its money.
“Every kid in the place was a ward of the province,” Nixon said. “We have this terrible inequity in which Newfoundland, which shares in the liability, is actually trying to take down two schools here that have absolutely no blame whatsoever for the wrongdoing in Newfoundland.”
Meanwhile, parents like Monica Conlin remain confident despite the liquidator's threats that the schools will not reopen in September. Nixon's own son is registered and ready to return this fall. There is still a waiting list for admissions, and the spirit of Blessed Edmund Rice, founder of the Christian Brothers, inspires parents, staff and students.
It was his spirit, Conlin said, that led her to choose Vancouver College for her sons. She's also certain that when September arrives, the doors will reopen and it will be a “stronger, faith-filled” community that gathers to celebrate.
Paul Schratz writes from Vancouver, British Columbia.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Schratz ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Sparks Fly Between East and West DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — It was a dramatic moment at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception: two Eastern Orthodox leaders — an archbishop and a metropolitan — holding aloft the hands of an Eastern Catholic patriarch and proclaiming to a crowd that he had spoken as a true Orthodox Christian.
What Melkite Patriarch Gregory III had declared was that he was in fact an Orthodox, but an Orthodox “with a plus” — one in communion with Rome. But he also declared that Rome has not fulfilled its obligations to the Eastern Churches.
“We are defending our own tradition in the framework of our communion with Rome,” Patriarch Gregory said. “We can do a lot because of our Eastern character, our communion with Rome, and our deep sensibility to the Eastern tradition. We have to open a dialogue with Rome.”
This year's Orientale Lumen (Eastern Light) Conference in late June focused on the situation of the Eastern Catholic Churches, which have been the most serious stumbling block so far in the dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The conference, held each year on the campus of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., brings together clergy and laity from the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.
The Orthodox have long complained about the existence of Eastern Catholic Churches, viewing them as an effort by Rome to poach Orthodoxy. The Eastern Catholics use the Orthodox liturgy and practices but are in communion with Rome. A recurring complaint during the five-day conference was that Rome's “second-class” treatment of the Eastern Catholic Churches is a major barrier to any Orthodox consideration of unity with the Catholic Church.
This was a theme highlighted by Archbishop Vsevolod of Scopelos of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the United States — one of the Orthodox bishops who embraced the Catholic Melkite patriarch. (The other was Metropolitan Nicholas of Amissos, leader of the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church.) Archbishop Vsevolod in his paper described the attitude of those who believe the Eastern rites are of lesser worth than the Roman:
“I truly have met such Catholics, both Roman Catholics and Eastern Catholics, who firmly believe that the Roman liturgy, Roman theology, Roman discipline, Roman everything represent the pinnacle of Christianity, that the Eastern rites can be no more than a temporary concession, and that the sooner these people become full-scale Roman Catholics the better,” Archbishop Vsevolod said. “I have also met Orthodox Christians who are convinced that this is what the Catholic Church has in mind for them.”
Archbishop Vsevolod frequently quoted Pope John Paul II and other popes in defense of the idea that the Eastern Churches are equally valuable with the West and that their patrimony should be respected by all.
Yet the practice has not matched the pronouncements, Archbishop Vsevolod said. In particular, Eastern Catholic churches are not fully empowered to name their own bishops; Rome typically appoints an Eastern Catholic bishop from a list of candidates proposed by a particular Eastern Church. Eastern Catholic priests have too often found themselves at odds with their bishops when they try to be authentically Eastern, Archbishop Vsevolod said.
“It is Rome that appoints these bishops,” Archbishop Vsevolod said. “If Rome consistently appoints bishops who ignore these directives with impunity, Rome cannot absolve herself of the responsibility. Rather, it would be well for everyone to take to heart the exhortation of Pope John Paul II in his 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen on the importance of ‘eliminating all duplicity and ambiguity.’”
Committed to the East
Bishop John Michael Botean said that Eastern Catholic bishops today are committed to the Eastern practices. Bishop Botean heads the Romanian Catholic Eparchy of St. George's in Canton, Ohio.
“I don't know of any priest who wants to be authentic running into trouble,” Bishop Botean said. “I think that may have been the case more in the past. I don't see that happening in the future. Rome has been naming bishops [who are] more traditional.”
At the same time, Bishop Botean does see the Roman naming of Eastern Catholic bishops as problematic if Eastern Catholic churches are to be seen as truly self-governing.
Archbishop Vsevolod said Eastern Catholics also chafe over their continued inability to have a married priesthood outside of their native lands.
“So long as Rome continues to try to impose sacerdotal celibacy on the Eastern Catholics, Orthodox will find Roman assurances of complete respect for our tradition less than fully credible,” he said.
In the United States, clerical celibacy was imposed on the Eastern Catholic Churches in 1929 in a document that has never been formally revoked. However, some married men have been ordained as priests in Eastern Catholic churches in America in recent years, so far with no apparent objection from the Latin Church.
More Recognition
Cardinal William Keeler, the archbishop of Baltimore and a speaker at the conference, said a worldwide synod of bishops in Rome last October included a call for a “fuller, more appropriate recognition of the structures of the Eastern Catholic Churches,” and a “better appreciation of the rights and responsibilities of the Churches of the East and those who lead them.” Now the bishops are waiting to see what language on this topic will be included in the apostolic exhortation based on the synod discussion and signed by the Pope.
The speakers at the conference also included Metropolitan Nicholas of Amissos, the head of the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church; Father Boris Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and rector of the Lviv Theological Academy; and Chorbishop Seely Beggiani, a professor of Eastern Christian studies at Catholic University.
Cardinal Keeler outlined the history of Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, including the impasse the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue reached in July 2000, at a meeting in Baltimore and Emmitsburg, Md. The dialogue broke down, Cardinal Keeler said, because Orthodox participants could not agree among themselves on the issue of Eastern Catholic churches.
The more “intransigent” ones, Cardinal Keeler said, refused to sign any agreement on the Eastern Catholic churches that did not label them as being in an “abnormal ecclesiological situation.” Other Orthodox representatives did not see the Eastern Catholics as obstacles. The Roman Catholics in the dialogue were not willing to sign any statement that belittled the Eastern Catholic Churches, Cardinal Keeler said.
Common Bonds
Cardinal Keeler and Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, the papal nuncio to the United States, were both of the front row in the Crypt Church of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception when the Catholic Melkite Patriarch made the appeal that won the hearts of Orthodox prelates Archbishop Vsevolod and Metropolitan Nicholas.
Patriarch Gregory explained that the Melkite Church has “almost everything in common with the Orthodox,” including reciting the creed without the filioque, the liturgical books and prayers, liturgical uses and the calendar of feasts and saints.
“Rome is very aware that we keep this very important bond of the common liturgy, and so our communion with Orthodoxy never ceases to exist,” Patriarch Gregory said.
The filioque — the part of the Nicene Creed in which the Spirit is said to proceed from the Father “and the Son” (filioque in Latin) — has long been part of the theological dispute between East and West. The disputed words are not in the original creed, but were added by the Church in the West in the eighth and ninth centuries to safeguard the divinity of Christ. The East has never accepted the addition or the pope's authority to authorize the addition.
While staying in communion with Rome, Patriarch Gregory said, the Melkite patriarchs have emphasized the importance of Rome “not insisting on new things, but accepting what had been decided … according to the ancient canons of the ecumenical councils mutually held by both the East and the West.”
Melkite leaders cite the Second Vatican Council and papal pronouncements that say that Catholics, when looking to unity with the Orthodox East, should consider the relationship that existed between the Churches during the first millennium of Christianity. They see later developments in Catholic doctrine — such as the declaration of papal infallibility and the expansion of papal jurisdiction — as obstacles to unity.
Rome doesn't see things the same way. Responding to the Melkite initiative, Rome has pointed out that the doctrine of papal primacy as developed until the present time has to be retained in its entirety. But what Rome has also said is that the manner of exercising this primacy is something that can be discussed — in fact, should be discussed.
Property Disputes
Surprisingly, there was relatively little focus during the conference on the property disputes that have marred Orthodox and Eastern Catholic relations in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Nor were there all that many references to the so-called Balamand document of 1993 that failed to achieve unanimous agreement among Catholics and Orthodox about the role of Eastern Catholic Churches. Speakers seemed to be looking beyond those disputes of the 1990s to a time when the Orthodox and Catholic Churches move toward a dialogue about papal primacy that could in turn resolve the situation of the Eastern Catholics.
And many speakers said that the people are disappointed that Church leaders are not moving more quickly toward unity:
E Patriarch Gregory: “My conviction is also based upon the deep sense of unity we discover in our people. We need to change our minds! The problem of ecumenism, of unity, is still too much clerical. The separation, the schism, is mostly clerical. We have to free the ecumenical movement from its clerical sphere, which forms a sort of ghetto.”
E Father Gudziak: “Our churches are looking for more than what is happening on the level of hierarchy. We can't leave the issue only on that level. [The papal visit to Ukraine] was controversial on the part of hierarchs, but not for those who participated. It was a visit that brought the word of God to many people in Ukraine. Questions of primacy and canonical territory are important, but more important is getting closer to God.”
E Metropolitan Nicholas, on the difficulties a lack of intercommunion creates among married couples: “We do not concelebrate the sacraments, at least officially. We speak of valid ordinations and sacraments and traditions, but when it comes to meeting the needs of our own parishioners we are at a loss. We allow [intermarriage] … but then deny them the ability to actualize the home church that we encourage them to create because we don't know what to do. No wonder our people can't understand our position.”
The Orientale Lumen Conference wasn't limited to talk about unity between Catholics and the Orthodox. Besides the speeches and question-and-answer sessions, participants got the chance to take part in many liturgical experiences from the various traditions.
There were Melkite and Orthodox Divine Liturgies, and vespers in the Melkite, Byzantine Catholic and Maronite traditions.
Wesley Young writes from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wesley Young ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Single Catholics Find Each Other, and Fall in Love, Via the Web DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES — While it is possible to meet other single, committed Catholics in a bar, at school or at work — the “usual” places couples meet — it isn't always likely. So where do Catholics turn when they're looking for true love?
Many, like Susan Galati, are looking on the World Wide Web. As the number of household computers in the United States has skyrocketed during the last five years, singles Web sites of all kinds have popped up, including ones that are Catholic-owned and –operated.
Galati, 30, of Chicago, believes there are more pros than cons when it comes to Catholic singles Web sites.
“I really want to meet someone who is faithful to the Church and will help me live my faith,” she says. “On a Catholic singles Web site you start off on a better foot than you do at a bar.”
Every week in the United States, thousands of Catholics are logging onto sites such as Ave Maria Singles, St.Raphael.net and CatholicSingles.com in order to meet new Catholic friends, find support for their faith and begin a cyber-search for their soul mates.
Anthony Buono, founder and president of Ave Maria Singles (www.avemariasingles.com), is upfront about Ave Maria's distinct mission: “We're a forum for those who have a marriage vocation.”
Although Ave Maria has a little more than 5,000 registered members and has been in operation since 1998, it will celebrate its 100th marriage next month.
“The site is all about cutting to the chase,” Buono says. “We're looking for quality people — practicing, devout Catholics. There are lots of Catholics in the United States, but only a handful are completely faithful.”
Acolyte — a company formed by Brian Barcaro, 29; Jason LaFosse, 31; and Michael Lloyd, 28 — operates St.Raphael.net. With more than 12,000 members, St. Raphael is a comprehensive singles site that fosters not only marriage vocations but also friendships and religious vocations.
“The primary reason people get on the site is to get married, but we don't just focus on the dating aspect,” Barcaro says. “We have community forums where people really develop solid friendships. They find that they're not alone, that there are faithful Catholics all over the United States.”
CatholicSingles.com, founded by David Nevarez, 37, in 1997, has more than 50,000 members, of whom 10,000 to 15,000 are actually active. Although some frown upon CatholicSingles.com because they say it is more accepting of Catholics who don't always agree with Church teachings, Nevarez says the site is indeed geared toward practicing Catholics.
“We certainly stand behind all the Catholic teachings,” Nevarez says. “We're more accepting of Catholics who deviate from Church teaching, but we've never had a problem with people attacking the Church on the site.”
While all three sites provide its respective members with opportunities to befriend Catholics around the world, each site has its own unique way of having members post a personalized profile. All three sites allow members to describe their personalities in writing and to list their interests and hobbies, but the sites' styles of allowing members to express their Catholicity differ dramatically.
On Ave Maria, members are asked to express their views on crucial issues including Christ's presence in the Eucharist; contraception; and family, children and schooling.
St.Raphael.net provides a simple “yes or no” format for members to express whether they agree with the Church's teachings on issues such as premarital sex, abortion and papal infallibility.
Regarding one's faith, CatholicSingles.com asks members to disclose how often they attend Mass; what kind of Catholic they would describe themselves as (conservative, moderate or progressive); and what their most significant religious experiences are.
Galati, a member of both Ave Maria Singles and St.Rapahel.net, prefers St.Raphael.
“On Ave Maria, there's no opportunity to converse,” she says. “On St.Raphael.net, you can chat with someone. Chatting gives you a better sense of who a person is.”
Buono himself says he finds “chatting” to be superficial, but nonetheless, Ave Maria launched a private one-on-one chat feature in mid-July.
“I believe in the preservation of writing letters to one person,” Buono says. “I want to promote exposing one's heart and soul with letter writing.”
Besides a chat feature, St.Raphael.net has forums where members can post messages on a wide range of subjects including apologetics, Catholic culture, life issues, religious vocations, politics and even employment opportunities.
Matt Lambrecht, 20, of LaCenter, Wash., a member of St.Raphael.net, has found the site to be of great use in cultivating Catholic friendships.
“I think I might be called to be a priest, but even though I'm leaning more in that direction than that of marriage, this site has been so useful and a wonderful connection with other Catholics,” Lambrecht says.
CatholicSingles.com has chat capability and a message board where members can post prayer intentions.
Nicholas and Mayra Jauregui, 33 and 32, respectively, of San Diego, are married because they met on CatholicSingles.com in August 1999. They e-mailed each other for six weeks and then talked on the phone for a few weeks until finally meeting in person. After a year and a half of dating, they were married May 5, 2001.
Nicholas Jauregui says his overall experience on CatholicSingles.com was positive. “It's a way of meeting good, faithful Catholic Christians that you would not otherwise meet. You can expose yourself and be exposed to other Catholic Christians,” he says.
According to Nicholas, CatholicSingles.com attracts a full spectrum of Catholics — some of whom are faithful, others who are not. He adds that the site provides a good way of screening people.
Not Always Blissful
These sites have had their fair share of problems, however. Common complaints by members about Catholic singles Web sites (and singles sites in general) include the impersonal nature of communicating with others through a computer; the impracticality of trying to conduct a long-distance relationship with someone who lives a time zone or two away; the difficulty of letting someone else know that one is not interested in pursuing a relationship with him or her; and the superficiality of some men.
“Some of these guys are so picky,” Buono says. “We have guys looking only for blond, blue-eyed women. That's very shallow.”
Another common annoyance is the uncomfortable pressure some older men place on younger women. Buono mentions the ubiquitous 40–something male searching for a 20–something woman.
In addition, some people hold that the critical but mysterious element of “chemistry” is something that Web sites cannot provide.
Jennifer Rames, 32, a former member of CatholicSingles.com, says she had “disappointment after disappointment” with meeting men.
“I would e-mail someone … then talk on the phone, and then we would arrange a meeting at a coffee house or restaurant. But when it came to meeting one another, there was never any 'spark,'” she says. “I'd always come home from these meetings feeling more defeated than ever. In theory, the concept [of meeting people online] was great; however, in reality, the crucial component of ‘chemistry’ was missing.”
Susan (who declined to give her last name) says she met a number of “problem” men during her membership on a site whose name she declined to give.
“A few of them were frustrated over their dating failures and they complained about their former dates constantly, some had low self-esteem — one of them was so nervous that he was shaking nonstop during our first date,” she says. “A few had commitment problems, others were just plain jerks. I've been stood up a few times, too. Another made some racist comments.”
Regardless, she says, she still had some positive experiences. “I did meet a few wonderful guys. One of them became a long-term boyfriend and another is a very good friend.”
Fortunately, harassment by one member toward another has been minor, according to all three spokesmen.
“To our knowledge, we haven't had any reports of criminal or greatly immoral behavior,” Barcaro says. “In the last three or four years, we've probably only deactivated three or four accounts due to online misbehavior.”
Happy Endings
Despite some faults, the Web sites feature plenty of “success stories” about couples who married because they met on the sites, as well as endorsements by prominent Catholics.
Ave Maria boasts endorsements by Father Benedict Groeschel (whose niece met her husband on Ave Maria), Kimberly and Scott Hahn, and Karl Keating, while St.Raphael.net takes pride in endorsements by Father Frank Pavone, founder of Priests for Life, and author Michael Rose.
Leilani Goeckner, 42, coordinator of young adult ministry for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, believes Catholic singles Web sites are worthwhile.
“They're important, especially today,” she says. “Many young people are technologically savvy. As the Church we need to use innovative ways of meeting the needs of our young adults. I think it's a positive thing.”
Martin Mazloom writes from Monterey Park, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Martin Mazloom ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Without Forgiveness, No Peace DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:The De La Salle Christian Brother is assistant to the secretary general of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association and an adviser to the Holy See's permanent observer mission to the United Nations on Middle East issues. He spoke to Register staff writer John Burger about how he became interested in Middle Eastern affairs and about current problems there.
You started your career studying math and physics. That's a long way from where you are now.
I started a data processing system for Cardinal Terence Cooke [archbishop of New York], in 1968. He was an adviser to many Vatican agencies, and he volunteered my services to install computers for the Holy See Mission to the United Nations. He was also vicar of the Military Ordinariate and was looking for someone with knowledge of nuclear physics. That was a big topic in the 1980s. [The U.S. bishops issued “The Challenge of Peace,” a pastoral on nuclear weapons, in 1983.] That's how I became director of research for the Pope John Paul II Center of Prayer and Study for Peace. Many of our programs focused on the Middle East because Cardinal Cooke also was president of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association.
The next thing I knew, I was a Middle East adviser to the Holy See Mission.
My avocation was reading history books. The then Msgr. Giovanni Cheli, who was permanent observer of the Holy See at the United Nations at that time, saw that I knew more than computers. He said, “You are well-versed in some of these areas that are of concern to us.”
Also, as an undergraduate at Catholic University, I did my senior religion paper on Churches of the East because we once had some Ukrainians come in to do the liturgy. I was attracted to the Byzantine style. I began to learn a tremendous amount about Eastern Christianity. We are basically an Eastern religion. Christ came from Palestine, a land in the East. He never went to Rome.
What have been some of your most interesting experiences with Catholic Near East Welfare Association?
My work brings me to many of the countries where we have projects and programs, so I've had the opportunity to be in the Middle East. For my annual retreat in 2000, I made a walking pilgrimage in Jordan, Palestine and Israel. We walked from Bethany to Jericho along the road of the Good Samaritan, up Mount Machaerus, where John the Baptist lost his head in Herod's palace, through Jerusalem and Nazareth.
Also, I've been to India on a couple of occasions, where we have a dynamic Catholic Church. They're very mission-minded. It's a very different kind of Church from here — small but with a strong witness to Christianity.
On trips to the Holy Land or here at the United Nations, I've met with Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, several presidents of Lebanon, Prince Hassan of Jordan, Hosni Mubarak. As part of the work at the Holy See Mission, you meet with leaders who have great respect for some of the positions of the Holy See.
At an American Jewish Congress meeting here I met with Yitzhak Rabin. As minister of defense during the first intifada, he took the attitude that if youth were throwing stones, the solution was to break their arms. Even though he was known as the breaker of bones, I could see that he could become a broker of peace. I sensed in him a man you could talk with, willing to craft a deal, given the right circumstances. He was looking beyond the intifada.
I reported to Archbishop [Renato] Martino, the Holy See's permanent observer at the United Nations, that Rabin wasn't a politician, he was a general, so he was more blunt. It was obvious that he was not happy with what he had to do in the occupied territories. You could see that he was thinking ahead, planning.
And it turned out that he was a broker of peace. He negotiated with Arafat, beginning with the Madrid Process and later the Oslo Agreements, resulting in his assassination.
In talks you've given, you seem to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. Are you still, despite all these suicide bombings?
There are human rights issues that are often neglected by the larger community. Because of the support by the United States of the position of Israel it doesn't allow for a full exposition of what some of those issues might be. The European Union has become more active. They brokered the settlement at the Church of the Nativity and received the 13 alleged terrorists [that were deported from Israel]. They did that because they were unhappy with the United States' efforts, which were not getting anywhere. Also, [on June 29] the European Union approved a 5 million euro grant to replace the electronic equipment that was destroyed by the Israelis in the Palestinian Authority complex in Ramallah. They're making a statement that they're not sure all the fault lies on one side.
You have to factor in that there must be a reason why these suicide bombings are happening. When you have a people who are literally hostage to a more powerful people you have to expect that things will occur. In the first intifada they were throwing stones. That was significant because in the Old Testament, the method of execution was stoning. In trying to roll over from the occupation of 1967 — and that's what intifada means, to roll over and shake off the dust — they were trying to make a statement.
Now, in the second intifada, arms are common on both sides. They can be purchased on the black market. We've lost the Code of Hammurabi, which called for an eye for an eye. Now it's two eyes for an eye and two teeth for every tooth. I'm not trying to assess blame on either side. Neither side is responding in what we would call a Christian manner, and the concept of reconciliation and forgiveness has been lost.
Pope John Paul II has said that the region is awash in weaponry. How did they get there? Who is supplying these weapons? The largest arms supplier in the world is the United States. Whose surrogate war are we involved in? In other words, is war good business? Do we need a couple of wars going on in the world to keep our arms business busy? Could we stop the war by not selling the weapons?
Maybe we think, “We're not being damaged here,” so we let it go on. They go through the black market. A lot of this is left over from previous conflicts. In the past, we helped Afghanistan fight off the Soviets. Now those guns are pointed at us. We dump stuff there and run away. At one time we supported Iraq against Iran.
On April 2 Israeli soldiers came onto the campus of Bethlehem University. They shot at a 75–year-old [Christian] brother because he opened the door to see what was going on.
You have them shooting an American citizen with what are probably American weapons.
The Israelis were occupying Bethlehem. Our university is on a high point; it's a good strategic place to be. About 100 soldiers occupied the campus for six days. Their claim was that gunmen were shooting from our place, which was a lie. They never found anyone. We told them there was nobody on campus shooting at them, but they insisted on occupying it. The brothers saved the weapons that were used against the university.
Christians have been leaving the Holy Land in large numbers for some time. What is the situation today?
We're down to 2% of the population in both Israel and the West Bank. Christianity was born in Jerusalem. Yet we [Christians] are a fragment, a remnant in our own birthplace.
People with an education are finding other opportunities and leaving. They are by and large the Christians because the Church has been very good in setting up schools. People aren't going to stick around when people are shooting at them or they can't get to their work because of closures of territory or checkpoints.
Do Christians still have a voice there? Are any working toward a solution to the conflict?
Christians are working toward a solution. The Latin patriarch, Michel Sabbah, has been very outspoken in trying to bring about some kind of dialogue, but the frenzy of attack and counteract precludes any voice saying, “Wait, this is ruining the economy of both countries. People can't work.”
There are peace activists going into the more difficult areas like Hebron and standing up in front of Israeli Defense Forces tanks. Some are Israelis. There's the group known as Women in Black, who are Israelis, who for years have been protesting the violence against the Palestinians.
What do you think of President Bush's proposed plan for a Palestinian state?
The conditions he lays down are quite ill-informed and will lead to more problems. I don't believe he read the Mitchell Report from May 2001. His speech went contrary to that report and opened up future possibilities for deeper tensions. I can well see the Palestinians re-electing Arafat because he's opposed by Bush. It will add to the fire of resentment that is still there.
To assess blame on one person is to fall into a trap. When you have groups like Hamas and Hezbollah going around, and you say that one man must control the situation, that's very naive. You're dealing with tremendous forces within a people and taking away all his tools — the house arrest, the destruction of the Palestinian system by the Israelis.
----- EXCERPT: Neither side is blameless in the Middle East, says Brother David Carroll ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother David Carroll ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Melkite Catholics Take Initiatives Toward Unity DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:The Melkites have been in the forefront of Catholic efforts to achieve unity with the Orthodox, even if at times they have placed themselves further out than Rome is willing to go.
Melkite Patriarch Gregory II Youssef Sayour attended the first Vatican Council (1869–70), where he opposed the definition of papal infallibility and left the council without signing the decree.
When forced to sign later on, he insisted on adding a provision drawn from the Council of Florence, the 15th-century effort at Catholic-Orthodox unity. That provision called for the preservation of the rights and privileges of the Eastern patriarchs. It's worth keeping in mind here that the Orthodox do not deny the Pope a primacy of honor but do deny his universal jurisdiction over the Church.
But what the Melkites are best known for nowadays it what is often referred to as the “Zoghby initiative.”
Archbishop Elias Zoghby, born in Cairo in 1912, proposed in 1975 a “Project of Double Communion” in which the Melkite Eastern Catholics of the Patriarchate of Antioch would rejoin the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch while at the same time staying in communion with Rome.
Archbishop Zoghby was motivated in part by the thought that overall unity between the Catholics and Orthodox would take too long to achieve without such a bold move. He wrote that “millions of faithful are born and die in a fragmented and divided Church, in a state of separation and dissidence. Meanwhile, the ecclesiastical bureaucracy spins its wheels in discussing doctrinal issues in their congregations and subcom-missions. God only knows where this will end.”
Rome reacted negatively to Archbishop Zoghby's proposal, saying that unity could not be achieved on a local level but had to be accomplished globally. But the archbishop pressed on, writing what he described in 1981 as a “shock book,” Tous schismatiques? (“Are we all schismatics?”), which presented his ideas.
In 1995 Zoghby presented the following statement to the Melkite synod of bishops as a possible statement on unity:
“Profession of Faith
I. I believe everything Eastern Orthodoxy teaches.
II. I am in communion with the Bishop of Rome as the first among the bishops, according to the limits recognized by the Holy Fathers of the East during the first millennium before the separation.”
The profession of faith was signed by 24 of the 26 bishops and presented to the Melkite patriarch (then Maximos V) and the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius IV.
The following year the Melkite synod prepared a proposal for unifying the Catholic and Orthodox patriarchates of Antioch. It said the reunification “does not mean a victory of one church over the other, one church going back to the other or the melting of one church into the other. Rather, it means putting an end to the separation between the brothers that took place in 1724 and led to the existence of two separate independent patriarchates and returning together to the unity that prevailed in the one Antiochian Patriarchate before the separation.”
Concerning the position of the Pope, the Melkite leaders noted it remained to be discussed by the Joint International Commission between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Quoting from the Second Vatican Council and from Pope John Paul II's encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That All May Be One), the Melkite fathers said the relations between East and West in the first millennium should be the inspiration for those discussions.
In its response to Archbishop Zoghby's initiative, the Roman Curia repeated the earlier objections. Curial officials also said that the Church's doctrine on papal primacy had undergone development since the time of the first millennium and that the doctrine had to be held in its entirety. They cited Vatican I and Vatican II in this regard. Rome said that while the exercise of primacy is a legitimate subject for discussion, it could not be resolved in isolation from the rest of the Church.
The Orthodox have also given a cool response to Archbishop Zoghby's initiative, saying that unity of faith must precede intercommunion.
The current Melkite patriarch, Gregory III, has pressed on. In 2001, in the presence of the Pope during his visit to Syria, Patriarch Gregory declared his wish to celebrate Easter according to the Julian (“old”) calendar so that Catholics and Orthodox could celebrate together. The patriarch said the proposal caused a “tremendous ovation” from the crowd but clerical opposition caused it to fail.
He vowed to continue pressing the case for a common Easter celebration.
— Wesley Young
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Will High Court Ruling Mean a 'Voucher School' Boom Time? DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:CLEVELAND — Though there are few publicly funded school voucher programs in the country, there will soon be many more.
That's what experts say in the wake of of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Cleveland's scholarship program was constitutional.
The court's 5–4 decision on June 27 found that Cleveland's program “is one of true private choice … and is neutral in all respects toward religion.” The state does not sponsor religion when it enables parents to enroll their children in accredited public or private schools, including religious schools, the ruling stated.
“For years, legislatures have tried to avoid accepting hard educational policy issues because they have said that vouchers are not constitutional,” said Mark Chopko, general counsel of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Now legislators across the country will have to come to grips with hard educational questions and decide if vouchers help or hurt education, empower or not empower parents.”
Sister Glenn Ann McPhee, secretary of education for the bishops' conference, said that “removing the constitutional barrier [to voucher programs] opened the door to potentially establishing more voucher schools.”
Nationwide Impact
Currently five states offer different models of voucher programs. Ohio and Wisconsin pay tuition expenses for low-income families. Florida provides scholarships for pupils in schools rated as “failing” by the state department of education. In Maine and Vermont, rural towns without traditional public schools pay tuition for pupils to attend public or nonreligious private schools outside their area.
In addition, numerous privately financed scholarship programs, such as the Children's Scholarship Fund, have assisted thousands of students throughout the country.
Since 1972, proposals to establish school voucher programs have failed in Maryland, Michigan, Colorado, California and Washington, according to the National Education Association, which argues that private-school vouchers drain needed funds from public schools.
Teachers unions and groups such as the Council for Secular Humanism also oppose state tuition assistance to parents. In the council's bulletin, John Suarez, M.D., calls vouchers the product of “the radical religious right” that is targeting public education.
Voucher supporters counter this attack and point to improvements in public schools, resulting from increased competition with private schools that accept vouchers.
Sister McPhee said she hopes other states will examine the six-year-old Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program for pupils in kindergarten through eighth grade. This program provides qualifying low-income families with scholarships, capped at $2,250, to public and private schools and tutoring grants to public school students.
About 80% of the scholarship students, which total nearly 4,500, attend 30 Catholic schools in Cleveland, according to Mary Lou Toler, special projects director for the Cleveland diocesan Office of Catholic Education.
These parents “want more than the public school system — an educational environment with faith and values,” Toler said.
“The public schools are not safe … I felt I needed a police escort to take me in and out,” said Johnnie Mae Boone, who enrolled her two children in Holy Name Catholic Elementary School. “[Here], my children are getting a better education. They are learning manners. They are learning basic things about getting along with others.”
This education is also subsidized by parishes, which contribute an average of $894 per pupil, because scholarship vouchers do not cover Catholic school tuition costs, Toler said. Catholics comprise about 43% of Cleveland's Catholic school enrollment.
Cleveland's voucher program has not decreased state funding to its public schools, because the maximum $2,250 scholarship is far below the municipal school district's per pupil cost of about $9,000, according to a consulting firm hired by the Ohio Department of Education.
This report brings little comfort to some voucher opponents. “Cleveland public schools are not failing … they are starving for finances,” said Steve Croom, whose two daughters attend the city's public schools.
Positive Results
The Cleveland scholarship program is evaluated by the Indiana Center for Evaluation, which reported that students enrolled in the program from kindergarten through second grade performed slightly higher than their public-school counterparts. The center's studies also found that families receiving vouchers were more involved in school activities and more satisfied with their children's education than were parents in the city's public schools.
Families in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program also gave high marks to the private schools they chose. Cheryl Bowen, who enrolled her three grandchildren in St. Rafael Catholic School, said, “The teachers there are really dedicated. Obviously, they could all make more money somewhere else. … And the families are more involved.”
Bowen said her grandson “is an excellent reader, does well in math and is learning Spanish.” His achievements illustrate the conclusion of a Harvard University team that evaluated the program and found significant gains in students' reading and math test scores.
The 12- year-old Milwaukee program enrolled nearly 11,000 students from low-income families in private schools during the past school year. About 3,800 attend 34 Catholic elementary schools and five secondary schools, according to Maureen Gallagher, director of Catholic education for the Milwaukee Archdiocese.
Families receive about $5,500 in tuition assistance from the state and cannot be charged for books and fees, Gallagher said. The state caps attendance in the voucher program at 15,000 and requires that students be excluded from religious activities at their parents' request. Most of the Choice Program students are non-Catholics, she added.
Just a ‘Passing Fad’?
Like other voucher programs, the Milwaukee model has its opponents. Stan Johnson, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, said that vouchers “cost many students a quality education. Vouchers are just one more passing fad … the educational equivalent of the eight-track tape player.”
The Florida voucher program is more than a fad to Mary and William Cunningham of Pensacola, who enrolled their son at Sacred Heart Catholic Elementary School through the state's A+ Opportunity Scholarship Program.
“He's doing very good academically. I can tell by his progress reports and his attitude toward doing homework and going to school,” Mary Cunningham said.
Florida awards scholarships of about $3,400 to parents with children in schools designated as “failing” by the state Department of Education. The state also gives McKay scholarships to parents with disabled children who are dissatisfied with their progress at an assigned school. More than 5,000 students participated in the two programs last school year.
“Most studies have found that voucher programs … tend to promote more positive parental or families' attitudes toward school,” the Indiana Center for Evaluation reported.
As Johnnie Mae Boone of Cleveland put it: “Parents need to be able to choose what they want for their kids. The voucher program is giving them a better chance. They need this. I sneed it for my children.”
Joyce Carr writes from San Diego.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joyce Carr ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:High Court Hears Abortion Next Term
THE WASHINGTON POST, July 8 — Having just wrapped up a Supreme Court spring session that addressed a number of tough issues such as school choice and the death penalty, the justices now have three months off. According to The Washington Post, they're going to need the rest, since the fall term is likely to be a rough ride.
Among the cases the justices will face is one concerning pro-life activists and their freedom of expression. In a consolidation of two landmark — some say infamous — cases, Scheidler v. NOW and Operation Rescue v. NOW, the justices will consider whether lower courts overstepped the plain intent of the law when they applied the anti-racketeering “RICO” act to pro-life demonstrators.
In both cases, the pro-abortion group National Organization for Women successfully argued that the national Operation Rescue movement fit the law's description of a criminal conspiracy and won massive, crippling damages against its organizers, including well-known Catholic activist Joseph Scheidler.
The outcome of these cases could determine whether the nonviolent, civil disobedience these pro-life groups used is protected by the U.S. Constitution.
States Revoke Clergy Exemptions for Reporting Abuse
USA TODAY, July 5 — For many years, clergymen of every denomination enjoyed broad exemption from reporting allegations of sexual abuse against minors in some 21 states, according to USA Today. However, that practice is changing in the wake of recent scandals.
Since January, four state legislatures — those of Massachusetts, Illinois, Missouri and Colorado — have made it a crime to fail to report such accusations of abuse to the police, and more states are expected to act soon.
A sponsor of the Illinois bill, state Rep. Rosemary Mulligan, said, “The scandal is so far-reaching it was important to make a stand. We have to put in safeguards for the welfare of children.”
Most denominations' leaders have accepted the change in the laws in the wake of revelations about abuse that went unpunished in Massachusetts and other states.
Boston Cardinal Bernard Law backed the change in his state's law, and the U.S. Catholic Conference in Dallas took a similar stand.
Marriage Amendment Again Up for Consideration
THE BOSTON PILOT, June 28 — According to the Archdiocese of Boston's newspaper, The Pilot, legislation defining marriage as a heterosexual, non-polygamous union still languishes in the Massachusetts legislature.
When that state's Assembly opened in June, it took “only three minutes” for state Senate President Tom Birmingham, D-Chelsea, “to recess the session without debate or a vote on the proposed Protection of Marriage Amendment,” the paper complained.
The bill would place the amendment on the ballot for approval by voters. In states where such referenda have made it to the ballot – even in liberal states — they have usually prevailed.
To reach the ballot, the amendment must be approved twice by the legislature within two years. However, “if the first vote is not taken before this session ends July 31, the measure will die,” The Pilot warned.
Maria Parker, associate director of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, called traditional marriage a fundamental building block of a stable society and asked the legislature to reconsider the amendment.
“Marriage is central to our system of beliefs and basic to family, procreation of children and love between a husband and wife,” she said. “The legislature needs to know that people are angry and that they are willing to thwart democracy in this society.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Web Site Seeks to Give Pro-Life Advocates a 'Level Playing Field' DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:KELOWNA, British Columbia — The National Abortion Federation collects statistics on acts of violence against abortion clinics, reputedly showing how violent the pro-life community is.
But a new Web site seeks to demonstrate that there is violence against members of the pro-life movement as well.
Prochoiceviolence.com carries newspaper articles about pro-abortion violence, medical malpractice, deaths during abortions, sexual harassment and other misdeeds committed by abortionists. It has video of aggressive behavior by clinic escorts and pro-choice demonstrators, including college students disrupting a pro-life demonstration on campus. There are links to other sites documenting pro-abortion violence, including one sponsored by Human Life International.
The site is the brainchild of Ted Gerk, former president of the Pro-life Society of British Columbia and former executive director of Kelowna Right to Life.
“We are merely educating the public as to the real stories surrounding abortion,” Gerk said. “The abortion industry has done a fabulous PR job, keeping this information hidden. This Web site will expose the truth, both of pro-choice violence but also of the media complicity in keeping this information hidden from legislators and the general public.”
Gerk said that often there is good reporting on pro-abortion violence at the local level, but that it rarely makes it to the national media. Violence committed in the name of the pro-life cause, however, gets plenty of play.
“It's a great idea,” said Father Peter West of Priests for Life. “I've been involved in demonstrations, and the behavior of some of these counter-demonstrators is awful.”
Pro-life advocates like Dan Brusstar of New York City can attest to that. He said he still witnesses harassment by clinic escorts outside an abortion clinic on Manhattan's East Side and recalled being pushed and shoved when he participated in Operation Rescue in the early 1990s.
“At almost every rescue, we had pro-death groups,” he said, recalling one whose members were dressed in black leather and reminded him of Nazi storm troopers. “They tried to punch some pro-lifers, though, luckily, the cops intervened and arrested some of them for assault.”
Groups like the Women's Health Action & Mobilization (WHAM), would have five or six people surround a woman going into a clinic and shove pro-lifers out of the way, preventing them from speaking to her, he said.
Brusstar reported that members of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal are regulars at the Manhattan clinic now, and they have a way of counseling women without being confrontational. He speculated that their prayer life contributes to their calmness.
Calls to Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the National Abortion Federation were not returned. The National Abortion Federation's Web site claims that since Roe v. Wade, abortion clinics in the United States and Canada have been “under vicious and unrelenting attack by people who are not interested in living within the laws of the United States.”
The Web site speaks of an increase in violence in 2001, including the rash of phony anthrax letters sent to clinics last fall. After mentioning that, it goes on to speak in alarming terms of an increase in the number of pickets outside clinics — more than 9,900 incidents.
“The tide of violence jeopardizes access to vital medical services and threatens domestic security for all citizens,” the pro-abortion site says.
But the material documenting pro-choice violence is out there, Gerk said, and his aim is to convince the general public. Because the public tends to be more skeptical, he uses as much material from the secular press as possible, though he does not discount material from pro-life sources.
For Gerk, the Internet has been a full-time Christian “ministry” for the past three years. Other Web sites he has developed look at topics like euthanasia and RU–486. He said his sites get a million visitors a year.
“We complain about the media, but here's a medium we have to exploit,” he said. “The Internet gives us a level playing field.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Examples of violence cited on the Prochoiceviolence.com Web site: DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:May 22, 2002. Life Dynamics of Denton, Texas, releases report on Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country counseling underage girls not to speak about the age of the adult men who impregnated them. Planned Parenthood is obligated to report instances of sexual abuse of minors.
April 14, 2002. More than 100 women have come forward to accuse a Phoenix abortionist of sexual abuse and sexual assault. The National Organization for Women says Brian Finkel's accusers are lying.
Feb. 28, 2002. Security guard Anthony Harvell of Louisville, Ky., is convicted of rape in incidents in which he posed as a police officer. In one rape, he drove a woman to the rear of the EMW Women's Surgical Center and entered a fenced area by punching in a code on the keypad. He maintains his innocence but is sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Jan. 8, 2002. Oklahoma City abortionist John Hamilton is convicted of murdering his wife on Valentine's Day 2001. He denies that he killed her but is sentenced to life in prison.
Jan. 15, 2002. A Delaware family is awarded more than $2 million in damages after Dr. Mohammed Imran is found medically negligent in the death of a woman after an abortion.
April 2001. Farmhand Danny Court of Pavilion, N.Y., pleads guilty to second-degree abortion and second-degree assault. He laced his pregnant girlfriend's drink with a veterinary drug used to induce miscarriages in cattle. He is sentenced to two to four years in prison.
Oct. 11, 2000. A young woman in Dayton, Ohio, dies after an abortion. She had been sent home from the Dayton Women's Services facility following an abortion there. She was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton.
April 17, 1998. LouAnne Herron dies after having an abortion on her 26- week-old unborn baby, two week's older than Arizona's 24- week cutoff. There is no nurse in the recovery room at the Phoenix clinic, and the administrator insisted on waiting more than two hours before calling para-medics. Dr. John Biskind was eating lunch and did not respond to her pleas for help.
January 2001. The office of Kentucky Right to Life in Louisville is vandalized three times, with profanity spray-painted across the front of the building directed at “God and his slaves.” In previous years, the windows had been shot out a number of times.
Jan. 13, 2001. A man driving past a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Overland Park, Kan., threatens pro-life demonstrators with a gun.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Vatican Protests Exclusion From AIDS Conference
CWNEWS.COM, July 9 — Even though more than a quarter of all AIDS treatment facilities in the world are operated by the Catholic Church, representatives from the Vatican were omitted from the 14th world conference on AIDS in Barcelona last week.
Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragan was impatient toward the current approach to AIDS, which stresses condom distribution and “safe-sex” practices. That approach, he told the online news service, has produced “no visible results.” To the contrary, “the number of AIDS victims is rising, in a terribly important trend.”
Wealthy nations hide facts about AIDS, the archbishop accused, by saying that poverty is the main cause of the disease. However, he argued, “Europe and the United States are largely responsible for exporting AIDS to poor countries through sexual tourism and the spread of libertine attitudes.”
The best way to prevent AIDS, the archbishop concluded, is to adhere to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Sexual abstinence and marital fidelity work “with absolute efficiency, which no one can deny.”
Canada Snubs Christ — or at Least His Vicar
CWNEWS.COM, July 8 — Online Catholic news service CWNews.com reported that Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien might not appear to greet Pope John Paul II when he arrives in Toronto to open World Youth Day on July 22.
Organizers heard the bad news from government officials and made their dissatisfaction known. Chretien's spokesmen insisted that this was not intended as an insult, although the head of government traditionally greets heads of state personally. (As ruler of Vatican City, the Pope has that diplomatic status.)
Then the press staff at the prime minister's office backtracked, according to CWNews.com, saying, “No final decision has been made” about the Pope's visit.
The Vatican's Time Machine
FLASHNEWS.COM, July 2 — Another conspiracy theory has emerged, with the Vatican as the villain.
It seems that the Holy See has a time machine, which it will not share with the world. Wireless Flash, a popular culture news service, reported on a recently published book from New Paradigm Books, a New Age publisher. Father Ernetti's Chronovisor: The Creation and Disappearance of The World's First Time Machine, by paranormal journalist Peter Krassa, tells the story of Benedictine Father Pellegrino Ernetti.
The priest claimed he constructed a time machine in the 1950s and used it to witness historic events and rescue lost manuscripts. According to the publisher, Father Ernetti “was a priest and scientist and musicologist, one of the world's leading authorities on archaic music. He claimed to have yoked the insights of modern physics to the ancient occult knowledge of the astral planes to build, in secret, a time machine — the chronovisor. He asserted that, using the chronovisor as his eyes and ears, he had watched Christ dying on the cross and attended a performance of a now-lost tragedy, Thyestes, by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius, in Rome in 169 B.C.”
So far, the Holy See has not responded to the reports.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope Calls St. Maria Goretti a 'Model of Chastity' DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — To mark the centennial of St. Maria Goretti's death, Pope John Paul II issued a letter dated July 6 that proposed the young saint as a model of chastity and forgiveness, two themes that will be addressed at this month's World Youth Day in Toronto.
Echoing his message for World Youth Day 2002, in which he calls on youth to be the “sentinels of the morning who announce the rising of the sun, who is the risen Christ,” the Holy Father wrote that the life of St. Maria Goretti shows young people that they are “not alone … in walking in the footsteps of the divine Master.”
“St. Maria Goretti and many adolescents, who in the course of the centuries have paid with their martyrdom for their loyalty to the Gospel, are beside [today's youth], to fill their souls with the strength of remaining constant and faithful. In this way, they can be sentinels of a radiant dawn, illuminated by hope,” John Paul wrote.
The letter was addressed to Bishop Agostino Vallini of Albano, near Rome, in whose diocese rests the shrine of St. Maria Goretti in Nettuno. A modern basilica has been built over the tomb of the young saint.
The 12–year-old Maria was fatally stabbed in 1902 when she refused the sexual advances of Alessandro Serenelli, a young man who lived next door. She died on July 6 — now her feast day — and was canonized in 1950. The crowds were so immense for the ceremony that for the first time it was held in St. Peter's Square rather than inside the basilica.
“It is justly observed that the martyrdom of St. Maria Goretti opened what would be called the century of martyrs,” wrote the Holy Father of the 20th century.
He also noted that her martyrdom was for the cause of chastity.
“In a culture which values above all the physical relationships between man and woman, the Church continues to defend and promote the value o f sexuality as a factor which involves every aspect of the person and that must therefore be lived in an interior attitude of freedom and reciprocal respect, in the light of the original design of God. In such a perspective, the person discovers himself as the recipient of a gift and is called to make himself a gift for the other,” the Pope wrote.
While St. Maria Goretti is known as a “martyr of chastity,” the papal letter also highlighted another important aspect of her story: forgiveness. While in the hospital the parish priest brought her Viaticum and asked her whether she forgave her attacker, Alessandro.
“Yes, I forgive him and want him to be in paradise with me some day,” the dying Maria said.
Alessandro would not die for another 68 years. Unrepentant of his crime, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 1910, his eighth year in prison, Maria appeared to him in a dream and offered him a bouquet of flowers. Alessandro had a conversion, repented of his crime and went to confession.
A model prisoner afterwards, he was released early in 1928 and went immediately to Mrs. Goretti to ask her pardon. Mother and assassin received Communion together at the Christmas Mass that year. Alessandro subsequently lived at a Franciscan friary, tending to the garden and living as a Franciscan tertiary. He was present at the canonization in 1950.
“Forgiveness, in the thought of the Church, does not mean moral relativism or permissiveness,” the Holy Father wrote. “On the contrary, it requires a full recognition of one's own fault and the assumption of one's own responsibility as a condition for finding true peace again.”
“The mother of the saint, for her part, offered [Alessandro] without reticence the forgiveness of the family in the courtroom where the trial was held,” the letter noted. “We do not know whether it was the mother who taught forgiveness to the daughter, or whether it was the forgiveness offered by the martyr on her deathbed which determined the behavior of the mother. Nevertheless, it is certain that the spirit of forgiveness animated the relationships of all the Goretti family.”
The relationship between peace, justice and forgiveness was the subject of the Holy Father's World Day of Peace message for 2002. According to officials at the Pontifical Council for the Laity, which organizes World Youth Day, the themes of that letter are expected to be the focus in Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Register Summary DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul II met with pilgrims at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo on July 10 for his weekly general audience. He continued his teachings on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours by reflecting on the canticle of the three young men found in the Book of Daniel.
According to the Pope, the canticle of the three young men is “a song of thanksgiving that the faithful say to the Lord for all the wonders of the universe.” Even though the three young men are facing martyrdom, “They do not hesitate to sing, be glad and give praise. The harsh and violent pain of their trial vanishes; it almost seems to dissolve in the presence of prayer and contemplation,” he noted.
In the end, an angel of the Lord rescues the three young men from their plight. “Nightmares dissipate like fog in the sun, fears vanish and suffering is wiped out when a human being is transformed by praise, trust, hope and expectation. The strength of prayer shines forth when it is pure, intense and total in its abandonment to God, who provides all things and redeems all things,” the Holy Father said.
The canticle of the three young men is an invitation to all creatures to praise the Lord in all circumstances. “This is all the more reason why we, as human beings, should add our joyful and trusting voice to this concert of praise, coupled with a lifestyle that is consistent and faithful,” the Pope added.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Hymn of Praise to the Creator DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:In Chapter 3 of the Book of Daniel we find a rather striking prayer in the form of a litany that is truly a canticle of creation. We read different parts of this prayer on several occasions during morning prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours.
We have just heard the main part of this prayer, which is a majestic, cosmic chorus, of which the two antiphons at the beginning and the end are a summary: “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord, praise and exalt him above all forever. … Blessed are you in the firmament of heaven, praiseworthy and glorious forever” (verses 56-57).
Between these two shouts of acclamation, a solemn hymn of praise unfolds that is expressed in the repeated invitation to “bless.” Properly speaking, it is simply an invitation that is addressed to all creation to bless God. In reality, it is a song of thanksgiving that the faithful sing to the Lord for all the wonders of the universe. Man becomes the spokesman for all of creation by praising and thanking God.
The Power of Prayer
Three young Hebrew men sing this hymn and invite all creation to praise God. Their hymn flows forth from a rather dramatic situation. The three young men, who are being persecuted by the king of Babylon, have been thrown into a burning furnace because of their faith. Nevertheless, even when they are about to suffer martyrdom, they do not hesitate to sing, be glad and give praise. The harsh and violent pain of the their trial vanishes; it almost seems to dissolve in the presence of prayer and contemplation. It is precisely this attitude of trusting abandonment that causes God to intervene.
In fact, as Daniel's thought-provoking account attests, “The angel of the Lord went down into the furnace with Azariah and his companions, drove the fiery flames out of the furnace and made the inside of the furnace as though a dew-laden breeze were blowing through it. The fire in no way touched them or caused them pain or harm” (verses 49–50). Nightmares dissipate like fog in the sun, fears vanish and suffering is wiped out when a human being is transformed by praise, trust, hope and expectation. The strength of prayer shines forth when it is pure, intense and total in its abandonment to God, who provides all things and redeems all things.
All Creation Praises God
In the canticle of the three young men, we see before us a kind of cosmic procession. It begins in the heavens, where the angels dwell and where the sun, moon and stars shine. From on high, God pours down on the earth his gift of the waters that are above the heavens (see verse 60) in the form of rain and dew (see verse 64).
Then the winds also blow, lightning flashes and the seasons break forth with their warmth and their cold, both with the burning heat of summer and with frost, ice and snow (see verses 65-70,73). The poet also includes the rhythm of time in his song of praise to the Creator — day and night, light and darkness (see verses 71-72). Finally his gaze turns to the earth, beginning with the mountaintops, which seem to unite heaven and earth (see verses 74-75).
Soon the plants that grow on earth unite in praising God (see verse 76), together with the springs that are the source of life and fresh waters, as well as the seas and rivers with their abundant and mysterious waters (see verses 77–78). In fact, the composer of this canticle even mentions “sea monsters” along with fish (see verse 9), which is a sign of the primordial aquatic chaos on which God imposed certain limits (see Psalm 93:3-4, Job 38:8-11, Job 40:15-41 and Job 26).
Then it is the turn of the vast and varied animal kingdom, which lives and moves in the waters, on the earth and in the skies (see Daniel 3:80–81).
The last creature to appear is man. First the poet's gaze encompasses all the “sons of men” (see verse 82). Later, he focuses his attention on Israel, the people of God (see verse 83). Then he turns to those who are totally consecrated to God, not only as priests (see verse 84), but also as witnesses of faith, justice and truth. They are the “servants of the Lord,” the “spirits and souls of the just,” the “holy men of humble heart” and, among them, the three young men, Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael, who are spokesmen for all creatures in their universal and eternal hymn of praise (see verses 85-88).
Three verbs that glorify God resound over and over like a litany throughout the song: “bless,” “praise” and “exalt” the Lord. This is the true spirit of prayer and song: to celebrate the Lord unceasingly as a joyful part of a choir that includes all creatures.
God Blesses All Creatures
We would like to conclude our meditation by quoting the fathers of the Church, like Origen, Hyppolitus, Basil of Caesarea and Ambrose of Milan, who have commented on the account of the six days of creation (see Genesis 1:1-2, 4a) and who have actually connected it with the canticle of the three young men. But we will limit ourselves to a comment by St. Ambrose, who, referring to the fourth day of creation (see Genesis 1:14-19), imagines that the earth speaks and, while talking about the sun, finds all creatures united in praise of God: “In truth, the sun is good, because it serves, helps my fruitfulness and nourishes my fruits. It was given to me for my good and is subject with me in my labor. It groans with me, for the adoption as sons and the redemption of the human race, so that we also can be released from slavery. At my side, together with me, it praises the Creator. Together with me it raises a hymn to the Lord our God. Where the sun blesses, there the earth blesses, the trees that bear fruit bless, the animals bless and the birds bless with me” (I Sei Giorni della Creazione, SAEMO, I, Milan-Rome, 1977-1994, pp. 192-193).
The Lord excludes no one from his blessing, not even the sea monsters (see Daniel 3:79). Indeed, St. Ambrose goes on to say: “Even the serpents praise the Lord, because their nature and aspect reveal to our eyes a certain beauty and show that they have their reason for existing” (Ibid., pp. 103-104).
This is all the more reason why we, as human beings, should add our joyful and trusting voice to this concert of praise, coupled with a lifestyle that is consistent and faithful.
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Don't Curse in Zapopan
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 5 — When in Mexico, watch your language — at least in the western city of Zapopan, whose city council has just adopted a ban on public use of profanity, punishable by fines of up to $400 or a day and a half in jail.
The suburb of Guadalajara passed the law last week, which was proposed by a member of the once-dominant Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (PRI), according to Associated Press.
The law doesn't spell out which “bad words” are forbidden, leaving that up to police, who must determine which words offend “morals and good customs.”
The wire service reported that other Mexican cities have seen proposed bans on miniskirts in municipal buildings and homosexuals in public swimming pools.
Britain's Ban on Catholic Kings
CWNEWS.COM, July 3 — Great Britain's lord chancellor, Lord Irvine, a Catholic convert, doesn't think the United Kingdom needs to permit a Catholic monarch, according to CWNews.
Lord Irvine, addressing the House of Lords, said he did not plan to repeal a law dating from 1701 that specifically prohibits a Catholic from inheriting the throne and a monarch from joining the Church or marrying a Catholic.
Lord Irvine said he saw “no clear or pressing need” to change the law, which was enacted after the overthrow of Catholic King James II in 1688.
While Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose wife is a practicing Catholic, called the Act “plainly discriminatory,” Lord Irvine said the status quo was widely accepted “by leaders of both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. … This is not an issue that troubles people from the Catholic tradition or indeed from most religious traditions. Most people in this country who have a religious belief are full of joy that we have so little discrimination and that there is such a pluralistic and tolerant situation.”
If a future monarch should object to the act, Lord Irvine said, “then the matter would have to be addressed.”
New Priests are Channels of God's Love
FIDES, July 5 — To crown his pastoral visit to Seoul, South Korea, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe conferred the sacrament of holy orders on 43 deacons.
In his homily, the missionary prefect emphasized the Church's teaching that priests are called to be channels of God's love. The priest represents the love of God, who is the Father “rich in mercy” and forgiveness.
“The ministry of reconciliation is first of all for the forgiveness of sins,” he said. “This comes about through the sacrament of confession, but it is also reconciliation in a general sense. That is, harmony among brothers and sisters, reciprocal forgiveness, human collaboration and social peace.”
He reminded the young priests that they had just put their lives in the hands of Christ and henceforth belong only to him and his Church.
“In order to be a visible and authentic sign of this reconciliation, the priest must be free,” he said. “He must not take sides, he must be free of ethnic, social or political ties, even of family bonds. He belongs only to Christ and to the Church, the mystical Body of Christ.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: EDITORIAL DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:W
wrap skirts and loose, sleeveless blouses.
Anybody can connect the evenly spaced, uniformly sized stars on Mary's cloak any old way and call them “constellations,” but so what?
Finally, there was no Aztec winter solstice festival nor did their year end then. Atemoztli, the 16th of their 18 seasonal festivals (held Dec. 11–30) celebrated the descent of water, honoring a water deity and sacred mountains.
SANDRA MIESEL
Indianapolis
----- EXCERPT: The Pope Must Suffer ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: (Photo) Credit Where It's Due DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Father Stanley Klores, pastor of St. Patrick's Church in New Orleans and his wonderful parishioners were very happy and surprised to see the photo I took of the special Holy Hour at St. Patrick's on June 1 dedicated to Sts. Justin Martyr and Joan of Arc (“The Power Presence,” July 7-13).
St. Patrick's is National Historic Landmark on the U.S. Department of Interior's register. It was first opened in 1833 in the heart of the American side of the city. The central mural depicts the Ascension. The mural to the right of the Assencion depicts Jesus reaching out his hand to St. Peter, who's sinking in the water as his faith falters. The mural to the left, I think, represents a depiction of St. Patrick converting the Irish.
Above these awesome murals and the altar is a wonderful dome of beautiful stained glass through which daylight filters and wonderfully illuminates everything in the church with a sense of the divine.
The Church also features a wonderful statue of Joan of Arc when she was still called Blessed. I hope you will have occasion to use this photo I took of St. Patrick's again and, if you do, if you can, please let people know where this wonderful church is in case they'd like to visit it when they come to New Orleans.
JOHN CRAVEN
New Orleans
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Are Jihadi Martyrs?
Brian Caulfield is probably correct in noting a significant link between the promoting of suicide bombing and an understanding of jihad more as an external than an internal spiritual struggle (“Militant Muslims: Martyrs or Murderers?” July 7–12). However, Amir Taheri, writing in the May 8 edition of the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, demonstrates that Islamists are resorting to linguistic contortions to defend actions inconsistent with traditional Islamic teaching.
Taheri notes that, in Islamic ethics, suicide is one of five “unpardonable sins” — “deeds that cannot be undone.” Second, Taheri insists that, “In Islam, Allah himself is the first shahid [martyr], meaning ‘witness,’ to the unity of creation.” Islam traditionally recognizes only about a dozen shahids “who fell in loyal battle in defense of the faith,” thus bearing “testimony to the truth of God's message.” One doesn't decide to perform an act with a view to becoming a shahid/martyr, for that implies one may force Allah/God's hand. (This understanding seems close to that of T.S. Eliot's Thomas a Becket in “Murder in the Cathedral.”)
To get around the impossibility of justifying suicide bombing as legitimate shahada/martyrdom, Taheri says that a word sharing the root of shahada/shahid is being applied–etsesh'had, “which literally means ‘affidavit.’ As a neologism, it means conducting ‘martyrlike’ operations.”
The most profound reason for Islam to reject the identifying of suicide bombing with martyrdom, according to Taheri, is that “Islam forbids human sacrifice,” and a militant who detonates an explosive belt is, first of all, making a human sacrifice of himself. Taheri asserts that this rejection of human sacrifice is the heart of the Islamic interpretation of the biblical story of Abraham's offering Isaac, celebrated as Eid alAdha, “the greatest Islamic festival.” According to Taheri, “Islam also rejects the crucifixion of Christ because it cannot accept that God would claim human sacrifice in atonement of men's sins.” (Of course, a Christian would insist that Christ's death is the one sacrifice for which the intention and person of the One offered totally determines the character of the offering.)
If Amir Taheri is representative of Islam, we may hope his interpretation helps the faithful to submit to their true teaching.
JOHN R. TRAFFAS
Wichita, Kansas
Who's ‘Pro-Life’?
In “Diocese Bans Pro-Abortion Candidates” (July 14-20), Cliff Zarsky, a member of the Corpus Christi Diocese's Human Life Committee and the president of Corpus Christi Right to Life, referred to Texas' Republican governor, Rick Perry, as “supporting the right to life” — though Perry makes exceptions to this support in the cases of rape and incest or if it is deemed that the mother's life is in danger.
Mr. Zarsky commits a common error by stating that those who believe it is appropriate to terminate the life of an unborn child under certain circumstances are still to be considered pro-life. Now it more rightly might be explained that a vote for such a politician as Mr. Perry might be of an advantage to the pro-life cause as he may be more disposed to the pro-life agenda than his opponent, but it adds to the confusion apparent among the Catholic faithful when we state that such a politician is pro-life.
What the Church has failed to articulate is a consistent argument against abortion and a consistency of language when articulating that argument. What conclusion does a member of the Church come to when candidate A is said to be pro-life yet they read his official position that endorses abortion under this circumstance or that? Can we conclude that it is this inconsistency of argument and language that creates an environment where over half of all self-proclaimed Catholics vote for the candidate who believes in unrestricted abortions? And that allows for the continued abortion of 1.5 million unborn children each year?
PHILIP SMALDONE, MD Arvada, Colorado
The Real Hippocrates
Thank you for your rapid printing of my recent letter (“Hailing Hippocrates,” July 14–20). However, I would like to alert you to the fact that the Hippocratic oath printed next to my letter is not the one from the National Catholic Bioethics Center's Web site. (Theirs does not open with swearing before Apollo and other gods and goddesses!) The fact that my letter references the National Catholic Bioethics Center's one may lead readers to falsely believe that the oath printed next to my letter is the one to which I'm referring, which it is not.
That better version of the oath can be found at: www.ncbcenter.org.
KAREN D. POEHAILOS, MD Charlottesville, Virginia
Pro-Priesthood
Thank you for your requests for examples of how to promote the priesthood (“Going on Offense,” May 26-June 1, and currently posted on www.ncregister.com). Our Serra Club of Reno ran three one-quarter-page ads containing this attached letter in the Reno Gazette-Journal and we mailed it personally to each of the priests in our Diocese of Reno (Nevada).
On Aug. 2 we will host our annual seminarian barbeque at Bishop's Staling's residence and we have invited all our priests, sisters, brothers and seminarians to a wonderful Mass and dinner.
Our Serra Club received three new members as a result of our ad in the newspaper. I agree with your editorial. No institution does more good work in the world than the Catholic Church. What we need now is an incessant campaign to put the great charitable works of the Church in the news media. Thanks for the positive reinforcement.
ROSS BARKER
Reno, Nevada
The writer is a past president of the Serra Club of Reno.
Pro-Choice Violence Unveiled
As a pro-life physician, I am pleased to hear about a new Web site exposing pro-abortion violence (“Web Site Seeks to Give Pro-Life Advocates a 'Level Playing Field,” July 21–27). The site publicizes the work of Life Dynamics, an aggressive pro-life organization, that recently had a 13–year old girl call over 800 abortion clinics nationwide. She admitted to the clinic worker that she was impregnated by her 22–year-old boyfriend. In almost all the conversations, the clinic worker reassured her that they would keep her secret or advised her to keep it a secret when she came in for her abortion.
This is illegal! Failure to report statutory rape is a crime! The proof is rock solid, the conversations were legally recorded. Now the litigation will begin. I pray that the abortion industry and Planned Parenthood will be exposed for what they are — harborers of child predators.
When someone covers up for men who sexually abuse children, they not only become accessories to those crimes, but they also leave the perpetrators free to pursue future victims.
Hopefully this new information will convince school districts to kick
Planned Parenthood out of our schools where they continue to lie and spread their message of “safe sex” to our children.
THOMAS MESSE, MD Groton, Connecticut
Eco-Theology
Several statements in the article “Rethinking Environmentalism” (July 7-13) struck me as defying logic. While it is logical to recognize that fires are a natural and healthy aspect of forest ecology, as many environmentalists have come to realize, I don't see how that proves that human interaction with forests (in the form of logging, etc.) are necessary for a healthy forest ecosystem, as several individuals stated or implied.
Gordon Durnil implied directly that forests left alone without human interaction are “unnatural and the consequences can be catastrophic.” Jerry Taylor states that “human interaction with forests … is essential for environmental health.” To believe this is to suggest that at the time of creation, and for many years to follow, the only healthy ecosystem was the Garden of Eden (as Adam and Eve were there to “dress it and keep it”) and that the rest of the earth's forest systems were created grossly out of balance and desperately in need of human interaction.
While it is possible for humans to interact with and extract resources from forests in responsible and sustainable ways it defies logic and common sense to insist forest ecosystems require human interaction to be healthy. The preeminent Christian environmentalist Wendell Berry believes that human communities can and should act in a “continuous harmony” with the rest of creation and that some places in the natural world should be left without human interaction or resource use precisely because we need models of natural harmonies from which we can learn how to interact with creation in the most sustainable ways, as well as to marvel at the handiwork of the creator.
Finally, Mr. Taylor's statement that “the earth contains more trees and vegetation today than at any time in the past 100 years” needs some explanation. Even assuming that his research is true, the salient question is “how many acres of healthy forest, and other ecosystems, do we have today compared with the past?”
GREG WOOD Ojai, California
In Her Eyes
Regarding “In the Eye of the Beheld: Science and Our Lady of Guadalupe” (July 14–20):
The lovely image of La Guadalupana certainly has been subjected to a lot of wishful thinking. If Juan Diego is presenting the tilma to the bishop, how can he be simultaneously reflected in the Virgin's eyes? And what's an Indian doing with a beard and mustache? In my opinion the blobs interpreted as faces are those seen in clouds.
It's worth noting that the sun, moon, angel, stars and flowers on the image were later additions by human hands to make Mary look like European representations of the Immaculata. (There used to be a silly little crown, too, but it was removed in the 19th century.) Moreover, the original figure is costumed like a European Madonna — not, as sometimes claimed, an Aztec princess. Aztec women wore calf-length
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: The Five Wounds of The Church DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Group the cardinals around the Pope, and you have the makings of a front-page story in all the major media, with a headline that screams the word “crisis.”
It's a shame, however, that the media turned to the crisis so late in the game, because the Church's crisis — along with other world crises just recently come to bloom — was diagnosed in painful, prophetic detail in a meeting held on a summer day some years ago.
If we had heeded the call then, perhaps we would not be facing these crises today. Yet you didn't read about the meeting here. You didn't see it on CBS, CNN or Fox.
It's easy to see why. The Pope called the cardinals and bishops to meet him off-site, far from the Vatican, and he himself traveled to the meeting in secrecy, incognito. Many bishops attended; estimates of the head count range from 150 to 300.
After praying the traditional prayer Veni, Creator Spiritus (Come, Holy Spirit), the Pope opened the meeting with a sermon on a text from the Psalms: “When the cares of my heart are many, thy consolations cheer my soul” (94:19).
The cares he counted off were indeed many, but they were summed up in five general categories, which he described as “The Five Wounds of the Church.”
He was evoking, of course, the five wounds Jesus suffered at his crucifixion; but now, the Pope lamented, Christ suffered five grave wounds in his mystical body, the Church.
What were those five wounds? You might recognize them now, though few people could have listed them in this order a year ago.
E The sins of the clergy and the spread of heresy. His Holiness saw that clergy who were lax in morals were unconvinced and unconvincing in their Christian witness. No doubt, he was alluding to sexual scandals of the sort that fill the papers and the air-waves today.
E The rise of militant Islam. At that time, the Pope was watching the drama from afar, as it took place in the Middle East. But he predicted that, if left unchecked, it would soon come crashing into the Christian West.
E The continuing, tragic division of Christianity. Not only the Catholic Church, but all the nations that are traditionally Christian, have grown weak because of their inability to present a unified, compelling moral vision.
Thus, the lands formerly known as Christendom are vulnerable to conquest in any significant clash of civilizations. Most devastating to the Church is the schism between East and West.
E Military threat from the Far East. China quietly grew stronger while the West went about its business. As it grew more powerful, it persecuted any Christians who stood in its way — and many, too, who offered no resistance.
E Persecution by secular political power. In the century leading up to this sermon, one after another godless government had seen the Christian Church as the greatest threat to its authority. Some states marginalized the Church by killing its leaders; others accomplished the same end by strictly limiting the Church's sphere of influence far from the naked public square.
It's chilling for us, today, to see these crises as clearly as the Pope saw them then.
It's more remarkable still if we realize that the Pope — Pope Innocent IV — preached that sermon on June 28, 1245.
The occasion was the First Council of Lyons, during which the bishops agonized over what to do about the breakdown of clerical discipline, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Saracens, the Mongol invasion of Hungary and the anti-religious machinations of Emperor Frederick II.
Some seven and a half centuries later, the problems remain — in the same order, perhaps. Yet so, too, does the prophecy.
Though priests and bishops resign in shame, the Church continues to speak with the same voice, guided by the same Spirit, guaranteed by the same promises of Christ. Though many declare themselves to be enemies of the cross — and zealously shed the blood of the martyrs — the cross stands taller where Christian martyrs have died.
We face the same problems, within and without, as our ancestors in the faith. But we work with the same graces as well.
If Christians can take little comfort in history, we can at least find hope there.
In addition to the grace we get, a little historical perspective can't hurt.
Scott Hahn is founder and director of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (www.salvationhistory.com) and author of First Comes Love (Doubleday).
----- EXCERPT: Expectations run high, these days, whenever Catholic bishops gather. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Scott Hahn ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: People of the Cross DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:“Largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” That description of Christian Coalition members, in a 1993 front-page Washington Post “news analysis,” became an infamous example of elite and journalistic bias against Christianity. The Post quickly apologized, but its ill-chosen words reflect the inner thoughts and assumptions of the “cultured despisers of Christianity.”
Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger pithily expressed another stereotype: Christianity as woman-hate: “If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for woman.”
Hispanic lesbian activist Cherrie Moraga claimed, “Everything misogynist I learned as a child, I learned from the Catholic Church.”
Christians, and religious believers more generally, are frequently caricatured as miserable, repressed, self-loathing, misogynist and uneducated. Movies like Oscar-nominee Chocolat imply that rejection of religious authority is the road to personal happiness and fulfillment.
Now comes a new study from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society that puts into sociological jargon what most Christians already know: Religion generally brings hope, not despair; it is not a sickness; it is not a source of contempt for women.
Faith-Based Health
“Objective Hope” is a two-part report. The second part is concerned with the dearth of literature studying the effectiveness of faith-based charitable organizations. With President George W. Bush's call for a bigger role for such charities and a closer partnership between the charities and government agencies, everyone wanted to know whether religious charities actually did more to help poor people and transform lives than secular nonprofits or government anti-poverty programs. Unfortunately, the social sciences have tended to downplay the role of religion in people's lives, and there has not been enough research on faith-based charities to allow us to draw any firm conclusions.
The authors of the new study point out that the research that has been done shows promise; religious charities, in general, do show positive results. But we just don't know enough yet to say that social science has proved that religious charities do better than the alternatives. Very few studies have even attempted to distinguish between charities that are run by religious organizations but do not emphasize faith and personal transformation, and charities that do rely heavily on religious commitment and evangelization.
Another study by the same research center found that a majority of “faith-based” welfare-to-work programs actually “do not make explicit religious messages a central feature of their work.”
The lack of research on faith-based charities may well be a product of a more general reluctance to acknowledge religion's importance in changing people's lives. However, the first part of the “Objective Hope” report should pique researchers' interests. It's the first half of the study that makes the bold claims, detailing the many ways in which religious commitment improves health, education and personal behavior.
The researchers conducted a comprehensive review of 669 studies on the relationship between religious belief and personal well-being; their report makes some eye-opening claims. Among them: People who believe in God, attend worship services regularly and show other signs of religious devotion are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol. They are less likely to suffer from depression and hypertension. They live longer, are less likely to have children out of wedlock and have lower suicide rates. Even in neighborhoods without strong social pressures to do the right thing, religious believers are responsible for less promiscuity, less delinquency and less criminal behavior. (Most of these studies took place among Christians, but the report does not distinguish between Christianity and other religions.)
Religious people have more hope. They have larger support networks and more social relationships. Religious commitment is correlated with higher self-esteem. (The report notes, “Most would agree that contemporary American culture places too much significance on physical appearance and the idea that one's esteem is bolstered by their looks. … Religion provides a basis for self-esteem that is not dependent upon individual accomplishments, relationships with others or talent.”)
Contrary to what the Post's news analysts would have you believe, recent studies have shown that people who become involved in religious activities tend to improve their educations. And if you think religious belief promotes woman-hating, it might startle you to learn that, although little research has yet been done in this area, several recent studies have found that religious families and individual religious men were less likely to commit domestic violence.
This sounds great — and it is good news. But Christians should be wary of some of the possible interpretations of these studies. Our faith is not judged by the criteria of social science; according to these surveys, St. Thérèse of Lisieux would be considered “unhealthy” and St. John Vianney would be “uneducated.” One can only imagine what a sociologist would make of St. Catherine of Siena. Yet, in fact, these people are models of Christian sanctity.
Sanctified — or Silly?
Similarly, Christians must always find a home in our churches and our hearts for delinquents, drug abusers, promiscuous men and women, and others who don't show “pro-social behaviors.” Too often, such people avoid Christian churches because they are afraid they'll be condemned and rejected. We need to remember who Christ's companions were — tax collectors, prostitutes and other pariahs. We need to remember the biographies of many of our saints — St. Bernard of Corleone, a deadly swordsman before he found Christ; St. Afra, a repentant prostitute who was martyred for her faith; St. Augustine, watching in bloody-minded fascination as a gladiator slaughtered his opponent. And we need to remember that people trying to turn their lives around often find themselves slipping back into old behaviors; that doesn't mean they're not “really Christian.” They're just really sinners. Like everyone.
A view of Christianity as a faith for “the good people” is exactly contrary to Christ's words: “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Mark 2:17).
Yet the study does prove that the cultured despisers are simply wrong. Christianity is not the faith of weaklings, a “slave mentality” or a misogynist plot; its ceaseless call to repentance and forgiveness does not excuse immoral or criminal behavior.
We should have known this all along — just look at the Christian heroes. The faith that inspires Harry Wu to risk his life returning again and again to China's gulag-like laogai prisons, John Henry Newman to pour out his life in scholarly and pastoral service, Mother Teresa to care for God's poor, and Father Mychal Judge to give his life administering the sacraments at the World Trade Center has never fit the stereotypes of the Washington Post piece.
It's good that the new report calls for more research, especially research on the effects of faith-based charities. Let the social scientists get out their microscopes and magnifying glasses. But we don't need to wait for them to proclaim that Jesus Christ heals broken lives. That's not their job as data-sifters; it's our job as apostles.
Former Register staff writer Eve Tushnet writes from Washington, D.C.
Editor's Note: Objective Hope: Assessing the Effectiveness of Faith-Based Organizations is posted on the Internet at www.manhattan-institute.org.
----- EXCERPT: What social science can (and can't) tell us about religion ----- EXTENDED BODY: Eve Tushnet ----- KEYWORDS: Commentry -------- TITLE: The Bishop, the Boy and the Soggy Sneakers DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Word was sent far and wide — to uncles, cousins, grandparents — that the boy who loved conducting odd science experiments and making buildings from trash was at last interested in a competitive sport. Shortly after practice started we bought him a brand new pair of track shoes, gleaming white with royal blue stripes.
He brought them home and, while we all admired them, he asked a big question: “Mom, do you think we could get Bishop D'Arcy to bless them?”
“Why the bishop, honey?” I asked. “Why not Father?”
“It's important, Mom,” he said. “Could you just ask him?”
I hesitated, but then agreed to take the shoes to the next event attended by our diocese's chief pastor. It was a May crowning, part of a Mass celebrated for the local home-school group. After Mass but before the cookies, I nervously popped the question.
“Sure I'll bless them,” our dear bishop said affably. “Go get the holy water from the altar — we'll do it up right.” And then Bishop John D'Arcy, ordinary of South Bend-Fort Wayne, Ind., blessed my son's sneakers.
I snapped a picture for my boy to see when I got home. He wore them proudly to the very next practice — and was promptly cut from the team.
I held my breath for the first crisis of faith I was sure was about to follow. Would he blame God? The bishop? His coach? Me? I looked around the gym after the announcement. Others who were cut were fighting back tears. My son stood, tall and silent, just staring for a few moments.
At last, he spoke: “Mom, can we go to the big meet anyway? I want to cheer for the team.”
Days went by. We showed up at the big meet. We cheered our team, and they won. On the way home, my son was still silent — but not with rage. With thoughtfulness. Finally I had to ask. “Son,” I said, “are you wondering about why you were cut? I mean, you know, after the bishop blessed your shoes and all?”
“Mom, I asked for a blessing,” he said. “Not a spell.”
For me, this was an epiphany. My baby's grasp of theology, it seemed, was beginning to exceed my own. For in that precious moment, I knew that my son had something to teach me about faith. And, given the attention focused on all American Catholic bishops these days, it occurred to me that his insight might be fitting for a lot of others as well.
Had he acted on some of the emotions he surely must have felt that day, my son might well have carped about Bishop D'Arcy, sworn off extracurricular activities and tossed his blessed shoes in the trash. Instead, he chose to trust and make the most of the situation he'd been handed. He seemed to know instinctively that you don't need to be a player to make it to the winner's circle, that you can get to an equally rewarding place by being an intercessor.
I've seen a lot of those shoes since then. Now they're torn and caked with mud from endless crawdad hunts at the riverbank. During one fishing expedition, they were worn as waders, and my mind flashed back to that old Anthony Quinn film The Shoes of the Fisherman, a story that movingly conveys a sense of the rich heritage of the Church and the papacy. I remember watching it on TV with my dad, whose eyes welled with tears at the moment the new pope was chosen.
“This is what we're all about,” Daddy told us eight kids. “All the popes and cardinals and bishops march through time in the shoes of Peter, the fisherman.” The one called by Christ himself. Our bishops have been ordained by God, their offices handed down through the centuries from a man just as flawed as any of them. If you think that's an exaggeration, remember that Peter, Jesus' right-hand man, essentially disowned the Lord — during Jesus' darkest hour, at that.
God doesn't expect perfection. He expects trust. I suppose that, as we listen to one another discuss the bishops' role in the present scandals, the meeting in Dallas and everything before and after, we could all find plenty of fault. But how much more blessed we will all be if we appreciate what they are trying to do. And remind ourselves who they are in Christ's eyes.
No bishop in the world wants to endanger young people. They never did. They never will. We also thwart our own healing when we start demanding: “This is our Church; we want more say in how it's run.”
The truth is, it isn't ours. It's God's. If we really look, we'll see the Holy Spirit's light upon our dear bishops; if we listen, really listen, we can hear a voice like thunder in our hearts saying, “These are my beloved sons. Listen to them.” I am very proud of the way the U.S. bishops have looked straight into the jaws of hell in this scandal — and never lost their trust in God. There's certainly more work to do. Let's let them do it. Let's pray for them, love them, listen to them.
My son, of course, heard all the painful stories from victims of abuse. We wept together over it, our whole family. We felt the pain and rage and confusion. Again, I wondered how it was affecting our children's faith, so I asked my boy: “Do you still trust our priests?”
He rolled his eyes again, sighing, as he rummaged through the refrigerator. “Mom, it's not the priests. I mean, it's hardly any priests. More people hurt kids who are just plain guys. Besides, if anybody ever tried to hurt me, no matter who he is — I'd just tell you, and you'd tell the bishop and the cops. Now that everybody knows about all that stuff, every-body's smarter.”
Munching on some leftover pizza, he added: “Have you seen my track shoes?”
We are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a people set apart. Onward we march in blessed, albeit tattered, shoes. Where are we going? To the foot of the cross. There, behind our shepherds — flawed, sometimes stumbling — we are refreshed, renewed, cleansed.
Recognize this spot? It's our winner's circle.
Susan Baxter writes from Mishawaka, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: Our entire family was thrilled when my son, 12, went out for track this spring. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Susan Baxter ----- KEYWORDS: Commentry -------- TITLE: Spirit & Life DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:The sexual scandals that the media say are “rocking and roiling” the Church have had remarkably little effect on the parishes I know.
Yes, people are shocked by the revelations of unspeakable clerical conduct and we parents would think twice before leaving our children with a priest we do not know well. But parish life and Sunday Mass have little of the turbulence that you would expect from a “Church in crisis.” Nationwide surveys support my observations: Catholics are generally happy with their priests and parishes, and few outside of the dioceses where notorious actions have occurred are leaving the Church or even cutting back on their donations.
I think these positive surveys show the good work and excellent example of the average parish priest. If Catholics by and large did not trust and even love their pastors and priests, the media saturation over the scandals of the few would have sparked a mass exodus. The fact is, though, that when most of us think of priests, we don't think of the scandals or the bishops who covered up. We think of Father Bob who baptized our children or visited our mother in the hospital. We think of good men of good humor and intelligence who made algebra or chemistry fun if not always understandable in high school or helped with life-defining decisions in college.
Sure, we all have bad priest stories of harsh confessors or a pastor with whiskey on his breath, but for most of us they pale in comparison to the good ones. The majority of Catholics have no direct experience with the “roiling” scandals, and we should not be shy in s t a t i n g that fact. Now is the time for good priest stories. Here are two of my own.
Father Shelley, a priest of more than 50 years, called me at work one morning to ask if I could teach the lesson for him at the adult catechism class that evening. His doctor had found a growth on his chest and wanted to do a biopsy, Father explained. I left work early and rushed to the church to prepare the lesson, but arrived to find Father Shelley in the classroom arranging the chairs. A white bandage bulged through the chest buttons of his cassock.
“I tried to rest, but I was never good at napping,” he said after I urged him to sit down. Gently, I asked about the biopsy.
“It's cancer,” he said with stoic finality while writing on the blackboard. “The doctor said the result was negative.”
“But doesn't negative mean good in this case?” I said.
“Wait, you're right,” he replied, pausing a second. “Negative means it's not cancerous!” He continued to write on the board. Never had I seen such detachment from self.
On another occasion, a young priest, Father McCarthy, received a call at 5 in the morning from my friend whose wife had died at home after a long battle with cancer. Father McCarthy arrived 15 minutes later with Roman collar in place and prayer book in hand. He had anointed my friend's wife the day before, while she was in a coma, so he said the prayers for the dead at the bedside. After a few words about how the faith of this young mother had inspired him, he offered consoling handshakes and headed for the door. No long speech, no excessive display. He let Christ and the prayers of the Church do the talking.
At the door, he told my friend, “Call me any time.”
Think of your own good priest stories, and tell them to a friend whose faith may be wavering.
Brian Caulfield writes from West Haven, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Good Priest Stories ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Traveller -------- TITLE: St. Kevin's Monastic Municipality DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Despite Ireland's current infatuation with consumerism, the Catholic traveler can still encounter the country's Christian Celtic soul at Glendalough — site of St. Kevin's sixth-century monastery and home to some of the earliest Irish monks.
The word “Glendalough” means “valley between two lakes” and to step into this brilliantly green valley, nestled high along the granite backbone of the Wicklow Mountains, is to step into the heritage of Celtic Christianity.
Glendalough has been a pilgrimage site for more than 1,400 years; today more than 1 million people, many of them Americans, make the journey each year. While on vacation in Ireland recently, I traveled by bus from Dublin to Glendalough, about an hour's ride. When I was deposited in the parking lot of the visitors center, I was initially disoriented. The ruins of St. Kevin's monastic city were nowhere to be seen. After wandering around for a bit, I did what I should have done from the start: found a walking tour to tag along with. To the first-time visitor to Glendalough, this is essential. Although the tour doesn't visit all the ruins, it gives one a valuable orientation to the area and its history.
In the sixth century, our guide told us, a young rich man — probably the son of a local chieftain — fled to this steep-sided valley to live as a hermit. St. Kevin is said to have lived in a narrow cave in the cliff face, now known as “St. Kevin's Bed,” overlooking the larger lake. St. Kevin was a mystic, a friend of animals and an ascetic influenced by the Desert Fathers. After several years alone, his fame as a saint and a scholar attracted disciples and a monastery was formed.
Early Celtic monasticism embraced entire families. The celibate monks and nuns lived within the inner wall of the monastery. Families and their animals lived between the inner wall and the circular wall that enclosed the monastic village. Glendalough became a renowned center of learning, especially of Scripture. By the end of the sixth century, about 6,000 people, some 200 of them monks, lived in and around the monastery.
In the Kitchen
I found the monastic city both fascinating and odd. For many centuries it has been considered holy ground and, consequently, part of it is now a cemetery. The intact seven-story round tower and St. Kevin's Kitchen (really a church) thus stand in the midst of a crop of Celtic tombstone crosses dating from several centuries ago to the present. Of the seven stone church ruins scattered around the valley, only St. Kevin's Kitchen still has a roof. The stone tower, one of the best-preserved in Ireland, was once used for storage and for refuge during raids by Vikings and others.
Once the walking tour was over, I began to explore the other ruins on my own. They stretch out over several miles, so be prepared for a hike if you want to see them all. But the hike is worth it. When I climbed the steep hill to the site of St. Kevin's Cell (different from St. Kevin's Bed, the rock cave), I gained a clearer insight into ancient Celtic spirituality. I'd always puzzled over reconciling its love of nature with its zeal for harsh penances. Standing inside the semi-circle of low stones, about 3 feet in diameter, that was once St. Kevin's beehive hut, I began to understand.
The place where St. Kevin built his cell, where he did penance during Lent, is almost otherworldly in its beauty. It's on the ledge of a cliff about 200 feet above the larger lake. The sparkling water, the green of the surrounding woods, the blue sky — so low it seems you can reach out and touch it. The beauty of the spot is breathtaking. Yet here is where the saint chose to perform his legendary penances, spending the entire Lent in his cell, fasting and praying. One senses that, for St. Kevin, to deny himself was the same thing as affirming the almighty Trinity, who shows himself in the glories of the natural world. I could see why this place and others like it were known in Celtic spirituality as “green deserts.”
As I strolled along the paved paths edged with wild holly and hazel hedges, I stopped to look across the lake at St. Kevin's Bed, a small cave in the cliff. (The cliff is too dangerous to climb, so no access across the lake is provided). This cave is where the saint lived most of the year.
I could imagine St. Kevin, reputed to have prayed for so long that a blackbird built her nest and hatched her young in his upturned hand, whisper his wisdom on the soft wind that breathes down the valley: “Be still and know that God is God.”
Hermitage Hospitality
Another ruin not to be missed is St. Saviour's Church, which sits 100 yards off the footpath, about a half-mile east of the visitors center. Since few tourists make the trek this far, you may find yourself alone, or nearly alone, as I did. I found it deeply moving to stand inside those ancient stone walls and imagine the monks and the villagers of 900 years ago celebrating the one and same Eucharist that we celebrate in our home parishes today.
Although many bed and breakfasts service overnight guests in the area, thanks to Father Sean O'Toole, Glendalough's parish priest, pilgrims can once again make retreats in monk-like hermitages in the valley. With the help of the Irish Board of Tourism, Father O'Toole has built six one-roomed hermitages, called “cillins.” Since they opened last year, they've been in constant use.
Most visitors, like myself, cannot easily make a retreat, but even a single afternoon spent under the low Irish sky and its pearly light that fills the valley — wandering the ancient ruins, soaking up Glendalough's natural green beauty — can impart a sense of otherworldly peace.
At the end of the day, a pilgrim can stop at the tea shop in the nearby village of Laragh, which sits at the mouth of the valley. Over a cup of strong tea and a buttered scone, you might find yourself taking a long look at the hectic pace of your life and the pitiful scraps of time most of us give God. Like many others, you may come to a deeper appreciation for the periodic silence and solitude that the spiritual life requires.
Maybe you'll leave with a piece of Glendalough in your heart and a resolution to step back now and then from the busyness of life to be alone with God in the presence of his creation.
Una McManus writes from Alexandria, Virginia.
----- EXCERPT: The 'green desert' of Glendalough, Ireland ----- EXTENDED BODY: Una Mcmanus ----- KEYWORDS: Traveller -------- TITLE: Why Catholics Belong on the Internet DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:You can look it up in the Pontifical Council for Social Communications' recent document The Church and Internet.
Even though the Church at times has to condemn serious abuses, still her role is not one of merely censorship. Pope Pius XII's 1957 encyclical letter on mass communications Miranda Prorsus, called media innovations “gifts of God.” In 1971, Communio et Progressio, the pastoral instruction on the means of social communication, went further still, stating that the media are part of God's providential design uniting men in brotherhood, which helps them to cooperate in God's plan of salvation. All this applies to the Internet as well.
For me these are refreshing words. Because of the interest in my book Catholics on the Internet, I have been interviewed on various Catholic radio and television shows. The attitude of the show hosts has been overwhelmingly negative toward the use of the Internet. They certainly did not see it as a “gift of God.” Some questioned whether the Church should use it at all. The show hosts certainly did not reflect the basic, positive attitude that the Church has toward the use of the media. But if the Internet is a “gift of God,” then we would be very ungrateful children not to appreciate and use this gift.
It is interesting how the Church understands the history of human communication. It is like a long journey that brings humanity from the prideful tower of Babel, which resulted in confusion and mutual incomprehension, to Pentecost — where, through the gift of tongues, human communication was restored. Now, through the action of the Holy Spirit, it was to be centered on Jesus. Communications finds its highest ideal in the incarnation of Jesus, who was God become man and brother.
There is no doubt that the Internet has bridged distances between peoples even more so then the telephone or postal mail. Not long ago I corresponded with a Catholic convert in Australia who was having some difficulties. Just a few years ago, this person would never have known I even existed. I have corresponded by e-mail with people from just about every country in the world.
Imagine my phone bill if I tried that by telephone! The Internet has connected hearts and minds, and exposed the Catholic Church and her message to many more countries and peoples than even imaginable in times past.
The Church recognizes that the Internet is helping to bring about a revolutionary change in commerce, education, politics, journalism, the arts and international relations. This change is not limited to communications; it has ramifications for how people understand (and thus live) their lives. The Church desires to encourage all who participate in modern communications media to use the technology rightly — for the sake of human development, justice and peace. The aim is to build society at all levels in the light of the common good and in a spirit of solidarity. The Church seeks to dialogue with those responsible for the communications media to shape media policy, especially by proposing ways of removing obstacles to human progress and the proclamation of the Gospel.
Of course the Church's concern for the media extends to its use in and by herself. This concern involves more than just technique. Its starting point is the communion of love among the persons of the Holy Trinity and their communication with us. “God continues to communicate with humanity through the Church, the bearer and custodian of his revelation” (The Church and Internet).
The media is a tool for communication within the Church. The Church herself is a communion of persons — specifically, of eucharistic communities arising from and mirroring the communion of the Trinity. Communication is part of the very essence of the Church. So certainly the media is going to be a part of this communication.
Everything said in the past by the Church regarding the media in general applies to the Internet. At times the Internet may seem at odds with the Christian message. But it does offer unique opportunities for proclaiming the saving truth of Christ to the whole human family. Pope John Paul II has emphasized the positive capacities of the Internet to carry religious information and teaching beyond all barriers and frontiers. And he further emphasized that Catholics should not be afraid to throw open the doors of social communications to spread the Good News.
At a recent retirement party for a religious sister at our chancery, I sat across from a sister who had recently returned from Africa. Although up in age and mostly computer illiterate, she wanted to learn to use the Internet. Why? Because she wanted to set up educational audio and visual files that would be accessible to the community she had left behind. She saw that, thanks to the Internet, distance wasn't necessarily a barrier toward the ongoing religious education and formation of her African community.
The Church and Internet also talks about the Internet's potential as an educational aide. It discusses myriad opportunities and challenges, along with recommendations for making the most of the online experience.
Perhaps as a Web surfer, you don't think you can make a difference. Well, think again. This new media has brought new opportunities. To find out how, read the document online at vatican.va/roman_ curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/doc uments/rc_pc_pccs_doc_20020228 _church-internet_en.html
The Internet is here to stay. Find out how you can both benefit from it and contribute to it on behalf of the Church.
Brother John Raymond, co-founder of the Monks of Adoration, writes from Venice, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: The Church has taken a fundamentally positive approach to the media. All media. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Monthly Web Picks DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Speaking of reaching the world, for this month's picks let's look at online radio stations.
Living in Florida I sometimes listen to Spirit 905 FM radio, a ministry of the Diocese of St. Petersburg. They have a very upbeat station — a worthy competitor to the many Protestant radio stations broadcasting in the area. Wherever you are, you can tune in to their broadcasts live online at spiritfm905.com.
Pax Catholic Communications, put out by the Archdiocese of Miami, has as its purpose the evangelizing and proclaiming of the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the media. You will find Radio Peace (English) and Radio Paz (Spanish) both broadcast live on their Web site at paxcc.org.
I presume most Register readers know about Vatican Radio, but, in case you don't, tune in over the Internet at vatican.va/news_services/radio/index.htm. The same goes for Mother Angelica's radio station, WEWN, at ewtn.com/wewn/index.htm.
New Heart New Voices is a Catholic radio ministry whose aim is to present the Good News of Jesus Christ using the best in contemporary Catholic music. Catholic artists showcase Catholic music that is contemporary, fresh, personal and well-executed. Hear it for yourself at newheartnewvoices.com.
For more Catholic radio stations, see my online Catholic directory radio category at monksofadoration.org/radiotxt.html
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters & Marvels (2002)
Spider-Man is this summer's biggest hit so far. Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters & Marvels is a biography of the comic-book writer who created that character and many others on which movies and TV series have been based (X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, etc.). Writer-director Kevin Smith (Clerks) gets the elder statesmen of comic-book art to open up about the genesis of his ideas and the beginnings of the now-classic Marvel Comics publishing company.
The original intent of Lee and Marvel artists like Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, Steve Ditko and John Romita was to sell comic books to teen-age males. But their product evolved into a fictional universe complete unto itself.
They spawned a modern mythology that's characterized by a clear sense of good and evil and defines a certain kind of 20th-century super-hero.
Although the movie's primary emphasis is on Spider-Man, we also get the inside scoop on other Lee creations like The Fantastic Four and Iron Man. This 95-minute documentary is a valuable contribution to our understanding of contemporary popular culture.
Iron Will (1994)
Disney's new management still occasionally makes the kind of movie on which its reputation was built. Iron Will, directed by Charles Haid and written by John Michael Hayes (Rear Window), is an action-packed yarn about dog racing. Will Stonemen (Mackenzie Astin) loses his father in a freak dogsledding accident. As the bank is threatening to foreclose on his family's South Dakota farm, the plucky 17–year-old decides to enter the 1917 Winnipeg-St. Paul dogsledding race, with a $20,000 prize offered by a railroad magnate (David Ogden Stiers).
The adventures that follow test Will's mettle: He must win the respect of Gus, the lead dog who was loyal to his father; on the race course his fiercest rival (George Gerdes) is willing to cheat to win; and a local reporter (Kevin Spacey) smells a potential human-interest story and exploits the teen-ager to sell papers. A few of the plot twists may be predictable, but the story keeps you on the edge of your seat and the snowy landscape is gorgeous.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Pro-Life Professors Face Uphill Battle ... DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:ANN ARBOR, Mich. — They have no hired staff, their colleagues tend to disdain them and the mainstream media almost always ignore them, but nearly 300 professors — most from the United States — are using their intellects and research to try to raise public awareness about pro-life issues.
About 80 of those professors attended the University Faculty for Life's (UFL) 12th annual meeting in June at the Ave Maria School of Law. Speakers included political science professor Hadley Arkes of Amherst College in Massachusetts, author of the book First Things and an expert who has testified before Congress on abortion. Other attendees included theologians, philosophers and lawyers from both secular and religious colleges.
The organization was founded after a meeting of the American Collegians for Life in 1989. There, Jack Wilke, the former president of the National Right to Life Committee, gave a speech in which he highlighted the absence of a faculty pro-life organization.
Jesuit Father Thomas King, a professor of theology at Georgetown University, and several other professors — including Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer, now president of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. — took Wilke's message to heart and founded UFL.
Father King said he was also motivated to start UFL by a desire to answer the criticism of media mogul Ted Turner. “Turner said, ‘Pro-lifers are idiots and ding-dongs,’” Father King said. “[Through UFL] we want people to know that some of those ‘idiots’ are university professors.”
According to its brochure and Web site, UFL is concerned with the value of human life from conception to natural death and particularly focuses on abortion, infanticide and euthanasia. Beyond that Father King, who still serves as UFL's president, said he sees two main goals for the organization: First, to give pro-life professors the means to speak confidently about issues relating to life from conception to natural death. Second, to let the public know that there are pro-life instructors in college.
While UFL counts two priests among its founders, the organization is not made up entirely of Catholics. Many of the professors espouse other religions and at least one is an atheist, Father King said.
Media Ignore Message
Still, Father King worried that UFL's message is not getting across.
“It's been very hard for us to get press coverage,” he said. In fact, with the exception of a mention in two columns by Norah Vincent that ran in the Village Voice – a paper well-known for its liberal slant — UFL has been almost completely ignored.
Even among pro-life activists UFL is relatively unknown. Though she knows Father King and has asked him to speak at her events in the past, Nellie Gray, president of the March for Life, said that she did not know enough about UFL to comment on the organization.
“I have never been to one of their programs,” she said.
According to Teresa Collett, a longtime UFL member and a professor at the South Texas College of Law, much of the problem stems from the fact that UFL does not receive enough support from any single university to be able to hire a staff. As a result, she said, it falls to full-time professors, especially Father King, to organize UFL's quarterly newsletter and yearly conference in addition to fulfilling teaching duties.
“Ideally,” Collett said, “I would like to see some university that would have an Institute for Life Studies,” which would be a pro-life answer to Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute. The Guttmacher Institute provides abortion statistics often considered more accurate than those of the Center for Disease Control.
Academics Hostile
Professor Richard Myers of Ave Maria School of Law acted as local host to UFL's June conference.
“UFL is a great organization,” he said, “and it fits in well with what we are trying to do at [Ave Maria].”
But Myers isn't sure that a college pro-life institute would solve what he sees as a bias against religious organizations. He pointed out that it is often easier to get research published if a professor teaches at a large, secular college, and that the prevailing academic and media bias might marginalize such an institute as it has tried to do to UFL.
A poll taken in January 2002 by the Luntz Research Center for the Study of Popular Culture revealed that most professors at America's top universities are pro-abortion. Only 1% of Ivy League professors thought abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, while 37% thought it should be legal in every case. In the general population, according to a Gallup poll in August 2001, only 26% believed abortion should be legal in all circumstances while 17% thought it should be illegal in all circumstances.
Such a poll comes as no surprise to Collett. Like Myers, she has seen academic hostility.
Collett recalled talking to the dean of a well-known law school. The dean said that she “could not” hire a pro-life professor at her school. The irony, according to Collett, was that the dean was a black woman. Especially given how much discrimination the black community has suffered historically, Collett said, she was shocked to hear this woman's blatantly discriminatory statement.
“I wanted to say to her, ‘Do you hear what you are saying?’” Collett said.
Because of the prevailing bias against pro-life academics in colleges, many young professors are counseled to “wait until they get tenure” before they publish anything that is pro-life, according to Collett. But since what is published early in a professor's career tends to be what he or she continues to work on, such work results in very little pro-life work being published.
Although such advice is given with good intentions, it is “warping,” Collett said. And then there are the “hostile” members of the academic community who are outraged by any pro-life publication.
Other secular university policies also contribute to an anti-life culture, Father King said. He warned that as long as colleges maintain current lax dorm policies that encourage casual sex, there will be no complete end to the perceived need for abortion.
“Many colleges have dorm policies that encourage recreational sex,” Father King said, and so abortion is seen as “a necessary backup as long as you have that whole culture.”
Signs of Hope
Despite its trials, Father King and others see signs of hope for UFL. And Teresa Collett said she thinks that the multidisciplinary approach of UFL is one of its greatest strengths.
“The interdisciplinary approach is a great advantage,” she said. “We have lawyers, philosophers, theologians, doctors and historians” who can fill in the gaps in their colleagues' backgrounds, she said.
In addition, Father King pointed out that UFL can give professors the tools they need to discuss pro-life issues in an academic setting.
“Some professors won't speak up about an issue unless they feel confident [about their knowledge of the issue],” he said, and UFL's multidisciplinary approach facilitates that in a unique way.
And the message seems to be getting out despite the hostility.
“Fourteen years ago, 64% of college freshmen were pro-abortion; last year it was down to 51%,” Father King said. That, he said, is indicative of the fact that there is “more openness to the pro-life cause than there was 15 years ago.”
Another positive development he cited is that the word most commonly associated with abortion in a recent survey of young women was “pain.”
That, he said, indicates that “these girls had friends who had undergone psychological or physical pain as a result of [abortion].”
As Father King is preparing to send out the proceedings of the last two conferences free of charge to more than 700 libraries, he is also looking forward to next year's UFL conference with special anticipation since his university, Georgetown, will host the event the weekend after Memorial Day 2003.
Until then Father King said that he wants people to know what he told the crowd at the March for Life: “Several hundred university professors see what you see [about abortion], and we are going to tell the truth.”
Andrew Walther is based in Los Angeles.
Views on Abortion
Ivy League Professors
E Legal under any circumstances – 37%
E Legal only under certain circumstances — 59%
E Illegal in all circumstances — 1%
E Don't know/refused — 3%
Luntz Poll January 2001
All Americans
E Legal under any circumstances — 26%
E Legal only under certain circumstances — 56%
E Illegal in all circumstances — 17%
E No opinion — 1%
Source: Gallup. August 2001
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Weekly Book Pick DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:YOUR LIFE IS WORTH LIVING: THE CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (transcribed by Jon Hallingstad) St. Andrew's Press, 2001 416 pages, $24. 95 To order: (877) 362–0807 or www.bishopsheen.org
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who died in 1979, is a priest for our troubled times. Reading this book, a transcription of a popular set of albums he recorded after the close of the Second Vatican Council, a paraphrase of Simon and Garfunkel came often to mind: “Where have you gone, Archbishop Sheen, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you …”
Here is Sheen on what ails us. “The vast majority of people today are suffering from what might be called an existential neurosis, the anxiety and the problem of living. They ask, ‘What is it all about?’ ‘Where do I go from here?’ ‘How do I find it?’”
He offers two solutions. “First, go out and help your neighbor. Those who suffer from anxiety of life live only for themselves … Visit the sick. Be kind to the poor. Help the healing of lepers.”
The second solution is to “leave yourself open to experiences and encounters with the divine, which come to you from without …
“ I am suggesting you will not just reason yourself into the meaning and purpose of life; you will act yourself into the meaning and purpose of life by breaking the shell of egotism and selfishness, and cleaning the windows of your moral life to allow sunshine in.”
Those who watched Sheen's top-rated television show in the 1950s, or who have seen replays on video, will read with the archbishop's inviting voice and piercing eyes in mind. But any reader will be captivated by the gifted evangelist and storyteller, who draws on his wide experience as director for 16 years of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in New York City. His famous conversion stories are here. A young woman of culture comes to see him and he invites her to view artwork in the church. She agrees on the condition that he will not ask her to go to confession. While showing her the splendid paintings, he “pushes” her into the confessional. When Clare Booth Luce asks in tears why God has allowed her teen-age daughter to die, Sheen declares, “In order that you might be here, learning something about the purpose and meaning of life.”
Not exactly common pastoral practice, but the reader is struck with Sheen's zeal and directness.
Perhaps the best advertisement for this book is the experience of Jon Hallingstad. After listening to the vinyl recording that he later transcribed into this book, the one-time Lutheran converted to the Catholic faith. Archbishop Sheen, famous for making converts in his day, is still at work. In the book's foreword, Hallingstad explains his motive for transcribing the 25-album set first released in 1965: “It was as if Sheen himself spoke to me, quietly encouraging me to spend an hour with him each evening. Over the next five months, before I retired each night, I transcribed this work word by word.” Sheen's ideas are organized into five headings: God and Man, Christ and His Church, Sin, Sacraments and World, Soul and Things. Each chapter is an adequate lesson in itself, so readers can skip throughout the book without losing the train of thought.
This is an excellent book to give to relatives who are away from the Church, to evangelicals who approach you at work, or to teens searching for the meaning of life. No theological knowledge is needed to delve into this surprisingly simple presentation of human nature, the longings of the heart and how only the Catholic faith satisfies the deepest needs of each person.
Brian Caulfield writes from West Haven, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Your Sheen is Worth Reading ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 07/21/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 21-27, 2002 ----- BODY:Right and Wrong
THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS, July 1 — Nearly three-quarters of college seniors said they have been taught that “what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity,” according to a Zogby poll conducted for the association, a group that advocates a traditional curriculum.
“When students … [are] convinced that ethical standards are simply a matter of individual choice they are less likely to be reliably ethical in their … careers,” the report said.
Noting a “politicization of ethical standards” in education, the report found that students think a diverse work force and “minimizing environmental pollution” were more important than a company's obligations to stockholders.
Name Change
CREIGHTON UNIVERSITY, June 23 — St. Joseph Hospital of Omaha, Neb., has been absorbed by Creighton's Health Science Division and is now known as the Creighton University Medical Center, the university announced.
“The new name clarifies the position of St. Joseph Hospital as the teaching hospital of Creighton University,” said a university press release. The religious identity of the hospital, established by the Sisters of Mercy in 1870, will be preserved “through the university's link with the Jesuits at Creighton. The Catholic litany will remain on the hospital wall that identifies St. Joseph as the patron saint of the hospital.”
New Programs
FRANCISCAN UNIVERSITY OF STEUBENVILLE, June 28 — The university has established new undergraduate majors for the fall semester in German and legal studies, according to press releases. A bachelor of arts degree in German was developed partly because of student demand, which has only grown since the university brought its study-abroad program to Austria. A bachelor of arts degree in legal studies, the university said, will prepare graduates for a range of careers as paralegals in the legal profession, government and business.
Irish Summer School
BOSTON COLLEGE, June 23 — The spirited cadence of step dancing and the distinctive tunes of fiddles, tin whistles, harps, accordions and pipes filled the air as the Jesuit college hosted its annual Gaelic Roots Music, Song and Dance Summer School in June. Run by BC's Irish Studies Program, the summer school includes detailed instruction in Irish dance and music.
Voucher Boost
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONTIOR, July 1 — Catholics are among the wide array of Americans who are seeking to expand the school-choice movement following the Supreme Court's approval of school vouchers.
The Archdiocese of Indianapolis, for example, has built two new schools in the city center in three years with the help of the nation's first privately funded voucher program. Supporters told the Monitor they hope to see those private scholarships augmented by public vouchers.
The newspaper also reported that “some church-based groups … worry that vouchers could introduce unwanted government regulation, compromising the mission of sectarian schools.”
Good PR
PUBLIC RELATIONS SOCIETY OF AMERICA, June 20 — The society's Buffalo/Niagara Chapter presented the Canisius College public relations staff with six Excalibur Awards. Debra Park, director of public relations at the Jesuit college, led the group by receiving the May C. Randazzo Outstanding Practitioner Award.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: A Lost Generation Returns DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:VANCOUVER, British Columbia—By the time Mareva Dupre was 16, she had circumnavigated the globe three times on her father's homemade boat.
It might have been the education of a lifetime, but it left her without the one thing she would soon find herself craving: spiritual security.
Never baptized, her family's nomadic lifestyle meant “we didn't really live in a place where I could go to church,” she said.
Thanks in part to grandparents who taught her to pray at an early age, Dupre, now 20, is today a baptized Catholic—one of a new spiritual generation once dismissed as a religious wasteland.
Unexpectedly to those who have predicted the demise of religious faith, the secularism textbook is being rewritten to reflect a significant movement that some religious observers are calling a “spiritual renaissance.”
Just in time for World Youth Day in Toronto July 18 to 28, increasing numbers of people interested in religion—especially youth—have sociologists around the world questioning their assumptions about the declining relevance and popularity of mainstream religion.
The trend is evident in many places and crosses denominational and faith lines, with religions such as Islam and Sikhism showing growth. But it's particularly apparent in the so-called mainline Christian churches, including the Catholic Church.
By the middle of this century, for example, the U.S. population will be one-quarter Latino and 8% Asian, said Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University. Many in those communities are Christian. “It's bound to have a major impact,” he said.
In Canada, the unexpected growth of spirituality has been one of the top religion stories of the year. Reginald Bibby, the country's leading religious pollster, noted in his just-released book, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada, a significant rejuvenation of religion in the country inside and outside of churches.
Bibby, dubbed “Bad News Bibby” for his reputation for noting declining religious trends, is shedding his image as naysayer and receiving abundant exposure as newspapers and networks clamor for him to explain why religion, essentially written off as a factor in public life, is making a comeback.
The trend has surprised Bibby as much as anyone. Contrary to decades of polls—many of them by Bibby himself—showing people leaving the pews, the mainstream churches are holding their own. What's more, few people are abandoning established faiths for New Age movements or a complete rejection of religion.
In short, secularization is a myth, he said, and revitalization is taking place in many mainstream churches. In the Catholic Church particularly he said he sees “considerable vitality.”
Surprising Numbers
Considering Bibby's research concluded before Sept. 11, religion's rejuvenation is even more surprising, with the newfound interest consistent at all age groups. Even teens showed increased involvement in religion. In 1984, for example, 22% of those between age 15 and 19 went to church weekly. Those numbers dropped to just 17% in 1992, but by 2000 they were back to 22%.
Fully 90% of Canadian teens—three times that of adults and even Catholics in general—expect to turn to a “minister, priest, rabbi or some other religious figure” for so-called rite-of-passage events such as baptisms, weddings or funerals. Catholic teens show even greater interest, with more than 92% anticipating religious ceremonies, which is consistent with numbers from the 1980s.
In the United States, which is typically more religious than Canada, there are independent signs that rumors of religion's death have been greatly exaggerated. A study by a Protestant research group has found church attendance by U.S. Catholics is up 7% from last year. Among parents with children under 18 it's up 10%, according to the Barna Research Group.
The flipside of the coin, however, is a reduction in faithfulness to the Church, with levels of “absolute commitment” to Christianity and personal commitment to Christ declining among those same parents. With those describing their religious faith as “very important” dropping to 64% from 70%, Barna president George Barna calls it as an “internal conflict of values.”
Despite the seeming paradox between higher church attendance and more questioning attitudes, many experts are now retracting their previous forecasts of the death of religion. Sociologists such as Harvey Cox and Peter Berger once predicted a future secular society. Berger admits that was “a mistake,” although a cultural elite is still trying to bring it about.
Meanwhile Cox, who in 1961's The Secular City prophesied the eventual demise of religion, acknowledged “a religious renaissance of sorts is under way all over the globe,” particularly among conservative and orthodox denominations. Canada's National Post newspaper recently noted the trend in a sympathetic editorial TITLEd “Religious Revival” that said “rejecting Christian teaching no longer requires daring; it is the path of dull conformity.”
First Things magazine editor Father Richard John Neuhaus has said “de-secularization” is now the “most interesting thing on planet Earth.”
The New Christians
What's more, the growth of an increasingly global society means the impact of the spiritual renaissance has cross-border implications. In Jenkins' new book, The Next Christendom, The Coming of Global Christianity, the author notes an explosive southward expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Such Christianity is also reshaping the culture of the north through immigration. “One of the most important religious facts for the northern hemisphere is what's happening in the south by means of immigration,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins cites Vancouver as an example of how North America is benefiting from a wave of Asian immigration over the past two decades, much of it Christian. “Everyone's heard of the Pacific Rim; I believe in many ways that's turning into a Christian arc,” he said.
Although immigration is playing a part in the growth of religion, other factors are also at play. Bibby's numbers show that large numbers of people who don't attend church regularly still identify with the faith they were exposed to when young.
That was the case for Mareva Dupre, whose grandparents provided her prayer books as a child.
Baptized this Easter, she said she sees a searching and “growing awareness” for religion among her friends. “I think sometimes when people get older they get that little weird spurt between 19 and 25,” she said. They either “get married or they do something really drastic with their lives; for some it's finding religion.”
RCIA instructors report seeing young people who were baptized in infancy and spent their lives unchurched now showing up on parish doorsteps.
“We have a fair number of people that come through on a fairly regular basis that have Catholic backgrounds, probably baptized, not confirmed,” said Don Adams, who coordinates an RCIA program in the Vancouver, B.C., suburb of Langley.
Reaching Youth
The enormous numbers of youth standing just outside the Church's doorstep are one of the signs of hope that some experts see for the Church. At last month's Continental Congress on Vocations in Montreal, sociologist Sister Mary Johnson of Boston's Emmanuel College said the roughly 20 million young U.S. Catholics represent an impressive number of people that “a lot of faith traditions would give anything to have.”
Her research on young Catholics shows that young adults, while at odds with some Church teachings, remain strong in their faith and spirit of service.
Sister Johnson has published her findings in Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice, from the University of Notre Dame Press. She told the congress that the Church needs to find new ways to bring young people across the threshold, such as peer witnessing.
Indeed, those involved with RCIA credit Christian witness—from grandparents to friends—for drawing young people into a Church they've never frequented.
“It's interesting how frequently we ask them why they're there, and they say, ‘Well, my parents didn't go to church, but my grandmother used to take me to church when I was a child,’” Adams said.
Textbook Case
Scott Roy is a textbook example. The 24-year-old construction worker from Maple Ridge, B.C., was baptized Catholic as a baby, but his parents left the Church when he was 3. It was in high school that he “realized there was something missing” in his life.
Like many who represent the stories behind the statistics, Roy felt an “emptiness” and a lack of direction in his life. Today he is RCIA coordinator at his parish and hopes to return to school to finish a theology degree.
He agreed that there is a resurgence in spirituality among young people at Protestant and Catholic churches alike, and said the spark is coming from exposure to other Christians.
Said Roy, “Living the life and radiating the light is definitely the most effective form of evangelizing.”
Paul Schratz writes from Vancouver, British Columbia.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Schratz ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Protect Victims, But Also Priests, Says Canon Law DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—It wasn't USA Today's usual fare.
Father Jay Scott Newman wrote an opinion piece in the paper on canon law, responding to an article that appeared in the Jesuit biweekly La Civiltà Cattolica, a scholarly journal that doesn't even have pictures.
“As frustrating as this legal hairsplitting is, the rule of law must prevail,” wrote the Greenville, S.C. priest. “After all, lawlessness among priests caused this crisis; more lawlessness among bishops will not solve it.”
The article, which appeared May 18, was written by Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S.J., dean of the canon law faculty at the Jesuit-run Gregorian University, and an official consultant to several senior Vatican congregations.
The article received wide coverage, including the front page of the New York Times, as Father Ghirlanda raised concerns about some measures adopted by bishops in handling accusations of sexual abuse.
Writing strictly from the point of view of canon law, Father Ghirlanda opposed the use of mandatory psychological evaluations for accused priests, the turning over of names to civil authorities and the informing of parishioners of previous misconduct when reassigning priests.
All three elements are common practice in many dioceses and will likely be part of the national policy formulated at the American bishops' meeting June 13-15.
Because La Civiltà Cattolica's contents are reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State—and because of Father Ghirlanda's stature—the article was taken as a Vatican “directive,” though the author insisted that the article was only his view, and was written prior to the recent cardinals' summit on sexual abuse.
Father Ghirlanda stated that in handling sexual abuse allegations against clerics, bishops have a threefold obligation: to the victim, to the accused priest and to the common good of the diocese. That means that while a bishop may well say that “protecting children is my first priority,” canon law requires that it cannot be his only priority.
Father Newman's comment gets to the heart of Father Ghirlanda's concerns—that under pressure to remedy previous errors and oversights, the American bishops may adopt a policy that runs roughshod over their obligations in canon law.
Washington, D.C., Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has outlined in various interviews what he describes as five points of “consensus” around which a national policy can be drawn up:
E provision of care and counseling to the victim making the accusation,
E immediate removal of the priest from ministry while an investigation begins,
E notify civil authorities of the accusation,
E send the accused priest for a therapeutic evaluation, and
E refer to a lay review board to advise the bishop about any future reassignment of a priest found guilty.
Responsibility to the Victim
“The bishop must show all of his pastoral solicitude [for the victim],” writes Father Ghirlanda. “Nevertheless, it must be said, that from the canonical perspective, the bishop is neither morally nor juridically responsible for the criminal act committed by his cleric.”
Behind many of Father Ghirlanda's concerns is the fear that a system in which the bishop must choose between defending himself or defending the rights of his priests will lead to a situation in which priests no longer trust the bishop to defend them. This lack of trust is already evident in many dioceses as an ancillary result of the crisis.
On this point, though, there is little American bishops can do, as the civil law does hold the diocese responsible in such cases. Father Ghirlanda agrees that a bishop can be held responsible if, when informed of sexual abuse, he does nothing in terms of canon law to discipline the guilty priest and to ensure that no further harm is done.
“Any public intervention on the part of the bishop, solely on the basis of suspicions which may prove to be false, would not only be imprudent but unjustifiably damage the good reputation of the cleric, inasmuch as such an intervention would be interpreted by the people as a declaration by the bishop that [the criminal acts really occurred],” wrote Father Ghirlanda.
Canon law gives bishops the right and duty (Canon 1722) to suspend or remove a cleric from ministry in order “to preclude scandals, to protect the freedom of witnesses and to safeguard the course of justice” at any stage of the process, after having looked into the matter. The key question relates to the bishop's investigation before he takes action.
He is obliged (Canon 1717) to “cautiously inquire… about the facts and circumstances and about imputability” whenever he receives an accusation, and the same canon obliges “care must be taken lest anyone's good name be endangered by this investigation.”
Father Ghirlanda does not express himself explicitly on the question of immediate removals, but his article would clearly oppose practices where accusations are not investigated before priests are removed.
In many dioceses the standard is “credible accusation,” but in the current crisis, many accusations have been deemed credible before any meaningful investigation could have taken place.
It appears that a definition of “credible accusation,” or at least a defined procedure for determining such, will have to be part of any national policy that hopes to get Vatican approval. The Holy See would be unable to approve a policy that contradicted the obligations for investigation set out in canon law.
Civil Authorities
“Certainly it does not seem pastoral behavior that a bishop who receives an accusation informs the civil judicial authority in order to avoid being implicated in a civil process that the victim may undertake,” Father Ghirlanda's article states in the passage which attracted the most attention.
On this point, the options of bishops may be limited as many states already mandate reporting of sexual abuse allegations. Yet Father Ghirlanda's caution is that the bishop is first a pastor of souls, and not an agent of the state. Specifically, Father Ghirlanda says that a bishop should not report a priest to the civil authorities in order to avoid a lawsuit against the bishop himself—again the issue of the bishop's interest conflicting with those of his priests.
“In this case, I would say being a bishop comes first, not being a citizen,” said Father Ghirlanda in an interview with Catholic News Service.
“My position is this: If a bishop is questioned [by the state] he should respond. If he is not questioned, he should not report.”
While it is always possible for the victim, or a third party, to involve civil authorities, Father Ghirlanda raised the concern that a bishop cannot easily be a pastor to the victim, priest, and community if he himself initiates a criminal investigation.
“It is my opinion that it is not permissible that the accused cleric is forced to put himself under psychological evaluations in order to determine whether his personality is inclined to commit the crimes in question, or in order to extort a confession. Such practices are contrary to Canon 220, which protects the right to defend one's own privacy,” wrote Father Ghirlanda.
Here, Father Ghirlanda—who supports the “proper” use of psychological evaluation in priestly formation—runs counter to near-universal practice in the United States, where clerics are routinely sent for psychotherapy for various problems, not all sexual.
While such therapy is itself not contrary to canon law, Father Ghirlanda argues that to be forced to undergo it on the basis of accusations violates the emphasis in canon law on confidentiality, privacy and the right to protect the seal of confession.
Reassignment
The reassignment of clerics guilty of sexual abuse is likely to become a moot point, as an increasing number of dioceses have already announced that no such priest will ever be reassigned. On this issue, Father Ghirlanda wrote that it would be better not to reassign a priest than to reassign him and notify his parishioners of his crime. Such a policy would render the priest pastorally ineffective, Father Ghirlanda argues.
Like all policies, the details are all important. It is quite possible that the emerging national policy may combine the points of consensus enumerated by Cardinal McCarrick with the canonical concerns raised by Father Ghirlanda. That, after all, is what canon lawyers are trained to do. Nevertheless, the La Civiltà Cattolica article and the reaction to it signify that the Dallas meeting will be more complex, not less. Whatever the bishops decide, it will have to meet not only the test of compassion, justice, public opinion and the media, but the common sense encoded in the law of the Church.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Knights of Columbus Lead Campaign of Support for Priests DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW HAVEN, Conn.—As people left a pancake breakfast at St. Mary's Church here recently, they wore lapel buttons that read “In Solidarity With Our Priests.”
And in that way, they became part of a nationwide effort to show that, despite months of headlines about clergy sex abuse, parishioners still have faith in their priests.
The campaign is being led by the Knights of Columbus, which is based here and was founded at St. Mary's, near Yale University, in 1882. The breakfast was sponsored by the Father McGivney Council, named for the organization's founder, Father Michael McGivney.
“We did it for two reasons,” said Jim Moyer, grand knight of the council. “First, to support priests who are faithful to their vows, especially at this time, when so many are attacked for the actions of a few; and second, to show that we support vocations and our priests.”
The council has also distributed vocation awareness bookmarks with the slogan, “In Solidarity With Our Priests” and the Knights logo. The card has a prayer for vocations, a photograph of Father McGivney and the tagline, “One good priest can make a difference.”
In response to the sex abuse scandals, Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the 1.6-million member organization, said Catholics must be in unity with their bishops and, through them, with their priests. He called for “greater closeness” between families and their bishops and priests.
“We must not permit our priests to become isolated from those they serve,” Anderson wrote in the May issue of Columbia, the Knights' monthly magazine.
The supreme knight asked local councils to continue hosting “clergy appreciation nights,” a practice for a number of years.
“You are something special, and we stand shoulder to shoulder with you,” New Jersey state deputy William Birtwistle told 89 priests of the Diocese of Trenton, N.J., at one such recent gathering.
Another, held in the Diocese of Palm Beach, Fla., drew more than 250 people.
“This year's affair has greater importance than usual,” said Rory O'Donovan, grand knight of the Santa Maria Council in Palm Beach Gardens, a month after the March 8 resignation of Bishop Anthony O'Connell over sex abuse allegations. His predecessor had also resigned over a sex scandal. “We need to show our priests, deacons and all religious our continuing love and support,” O'Donovan said.
Father John Mericantante, pastor of St. Mary's parish in Pahokee, Fla., told the gathering that the Church has survived other difficulties over the course of her history but that the current crisis is difficult for good priests. He spoke of the need of lay faithful to encourage their priests to be faithful to their prayer life—he said that some priests have given up saying their breviary, even though the Church still requires it of the clergy—and avoid bad habits such as drinking beyond their capacity.
The renewed focus on holiness is one that the Knights are also supporting. Lay Catholics, responding to the crisis, “must follow the path of renewal and pursuit of holiness set by the Second Vatican Council,” Anderson said. “The key to renewal of the Church in our time is the embrace of the new evangelization called for by Pope John Paul II. The blueprint for this renewal already exists in his writings, especially his apostolic exhortations on the priest-hood (Pastores Dabo Vobis), on the laity (Christifideles Laici) and on the family (Familiaris Consortio).”
No Rush to Judgment
Moyer, a neuroscientist who works in the psychology department at Yale University, is concerned about the effect headlines regarding the sex abuse scandals are having on those who have a shaky relationship with the Church. He said he has heard of people who say they will not go to confession anymore because of the bad press the Church is receiving due to the misconduct of a few priests.
“Instead of saying the proportion [of pederasty] is lower among priests than among married men, [the press] says that we've got a problem because of celibacy,” Moyer said.
“The Church will have to recover from the bad press. Some people might never be brought back in, and that's costly.”
“The general impression is that we're getting hammered pretty hard for this, harder than other groups,” said Randy Schroeder, grand knight of the Tara Council in Jonesboro, Ga.
Also, some are conscious of the danger of sensational press coverage in which even unsubstantiated accusations get front-page exposure. Some of those accusations turn out to be false, but the priest's reputation is ruined.
Moyer related an incident in which a priest who was accused of using excessive physical force in disciplining a grammar school student also became the subject of rumors of sexual abuse. The diocese transferred the priest, not to cover up sexual abuse but because the lawsuit brought against the parish school and the media coverage of it was disruptive of parish life.
Father Mericantante, in his talk at the Palm Beach clergy appreciation night, quoted T.S. Eliot, who once quipped that the press is more interested in getting a story out than getting it right.
But, in general, parishioners of St. Mary's in New Haven have been “very supportive,” said the pastor, Dominican Father William Holt. “Attendance has remained steady, and a number of people have sent cards and letters of support.”
Father Holt said people understand the scandals as a “tragedy” but realize “how important their life with the Lord is and where they get support” for living that life. That support comes from attendance at Mass, he said, “and naturally, people need priests for the sacramental life.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Cockney Gangster Turned Apostle DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:One-time Cockney gangster John Pridmore from London is a former nightclub bouncer, drug dealer and self-confessed thug.
He has just published the remarkable story of his transformation to youth evangelist in his book, From Gangland to Promised Land (Darton Long and Todd, available on Amazon.com).
He spent time with the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the Bronx borough but is now leading youth missions with Youth 2000 Ireland. He told Paul Burnell about his own road to Damascus.
What kind of background did you have?
My mum was Catholic, and my dad, a London cop, was brought up in the Church of England but had no strong religious beliefs. Living in London mum drifted away from her Catholic faith soon after I was born and only went to church occasionally. Yet each time we walked past the church where I had been baptized she reminded me of it.
Did you have any faith then?
I was always fascinated by God, even at that age, and I once asked an aunt to buy me a Bible. I have a lot of happy memories from the early years of my childhood. Looking back I felt secure, content, loved.
When did things go wrong?
When I was 10 my parents divorced. I was devastated. The two people I loved most had crushed me. I felt unloved and as I grew up I vowed I would never love so I could not get hurt. In those teen-age years I dabbled in petty crime and served time in prison for stealing. What I really wanted was someone to ask what was happening with me. Soon I was led into big-time drug dealing. This led to crack parties, life in a penthouse and a Mercedes with a personalized numberplate. I was high on the buzz from drugs, violence, power and reputation and an endless supply of money and sex.
What made you change?
In the summer of 1991 I was working as a bouncer in a West End pub in London. I smashed a guy on the chin with my knuckle-duster, and as his head hit the sidewalk it exploded, spattering blood everywhere. Thank God the guy lived. Back at my flat I sat alone thinking how messed up my life had become. I wondered how I could nearly kill someone and not care. Then I heard what could only be described as a voice. It was telling me the worst things I had ever done. I thought it must be the TV but when I flicked it off the voice was still there. Then something clicked—it was the voice of my conscience, the voice of God. I fell to my knees and tears began to well up in my eyes. “Give me another chance!” I pleaded with God.
What happened then?
Suddenly I felt as if someone's hands were on my shoulders and I was being lifted up. An incredible warmth overpowered me and the fear evaporated. At that moment I really knew—not just believed—that God was real. Then I did something I had never done before—I prayed, “God, up to now all I have ever done is take from you in my life—now I want to give!” The most awesome feeling of love overpowered me. This was the most amazing buzz I have ever experienced. Then I knew for the first time I was loved by God—I had always thought I was worthless and it did not matter if I lived or died.
I went straight to tell my mom that I had found God. She replied, “What? At 1:30 in the morning?” After I had told my story she told me, “I have always prayed for you every day of my life but two weeks ago I felt my prayers were not being answered so I told Jesus to take you. If it meant that you died then he had to let you die. But not to let you hurt yourself or anyone else anymore.” She also told me she had said a novena to St. Jude, patron of hopeless cases.
How did you follow this up?
I went to Youth 2000 retreats and eventually went to confession for the first time in my life. I was at Westminster Cathedral and told the priest everything I did. He asked what prayers I knew and I told him the Our Father. He told me to say the Our Father for my penance and said to me, “Welcome home.” When I came out of the confessional I felt an indescribable joy.
I should have gone on a retreat but I was sentenced to prison for non-payment of fines. I shared a cell with a gypsy and I found out he was Catholic, although he hadn't been to church in years. He hadn't been able to contact his wife. We prayed the rosary together—the next morning the warden came in and said [the gypsy's] wife had given birth to a girl and was on her way to see him. He fell to his knees said he was going to give his life to God and wasn't going to drink anymore.
What did you tell the priest who invited you to the retreat?
When I got out I phoned him and he laughed but told me there was another one at the ancient shrine of Aylesford in Kent, England. I was still finding Mass boring at this time. The speaker was Father Slavko Barbaric from Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. I had a strong sense I should go to confession to him. I told him everything. He placed his hands on my head and absolved me, and I could feel Jesus' blood running down my face and an incredible love going through me. I still found it hard to believe Jesus was truly present in the Bread. I asked another guy about it and he told me to ask Jesus to help me understand. I did and felt an incredible experience similar to that night when I first prayed in my flat.
I knew Jesus was really present and all my hang-ups about the Catholic Church vanished. Somebody told me father had brought some young people who said they saw Our Lady. I was in the same room as them and asked God to show me if this was real. Again I had another experience of his love and felt I had been reborn.
At one stage you joined the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the Bronx. What happened?
After a time I was told to really ask God if this was my vocation. I prayed “your will be done” each day. One night in prayer I saw a wounded child behind a wall but noticed the wall was knocked down. I read my Bible and saw the words, “Go home; your servant is healed.” I realized I had been healed and that I had joined the friars not because God wanted me to be a friar but because I wanted to be holy.
God had used my time in New York to heal me and make me a better person. Before I left for England I went on retreat at the center where Father Benedict Groeschel is based. I told him about my decision. He blessed me and said, “John, you're a free spirit and God will use you as a free spirit.”
What are you doing at the moment?
I am doing school retreats, school missions and weekend retreats with Youth 2000 Ireland. I am not really based anywhere. I stay with lay people and priests. We move around and rely completely on God's providence. I have been here since October 2001. We work on both sides of the border. We have been up to Belfast and Derry.
Was it hard to write the book? You are very frank about your past life and your struggles.
I didn't want it to seem that I was something special. The only person who is special is God. I didn't think it was that hard; there were some things that I didn't want to remember, but I had to remember them.
What kind of impact does your testimony have on young people?
I think because I am real and because I make myself vulnerable they just respond. I had one girl come up to me recently to speak about confession. She said, “I'm a Protestant. We don't have confession.” Since she wasn't a practicing Protestant, I told her to speak with a priest and tell him what she felt.
We had a call from the religious education teachers at a school we visited recently saying that many of the children went to confession that Saturday followed by Holy Mass on Sunday—this was the first time it had happened.
Some speakers might just tell their story and then leave, but you seem to spend a lot of time just talking one-on-one with the young people. Is that as important as sharing your testimony?
I think this is just as important. I think some of the conversations I have had with the young people have been very important. I was in County Clare when a 16-year-old came up to me and said, “I also had a bad childhood.” This kid came up to me and said he was abused when he was a kid and couldn't forgive the guy. I told him, “Even though it's not your fault go to confession and confess not being able to forgive this man. Just speak to the priest as if you were speaking to Jesus.” He realized Jesus loved him even though he felt nobody could love him. That would never have happened if I did not hang around just to chat. Because I make myself vulnerable they feel they can share their vulnerability.
One kid wrote to me and said, “You told us so much about yourself I wanted to tell you something about me.” Most of the youngsters we meet are 15-plus and adults never tell them their own vulnerabilities.
Are you able to reach kids who were like you at that age?
There was one kid—I just saw his pain. When we finished, I asked him what his name was and told him I would be praying for him. Jesus sees your pain and he is with you. At the end of the mission the teacher told me, “We're really worried about him. Will you go and have a word with him?” It was almost as if I saw myself in him. He expressed what he was feeling and really opened up. He was beginning to pray before my talk that he felt there must be someone who loved him, and his prayer was answered.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Pridmore ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Couples Hoping to Conceive Turn to St. Gerard Majella DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:STAMFORD, Conn.—On the Friday before Mother's Day, Joseph and Laura Cogoni drove from New York to Sacred Heart Church in Stamford, Conn. Alvino and Alma Guajardo flew in from Texas.
They joined the scores of couples unable to conceive, expectant ones praying for a safe delivery and thankful couples toting babies for the annual Mass in honor of St. Gerard Majella.
The Cogonis brought 14-month-old Gianna, the answer to their prayers. “We call her our little miracle baby,” Laura Cogoni said. “The path of faith led to St. Gerard.”
Yet two years ago the Cogonis were among the many married couples unable to conceive for various reasons or told by doctors that it was medically impossible for them to have children. The Cogonis had first traveled the medical specialist route to a dead end. All the while, St. Gerard had the answer.
“We came to the Mass, and one month to the day later, we were expecting,” Joseph Cogoni said. “It's a true blessing,” he added with a big smile. “And she's a great baby.”
Their story is among the countless miraculous answers to prayers St. Gerard has provided with his heavenly intercession. For nearly 250 years his specialties include helping apparently infertile couples conceive a child and aiding mothers with difficult pregnancies to have smooth sailing for safe, joyful births and healthy babies. By popular acclaim over the decades, this Redemptorist lay brother has been unofficially called the patron of mothers, patron of motherhood and protector of expectant mothers and their unborn children.
“Even though he's an 18th century saint from Italy,” Father Thomas Nicastro Jr. said, “his love and special devotion for mothers, their children and the unborn is timeless. It reaches into the 21st century where some have come to realize that placing their hopes in modern medical procedures is not the true road to take.”
Instead, during this annual Mass he has instituted in the Diocese of Bridgeport and during private counseling sessions, Father Nicastro reminds couples “to lay aside all those medical procedures not in conformity with the teachings of the Church and put their faith and trust in God and his saints, like St. Gerard.” (Many in vitro fertilization procedures have been specifically condemned by the Church as being gravely sinful.)
Once couples do, miraculous answers often get added to the innumerable miracles already reported for Gerard's heavenly intercession. They often involve the St. Gerard handkerchief, a sacramental that's been part of the devotion from the beginning. Handkerchiefs touched to Gerard's relics have blessed innumerable mothers with safe deliveries, joyful births and healthy babies. “It is a symbol and a spiritual trademark, so to speak, of the saint and his predilection for mothers and their children in the womb,” Father Nicastro said.
During the Mass, every couple holds this handkerchief while being blessed with a first-class relic of St. Gerard. They're also given a handkerchief, blessed medal and novena to St. Gerard to take with them.
Last year, the rector of the international shrine joined Father Nicastro. This year, Bishop William Lori, head of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., and principal celebrant of the Mass, blessed the couples as they came up individually.
“St. Gerard is no stranger in my parents' home,” the bishop said in his homily. “Years ago, when my mother was carrying my younger brother, I recall that she used to pray to St. Gerard … that she would be given the grace of bringing her baby safely into the world.”
“If you ask my mother, she would tell you readily that St. Gerard has helped her through the years and that he continues to help her as she prays for her husband and her sons,” Bishop Lori said. “I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the saint who has drawn all of us together.”
Among couples that traveled from different sections of the country were Alvino and Alma Guajardo, who flew in from Grand Prairie, Texas. They brought along their 13-year-old son, Alvin.
“We came looking for the ultimate blessing,” Alma Guajardo said. “We desire to have another child but it's difficult. We really have faith he [St. Gerard] will bless us.”
The Cogonis' strong faith remains rock-solid, too. They attended this year's Mass, Laura said, because they want Gianna to have a little brother or sister.
Last year their faith and story inspired seven couples to join them for the Mass. “They all recently had children!” Laura reported. One couple—the husband works with Joseph—had visited medical specialists for two unsuccessful years.
St. Gerard proves to be a tireless defender of pro-life causes, said Father Nicastro, who received his lifelong devotion to the saint from his maternal grandmother, Anna Miano. While growing up in Newark, N.J., he was active at the National Shrine of St. Gerard Majella located in St. Lucy's Church. He also directs people to this shrine, where he assists during the huge annual novena leading to St. Gerard's feast on Oct. 16.
“We have tried through media awareness to ignite a spark that has now grown into a fire that's spreading devotion to St. Gerard and causing a renewal of this devotion in the United States and internationally,” Father Nicastro said.
Saint for Today
St. Gerard “is truly a saint for our times—times of turbulence for the Church, times when the family is under assault, times when innocent human life is threatened in so many ways,” Bishop Lori said.
That's why Father Nicastro stressed, “Now more than ever before our society and our world need a heavenly champion to promote Christian family values and the culture of life, especially where mothers and the unborn children are concerned.”
“For pastoral reasons,” he continued, “we need a saint in the United States that married couples can look up to as a powerful intercessor and to intercede for us to help wipe out this terrible scourge of abortion and partial-birth abortion. The unborn need a great protector like him.”
People receiving favors from St. Gerard help spread this devotion, too. “We tell everybody our story,” said Laura Cognoni, adding she prayed to Gerard for an easy labor and she got what she prayed for.
“When Gianna grows up,” she said, “she's going to know the story.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:Tough Sell for Book on Peril of Postponed Pregnancy
The New York Times usually reports on books that become best sellers. This week, it ran a story wondering why Hewlett's book was not selling, despite “the kind of publicity authors and publishers usually only dream of”—including the cover of Time magazine and segments on “Oprah,” “Today,” “Good Morning America” and the “NBC Nightly News,” plus stories in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times.
It seems that “the most talked-about book in America, which raises the specter that women who sacrifice families for careers might wake up childless at 45, is hardly selling at all.” The story puts sales at around 8,000, nationwide. The Times suggests that “the explanation is all too simple: women are just not interested in shelling out $22 for a load of depressing news about their biological clocks.”
The book warns of the pitfalls of career women sacrificing their “prime childbearing years” in the workplace. Even with fertility treatments, Hewlett reported, “only 3% to 5% of women over 40 are able to have children.”
Pat Buchanan Calls for End to Cuban Embargo
THE AMERICAN CAUSE.ORG, May 14—Echoing repeated calls by Church leaders—including Pope John Paul II during his 1998 visit to the communist island—Catholic columnist and longtime cold warrior Patrick Buchanan has urged President Bush to end the U.S. economic embargo against Fidel Castro's Cuba.
The former presidential candidate argued that the embargo served American interests well during the struggle against world communism by forcing Moscow to divert $5 billion yearly to prop up Castro's regime, contributing to “the endless bleeding [that] helped to bring that empire down.”
However, now that Russia is an American ally and no longer supports Castro's increasingly bankrupt regime, it's time for the United States to normalize trade, Buchanan continued. It is true, he said, that Cuba “is a police state, a totalitarian state and its ruler is the same political criminal and America-hater he has been his whole life.”
But one could say the same thing about the governments of China and Vietnam, both of which receive U.S. trading privileges. So, Buchanan argued, it is hypocritical and needlessly punitive of the Cuban people to maintain current policy.
“Embargoes are usually reserved for enemies that threaten the United States,” Buchanan said, concluding that “the Cuban embargo may well be a case where America can truly declare victory and get out.”
District Attorney Issues Warning to Cardinal Mahony
UPI/NEWSMAX.COM, May 17—Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles has suffered from less critical media scrutiny than Boston's embattled Cardinal Bernard Law, but it seems that the legal establishment is not so easily deterred.
The cardinal was warned last week by a hand-delivered letter from District Attorney Steve Cooley that he would be hauled before a grand jury to answer questions about sex abuse cases unless he provided the information required by the prosecutor in short order, reported UPI news service.
Two months ago, Cardinal Mahony had made a widely publicized pledge to work along with civil authorities in investigating claims by 36 children of clerical abuse. But as of last week, UPI reported, prosecutors were still waiting for the promised documentation.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: ACLU vs. Abstinence: Civil Rights Lobby Sues Louisiana Program DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:BATON ROUGE, La.—The American Civil Liberties Union—the ACLU—has filed suit against Louisiana's abstinence program, claiming it violates the First Amendment's establishment clause on religion.
The initiative, known as the Louisiana Governor's Program on Abstinence, provides education for junior high school students and abstinence clubs for high school students.
The ACLU lawsuit, filed in early May, alleged that elements of the program have used God or religious themes in abstinence presentations, violating the separation of church and state. The ACLU also claimed that “pervasively sectarian” organizations such as the Catholic Church received funds from the program, also violating the First Amendment.
The Louisiana program was established in 2000 as a result of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which set aside Federal “TITLE 5” funds for abstinence-only education in states.
Dan Richey, director of the Governor's Program on Abstinence, said the charges are groundless.
“The ACLU is upset because the message is getting out,” said Richey, who called the timing of the lawsuit a political ploy. “The reason for their timing of this frivolous lawsuit is that the program is supposed to be extended soon by Congress.”
Further evidence of the ACLU's use of the case for political purposes is evident from the fact that it released the lawsuit to the Washington Post before filing it in court so only its side of the story would hit the press, Richey said.
ACLU press officers declined to comment on the case and said the schedule of the lawyer involved would not allow for an interview.
But the ACLU's position was made clear by a May 9 statement by Joe Cook, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana: “This case is yet another example of the state of Louisiana using public money to preach religion,” he said. “The governor's office has to get out of the pulpit and stop putting taxpayer money in the collection plate.”
According to Richey, most of the complaints made by the ACLU are false and occurred when groups with whom the state had contracted to run abstinence education did events on their own that were not funded by the state.
Constitutionality
Stuart Roth, a senior attorney with the American Center for Law and Justice, which specializes in pro-life and religious liberty cases, said even if there is occasional reference to religion or religious themes in a program like Louisiana's, there is no constitutional problem.
“Abstinence is not a religious issue, it's a decency issue,” he said.
Roth added that if religious themes occasionally come up in the program it is acceptable because the courts have recognized that there will inevitably be places where religion crosses the path of mainstream American life.
“It is the secular purpose, not the ultimate use, that matters [to the courts],” Roth said. He said he believes the ACLU begins with the premise that abstinence is religious, not secular, and then they try to find someone who did something religious in the program.
Roth said he sees such an attitude as disingenuous. “[Because] feeding the poor is biblical,” he asked, “should the government stop [social services] to the poor?”
The second half of the ACLU lawsuit, claiming that churches receiving funds to teach abstinence violates the First Amendment, is also without merit, Roth said. He said there is also no constitutional problem with churches receiving some of the money.
“Faith-based groups get money all the time,” he pointed out. “But it's not for evangelization purposes,” and therefore there is no constitutional problem, he said.
John Eastman, professor of constitutional law at Chapman University in Orange County, Calif., agreed with Roth that there is no constitutional violation.
“Not only does the fact that some aid flows to religious organizations—even pervasively sectarian ones—not violate the establishment clause under current precedent, it arguably would violate the free exercise clause if government were to refuse to allow churches to participate in the program merely because of their religious nature,” he said.
Catholic Support
While the ACLU has attacked the abstinence program, Catholics such as Brenda Desormeaux, former director of pro-life activities for the Diocese of Lafayette, La., see the program as very positive.
Desormeaux worked with the Governor's Program while she worked for the diocese and continues to do so now, although she is no longer with the diocese.
“It's a very secular program based on the health crisis of” sexually transmitted diseases, she said. “We're not teaching religion, we're teaching morals.”
Desormeaux was also clear that the program, although secular, teaches the same morality as the Catholic Church. “The guidelines for the Governor's Program could have been written by the Catholic Church,” she said.
The Catholic Church is unequivocal in its teaching on abstinence before marriage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “[Fornication] is gravely contrary to the dignity of persons and of human sexuality, which is naturally ordered to the good of spouses and the generation and education of children. Moreover, it is a grave scandal when there is corruption of the young” (No. 2353).
Like Richey, Desormeaux said the message is getting out. “Ten thousand kids in Louisiana have heard the abstinence message,” she said.
Richey noted that even more are hearing the message via the state's Web site.
“Every school in the world can download our programs from the Web site to provide a positive message [to their students],” he said. This, he said, is the reason he believes the ACLU is angry.
Desormeaux said she isn't worried about the suit.
Said the Catholic pro-lifer, “I don't have any doubt that by the grace of God we will prevail.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope Consoled by Prayers from Around the Globe
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, May 19—Amid media speculation about his health and scandals besetting some American clerics, Pope John Paul II told a crowd in St. Peter's Square on Sunday that he is consoled in his ill-health by the prayers of Catholics from around the world.
The AP reported on the Mass May 19, the day after the Holy Father's 82nd birthday, noting that he “appeared almost exhausted during a two-hour ceremony to raise five religious workers to sainthood. His head trembled as he said prayers before Communion on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica, and his words during the Mass and while reading the homily were so slurred they were often unintelligible.” These symptoms of Parkinson's disease sometimes mask the fact that the Pope's intellect is still extremely active.
While prominent cardinals have speculated on the possibility of papal retirement in the case of a genuinely incapacitated pope, few expect John Paul to step down. This week, the AP reported, he starts a pilgrimage to Azerbaijan and Bulgaria.
Pope Still Seeks Peace for Holy Land and Places
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, May 17—Last week Pope John Paul II reflected on the recent siege of Bethlehem's Nativity basilica and called for international guarantees of the safety of Christian holy sites, the AP reported.
“I appeal yet again for the international community to take, without delay, the necessary measures to see that the specific statute (protecting) holy places is respected and assuring their true protection,” the Holy Father said.
The Holy See has always sought international involvement in the defense of the sacred sites associated with the life of Christ. As he welcomed the new ambassador from the kingdom of Jordan, a moderate Arab state that maintains good relations with Israel, thr Pope called once again on that state and the Palestinians to renew negotiations for peace.
Algerian Film Director Sends Birthday Best to Pope
FIDES News Service, May 19—Algerian film director Rachid Benhadi, raised a Muslim, sent Pope John Paul best wishes on his 82nd birthday, according to the missionary news service Fides.
“The Pope is a man of great lucidity, extraordinary charisma,” Benhadi said. “Every time he sets out on a journey it means more physical suffering, but what is most important is that his mind is as keen as ever. I sincerely wish the Pope long life and that he may carry on his work with serenity. I hope his health will give him less trouble and a bit of peace!”
Benhadi provided research to the Pontifical Council for Culture for an upcoming film on St. Augustine, the fourth-century bishop of Carthage.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Pope Reaches Out to Orthodox in Visits to Azerbaijan and Bulgaria DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—A determined Pope John Paul II completed his 96th foreign pastoral visit last week, spending five days in Azerbaijan and Bulgaria. The Holy Father used the trip to praise those who remained faithful during the communist period and to build bridges to the Orthodox world.
In Bulgaria on May 24, in a gesture of goodwill toward Orthodoxy, John Paul presented Bulgarian Orthodox Patriarch Maxim with a gift from the heart of Rome—the Church of Sts. Vincent and Anastasius near the Trevi Fountain, which will be given to the Orthodox for their liturgical use.
The five-day visit was the first foreign journey since the Pope's condition noticeably worsened during Holy Week, with the Holy Father now unable to stand or walk without difficulty and with a frequent shortness of breath. For the first time an elevator brought the Pope from the airplane to the tarmac since he could not descend the stairs. The moving platform he uses at the Vatican was also employed.
John Paul did not deliver his addresses in Azerbaijani, but only read the first and last lines, leaving an aide to deliver the rest. It was not clear whether this was because speaking in general was too taxing or whether the Turkic language posed particular difficulties.
“I have come to Azerbaijan as an ambassador of peace. As long as I have breath within me I shall cry out: peace in the name of God,” said the Holy Father to an overwhelmingly Muslim country.
“No one has the right to call upon God to justify their own selfish interests,” he said, echoing themes he spoke about when he visited Kazakhstan and Armenia last fall in the aftermath of Sept. 11. “I ask religious leaders to reject all violence as offensive to the name of God.”
Azeri leaders were particularly keen to host the Pope after the Armenia visit. Ten years ago, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a war over the territory of Nagorno Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but is home to ethnic Armenians. The war killed 30,000 people in the early 1990s.
Turning to the Orthodox, which is the largest Christian church in Azerbaijan, the Holy Father thanked them for coming to the aid of Catholics during the communist period.
“When the fury of atheism was unleashed in this region, you welcomed the children of the Catholic Church who had lost their places of worship and their pastors,” he said.
John Paul used his 25 hours in Baku, the Azeri capital, as a moment to remember the evil of communism imposed when Russia annexed this small republic to the Soviet Union. That he did so in the Russian language itself, on former Soviet soil, was a historic moment.
“The universal Church pays tribute to all those who succeeded in remaining faithful to their baptismal commitments,” the Holy Father said. “I am thinking in particular of those who live permanently in this country and who experienced the tragedy of Marxist persecution and bore the consequences of their faithful attachment to Christ. Brothers and sisters, you saw your religion mocked as mere superstition, as an attempt to escape the responsibilities of engagement in history. For this reason you were regarded as second-class citizens and were humiliated and marginalized in many ways.
The Azeri Catholic community is the smallest the Pope has ever visited. Only 120 strong, the Catholic presence is so tiny that for the first time the Holy Father stayed overnight in a hotel, there being no nunciature, episcopal residence, convent or seminary to stay in.
The visit to Bulgaria was seen as a continuing effort to reach out to Orthodoxy. The Bulgarian Orthodox adopted the formula of their Greek brothers in not inviting the Pope, but not officially opposing the visit either. Indeed, the Greek experience seemed to have warmed expectations in Bulgaria, even if there were some misgivings on the Orthodox side.
Bulgaria seems to be part of what one observer called John Paul's “ring around Russia” strategy. Having visited Romania, Georgia, Greece, Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Bulgaria in the last four years, the Holy Father is making it clear that Russia is the desired next step.
Apart from ecumenical considerations, Bulgarian authorities were quick to point out that the papal visit removed the “shame” of the so-called “Bulgarian connection” of would-be papal assassin Mehmet Ali Agca. Despite widespread reports that the Bulgarian secret police was involved in the 1981 attempt, the Vatican has never implicated Bulgaria in the crime.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Our Mission: Love and Forgiveness DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:The following is the Vatican's English text of Pope John Paul II's message for 2002 World Mission Sunday, Oct. 20. With the theme, “Mission Is the Proclamation of Forgiveness,” it was released at the Vatican May 18.
The evangelizing mission of the Church is essentially the announcement of God's love, mercy and forgiveness revealed to mankind through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. It is the proclamation of the good news that God loves us and wants all people united in his loving mercy; he forgives us and asks us to forgive others even for the greatest offenses. This is the word of reconciliation entrusted to us because, as St. Paul says, “God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself not counting men's transgressions against them and he entrusted the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Corinthians 5:19). These words are the echo and a reminder of the supreme cry from the heart of Christ on the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
This, in synthesis, is the fundamental content of Mission Sunday, which we will celebrate on Sunday, Oct. 20, with the stimulating theme: “Mission Is the Proclamation of Forgiveness.” Although this event is repeated every year with the passing of time it loses none of its special significance and importance, because mission is our response to Jesus' supreme command: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19).
The Cross
At the beginning of the third Christian millennium the missionary duty is ever more urgent, because as I said in the “Redemptoris Missio” encyclical: “The number of those who do not know Christ and do not belong to the Church is constantly on the increase. Indeed since the end of the council it has almost doubled. When we consider this immense portion of humanity which is loved by the Father and for whom he sent his Son, the urgency of the Church's mission is obvious” (No. 3).
With the great apostle and evangelizer St. Paul, we wish to repeat: “Yet preaching the Gospel is not the subject of a boast: I am under the compulsion; I have no choice. Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel … it is a charge entrusted to me” (1 Corinthians 9:16-17). Only God's love, able to make brothers and sisters of people of all races and cultures, can heal the painful divisions, ideological conflict, economic unbalance and violence which still oppresses humanity.
We are all aware of the horrible wars and revolutions that bloodied the last century and the conflicts that, unfortunately, still afflict the world almost endemically. However undeniable also is a longing of men and women who, despite dire spiritual and material poverty, have a deep thirst for God and for his loving mercy. The Lord's call to proclaim the good news is still valid today: indeed it is evermore urgent.
In the apostolic letter “Novo Millennio Ineunte” I underlined the importance of contemplating the face of Christ suffering and glorious. The heart of the Christian message is the proclamation of the paschal mystery of Christ, crucified and risen. Contemplating the face of the crucified one in agony “we confront the most paradoxical aspect of his mystery as it emerges in his last hour, on the cross” (No. 25). In the cross God revealed to us all his love. The cross is the key that gives free access to “wisdom, which is not of this world, nor of the rulers of this age … God's wisdom, mysterious and hidden” (1 Corinthians 2:6-7).
The cross, in which the glorious face of the risen Christ already shines, introduces us to the fullness of Christian life and perfect love, because it reveals God's longing to share with mankind his very life, his love, his holiness. In the light of this mystery the Church, remembering the words of the Lord: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (cfr. Matthew 5:48), understands evermore clearly that her mission would be senseless if it did not lead to fullness of Christian life; that is, to perfect love and holiness. Contemplating the cross we learn to live with humility and forgiveness, peace and communion. This was the experience of St. Paul, who writes to the Ephesians: “I plead with you, then, as a prisoner for the Lord, to live a life worthy of the calling you have received, with perfect humility, meekness and patience, bearing with one another lovingly. Make every effort to preserve the unity which has the Spirit as its origin and peace as its binding force” (Ephesians 4:1-3). …
The cry of Jesus on the cross (cfr. Matthew 27:46) is not the anguish of a desperate man, it is the prayer of the Son who offers his life to the Father for the salvation of all mankind. From the cross Jesus shows the conditions that enable us to forgive. To the hatred with which his persecutors nailed him to the cross he responds with a prayer for them. He not only forgives them, he continues to love them, to want their good and to intercede for them. His death becomes the full realization of love. …
During the Last Supper, the Redeemer said to his apostles: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you too love one another. This is how all will know you for my disciples, your love for one another” (John 13: 34-35).
The risen Christ gives peace to his disciples. The Church, faithful to the Lord's command, continues to proclaim and spread his peace. Through evangelization believers help people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and, as pilgrims on this earth, although on different paths, we are all on our way to the common homeland that God, through ways known only to him, does not cease to indicate to us. The main road of mission is sincere dialogue (cfr. “Ad Gentes,” 7, “Nostra Aetate,” 2); “dialogue does not originate from tactical concerns of self-interest” (“Redemptoris Missio,” 56) nor is it an end in itself. Dialogue instead speaks to others with respect and understanding, stating the principles in which we believe and proclaiming with love the most profound truths of the faith, which are joy, hope and meaning of life. In fact dialogue is the realization of a spiritual impulse leading “to inner purification and conversion which, if pursued with docility to the Holy Spirit, will be spiritually fruitful” (ibid.). Commitment for attentive and respectful dialogue is a “conditio sine qua non” for authentic witness of God's saving love.
This dialogue is linked closely with readiness to forgive, because a person who forgives opens the hearts of others and learns to love and understand others entering into harmony with them. Because the act of pardoning, after the example of Jesus, challenges and opens hearts, heals the wounds of sin and division and creates real communion.
Mission Sunday
The celebration of Mission Sunday offers everyone an opportunity for self-examination on the demands of God's infinite love. Love which calls for faith; love which tells us to put all our trust in him. “Without faith it is impossible to please him. Anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists, and he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).
On this annual recurrence we are called to pray assiduously for the missions and to cooperate with every means in the Church's activity all over the world to build up the kingdom of God, “an eternal and universal kingdom: a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace” (Preface for the Feast of Christ the King). We are called to bear witness first of all with our life to our total adhesion to Christ and to his Gospel.
Yes, we must never be ashamed of the Gospel and never be afraid of proclaiming that we are Christians, hiding our faith. Instead we must continue to speak to extend the spaces for proclaiming salvation, because Jesus has promised to be with us forever and he is always in the midst of his disciples.
Mission Sunday, the feast day of mission, helps us discover the value of our personal and community vocation. It stimulates us to reach out to “my least brothers” (cfr. Matthew 25:40) through missionaries in every part of the world. This is the task of the Pontifical Mission Societies, which have always been at the service of the Church's mission, ensuring that the least ones are not lacking those who break with them the bread of the Word and continue to bring them the gift of inexhaustible love that gushes from the heart of the Savior.
Dearest brothers and sisters, let us entrust this commitment to proclaim the Gospel and indeed the whole evangelizing activity of the Church to most holy Mary, queen of missions. May she accompany us on our journey of discovering, proclaiming and witnessing to the love of God, who forgives and gives peace to mankind.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Catholic Europe Toes EU's Anti-Church Line on Life Issues DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:BRUSSELS, Belgium—There is much talk in Europe these days of “European values”—partly in response to the success of far-right candidate Jean Marie Le Pen in the first round of the recent French presidential election, and in response to the rise of a libertarian/anti-immigration party in Holland that was founded by Pim Fortuyn, who was recently shot dead by an extremist Green activist.
These European values at first glance seem unobjectionable. They are the values of all liberal democracies—respect for minority rights, freedom of religion, tolerance, etc. But when these values are translated into policies problems arise, because in practice they often turn out to be the values of the radical, egalitarian, secular left.
Or at least one might think problems would arise, because they ought to be troubling to Catholic countries such as Ireland, Spain, Portugal or Italy. It may be the case that Catholicism is not the force it once was in these countries, but nonetheless many of the edicts and policies issuing from the European Union are so radically at odds with the values of many ordinary people in such places as Ireland that alarm bells should be ringing.
How is it, for example, that an Irish government representative can travel to the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels and agree to an initiative by the EU to provide funding for human embryo research?
And how is it possible that the Irish government can acquiesce when a European Union delegation turns up at another U.N. conference, speaking on behalf of all EU countries, and aggressively insists on inserting references to “reproductive rights” (read abortion) into that conference's document?
Embryo Research
On May 7 a meeting took place in Brussels between the EU's governing Council of Ministers, the Commission (which floats initiatives that must be approved by the Council), and the European Parliament (which must approve expenditure).
Under discussion was the Caudron report. This report investigates whether or not the EU should fund “therapeutic” cloning, human embryo research, stem cell research, etc. While it recommends that “reproductive” cloning should not receive EU funding, it endorses research on so-called “surplus” embryos created through in vitro fertilization treatments and research using embryonic stem cells—both of which the Catholic Church has condemned as gravely immoral.
The Spanish government currently holds the presidency of the European Union and so is in charge of negotiations between the member states of the EU and between the various EU institutions. At no point has it raised any real ethical objections to what the Commission is proposing.
Several European countries ban embryo research under their own laws or constitutions. They are: Ireland, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Italy and Spain. Only one of these countries, Germany, sent a meaningful set of guidelines to the Spanish negotiator that in any way reflected its own national laws.
Ireland did say that it absolutely opposed cloning. It also said that it objected to the manufacture of embryos for the specific purpose of research.
But note what it did not say—it did not say it objected to research being carried out on embryos that have already been brought into existence, for example, by fertility clinics.
Embryo research cannot take place in Ireland, but the Irish government will fund it via the EU since the EU will pay for it out of a central pot to which Irish taxpayers contribute.
Child Summit
In May, the United Nations hosted a child summit in New York. The EU, as usual, sent a delegation. As mentioned above, it wanted reproductive rights recognized in the end-of-summit document. The EU position paper did mention the family, but only because pro-family members of the European Parliament, among them Ireland's Dana Rosemary Scallon, had won a desperate battle against their feminist-minded counterparts before the position paper was finalized.
Pro-life/pro-family delegates who attend these conferences often remark how disappointed they are at the positions adopted by countries such as Ireland and even Malta. Malta is as Catholic today as Ireland was 30 years ago, but still it mainly goes along with the EU line. How can this be when it isn't even a member of the EU?
The answer is not hard to find—it is because it is led by a government that wants to see Malta become a part of the EU and so is learning to toe the party line.
In the short-term view it is hard to see what Catholics and others who oppose anti-life and anti-family policies can do about this. There is a rigid consensus among all the main parties in Europe about all the major issues, whether economic or social. The media usually go along with this consensus; indeed, many EU correspondents often have the same slavish attitude towards the European Commission that Pravda correspondents once had towards the Kremlin.
In the long-term view, Europe will likely see a growing number of voters turn in desperation to anyone who will challenge Europe's cozy consensus. Often this will be extremist parties such as Le Pen's National Front. When this happens Europe's elites will have no one but themselves to blame.
But when it does happen, real differences might emerge among the main European parties again as they respond to their electorates. One of those differences might concern family and life issues. Those who support the traditional family and oppose the culture of death can only hope so.
David Quinn is editor of the Irish Catholic.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Quinn ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:A New Catholic Nation Is Born in Asia
ASSOCIATED PRESS, May 19—Overwhelmingly Catholic East Timor marked a new phase in its history on Sunday as the one-time colony of Portugal celebrated its independence from Indonesia—a majority-Muslim country that invaded 24 years ago and waged a month-long genocidal campaign against separatists in 1999.
As Associated Press reported, East Timor's independence day began with a Mass. Catholic Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, who shared a 1996 Nobel Peace Prize with independence activist Jose Ramos-Horta, welcomed 500 visitors in his garden for the liturgy.
Echoing the bishop's homily, Ramos-Horta said, “My message for this morning's service is peace, tolerance and forgiveness. We are very happy. We are a proud and simple people who deserve peace, who deserve freedom.”
Statesmen in attendance included East Timor's president-elect, Xanana Gusmao, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.
The U.N.'s refugee agency has reported that more than 200,000 East Timorese refugees have come back since the end of Indonesia's 1999 rampage in the territory, sparked by its referendum vote for independence.
Australia provides some 1,500 troops of the 5,000 international peacekeepers who shepherded East Timor to independence. The new island nation will sign a treaty with Australia next week, dividing up East Timor's extensive oil and natural gas reserves. East Timor will receive 90% of the revenues from those reserves, which are not expected to start flowing until 2005, Associated Press reported.
In the meantime, the country faces extreme poverty and will be utterly dependent on international aid.
Americans Want a Fair Mideast Settlement
Bill Maxwell, columnist for The St. Petersburg Times, cited a survey of 801 U.S. citizens, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which revealed that 58% of respondents believe the United States should play an “even-handed” role with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The respondents were equally sympathetic toward both sides in the crisis—again pitting public opinion against that of most U.S. senators and representatives,” Maxwell wrote, noting “respondents blame Israelis and Palestinians equally for failed peace efforts.”
The questions were crafted in consultation with both the Israeli Embassy and the Palestinian Mission to the United Nations. Some 75% of those polled said they “closely follow” news about the Mideast.
British Opposition Party Fights Homosexual Adoption Bill
The Tories will try to recruit support from more socially conservative Laborites, bishops and nonpartisan Lords, the paper said.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who often attends Mass with his Catholic wife, joined with other members of parliament in his ruling Labor Party in supporting the homosexual adoption measure.
Conservative peer Lady Young is expected to lead the fight against relaxing the law. She told The Telegraph, “Recent events in Europe show what happens when politicians ignore the voters,” referring to surprisingly strong showings by right-wing parties in France and Holland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Saving Marriage DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:The federal marriage amendment recently introduced in Congress would add two small but immensely significant sentences to the U.S. Constitution: “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.”
The idea is to stop in its tracks the out-of-control train that is pulling homosexual-marriage laws into state after state following Vermont.
When voters are asked, they say No to homosexual marriage. They did so in California and many other states that have passed “defense of marriage” laws.
Nonetheless, adding an amendment to the Constitution is the hard way to go about changing the law. It needs two-thirds approval by both houses of Congress, followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states. But the amendment's supporters say that in this case it's the only way to keep marriage from being redefined by the courts.
Unfortunately, the courts are the easy way to go about changing law.
Homosexual activists' lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts put a nail in the coffin of marriage when Boston's Suffolk Superior Court awarded them a victory in late May. The case will now be appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court there.
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, fresh from its success in Vermont, brought the case to Boston on behalf of seven life-long homosexual couples who they say have been discriminated against by the state in their attempts to get marriage licenses.
Homosexual activists didn't pick Massachusetts at random. They love the Bay State, the place where last year the high court forced homosexuals on the organizers of St. Patrick's Day parade in a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously opposed.
Matt Daniels at the Alliance for Marriage and Family predicts that the case is very likely to result in a defeat for traditional marriage by sometime in early 2003.
That's bad news, and not just for Massachusetts. Once homosexuals have gotten marriage-style rights in one state, they'll quickly move into other states, which will be hard-pressed to oppose them in the courts (more than 80% of couples who joined legal “civil unions” have moved out of Vermont, by some estimates). The Equal Protection Clauses and Full Faith and Credit Clauses of the constitution will be invoked on behalf of homosexual couples. Courts will foist these couples on state after state.
Even those states that have passed specific defense-of-marriage measures will be defenseless against the court assault, which neatly sidesteps the issue of the state's own laws. And those laws, following the Massachusetts momentum, will likely begin to change rapidly, also.
Can the homosexual marriage juggernaut be stopped? Maybe.
A vociferous laity can help. Connecticut's Catholic Conference recently confronted a behind-the-scenes legislative assault on traditional marriage in the statehouse.
Marie Hilliard, executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference, alerted Catholics and others to the danger, and got the names and phone numbers of state legislators into as many hands as possible.
A phone assault on the statehouse began and, by the end, the bill was dead. It seems lawmakers had become squeamish about public reaction. “This was accomplished by the hundreds of faithful who made calls,” said Hilliard.
The moral: When concerned voters speak, politicians listen. Perhaps it's time to tell them what we think about the federal marriage amendment?
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Liturgy and Language DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:I have appreciated your articles about English in the liturgy in recent months. While I was enrolled in a typical 12-year program studying for the priesthood in the '50s and '60s, I was required to study Latin for six years and Greek for three. After I left the seminary to pursue a calling to marriage and a career in education, I maintained interest in Latin and Greek because so many seminal documents of Christian theology and spirituality are written in these languages. In my professional library I keep seven lexicons of Greek and Latin, as well as Latin and Greek grammar textbooks.
Because I appreciate the Latin I was required to study in the seminary, I pray parts of the Divine Office daily in Latin. I purchased a four-volume Liturgia Horarum from Libreria Editrice Vaticana in 1994 since I had grave concerns over ICEL [mis]translations and because I wanted to offer prayers for priests who no longer prayed the Divine Office, for whatever reason, even though it was translated into English.
In the early '90s, I had begun to read criticisms about English translations. I got out my Latin and Greek versions of the sacred Scripture, and my lexicons and grammars, and saw that ICEL was mistranslating or paraphrasing where a more literal translation would have been completely acceptable to speakers of English “in the pews.” Hence, I am so pleased that the National Catholic Register is providing Catholics [in the clerical and lay ranks] with coverage about English versions of the Mass.
I should add, though, that the new lectionary also suffers from translation problems. For example, in the Gospels, in Greek and in Latin versions, there is no mention of Jesus being crucified with “revolutionaries,” as the newlectionary reads. The Greek and Latin words, as well as prior English versions such as the Revised Standard Version / Catholic Edition, indicate clearly that the other two crucified persons were “robbers.” Although calling one of the crucified “The Good Thief” is somewhat close, a “thief” is clearly different from a robber—but a “revolutionary” is not even close to the semantic features of the original Greek and Latin words.
If Scripture experts want to mention their views [based on information not contained in the sacred Scriptures] that these two men were revolutionaries, they should place their commentary in a footnote. But they should not change the wording of the sacred Scripture itself.
Few seminarians ordained in recent decades have engaged in Latin, Greek and Hebrew studies as Vatican II instructed. Hence it is vital that bishops and scholars who know classical Greek, Latin and Hebrew appoint commissions and translators who respect the integrity of the ancient and original languages.
The sacred Scriptures are absolutely essential and central to our Catholic faith. Our bishops, whom we Catholics love, respect and pray for, need to take greater responsibility for English translations of the Bible, the lectionary, the Mass and other official prayers of the Church—just as they need to take far greater responsibility for reforming seminary education and the moral and spiritual formation of priests in light of the recent sex scandals in the Church in America.
GERALD H. MARING, PH.D
Pullman, Washington
Succession Planning
I am a subscriber and assiduous cover-to-cover reader of the paper. I would like to point out that your Inbrief note “Dean Ratzinger and the Pope” (May 19-25) is somewhat erroneous.
First of all, Cardinal Bernardin Gantin lost the right to participate in the conclave when he turned 80 on May 8 but did not have to step down from the deanship of the College of Cardinals. Cardinal Ratzinger is still the sub-dean. Moreover, Cardinal Gantin (if he is still dean) will, upon the death of the Pope, notify all heads of state and cardinals and convoke them to the conclave. He will receive condolences from the heads of state and will also preside over concelebration of the Eucharist for the deceased Pope with all the members of the college. This is what Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri did twice in 1978.
SALVADOR MIRANDA
Miami, Florida
Roman Holiday
I enthusiastically applaud your comments in the editorial “The Summit's Lessons” (May 5-11), about eliminating homosexuality from the seminaries and not admitting more homosexuals, as this is too heavy a burden for them and will perpetuate the scandal we are enduring now. I do hope all of the bishops will come to that conclusion.
Unfortunately, our bishop, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that, if a man has led a chaste life and he is homosexual, he should be given the chance to serve as a priest. I think the vast majority of the laity don't want to take that risk.
You opened your editorial by tweaking the media for its sensationalism in covering the scandals, and indeed the anti-Catholics in the media are enjoying the scandal. There is another side to this though; if the media didn't sensationalize the story, the cover-ups by the bishops would continue. Even after the hype was in full swing, we read a communiqué from the cardinals that indicated they would remove “notorious” and “serial” abusers, when everyone was expecting the “one strike and you're out” policy. Ironically, we have to thank the media for hyping the story because there was no movement by the bishops to clean up the mess before that.
It is time to admit that the Church is sustaining an even greater scandal, i.e., failure to provide the Church's teaching on sexual morality to the laity. Oh yes, the bishops write great words, but the words are not preached to the people and the vast majority don't read the bishops' writings. Also, we see Catholic entities providing honors to prominent promoters of abortion. Recently Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, received an award from Loyola University in New Orleans, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., recently spoke to Jesuit graduates at a Catholic church in Washington, D.C., on “The Challenge of Choosing Wisely.”
If a Catholic just attended church as required, he would certainly get the feeling that contraception and abortion are permissible, because the culture enthusiastically embraces them and the Church says nothing against them.
RICHARD A. RETTA
Rockville, Maryland
Pray for Priests
The world seems to be saying, “What hope is there in religion when those who we look to for guidance could be in worse shape than we?” It seems to be setting a bad precedent for all kinds of blasphemy and blatant disrespect for the Church. Suddenly, everyone thinks they have license to say any manner of evil against the Church—not only non-Catholics, but members of our own body!
Our faith is not to rest in the priesthood itself, but in Jesus Christ, who established it. This [crisis] is a call to faith, love and prayer for the Church and for our priests. It is a test of our commitment, for better or worse, and yes, up to death do us part. To the degree we value the Church and the sacraments, we will value and respect the priesthood, no matter what befalls it.
Our priests are there when we ourselves fall—they absolve our sins. They give us the precious Body and Blood of our Lord, without which we would be just another denomination, an empty church.
Yes, the accused have succumbed to temptation, which is unfortunate for all involved; however, it seems that because they are priests, no one thinks they deserve mercy. Folks, this is why Jesus came. His infinite mercy saves us from ourselves. Because we are human, it doesn't happen overnight, but salvation is always a process, if we cooperate with it.
Brothers and sisters, have faith, hope and love—Jesus has already overcome the world and he is rich in mercy for those who seek and trust in him. Let us stand by our brother priests, pray for them every day, offer them our hand of friendship, affirm and love them unconditionally, as our Savior did when he chose to die on the cross for them and for the whole world.
JACQUELINE STUTMANN
Langley Air Force Base, Virginia
Even the Ads Exhort
We look forward each week to your great newspaper. I read it from front to back, (or maybe from back to front) and devour every article.
It's so informative, and we read about things we'd never hear about elsewhere.
My main reason for writing is to ask if anyone ever comments on the ads. Specifically, the ads for religious orders, both for men and for women. They are so inspirational. Those young ladies look so happy and the young men do, too. What's more, it gives the lie to those who say that there aren't any more good religious orders, or that there just aren't any more good priests or nuns. We know better.
MARY WHITE
Villa Park, Illinois
Singles are Called to Celibacy
Many articles in both the secular and the religious press have discussed the discipline of priestly celibacy. The prevailing tone in the articles I have read tends to give the impression that celibacy is somehow unique to the priesthood. What needs to be kept in mind is that all single people, not just priests, are called to celibacy! For priests it is a lifelong, vowed commitment. However, single lay people (such as myself) are also called to celibacy for as long as they remain single, be that for just a few years until marriage or for a lifetime in the case of those who never marry. I believe that priestly celibacy is a treasure, and eliminating it (as some have been advocating) will solve nothing.
ARTHUR W. PETERSON
Richmond, California
Curtain Call for Celibacy
Your article “Celibacy Isn't the Problem—It's the Answer, Say Priests” (May 19-25) was wonderful.
Every Catholic needs to read it. This is an issue that even the strongest Catholics are struggling with.
Most know that changing the rules on celibacy is not the answer, put perhaps cannot articulate a good argument. This definitely helps.
Will you please make it available electronically?
I've got a few hundred people I'd like to send it to.
MARTY WALSH
Coppell, Texas
Editor's note: The article is posted on www.ncregister.com.
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: What's the Cure for the Common Individualism? Corpus Christi DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:On this feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ—
Sunday, June 2, formerly known as Corpus Christi—we American Catholics could do worse than to stop and think about the premium our society places on individualism. The effects of individualism are felt wherever unauthorized innovations undermine the true faith. They are manifest when divorce, contraception and abortion ruin family life. We see an over emphasis on individualism when corporate greed creates social crises and pork-barrel politics make them worse.
To find a solution, we must go back 500 years to the golden age of Catholic corporatism. Eamon Duffy's book The Stripping of the Altars gives us a richly detailed portrait of English society in the late Middle Ages, before the Protestant Reformation dissolved the bonds of Christian community.
Corporatism is derived from the Latin word corpus, which means body. The consecrated Host was originally called the corpus mysticum, or mystical body. The Church itself was termed the corpus verum, or true body. Having been entrusted with the mystical body of Christ, the Church represented Christ in the real world.
Over time, these terms were inverted, so that the eucharistic species was seen as the true Body, and the Church became known as the mystical body. As Cardinal Josef Ratzinger has argued in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, this switch in meaning made little difference. The point is that all of civil society formed a body which had a dynamic union with the Body of Christ.
In practical terms, this meant that Christian rulers were responsible to Christ and the Church for their actions. If they behaved unjustly, they could be, and frequently were, cut off from the Body of Christ until they repented.
The Church's role as moral watchdog for the state was one type of corporatism. Another had to do with the guilds which regulated economic activity. Guilds were the first corporations, a term which, not coincidentally, derives from corpus. Like modern corporations, guilds were licensed by communities to perform socially useful functions and received privileges in return.
Unlike today's corporations, guilds were integrated into the life of the Church. Many trades had special patron saints and feast days that the Church observed and defended. By honoring these feasts, the Church guaranteed that laborers would have leisure time and, thus, protected them from exploitation. Through the guilds, the Church also prevented other abuses, such as price gouging, forestalling, engrossing and usury.
In return, the guilds supported the Church by endowing chapels and benefices, paying for church renovations and sponsoring public devotions. Fittingly, these devotions often had a eucharistic emphasis. During the liturgy of Holy Week, for example, the Blessed Sacrament was reserved in an “Easter sepulcher” that became the focus of prayer for the community. These sepulchers were built and maintained by the guilds.
Community ravaged by individualism? Enthrone the Body of Christ as lord of the body politic.
Corpus Christi devotions were the epitome of guild piety. The traditional procession on that feast offered a dramatic witness to Catholic corporatism. The Blessed Sacrament was borne through the streets to testify that the body of the community sprang directly from the Body of Christ.
The guilds gave the Church leverage in society. But Duffy argues that they also increased the influence of the laity within the Church. The guilds' financial contributions gave them some say in Church affairs, as did their role in planning liturgical events like Corpus Christi.
To some extent, the various ecclesial movements of lay people, such as Opus Dei and Focolare, have inherited the role played by the guilds. But these movements do not exhaust the possibilities of Catholic corporatism. Within parishes, in humble cooperation with clergy, lay people should form societies to promote worthwhile devotions.
In keeping with the idea of corporatism, eucharistic piety should be the first aim of these modern guilds. Indeed, perpetual and nocturnal adoration societies have begun to flourish again. There is no better way to promote individual devotion while proclaiming the integrity of the community.
Our medieval fathers teach us that the Body of Christ and the body of the community are indissolubly linked. The best way to restore a community ravaged by individualism, then, is to do honor and reverence to the Corpus Christi, to enthrone him as the lord of the body politic.
Such devotion will eventually spill over into society at large. At present, those bodies we call “corporations” bear little resemblance to true Catholic corporations. Modern corporations receive privileges—tax breaks and zoning variances, for example—from the states. Unlike the guilds, however, they generally take little responsibility for the communities they are supposed to serve.
It may never be possible to restore the guild system, which gave the Church a powerful voice in civil society and lay people an honored place in the Church. But if we Catholics adore the true corpus in all our parishes, the fruitful collaboration of clergy and laity, so much desired by the Holy Father, will become a reality.
Scott McDermott writes from Nashville, Tennessee
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Scott Mcdermott ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Sins Make Us Face Facts DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:A young military officer wrote me recently. “Have you written anything,” he wanted to know, “on pederasty in the priesthood? So many facets of this are very troubling for those of us who raise our families in the Church. Still, we must fight what seems to be a natural impulse to withdraw from the Church in an effort to shelter our children and ourselves.”
“Very troubling facets” is putting it mildly. From those segments of the Church that are dangers, one should “shelter our children and ourselves.” We never suspected danger on that front.
The American bishops and cardinals who convened in Rome with the Holy Father to discuss the situation, showing it is not just a problem for the laity, said: “We know the heavy burden of sorrow and shame that you (priests) are bearing because some have betrayed the grace of ordination by abusing those entrusted to their care.” Christ came to call sinners, including clerical sinners, perhaps them above all. The Holy Father has been careful, as a matter of principle, not to deny the basic Christian supposition that men are free, that they can repent. Such a free way is the proper way in any sinful situation.
But St. Thomas tells us that law can be used to coerce those whose sins are more dangerous to others. Sin is broader than law, but law needs to be invoked at times. Part of the trouble today is our confusion in the civil order about just what is right and wrong. Christ did not need to explain to us that such sins as these are sins. We are not to be confused about that fact.
A lady wrote: “I am not sure that a convocation of red hats in Rome did a thing. I hope something concrete comes out of the Dallas meeting in June. We need to see some higher-ups go. People are much more disturbed about the cover-up than they are about the dreadful abuse.” This comment seems right. The puzzle about the current scandals is not that they happen—“Woe to thee by whom they come”—but about the ineptitude in identifying them and facing them in time. Until the public scandal and legal costs, nothing much happened.
The good thing about sins, often-times, is that they make us face facts. The Church is an institution designed to forgive sins. But it is also an institution formed, whether we like it or not, to spell out what exactly sins are. Active homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia—today such things are called “human rights.” Meantime, the Church itself constantly affirms “human rights.” Not surprisingly, people are confused when the practice of certain “rights” is advocated or found within a Church that officially rejects them. In one sense, this crisis is also a crisis of the Church's own loose usage of the term “rights,” something of less than pious origins in modern thought.
Seeing the Right
The public astonishment at this unclarity over whether the Church accepts “all” rights has long needed attention. The Wall Street Journal editorial had it right about the meaning of the problem in an April 26 editorial:
“So there is outrage in the pews. … Like the Pope, millions of American Catholics have been grievously wounded to learn that priests entrusted with the innocence of their children have betrayed them—and that their bishops used the collection plate to pay off millions in hush money to victims. There is, however, a parallel anger at work here, which proceeds from different motives. It represents a mindset that has long viewed the Catholic Church—correctly—as one of the last institutional voices objecting to anything-goes sexual morality. Think of the irony: A sex-drenched American media culture is now upbraiding the Catholic Church for being too forgiving toward licentious sexual behavior. … When we talk about hostility to the Catholic Church, we are talking about a culture that sees the Church as one of the few institutions willing to say no.”
What particularly bothers many clerics and laity, I suspect, is the slowness of bishops and superiors to affirm this “no.” Many worry about a perceived failure to back up the theoretic suppositions of philosophy and theology that require them clearly to state this “no,” to explain effectively its meaning and justification. The Pope has often been left to do this all by himself.
Neither in the Church nor the culture can we have it both ways. We cannot say, first, that homosexuality and pedophilia are “rights” and, secondly, that priests practicing the same “rights” are wrong. The obviousness of this contradiction has more recently effected a lessening of media interest in this troubling topic. We have, in the name of “rights,” chastised the military services and the Boy Scouts for being leery of active homosexuals within their structures. It turns out that there is good reason for this caution.
Maggie Gallagher, a mother of two sons, said it succinctly in the March 14 Washington Times: “The Catholic tradition teaches that men and women are made for each other. Any sexual union outside of marriage between a man and a woman is wrong. But all of us are subject to sexual temptations, and there is nothing in Catholic theology to suggest God is harder on same-sex sins than any other kind. I still believe that. But now certain sexual—not theological—truths seem apparent, too: It is simply not practical for an all-male organization committed to celibacy to ordain men who are sexually attracted to males. Am I the only one who sees this?”
Evidently, everyone is beginning to see it.
Shaping Things to Come
We should not forget that there are those who promote pedophilia as a “right.” The age of consent is pressured ever downward. As commentator John Leo has pointed out, there are advocates of pedophilia as just another “normal” practice; the only problem for them, of course, is those moralistic dullards who think something is wrong with it.
Some within the Church publicly maintain that, if the Church had a married clergy, no restrictions on sexual practice, and none of this anti-contraceptive or anti-abortion nonsense, all would be well. The problem, it is said, is celibacy—if not the commandments themselves. Of course, if the Church were to buy this doctrine, after 2,000 years of teaching the opposite, there would be no reason for any sane person ever to belong to the Church. Consistency remains a Catholic virtue. Philip Jenkins is right: “This is not a celibacy problem with frustrated priests being driven to perversion and molestation,” he wrote in the March 26 Wall Street Journal. “It is, in the end, a fundamental cultural conflict, the outcome of which will script the future shape of American Catholicism.”
The “moment of grace” is present. The popular culture has long said “yes” to sexual libertarianism, but now finds itself agreeing with the Catholic Church that some things practiced under that umbrella are clearly wrong. It is one thing to delight in the Church's embarrassment over having arbitrary, even inhuman, “rules” about certain males in orders, and then seeing those same “arbitrary” orders disobeyed. The temptation to cry “hypocrisy” is great.
But the logic remains. If it is “right” for everyone, it cannot be “wrong” for the clergyman without violating his fundamental “rights.” But if it is wrong for everyone, it follows that something is wrong with the culture.
In the end, for those who insist that homosexuality is a “right,” it is best to change the subject. It is too dangerous. The “moment of grace” is that the bishops also begin to see the necessity of upholding their own rules both in theory and practice.
Jesuit Father James Schall teaches political science at Georgetown University.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: James V. Schall ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Gen-JP2: We're Here. We Don't Fear. Get Used to It. DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:It has been difficult to find hope in the future of the Church during this time of crisis and trial.
Yet, for all those with eyes to see and ears to hear, a revolution of love—focused on the person of Jesus Christ and firmly planted in the Catholic Church—has been quietly gaining strength during the last two decades.
Responding to the invitations of Pope John Paul II, roving mobs of young foot-soldiers for Christ have made high-visibility pilgrimages to sites around the world. Then they've gone forth and carried the Good News to every sector of society. These members of the “JP2 generation” have set up camp in Buenos Aires, Santiago de Compostela, Czestochowa, Denver, Manila, Paris and Rome. In late July, they will descend upon Toronto for five days of liturgy, sacraments, worship and the joy of sharing Jesus with the successor of St. Peter—and with one another.
It will be an exciting and transformative five days. How do I know? I was there in Denver in 1993, there in Paris in 1997. And I wouldn't miss Toronto for the world.
As we have at past International World Youth Days, we will, at this 17th such occasion, meditate on the words of Jesus Christ: “You are the salt of the earth … You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14). And we will walk away forever changed by the experience.
The last World Youth Day to be held on North American soil was hosted by the city of Denver in August 1993. At that time, young Catholics gathered in the mile-high city to proclaim the fullness of life that can only come from Jesus Christ. They carried their message of hope for the world through the streets of Denver as they trekked more than 15 miles to Cherry Creek State Park for an overnight prayer service with the Holy Father. Following their meeting in the developed world, they next desired to stand with the poor in Asia. In 1995, they held the largest outdoor gathering in human history on the least Christian continent in the world. In the city of Manila, Philippines, a young Asian woman galvanized the sense of unity among the throngs when she proclaimed, in the name of all those present: “Holy Father, we are not afraid to become saints!”
During the last five years, the JP2 generation has not shrunk from doing its part to foster a culture of life. In 1997, confounding the dim expectations of the French media, more than 2 million young people descended upon Paris in order to call the people of France—“the Church's eldest daughter”—back to their Catholic heritage. Then, during the most recent international World Youth Day, they gathered around the tomb of St. Peter in Rome during the Jubilee Year—the 2,000th anniversary of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.
We are fighting a spiritual battle that will not only define our young lives as committed Catholic men and women, but will soon come to have lasting effects on the future life of the Church and the world. And the results are unmistakable.
Indeed, the effects of these international meetings with Pope John Paul II are measurable far beyond their original context at World Youth Day. In our own country, an unprecedented number of young Catholic men and women turned out to vote for pro-life and pro-family candidates during the most recent elections and the same seems to be in order for the gubernatorial races this year. American colleges and universities across the nation have founded new programs geared to making their students the future leaders of the new evangelization—and the same colleges and universities have reported enthusiastic responses from their respective student bodies.
Young policy groups and think tanks in Washington, D.C., New York City and elsewhere have found practical ways to build a civilization of love; World Youth Alliance, a U.N.-lobbying organization, will soon celebrate its third anniversary of service to the pro-life community at the international level.
While some have taken the Good News of Jesus Christ into the heart of the world, others have flocked to orthodox seminaries and houses of religious formation in Catholic strongholds such as Denver and Sioux Falls, S.D.
In the course of his visits to the people of every continent, Pope John Paul II has never tired of seeking out young Catholic men and women. He sees in us the face of the future of the Church, as he made clear during his 1999 visit with young people at the Kiel Center in downtown St. Louis. At the conclusion of his remarks, the Holy Father issued a strong statement that we may all do well to recall to mind during this time of crisis:
“Christ is calling you; the Church needs you; the Pope believes in you and he expects great things of you!”
To date, the JP2 generation has responded to that call with great enthusiasm and love. Look for the momentum to continue growing in Toronto and beyond.
John Paul Shimek, a philosophy major at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., will participate in a roundtable discussion on the human person in a free and just society at World Youth Day in Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Paul Shimek ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: The Joys of June DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:June is the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Sacred Heart is a great way to help your children embrace a concept that is hard even for adults to understand. How can God—almighty, spiritual, everywhere at once—be a man? Aren't men (and women) weak, fleshly and mortal? The answer lies in Jesus' heart.
In a wonderful meditation on the Sacred Heart, Pope John Paul II writes: “In the Sacred Heart of Jesus, God loves in a human way, and human love takes on a divine intensity.”
Last year, for the entire month of June, we kept a poster up in our dining room. It was a picture of a tree, leafless in the winter. Every day we read a little bit about the Sacred Heart. Each child picked colorful, construction-paper “leaves” from a basket to attach to the branches, making the tree “come alive.”
On the leaves were pieces of paper, prepared ahead of time, containing different little prayers to the Sacred Heart. “Pray that you may learn to be kind to everyone,” said one. “Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like yours,” said another.
The children loved gluing these to the tree so much that we also let them add plain leaves (without the prayers) so there would be more leaves to go around.
June 2 is Corpus Christi Sunday. If you're blessed with a parish that has a eucharistic procession planned, nothing can make a more profound impression on your children than seeing adults processing solemnly behind the Blessed Sacrament in the monstrance.
If they're at all confused about what it means for Christ to be present in the Eucharist, and how that's different from his presence everywhere else, this will make the concept clear. See what's in your area by checking with the Knights of Columbus or by asking at local perpetual-adoration chapels.
June 7 is the feast of the Sacred Heart. It's also the first Friday in June—a good day to go to Mass with the whole family on a weekday when you don't technically have to.
If you're not sure how to celebrate this feast, think of it as God's Valentine's Day: the day to celebrate God's passionate love for us. Tell your children that God is love, and that's why we have a whole day dedicated just to Jesus' Heart. The next day is the Immaculate Heart of Mary. You can have a love feast for two days running!
June 16 is Father's Day. It's a great time to honor our priests, who work so hard for us and, especially nowadays, could use more appreciation.
You might do what some friends and I are doing. We've made up spiritual-bouquet cards for parishioners to fill out. On each, we give a parishioner the opportunity to pledge to say certain prayers for the pastor and associate priests: Glory Be's, Hail Mary's, Our Father's, Masses, rosaries, and so on. I passed them out, on the sly, to catechism students at a potluck dinner recently.
The children made wonderful sacrifices. One small boy promised a million of every prayer. Just as touching were the children who seemed to take great care in making their promises realistic—there are many crossed-out numbers replaced with new numbers, showing that the students took their pledges seriously. We are going to present them all to the priests after Mass on Father's Day.
April Hoopes writes from Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: A Pril H Oopes ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Meditation by the Mediterranean DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:There are places in this troubled world that are so stunning in their beauty that they can transfix even the most jaded travelers on arrival.
Ravello, high atop a rocky precipice overlooking the Mediterranean sea in southern Italy, is one of those places.
To convince others that our reason for going there is really a pilgrimage is no easy task. And yet a very holy feeling is what most people experience in Ravello, a place of sublime beauty that helps us remember how enchanting God's world can be.
Such great charm, of course, did not escape the builders of the Faith, and in 1086 Ravello became a bishopric, housing by then 13 churches and four monasteries. Soon a vast cathedral was built. The Duomo (as each town's cathedral is called) is not imposing from the outside, having been often restored, except for its heavy bronze doors, exquisitely carved by Barisano da Trani in 1179. Its 54 squares depict saints and Christ's Passion.
The Duomo was begun in 1086 and dedicated to St. Pantaleone, patron of Ravello and of physicians. The bishop at that time also had an intriguing name, Orso Papirio.
St. Pantaleone's Blood
The saint's legend describes him as court physician to the Emperor Galerius. Converted from a life of indulgence to one of Christianity, he was arrested during the persecutions of Diocletian. Killing him tried the lethal skills of many until he was finally beheaded in the year 303, while a halo and other fine things appeared around him.
The late, delightful Catholic traveler H. V. Morton noted that “there was great competition for doctor saints during the Middle Ages, particularly in the maritime towns that traded with the East and were so often stricken by plague; and no doubt the bones of St. Pantaleone arrived by way of the relic trade or by tomb robbery similar to the pious burglaries that brought St. Mark's body to Venice and St. Nicholas to Bari.”
Last year, one very wet spring afternoon, I took a bus up the long, tortuous road from seaside Amalfi to Ravello. Diagonal sheets of rain quickly decimated my umbrella when I got out in Ravello, and I found myself running past the great bronze doors of the cathedral for shelter of more than one kind. Walking through its huge interior space, I heard a murmuring and soon found myself kneeling with a rosary group, intoning “Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, ora per noi peccatori
…” None of the local women at prayer seemed annoyed by the squishy shoes of the dripping foreigner.
When we finished, I walked around the church, so simple inside yet graced with great artistic dignity by a stunning pulpit dating from 1272. Its oblong lectern of marble and exquisite mosaic designs perches on six slim, twisting columns that rest on the backs of growling, toothy lions.
Near the pulpit stands a rare mosaic work in which Jonah is clearly seen being devoured by the whale, a metaphor for Christ's descent into the underworld before the Resurrection.
St. Pantaleone's side altar was built in 1643 to honor the doctor saint. His feast day is July 27, when his blood is apt to liquefy in its reliquary ampoule.
Apart from the natural beauty of Ravello and much of the Amalfi coast below, Ravello derives much of its earthly charm from the delicate columns and arches of its Arab Norman past. King Roger the Norman occupied southern Italy during the 11th century, about the time of the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
Contact then with the Middle East was frequent, unfortunately, because of the Crusades. Then, too, Amalfi's status as a major port made it a cultural crossroads. The Arab civilization of the time, particularly in nearby Sicily, was among the most advanced in the world in art and literature.
From the cathedral, the grand garden-rich villas of Ravello are a short walk. The Villa Rufolo was once home to Pope Hadrian
IV. Hadrian's short 12th-century reign saw this first English Pope alllied with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa and being rejected by the Roman commune; he surely enjoyed his respite here. Villa Cimbrone, from its seaside end, has one of the finest panoramas of coast, sea and sky that I have ever seen. Afternoons are the best time in summer to enjoy an unhazy view from its belvedere. On the way into Villa Cimbrone, notice the figures of the Seven Deadly Sins in a cloister-like area.
Among other churches in Ravello that merit a stop, you'll find the 12th-century church of San Giovanni del Toro, with its persian-inspired mosaics and a frescoed crypt open to visitors.
Look for the charming domes shown in many illustrations of Ravello, such as the one atop the 13th-century Annunciata, on a level below the Villa Rufolo. Two other churches are located nearby, Santa Maria delle Grazie and San Pietro (Peter). From here the more athletic can continue down through the tiny village of Torello and onward to the major beach town of Minori.
Before leaving Ravello, I always find another tiny holy-water font (aquasantiera) for my collection, available here at a very modest price. Some are about a little finger long, in ceramics. In Piazza Duomo itself, which is very large, many small shops sell ceramics of good quality and other imaginative works, such as an intricate Nativity scene carved out of coral.
Like so many Italian towns in which the modern mingles so easily with the ancient, Ravello beckons the tourist looking for rest and relaxation—while rewarding the pilgrim looking for a special place to pray.
Barbara Coeyman Hults is based in New York City.
----- EXCERPT: The coastal beauty of Ravello, Italy ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman Hult ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: From Dolls to the Divine DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:For artist Yolanda Bello-Bogdanyi, the transition from secular assignments to sacred works has been seamless.
In 1996, after 30 successful years as a sculptor, she changed her medium to painting. A steady stream of commissions has followed; her recent clients have included the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass., the Missionaries of Charity in Bronx, N.Y., and a number of parish churches.
Venezuelan-born Bello Bogdanyi, herself a lay Missionary of Charity, arrived in the United States in 1966. Married last December, she and her husband Francis established St. Joseph Enterprises, Workers of Sacred Art, on March 19 in Omaha, Neb. She spoke with Register correspondent Joseph Pronechen about her work and her ministry.
Why the thematic shift from the secular to the sacred?
After sculpting for many years in the secular world, I got a contract as a doll designer. I always gravitated to do babies; I loved to [depict] the beginning of life and the beauty of life. Always I've been fiercely pro-life. My name became very well-known. Any time I was interviewed, they usually asked what I thought about all these middle-aged women holding dolls.
I would always say the same thing: It seems to me they're missing the pitter-patter of 20 million babies who never got to live. From the mid-'80s to the late '90s, the No. 1 collectible in the world was dolls. Why? They're substitutes. How else do you explain the doll-collecting business going through the roof when the birthrate is the lowest?
So, philosophically, I felt I was already in sacred art.
What response do you hope your work elicits from those who view it?
Hopefully God can use it to reach hearts. The 50-foot wall mural I did for the Missionaries of Charity is across from a park where there are many drug addicts. Some amazing things have happened with people stopping to kneel and pray in front of the mural.
Did Pope John Paul II's 1999 Letter to Artists make an impact on your work?
Yes. He verbalized what I take very seriously. The Holy Father placed on our shoulders the responsibility that what people are led to believe is clearly formed by the artists who illustrate it. He says we have to bear the responsibility of the imagination out there. What is between the lines is that we artists—we who form people's imaginations—have often used our talent to demean human dignity.
Do you approach sacred-art projects differently than you approached secular projects?
The whole point of sacred art is that people are drawn to prayer. So I strive to exclude myself from the picture and to come, as if armed with visual cannonballs, with the message of God. I want those who view the works to be caught up in what God is trying to say to them. It's a matter of letting God work through you as an artist to reach the people in ways only an artist can present.
What advice would you give to artists making a living in the secular world who would like to move into sacred art?
You can do it two ways. I did it as a way of answering the invitation Jesus extended to the rich young man [in Mark 10:17-21]. But that response can be too traumatic for many. I know of many artists who have a calling to do sacred art. They may be working at McDonald's or at a big corporation, but their passion is to do sacred art for God, to speak the truth of God. In their free time they can engage in that which burns in their heart and allow the Holy Spirit to just flow out, whether it be on sketches or even painting their church walls.
What role does your husband have in St. Joseph Enterprises?
In every work that has come my way since we met, he has had to be involved somehow for the piece to succeed as much as it did. He handles the lettering and other technical dimensions within the project, while I'm good at bodies and expressions. For example, in the 50-foot mural we did in the Bronx, he did in minutes what may have taken me hours or days to do.
Where do you see St. Joseph Enterprises several years in the future?
Being a tool God can use to transform churches and illustrate the greatest invisible reality—his presence among us.
Joseph Pronechen is based in Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:Snow Dogs (2002)
Disney can still make pro-life, pro-family films when it wants to. Snow Dogs, based on Garr Paulsen's book Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod, is a light-hearted, slapstick comedy about a city slicker traveling to the country to discover his roots. Ted Brooks (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) is a dentist in Miami who only learns that he's adopted when his birth mother dies and leaves him a cabin and a team of sled dogs in Tolketna, Alaska. The small town's resident curmudgeon, Thunder Jack (James Coburn), wants to buy the canines so he can race them in the region's annual sled race. Ted has never gotten along with dogs, but finds he dislikes the seemingly mean-spirited Thunder Jack even more and becomes determined to win the race on his own.
The two men scheme against each other until they uncover a secret that bonds them together. Adoption is depicted in a positive light, and the choice made by Ted's birth parents not to have an abortion is implicitly applauded.
The Flying Tigers (1942)
It seems likely that future generations will get their history from Hollywood. If so, they may conclude that John Wayne won World War II. The Flying Tigers, the Duke's first war movie, sets the pattern for the films that followed. It's a fictionalized account of the American Volunteer Group, which flew against the Japanese for Chiang Kai-Shek's China under the command of Gen. Claire Chennault before Pearl Harbor. Squadron leader Jim Gordon (Wayne) is a true-blue hero—two-fisted, but fair.
Each pilot receives $500 for every Japanese plane shot down. Gordon's second-in-command, the experienced Hap Davis (Paul Kelly), has failing eyesight. The new recruit, the wise-cracking Woody Jason (John Carroll), is a lone ranger who cuts in on the kills of his fellow pilots to grab the reward. Gordon pulls everything together to make the enemy suffer, grounding Jason until he gets his head right. Director David Miller mixes the personal conflicts with well-staged aerial combat footage. The American pilots come off as mercenary and patriotic, carefree and brave.
The Remains of the Day (1993)
Director James Ivory (Howard's End) uses Kazuo Ishiguro's award-winning novel to take an imaginative look at the dark side of English aristocratic culture during the 1930s. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) is the perfect butler to the arrogant but seemingly decent Lord Darlington (James Fox). “I don't believe a man can consider himself fully content until he has done all he can to be of service to his employer,” Stevens comments.
Darlington is hosting soirees with Nazi sympathizers in a misguided effort to keep England out of war. He hires a head housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), who's critical of much that she sees around her. Stevens is at first scornful, but later develops deeper feelings for her that he doesn't know how to express.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
JUNE, VARIOUS DATES
The World Cup ABC, ESPN and ESPN2
This 32-team, month-long tournament, held every four years, attracts hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide. South Korea and Japan are the hosts this time.
The U.S. team's first match is with Portugal June 5 on ESPN2 at 4:55 a.m. ABC will present the eagerly awaited championship June 30 at 6:30 a.m.
SUNDAY, JUNE 2
When Children Adore EWTN, 10:30 a.m.
In this new show, telecast in segments today at 10:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., Father Antoine Thomas tells children about Mass, eucharistic adoration, the rosary and personal prayer. Paul Jernberg supplies music.
SUNDAY, JUNE 2
Tasting Napa Food Network, 10 p.m.
This new special about California's lovely Napa Valley lets us explore olive orchards, enjoy a family's cheese market, discover a gourmet food drivein and have a picnic.
MONDAY, JUNE 3
The Seven Wonders of the World History Channel, 9 p.m.
How many wonders of the ancient world can you name? Do any of them still exist? Refresh your memory with this fun, fact-filled special.
TUESDAY, JUNE 4
The Stanley Cup, Game 1 ESPN, 8 p.m. live
The National Hockey League's best-of-seven championship series begins. The teams were not determined as of presstime. ABC will televise some of the games.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5
NBA Finals, Game 1 NBC, 8 p.m. live
The National Basketball Association's always-exciting, best-of-seven championship series gets underway. As of our deadline the teams were not set. Note: If both conference finals end in five games or fewer, this game will take place Sunday, June 2.
WEDS.-THURS., JUNE 5-6
Knights and Armor History Channel, 6 a.m.
This two-part special uses re-enactments, interviews and painting to depict the daily life and military equipment of knights in the Middle Ages, including Crusaders.
FRIDAY, JUNE 7
The World Over EWTN, 8 p.m.
EWTN news anchor Raymond Arroyo hosts Father Richard John Neuhaus, a convert who edits the influential journal First Things.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Study Confirms the Value of Vouchers DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:Voucher participation has climbed during the past 10 years, and those who benefit the most are African-American students who attend Catholic schools, according to a recent study.
The study, “The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools,” published by the Brookings Institution, noted that most students who use vouchers have chosen to attend religious schools.
It also showed that test scores for African-Americans who use vouchers jumped 3% in first grade and doubled that gain the following year.
The study also showed that, although Catholic schools account for half of private schools, they make up more than that proportion of schools selected by voucher students. More than two-thirds of New York City students using vouchers choose Catholic schools. In Dayton, Ohio, more than half the students choose Catholic schools, and in Washington nearly half do.
During a recent conference in Washington sponsored by the Brookings Institution, two of the study's authors also pointed out other details about private schools.
For example, private-school students overwhelmingly are more likely to go to church than students from public schools, said William Howell, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“Sixty-eight percent of private-school students attend religious services,” said the professor, one of four authors of the voucher study. “Thirty-eight percent of public school students attend religious services.”
Paul Peterson, director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., also pointed out that Catholic schools educate students at half the cost of public institutions.
The study's authors said that, in the past decade, the number of students using vouchers to attend private schools climbed from about 5,000 to more than 60,000 and that nearly 50,000 of these students currently participate in 68 privately funded voucher programs and another 12,000 participate in three publicly funded programs.
In Dayton, New York and Washington, the three cities studied for the report, voucher programs are funded from private foundations.
The key distinction between privately and publicly funded voucher programs is that publicly funded vouchers expect no contributions on the part of parents while privately funded vouchers do.
The researchers concluded that this cost drives many parents to opt for charter schools, which have been gaining in popularity.
A weakness of the voucher program, according to Allan Krueger, an economist from Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., is that while students in the first and second grade post higher test scores than their public school counterparts, those in the third and fourth grades do not.
Krueger, pointing to a study of vouchers by the Mathematical Policy Institute, said that “average test scores in math went down for the group in the voucher program.”
At the Brookings conference, he said he finds the concept of vouchers “interesting,” but pointed to smaller class sizes as an alternative to achieve educational gains.
Peterson responded saying ideas about smaller class sizes and more spending have been tried for 30 years and have failed to produce results.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Malcolm A. Kline ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Patronized, But Not Put Upon DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:SAINTS FOR EVERY OCCASION:
101 OF HEAVEN'S MOST POWERFUL PATRONS
by Thomas J. Craughwell
C.D. Stampley Enterprises, 2001 432 pages, $19.95
Available in retail and online bookstores.
“Patronage” has gotten a bad rap. Associated in the popular mind with political corruption, moderns tend to regard patronage as something baneful.
But patronage has a good side. Because a pope was his patron, an Italian ceiling painter named Michelangelo got to decorate the Sistine Chapel. Today we call patronage “mentoring” or “networking”—but the idea is the same: People need people to achieve their goals, natural or supernatural.
Heavenly patronage is the subject of Craughwell's book. He assembles the lives of 101 saints, designated by Church teaching or popular practice as “patrons,” and recounts their stories.
Some are old favorites: St. Anthony, patron of those searching for lost things: St. Jude, patron of hopeless causes; St. Blaise, patron of the throat. Some are newcomers—St. Faustina Kowalska, for confidence in Divine Mercy, or St. Maximilian Kolbe, for political prisoners. Some make surprise appearances, like St. Christopher (patron of travelers). Some are in the process of acquiring patronage, as is the case with St. Isidore of Seville, who is being considered for patron of the Internet. Some get looked at in new ways. St. Paul is called patron “against snakebite” (see Acts 28: 1-7). St. Aloysius Gonzaga is described as patron of “AIDS sufferers” not because he lost his association with chastity but because he overcame his fear of plague to work with the sick during an epidemic.
Craughwell writes about saints as patrons for contemporary life. Thus we have St. Martha interceding for those “stressed by entertaining” and St. Joseph Cupertino for astronauts. Tax collector St. Matthew is patron of “financial professionals.” St. Helen, mother of Constantine, is presented Constantius as patroness “for those divorced or divorcing” (her husband, Constantius, dumped her for a more politically expedient wife).
The book is light and easy-to-read. Each saint gets three or so pages, and the essence of the saint's story is pithily captured. Here's how Craughwell explains the core of St. John the Evangelist's teaching:
“A tradition repeated by St. Jerome holds that when John was very old and too weak to walk, his disciples carried him to wherever Christians had assembled for the Eucharist. All he said to them was, ‘Little children, love one another.’ On one occasion someone in the congregation asked him why he always said the same thing. ‘Because these are the words of the Lord,’ John answered, ‘and if you do this, you do enough.’”
Craughwell sometimes focuses too much on the miracles of a few patristic and medieval saints (like St. Nicholas restoring three boys to life who had literally been butchered by an innkeeper, the aerial acrobatics of various levitating saints or St. Christina's triple “deaths”). My understanding was that the 1969 reform of the Roman calendar was intended to replace fantastic fervorinos with the sobriety of real flesh-and-blood saints with whom contemporary people could identify. The publisher promises a sequel to this book; a presentation of the saints with obligatory or optional feasts in the revised Roman calendar would be especially useful.
Those criticisms noted, however, this is a good book of light reading for spiritual edification. It's probably best read one saint at a time. If we each acquired but one of the characteristics with which these men and women were imbued, we'd all be holier. Parents can share these stories with their children. Once upon a time tomes such as Butler's Lives of the Saints graced Catholic homes. Contemporary Catholics, especially the young, need ideals, role models, heroes, mentors … patrons. Craughwell offers no fewer than 101 to choose from.
John M. Grondelski writes from Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:New Library
‘Heterosexism’
Gay groups say that it is “heterosexist” to require roommates to be of the same sex, and the new policy at Swarthmore and Haverford colleges in Pennsylvania is designed to accommodate students who are uncomfortable about sharing living space with a roommate who might not approve of homosexuality, or because it might result in “sexual tension.”
Let Us Be Quiet
ASSOCIATED PRESS, May 19—At least a dozen states have begun considering laws this year that would allow public schools to provide a moment of silence for students to think, reflect or pray.
The impetus for change, says Associated Press, came from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and last October's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld a Virginia law that permits the moment of silence. At least a dozen states have begun consideration of similar laws.
No Study Aid
Not amused, the university pressed charges.
Award to Bishop
The award is given to those who “exemplify Benedictine ideals.” Bishop Kinney is being honored for “Christian leadership and service to priests and parishioners” in his home region, the nation and “the greater Church beyond,” a reference to Bishop Kinney's support of the Church in Kenya.
A First?
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS COLLEGE—Coverage of the 50th anniversary of suburban New York's St. Thomas Aquinas College (STAC) revealed an anomaly for an American Catholic college.
Most of STAC's presidents have been Dominican nuns, and some 20 Dominicans currently serve the coed institution in a variety of offices. Sister Margaret Fitzpartrick is the college's seventh president.
Sister Margaret, however, is a member of the Sisters of Charity. While many Catholic colleges have had lay people serve as president—STAC was led by a layman from 1974 to 1995—this may be the first time that a Catholic college, founded by a particular order, is headed by a member from a different religious community.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: By Wisdom Is a House Built DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:Q
My wife and I are looking to purchase our first house. Do you have any guidelines that would help us determine how much we can afford?
A
I remember spending many a Saturday driving around looking for just the right neighborhood and just the right home when we were ready to buy our first house. It was an exciting time! Yet buying a home is also one of the most significant financial decisions we make.
In our search for the “American dream,” it's easy to let our eyes and emotions run way ahead of our available resources. Too often we see couples overcommit on the purchase of their home only to find that there isn't enough money left to meet the rest of the family's needs. I believe the greatest advice I can offer is to make sure you don't fall into this trap. In Luke 14:28-29, Jesus tells us, “If one of you decides to build a tower, will he not first sit down and calculate the outlay to see if he has enough money to complete the project? He will do that for fear of laying the foundation and then not being able to complete the work.”
Here are some ideas that will help you make a decision that will honor God and your family.
Examine Your Motivation
What is your motive for seeking a new home? Is it based on valid needs such as a growing family or is it primarily for status? It is so easy for us to get caught up in the status symbol of a home, which leads to purchasing more than we need or can afford. Before you make your purchase, come before Our Lord in prayer and seek his guidance over this important decision. Ask him to help you avoid the trap of materialism.
Establish a Solid Economic Foundation
Proverbs 24:27 says, “Complete your outdoor tasks and arrange your work in the field; afterward you can establish your house.” Here are a few questions you should ask before making a commitment to purchase a home: Do you have a stable job? Do you have the means to make an adequate down payment (preferably 20%)? Are you living on a budget? Are you planning in such a way that provides the maximum opportunity for your wife to nurture your children at home full time? Spending time now getting your economic house in order will reap big dividends in the future.
Buy Based on Need and Budget
Finally, most families (95%) don't have a budget. As a result, when they apply for a home loan they depend on the bank to tell them how much they can qualify for. Most banks use a formula that leads to a debt burden you will find oppressive (40% of gross income allowed for all debt payments). Take your budget to the bank and show them how much you can afford. This way you won't end up relying on credit cards to meet your other obligations because you have purchased too much house.
God love you!
Phil Lenahan is executive director of Catholic Answers.
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Catholic Family Vacations DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:Whether you are at the Walt Disney Resort or snow skiing in Vermont, vacations are supposed to be a time to take a break. But like everything else under heaven, leisure has been given to us by God for a purpose. Vacations are not only a time to give our bodies a rest from the rigors of work, they are also great opportunities to give us time to think about Christ. As St. Augustine said, our souls are best at rest when resting with God.
Turning what might be just another vacation into a pilgrimage of grace is one way to rescue our own attitudes regarding leisure and rest.
Father F. Joseph Harte is pastor of Queen of the Universe Shrine in Orlando, Fla. The Shrine initially grew out of a diocesan ministry to travelers in the Walt Disney area. Commonly thought of as the “Disney Church,” the Shrine has catered almost exclusively to the spiritual needs of tourists since its opening in 1986. Father Harte reminds travelers, “Your relationship with Christ doesn't change when on vacation—you take him with you wherever you go.”
“Americans don't really take pilgrimages,” Father Harte said. “Whereas it's very common in Europe, it's something we're just not familiar with in the States.”
Mention the word “pilgrimage” and most think of an overseas trip to Lourdes or to the Holy Land. In the Americas, it might mean a visit to Our Lady's Shrine in Guadalupe, Mexico. But a pilgrimage is much more than a visit to a famous site. Father Harte explained that a pilgrimage is basically a journey to be taken with God, to meet God and then to take God back home with you. “Invoke Christ at the beginning of your journey,” he said. “Your efforts to make contact with God are impelled by grace. As we journey to meet him, he turns and meets with us.” It is these moments of grace that will bring us the true refreshment we are looking for during vacation.
It is relatively easy to build a pilgrimage into your plans, regardless of where you are headed. Daily Mass is a good place to start. By dialing (800) Mass-Times—(800) 627-7846—Catholics have access to 22,000 parishes throughout the nation. This free service provides information from locations and Mass times to confession and wheelchair access. Also, the University of Dayton has an extensive list of Marian shrines available on its “Mary Page” Web site. The Liguori Guide to Catholic USA (Liguori Publications, 1999) is another excellent aid to finding monuments, shrines or monasteries along the path to your destination.
Once you are there, make use of all the time you have. Whether you stay for Mass or just have time to say a rosary, if you pray the Stations of the Cross or simply light a candle before a favorite statue—Christ is there, meeting with you and your family.
Father Harte has seen the Holy Spirit at work in the hearts of many throughout his ministry at the shrine. “Inevitably, people come here first just to look around. Suddenly, they are beckoned by Christ and are here saying their confession, walking the rosary-walk or participating in Mass,” Father Harte said.
Anne Olund of Blaine, Minn., is a mother of five. For the past three years her family has participated in a Catholic Family Camp. Each summer, approximately 40 families come together for a weekend camping experience seasoned with the faith. Morning prayers are at 8 a.m. followed by daily Mass. Afternoon Gospel meditations are also part of the daily spiritual food. Because it is held at a Baptist camp, they have the added security of knowing that no radios, television or immodest bathing suits are allowed. Every evening, the families share an examination of conscience and do their nightly prayers. A campfire rosary is a favorite for children and parents.
“Even though we are in the midst of chasing all our children, there really is a wonderful peace of God here,” Olund said. “It may not seem as fancy as some other vacation, but the witness of others living their Catholic faith impacts us all. Relationships are built — within our families as well as with other like-minded families. It's really just a wholesome, family vacation.”
Don't have the time and energy to plan a Catholic vacation? Plug into a week of ready-made Catholic culture with a rustic, natural backdrop. Catholic Familyland in Bloomingdale, Ohio, is a week of summer fun in the context of Catholic culture. Daily Mass and teachings are interspersed with sports, pony rides, crafts and water slides. “Families come here because they want to get their families to heaven. They realize they just can't find that Catholic environment anywhere else,” said Jerry Conniker, founder of Familyland.
Doug and Patty Green of Columbus, Ohio, agreed. “We just never knew anything like it existed: a place where your family can get away, have fun, relax and grow in your faith. Everything that makes you a Catholic is provided here: Mass, rosary, the 3 p.m. chaplet, praise and worship, and eucharistic adoration.”
“Growing in our faith helped us to grow as a family. And seeing other families practicing the faith really helped our kids grow, too,” Patty Green said.
Whatever your vacation plans, remember to slow down—especially if you are traveling by car. What American doesn't share the memory of a bleary-eyed 4:30 a.m. awakening followed by 13 miserable hours in a hot, stuffy car, whining for potty stops, pleading for lunchtime, missing scheduled naps—and all that just from Dad!
In their zeal to provide memories and photo-ops, parents can often miss the close family time they'd hoped to have. The travel experts at Fodors remind us that “traveling with kids can bring out the best in you as well … When rolling along the highway with your child, share the scenery, sights and sounds of the open road. Most of all be patient, and enjoy the ride!”
In other words, make the trip part of the trip. Waiting until we are “there” brings out that “Are we there yet?” syndrome in everyone. Whether you're traveling by car or by jet, use travel time to your family's best advantage: discuss family life, play those stupid car games you loved as a kid (punch buggy red!), listen together to library books on tape instead of ignoring each other until the real vacation begins. Stop and picnic at parks or shrines that lay along the drive—and get in a short visit to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament as long as you are there. Keep a Frisbee or soccer ball handy for a boisterous game at each pit stop. After each stop, have the little ones lead the family in a decade of the rosary before continuing on your way. Between the prayers, the visits to Jesus and the family talks, you have created your own Catholic family retreat. When the car is unpacked, the film is developed and the laundry is finally done, look back and ask yourselves, “Have we come home closer to God and each other?”
Caroline Schermerhorn writes from Newark, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: Taking the high road ----- EXTENDED BODY: Caroline Schermerhorn ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Bring the Faith With You DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:Father Harte's suggestions to make your vacation less stressful and more Catholic:
E Mom and Dad need to agree to make this a time to grow in grace.
E Avoid untimely surprises with thorough planning.
E Pray at bedtimes, regardless of where you are or what your schedule entails.
E Pray especially at mealtimes—even when in restaurants.
E Remember to invoke God at each point of the journey.
Resources
Catholic Familyland: (800) FOR-MARY
Queen of the Universe Shrine: www.maryqueenoftheuniverse.org (800) Mass-Times (800) 627-7846 University of Dayton Mary Page: www.udayton.edu/mary Fodor's Travel Resources: www.fodors.com or at your local library
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: New Life in New Orleans DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW ORLEANS—There's a brand-new place in New Orleans for assisting women in choosing life over abortion—the Woman's New Life Center on Napolean Avenue. It is distinct among crisis pregnancy centers because it is staffed by professionals and offers ultrasounds to pregnant women.
“As I began to work in pro-life [work] I found that women interested in abortion who see their unborn child on the ultrasound screen will choose not to abort over 90% of the time,” said Susan Mire, founder and executive director of Woman's New Life Center. “I also found that it is important to counsel women against having an abortion; but women have more needs than this. I wanted to create a place for women to support them in their needs as they make the choice for life.”
Although raised Catholic, difficult family experiences combined with personal choices led Mire away from the Faith to the point of developing a hostile attitude toward the Catholic faith, especially toward its stance on sexuality and birth control. During a life-changing experience while on a religious pilgrimage in 1987, Mire recognized the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist for the first time. She also developed a deep relationship with Mary. “It was like a quiet bolt of lightning,” she said. “You could say my life started at 22.”
Mire realized she had to let go of an immoral and even abusive relationship and began to reconsider her thoughts and beliefs about the Church's position on sexuality and birth control.
“Sex creates bonds that if created outside of marriage need to be broken. Men and women need to be able to let go and heal from these,” Mire said. “Society takes this too lightly. In our work at the Center, we counsel women that the chaste life is a boundary. This is living in obedience to God but it is also there for our own protection.”
Mire began to experience inner healing from her hurts, especially those from relationships with men. “I began reading spiritual and medical literature on birth control. I wanted to know why the Church said it was wrong. I began to realize that fertility is part of being a whole person. I began to wonder what it really was to be a ‘liberated woman,’” she said. “Women were taking birth control to enable these relationships with men who were not committed to them and just wanted sex. Is that liberated? Then I read the testimony of a post-abortive woman. After this, I got involved with Access Pregnancy Center, a branch of Catholic Charities, which offers pregnancy testing and counseling to pregnant women. Eventually I became director and continued reading and learning more and more about the pro-life movement.”
Mire earned a master's degree in marriage and family counseling and mental health while she continued her involvement in pro-life work. Her passion for helping women and their unborn babies eventually led her to visualize a place where women could receive professional services before, during and after their pregnancies. She wanted it to have a solid pro-life, pro-Catholic policy.
A Holy Call
One day a call came from priest friend, Monsignor Bobby Guste. He said, “Susan, there's a building across the street from an abortion clinic on sale in New Orleans. What are you going to do about it?” Mire and her pro-life cohort got on the move. In 1999, Mire formed a board called the Woman's New Life Center for professionals interested in volunteering their services for pro-life. Josephite Father Joseph Doyle, president of the board and president of St. Augustine High School in New Orleans, helped to fund raise. They went to business people, the archdiocese and social services to begin building key relationships. Things “just happened,” Mire said.
Mire related one story in particular: “I was visiting a friend and began telling her about our plans. I met her sister, a college student at the time, who gave me the card of a local Catholic businessman involved in health care. I called and we hit it off. He supplied us with medical equipment, ultrasound and funding.”
Although they did not end up with the building Monsignor Guste called about, they finally found and renovated a building on Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans across the street from Memorial Hospital. They were provided with many of the professional services they needed to get the place up and running, such as architecture for the renovation, legal services, accounting and a Web site, all donated by volunteers. As Mire put it, “The Lord opened the floodgates.” The Center had its grand opening in September 2001.
“I was in awe at God's hand when everything finally came together,” said Jeanette Rollins, a volunteer at the Center. Rollins became somewhat of a sounding board for Mire as she discussed her vision of the Center years ago over many cups of coffee. They had met at Access Pregnancy Center.
Woman's New Life Center provides two full-time staff: Mire as executive director and Sharon Normand, a professional counselor. Part-time staff includes one nurse, Trudy Lefort, R.N.; a medical doctor, Dr. Larry Colcolough, M.D.; and an ultrasound technician, Donna Bodin. They provide pregnancy testing, ultrasound, professional counseling, referrals to social services and material needs as they are donated such as baby beds and clothing. Although the Center opened in September, it is currently serving three post-abortive women and four open cases for crisis pregnancy. Of course there is plenty of phone counseling.
“Susan and Sharon are giving excellent volunteer training. They are providing people with the philosophical and theological training behind what the Center is all about,” Rollins said. “These volunteers are what I call ‘well-prepared weigh stations’ then ready to turn over the clients to professionals.”
Mire especially has a heart for the poor. She recognizes abortion as a social justice problem. As she put it, “Society views the poor and their unplanned pregnancies as, ‘We don't need anymore of that,’” she said. “Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics always open up in poor neighborhoods. This is how they exploit the poor. They are targets. Some of these people (the poor) may continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. This is a social problem and society pressures them to have abortions. This is a problem but God created these people.” Mire realizes the importance in caring for and educating people.
“What's unique about the Center is that it fosters abstinence before marriage and Natural Family Planning in marriage when there is a serious reason to avoid a pregnancy,” said Monsignor Guste. “There are physicians who say they are pro-life but still prescribe contraceptives such as the pill, etc. Woman's New Life Center does not hesitate to let people know that all of the chemical contraceptives have an abortive potential.”
One recent success story is about a girl who called looking for the drug RU-486, an abortifacient. When she came in to talk about it, she began telling Mire that although she thought she wanted an abortion, she really felt more pressure from others to have one. She related how she was forced to have her first one at the age of 16. She recalled that the nurse during the procedure continuously pushed her face away from the ultrasound screen (some abortionists use these to guide the removal of the baby during the procedure). During the course of the conversation with Mire the girl realized she really wanted to keep the child. She is currently undergoing ongoing counseling and a pregnancy care plan.
All of the services offered at the Center are free. The Center hopes to offer other services in the future such as housing for those who need it during pregnancy and classes by volunteer professionals on the topics of child-rearing and fertility awareness.
In addition to her work at Woman's New Life Center, Mire is also head of the local Project Rachel, a national organization that works with post-abortive women. She also does therapy at Lighthouse Counseling.
Lisa Lottinger writes from Luling, Louisiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Lisa Lottinger ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 06/02/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 02-08, 2002 ----- BODY:Pro-lifers Chain Around Capitol
State Rep. Sheryl Albers said to the crowd that pursuit of unethical goals at the expense of other people's lives is no better than suicide bombings and nuclear bomb research.
She proposed an end to funding for cloning and stem cell research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Speaker and musician Eric Eckenrode shared his story of losing a child to abortion.
Eckenrode said he has learned that God's mercy heals the wounds of the post-abortive person.
N.Y. Fetal Homicide Bill
Under current law, a person who injures or kills an unborn child can only be criminally charged with harming the mother.
Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno said, “It provides unborn children with a measure of protection afforded to everyone by our criminal justice system.”
Senate proponents cited cases in which people went unpunished for attacks on a fetus, including one in April 2000 when a Bronx doctor stabbed a nurse with a syringe full of an abortion-inducing drug to try to kill a baby he had fathered.
Canadian Human Life Petitions
“The petitioners are asking the government to bring in legislation defining a human fetus or embryo from the moment of conception, whether in the womb of the mother or not and whether conceived naturally or otherwise, as a human being and making any and all consequential amendments to all Canadian laws as required,” Vellacott told his colleagues.
Kenyan Warning on Abortion
“So what after abortion? The moment Parliament legalizes it, proponents of euthanasia will also want to have the vice legalized,” Archbishop Ndingi said.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of life -------- TITLE: But Rome's Approval of New Norms Is Not Certain DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:DALLAS — Approving a policy that calls the sexual abuse scandal “a crisis without precedent in our times,” the U.S. bishops voted June 14 to permanently remove from public ministry all priests and deacons for any acts of sexual abuse against minors, with no exceptions.
“From this day forward no one known to have sexually abused a child will work in the Catholic Church in the United States,” declared Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Under the terms of the bishops' “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” abusive priests can be fired and laicized at the discretion of their local bishop and with Vatican approval. The charter is posted on the conference's Web site at www.usccb.org/bishops/charter.htm.
The charter and the separate legal document outlining the norms that will be submitted for Vatican approval of the charter's dictates and procedures would allow some priest-abusers (primarily those guilty of a single offense in the distant past) to remain diocesan employees, leading secluded lives of solitary prayer and penance. But they would have no ministerial contact with the public, could not present themselves publicly as “priests” and could not be seen in public wearing the collar.
“If he were a policeman, it would be as if they took away his badge, his gun and his uniform and he ain't going to be on the beat anymore,” said Father Thomas Reese, editor in chief of America and a canon lawyer who was impaneled by the conference to explain Church law to the public and the press in Dallas.
Bishops who favored allowing some past abusers to stay on in solitary priest-hood argued that it is not Christ-like nor good for society to put a priest in his 70s or 80s — in response to decades-old abuses in some cases — into the streets with no family or means of support.
The charter, which needed 190 votes for the required two-thirds majority, passed 239-13. It came after extensive testimony from survivors of sexual abuse by priests, whose stories brought dozens of bishops to tears.
“There is a lot of depression among the bishops about what these victims have gone through and how poorly some elements of the Church have been at responding to them,” said Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver.
The norms would require each U.S. diocese and eparchy (the Eastern-rite equivalent of a diocese) to establish a written policy on sexual abuse of minors (defined as those under 18) by clergy or other church personnel. Each bishop would appoint a review board consisting mostly of laity but including a priest and an expert in the treatment of sexual abuse. The board would be charged with advising its bishop on whether allegations of misconduct appear credible; a separate diocesan review board would examine board recommendations upon request by the bishop.
At the national level, the charter establishes an Office of Child and Youth Protection at the bishops' conference headquarters in Washington, D.C., in order to ensure accountability and to assist in consistent application of policies. After bishops adopted the charter, Bishop Gregory announced the appointment of Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a former FBI agent and prosecutor, to head a national review board to govern the oversight agency.
Keating told reporters he was troubled by the way some bishops have handled past sexual abuse cases and said several times that he won't hesitate to pressure for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who has been severely criticized over his handling of two serial priest-pedophiles. Keating also insisted he won't hesitate in seeking resignations of other bishops who mishandle sexual abuse cases.
“I didn't think that's part of his job,” said Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia when asked about Keating's statements. “Whether a bishop resigns is an issue between that bishop and the Holy Father, not a review board.”
The norms are written to encourage abusive priests to resign voluntarily from ministry, saying: “Such a cleric may voluntarily withdraw from ministry. For such clerics, the option of a lifelong regiment of prayer and penance in a controlled environment may also be offered.”
But unlike the norms, the charter doesn't link the opportunity for a personal prayer and penance ministry with voluntary resignation. Rather, it suggests this opportunity pertains solely to abusive priests who are allowed to remain in the priesthood, saying: “If the penalty of dismissal from the clerical state has not been applied (e.g., for reasons of advanced age or infirmity), the offender is to lead a life of prayer and penance.”
Although allegations must be deemed “credible” for the permanent removal of a priest, bishops will be required to involve police regardless of credibility. The charter and norms require bishops to contact civil authorities immediately upon receiving allegations of sexual abuse and to cooperate in the police investigation in accordance with the law of the civil jurisdiction.
Cardinal Bevilacqua tried to amend the charter so that bishops would have to contact civil authorities only in response to allegations of sexual abuse deemed “credible” by each bishop. The amendment failed, however, after several bishops expressed concern that it would be seen as a loophole for abuse.
“It's hard to understand why, when someone makes an accusation that is obviously frivolous, it has to be reported,” Cardinal Bevilacqua said. “Once you involve the authorities, it goes into public record and it can ruin the reputation of a perfectly good priest for no reason. The priest has to live with a blemished public record, yet he's completely innocent. The damage to his reputation will be very difficult to counter.”
Several bishops expressed similar concerns.
“In my diocese, we have one woman who regularly gets drunk and calls in accusations about every priest she knows,” said Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb. “She tells stories about priests raping her on the streets, and it's completely unfounded and everyone knows it is.”
Cardinal Avery Dulles, a Fordham University theologian, urged bishops to vote against the charter because of its broad definition of sexual abuse. The charter defines sexual abuse more broadly than civil law, saying it need not involve force, nor genital or physical contact. Rather, says the new charter, sexual abuse results “when the child is being used as an object of sexual gratification for the adult” in any manner.
“We have the definition so broad we're not depriving men of ministry only for heinous crimes, but for looks and touches and hugs,” Cardinal Dulles argued.
However, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago was among the bishops who urged passage of the charter even after criticizing it sharply. Cardinal George called the document “deeply flawed,” but said urgent action was needed. He explained that the sexual abuse scandal resulted from a gradual weakening of the Church caused by a failure of bishops and clergy to boldly enforce Church teachings on sexual morality amid a materialistic culture that devalues Church doctrine.
Canon Law
The abuse policy states that in every case, due process under canon law must be observed before a priest can be removed from ministry, laicized or both. Although the bishops have formally agreed to bind themselves by the policy and voluntarily obey it, the Vatican must approve a set of norms devised by the bishops before the charter becomes “particular law” that would pertain exclusively to the United States.
The Vatican has repeatedly signaled that the norms must fully respect the canonical rights of priests and give full voice to the Church's mission of promoting reconciliation and repentance. In an article published June 10 by The New York Times, Cardinal Dulles suggested that Rome can make more balanced judgments on these issues than the beleaguered U.S. bishops, who remain under intense public and media pressure to implement a highly punitive, “zero-tolerance” policy.
“The bishops are understandably concerned to show that they are taking bold and decisive measures,” Cardinal Dulles said. “But they should take care not to lock the Church into positions that will later prove to be unwise. If they yield too much to the present atmosphere of panic, the Holy See can be relied upon to safeguard the theological and canonical tradition.”
— Cardinal Avery Dulles
Speaking on NBC's “Meet the Press” June 16, Bishop Gregory acknowledged that Vatican officials had questioned whether the proposed norms sufficiently promote reconciliation and the rights of priests.
“It is troubling, but it is not surprising,” he said. “It's not surprising that people who do not live in the United States under a British common law set of legal standards … don't understand all of the realities that we, as Americans, live with, and I'm not surprised that they want to remind us about reconciliation, conversion.”
Bishop Gregory added that he was “as confident as I can be at this time” that Rome would eventually approve the policy. “They have expressed their overwhelming desire to assist us,” he said. “Can I sit here and presume that they will approve it without modification? No. But am I absolutely confident that they are going to work with us? I am.”
Meanwhile, other critics — particularly members of SNAP, the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests — are objecting that the abuse policy set out in Dallas is too lax, not too severe. “The Holy Father himself said no one belongs in the priesthood who would sexually offend a child, so I don't believe the bishops are living up to the standards the Holy Father himself set … when he met with American cardinals in Rome,” said Mark Vincent Serrano, who was abused by a priest from ages 9 to 16.
Reconciliation
Though the bulk of the charter establishes reasons and procedures for dismissal of priests from public ministry, the preamble apologizes to victims. And, responding to Pope John Paul II's request in April that the U.S. bishops work toward healing and reconciliation, the first of the charter's 17 articles establishes a commitment for each diocese to reach out to victims and their families with “counseling, spiritual assistance, support groups and other social services.”
The Pope also requested reform of wayward American seminaries, calling for an apostolic visitation to ensure that they are teaching and enforcing Church doctrine pertaining to human sexuality. The Dallas document barely touches on the subject, but Article 13 says each diocese “will employ adequate screening and evaluative techniques in deciding the fitness of candidates for ordination.” Article 17 pledges “complete cooperation with the apostolic visitation of our diocesan/eparchial seminaries and religious houses of formation recommended in the interdicasterial meeting with the cardinals of the United States.”
Bishops in Dallas said that they did not have time to work out details of the apostolic visitation, which will be conducted by the U.S. bishops according to procedures approved by Rome. Nor did they have time to discuss at length any potential seminary reforms pertaining to admission and theological content — that will come next, they stressed.
“It will be part of what we have to do, and we've agreed upon that,” Cardinal Bevilacqua said. “Remember, it's an apostolic visitation. It's done by us, but it comes from the Holy See. And the details of that will be worked out between the president of the conference and the Holy See. I don't know when — probably in a few months. Visitation is important to make sure that there are proper screening processes in all seminaries and to make sure only proper candidates are approved.”
At issue is whether seminaries should accept homosexual candidates, even under strict special circumstances involving years of chastity and celibacy. Archbishop Chaput said the issue was raised by several bishops during executive session but was not discussed at length. In private conversations, he said, most bishops are expressing concern about the admission of homosexuals.
Broader Problem
However, Archbishop Chaput said homosexuals in the priesthood should not be viewed as a primary cause of the sexual abuse scandal. Furthermore, he warned, simply screening them out cannot be viewed as a panacea.
The more pertinent issue, he said, has been the history of American priests and bishops succumbing to cultural pressure for leniency on many Church teachings pertaining to sex and marriage.
“We've seen a permissiveness regarding contraception and pre-marital sex, and the same priests who allow that can easily slip into giving themselves permission regarding other issues of sexual moralities,” Archbishop Chaput said. “It's a spirit that says each person and priest can decide individually what to accept in terms of Church teachings.”
Wayne Laugesen wrote this report from Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bishops Set Penance Day ... For Bishops DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:DALLAS — The U.S. Catholic bishops will come together again in two months, but their next meeting won't be in Dallas or any other city.
Instead they will unite in prayer and penance Aug. 14 for a first-ever national bishops' day of prayer for healing and reconciliation for the Church in recognition of their failures of leadership in the scandal of sexual abuse by clergy.
Priests and the laity are invited to participate if they choose, but the day of prayer and fast will be specifically imposed on the bishops, as voted June 14 at their Dallas meeting. With impassioned comments, applause and a unanimous vote to schedule the day of penance for themselves rather than all the faithful, the bishops admitted their particular fault in the scandal.
“The penance that is necessary here is not the obligation of the Church at large in the United States but the responsibility of the bishops ourselves,” said Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Both ‘what we have done’ and ‘what we have failed to do’ contributed to the sexual abuse of children and young people by clergy and Church personnel.
“We are the ones, whether through ignorance or lack of vigilance or — God forbid — with knowledge, who allowed priest abusers to remain in ministry and reassigned them to communities where they continued to abuse,” Bishop Gregory added. “We are the ones who chose not to report the criminal actions of priests to the authorities because the law did not require this. We are the ones who worried more about the possibility of scandal than in bringing about the kind of openness that helps prevent abuse. And we are the ones who, at times, responded to victims and their families as adversaries and not as suffering members of the Church.”
One day of mortification might be only the beginning for the bishops, who were encouraged by Archbishop Patrick Flores of San Antonio to undertake a nine-month period of spiritual reconciliation and reparation. His comprehensive plan for prayer and penance will be distributed in the next letter mailed to the conference membership, Bishop Gregory said.
“The sexual abuse of children and youth has been painful to Jesus,” Archbishop Flores told the Dallas assembly. “Such actions bring to him … pain that is as severe as his scourging at the pillar, the crown of thorns, carrying of the cross, crucifixion and suffering on the cross until death.
“I think that the fault has been so enormous that the reparation from us collectively needs to be just as big.”
Archbishop Flores proposed that for the next nine months the bishops pray a holy hour early in the morning in the chapel before the Blessed Sacrament, and, if possible, again at bedtime; daily Divine Office; daily recitation of the rosary and meditation on the holy Scriptures; oral prayer with religious and laity as the bishops travel or as they meet with people in their offices; and observe fast and abstinence, daily if possible, for the nine months.
“As we offer all the above in reconciliation and reparation for our offenses, we should all pray and work for the further conversion of all of us to be more fully committed to Jesus, the divine Word,” Archbishop Flores said. “If we the priests and the bishops don't take Jesus' word more seriously, then how can we expect the people to listen to what we say from the pulpit?”
Lay Response
For weeks lay leaders in the Church have been writing and speaking of the need for deep spiritual renewal in response to the historic crisis.
That call was sounded again in Dallas, across town from the bishops' assembly, as an estimated 500 Catholics flocked to a panel discussion sponsored by Catholics United for the Faith.
“I think we're being called, every single one of us, to do something extraordinary,” said panelist Helen Hull Hitchcock, director of Women for Faith and Family. “We need to make special prayers and sacrifices for our holy mother Church.”
Saying “it can't fail,” she especially recommended fasting, at least on first Fridays, and eucharistic adoration to begin to rebuild what many see as a generation's worth of destruction in Catholic faith and authority in the United States.
Leon Suprenant, Catholics United for the Faith's national director, said the righteous anger and moral outrage rightly felt by many Catholics over the scandal are legitimate, yet they need to be transformed by Christ into a holy zeal for the faith and sacrificial love for others.
“There's no newfangled way of doing this,” he said. “It's the way of prayer, it's the way of reparation and penance, it's the way of the sacramental life.”
Quoting from Pope John Paul II on the laity, in comments that are cited in No. 828 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Suprenant said: “The saints have always been the source and origin of renewal in the most difficult moments in the Church's history.”
Parish Renewal
Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe, N.M., encouraged his brother bishops to offer a program of Christ-centered spiritual renewal in the parishes. He said the Renew program from Plainfield, N.J., helped his own diocese heal from a “terrible situation” of clergy scandal in 1993 and noted that Renew is currently developing a six-week parish series specifically focused on recovery from scandal.
“We came out of it and there are hope-filled signs of growth in the local Church there,” he said. “It's not just about norms, it's about holiness. It's about godliness.”
Ellen Rossini writes from Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Organization Enables Black Youth to Attend World Youth Day DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW ORLEANS — Brandt Lewis lives in Jennings, La., a small, heavily Baptist town with few Catholics and even fewer black Catholics.
But next month he will be surrounded by both when he heads to Toronto for World Youth Day with the Knights of Peter Claver, a Catholic fraternal organization active primarily in the black Catholic community.
“I can't wait,” said Lewis, the 17-year-old leader of the junior division of the Knights. “The Holy Father is going to be there, and it will probably be my first and last time to get to meet him or see him.”
In addition to Lewis, the Knights will officially send more than 20 members to World Youth Day.
Lewis, who has been with the Knights since his first Communion 10 years ago, said that of the Knights who will be attending, 10 are “kids” under the age of 18.
“I am taking four people from my district in Louisiana,” he said. Lewis also praised the Knights' commitment to helping black Catholics.
“For a lot of young African-Americans, especially in towns like Jennings that are mostly Baptist, the Knights have really helped us to keep our faith,” Lewis said.
Gene Phillips Jr., 32, from Austin, Texas, will also be going to Toronto with the Knights of Peter Claver, both as a participant and as a chaperone. He said that he is excited both by the prospect of seeing the Pope and by the fact that he will be around other young Catholics.
The Knights, who have more than 45,000 members in 32 states and Washington, D.C., was founded in 1909 by four Josephite priests and three laymen. Its focus is on evangelization. Members are dedicated to St. Peter Claver, a Jesuit priest who evangelized black slaves in South America in the 17th century, converting hundreds of thousands of them.
Today, the Knights fund $75,000 in annual scholarships, assist black seminarians, conduct tutorial programs and contributed $100,000 to Our Mother of Africa Chapel in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., according to Executive Director W. Charles Keyes Jr. He said that this would be the Knights' first official attendance at World Youth Day.
Phillips and Lewis both credited Supreme Knight Arthur McFarland for his focus on young, emerging leaders.
“Mr. Keyes and Mr. McFarland really pay attention to the young people,” Lewis said.
Poor Parishes Hurt
Because of the difficulties faced by many parishes, those who will be attending World Youth Day with the Knights of Peter Claver are fortunate, according to Ono Ekeh with the U.S. bishops' African-American Catholics office.
It is often hard, Ekeh said, especially for inner-city black parishes, to send people to World Youth Day because of lack of funds.
“I have been trying to encourage more participation at the diocesan and local levels,” he said, “but the response has been slow, partly because of funding.”
According to the latest statistics, Ekeh said, there are 2 million to 2.3 million black Catholics in the United States, primarily in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., southern Louisiana, Los Angeles, Chicago and St. Louis.
One problem, Ekeh said, is that many predominantly black parishes don't have enough money for youth ministers. He also said that many people have had to choose between going to World Youth Day and going to the National Black Catholic Congress, which is held every five years to address issues facing black Catholics. It will be held this year in late August in Chicago.
The Bishops' conference office for African-American Catholics continues to actively encourage black participation in World Youth Day. Its Web site lists fund-raising ideas and the stories of participants at previous World Youth Days. It also provides a list of black groups that will be attending from parishes, dioceses and the Knights of Peter Claver.
Fanya Burford, youth minister at Holy Spirit Parish in Naperville, Ill., will attend World Youth Day with her youth group, but her home parish, Sacred Heart — which is predominately black — will not be sending anyone to World Youth Day.
They don't have the money for a full-time youth minister to coordinate it, she said, and the Diocese of Joliet is not sponsoring any groups this year.
Two black youths are going from another local parish, but Burford said she wishes more could go to experience “the wider Church.”
“It would be great for them to see other Catholics who are from Africa and around the world,” she said. “We want to build leaders [and] we don't want to be an isolated community.”
Past participants have come back with the realization that the Church is from everywhere, she said, recalling one young man who went to the World Youth Day in Rome and was especially excited because he met “real Africans” there.
Tracy Brown, a student at DePaul University who went with a parish youth group to World Youth Day in Paris in 1997, echoed the excitement of seeing a broader cross-section of the Church.
She wasn't very interested in her faith when she attended, Brown said, but the experience was inspiring.
“I loved it,” she said. Brown was especially impressed by “the different styles of worship for God” that she saw expressed by the groups from around the world.
In retrospect, Brown said, “It probably helped to bring me back to God.” She said she would definitely go again if given the opportunity.
Many young people she knows are afraid to ask adults questions about the faith, said Brown, who now does urban ministry on the West Side of Chicago.
So for those going this year, Brown had some advice: “Being young can be hard, so take advantage of your time at the event and ask hard questions of the other young people you meet.”
(CNS contributed to this story.)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Faith, Hope and Dallas DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Bishop Timothy Dolan has seen the scandal from two sides.
As the former rector of the North American College in Rome, he knows what it takes to form priests. As a new auxiliary bishop of St. Louis, he removed from ministry the pastor and associate pastor from a parish for past abuse allegations. In Dallas June 13-15 for the bishops' meeting, Bishop Dolan, a Church historian, spoke with Register correspondent Ellen Rossini on the catastrophe of the clergy scandal and the surprising new Catholic moment it presents.
What is your assessment of this crisis and its meaning in the life of the Church?
I would say we're people of hope, and we've got to look at this through the lens of what the Lord is inviting us or challenging us to do at this moment. I think obviously everybody's saying that he is calling us to cleansing, purification and renewal.
I really think we're at a moment somewhat similar to the Catholic Reformation after the Council of Trent. When you add to the millennium, which would be the positive side, this whole scandal — which would be the negative side — I really think what we've got is a privileged moment of grace when the Lord is inviting his Church to intense renewal and a call to sanctity.
At this time the laity are asking their shepherds to be not merely administrators but true pastors. How do you see that being lived out from this point on?
As my own Archbishop Justin Rigali often says, there is no way that we can get by with anything less than holiness of life, which shows itself in integrity and fidelity.
I think for us as bishops, it's starting with us. And it's starting internally. We see that our people are calling us to be shepherds, our people are calling us to be pastors and our people are calling us to be men of prayer and heroic virtue; men firm about the pursuit of perfection.
I often think that the Lord's mandate, duc in altum (cast out into the deep) is what he's doing. Shallowness, superficiality, getting away with the minimum, complacency: forget it, it's all over. It's all over.
What we're interpreting our people summoning us to is personal sanctity, which then transfers to Step 2 of calling our people to sanctity, which translates to Step 3, a real time of renewal and recommitment in the Church.
What do you mean by “renewal”?
There are some who say — and I would disagree with them wholeheartedly — that this is a time for radical change in the Church. I would maintain that instead this is a time for radical rediscovery of what is most noble at the core of the Church.
The horrors that we're talking about did not grow out of the Church. The horrors happened because the Church wasn't true to itself, wasn't true to its most noble core, which is impeccable virtue, heroic sanctity and the pursuit of perfection, which shows itself in fidelity and integrity of life.
People are horrified by the scandal yet don't often make the connection, as has the Holy Father, with the need for the Church to commit to “the fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality.” How are they related?
In a way, thanks be to God that people are horrified by this terrible scandal. It is at odds with human decency, it is at odds with the Gospel, it is particularly at odds with everything the priestly vocation stands for. It also shows again how far off the mark we've gotten when it comes to the Church's whole teaching on chastity, how far we have strayed from the Church's beautiful teaching on sexual love. What's a painful paradox is that many of the people who find this [scandal] most horrible don't make the connection that so are other sexual aberrations.
The sexual expression of love is so noble, is so decent, is so wholesome — so much so that it mirrors, it icons, the passionate love that God has for his people. Therefore it has the very characteristics of God's passionate love for his people, namely fidelity, fruitfulness and exclusivity. That's why the Church says sexual love is so powerful, so beautiful and so poetic that it's only limited to the lifelong, faithful relationship of a man and woman in the sacrament of marriage.
I'd like to think that maybe this is going to spur us on to a whole new apologetic of the sacrament of marriage, of chastity.
Some seem more ready to blame the Church's teaching for the problem instead of seeing it as the solution.
Unfortunately, you've got people who say this all flows from this kind of oppressive, antiquated, medieval Church teaching on sexual chastity [and] from an unhealthy, anti-sex mentality that the Church traditionally has.
Just the opposite, of course, is true. This [scandal] all flows from a kind of cheapening of sexual love, from the whole idea that the whole purpose of sex is simply for momentary enjoyment, that we use other people instead of respect them as partners in procreative love. It's just at odds with everything the Church teaches.
You'd almost like to see a kind of romantic rediscovery of the beauty and elevated poetry that the Church has always held about sexual love and the beauty of chastity as a positive virtue to protect what is so good and powerful and sacred.
We can't allow this to be interpreted, as our enemies will, as just another nail in the coffin of the Church's traditional teaching on sexual morality. If anything, it's sort of like throwing cold water in our face and saying, “Let's get back to basics.”
Has this been the reaction of your fellow bishops as well?
I would say that my brother bishops didn't need convincing of the doctrine of the Church's moral teaching. I think we did need a wake-up call that now is a time to be more compelling, more cogent, more convincing than ever.
Did some bishops just get so lazy that they weren't watching? How was the abuse allowed to occur and seminaries become, as we've heard, homosexually promiscuous?
I would say some of us are realizing perhaps that we gave more attention to the psychological dimensions of sexuality, maybe more attention to the biological parts of it and not enough attention to the theological, to the moral dimensions of it.
If anything, it's calling us back to that. So now you've got such a call to integrity of life among priests that there's no way out of it. There are no split lines, there's no hidden compartment, there's no time off for chastity. This is a radical, top-of-the-head, tip-of-the-toes commitment of self.
I love, even more than chastity, the word “purity.” We are purely, totally, radically, completely given to Christ. To use the words of Father Benedict Groeschel, “he claims every cell of our body, from our brain cells to our sperm cells.” They all belong to him when we give that over to chaste celibacy.
All these abuses were not because of celibacy, they were because celibacy was not properly understood, appreciated and obeyed.
So will the renewal of the Church start at the top, with the bishops, and then spread out to the faithful?
I wouldn't want to come down too strong on that, because the Holy Spirit really works through our people, and what we're finding is that it is our people who are calling us back to this; our people are saying it.
I know we bishops pay a lot of attention to those who are griping and criticizing, but what moves me more as a bishop are the overwhelming expressions of support that I get from my people. Not support obviously for the abuses, but almost like you parents would say to your children, “We know you've got this in you. We know that this incident that is now grabbing the headlines is uncharacteristic of what's best in you. And we want to call you back, that you can do this, and that we need you for it, we respect you for it, and we love you for it.”
It's almost like how sometimes forgiveness is a greater motive for good than punishment. That's the way the Lord acts. When we look at the Lord and he says, “I forgive you your sin,” that doesn't say, “Oh, he's so tolerant, I'll be able to sin more.” I say, “He loves me so much that I'm going to live up to this love; I'm going to live a life of grateful, humble obedience to everything that he's called me.”
What have you experienced personally from the people in your diocese?
I've been amazed. I know since Easter I've probably done 50 confirmations, so you're talking about 1,000 young people. And every time I spend time with them, there's not one of those young people — not one time that I meet with them — that stand up and say, “We are really sick of you bishops and priests, we are really shocked, we are scandalized, we're going to leave the Church.”
They say the opposite. They say to me, “We really love and respect our priests, we want good and holy and pure priests and we need them more than ever, we're with you all the way.” Now that awes me. I'm going to redouble my effort, because I want to make sure I'm worthy of this trust that these people are giving to me.
How was it at your parish when you had to remove the two priests from ministry?
You can imagine the shock waves. These were two beloved priests; these were two respected priests. That was a tough time; it was very volatile.
I'm coming home one night, and I see this young man come up to me and he introduces himself and says, “I've got to talk to you about the pastor.” I'm thinking, “Uh-oh, another allegation.” We go in, and he says, “Will you please tell him that I have a lot of love and respect for him and that I still want to be a priest?” Do you know what that does to me? I'm thinking, “How can we do anything to betray this trust?”
Not too long after that I'm coming home, and I see this young couple running up to me in the parking lot, and I'm thinking they're going to gang up on me. See, the people were upset at me, being an authority figure, for removing the priests.
They say, “Hey, Father, are you in this parish? We just moved in and we want to register. We hear this is a great parish [and] it's an anchor of the neighborhood. We hear the Sunday Mass here is beautifully done [and] you've got a great school. We hear you've really gone through some trouble, too; but, well, life's got to go on.”
You know what that does to me, that sense of resilience? You'd think that this young couple would say, “We don't want anything to do with that place, what kind of moral cesspool is that? We're going somewhere else.”
That's what I mean by our people calling us back. And this is what I'm hearing from priests all over the place.
What do you see as the long-term effect of this crisis on the priesthood?
I see the whole rediscovery of the spiritual dimension of our office. One of the ways I see this is through somewhat of a feeling of helplessness that translates into humility.
One of our priests at home … said to his brother priests, “I don't know how you guys feel, but I'm a little embarrassed to go out in the collar. I almost feel like every time I open the paper that somebody's punched me in the stomach. I kind of feel at the bottom of the ladder. But you know, that's probably not a bad way to feel because that's how our Lord felt, and he was the first priest.”
He said one day somebody after Mass said, “Father, how do you feel?” and he said, “Well, I've sort of been knocked to my knees,” and the person said, “Well, that's not a bad place to be!”
If we're discovering that a lot of things in the past that have propped us up have now been whittled away, maybe that's going to impel us to a rediscovery of our helplessness, that we need the Lord, that we need other people, that we need one another, we need the Church, we need the sacraments, we need prayer — all that admission that we can't do it on our own.
People are telling us that one of the mistakes we made is we kept this to ourselves, we thought we could handle this by ourselves and we'll just take care of it, business as usual. We have to be people of genuine humility and sanctity and say, “We need God's help; we need your help.” That posture of humility is going to be a long-term fruit of all this.
How will you assist your priests through this difficult episode?
We need to restore a sense of priestly identity and dignity among our priests. We bishops have a particular bond with our priests. We're to be to our priests what your pastors are to be to you. We have to know a lot of them are hurting, a lot of them are feeling they are really the ones bearing the brunt of all this.
We have to intensify our efforts to renew priestly formation in our seminaries. I really believe the next 25 to 30 years we're going to see Charles Borromeos, we're going to see Philip Neris — these great saints that rose up in the Catholic Reformation who are calling us back to holiness, humility, integrity, fidelity and joy.
It's not going to come in big programs; it's just going to come in day-in and day-out faithful Christian living.
Register correspondent Wayne Laugesen contributed to this interview.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bishop Timothy ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Dapper Don Dies — No Public Send-Off
But funerals are an exception. As any fan of Coppola and Scorcese movies knows, Mafia funerals tend to be big, splashy church affairs marked by eulogies that paint the defunct dons as misunderstood avatars of St. Francis.
But the deceased John Gotti won't get that kind of farewell, according to Father Andrew Vaccari, chancellor of the Diocese of Brooklyn. Gotti, the former “capo” of the Gambino crime family who died June 10 in his Springfield, Mo., prison cell while serving time for five murders, will not receive a Catholic funeral, The Post reported.
The Church sometimes denies Catholic rites to “public sinners” to avoid the scandal it might give the faithful.
Coincidentally, the last major crime figure to be denied a funeral Mass was “Big Paul” Castellano, whom Gotti murdered in 1985.
Unlike Castellano, however, Gotti will be allowed a Christian burial in Queens' St. John's Cemetery, which also holds the remains of Carlo Gambino, Carmine Galante, Vito Genovese and Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
The diocese said that the Gotti family will be permitted a private Mass for the dead at a later date.
Baptists Won't Throw Stones on Abuse
ASSOCIATED PRESS, June 11 — Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, who frequently cooperate with Catholics on social and life issues, were markedly charitable in their response to recent clerical scandals, reported Associated Press in its coverage of the annual national meeting of the country's largest Protestant group.
Speakers “warned delegates against passing judgment as Catholic bishops prepare to discuss what to do with sex-offending priests,” Associated Press said, noting that scandals exist in every denomination.
“We shouldn't enjoy this Catholic mess too much,” said one pastor, the Rev. Bobby Welch. “We're waiting on the other shoe to drop, and when it does, don't be surprised if there is more and more within our ranks.”
Father Frank Ruff, the official Catholic liaison to the Southern Baptists, expressed relief and gratitude at the Baptists' response.
“Our dirty laundry is out there for everybody to see — and it's pretty dirty,” he said. “But I think everybody here in leadership knows that there's a fair amount of sexual abuse that goes on in all institutions, in all churches, in all schools, in many, many families.”
NYC Cardinal's Appeal Could Break Records
ASSOCIATED PRESS — The Archdiocese of New York has taken some hits this month, losing both its leading fund-raiser and an auxiliary bishop to accusations of sexual misconduct.
But that isn't closing New Yorkers' wallets to the charitable and educational works of the Church, Associated Press reported.
Church spokesman Joseph Zwilling said that the annual Cardinal's Appeal had raised $13.44 million so far, putting it well on the way to meeting its goal of $15 million — a record amount for the Archdiocese.
Said Zwilling: “I think it will be the most successful cardinal's campaign that the archdiocese has ever had.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Abortion Activists Pushing Military to Adopt Anti-Life Agenda DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — The military has come under fire from abortion activists on two fronts in a major effort to force the Pentagon to adopt an abortion culture.
A federal judge in Boston has ordered the military's insurance to pay for an abortion committed on a child suffering from anencephaly, a condition in which the baby has only a brain stem and survives for only a few days after birth.
Under federal law passed in the 1977 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980, the military's insurance cannot pay for any abortion unless the mother would otherwise die.
But U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gernter ordered the military June 6 to compensate Maureen Britell for an abortion on her 5-month-old anencephalic unborn child.
“Through the funding power the government seeks to encourage Britell and women similarly situated to suffer by carrying their anencephalic fetuses until they are born to a certain death,” Gertner wrote in her decision. “This rationale is no rationale at all. It is irrational and, worse yet, it is cruel.”
Britell currently runs a pro-abortion lobby group called Voters for Choice in Washington, D.C. She hoped that the federal judge's decision would open the door for more taxpayer-supported abortions.
“I am relieved that the court has realized how harmful military restrictions on abortions are to women. I only hope that this decision will help lift the heavy burden from the other families who will face the devastation of fatal fetal anomalies,” Britell said.
That's a decision for the American people to decide, not a federal judge, said New Jersey Republican Chris Smith.
“The violence of abortion should never be subsidized by taxpayers. Higher courts have consistently agreed with laws that restrict government funding of abortion; I am sure they will in this case when it is appealed,” Smith said. “I don't think Judge Gertner can ignore all those rulings based on her arbitrary decision that anencephalic children are not human.”
Plan B Blocked
The abortion-related ruling came on the heels of successful efforts by pro-life members of Congress to block a Pentagon order mandating that all Department of Defense clinics stock and dispense levonorgestrel, a drug known as the “morning-after pill” and marketed as Plan B.
If taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse, the pill can act either to prevent fertilization from occurring or as an abortifacient, ending a pregnancy when a new human life has already commenced.
According to memos obtained by the Register, DoD's Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) Executive Council “recommended the addition of levonorgestrel 0.75 mg (Plan B) to the Basic Core Formulary (BCF).” The Basic Core Formulary is the roster of drugs that all military pharmacies are required to stock and dispense to all patients.
The executive director of the council signed the order April 3 and notifications were sent out to military pharmacists around the country.
One Navy pharmacist, opposed on moral grounds to dispensing the morning-after pill, reached members of Congress in early May — the same week the House was to authorize Defense Department funding.
“We put the word out that members of Congress were going to author morning-after pill amendments to the DoD authorization bill,” an aide to House conservatives said. “And within 24 hours we learned that the military-wide morning-after pill mandate was pulled.”
A May 8 Defense Department memo confirmed this, stating that the minutes of “the May 2002 DoD P&T Executive Council will reflect that Plan B has NOT been approved for addition to the BCF at this time.”
Battle Continues
But the morning-after pill might still be found at some of the Pentagon's 76 military hospitals and more than 500 health clinics worldwide.
The May 8 memo, written by Col. Dan Remund, co-chair of the DoD's P&T Executive Council, said that while the current policy doesn't force military pharmacies to carry the drug, it doesn't prohibit its dispensing.
“Pharmaceutical agents added to the BCF are required to be carried on every MTF formulary. As a result of Plan B's removal from the BCF, each MTF's P&T committee must re-evaluate whether this product is within the scope of practice at the TF and whether the MTF wants to continue to have Plan B on its formulary,” Remund wrote.
The Department of Defense didn't return requests for comment, but Army Maj. Steve Stover confirmed to CNSNews.com that the current policy allows for individual military pharmacies to dispense the morning-after pill.
“It's basically up to the individual pharmacy, and it's not just the Army, it's a DoD policy that's been in place for years,” he told the online news service.
But retired Army Col. Robert Maginnis, who is now vice president for policy with the Family Research Council, said Stover's statement underplays the policy shifts made this spring by Congress regarding the dispensing of the morning-after pill.
“[House Armed Services Chairman Bob] Stump said you better pull this,” Maginnis said. “But the bureaucrats' language is ‘we'll re-evaluate it.’”
Maginnis is worried that without constant vigilance by congressional pro-lifers, abortion activists will succeed in forcing their agenda on the military. He noted that California Democrat Loretta Sanchez offers legislation every year to allow abortions on military bases. This year, Congress narrowly defeated her proposal 215-202, meaning that a switch of only seven votes and the bill would have passed.
“Maybe it's dead for this year,” Maginnis said of efforts to force the military to change its policies. “But you can't take your eye off it because they'll try to sneak it back in.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope Supports Venezuelan Bishops' Role in Society DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II defended the role of the Church in Venezuela, where Catholic leaders have clashed with President Hugo Chavez over the country's social direction.
In a June 11 meeting with Venezuela's bishops, the Holy Father encouraged the Church leaders to promote a climate of open and constructive dialogue with the country's government despite the difficulties.
The bishops were in Rome for their “ad limina” visits, which heads of Church territories make every five years to report on local conditions.
Since Chavez became president in early 1999, Venezuela's bishops repeatedly have criticized him for what they call abuses of power and an erosion of the credibility of democratic institutions. They also have criticized his social reforms, intended to be modeled on communist Cuba, as “exclusive and excluding.”
When Chavez was ousted briefly in April in a coup, Caracas' Cardinal Ignacio Velasco Garcia met with him and later said Chavez promised to make some changes to his policies in the country, whose population of 24 million is about 89% Catholic.
John Paul said poverty and even extreme poverty had sharply increased in Venezuela in recent years, a situation he said urgently needed addressing.
He said the Church there was called to help build a more just, peaceful and prosperous social order, especially by giving a voice to the poorest and weakest members of society — a mission he said did not put the Church in competition with the government.
Civil organizations “cannot overlook or ignore the considerable contribution of the Church in many aspects regarding the common good,” he said.
The Pope said he realized that the bishops' social efforts in Venezuela were difficult, given the climate of “misunderstandings, misrepresentations or proposals that are more or less openly partisan.”
“But this is not the ground on which the Church moves,” he said. The Church “wants precisely to promote a climate of open, constructive, patient and disinterested dialogue among all those who hold public responsibility.”
Archbishop Baltazar Porras Cardozo of Merida, president of the Venezuelan bishops' conference, told the Holy Father the bishops were worried that Venezuela's fragile civil coexistence might break down.
He said the bishops also were concerned about the “weakened condition of the democratic system and state of law (in Venezuela), which has increasingly serious consequences of impoverishment, insecurity, desperation and hatred.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Norton ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Five Cardinals Join Highest Church Court
ASSOCIATED PRESS, June 7 — Five new cardinals have joined the Apostolic Signatura, the Church's highest court of appeal in Canon Law, which handles such cases as annulments, disputes between clergy and discipline of priests and religious.
The new appointments are Cardinal Edward Egan of New York; Cardinal Jozef Glemp, former primate of Poland; Cardinal Agostino Cacciavillan, the former Papal Nuncio in the United States; Cardinal Sergio Sebastiani; and the president of the pontifical council for promoting Christian unity Cardinal Walter Kasper.
Make Jesus the Center of Your Personal Life
VATICAN INFORMATION SERVICE, June 8 — When Pope John Paul greeted a group of pilgrims from the Italian Archdiocese of Capua, he urged them to try to find Christ “with new ardor, to listen to his voice, he who calls you to a more intense evangelical faithfulness.”
The Holy Father continued: “He asks you to make him present wherever man finds himself alone, rejected or humiliated due to sorrow or violence and wherever people, tired of human words, have a deep desire to be close to God. …[Y]oung people: Do not ever lose pride in being Christians…forge a friendship with Christ …look for what he looks for… behave as he behaved. Jesus must become the center of your life. He helps you to be the ‘salt and leaven’ of your land.”
A Few More Questions for Neocatechumenate Way
CWNEWS.COM, June 4 — While their activities have received extensive encouragement from Pope John Paul, the lay and clerical movement “NeoCatechumenate Way” will not yet have its official statutes approved by the Vatican, reported CWNews.com.
It appeared there were still questions remaining about the role of priests within the group and their relationship to local bishops. The statutes are still unclear, Vatican sources said, about who will exercise authority over the clergy associated with the apostolate.
Work has continued on these statutes, which are necessary for full Church approval of the group, for more than a year. CWNews.com reported that “four successive drafts of those statutes have been produced, and each time the drafts have been sent back for further modifications.”
Three Vatican congregations must approve the statutes before they are published.
Founded in 1967, the Neocatechumenate is active around the world, encouraging Catholics to minister to the poor and dispossessed with their presence and friendship as well as material aid.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Thousands Gather at Vatican for Padre Pio Canonization DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — On Sept. 23, 2003, your local parish priest will celebrate the feast of St. Pio of Pietrelcina — no matter where you are.
Declaring that “our time needs to rediscover the value of [Padre Pio's spirituality of the cross] for opening the heart to hope,” Pope John Paul II announced that the “date of his birth in heaven,” Sept. 23, would henceforth be observed as an obligatory feast day for the whole Church.
Only one other 20th-century saint has been so honored — Padre Pio's fellow Franciscan, St. Maximilian Kolbe, whose feast is August 14. The two saints have been given what in liturgical par-lance is called an “obligatory memorial,” a rank they will share with their fellow Franciscans, Sts. Francis, Clare, Anthony and Bonaventure.
“The life and mission of Padre Pio give testimony that difficulty and suffering, if accepted with love, transform themselves into a privileged path of sanctity, opening toward a larger good that is known only to the Lord,” the Pope said during the Mass.
John Paul canonized 460 saints before Padre Pio, but the June 16 canonization of the Capuchin friar, mystic and stigmatist was perhaps the most eagerly anticipated.
The Holy Father was not able to finish the formula of canonization without interruption. As soon as the immense crowd heard the words “we declare and define Blessed Pio of Pietrelcina to be a saint,” they erupted in sustained applause.
Enthusiastic Crowds
The canonization Mass drew more than 300,000 pilgrims, making it one of the largest events ever held at the Vatican. As early as 5 a.m. the first of 2,000 buses began depositing pilgrims at St. Peter's. Ten special trains were chartered for pilgrims.
Saluting the crowd for its courage in braving the blistering 90-degree heat for many hours, John Paul clearly shared their enthusiasm, directing his popemo-bile to drive the entire length of the Via della Conciliazione, the street leading to St. Peter's Square, where overflow pilgrims watched the Mass on large screens.
More than 900,000 tetra-packs of water were distributed — each marked “Padre Pio Santo” — and water trucks sprayed the crowd during the Mass. Nevertheless, more than 400 people were treated by first-aid workers for heat exhaustion.
One of the first to be overcome by the heat was the dean of the College of Cardinals, 80-year-old Cardinal Bernard Gantin, who was rushed from the Mass in a wheelchair only 15 minutes after it began. The heat was so intense that the yellow-and-white umbrellas kept on hand in case of rain were distributed to shade the bishops and concelebrants.
While there were pilgrims from all over the world, Padre Pio's fellow countrymen were the most numerous and most visibly devoted. A large delegation represented the Italian government, including the speaker of the Italian parliament and the mayor of Rome. The presence of so many Italian politicians underscored that Padre Pio is an Italian icon, even for those who are not particularly fervent in their faith.
“May God be blessed for having given us a friar like you, a saint,” wrote former dictator Benito Mussolini in 1937 to Padre Pio. It was the only letter he ever wrote to a religious.
The Holy Father proposed Padre Pio's heroic service in the confessional — sometimes 10 or 12 hours a day — to priests today, encouraging them to devote themselves “with joy and diligence” to hearing confessions.
John Paul also addressed the “apparent harshness” with which Padre Pio sometimes treated penitents who were insincere or unrepentant. This was due to the new saint's “awareness of the gravity of sin,” the Pope said, noting that such penitents “almost always returned for the peacemaking embrace of sacramental forgiveness.”
“I too had the privilege during the years of my youth to benefit from his availability in the confessional,” John Paul said, spontaneously departing from his prepared homily text.
In 1947 the young Father Karol Wojtyla went to Padre Pio's friary in San Giovanni Rotondo to confess to him. In 1962 Bishop Wojtyla wrote to Padre Pio to ask his prayers for a Polish woman suffering from throat cancer. Dr. Wanda Poltawska, a long-time friend of the future Pope, was cured within days. She was present at the canonization Mass.
Also present in St. Peter's Square was Matteo Colella, an 8-year-old boy whose inexplicable cure from multiple organ failure was the miracle accepted for Padre Pio's canonization.
Colella, who was cured in 2000, made his First Communion at the canonization Mass. He had been scheduled to receive Holy Communion from the Pope, but he received it from another bishop when the Holy Father was too tired to distribute Holy Communion.
“Without constant reference to the cross one cannot understand his holiness,” John Paul said in his canonization homily, which concluded with an extraordinary prayer addressed to Padre Pio himself: “Help us to pray without ever tiring, certain that God knows what we need, even before we ask him. Obtain for us the outlook of faith capable of quickly recognizing the face of Jesus in the poor and the suffering. Sustain us in the hour of combat and of trial and, if we should fall, grant that we may experience the joy of the sacrament of forgiveness.”
Daylong Celebration
The canonization festivities concluded with a special concert in the Paul VI Audience Hall followed by an ear-splitting fireworks show over St. Peter's Square that rattled windows in the Apostolic Palace.
At 10:30 p.m. St. Peter's Square was still full, with more than 5,000 pilgrims on hand, many of them singing and chanting, hoping that they could persuade the Holy Father to come to his window. While they were disappointed at night, John Paul received them in an audience the following day.
“What is the secret of the great admiration and love for this new saint?” John Paul asked, addressing pilgrims June 17. “He was above all a ‘friar of the people,’ traditionally characteristic of the Capuchins. He is, moreover, a miracle-working saint, as the extraordinary events that marked his life testify. Above all, Padre Pio is a religious sincerely in love with Christ crucified. In the course of his life, he participated even in a physical way in the mystery of the cross.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Understand Suffering Through God's Eyes DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II urged the 8,000 pilgrims who gathered in the Paul VI Hall for his general audience on June 12 to see human suffering “from an eternal perspective.” He was commenting on Psalm 92 in his series of meditations on the psalms and canticles in the Liturgy of the Hours.
Psalm 92 portrays two opposing figures: the sinful man and the just man, the Holy Father said. “Though the wicked flourish like grass and all sinners thrive,” he noted, quoting verse 8 of the psalm, “they are destined to dry up and disappear.” This is a natural result of the evil that pervades their minds and hearts.
The just man is certain that the Lord will come to bring justice to the earth and crush the arrogance of the foolish, he said. “It is only with God's light that we can fully understand good and evil and justice and wickedness,” the Pope added.
Psalm 92 is an optimistic song of praise and thanksgiving, he said, that celebrates our trust in God, who is the source for peace and tranquility. “It is a peace that will remain intact even in old age, a stage in life that can still be a time of fruitfulness and security,” he noted.
Psalm 92, the song that a just man sings to God his creator, has a special place in the ancient Jewish tradition. As the TITLE of the psalm indicates, it is really a Sabbath song (see verse 1). Thus, it is a hymn that people lifted up to the eternal and almighty Lord as the sun was setting on Friday and they were beginning a holy day of prayer, contemplation and peaceful repose for their body and for their soul.
God the almighty appears solemnly and majestically in the middle of the psalm (verse 9), surrounded by a world that is harmonious and peaceful. The just man stands before him. According to a concept that is popular in the Old Testament, he is blessed with well-being, joy and long life as a natural consequence of his faithful and honest life. According to this so-called “theory of retribution,” every wrong doing merits a punishment on earth, and every good deed is rewarded. Even though there is an element of truth in such a vision, the reality of human suffering is, nonetheless, much more complex and cannot be reduced to such simple terms. Job helps us to understand this, and Jesus confirms it (John 9:2-3). In fact, human suffering must be considered from an eternal perspective.
A Call to Praise
Now we will examine the liturgical implications of this very wise hymn. It includes a resounding call to praise, to a joyful song of thanksgiving, to a musical celebration with a 10-stringed harp and a lyre (see verses 2-4). We should celebrate our love for the Lord and our faithfulness to him through liturgical songs that are done in good taste (see Psalm 47:8). This invitation holds true for our celebrations today. They should radiate a splendor not only in words and actions, but in the music that inspires them.
After this appeal to never stifle the prayer that is within us and around us — truly the steadfast breath of mankind that is faithful, Psalm 92 presents two portraits: one of a sinful man (see verses 7-10) and the other of a just man (verses 13-16). The sinful man, however, stands before the Lord “forever on high” (verse 9), who will destroy his enemies and scatter all sinners (see verse 10). Thus, it is only with God's light that we can fully understand good and evil, and justice and wickedness.
The Weakness of Sinners
An image from the plant kingdom is used to depict the sinful man. “Though the wicked flourish like grass and all sinners thrive” (verse 8), they are destined to dry up and disappear. In fact, the psalmist uses several different expressions to describe their destruction: “They are destined for eternal destruction … Indeed your enemies, Lord, indeed your enemies shall perish; all sinners shall be scattered” (verses 8 and 10).
The evil that pervades the mind and heart of the wicked man is at the root of his catastrophic outcome: “A senseless person cannot know this; a fool cannot comprehend” (verse 7). The adjectives that are used are characteristic of the language of the wise and denote the harshness, blindness and foolishness of whoever thinks he can ravage the face of the earth with any moral consequences, under the illusion that God is absent or indifferent. The psalmist, on the other hand, is certain that the Lord will appear sooner or later on the earth's horizon. He will bring justice to the earth and crush the arrogance of the foolish man (see Psalm 14).
The Strength of the Just
Now we can examine the portrait of the just man, who is depicted in a multitude and variety of terms. Here, too, the image of a plant that is growing and flourishing is used (see Psalm 92: 13-16). Unlike the wicked that flourish like grass in the fields and quickly disappear, the just man rises up toward the sky, solid and majestic like the palm tree and the cedar of Lebanon. Moreover, the just are “planted in the house of the Lord” (verse 14). They have a very solid and stable relationship with the Temple and with the Lord, who has established his dwelling place there.
Our Christian tradition toys with the double meaning of the Greek word phoenix, which is used to translate the Hebrew word for palm tree. Phoenix is the Greek word for the palm tree, but it is also the name for a bird that is called a phoenix. Now it is worth noting that the phoenix was a symbol of immortality because people believed that this bird rose renewed from its ashes. The Christian undergoes a similar experience thanks to his participation in Christ's death, which is the source for new life (see Romans 6: 3-4). “But God … even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ,” Ephesians 2:5-6 tells us, and “raised us up with him.”
Strength in Old Age
Another image that is used to portray the just man is an image from the animal kingdom. It exalts the strength that God lavishly pours out on us, even in old age: “You have given me the strength of a wild bull; you have poured rich oil upon me” (Psalm 92:11). On one hand, the gift of God's power is a source of triumph and security (see verse 12). On the other hand, the forehead of the just man is gloriously anointed with oil that is a source of energy and a protective blessing. Thus, Psalm 92 is an optimistic hymn that is strengthened by music and song. It celebrates our trust in God, who is the source for peace and tranquility even when we witness the apparent success of the wicked. It is a peace that will remain intact even in old age (see verse 15), a stage in life that can still be a time of fruitfulness and security.
We will conclude with some words from Origen that were translated by St. Jerome, which were inspired by the psalmist's words to God: “You have poured rich oil upon me” (verse 11). Origen made the following comment: “We, too, need God's oil in our old age. When are bodies are exhausted, we refresh them by rubbing them with oil. When the flame of an oil lamp is dying out, we add oil to it. So, too, the flame of my old age needs the oil of God's mercy in order to grow. Moreover, the Apostles also went up to the Mount of Olives (see Acts 1:12) to receive light from the Lord's oil, because they were weary and their lamps needed the Lord's oil … Thus, let us pray to the Lord so that our old age, and all our weariness and all the dark shadows of our life will be illuminated by the Lord's oil” (74 Omelie sul Libro dei Salmi, Milan 1993, p. 280-282, passim).
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Falklands Revisited: Officer Recalls How Prayer Led to Peace DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:As British soldiers sailed to war with Argentina 20 years ago this month to dislodge Argentina's illegal invasion from the Falkland Islands, many just prayed to survive. But paratroop officer Christopher Keeble had other ideas. The father of four prayed that it would be a spiritual experience.
As second-in-command of the elite 2nd Parachute Battalion, his faith was put to the test when his commanding officer Col. “H” Jones was killed in an attack during the Battle of Goose Green. He found himself facing an Argentinean force three times the size of his own and holding 112 islanders hostage.
With the 20th anniversary of the Falklands conflict and England's World Cup soccer defeat of Argentina earlier this month both rekindling memories of the two nations' military showdown in 1982, the 61-year-old former colonel told Register correspondent Paul Burnell about his spiritual journey to the South Atlantic and his continuing debt to a saintly French soldier-turned-priest.
It is said there are no atheists in a foxhole — did you always have a strong Catholic faith?
I was educated at Douai, a Benedictine boarding school north of London, and went straight to Sandhurst [the British equivalent of West Point]. I had always been pretty serious about my faith, even since prep school. My relationship with God and Christ as a way of life was also very important and had always been an essential factor for me in understanding how I would live in the world.
When you knew you were going to war, how did you pray?
I went up to the hills surrounding my home, knelt down in the grass and committed myself to this endeavor in the hope that this experience would be essentially a spiritual one. I did not see it as a military experience at all.
I had this amazing sense of committing myself, and the whole experience, to my spiritual progress. I had a great sense of the Holy Spirit.
At the Battle of Goose Green, your commanding officer had just been killed, half of the battalion was elsewhere, it was hand-to-hand combat and you were outnumbered. What thoughts went through your mind?
I don't mean to sound ruthless, but there is a job to do and it is important to keep one's emotions well under control. You have to be a professional. You have to know the tactical position. You are carrying the greatest burden. You have to make decisions so that you don't lose your friends when you have to fight. You are risking everybody's life. The much more demanding decision is how to act in a way that could be justified afterward: Did you act ethically?
I understand the prayer of Charles de Foucauld was very important to you.
I had read about him and knew something of his life. He was a French soldier who was quite well-bred. He committed himself to the Arabs after experiencing warfare in Algeria and came across the Tuarag Arabs. He had some kind of conversion and dedicated himself to being a Christian presence among the Tuarag. His contribution was to become one of them, to be poor as they were poor. He was a Trappist priest. I read this fabulous prayer by him:
“Father, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you do I thank you. I am ready for all. I accept all. Let only your will be done in me. I wish for no more than this.”
I had it laminated many years ago and always carried this plastic card with me. I prayed that prayer in a very dark time when there was nobody else. I didn't know what options were available, I did not want to go on killing people — it is not the best position [to be in]. I knelt down in the gorse and said that prayer.
That was when the most remarkable experience happened. I suddenly knew exactly what I needed to do, something which had never occurred to me.
I needed to have a conversation with the enemy to see if there was a possibility to invite them to surrender, which for a paratrooper was counterculture. It was the most influential moment of my life and a very significant moment of my turning in a new direction.
Practically what happened was that along with this inspiration came a doubt, which didn't go away, which was curious. I remember talking to a Bedouin Arab who once said to me, “Trust in God and tether your camel.” I had never forgotten that.
In other words, I had to do something.
I got hold of two POWs and said I was releasing them and explained what I wanted to do, so there was a bit of tethering the camel — I didn't just put my rifle down and head toward enemy lines.
Is it true you also appealed to your common Catholic faith with the Argentinean officers?
I wrote them a note [saying] something like, “we are both Christians” and here they could remove this stalemate and release the prisoners they held unjustifiably. I wrote that we were paratroopers who would fight to the death and that we both had a common responsibility.
They surrendered. I was offering something that they wanted anyway but I could not have known that when I said the prayer.
What is interesting is that a few years later I reflected that we had resolved this difficulty by negotiation. I wanted to persuade my general to do the same thing for the rest of the Falklands, but it wasn't possible.
What did the experience teach you about reconciliation?
A few years after the war, I was contacted by Horacio Benitez, who had fought against my battalion in one of the last actions of the war. He came to the UK asking for forgiveness for himself and his people, saying he needed to be forgiven by the people he fought against.
When I got out of the car I looked him in the eyes and saw the tears there. He just held out his hand and embraced me. I told him, “You have done nothing wrong; I hold nothing against you but if that is what you feel I forgive you.” I told him if the war had not been fought the Junta [Argentina's former military government] would still be in power and people would still be disappearing.
I told him we were both on the same side and as Christians we had to go through this miserable suffering in order that the greater good would be achieved.
Paul Burnell writes from Manchester, England.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Burnell ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Washington Red-Faced Over Hostage Botch
On the mainly Muslim island of Mindanao, long the scene of separatist violence, American missionary Martin Burnham, his wife, Gracia, and Filipino nurse Ediborah Yap were taken hostage more than a year ago by bandits of the Abu Sayyaf gang associated with al Qaeda. On June 7, Philippine authorities lost patience with the hostage-takers and employed American expertise and tactics to attempt a rescue — with disastrous results.
Philippine soldiers stormed the Abu Sayyaf camp that day with guns blazing and, authorities admit, probably shot the hostages themselves. In the course of a three-hour firefight, Martin Burnham and Yap were killed and Gracia Burnham was wounded while leading kidnappers escaped. Eight soldiers were wounded, and four rebels were killed.
The Herald reported the Burnhams, who had lived in the Philippines for 15 years and had three young children, were abducted in May 2001 from a resort on the western Philippine island of Palawan, where they were celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary.
Australian Leader Supports Catholic Prelate
ASSOCIATED PRESS, June 5 — Australian Prime Minister John Howard has come out in defense of embattled Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, leader of the Catholic Church in that country.
Archbishop Pell has sustained heavy criticism for offering payments to victims of clerical abuse, which Church critics have called “hush money.” Howard called it “unfair” to term these agreements as a cover-up, Associated Press reported.
“The Archbishop impresses me as a strong leader and as a person who has a great deal of integrity,” Howard said, announcing that he would not launch an investigation into the Church, which might “just become an unending witch hunt.”
Archbishop Pell has noted that there was no confidentiality clause in the agreements reached with the families of victims.
From the Army to the Church
ASSOCIATED PRESS, June 6 — The Central American nation of Guatemala — long a scene of fighting between guerillas and the army — is experiencing more peaceful times and is shifting its media ownership to reflect that, the news service reported.
Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo's office announced June 6 that the government would probably shed the army's official television station, channel 5, and transfer it to the Church. “We would like to give it to the Catholic Church as a way for civil society without access to the media to participate,” the announcement said.
According to Associated Press, 70% of Guatemalans are Catholic. Some 26% belong to evangelical churches, which also operate a TV station in that country.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Out of Dallas, Hope DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Repentance. Holiness. A new focus on the urgency and importance of the Church's teachings on sexual morality. These are the fruits of the Dallas meeting, bishops tell the Register.
If, last year at this time, these things were in the hearts of bishops, now they are at the forefront of their minds. If they were convinced of their need before, now they are committed and urgent about them.
These intangibles may be the most important result of the bishops' meeting in Dallas — results that can't be neatly summed up in a policy.
But a policy was made in Dallas as well. In assessing it, it's important to remember that the sex-abuse rules the bishops adopted are only the latest word, not the last, on what diocese will do in these cases.
There is much good in the policy. Bishops were already adopting stricter rules for dealing with sex-abuse cases; this will ensure that they all do. But there is also much to quibble with — as Cardinal Avery Dulles pointed out, some of it has the feel of being conceived in a panic. Its broad definition of sex abuse, and its insistence that any accusation be turned over to civil authorities — not just credible ones — could enable grave injustices against priests who are innocent. If it is implemented, it will leave priests too vulnerable to the wild accusations that, as many a parish secretary will tell you, are all too common.
However, the policy that is implemented months hence may have none of these problems. The Vatican will have to sign off on the policy and, as the theologian-cardinal added, the Vatican isn't likely to reinforce its weak spots.
“The bishops are understandably concerned to show that they are taking bold and decisive measures,” he wrote in The New York Times before the meeting started. But “[i]f they yield too much to the present atmosphere of panic, the Holy See can be relied upon to safeguard the theological and canonical tradition. The many levels of authority in the Church are a precious resource.”
Then there is the matter of jurisdiction. Individual bishops, not the conference, have authority in their own dioceses. It's an open question how binding a national policy will be on them. As will be clear in November when the bishops take the matter up again, the abuse policy is far from finished.
But what is finished are the media swarms of June. In Dallas, a national meeting featured the frightening stories of victims and the tearful apologies of bishops. It is unlikely that the story will be able to muster the elements needed to match its drama.
As important as the policy is, the awareness caused by that intense, national attention may be the real legacy of the June meeting. The attention was often unfair. (“Two-thirds of bishops let accused priests work,” screamed one headline — but the cases the story cited didn't all involve priests and didn't add up to two-thirds of bishops.) But it accomplished some good.
First, it helped the public to see that bishops are concerned and committed to solving the problems of clergy abuse. The caricature of our bishops as uncaring and unfeeling is hard to sustain in the face of their clearly sincere repentance. It would have been easy for bishops to take a different approach — after all, according to Associated Press less than half of 1% of priests are even accused of sexual abuse. But bishops owned up to their responsibilities and accepted painful public rebukes.
Second, the media attention taught an object lesson in applied morality. Sexuality is powerful and sacred. Its misuse doesn't merely violate finger-wagging rules of the past. It has painful consequences for everyone involved. As much as news outlets tried to claim that the problem wasn't about sexual disorders — from homosexuality to basic sexual immaturity — there is no escaping that this is precisely what the abuse problem is.
The bishops have come back from Dallas changed. They have sent an unmistakable message: Never again will the abuse of children by clergy be handled insensitively. But we knew that before they went.
The biggest change will be interior. And that's where the biggest difference will ultimately be made. Catholics want holy bishops, men of faith and courage. Dallas gave our bishops a step in the right direction.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Laity, Drop Your Stones
It has been extremely difficult and painful to confront the reality of the Church's abuse scandals. However, as with any scandal, now that it is out in the open there is a real opportunity for healing to occur.
As a layperson, my greatest concern at this point is how the laity has been addressing this issue. Those who have been most vocal seem to put all the responsibility on priests and bishops. How self-righteous we are. Perhaps it's time to address the plank in our own eye. After all we, the laity, have our own scandals to address.
Though many of the lay groups that are forming to address this issue call themselves “faithful,” the majority of the laity over the past several decades have been anything but. Indeed, I would suggest that a good place to start addressing our own scandals would be our widespread unfaithfulness to the Church's teachings. And our collective disobedience has been most prominent in — of all areas — sexual morality!
Does anyone really believe it's just a coincidence that after 30 to 40 years of thumbing our collective nose at the teaching authority of the Church in this regard, we find the Church mired in a sex scandal? Where in the world do we think these priests and bishops came from, anyway? The Church didn't raise them. We did. They came out of our families. I believe that it's well past time that we put down our rocks, get on our knees and undertake our own purification in this regard.
The time has long since passed for the laity to put aside the cafeteria-Catholicism of the last several decades and truly partake of the banquet the Church has to offer. If we do, this can truly become the “springtime of hope” the Pope envisions. The only question is: Do we have the maturity, the integrity — and the faith — to face this scandal at its core? For our sake and that of our children and of the world, I pray that we do.
JOHN RYAN Ballwin, Missouri
Deacons Aren't Laymen
Very rarely do I find myself in a position to comment on articles in your excellent paper, but on this occasion I am compelled to do so. I am referring to the article “Researcher Claims There is No Priest Shortage” (June 9-15).
I am not commenting on the contents of the article per se, but rather to Father Sullins identifying deacons as “lay deacons.” I am a candidate for the permanent diaconate and, God willing, I will be ordained in February of next year. The operative word in that last sentence is “ordained.” Canon 1009 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, paragraph 1 says: “The orders are the episcopate, the presbyterate and the diaconate.”
I trust that Father Sullins will, someday, acknowledge that deacons are, in fact, recipients of the sacrament of holy orders. This is by no means intended to denigrate the laity but rather to point out what is, I am sure, an oversight and not a misinterpretation of the sacrament of orders.
ALFRED T. SAMORANSKI Buford, Georgia
Fan Mail
I wonder what I would do without the Register? I hope I never find out. Thanks for a wonderful Catholic periodical, and God bless you!
R. EMMET HARRIGAN Crystal Lake, Illinois
Prizer: Cheers and Jeers
I wish to thank John Prizer for his recommendation of the movie Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo with Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson (Weekly Video Picks, June 9-15). My cousin, Robert Clark Bourgeois, flew with Col. Doolittle over Tokyo on that historic mission and, last Nov. 13, three days after he attended my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, he passed away. He was the bombardier in Flight Crew #13, “Lucky 13.” His story is recounted in the recent book Twenty-Five Yards Of War by Ronald Drez. Robert's story is Chapter 1 of this great book.
But, at the same time, I wish to wholeheartedly concur with Mr. Nathan Halloran's letter about John Prizer's review of Spider-Man (“Triumphs of a Man Called Spidey,” Letters, June 9-15). Mr. Prizer's review (May 26-June 1) seemed like he was desperately in search of something to criticize about the movie and, in lieu of that, he made something up.
I've seen Spider-Man three times and I saw the new episode of Star Wars twice.
Each and every time I saw Spider-Man, the audience remained attentive throughout, yet it was not so for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. During the Star Wars movie, people were very fidgety and getting up and going out. Not so for Spider-Man.
Mr. Halloran is absolutely correct regarding the lasting impression Spider-Man left on moviegoers such as myself. And he's certainly correct about the line “with great power comes great responsibility” having a great impact throughout the whole movie. One thing I wish the filmmakers would have done: include a cross on Uncle Ben's headstone. Maybe next time they'll make up for this little lack of courage in an otherwise very courageous movie.
JOHN CRAVEN New Orleans
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: In Solidarity With Priests and Bishops DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:I am proud to be a Catholic. I am proud to be an American Catholic. I am proud of our cardinals, bishops and priests in whom I see Jesus on the altar.
I am proud of the priests who minister to people in the nursing homes, hospitals and prisons; who serve as teachers in our schools and as military chaplains in our armed forces. I am proud of our missionaries all over the world. I am proud to attend Mass every day.
No priest, no Mass. No priest, no sacrament of reconciliation. No priest, no confirmation. No priest, no holy orders.
I am proud of our priest who celebrated 60 years of ordination, of all our good and faithful priests. So pray and give thanks and let our priests lift high the cross. I am proud of Pope John Paul II and my holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Thank you for all your wonderful comments and articles about the 99% of priests who are good and holy.
JOHN TRENTON Altoona, Kansas
The newspapers and TV are valuable sources of information when they are objective. But the media are being unjust to Catholics by their distortion of the priestly sex-abuse scandal. The media have made three errors.
First, there are more than 46,000 priests in the United States alone, and the total of abuse cases extending back for 30 to 40 years is less than 200. This is less than half of 1%. From the statistics I've seen, married Protestant and Jewish clergy have at least the same incidence of sex abuse.
Second, the bishops relied on the psychiatric profession for advice in handling these cases. Many of the same psychiatrists who guided the bishops now accuse the Church of criminal mismanagement. I'm sure there were mistakes made by the bishops, but there were also mistakes made by the psychiatrists.
Third, except for a handful of cases, most of the abuse cases involved homosexuality and pederasty, not pedophilia. The Church teaches that both pederasty and homosexuality are grave disorders. Some people can't help being homosexual or pederasts and need our pity and compassion. But they also teach that homosexual and pederastic activities are very wrong. Whether a person is married or single has no effect on whether they are homosexuals or pederasts. (This celibacy discussion is misguided.)
We have a confused, mixed-up world and the media should build up, and not tear down, the vast majority of priests who dedicate their lives to helping and strengthening our culture.
CURT LAMPKIN Merritt Island, Florida
I am writing in response to your informative Web site (www.ncregister.com), which I happened to come across while doing research. With all of the controversy going on today about Catholic priests, I have become a more interested and active parishioner. I was very confused about my religion when the news started broadcasting reports on “Catholic pedophile priests.”
I started researching the topic as soon as it came on the news, but I didn't have as much luck as I had hoped for. Many Web sites blamed Catholics, many newspapers questioned the faith, and many people doubted their religion.
Then I came upon your article “Media Myths Fuel the Clergy Abuse Scandal” (April 7-13). I was finally put to ease, my questions were all answered, and I really do owe a lot of it to you.
There are not many Web sites out there that include important information. Many of the ones today consist of garbage. I would just like to commend you for producing a very informative Web site. As a young Catholic, I know that finding out more about my religion is important, and with the aid of your Web site I can do just that.
ALEXIS HOYT Tempe, Arizona
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Good Things That Can Come From Scandal DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Vast sectors of the media continue to train their spotlights on the scandalous behavior of a few bad Catholic priests.
I sit down to write just after learning that Pope John Paul II has accepted the resignation of Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee.
By the time this column comes to print, I am sadly certain, other prominent priests and bishops will have resigned as well.
It is quite easy to be weary of the whole thing, to turn the channel or the page and get on to something more cheerful. Things were going so well, it seemed, riding high as we were under the leadership of the current Pope. Well, if we are tired of the scandal, and don't want to read or hear another word about it, then I am afraid that we are part of the problem. We cannot tire of it, but must fight to bring back the spiritual and moral health of the Church.
Perhaps it would be easier to bear, however, if there were a ray of hopeful light, some sign of victory in what appears to be a dark cloud enshrouding the entire Church.
At the risk of causing a bit of shock, may I suggest that the current scandal in the Church is a great sign of hope — even (if rightly understood) a cause for rejoicing. Please be patient while I explain.
First and most obvious, the problem with priests and bishops unfaithful to their vows of celibacy was a cancer in the Church for decades, a cancer that poisoned all aspects of their promised fidelity, from sexuality to doctrine to liturgy. The very worst thing that could have happened was for the cancer to continue its growth uninterrupted by disclosure. As with the seeming violence of an operation, the patient could not be cured without deep and invasive surgery using the intense light of public scrutiny. The scandal is just what the doctor — or more accurately, the Wounded Healer — ordered.
The good news, then, is that the Wounded Healer is now doing his work, and the scandal is his cure. If it were not so public, and the light of scrutiny were not so uncompromisingly bright, the deep surgery of reform would not occur. And as much as this has grieved John Paul II, we must remember that it is only part of the grief that has been piercing the Sacred Heart of Christ for as long as the cancerous infidelity has been growing. Further, who better to assist the Wounded Healer than this Pope, surely one of the greatest of all time?
Second, if you are Catholic, rejoice in the knowledge that you live in a Church in which hypocrisy is still possible. In order to have hypocrisy, vice must have some virtue to which it can pay tribute. The Church is such a broad and easy target for charges of hypocrisy because it draws clearly defined blacks and whites in a culture near-blind in a gritty, dense fog of moral grays.
Third, consider this. It is not only the Church's defense of virtue that makes it a favorite media target, but the very unity by which it is able to offer such defense. In most Protestant churches, the scandal can only rise as high as the individual who commits it. This might seem to be an enviable fireguard to snuff out scandal at the source, but it does so only by shrinking the unity of the body of Christ until it resides in the body of a mere individual. That is a very small church indeed.
By contrast, the true body of Christ, as St. Paul makes clear, “does not consist of one member but of many.” A mark of being a member of that body is that “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Corinthians 12:14, 26). But also, if one member sins, all suffer together; if one member is dishonored, all lament together. If it is not too paradoxical to bear, be happy, Catholics, that you share today the shame of your bishops and priests, for that shame is rooted in the glorious privilege of being a member of the body of Christ.
And here is a fourth blessing. The so-called media feeding frenzy will allow — nay, force — the Church to declare once again its teachings in regard to sexuality, especially homosexuality. The problem is not pedophilia, as the media have consistently tried to portray it, but homosexuality.
In happily turning the bright glare of scrutiny on the scandal, the media will inadvertently uncover not only the “intrinsically disordered” nature of homosexual acts, but the “objectively disordered” inclination of “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” themselves (Catechism, Nos. 2357-2358). They will find that those who entered the priesthood with such deep-seated homosexual tendencies and were told that these tendencies were harmless soon translated the subjective disorder into the objective homosexuality of the scandal.
There is hope then — true hope. The current scandal is proof of the power and wisdom of God in uncovering and exposing what has remained covered and festering for too long in the body of Christ and proof that the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church.
Ben Wiker teaches philosophy of science at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin D. Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Priestly Celibacy Reflects Who - and Whose - We Are DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:A priest was recently asked about priestly celibacy on a network television program. Sad to say, he responded by nonchalantly stating that the celibacy requirement for priests was only instituted about 800 years ago — “to keep property out of the hands of family heirs.”
If that were true, celibacy would be worse than wrong.
Why a cleric with virtually no critical competence should have been called on as a “spokesman” for the Church can only be explained by the network. The man himself made things worse by his off-handedness.
The history of celibacy, as it has been subject to intense scholarly review in recent years, does not deserve glib treatment. Rather, it deserves the kind of thoughtful reflection it receives in Priestly Identity: A Study in the Theology of Priesthood by Opus Dei Father Thomas McGovern.
Published by Four Courts Press in Dublin, this work presents a deft response to shallow perception. It follows Father McGovern's previous, equally worthwhile Four Courts book, 1998's Priestly Celibacy Today, which was similarly mindful of celibacy as a charism.
A close reading of the new work will do much to enlighten the faithful on the true nature of priestly identity — an understanding of which is essential for any who would speak out on priestly celibacy.
Indivisible Identity
Recent crises in the Catholic priest-hood have provoked hostile demands for restructuring. Many of these calls are notable only for their lack of understanding about what a priest is and why Christ instituted the priesthood the way he did. Father McGovern explains the big picture in clear language, paying close attention to detail.
The romantic utopianism that animated many naive churchmen in the period of Vatican II was sorely dashed by the volcanic eruption of defections from the priesthood and the decline in vocations, especially in the West. The author writes from Ireland, which has experienced the sharpest rate of decline in the number of seminarians in all of Europe.
Papal teaching since Vatican II will be as highly regarded in future generations as it has been ignored in our time. That neglect is in part accountable for the moral disarray around us. Yet people continue to look to their priests and have even become almost presbyterian in their support for faithful priests — and their frustration with an episcopate that has become, in popular opinion, excited by the secular media: a symbol of clericalism impeding priestly life. A high theology of the priesthood cannot be separated from a high theology of the episcopate that embodies the fullness of the priesthood. Such theology cannot breathe if the priesthood degenerates into a bureaucratic caste.
Father McGovern recovers the essence of such seminal documents as Pope John Paul II's 1992 apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis (On the Formation of Priests in the Circumstances of the Present Day) to explain what the Church means by the man ordained for others. He divides his analysis into three sections that parallel, perhaps by a happy intuition of grace, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: His account of the priestly life is in terms theological, spiritual and pastoral. As the Holy Trinity is undivided, so can these aspects of priestly life be isolated one from the other only at the price of priestly integrity.
Most people know their priests from their words at the altar, in the confessional and behind the pulpit. And, indeed, all other aspects of the priest's work flow from these places. Josef Pieper said that the crisis in priestly identity is rooted in a defective faith in the sacrifice of the Mass. Father McGovern is very practical in describing what has happened to the liturgy, preaching and spiritual direction, profiling a priesthood that transcends “democratic” and “autocratic” models alike.
It is not impious to say that papal documents generally lack popular diction. Apologists exist to popularize them; good apologists render them in the vernacular without abusing them. The McGovern book, not prodigal with words, would be valuable if only for its bibliography. This cites not only the expected conciliar documents and classical sources, but also the likes of such popular popularizers as Joseph Pierce, Catherine Pickstock, Wanda Poltawska, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Saward, Janet Smith, Eamon Duffy, Alec Guinness and Aidan Nichols.
Gift and Mystery
Soul-numbing mistakes have been made in the liturgy and seminary formation. Even earnest churchmen invested so much of themselves in those miscalculations that, in their sunset years, they cannot admit the essential defects in their dated enthusiasms. Meanwhile saintly modern examples of priestliness have been undercut by a failure to correct bad examples.
A notorious instance was the 1982 visitation of seminaries in the United States, whose failure has only now been acknowledged. A new generation has appeared for whom all that is a curious history. Its members need good guides. What Father McGovern writes could not be more timely.
The ranting of Pharisees in the press is a warning of how much ignorance fuels a hatred of the priesthood which, as one French historian wrote of the Revolution of 1789, is the oldest animus in Western civilization. With prescience — if understatement, in light of the present crisis — Father McGovern says: “One cannot help feeling at times that the active prosecution of failure in celibacy by the media is another way of attacking the Church's stand on sexual morality by trying to show it to be self-contradictory.”
As the priesthood is Christ's gift to the Church to enable the Church to be the Church and given the confusion over the priesthood in our time, Priestly Identity should be required reading for lay faithful as well as priests.
Father George W. Rutler is pastor of The Church of Our Saviour in New York City. Both Priestly Celibacy Today and Priestly Identity: A Study in the Theology of Priesthood can be ordered over the Internet at www.four-courts-press.ie.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George W. Rutler ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Complete Consecration to Charity DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:In the community of the faithful committed to his charge, the priest represents Christ. Thus, it is most fitting that in all things he should reproduce the image of Christ and in particular follow his example, both in his personal and in his apostolic life. To his children in Christ, the priest is a sign and a pledge of that sublime and new reality which is the kingdom of God; he dispenses it and he possesses it to a more perfect degree. Thus he nourishes the faith and hope of all Christians, who, as such, are bound to observe chastity according to their proper state of life. …
By reason of his celibacy the priest is a man alone: That is true, but his solitude is not meaningless emptiness because it is filled with God and the brimming riches of his kingdom. Moreover, he has prepared himself for this solitude — which should be an internal and external plenitude of charity — if he has chosen it with full understanding, and not through any proud desire to be different from the rest of men, or to withdraw himself from common responsibilities, or to alienate himself from his brothers, or to show contempt for the world. Though set apart from the world, the priest is not separated from the people of God, because he has been “appointed to act on behalf of men,” since he is consecrated completely to charity and to the work for which the Lord has chosen him.
Excerpted from Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, Pope Paul VI's 1967 encyclical on priestly celibacy.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sacerdotalis Caelibatus ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: My Meeting With the Prayed-for President DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:As a journalist, I spend much of my time on the telephone. But nothing could have prepared me for the call I received a few Fridays ago.
Mr. Drake, how would you like to attend a meeting as a special guest of the president of the United States?
Talk about a wake-up call!
Why me? Evidently, my volunteer work supporting local pro-life candidates had landed me on a short list of Minnesotans a certain political party wants to woo for the coming elections. In attendance would be approximately 100 people from four different states.
My wife and children, busy in the garden, must have thought I'd gone crazy when, immediately upon hanging up the phone, I ran outside to tell them the news. No matter. A couple of weeks later, there I was enjoying a private tour of the East Wing. (As private as you can be when you're one of 100, anyway.) This was followed by a series of speeches in the briefing room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Then the president himself stepped up to the podium.
I counted myself blessed to be there, considering that the event was closed to the media. But I didn't know quite what to expect. I'd had mixed feelings about the president, but had been impressed, like everyone, with his leadership after Sept. 11. What I found surprised me. It was obvious he was speaking off the cuff, not from a prepared speech, and I found the “real Bush” to be a man of character, intelligence, wit, faith — and, though it sounds odd to say it, humility.
With his first statement alone, one realized that we have a president who is very different from the last one.
He began, quite simply, by saying, “Let's see. What can I tell you? My marriage is fabulous. That's pretty surprising, considering that we live in a fish-bowl and we don't get out much. But it's never been better.” Then the president framed a 23-minute talk around the various pictures that he has hanging in the Oval Office.
First he spoke of a picture of a horse and rider climbing a hill. It is a picture that reminds the president of home. “I've changed addresses, but I haven't changed my home,” he said. “My home is Texas.”
The president realizes the historic moment our country faces and of the dark days that his presidency has already seen. Yet, he said, the picture reminds him that “a better day is coming.”
Then the president commented on a Methodist hymn framed and mounted on an Oval Office wall. The hymn says that “we must serve something greater in life than ourselves.”
Here, the president showed real humility. It was clear that he is not so concerned with how history will judge him as he is concerned about being a leader. “I serve my country and the Lord,” he said plainly.
Finally, President Bush made it evident that he looks to Abraham Lincoln as a role model for troubled times like ours, and that he has a clear vision for the country. A painting of Lincoln in the Oval Office reminds him that the job of a president is to be a peacemaker and to unite the nation. “When I have peace, I will keep our nation united,” he said, quoting Lincoln. The president recalled the pain of growing up in a country that was divided on civil rights.
“There are a lot of people that didn't vote for me. You know that,” President Bush added. “But, they're stuck with me. My job is to unite the country.”
His candor was appreciated. But is it naïve to trust a politician?
His short speech echoed sincere Gospel values and pro-life convictions. He remarked, “If you want to fight evil, do good. Love your neighbor.” He also said that “we must always hold true to the value that each life matters.”
For people of faith, maybe it isn't so much of a stretch to believe that a politician can be a good man. After all, he's one of the most prayed-for presidents in memory. Sept. 11 made sure of that. In addition to the private imperatives of countless American believers, there are the evangelical Presidential Prayer Team's 1.2 million prayer pledges and Catholics who have rallied behind Pope John Paul II's repeated calls for daily rosaries.
The president made it clear that he recognizes the importance of faith and prayer. “I'm a grateful president,” he said. “It's great being the leader of a nation where people pray for its president. The greatest gift you can give the president is prayer.”
Will Bush apply his faith and courage to attacks on unborn life with the same energy as he has shown in the war on terrorism? Will he do with abortion what his hero Lincoln did with slavery? Will he find effective ways to put it on a path to extinction, even in a divided nation?
Let us pray.
Culture of Life editor Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: For I Have Sinned DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Recently I found the prayer that saved my life — my eternal life.
By one of those happy events that we think are coincidence but are due to God's providence, I heard a priest leading the people in the novena to the Infant of Prague. I was chasing my toddler son across the back of the church at the time, thinking self-righteously that I didn't deserve such disobedience, when the words of the novena made me aware of my past misdeeds and how far Jesus has led me on the spiritual path.
Let me explain.
Some years ago, when I was returning to the Church after my own personal “me decade,” I decided to take the big step into the confessional.
I had been attending Mass, absorbing the Scriptures and enjoying the homilies of my favorite priest, but, at Communion time, I felt like an orphan. I had been taught well by the Sisters of Charity in my youth, and knew that after 12 years of missing Sunday Mass and other assorted sins, I could not receive the Eucharist until I had gone to confession.
My first step, of course, was to go to a parish where none of the priests knew me. I sat in the pew near the confessional, but far enough away so that no one would think I was there for confession. The light above the priest's station was green. The lights above the adjoining cubicles blinked red and green as penitents entered and left.
Spiritual Life
Butterflies fluttered in my gut as I saw the green light flash and thought it was my turn. Waves of relief came over me as someone else rose from a pew to enter the confessional.
By an instinct of my upbringing, though, I knelt down for a final good-bye, asking God to understand, and there before me was the Infant of Prague prayer.
It was typed out unevenly on a sheet marred by ragged scissor marks — obviously a homemade job. I skimmed the lines quickly, but came to a screeching halt at the words “I am firmly resolved never to offend you again and to suffer everything rather than displease you.” The thought haunted me, and challenged my manhood: Would I rather die than offend God?
I pictured the old lady who I imagined had placed this prayer in the pews. She passed unnoticed through the bustle of Manhattan, silently fingering her rosary beads on the subway, giving a quarter to the beggar on the corner, talking to St. Jude in the darkness of the church. I had smugly dismissed her and her kind as hopelessly old-fashioned and repressed, yet now I saw her as a warrior of the interior life.
I would suffer everything rather than displease you! I said the words but didn't mean them. I would rather live on my own terms, I thought. I knew then that I needed more than ever to go to confession. I needed to learn the language of this new warfare that involved the battle for my soul, the “me” I so cherished.
When the light turned green, I entered the confessional: “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 12 years since my last confession; these are my sins …” I thought I heard a sigh through the grille, but realized it was my own aching soul.
Every Saturday now, my wife and I bring our son to St. Mary's in New Haven, where they pray the novena. I bring Stephen James to the statue of the Infant of Prague, the little Jesus somewhat over-dressed as king. My son points to the statue as I tell him, “There's the baby Jesus who saved your daddy's life.”
Brian Caulfield writes from West Haven, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Peter and Paul in the City of Brotherly Love DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:The Cathedral Ba-silica of Sts. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia is, to put it simply, one of the grandest churches of its kind that you're likely to find in the United States.
It will be a fitting place to pray to the two greatest Apostles on June 29, their feast day.
Back in 1864, when the cathedral was completed, its epic qualities must have caused a great stir — even with the raging Civil War on everyone's mind.
Directly across the street, I found the large park that forms the Logan Circle traffic hub to provide an ideal vantage point for admiring the enormous church's exterior. Of course, neither the traffic nor the circle was here when construction began on this massive Roman-Corinthian style edifice in 1846. Neither were the neighboring civic landmarks on Ben Franklin Parkway.
It would be hard not to notice, even if not for a little Catholic pride, that the 156-year-old cathedral still outshines them all.
The majestic façade, a vision of brownstone that now has a pinkish hue due to the weather and the years, was in the works during St. John Neumann's tenure as bishop of Philadelphia. The façade's four gigantic stone Corinthian columns are perfectly balanced under a pediment that rises 101.5 feet above the ground.
The four statues in individual niches on the façade are easy to identify. They are the Sacred Heart (to whom the diocese was consecrated), the Immaculate Conception (Mary was proclaimed Patroness of the United States at the First Council of Baltimore in 1846) and, of course, Peter and Paul. The three sets of huge bronze doors fit the original design even though they were part of major renovations in the 1950s.
The vantage point of the park also gave me a good sense of the dimensions of the cathedral. At 250 feet long, 136 feet wide and 209 feet to the top of the gold cross on the dome, this is one massive architectural achievement.
Impressive as it is from the outside, the cathedral is exponentially more affecting once you step inside. I nearly got dizzy trying to take in everything, from the extended apse 236 feet away, to the intricate coffered ceiling with its gold rosettes on a rich blue background 80 feet high from the pews, to the soaring 156-foot-high inner dome with its splendid paintings of the Assumption and Angels of the Passion, to the awe-inspiring sanctuary with its superlative baldachin over the main altar.
Splendid marbles everywhere add to the rich and reverential feeling. Botticino with Mandorlato rose trim for the main altar. Red Antique Italian for the extraordinary baldachin, and white for the 10-foot marble angels standing above its bronze Corinthian capitals. Verte imperial for the sanctuary's six colossal columns, each 40 feet high and weighing more than 25 tons.
The statistics — like the enormous pillars along the nave — told me more than a story about the size of this historic cathedral. They really gave me a sense of being in a house of worthy of God. So did the liturgical art and a few unique facts about the cathedral.
For one thing, the church is modeled after the Lombard Church of St. Charles (San Carlo at Corso) in Rome. For another, regular side windows were purposely left out because, when the walls were being built, the Know-Nothing Party was inciting anti-Catholic riots. No windows to break here.
Natural lighting comes in from the clerestory windows with designs in pastel-like stained glass. But they're over 45 feet above ground level. According to occasional tour guide and lifetime parishioner Lou Ferrero, the walls are 10 feet thick in some places. They're all masonry without a hint of structural steel. In one side chapel completed relatively recently, the original brick masonry construction has been left unplastered. It blends with the new chapel's decoration even as it gives us a peek back to 150 years ago.
Speaking of side chapels, I was again pleasantly surprised by the strong connection St. Katharine Drexel and her family had to this Philadelphia cathedral. One rear-most chapel was — and still is — dedicated in memory of her parents, Francis and Emma. In the 1880s, when the cathedral's regular organist was away, Katharine's wealthy financier father, an excellent organist himself, would substitute.
Experts rank the organ's carved and handsomely ornamented walnut casing, which was designed by Otto Eggers (who also did the Jefferson Monument and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) as one of the most outstanding in the country.
Astonishing is too mild a description for these altars dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Each has a resplendent Venetian glass mosaic dating to 1915 and is elaborately framed like an enormous painting in a Vatican museum. Though I was on assignment, I couldn't keep myself from lingering before them to be grateful for their messages and to appreciate their splendor.
True to Its Roots
The exquisite mosaic behind the Sacred Heart altar presents Jesus appearing to St. Margaret Mary Alocoque. The mosaic behind the Blessed Virgin Mary's altar, which heaven surely inspired in the artist, shows her Assumption in a most radiant scene. Mary rises triumphantly to the Holy Trinity, while the Apostles ponder her empty tomb and prayerful angels contemplate her glory. Brilliant, dazzling, astonishing — I could run through a thesaurus trying to do justice to these two masterpieces and still fall short.
The Blessed Sacrament is reposed in the tabernacle at the Blessed Virgin Mary's side altar, so the stop is all the more necessary and fruitful. Even when Mary appears to be the star attraction, she's always pointing us to Jesus.
In the transepts, we find more biblical scenes to meditate upon. One links the Ascension and Pentecost on a single mammoth canvas that's framed by a high arch over fluted Corinthian pilasters. These columns in relief echo the generous proportions in everything around the rest of the cathedral. In the opposite side transept, the painting deals with the Adoration of the Magi.
Both are actually part of some major renovations along the years. The originals under them were the work of Constantino Brumidi, who did most of the frescoes in the U.S. Capitol. His painting of Mary's Assumption still remains in the high dome.
Whenever they came along, the renovations seem to be part of an evolving cathedral-basilica that remains true to the beauty of its roots.
Even the wall-sized 1975 mosaic at the rear, honoring the life and works of Philadelphia's and the basilica's own St. John Neumann, seems a natural extension of the 19th-century beauty.
Throughout, in the tiniest details and the most sweeping spaces, this is one church that conveys how awesome our God is, and how deserving of all our love.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul, Philadelphia ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Who's Nuking Us Now? DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Call it the Sept. 11 effect. Since that dark day, even the most exaggerated, apocalyptic fantasies about terrorism and nuclear destruction have to be taken seriously.
In movie terms, what used to play as trashy, video game-style entertainment is now being held to the highest standards of political realism and intelligence.
The Sum of All Fears, the fourth film in a lucrative big-budget series based on Tom Clancy's best-selling novels, dramatizes some of these fantasies. Director Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams) delivers the goods according to the old escapist rules — but his film falls short when measured against our post-9/11 expectations.
Filming was completed before the World Trade Center attacks, and Robinson's crew has succeeded in altering the movie's tone during the editing process to suit the new national mood. Yet Clancy's book was published in 1991. The political landscape has radically changed since then, and much of the plot now seems dated. But the filmmakers' “improvements” on the original story make matters worse as they conform to politically correct attitudes popular in pre-9/11 Hollywood.
Paramount Studios has been accused of crass exploitation for distributing the film at this time. But the pop-culture airing of our deepest fears about nuclear terrorism may be a good thing, providing a release of tensions that could have a salutary effect on our consciousness.
The movie begins during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. An Israeli plane carrying a small atom bomb is shot down over the Golan Heights. The bomb ejects and lands in the desert sands.
Some years later a pair of Palestinian Arabs discover the weapon and, unaware of its nuclear capabilities, sell it to a South African arms dealer (Colin Feore) for $400. He, however, knows what he's got and sells it for many more millions to Richard Dressler (Alan Bates), a wealthy Austrian neo-Nazi who dreams of resurrecting the Third Reich. “The virus doesn't need a strong host to spread,” he declares.
Flash forward to CIA headquarters in the late 1990s. Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) is a novice analyst who specializes in Russian politics. His imaginative ideas catch the attention of the agency's veteran director, William Cabot (Morgan Freeman), who becomes his mentor. Clancy fans will note some significant changes to Ryan's character.
He has suddenly become younger and lost the spouse to whom he was married in his previous cinematic incarnations. Instead he's shown dating a beautiful physician, Dr. Cathy Muller (Bridget Moynahan), who may become his future wife.
This version of Ryan is an information-age, Generation-X yuppie with mildly rebellious ways — a very different figure than the mature family man of the earlier movies.
Although the new Ryan works hard and knows all the answers, his manner is cool and hip, and he dresses more informally than his coworkers.
The final countdown is triggered by Russian aggression in Chechnya. The filmmakers, along with all their American characters, view this purely as a human-rights violation. There's no mention of this aggrieved people's Islamic culture, or of its evolution into a breeding ground for terrorists.
Ryan is taken by Cabot into a national security meeting chaired by President Fowler (James Cromwell). The novice analyst alone believes that the Russian president, Nemerov (Ciaran Hinds), may not be as hawk-ish as his actions suggest.
Ryan is also part of a mission to the former Soviet Union in which it's discovered that certain key nuclear scientists have disappeared. In a convoluted series of plot twists, we learn that the neo-Nazi Dressler has made an alliance with rogue elements of the Russian military and plans to use the missing physicists and the black-market bomb to trigger a nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia. When the rubble clears, the new Third Reich will somehow take control.
The filmmakers keep us on the edge of our seats as Ryan, with some help from Cabot and an experienced operative (Liev Schreiber), tries to checkmate this scenario. In the process, the novice analyst must transform himself from a desk jockey into man of action.
In the movie's scariest sequences, Dressler's free-lance terrorists succeed in smuggling the missing nuclear weapon into the United States and detonating it during a football game at a crowded Baltimore stadium. The film handles the horrific mayhem that follows with appropriate restraint, resisting the impulse to milk it for exploitative effect.
Our leadership assumes that Russia is behind the attack, and the story's final third replicates the plot of the 1964 classic Fail-Safe, in which America and Russia inevitably escalate their moves to a terrifying showdown. In The Sum of All Fears, Ryan is presented as the only person who can save the world from nuclear obliteration.
Despite the high stakes, all this is a letdown. The U.S.-Russian confrontation seems left over from the Cold War, and the villains are irrelevant. In Clancy's novel, the terrorists were Arabs, a choice that now seems prophetic.
But Hollywood's fear of ethnic stereotyping has led them to make the bad guys neo-Nazis. This failure of nerve weakens our appreciation of the movie's considerable accomplishments as a suspense-thriller.
After the World Trade Center attacks, we believe that what the filmmakers have put up on the screen in The Sum of All Fears might someday happen to us.
But now we also demand a more sophisticated understanding of why.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Politically pressured, The Sum of All Fears pulls punches ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Black Hawk Down (2001)
The United States' 1992-93 involvement in Somalia was the country's most disastrous foreign-policy venture since Vietnam. What is often forgotten is the extraordinary bravery of the American soldiers involved. Black Hawk Down, directed by Ridley Scott (Gladiator), sets the record straight. A Somali warlord seizes control of food distribution during a famine and, in effect, declares war on the United Nations. The United States considers him a political outlaw and sets out to capture him and his top lieutenants.
A key U.S. operation falls apart when two of its helicopters are shot down. What was intended to be an offensive commando raid turns into a defensive rescue mission, and the audience is viscerally plunged into the horrors and confusion of urban combat. The drama springs from the group dynamics of the American soldiers. Their courage and camaraderie is much like the spirit displayed by the police and firemen at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
Silent Running (1971)
Star Wars wasn't the first movie to feature cute robotic drones as central characters. Director Douglas Trumbull, who designed the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, beat George Lucas to the punch. In Silent Running, he sets the action in 2008, with all plant and animal life on earth destroyed by nuclear radiation. Lowell Freeman (Bruce Dern) is a botanist who's in charge of a spacecraft that shelters the last remaining forest. A stubborn nonconformist, he often rubs his crew (Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin and Jesse Vint) the wrong way. His only allies are the drones Huey, Dewey and Louie (Mark Persons, Cheryl Sparks and Larry Whisenhunt). They bond while playing poker.
When the authorities order Freeman to destroy the forest, he mutinies and heads deep into outer space. His goal is to preserve the potential for life for some other time and place. But his human companions have other ideas. Trumbull's primary focus is on the imaginative visual effects and strong ecological message.
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935)
Duel-identity heroes (like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man) have been capturing our imagination for generations. The Scarlet Pimpernel, based on Baroness Orczy's novel, has been the inspiration for several feature films and a TV miniseries. It tells the story of a mild-mannered English aristocrat whose secret life thrusts him into the French Revolution, where he boldly rescues condemned nobles.
The best version is the 1935 extravaganza produced by legendary British impresario Alexander Korda. Sir Percy Blakeney (Leslie Howard) is a foppish aristocrat in the London court of the Prince of Wales (Nigel Bruce).
His wife, Lady Marguerite Blakeney (Merle Oberon), holds him in contempt for his languid lifestyle. But she doesn't know that her husband is, in fact, the mysterious master of disguises who has saved many of their friends from Robespierre's (Ernest Milton) guillotine. His signature is a small red flower — a pimpernel that he leaves behind after each rescue. The movie's emphasis is on character and intrigue rather than action and special effects.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, JUNE 23
Arts & Crafts Legacy
Home & Garden TV, 5 p.m.
“Hearth, home, family” was a byword in the Arts and Crafts movement, which flourished between 1895 and 1920 in architecture, furniture and décor. Its devotees sought simplicity, functionality and harmony in design, construction and handcrafting. Many bungalows they built still exist, and so does much of their furniture.
MONDAY, JUNE 24
Searching for the Afghan Girl
National Geographic Channel, 9 p.m.
No one even knew her name, but her cover photo in 1985 became National Geographic's most famous image ever: an Afghan refugee of 12 or so with green, penetrating eyes. Now, 17 years later, photographer Steve McCurry meets his subject, Sharbat Gula, a Pashtun whose parents the Soviets killed. Her husband Rahmat and three daughters — a fourth died in infancy — are the center of her life, which remains a hard one.
TUESDAY, JUNE 25
Antibiotics
History Channel, 1 p.m. and 7 p.m.
This special trains the microscope on new bacteria that resist all known antibiotics.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26
Mother Angelica Live
EWTN, 8 p.m.
Tonight's guest, Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer, heads Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., and is the founder of five institutes, including the Center for Life Principles. In 2000, he forth-rightly disinvited a Planned Parenthood speaker from appearing at Gonzaga.
THURSDAY, JUNE 27
The Great Bears of Alaska
Discovery, 7 p.m.
Alaska's brown bear - ursus arctos middendorffi — is fuzzy but not cuddly. He can be 8 feet tall, weigh 1,500 lbs., wield 4-inch claws and run with surprising speed.
FRIDAY, JUNE 28
The Good Life
Home & Garden TV, 1 p.m.
Meet a couple who moved to rural Oregon, took up cowboy-like living and started a bronze foundry.
SATURDAY, JUNE 29
The Rock of Truth
EWTN, 8 p.m.
This film by John Bird tells about the reported appearance of Mary near Tre Fontane in Rome on April 12, 1947, to Bruno Cornacchiola, an apostate who hated her and hoped to stab the Pope. Holding the Book of Revelation, she called herself the Virgin of the Apocalypse.
She told the renegade that because he and his wife had once made the nine First Fridays, Jesus would have mercy on him. She told him to stop persecuting her, accept the authority of the pope, pray much for sinners and become like a new St. Paul. Tre Fontane is the site of the martyrdom of St. Paul, and that April 12 was the eve of the day the Church now observes as Divine Mercy Sunday.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Middle Schools Prepare At-Risk Students for Higher Ed DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:In a public school system that continues to graduate students with below-average skills and test scores, are poor students doomed to low-performance schools?
In a two-part series beginning this week, the Register looks at how some students are being helped.
NEW YORK — Three years ago, 14-year-old Francisco Rosario struggled to identify pronouns and verbs and recall what he read.
Today the graduate of Nativity Mission School, a middle school in Manhattan, corrects grammar and punctuation mistakes on his moth-er's assignments for her college classes.
Francisco's language arts grades jumped into the 80s and 90s after he transferred from a New York City public school to the Jesuit-run Nativity School for boys, from where three of his cousins also graduated.
The school in New York City's lower east side has prepared inner-city at-risk boys for high school and college since 1971. Outstanding results have made it a model for some 40 schools throughout the country, including the year-old Nativity Prep Academy in San Diego.
These campuses aim to lift their pupils out of poverty by providing a tuition-free, intensive academic program that equips its youth to succeed in higher education. Although these middle schools are not operated by parishes, most offer a Catholic, value-based curriculum.
The Whole Person
At the Nativity School in New York City, small classes, an eight-hour school day and attention to each boy's academic, spiritual and social development have led to high levels of pupil achievement. Currently 89% of Nativity students graduate from high school, 75% enter college and 41% graduate with a college degree. This record far surpasses that of other schools in the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, Principal Charles Engel said.
Francisco said he intends to join the ranks of these graduates. He is now enrolled at Jesuit Xavier High School in New York City and said he hopes to attend college to prepare for a career as an attorney or business owner.
Daisy Rosario attributed her son's improvement to Nativity's teachers. “They are very devoted to the boys,” she said.
Fourteen teachers — most of them interns or members of religious communities — instruct a total of 47 pupils in sixth, seventh and eighth grades who receive help with homework during study periods and in the evening by tutors if their grades are below expectation, Engel said.
Prospective pupils become acquainted with the students and teachers during weekly visits to the campus. They are required to attend a seven-week summer leadership-training program at Camp Monseratte in Lake Placid, N.Y., where camp director Mark Lardner assesses their motivation to meet Nativity's demanding schedule. Boys enrolled at the school also spend each summer at the camp.
The camp schedule includes math and language arts classes, swimming and numerous games and sports. Two counselors work with groups of about 10 boys, who climb the Adirondack Mountains and hold nightly discussions about their goals for camp, home and school.
Some campers win awards for participating in optional competitions, such as creating science projects and memorizing poetry. One boy won a $25 gift certificate for reading 21 books at the camp.
Attending the camp in 1987 convinced Roberto Rodriguez that Nativity was the school for him.
Without this foundation, he said, “I probably would have dropped out of high school,” as did many other teens in his neighborhood, many of whom became scarred by gang violence, drug abuse and prostitution.
Instead Rodriguez graduated from Xavier High School and earned a degree from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1998. During his high school and college years, he assisted prospective pupils and other boys at Nativity School.
Today he conducts the school's graduate support program. Nativity pays part of their graduates' tuition to Catholic high schools, which most of them attend. They are required to return to the middle school at least once a week, where staff and volunteer tutors help with their homework. The school hires an instructor to prepare juniors for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Rodriguez helps them obtain scholarships and financial aid for college.
Catherine Hickey, superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of New York, gave Nativity Mission School high marks for developing the boys' positive attitudes.
“The school is academically successful in paving the way for their future,” she said.
National Model
On the other side of the country, lay directors and advisers of San Diego's independent Nativity Prep Academy believe the 18 fifth-grade Hispanic and black pupils who enrolled in September are also on the path to success.
It's an uphill road, said Principal Bob Heveron, explaining that the 10-year-old former public school pupils scored, on the average, at the third-grade level on standardized tests they took in September.
But he said he believes this deficit can eventually be overcome by the school's 12-hour day conducted by 10 full- and part-time teachers and tutors. The program offers field trips, sports, health services, camping, parent education and three free meals a day.
The teachers volunteer two years of service at the privately funded coeducational academy in exchange for a no-cost master's degree and credential in education from the Catholic University of San Diego.
They can see progress and improved attitudes in their pupils. Comments such as “I hate math,” have changed to “math is cool; it's okay,” said academy math teacher Tracy Pavey.
Religion teachers Caroline Sekula and Margaret Liegel noted the pupils' comfort in talking about God and praying spontaneously. They are learning to respect other races and religions and make fewer racial slurs, Liegel said. Through role-playing, they respond in a Christian manner to hypothetical situations, such as confronting shoplifters, she added.
Learning is not confined to the one-room school, however. The fifth graders observed invertebrates at San Diego's tide pools, saw gray whales surface in the Pacific Ocean and measured nutrients in Mission Bay, where they will dissect a shark and a perch during an upcoming science camp. These experiences are provided through the school's partnership with the Aquatic Adventures Science Education Foundation, said science instructor Lindsay Goodwin.
Opportunities to help disadvantaged children drew the teachers to Nativity Prep. Pavey, a University of Notre Dame graduate, said the children are teaching her “to appreciate the simple things in life — the three meals a day we take for granted.”
The academy will eventually enroll pupils in fifth through eighth grade, adding an additional grade each year.
Tom Beecher, director of the San Diego diocesan office for schools, said the school “benefits the community and diocese” and hopes it “will impact the lives of students” that its mission pledges to serve.
Joyce Carr writes from San Diego.
Next week: Peter Flanigan and Student Sponsor Partners gives hundreds of students the hope of an education and professional success.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joyce Carr ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Little Things That Bring Big Results DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:ST. BENEDICT AND ST. THÉRÈSE: THE LITTLE RULE & THE LITTLE WAY by Dwight Longenecker
Our Sunday Visitor, 2002 224 pages, $11.95
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who died on the cusp of the 20th century, is the most popular and written about modern saint of our day. St. Benedict and Benedictine spirituality, coming to us from the sixth century, is also well-represented in current Catholic booklists. With so many books on each already available, classic and contemporary, it seems reasonable to ask: Why these two saints again — and why together?
Because, explains Longenecker, where Thérèse offers a “little way” of spiritual childhood and Benedict offers a “little rule” for beginners, both give a fresh teaching about the sacrifice of the Gospel through ordinary life. “Their teaching is driven by their lives, and while we look to their lives for inspiration it is to their teaching that we look for possibilities,” he writes. “Thérèse and Benedict's teachings are complimentary. Benedict offers mature stability and the wisdom of age. Thérèse balances that with youthful idealism and fiery enthusiasm.”
Fair enough. And the book lives up to the promise implied in that synopsis. Biographical details of this “father-daughter” pair of saints emerge through their teaching. And the teaching, tested in daily experience, makes their spirituality especially practical. The 10 chapters cover themes such as ordinary miracles, childlike spirituality, obedience, stability, conversion of life, humility and wonder.
Longenecker displays a gift for explaining complex realities with a lightness bordering on levity. His style calls to mind the musings of G.K. Chesterton. Like C h e s t e r t o n , Longenecker locates the backbone of a subject, often turning words ironically to make it all but impossible to miss his point. The effect is the mental equivalent of a chiropractic adjustment. He examines the reader's mental joints and makes a sharp push or twist to align the ideas.
“Conversion experiences are powerful emotional events,” he writes, “but if there is nothing more than emotion, then the conversion experience is more experience than conversion, and the result is not spiritual rebirth but spiritual stillbirth.”
Elsewhere he shows how wonder is differentiated from curiosity. “Monkeys and cats are curious, but they are not full of wonder,” he writes. “Curiosity demands an answer, but wonder gazes at Truth. Curiosity is concerned with facts, wonder is concerned with meaning; curiosity is restless, wonder is at peace.”
And on man and nature: “The man of faith is natural. He lives in perfect harmony with his creator. Because he is as he should be, he does not appear remarkable. It is only the unnatural that is unusual. Flying pigs surprise us; flying parrots don't.”
Throughout, Longenecker's insights do not eclipse well-chosen and frequent quotes from Benedict and Thérèse, but grow naturally out of keen analyses of the two saints' words and lives. The reader hears the wisdom of these saints directly, in the saints' own words. And their words should cause us to stop, think and pray. Toward this purpose, each chapter begins with a page TITLEd “Thoughts and Prayers.” These consist of several quotes with a prayer to help direct our mind and spirit to the chapter's theme.
The premise of this book is unique; the result, compelling. Readers looking to grow in the faith at the feet of two great masters of prayer and devotion will find helpful hints here. And they'll find themselves by turns motivated, amused and sometimes even tickled by crisp thinking and lively writing.
Robert Trexler, editor of CSL:
The Bulletin of the New York C.S.
Lewis Society, writes from
Amherst, Massachusetts.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Trexler ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Grads Remembered
IONA COLLEGE, June 1 — The Irish Christian Brothers' college in New Rochelle, N.Y., raised nearly $750,000 to provide full scholarships to the children of the 15 alumni killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
The funds represented the total proceeds of the college's annual fund-raising dinner at Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
Prompted by a video tribute to the fallen graduates that was shown at the dinner, Iona alumnus Bob LaPenta contributed an additional $500,000 toward the $12 million needed for a new student union building. The building already had been scheduled to be named for LaPenta.
He asked that the new structure include a memorial to those lost on Sept. 11.
Back to Teaching
ST. ANSELM COLLEGE, May 25 — After 25 years as academic dean at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., Benedictine Father Peter Guerin will return to teaching theology full time. He was awarded an honorary degree for his devotion to Catholic higher education and monastic life at the college's recent commencement. Father Augustine Kelly, also a Benedictine, has been named the new academic dean.
Alternative Education
ACCURACY IN ACADEMIA,
June 4 — The organization, which exists to help check what it considers the leftist tilt of the faculties of most American colleges and universities, will hold a conference at the Jesuits' Georgetown University in Washington July 18-21. Scholars such as Dinesh D'Souza will offer free market and more traditional perspectives on history, philosophy, law, foreign policy, feminism, government and economics.
More information is available at www.academia.org.
Reporting Failure
CHRONICLE.COM, June 4 — St. Mary's College of South Bend, Ind., violated some federal regulations for reporting campus crime, according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Education, said the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The department also noted that the college's campus-safety efforts were “impressive.”
Conducted in response to complaints by two St. Mary's students, the investigation found that the college had incorrectly reported some crime statistics because it was calculating its statistics based on the academic year instead of the calendar year.
The report also found that St. Mary's had declined to include some incidents that were anonymously reported, which is required under the federal law that governs college crime statistics. The college, run by Sisters of the Holy Cross, has promised full compliance.
Home School Growth
TOWNHALL.COM, June 4 — In a column for the Web site, Phyllis Schlafly reported on a recent convention of Florida home schoolers in Orlando. Sponsored by the Florida Parent-Educators Association, it attracted 10,000 participants, a far cry from the handful that organized the association 15 years before.
The three-day convention included 100 workshops, 131 booths selling curricula and software, high school graduation ceremonies and the announcement of a college scholarship to Harvard.
The Florida Department of Education reported that the number of Florida children registered in home-education programs has grown from 5,313 in 1990-91 to 41,128 in 2000-01.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Banishing Workplace Blues DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Q I used to really enjoy my work — but, for the past few years, I have been getting tired of it. I switch jobs and it's exciting at first, then more of the same and I get bored and move on. It's still challenging, but I find I don't enjoy the challenge or the people as I used to.
A It sounds like you have an ailment that has reached epidemic proportions in the American male: The solve-it guy blues. The condition strikes men, mostly, but women in our can-do culture can suffer from it, too.
It comes from the American tendency to reduce situations to their abstract bottom-line. It cam make life intolerably depressing. Let me give a few examples.
First a domestic problem: Your wife is upset because you are late coming home from work yet again, despite repeated and recent promises to be timely. She tells you so, citing specifics: This is the umpteenth time it's happened. You know you have the reprimand coming. So why go into explaining yet again why you are late? You are armed with a solution and plan. You'll go into work earlier so it'll be easier to come home on time.
Or a moral problem: You know the Ten Commandments well enough that you should-n't break the law even if a particular temptation will produce expediency and a low likelihood of getting caught. Solution: You debate with yourself, but finally conclude that you shouldn't do it. You don't do it; you move on.
Work Life
Or a work problem: Someone comes to you with, let us say, a complicated and disturbing human-resource issue. You have a lot of experience in the HR realm. Solution: You immediately know what he should do and tell him so. Thanks.
See you later.
What do these three scenarios have in common? They all go from a problem immediately into a solution. What's wrong with that? It's not wrong. But if it becomes our norm for living, or our “style,” we end up impoverished. The corner we are cutting to do things this way is the corner where we acknowledge the other person as a person. We are nurtured and enriched by acknowledging and interacting with people as people.
If I say to my wife, “You are rightfully upset and maybe even lonely because I'm late again — are you not?” I'm treating her as a person. To God: “Would you give me the grace to do the right thing? This temptation worries me. I need your help.” This is how you develop a personal relationship with him. To an employee: “Sounds like this HR issue is one you are struggling with. Can we talk about what's bothering you before we jump into the solution?” This addresses that person as a person and not just as an issue or problem-bearer.
The first place to look if boredom, depression or a general listlessness overtakes us on the job is how much energy are we putting into creating or receiving personal acknowledgement and enriching interactions with others versus the energy to try to have as little interaction as possible so we can get stuff done or out of the way? Otherwise things just get done. And so do we.
Art Bennett is the director of the Alpha Omega Clinic and Consultation Services and a radio host.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:A report published by the Heritage Foundation has demonstrated that marriage significantly reduces the likelihood of childhood poverty. The poverty rate for all children in single-parent families is four times higher than the poverty rate for all children in married-couple families.
Married-Couple Families
8.2%
Married-Couple Families
35.2%
Source: Center for Data Analysis, April 2002
----- EXCERPT: MARRIAGE REDUCES POVERTY ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Every Step They Take Says 'life' DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:In 1999, Nicholas DiGiovanni's pregnant girlfriend said she wanted an abortion. This summer, he is walking through 10 U.S. states and one Canadian province for the child he would have had — Baby Genesis.
How did he go from out-of-wedlock, problem pregnancy to outspoken pro-life activism? By trying to choose life for his child only to lose the case to his girlfriend in the courts.
DiGiovanni will lead one of two Crossroads walks for life that will end at World Youth Day in Toronto.
Crossroads, a division of the American Life League, was founded in 1995 by Steve Sanborn, who led the first walk from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., with an Australian priest and eight fellow students from Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. Sanborn had been influenced by Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) and its call for “a general mobilization of consciences and a united ethical effort to activate a great campaign in support of life.”
Because the Pope helped inspire the cross-country walk, Adam Redmon, national director of Crossroads, said it seemed appropriate to have both walks culminate this year at World Youth Day. There, participants can thank the Holy Father and be in solidarity with him and others in a celebration of life. Redmon also is hoping that having Crossroads walkers at World Youth Day will spark interest in starting Crossroads walks in other countries.
Wearing T-shirts that say “Pro Life” in big, bold letters on the front, Crossroads participants, who range in age from about 18 to 25, walk 20 to 30 miles a day in shifts around the clock, accompanied by a mini-van that carries supplies. Their mission is to tell their generation the truth about abortion — something many regard only as a legal right.
DiGiovanni, who is now 23, said that, although he was raised Catholic, he was never exposed to the reality of abortion before learning of his girlfriend's pregnancy. “I knew the word abortion,” he said, “but I didn't relate it to the fact that babies died.”
When his girlfriend insisted on having the abortion despite his objections, he called a lawyer who agreed to work on a pro-bono basis. For 27 days, they managed to postpone the abortion.
His girlfriend, who was represented by a legal team from the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, won her case on Holy Thursday of 1999.
DiGiovanni wanted to take the case to the state supreme court. But, because the ruling came down on Easter weekend, when state offices were closed, he was unable to file an appeal. “I went back to my dorm room and bawled my eyes out,” he recalls. “I wanted still to fight. People said I did all I could. I said, ‘This is my son, this is my daughter, what do you mean I did all I could?’” DiGiovanni later learned his girlfriend had had the abortion the next day, on Good Friday.
That weekend, a priest from his home-town put him in touch with the American Life League. He now works for the organization, serving as editor of Reality Check, a youth publication, while attending George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. He told the story of his aborted child at ALL's 2000 convention and participated in his first Crossroads walk last summer. This year, he is directing the Southern Walk, which began in Tampa, Fla., May 20.
“If anybody wants to know why I am doing this, it's because I'm a father and because I have a responsibility to my child,” DiGiovanni says. “In this case, it's to help save other babies. The way I see it, every child affects so many lives. Every person affects many lives. When that person is killed by abortion, those changes do not occur. So my responsibility as a father to my child is to let other people get to know that child so that my Baby Genesis is not wasted.”
Michelle Perry, 25, a counselor at the Sacramento, Calif., Life Center who also is on the Southern Walk, said in her work she constantly meets girls and women who are uneducated about the truth of abortion. “Girls come in and they have no idea that their baby already has a heartbeat, a brain, arms and legs,” she said. “I show them a picture of an 8-week old baby, and they say, ‘No way. That can't be inside me.’”
Perry wanted to go participate in Crossroads to reach more people than she sees at the Life Center where, she says, “I just kind of wait for them to come in and see me.”
Sufferings Offered Up
In addition to giving a visible and vocal witness, Crossroads walkers also pray at abortion clinics, say the rosary as they walk and “offer up” the hardships of their life on the road as a sacrifice for the pro-life cause.
“I was told how much sacrificing we have to do on Crossroads before I came,” Perry said. “But until you do that walking, you have no idea how much it really is. Your legs are burning and you're tired, but you have to keep on walking and offering it up for the babies.”
In each major metropolitan area where Crossroads walkers stop, they also will be holding town-hall meetings.
This year, the Northern Walk team began in San Francisco and will amble through California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan before crossing the border into Canada. The Southern Walk route passes through Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi before stopping in New Orleans July 11 for ALL's World Family Conference.
In New Orleans, the Southern Walk will be joined by several bus-loads of high-school students who will be making a three-week pilgrimage to World Youth Day.
Occasionally, the groups run into trouble, as the walkers on the Northern Walk did recently while crossing San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Redmon said they were ordered by bridge patrol officers to remove their T-shirts, which have “Pro-Life” on the front and an American flag on the back. According to the officers, the shirts were considered a form of political protest. Redmon said Crossroads has contacted its lawyers about the incident.
Meanwhile, Perry said she hopes seeing the Crossroads walkers, who were born after abortion was made legal, will convince people to consider the value of life.
“I just wish that people would realize how valuable life is,” Perry said. “We made it, we're the survivors and we're here. It's so wrong of us to think that, just because we're here, we can decide for others who are in the womb or too old to defend themselves. It's really horrible that we feel we have that power. It's got to change. People have to realize the dignity and sanctity of human life. If it doesn't change, our society is going to just self-destruct.”
Judy Roberts writes from Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: SAINTS FOR FATHERS DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Father's Day is past but it's always a great time to think about holy men whom the Church has acknowledged either for their own heroic fatherhood or their courageous support of family life.
St. Joseph (Christ's Father)
St. Joseph, a simple, hardworking carpenter, was chosen by God to be the father of Jesus on earth. As such he was the guardian and defender of Jesus and Mary. According to Pope Leo XIII, “St. Joseph, by his work, regularly earned what was necessary for Mary and Jesus' nourishment and clothing.” When an angel appeared to Joseph warning him that Herod sought to kill his child, St. Joseph guarded Jesus and Mary and led them to Egypt. In Nazareth Jesus obeyed St. Joseph and was subject to his paternal authority.
St. Joachim (Christ's Grandfather)
St. Joachim was the father of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Tradition holds that Joachim and his wife, Anne, first lived in Galilee and then settled in Jerusalem, where Mary was born to them in their later years. Since St. Joachim was the grandfather of Jesus, he is considered a patron saint for grandfathers.
St. Thomas More (1478-1535)
St. Thomas More tried to be a Carthusian monk, but, after discerning that he was called to be a family man instead, he married Jane Colte in 1805. Together they had three daughters and one son — Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecilia and John. After his wife died in childbirth, he married Dame Alice Middleton. As a politician, he defended the sanctity of marriage and would not support King Henry VIII's plan to divorce Katherine of Aragon.
Unwilling to compromise his loyalty to the magisterium, he was imprisoned. From his cell he wrote letters to his children. In one missive to his daughter Margaret, he said, “Therefore, my own good daughter, do not let your mind be troubled over anything that shall happen to me in this world. Nothing can come but what God wills. And I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best.” When he was beheaded in 1535 his final words were: “The King's good servant, but God's first.”
Venerable Ralph Milner (16th Century)
Venerable Ralph Milner was born in England. Since he could neither read nor write, this father of eight children supported his family by manual labor. Raised an Anglican, his conversion to the Catholic faith led to his being imprisoned. His good behavior charmed the jailer into frequently letting him out on parole and he even received the keys to the prison.
For a while he escorted priests to the jail to administer the sacraments to other prisoners.
But when others discovered his liberties, he was placed under close confinement in Winchester, where a judge pleaded with him to attend a Protestant church and give up the Catholic faith. He refused, even when he was offered one last chance for life as his own children were brought before him at the gallows. Rather than give up his faith, he blessed his children, saying he wished them “no greater happiness than to die for a like cause.” He then died peacefully.
Blessed Edmund Rice (1762-1844)
Blessed Edmund Rice, an Irishman, married Mary Elliott when he was 23. His wife became pregnant, and in her final weeks of pregnancy was thrown from a horse and died. A doctor managed to save the child and, throughout his life, Edmund provided for his daughter, Mary, and even made sure she was provided for after his death, which came in 1844.
Blessed Nikolaus Gross (1898-1945)
Blessed Nikolaus Gross was a German editor a for a miner's newspaper. He married Elizabeth Kock, with whom he had seven children. When he became a member of the Nazi resistance, he was advised to stop for the sake of his family. He replied: “If we do not risk our lives today, how do we then justify ourselves before God?” While he was imprisoned he wrote to his family, assuring them that he had entrusted them to God's care. He was hanged in 1945.
St. Manuel Morales (1898-1926)
Saint Manuel Morales, a Mexican father of three, failed in an attempt to save an imprisoned priest during the religious persecution in Mexico. As a result, he was publicly insulted by government authorities and taken outside the city. A priest pleaded for the officials to spare Manuel for the sake of his family. But Manuel responded, “I might die, but God does not die. He will take care of my wife and my family.” Moments later, he was martyred.
Blessed Peter To Rot (1912-1945)
Blessed Peter To Rot was a native of Papua New Guinea. He married Paula la Varpite and they had three children together. Blessed Peter bravely defended the sanctity of marriage when he strongly opposed polygamy, which the Japanese had legalized on his island. Because of this, he was arrested, taken to a hut, held down and martyred by lethal injection.
Blessed Luigi Quattrochi (1880-1951)
Blessed Luigi Quattrochi, an Italian lawyer and civil servant, married Maria Beltrame in 1905. They had three children over the next four years.
When his wife had a difficult pregnancy with their fourth child, he was advised to have the baby aborted.
However, he and his wife chose life for their child. Both the mother and child survived. Three of their four children entered religious life. He and his wife were the first couple ever to be beatified together.
Blessed Frederic Ozanam (1813-1853)
Blessed Frederic Ozanam, founder of the Society of St. Vincent De Paul, married Marie-Josephine Amelie-Soulacroix in 1841. They had one child together, Marie. Though devoted to helping the poor, Blessed Frederic always found time to spend with his lovely daughter.
St. Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941)
Saint Maximilian Kolbe gave his life so that a father could live. For this reason, the Franciscan is considered a patron saint for fathers. Because of his work as an editor for a controversial religious publication, St. Maximilian was arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned in Warsaw in 1941.
When Francis Gajowniczek, a father with young children, was chosen to die at the camp, Maximilian volunteered to take his place so that the father could look after his family.
Mary Ann Sullivan writes from New Durham, New Hampshire.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ann Sullivan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: LIFE NOTES DATE: 06/23/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: June 23-29, 2002 ----- BODY:Pro-Life T-Shirt Victory
THOMAS MORE LAW CENTER, May 31 — A Michigan high school principal has seen the light on pro-life T-shirts. After the principal threatened students with suspension for wearing T-shirts that said “Abortion is Mean” and “Abortion is Homicide,” the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor sent a six-page letter to school officials detailing the students' rights to wear pro-life clothing.
The principal responded with a letter to the center explaining that he had reversed his earlier decision and agreed that the students had a right to wear the shirts in school.
Richard Thompson, the law center's chief counsel, observed: “This was just another example of Christians being silenced for expressing their faith. Fortunately, these two students and their families had the courage to fight back.”
Union Dues Dispute
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
June 4 — Kathleen Klamut resisted paying union dues when she worked as a psychologist for the Louisville, Ohio, school district because the Ohio Education Association and its national affiliate are pro-abortion. Klamut wanted to send her dues to a charity. An agreement negotiated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1999 allowed her to do so.
Now Klamut wants to do the same thing in her new district, Ravenna City Schools, where she is a part-time psychologist.
She filed a complaint with the commission last week claiming the union discriminated against her for religious reasons.
Chris Lopez, the OEA chief attorney, said Friday that the union routinely responds to religious objectors. However, Klamut says she has received no signals from her local union chapter or the OEA regional consultant that they would work with her.
Adult Stem Cells
DUKE UNIVERSITY MEDICAL
CEN TER, May 31 — Researchers from Duke University Medical Center and Artecel Sciences, Inc., have changed adult stem cells taken from fat into cells that appear to be nerve cells.
Duke researchers and scientists from Artecel have reprogrammed adult stem cells taken from liposuction into fat, cartilage and bone cells that are all connective tissue. The latest experiments have shown these stem cells can be turned from fat into a totally different type: neuronal cells.
The researchers hope future experiments may show these new cells have the potential to treat central nervous system diseases anddisorders.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Bush to Communist China: Stop Persecuting Church DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:BEIJING — In his private Feb. 21 meeting with Chinese leader Jiang Zemin and his farewell public address the next day at the conclusion of his trip to Asia, President Bush asked the Chinese government to ease its persecution of Catholics and other religions.
But human rights advocates wonder if mere words can change the conduct of the Chinese Communist regime, which is one of six countries the U.S. State Department has identified as being of “particular concern” for its treatment of religious freedom. The others are Burma, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Sudan.
Speaking Feb. 22 at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Bush told Chinese students that freedom of religion is not something to be feared and that believers of all faiths are “no threat to public order.”
Bush said it is his “prayer that all persecution will end, so that all in China are free to gather and worship as they wish.”
“Faith points to a moral law beyond man's law and calls us to duties higher than material gain,” Bush said. “Freedom of religion is not something to be feared, but it's to be welcomed, because faith gives us a moral core and teaches us to hold ourselves to high standards, to love and to serve others and to live responsible lives.”
At a Feb. 21 press conference at the Shangri-la Hotel in Beijing, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice commented on Bush's discussion with Jiang on religious freedom during private meetings earlier that day.
Said Rice, “They had an extensive discussion of religious freedom and a really rather long exchange, with the president encouraging President Jiang to think hard about opening dialogue with religious communities and with religious figures.
“He mentioned specifically the importance of dialogue with the Vatican and with the Dalai Lama, but also with other organized religions, and suggested that perhaps some of them might be invited here to the country.”
Rice characterized the discussion as “very friendly” and admitted that Bush did not press Jiang on specific cases of religious repression. On Feb. 13, Fides, the news agency of the Vatican's Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, released a list of 33 Catholic bishops and priests who have been arrested or are under house arrest since the mid-1990s because of their refusal to join the government-approved Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.
At a joint press conference with Bush after their Feb. 21 meeting, Jiang insisted that the jailed Catholic bishops were under arrest for criminal misconduct, not because of their religious beliefs.
Twice Jiang ignored questions concerning restrictions on religion in China and the detention of Catholic clergy, reported UCA News, an Asian Church news agency based in Thailand.
However, toward the end of the press conference, Jiang responded by saying that the Constitution of the People's Republic of China provides for religious freedom.
“I don't have religious faith. Yet this does not prevent me from having an interest in religion. I've read the Bible, I've also read the Quran, as well as the scriptures of Buddhism,” Jiang said, adding that he has met and exchanged views with religious leaders on various occasions.
However, he said: “Any religious follower has to abide by the law. So some of the lawbreakers have been detained because of their violation of law, not because of their religious belief. Although I'm the president of this country, I have no right interfering in the judicial affairs, because of judicial independence.”
‘Release the Bishops’
Rice was asked at her own press conference if she believed Jiang's claims that the Catholic bishops had been jailed for breaking the law. Replied Rice, “Well, I think our view is that these bishops need to be — that the Chinese government needs to release them. And we've made that clear. We've made that clear at a number of levels. The Catholic Church has made that clear. And the president has really asked the Chinese leadership to engage the Catholic Church, which is really the way that much of this will be resolved.”
In Atlanta, John Davies, president of Free the Fathers, an international Catholic human rights group, expressed disappointment that Bush's visit did not result in any of the bishops or priests being released.
In a Feb. 22 statement, Davies criticized Bush for not challenging Jiang's remarks that China had religious freedom.
But the Vatican newspaper gave front-page coverage to Bush's Feb. 22 remarks to Chinese students, in which he talked of his faith and the United States' freedom of religion.
The newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, said Bush “exhorted China to concede great freedom and to have greater tolerance for religion.”
“George W. Bush, like other presidents on similar occasions, avoided criticizing China directly, preferring to illustrate” how the United States deals with differences and benefits from the faiths of its citizens, it said.
Bob Fu, executive director of the U.S.-based Committee for Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China, told UCA News that the Bush administration would not speak strongly on religion because of business links with China.
Nina Shea, director of the Washington-based Center for Religious Freedom, expressed similar concerns after Bush's trip.
“Bush's request to Jiang Zemin to listen to the Vatican's appeal and release the Catholic bishops incarcerated in Chinese prisons has undeniable political value,” said Shea. “But the United States has very little power when it comes to China to be able to impose respect for human rights.”
Trade Status Mistake?
The United States lost its main bargaining chip on the religious freedom issue by granted favorable trade status to China two years ago, Shea argued. “The simple fact is that the United States has no way of sanctioning China, should it not respect human rights,” she said.
“When Clinton promoted China to the permanent status of favored nation in commercial exchanges in 2000, the weapon of the annual examination of human rights in the country was removed from Congress, on which trade relations with China depended. Now the only thing the United States can do is talk.”
The religious freedom advocate added that “it is frustrating to see that many countries, like the United States but also Europe, have already begun to treat China as a rightful member of the international community, before noting progress in respect for human rights and religious liberty.”
Shea held out little hope that Bush's comments in China would trigger any significant change in Beijing's anti-religion policies.
Predicted Shea, “Things will not really change until the Chinese state ceases to arrogate to itself the right to determine doctrine, define religious orthodoxy and appoint religious leaders, in direct violation of international mandates for respect of human rights which it has signed.”
(With files from combined news services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Register Staff ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Hardball With Orthodox In Russia DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — The creation of four new dioceses for the Russian Federation by the Holy See on Feb. 11 is the most definitive step yet indicating that Vatican patience is running thin with what is regarded as Orthodox intransigence.
The strongly negative reaction to the move by the Orthodox Patriarchate in Moscow has damaged Vatican-Orthodox relations, as Patriarch Alexei II immediately canceled previously scheduled meetings with Vatican ecumenical officials. Yet this reaction — which was expected as Orthodox officials were briefed in advance — was not allowed to forestall a regularization of Catholic life in Russia.
In 1991, when the Holy See created “apostolic administrations” — temporary structures created when it is not possible to create permanent dioceses — a firestorm erupted in the Patriarchate of Moscow, which had not been notified in advance and felt betrayed. It was considered at the time to have been a blunder on the Vatican's part, setting back Catholic-Orthodox relations by being insensitive to Orthodox fears of Catholic proselytism in Orthodox lands.
Ten years later, however, and after almost no progress on the ecumenical front, it is clear that it is no longer a question of hurt feelings over lack of consultation but rather a fundamental Orthodox objection to the Catholic presence in Russia. It was that realization, obviously unacceptable to the Holy See, that contributed to the decision to go ahead with creating Catholic dioceses despite Orthodox objections.
According to the Vatican, there are 1.3 million baptized Catholics in Russia. One concession to Orthodox sensibilities was made in the naming of the new dioceses. There is no “Archdiocese of Moscow” but rather the “Archdiocese of the Mother of God at Moscow,” and likewise the Siberian diocese is TITLEd the “Diocese of St. Joseph at Irkutsk.” This avoids having Catholic and Orthodox bishops with the same TITLEs. A similar courtesy was extended in 1850 when Catholic dioceses were re-established in England after 300 years; there is no Catholic archbishop of “London,” but rather of “Westminster.”
At the time of the announcement Vatican spokesmen went to great length to emphasize that this was not intended as a provocation, but was a normal step in Catholic life, commensurate to the Orthodox presence in Catholic countries. It was also pointed out that Catholic dioceses have historically existed in Russia, and that in recent years, Catholic charities have given $17 million to the Russian Orthodox Church. But after the reaction from Moscow, the rhetoric grew more pointed.
“Beyond the immediate facts, the fundamental questions seems to me: Does one accept and protect fundamental rights of freedom of conscience and religious liberty which are the basis of every form of pluralistic and civil communal life?” asked papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls in an official statement.
When the papal spokesman questions Russian Orthodox commitment to religious liberty, it is clear that the Vatican has changed policy from its previous deference to Orthodox sensibilities.
“The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church is now responsible before God and history for a sharp aggravation of our relations, for the frustration of the hope for their normalization that has just begun to take shape,” said a statement issued by the Moscow Patriarchate. “The Vatican's action has put in jeopardy the ability of the Catholic West and the Orthodox East to cooperate as two great civilizations for the benefit of Europe and the world.”
Characterizing the Orthodox reaction as “exaggerated,” the new archbishop “at Moscow,” Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, indicated frustration with having to contend with the same Orthodox objections over and over.
“Basically what they have repeated for 10 years — the problems of Ukraine's Byzantine rite, the problem of proselytism, the problem of the so-called invasion of the canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Moscow,” he said. “There is nothing new.”
Different Approach
The view that “there is nothing new,” and that far from “normalization” Catholic-Orthodox relations have reached a sort of stalemate, is now widespread in Vatican ecumenical circles.
It represents on the great failed hopes of the John Paul II pontificate, wherein the Holy Father's dream of healing the breach with Orthodoxy at the dawn of the third millennium appears to have been abandoned.
This was confirmed by papal decisions to visit both Ukraine and Greece last year despite the initial objections of the local Orthodox synods. In both cases, John Paul allowed the local government officials to prevail upon the Orthodox leadership to permit the visit — a great humiliation for the bishops at the hands of their own countrymen.
The recent decision concerning Russia has prompted speculation that a similar humiliation may be in store for Alexei II, patriarch of Moscow, who has to date refused to meet with John Paul and has declared him unwelcome in Russia. The week before the Feb. 11 announcement was made, papal trip planner Monsignor Renato Boccardo was in fact in Russia.
For the first 20 years of his pontificate John Paul refused to visit any majority Orthodox country without an invitation from the Orthodox bishops. Yet after two decades in which no invitations were forthcoming, John Paul decided to go ahead on his own.
Difficult relations with Orthodox patriarchs in Greece, Ukraine and Russia stand in contrast with continued warm relations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who has visited the Vatican, and was at the Pope's side last month in Assisi.
Raymond J. de Souza writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: American Catholic, Olympic Champion DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Fifty of Derek Parra's relatives and friends watched him on television at his parents’ house here on Feb. 19.
When the Olympic speedskater crossed the finish line in first place, the local newspaper reported, the crowd back home “raised their fists and shrieked for the ‘good little boy’ who had made a devout family proud.”
Then the skater crossed himself, and they screamed again.
The 31-year-old Mexican-American was a star of the Winter Olympics. He held the World Trade Center flag at the Opening Ceremonies; he set a world record in one gold-medal skate; he won silver in another.
His Catholic lifestyle was also on display.
The hardware-store employee has a newborn daughter whose picture he showed off whenever he could. After racing, he skated over to his wife saying, “I love you.” He knelt to pray on the Olympic podium before standing to receive his medal.
“I hear [Dutch skater] Gerard Van Velde drives a Ferrari,” Parra told Reuters. “I drive a Honda Civic and I have to save to put gas in it.”
Before racing, “I was thinking I'm truly blessed,” said Parra. “I guess this just shows what people can do if they have faith and have people behind you who support you.”
— Register Staff
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Senate Gearing Up for a Battle Over Human Cloning DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Competing bills will come up in the U.S. Senate this month to regulate human cloning. Proponents of the bills all claim that their measures will ban the procedure. But some would actually allow it.
Only the Human Cloning Prohibition Act, introduced last year by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., would make cloning illegal in the United States. The other bills, introduced by Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would allow cloning for the purpose of research but outlaw the implantation of the resulting embryo into a woman's uterus. And the Brownback bill might face a tough battle to even be considered in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
The Harkin and Feinstein bills would permit the establishment of “human embryo farms,” the National Right to Life Committee warned in a statement.
That charge riled William Burton, a Harkin spokesman, who said, “This talk of ‘embryo farms’ is pretty inflammatory and doesn't help the debate.” The proposed legislation would “absolutely stop human cloning,” he said, adding that its allowance of the creation of a human embryo but prohibition of its implantation is “similar to what's legal with in vitro fertilization.”
“It's hard to be against one and for the other,” Burton said.
In fact, Catholic teaching condemns both procedures, saying every human being has the right to be conceived in marriage and from marriage (Donum Vitae, No. 6). Every child has the right to a “fully human origin through conception in conformity with the personal nature of the human being” (note 32).
Donum Vitae, the 1987 Vatican Instruction on Respect for Human Life, also said that “the human being must be respected as a person — from the very first instant of his existence” (No. 1).
Cloning for scientific research or creation of medical cures would entail the destruction of human embryos.
The Harkin bill, TITLEd the “Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Research Protection Act,” would ban “asexual human reproduction by implanting or attempting to implant the product of nuclear transplantation into a woman's uterus or a substitute for a woman's uterus.”
Nuclear transplantation is defined in the legislation as “introducing the nuclear material of a human somatic cell into a fertilized or unfertilized oocyte (egg) from which the nucleus has been or will be removed or inactivated.”
Richard Doerflinger, a spokesman for the U.S. bishops' Committee on Pro-life Activities, sees the emphasis of the Harkin bill on banning the implantation of a human embryo rather than banning cloning. He predicted that if such a bill became law, scientists would eventually be calling for millions of clones in order to find tailored cures for people suffering from diseases such as juvenile diabetes.
“And where would they get the eggs?” he asked. “Just harvesting them poses risks for women.”
He said the bishops' conference strongly supports the Brownback bill, but he predicted that it would have to be introduced on the Senate floor as a substitute to the Harkin or Feinstein bills, a procedure that would require 51 votes.
But he was encouraged last month when Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., became the first Democrat to co-sponsor the Brownback legislation. Landrieu, a self-described “abortion-rights” supporter, said in a Feb. 5 statement: “The American people insist that the work of science must be conditioned on conscience. Anything short of a complete ban creates a loophole that would allow researchers, seeking to make money or headlines, the power to decide this issue for the American people.”
Landrieu also said that “vulnerable, low income women could be used as harvest tools” if cloning were permitted.
There has also been support for at least a moratorium on all cloning from environmental groups, such as Friends of the Earth. But such groups seem more concerned about how cloning might lead to genetic modification than the status of embryos.
Manipulating Language
Most legislators voice concerns about the possibility of human reproduction from cloning, but many do not show that same moral outrage against cloning if it is done to garner stem cells. Feinstein, in a statement Feb. 5, called cloning for the purpose of producing a human being “morally unacceptable and ethically flawed.” But in speaking of “therapeutic cloning,” she referred to the procedure as “nuclear transplantation,” which might give the impression that a nascent human being is not involved in the process.
Harkin, for his part, referred to the procedure as “therapeutic cellular transfer — or TCT.”
“Human reproductive cloning is simply wrong,” he said during a hearing of the Senate Labor, HHS and Education Appropriations Subcommittee Dec. 4. “We must understand that there is a distinct line separating human reproductive cloning and the potential lifesaving research of TCT. ... My legislation would protect our values by banning reproductive cloning but protect our health by fostering research.”
Brownback, on the other hand, said in a statement last month that efforts to create human beings by cloning “mark a new and decisive step toward turning human reproduction into a manufacturing process in which children are made in laboratories to preordained specifications.”
“Science continues to prove that human cloning is unnecessary,” he continued. “We can find cures for the many diseases that plague humanity without creating human clones. There is no need for cloning technology to ever be used with humans — whether for reproductive purposes or for destructive research purposes.”
Brownback also condemned the Jan. 18 recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences that therapeutic cloning continue to be allowed. “It is deeply disturbing that the National Academy of Sciences feels they can divide humanity into two different classes and condemn one class of humans to destruction,” the senator said.
Meanwhile, President Bush's Council on Bioethics has not come to any consensus on cloning or the moral status of a human embryo. The Associated Press reported Feb. 14 that the council, which had its first meeting in January, hopes to produce a report by summer. Leon Kass, the University of Chicago ethicist who chairs the panel, has said that it won't be rushed by political considerations.
One member of the council, Stanford University biologist William Hurlbut, said in an interview last week that the country needs to stop and think about what's at stake.
“If we keep the dialogue going, we all will gain a deeper appreciation of both the meaning of developing life and the thoughtful use of our advancing medical knowledge,” he said.
Even if the Senate passes the Harkin or Feinstein bill, U.S. bishops' spokesman Doerflinger hopes there will be a chance to amend it as it goes through a conference committee. The House of Representatives last year passed a total ban on cloning, and differences with the Senate bill would have to hammered out. President Bush has expressed his opposition to all cloning.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: An Iowa Boy in Vatican Corridors DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Jim Nicholson emerged from a childhood marked by hardship.
He was accepted to West Point and went on to earn a Bronze Star as an Army Ranger paratrooper in Vietnam. Later, he became a lawyer and real estate developer and, after switching party affiliation, rose through the ranks to become chairman of the Republican National Committee. Last September, Nicholson took up his appointment as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. He recently spoke from Rome with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
You're from Iowa originally, aren't you?
I grew up in Struble, a small town in Northwest Iowa. It had a population of 99 when I grew up there. Today it has a population of 67. My father suffered from the disease of alcoholism and was quite itinerant. He ended up being a feed and fertilizer salesman. My mother stayed at home until the children had grown. She later taught. She was a real stickler for education. We had some tough times during my teen-age years, but she saw education as being the key to getting ahead in America, so all seven of us children went onto college.
I understand that times were hard and you often had to rely on the kindness of neighbors?
Yes, we lived in a tenant house out in the country without electricity, plumbing or transportation. Sometimes we literally did not have food in the house. We went to a one-room school and sometimes the schoolteacher would send us food or get others to drop food off at our home. I remember one Christmas Day morning walking two miles with my father in knee-deep snow to buy some eggs at a nearby farmhouse. When we returned home mom used the eggs and some dried bread to make French toast. That was our Christmas dinner.
You were once a Democrat. What led you to switch parties?
My family grew up as Democrats. They liked Roosevelt. I went on to the Military Academy and went into the Army so I didn't have the opportunity to participate directly in politics.
I went on to law school in Denver and later became general counsel to the Colorado Home Builders Association. It was at this time that I realized that I wasn't a Democrat. As counsel I worked with small-business men and women trying to build homes and to provide shelter, and the Democrats were fighting them at every turn. They didn't want any growth in Colorado. That caused me to first change parties, and later I began helping Republicans to get elected.
You demonstrate that one can be both faithful and active in politics. How does one successfully bridge faith and politics?
They are certainly not mutually exclusive. My faith, and my belief in the power of prayer have always been important to me. I am a very grateful American – grateful to have grown up in a country that is so free and that provides such opportunities for people like me that come from such a humble background. It makes me very appreciative. This is also a country that provides for a great deal of religious freedom and the opportunity to practice one's faith. I believe that the two-party system we have in the U.S. has served us well and helped us to preserve that republic.
There is no jeopardy to one's faith in serving either party. I've met a lot of people very active in both parties that have a very active and important faith and prayer life.
You've been ambassador now for five months. What kinds of things have you been doing?
As the American ambassador I represent the President and the U.S. to the Holy See. It is my job to explain our country's positions in a way that is clear and understood so that the Vatican will appreciate our positions and agree with them more often than not.
One of the first things that you do after you are confirmed by the U.S. Senate is to present your credentials to the Head of the State, His Holiness John Paul II. That was scheduled far in advance for Sept. 13, 2001. When we met, at Castel Gandolfo, Pope John Paul II and I had a very long and personal conversation. The main topic of conversation, as you can imagine, was terrorism. The Holy Father said, “It's not just your country that has been attacked, but all of humanity.” He implored that in spite of the heinous act that the U.S. would maintain our tradition of preserving our system of justice in retaliation. I assured him that we would do that. They do not like bombs and bullets. They are into spirituality and ethics and morality and truth.
That meeting has set off a string of bilateral encounters where we have discussed our actions in Afghanistan and the just-war theory to try to get their support, and we have been trying to do that.
As former chairman of the Republican National Committee you successfully promoted unity within the Republican party. How did you go about this?
Essentially when I took over the party in January of 1997 it was a very dispirited and disjointed party. We had just lost a major national election and had lost confidence that we could win a national election. We were deeply in debt and very demoralized.
I put a plan together and began traveling the country to urge people to examine why we are Republicans. As Republicans we believe in freedom, and the sanctity of life, less government, and lower taxes. I stressed that if you believe in those things you are a legitimate Republican.
While we may not always agree on every issue, we are together on those core issues. We started raising some money and developed our values system, particularly on the issue of education. Day in, day out, in one city and state after another, I would meet with party leaders to share this message. In November of 1997 we won 19 of 19 races and showed that we could win. It wasn't space science, it was just common sense, hard work and adhering to our values.
Given that Catholics have historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party do you think that Catholics will ever be comfortable in the Republican Party?
Yes, Catholics can be comfortable in either of the parties. If they examine the party's values and make an informed decision, I believe they can be comfortable. Since I am currently in a diplomatic position, I'd rather not let myself be taken down the road in a partisan discussion.
In terms of your work with the Vatican, are there any issues in particular, which the president has asked you to work on with the Holy See?
I met with the president right before coming here. At that time, terrorism was not on the screen the way it is now. The Middle East remains a major area of concern for the U.S. and the Holy See. Human rights and religious freedom are also major issues for both of us. We are also concerned with the use of biotechnology to help feed more of the Third World and the ethical issues surrounding that. We are also very involved in the issue of human trafficking.
Can you put the problem of human trafficking into terms for those unfamiliar with it? What efforts are being taken to address this issue?
Well, 21st century slavery is going on in large numbers. The State Department reported to the Congress that over 700,000 people were trafficked in the year 2000. These are people that were impressed against their will into some kind of servitude — women forced into prostitution and young children impressed into forced labor. It is happening on every continent and most countries around the world. It is a horrific epidemic and a major human rights tragedy that needs to be addressed in a strategic manner.
We need to have a heightened awareness of the scope and gravity of the problem. We are setting out to try to expand that awareness. On May 15-16, we will be hosting a major conference to explore human trafficking and its potential solutions at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. We are enjoying the active, enthusiastic support of the Holy See and will bring together experts to share information with each other and the world.
How is the Holy Father doing?
He is doing well. He suffers from a neurological condition and it causes him a great deal of frustration, but his mind is like a steel trap. There are so many things that he wants to do and so many places that he wants to go.
His condition forces him to move much more slowly. Nevertheless, he does an amazing amount. I spent a day with him in Assisi last Thursday. I see what he does on a daily basis and it's really incredible the schedule that he keeps.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Nicholson ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: A Conversation With The Bishop of the Salt Lake Olympics DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:SALT LAKE CITY — He could be called the bishop of the Salt Lake City Olympics. Bishop George Niederauer, a priest from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, was named bishop of Salt Lake City in January of 1995, just five months before the city was chosen for the 2002 Winter Olympics. National Catholic Register correspondent Jesuit Father Matthew Gamber spoke with the bishop in his office during the second week of the Olympics.
Have these turned out to be the “Mormon Games” as some predicted?
Bishop Niederauer: I must say that the LDS — Mormon Church — have really not turned this into one long sound bite for their church.
But the fact that two-thirds of the people in Utah belong to the Mormon religion — it's their faith and practice — that has had a strong influence on the local culture and on the preparation and spirit of the city for the games.
But I recall attending my first Olympics in 1960 in Rome when the athletes all gathered in St. Peter's Square and were blessed by the Pope John XXIII — nobody called it the Catholic Olympics. It was just the Summer Olympics in Rome.
We have had a good spirit here and the Catholic Church has been very present throughout the city at the Games.
How has the Church been involved in the Winter Games?
Many of the winter sports are played in traditionally Catholic countries. So, by some estimates between 25 and 30% of the athletes that have come here are Catholics; then add their families, coaches, staff, etc. We have not been involved in the financial and technical side of the games, but as the local Catholic Church we have been able to offer a welcome to the Roman Catholics among our guests.
We have tried to be a welcoming presence to them at the hospitality centers we set up at parishes near the Olympic venues. Many of our Catholic families hosted athletes' families and legions of Catholics served as volunteers throughout the city. The Catholic Communications Campaign also gave us a grant that we were able to use to help fund our hospitality centers and increase our Olympic coverage in the diocesan paper. Ash Wednesday also fell during the first week and we were well prepared for that as well.
What have you learned in Salt Lake about the connection between religion and athletics?
Winning and losing at the Olympic level is a highly emotional matter. It's not “ho hum.” So the athletes may need the presence of a chaplain with them more than ever. The German, Swiss, Austrian and Italian teams all bring their own chaplains with them, as a matter of fact.
As Catholics we try to follow Paul's words and, “Do all in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” And that includes sports.
I met Timothy Goebel who came to Mass at our cathedral the Sunday after winning his medal in figure skating and I was deeply impressed by him and his family. You could tell he was not the kind of person to sacrifice anyone or anything in order to win, and so he probably is not going to be like that in the rest of his life.
Parents tell me about their children and say, “Basketball is his life,” or “Skiing is her life” but at a deeper level as Catholics we say, “Christ is my life,” and so the athletes and every Catholic need to be integrating that relationship into their activities — sports or otherwise.
What are your thoughts about the business of the Olympics and the ethical problems at the start of the Sale Lake Games?
I think it has been a needed challenge to the International Olympic Committee and the United States Olympic Committee to come up with a better way to do their business. The problems existed long before Salt Lake. But the good that can come out of this is that there will be more effective regulation of the bid process. It did not ruin the Olympics; we have had a beautiful Olympics. The hope is that we can turn something negative into a positive for other places.
What has it been like to be a Catholic bishop for seven years in this overwhelmingly Mormon city and state?
We are a missionary diocese, even though an old diocese, set up in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. The 2000 census showed that Catholics comprise between 9 and 10% of the population of the state. The Hispanic population has increased from 84,000 to 201,000 so that means that we have grown as a Catholic Church.
In certain parts of the state there is more support with Catholic elementary and high schools and large parishes to support the faith. But in the small towns there is a great challenge to the Catholics who may be very few in number. They face lack of respect and lack of social acceptance because they are different from the Mormons.
Our vocations are heading in the right direction. We had seven seminarians last year. This year we have 12. At one of our Salt Lake City parishes there have 155 people in the RCIA program in just the past 2 years. So we are growing and diversifying. Mass is said in Korean, Tagalog, more than 30 Masses in Spanish each month. We have a Vietnamese parish as well. It's a challenging and wonderful place to be a Catholic bishop.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Matthew Gamber ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Boston Scandal Has Little Affect on Collections
THE BOSTON GLOBE, Feb. 17 — Officials in the Archdiocese of Boston report little drop-off in the amount of contributions, in spite of reports that parishioners would withhold donations because of the handling of clergy sex abuse cases, the Boston daily reported.
A recent Boston Glob/WBZ-TV poll found that nearly 20% of Catholics in the archdiocese said they would withhold contributions. But Ken Hokenson, the archdiocese's chief development officer, said that only three or four of more than 100,000 pledges for the Cardinal's Appeal have been rescinded.
In addition, less than two dozen of some 4,000 donors to the Promise for Tomorrow fund have rescinded their pledges. Hokenson said the amount involved was less than one-half of a percent, or about $75,000 of the roughly $150 million pledged.
The archdiocese received more than $1 million in pledges in the second week of February. So far, no major donors have pulled their pledges.
Chicago Church Heeds Liturgical Reforms
CHICAGO DAILY HERALD, Feb. 16 — Recent liturgical directives from the Vatican are filtering down to the parish level, as in the case of a Chicago church replacing its Resurrection Cross with a crucifix. The Chicago daily quoted Father Dan Deutsch, pastor of Holy Cross parish, as saying the crucifix is an important reminder of what the Eucharist is all about.
Unfortunately, the article confuses terms when it talks about the ordination of acolytes to assist during Mass. The paper said that Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford, Ill., ordained seven men as acolytes on a recent visit to the church. It probably meant to say that seven men were instituted as servers. Acolyte was suppressed as one of the minor orders on the way to priestly ordination in the Latin Catholic Church.
The paper also said the men will help the priest purify the vessels for Communion after Mass, but according to the U.S. Bishops' Guidelines for the Concelebration of the Eucharist it is the priest, deacon or extraordinary minister of Holy Communion who is to purify the vessels at the side table or, after Mass has concluded, in the sacristy.
Tridentine Rites Extend Beyond Mass in New Jersey
HERALD-LEADER, Feb. 16 — The Tridentine Mass is alive and well, especially in Berlin, N.J., the Lexington, Ky., daily reported.
While many churches around the country have a weekly or monthly Mass in the form that was the norm until 1969, Mater Ecclesiae Parish in the Diocese of Camden celebrates all Sunday and daily Masses, as well as baptisms, weddings and funerals, according to the ancient rite.
It is also rare that an all-Tridentine parish be administered by a diocesan priest, rather than a member of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter or another religious order.
The article points out that the liturgies are conducted in Latin, but mistakenly suggests that the Second Vatican Council decreed that Mass should be in the “prevailing language of the parish.” In fact, Vatican II said that the use of Latin “is to be preserved in the Latin rites,” but that the vernacular may be used.
Mater Ecclesiae was established in 2000 by Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio for “Catholics who feel an attachment to the traditional Latin Mass,” according to the parish Web site.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Cleveland Voucher Case Before Supreme Court DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — The nation's highest court joined the debate on school vouchers, considering Feb. 20 whether the state aid that pays for tuition in religious schools is constitutional.
The discussion during oral arguments at the Supreme Court focused on such issues as the high percentage of Cleveland students who choose religious schools among private school choices and whether parents truly have an array of educational options.
The case centers on a pilot program adopted by the Ohio Legislature to aid mostly low-income children who attend troubled public schools.
Parents who choose to send their children to a private school receive a maximum of $2,250 per student per year. They sign over a check to the school they select.
“It offers true choice to parents,” argued Judith French, chief counsel for Ohio's attorney general.
Cleveland, which has one of the worst-rated public school systems in the country, established the voucher program so that parents could send their children to any of 51 participating schools, all but nine of which are religious and most of which are Catholic.
She asked the justices to overturn the 2000 ruling of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the program was unconstitutional because it advances religion.
Secular private schools and suburban public schools are eligible to participate in the program, but have chosen not to do so, which is not the fault of the program itself, argued French.
Justices considered the percentages of students who have enrolled in the program and chosen religious schools. That number has risen from 96% in 1999 to 99% in the current school year.
Based on some of the comments made by the justices during the 80-minute presentation, Cleveland's voucher program might be considered constitutional as long as parents are offered a wide variety of alternatives for their children beyond just public and religious schools. Alternatives include tutoring programs, magnet schools and community schools, which are public schools separately chartered from the regular school district.
Justice Stephen Breyer imagined the impression of a newcomer to this country viewing the program with “a large amount of money” spent by the government and used by students at parochial schools.
“Wouldn't you say the government endorses a religious education?” he asked.
David Young,, a lawyer for parents and schools who benefit from the program, added to French's arguments, saying that rather than endorsing religion, the government “was trying to resolve a problem of these disadvantaged, low-income children.”
Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued for the Bush administration, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the voucher program. With his arguments, the debate lasted 80 minutes instead of the usual hour.
Olson urged the court to consider the history and context of the program, which was designed to fix a “manifestly failing system.”
He cited an increase in the number of nonreligious schools participating in Milwaukee's voucher program.
But Justice David Souter pondered the fact that 99% of the students who currently use the vouchers in private schools have opted for religious schools.
“Doesn't that suggest there is perhaps something specious about the notion of wide choice here?” he asked.
The high percentage of religious schools among private school choices is a key to the argument of program opponents.
“It is a mathematical certainty that almost all of the students will end up going to religious schools,” said Robert Chanin, a Washington lawyer who represented the National Education Association before the justices.
More than one justice questioned whether the array of choices beyond private schools should be considered in determining the constitutionality of the voucher program.
O'Connor is Key
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is considered a pivotal vote in the case, asked several questions about all of the options available for Cleveland school parents and suggested that, “if anything,” the program was “skewed against religious schools in terms of public support.”
O'Connor said the numbers may be “skewed” in favor of religion only because voucher opponents are not including all choices in their argument against the program.
“Why should we not look at all of the options open to parents?” she asked, citing community and magnet schools as examples.
But Chanin maintained that the support of religious schools is unconstitutional. “It's a back-door approach to precisely what the Establishment Clause prohibits,” he said.
He said community schools are a “species of public education.”
“The only rational line to draw is between public and private,” he said.
Justice Antonin Scalia also wondered if the look at the religious programs paints an incomplete picture.
“The question is whether or not there is neutrality,” he said, speculating that Chanin may be asking the court to “put on blinders.”
“We are asking you to look at reality,” Chanin responded.
But Justice Anthony Kennedy disagreed: “You're asking us to look at part of reality.”
Scalia wondered how best to evaluate a program in which the percentage of students using state money at religious schools changes annually.
“The only schools that happen to be there are religious schools,” he said. “This doesn't mean the program will always be that way.”
He wondered if Chanin was suggesting that the solution would be to “abolish all religious schools.” Chanin suggested that innovative programs within public schools are a preferable option to providing state money that will be transferred to religious institutions.
Anti-Catholic?
The Becket Fund, a religious liberty law firm, noted in its friend-ofthe-court brief that the circuit court's ruling against the voucher program was based on previous Supreme Court decisions that missed a crucial undercurrent of 19th-century public policies.
Rulings in 1948 and 1971 restricting use of government funds for religious schools didn't take into account that the previous century's court decisions on which they were based used the term “nonsectarian” when what they meant was “non-Catholic,” the Becket Fund brief said. Such rulings were intended to suppress “the cultural threat” of Catholic schools, it argued.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the case before the end of the term in June.
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Register Staff ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pro-Life Protests Prompt Red Cross to Quit Condom Program DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:SALT LAKE CITY — The American Red Cross abandoned its participation in a condom distribution program at the Winter Olympics following protests by pro-life groups and local donors, The Washington Post reported Feb. 21.
The local chapter of the Red Cross objected to what it called “the circus-like approach” of some volunteers with the Safe Games 2002 program, the Post reported. The program planned to distribute 250,000 free condoms during the Olympics.
While the Red Cross chapter said that pro-life protests against the condom giveaways were not a factor in the organization's decision, a leader of the condom handout initiative credited the protesters with triggering the Red Cross reversal. “It's my feeling Red Cross gave in to the pressure from protesters,” Luciano Colonna, one of the Safe Games founders, told the Post.
The so-called Safe Games initiative was independent of a condom distribution program for athletes sponsored by the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee, which prolifers also protested against.
In an internal memo obtained by the Post, the Red Cross said it was abandoning the program because “the coalition's tactics at the Games are not consistent with the Red Cross approach to HIV/AIDS prevention education.” Incidents cited by the Red Cross included one volunteer tossing a packet at a local community leader and another giving an unsolicited condom to a teen-age girl.
Planned Parenthood and the Utah AIDS Foundation also participated in the Safe Games initiative.
Several pro-life youth groups, including Rock For Life, Generation Life, Teens for Life and Survivors demonstrated in Salt Lake City against the program.
“Attempting to destroy a child's innocence with condom handouts cannot be tolerated,” said Bryan Kemper, director of Rock For Life, in a statement posted on Rock for Life's Web site, www.rockforlife.org. “I am so honored to have witnessed young people confronting the mayor and the American Red Cross condom pushers.”
Rock for Life charged that volunteers in American Red Cross uniforms were handing out condoms to youth under the age of 18, including some as young as 12.
Said Kemper, “We will not put up with condom pushers lying to and deceiving kids. Condoms do not protect you against the chlamydia or HPV viruses. Handing out condoms to kids is endorsing promiscuous sex. That's irresponsible, immoral and an outrage.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Toronto World Youth Day a 'Countersign' to International Strife DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Canadian officials, in Rome to review security measures for Toronto's World Youth Day next July 23-28, were quick to give assurances that the event would not only be safe, but would serve as a much-needed “countersign” in a world afflicted by terrorism and war.
The papal trip to Toronto will mark a first for Pope John Paul II — for the first time he has scheduled a short vacation outside of Italy. He is expected to arrive in Canada three or four days in advance of his major World Youth Day ceremonies and then spend a short holiday north of Toronto at an as-yet-undisclosed location.
Vatican officials are also preparing for the possibility of a papal visit to Ground Zero in New York following Toronto, which in turn is likely to be followed by a visit to Mexico City for the canonization of Blessed Juan Diego at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Papal spokesmen still insist that no decisions have been taken on New York and Guadalupe, but the Pope's “NAFTA trip” seems likely, combining as it would three of John Paul's signature initiatives — massive gatherings of young people, the powerful witness of prayer at deeply symbolic sites, and pilgrimages to popular Marian shrines. If it comes off, John Paul's 97th foreign trip may be one of his most memorable.
“International gatherings like World Youth Day are even more necessary as antidotes to the poisons of violence, terrorism and uncertainty which now affect the international scene,” said WilfridGuy Licari, Canadian Ambassador to the Holy See, at a Feb. 8 briefing for the Vatican press corps. “The commitment of the government of Canada to the success of this event is absolute. In reference to security, I can assure you that [we have] taken all the possible measures to guarantee the security of all the participants and in the various event venues.”
“We have an unprecedented amount of cooperation among our municipal, provincial and federal police forces, and we're networking with the world. We've got our finger on the pulse and we feel very confident that Toronto will be a safe venue and these will be safe events,” added Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino, after meeting with high-level Italian and Vatican security officials.
“They don't want a militaristic approach,” commented Fantino, after attending a papal Mass Feb. 2 in St. Peter's Basilica to observe how Vatican security handles papal events. “Obviously the Holy Father is a people-person, and we don't want to create barriers for him.”
Canadian security officials will have a chance to improve over the security situation on the last papal visit in 1984, which included what longtime papal trip organizer Father Roberto Tucci characterized as some of the “most severe” measures taken on any papal journey, which sometimes frustrated the Pope's desire to get close to the crowds. The strict measures were taken then in response to terrorist threats in Québec before the visit.
Fantino and his delegation were received by John Paul, even though a papal audience was not scheduled for their visit. Canadian officials said that the Pope asked to meet the officers.
“It was one of those spiritual moments. We paid our respects to a great man, a man of peace, and received his blessing,” said Fantino.
Despite post-September 11 anxieties, Father Thomas Rosica, the national director of World Youth Day Toronto, said that the original security plan in place before the terrorist attacks was retained after a thorough review. Father Rosica and Vatican officials were quick to emphasize that Toronto, a city which they held up as a model of interracial and multicultural harmony, would be a powerful “countersign” after the terrorist attacks and subsequent war.
“Toronto is a city meant for WYD,” said Father Rosica. “The world is already in Toronto, and the world is getting ready to welcome the world.”
“Toronto is a young city, a secular city not known as a place for pilgrimages. But there are scores and scores of ethnic groups who live together peacefully, and this will offer the world's young people an example of how to live together in peace,” echoed Cardinal Francis Stafford, President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, which is responsible for World Youth Days.
Father Rosica reported that already 110,000 youth from 120 countries have registered for this summer's event. That figure is higher than the number of regis-trants at a comparable time for the previous World Youth Days in Paris (1997) and Rome (2000). In the end, both those events attracted over 1 million people to the closing papal events.
(CNS contributed to this article.)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Quote of the Week DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:The Church shows us ancient and ever new instruments for the daily combat against temptations: They are prayer, the sacraments, penance, careful attention to the Word of God, vigilance and fasting. Let us undertake the penitential Lenten journey with greater determination ... and arrive at Easter in the joy of the Spirit.
— Angelus Message, Feb. 17
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Vatican Secretary of State on Palestinian Problem
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 18 — Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's secretary of state, urged Italy to seek peace in the Holy Land and afterwards said the Church wants to help Israelis and Palestinians live together, each in their own state.
“We have to quickly bring an end to this situation, giving the right to two states to exist, the state of Israel and the state of Palestine,” Cardinal Sodano told the wire service after meeting with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi. “We must help these two people to live together.”
Chiapas Bishop Says Ban Encourages More Priests
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 17 — Bishop Felipe Arizmendi of San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, said that a Vatican-ordered five-year suspension of permanent deacon ordinations should not be seen as racist or discriminatory but as an “invitation to increase the ordination of Indian priests” in Chiapas.
Bishop Arizmendi said it was a deficiency that only one Indian priest has been ordained since the time of his predecessor, Bishop Samuel Ruiz, while 342 men have become deacons. He said he hoped that the Vatican would allow the married deacons to become priests, but the Vatican has rejected such a step.
The wire service said that deacons are an important element in Chiapas because many Indian communities do not respect celibate men as much as married Church workers with families.
Bishops Ruiz and Arizmendi have built up an “indigenous Church,” incorporating pre-Columbian customs of the Mayan Indians, the article said.
Italian Court Rejects Case Against Vatican Radio
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Feb. 19 — Italy has no jurisdiction over the central institutions of the Vatican, including, a judge said in throwing out a case involving radiation from Vatican Radio's transmission towers.
Judge Andrea Calabria invoked the 1929 Lateran Treaty by which Italy recognized the sovereignty of the Vatican. The French news agency said that residents near a cluster of 28 Vatican Radio towers 19 miles north of Rome blame them for an alleged increase in leukemia and cancer tumors in the area. Their case was supported by environmental groups and Italy's Green Party.
Vatican Radio last year halved the power of its transmitters and the length of its medium-wave broadcasts in a bid to comply with new Italian regulations. However, the emissions of electromagnetic radiation remained between three and six times the maximum permitted level, the article said.
Vatican Radio said the decision does not mean that Vatican Radio will stop adopting “precautionary measures” against health risks, the Associate Press said. A leader of a citizens group fighting the emissions said he would take the case before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Get Ready for Another Anti-Pius Feature
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Feb. 13 — Yet another attack on the memory of Pope Pius XII was unveiled at the Berlin Film Festival with the screening of “Amen,” by Franco-Greek director Costa-Gavras. “Amen” is a screen version of “The Deputy,” the 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth that started turning public opinion against the late Pope.
“Amen” accuses Pope Pius of ignoring evidence of severe persecution of the Jews. It dramatizes the life of Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who appealed to the Vatican after his efforts to convince the United States, other Western allies and his own Lutheran church to intervene.
“The only organization that had real access to the German people was the Church,” Costa-Gavras told a news conference after the screening. “It should have raised protest as early as 1933,” the year Hitler came to power.
There is no mention in the report by the French news agency of how many Jews Pius actually did save — over 700,000 by some estimates. The Pope did speak out on several occasions but seems to have recognized that directly condemning Hitler led to even greater persecution of Jews and Christians.
Hochhuth told reporters that he was gratified by Costa-Gavras' courage in adapting his work.
But what kind of courage does it take when it seems de rigeur to condemn the late Pope? Perhaps it's time to stop putting the dead on trial and recognize that the Church has been speaking out about a Holocaust that is taking place right now. Will Costa-Gavras, Hochhuth, et al help give the Church a voice in trying to reverse the culture of death?
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Appointments & Meetings DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Appointed
Saturday, Feb. 16
E Msgr. Paolo Urso as bishop of Ragusa, Italy, following the resignation Bishop Angelo Rizzo, who reached 75, the age limit.
E Msgr. Carlos Garcia Camader, and Fathers Jose Eguren Anselmi and Adriano Traviglia as auxiliaries of the Archdiocese of Lima, Peru. E Father Santiago Silva Retamales as auxiliary bishop of Valparaiso, Chile.
E Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski as apostolic nuncio in Kazakhstan and Tadjikistan.
E Father Gianfranco Girotti as regent of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature. E Accepted the resignation of Archbishop Ludwig Averkamp of Hamburg, Germany, who reached 75.
Monday, Feb. 18
E Cardinal Jozef Tomko as his special envoy for a plenary council of the Church in Slovenia, scheduled for May 18 in Ljubljana.
Tuesday, Feb. 19
E Msgr. John Fleming as bishop of Killala, Ireland, following the resignation of Bishop Thomas Finnegan, who reached 75.
E Father William Skurla as bishop of the eparchy of Van Nuys of the Ruthenians, California, following the resignation of Bishop Martin Kuzma, who reached 75.
E Father Karel Herbst as auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Prague, Czech Republic.
Wednesday, Feb. 20
E Accepted the resignation of Bishop Linus Okok Okwach of the Diocese of Homa Bay, Kenya. E Bishop Jose Maria Liborio Camino Saracho as bishop of Presidente Prudente, Brazil, following the resignation of Bishop Antonio Agostinho Marochi, who reached 75.
E Archbishop Murilo Ramos Krieger as archbishop of Florianopolis, Brazil.
Thursday, Feb. 21
E Father Miguel Delgado Galindo as bureau chief of the Pontifical Council for the Laity.
Cardinal Claudio Hummes of Sao Paulo, Brazil, preached the Lenten spiritual exercises of Pope John Paul II.
Met With
Saturday, Feb. 16
E Two members of the bishops' conference of Argentina on their ad limina visits, which heads of dioceses make every five years to review their diocese with the Pope and Vatican officials.
E Elias Najmeh, ambassador of Syria, on a farewell visit. E Bishop Christo Proykov, apostolic exarch of Sofia for Catholics of the Byzantine-Slavic rite and president of the Bulgarian Episcopal Conference.
E Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.
Thursday, Feb. 21
E Bashar Assad, president of Syria.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Ireland's Moment of Truth? Two Views on the Abortion Referendum DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:On March 6 Ireland will go to the polls to vote in a referendum the outcome of which will profoundly affect the fate of the unborn child in Ireland. Pro-choice and pro-life groups are under no illusions about the importance of this referendum.
If the pro-choice groups win, then from here on in almost every legislative initiative will lie with them. They will start by pressing for legislation allowing for abortion when a woman claims to be suicidal and can find a psychologist who will agree with her. Then they will then widen the psychological grounds until they have abortion-on-demand.
If the pro-life side wins on the other hand, although the pressure for abortion legislation will not disappear, it should recede into the distant future. The next step, having won the legal battle, will be to concentrate the greater part of the efforts of the pro-life movement on finding ways to reduce the number of Irish women traveling to England each year for an abortion. Currently this stands at 7,000, which means about one in seven Irish pregnancies ends in abortion. This is just over half the rate for Britain and America.
This will be the third time Ireland has gone to the polls over abortion. In 1983 we voted by a margin of two-toone to insert into the Constitution an amendment protecting the unborn child. In 1992, following the decision of the Supreme Court in the so-called “X” case to allow abortion where a woman, backed by a psychologist, claimed to be suicidal, the country voted to allow women to travel abroad for abortions, and to receive abortion information.
This time, the country will be voting to reverse the “X” case decision, meaning psychological grounds for abortion will be removed. To date, no abortions have taken place in Ireland because of the “X” case, but this is only because of a long-standing political stalemate, and because the governing body of Irish doctors considers abortion to be professional misconduct.
‘The great fear of the Irish bishops and the pro-life groups supporting the proposal is that the pro-life split will result in its defeat.’
Unfortunately, the pro-life movement in Ireland is split about the referendum. Some pro-life groups, chief among them Youth Defense, think the government proposal actually weakens protection for the unborn. This is chiefly because the legislation before the electorate deals with the unborn only after the embryo has implanted in the womb. They believe this effectively withdraws protection from the unborn between conception and implantation.
This is an interpretation hotly disputed by most other pro-life groups including the main one, the Pro-Life Campaign. They say the unborn child, pre-implantation, is still protected by the amendment of 1983.
Critically, this interpretation is also rejected by the Catholic hierarchy. Even more critically, the line being taken by the Irish bishops has the support of the Vatican. A delegation representing the bishops visited Rome shortly after the government proposal was announced in October and won support for the line they are taking.
The great fear of the bishops and the pro-life groups supporting the proposal is that the split will result in its defeat, because there is no split on the pro-choice side. It is united in its opposition to the proposal. Organizations such as Doctors for Choice and the Irish Family Planning Association have come together under the banner Alliance for a No Vote. They have the support of Labor, Ireland's third-largest party, and Fine Gael, the main opposition party. In addition, all of the main media are opposed to the proposal, including the national broadcaster, RTE.
At a typical press conference of the Yes side, pro-life campaigners will be asked challenging questions about the life of the mother, and hard cases like rape and incest. At press conferences of the No side, pro-choice campaigners will be asked soft, leading questions about the same topics.
Almost never is the No side asked about the status and rights of the unborn.
This is making it very difficult for the Yes side to get its message out. The message is a simple enough one, namely that the amendment, if passed, will protect both the life of the mother and the life of the unborn. Because the media is focusing almost entirely on the life of the mother, the unborn are being left out of the debate to a large extent. The longer the focus is on the mother only, the less chance this measure has of being passed.
The No side is running a negative, scare-mongering campaign. Although Ireland has one of the finest maternal health care systems in the world — one that proves you don't need abortion to save women's lives — they are saying the absence of abortion puts in danger the lives, as well as the mental and physical health of women. They are saying that if the amendment is passed, women will be put in “even more” danger.
Also, the hard cases involving rape and incest are being used to pummel the pro-life side into submission. To make up for the difficulty of getting their case out through the media, the pro-life side is canvassing voters directly. The country is being blanketed with posters calling for a Yes vote. Leaflets are being sent to every home in the country. The bishops will be issuing further statements in support of the measure. Hopefully parish priests will also lend it their support in a country where more than half of the population still goes to Mass.
A fierce battle is currently underway in a country that is almost the only one in the world to allow a popular vote on such an important moral issue, instead of letting the courts or the legislature decide it.
If this is passed, Ireland will remain one of the very few places in the world not to allow abortion. If it fails, then in a few short years we will change, and from a pro-choice point of view, the Irish nail will have been hammered into place at long last.
David Quinn, editor of The Irish
Catholic, writes from Dublin.
----- EXCERPT: David Quinn: Vote Yes ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Ireland's Moment of Truth? Two Views on the Abortion Referendum DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Throughout the past years, I have joined in the many calls for a new referendum that would effectively overturn the Supreme Court judgment in the “X” case and restore adequate protection for the unborn.
However, it is my belief that the current referendum not only does not afford protection for the unborn between the times of conception and implantation, it in fact removes the current protection of the pre-implanted unborn found in the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861, which has been interpreted to protect the unborn child within the woman's body from conception onward. Instead, the proposal provides criminal sanctions only for those abortions committed after the unborn child has implanted in the womb.
And while the proposed wording removes the mother's threatened suicide as a justification for abortion, it creates a situation where the justification for abortion would come down to “the reasonable opinion” of one medical practitioner. This could be open to wide interpretation, particularly if medical guidelines and ethics were to change in Ireland, as we are advised they may.
As well, I stated previously that the government's proposed wording of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution could not be judged in isolation from the European Union's decision to permit public funding of research using pre-implanted child embryos up to 14 days old. It is my understanding that the topic of protection of the pre-implanted and un-implanted child embryo was not discussed in the soundings prior to publication of the proposed wording of the 25th Amendment. However, legislative decisions have moved rapidly within the EU in the area of embryo research.
Sadly there is a majority within the EU institutions that supports public funding for destructive research on the child embryo. This is in spite of it being unconstitutional, or illegal, in four member states, of which Ireland is one. This is contrary to normal EU procedure, whereby public funding is not allocated to any project that is illegal in one member state.
The Irish government's declaration to the European Research Council, on Dec. 11, 2001, stated that our Constitution, under Article 40.3.3, protects the unborn embryo; even when artificially created, however, research on human embryos in Ireland is not regulated by law. The embryo is therefore entirely reliant on Article 40.3.3.
Within this article the term “unborn” is undefined. It is therefore a matter of deep concern to me that the Government Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction, the body that will make proposals to the government in this area, has suggested that if the embryo were held to enjoy the protection given to the unborn “this would have very serious implications for current practice,” such as replacement of unviable human embryos and other considerations such as disposal of stored embryos, and screening for certain conditions.
The proposed constitutional amendment fails to address these issues and leaves the artificially created embryo without statutory, and perhaps possibly Constitutional protection.
While it would be politically easier for me to accept a proposal that protects the embryo after implantation rather than from conception, I believe that there are certain principles that are non-negotiable for me. I feel that I cannot lend support to a measure, which in my opinion, creates in embryo development, an artificial line before which less protection is given to human life.
I cannot lend support to a measure that creates an artificial line before which less protection is given to human life.
I also believe the we must guard against dividing lobby groups into two camps so that those who vote Yes will be seen as pro-life and all those who vote No will be labeled as pro-choice. This polarization will not be accurate or fair, as I am aware of many people who share the same concerns as outlined above and believe they must vote No.
In reaching my decision I have taken into account that the only statutory protection afforded the pre-implanted embryo in Ireland will be repealed by the proposed amendment, and I have received no assurance that there are plans to introduce legislation to replace this protection.
Justification will rely on the “reasonable opinion” of one medical practitioner — this could be open to wide interpretation.
While the proposed wording strengthens legal protection for the unborn only after implantation in the womb, it does not vindicate the value of life from conception in a consistent measure from a legal point of view.
My conclusion has been reached after serious deliberation, which has taken into account and been respectful of the many opinions put forward on the subject. As a matter of conscience, and of my own integrity, my position must remain the same as it has always been — that I uphold the dignity of every human being from conception to natural death.
Singer Dana Rosemary Scallon is a Member of the European
Parliament. (Excerpted from a Feb. 15 statement)
----- EXCERPT: Dana Rosemary Scallon: Vote No ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Homosexual Bill Introduced in Poland
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Feb. 14 — Poland may be mostly Catholic, but its left-leaning government has introduced a bill legalizing cohabitation between people of the same sex, the French news agency reported. Joanna Sosnowska, a Democratic Left Alliance deputy who prepared the bill, said it was a necessary step for Poland's entry into the European Union.
A referendum on Poland's entry into the EU is scheduled for 2003. Sosnowska said EU standards prohibit discrimination against people of “different sexual orientations.”
Her bill, modeled after France's civil solidarity pact law, which states that people's sex does not make any difference in terms of cohabitation, would grant homosexual couples some of the benefits now restricted to married couples. Adam Schulz, spokesman for the Polish bishops conference, called the bill an “attack against the institutions of marriage and the family.”
“We agree that Poland needs to discuss not only Polish integration to the EU but also the values used to develop Poland's future after this ... and the qualities Poland will bring to it,” he said. But that should be done “without copying the shameful models promoted in certain EU countries.”
San Giovanni Rotondo Friars Launch Pio TV
THE GUARDIAN, Feb. 11 — As devotees of Padre Pio anticipate the canonization this year of the Capuchin friar with the stigmata, the friars at San Giovanni Rotondo, where he lived, are launching a television station that will make the saint better known.
Tele Padre Pio will transmit images of people praying at his crypt and recollections of those who knew him. The friars will need more than $321,000 for a satellite deal, but Internet users will be able to follow broadcasts at www.teleradiopadrepio.it.
The London daily, in reporting on the plans, did not fail to take a few stabs at the Church. It echoed the Italian newspaper La Repubblica's reference to San Giovanni Rotondo as the “Las Vegas of the faith,” noted that bingo player in town seek the padre's intercession for the right numbers, and dredged up ancient charges against the friar's involvement with young women. If the allegations were never proven, as The Guardian states, why bring them up at this point?
India's Bishops in Plea to Government
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Feb. 20 — The Catholic Bishops Conference of India said that it has received news of four attacks on Catholics in the past month, including one on a church in the southern state of Karnataka Feb. 17, the French news agency reported. Also, a priest in Chattisgarh state was attacked in January.
“We thought the attacks on Church institutions and its personnel had become a thing of the past,” Archbishop Oswald Gracias of Agra, secretary general of the conference, said in a statement. “We urge the competent authorities to nab the culprits immediately and take lawful action against them.”
Police arrested nine Hindu extremists for the attack on the church in the city of Mysore, which injured several worshippers, the Associated Press reported Feb. 18. The assailants demanded that the priest there end what they said were efforts to convert local villagers, who are mainly Hindu.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Public Education Cruelty DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about vouchers in February, and will announce its decision in June. But court watchers say they already know what decision the high court will make.
Based on the nine justices' previous decisions, the court likely will give the green light to Cleveland's government-aid for private-tuition system.
We hope they will.
Secular arguments against vouchers aren't very persuasive. Groups like Americans United for the Separation of Church and State say that any government money going to religious secondary schools constitutes an establishment of a religion and violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
But to argue this way, they have to ignore or explain away the government money that commonly goes to tuition-assistance programs at religious universities. They have to ignore or explain away the money going indirectly to religious secondary schools already. And they have to ignore or explain away nearly two decades of schooling in America, when the King James Bible was the “world history” textbook, the church hymnal was music class, every class began with prayer — and no court cried foul.
In fact, the first laws barring public money from religious schools, the turn-of-the-last-century Blaine amendments, weren't meant to stop God from being mentioned on the public dime, like the secularists want. They were, originally, the product of the Know-Nothing Party, which sought to keep public money from going to Catholic schools instead of the Protestant public schools.
Besides, in voucher systems, the state gives money to families, not to schools. The families then use it wherever they like. They can use the money in nonreligious schools, Catholic schools, Muslim schools, Jewish schools. That's hardly the establishment of a religion.
Students have no such choice in public schools. There, they must suffer an education that considers “separation of church and state” to mean the unbridled promotion of official atheism.
The more persuasive arguments against vouchers are the ones made not by its secular opponents — but by Catholics who might otherwise be their beneficiaries.
Many Catholics argue that state money taints whatever it touches, and that no dollars ever come from state coffers without strings attached.
Just as religion was stripped from public schools, they argue, it will be stripped from Catholic schools that take the money.
But one wonders which came first: the chicken of secularized Catholic school administrators or the egg of government money.
Catholic and other private schools still produce much better educated and better disciplined students. They still retain a respect for religion that is much tougher to find in public schools. But, sadly, secularization has taken a toll on Catholic secondary schools.
Today's Catholic schools are less likely to be forming Catholic consciences animated by the doctrines of the Church, souls unstoppably committed to Christ, or even a preponderance of students who intend to live their lives within the sacramental system of the Church.
It didn't take government money to secularize Catholic schools. And just as a university like Brigham Young sticks to its guns despite government money, a school that takes its Catholic mission as its organizing principle will be resilient to secularization. Having 20 students paying part of their tuition with an open-ended coupon from the state house shouldn't make a Catholic school administrator abandon his mission. If it does, then the problem is too deep to be solved by changing the students' payment plan.
Meanwhile, the need for vouchers is enormous among the poorest children in our inner cities. They face bleak prospects. Their classes are often high-stress exercises in disciplining society's roughest characters at their most undisciplinedages. Students are likely to be influenced by peers who value a thousand things above education. It is cruel of the public education establishment to want to force poor students to stay in these low-performance, dead-end schools.
Having no vouchers will hurt those students far more than vouchers will hurt Catholic schools. It's a matter of service to the poor — the Holy Father's special emphasis this Lent.
And if Catholics still have jitters about the effect of vouchers on Catholic identity, they need only listen to Americans United for Church and State. They don't fear vouchers will make religious schools more secular. They fear it will the state more religious.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Defending Justice Scalia DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:I think Antonin Scalia makes a lot of sense in what he says about the death penalty and the traditional Catholic teaching on it, but he is mistaken in what he says about the Catholic faith (“Scalia Defends Death Penalty,” Feb. 17-23). It is not just the infallible or ex cathedra teachings which a Catholic must believe; all of the teachings of the ordinary magisterium on faith and morals bind the conscience of the Catholic faithful. As Lumen Gentium points out, those teachings in the ordinary magisterium that have been constantly reaffirmed are infallible for that very reason.
Even though Scalia misstates Catholic teaching on the deposit of Faith, he is still on the right track. How can a moral doctrine like the Church's teaching on the death penalty, which has been constantly reaffirmed over the centuries, be changed by one pope? Scalia believes in the traditional Catholic teaching on the death penalty, reaffirmed as recently as 1953 by Pope Pius XII, but not in the teaching of Pope John Paul II. How can Scalia be wrong, let alone a “dissenter,” since he is believing in a constantly reaffirmed and hence infallible teaching of the ordinary magisterium?
I think the answer is that the present pope's teaching on the death penalty is no teaching at all. It is simply his prudential judgment on the issue being passed off in the Catechism as a revised or developed Catholic teaching. This situation in the Church today is not right and must be corrected. If one reads the relevant paragraph in Evangelium Vitae, one can see that the present pope has keyed his virtual opposition to the death penalty to his perception that the modern penal system without recourse to the death penalty is effective enough to do the job of protecting society on its own. The problem is that his teaching charism does not cover things like criminology. His teaching office pertains to matters of faith and morals only. I'm sure Antonin Scalia would have more authority on the question of the effectiveness of the modern penal system than the pope would.
In your editorial “Scalia's Dissenting Opinion” (Feb. 17-23), you imply that St Thomas Aquinas would have come around to this pope's particular view on the death penalty. I think that is highly unlikely. My reading of the Summa tells me that the Angelic Doctor saw God's granting of the ultimate sanction to mankind as keyed into human nature — the Cain and Abel factor, if you will — and not dependent on changes in human society. Society can become more civilized, which would make recourse to the death penalty less necessary in the interest of not using excessive force.
But human nature does not change and there will always be crimes that cry to heaven for vengeance. For these crimes, at least, recourse to the ultimate sanction is true justice and should be applied to the offender. “If a man be dangerous and infectious to the community on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good.” — St. Thomas Aquinas.
PAUL A. TROUVE
Montague, New Jersey
Editor's Note: Since we have received many letters on this subject, we believe it is worth addressing, in some detail, the issues Mr. Trouve raises.
Mr. Scalia oughtn't be called a “dissenter,” says the letter, because, in disagreeing with the Pope, Scalia is affirming the magisterium. Yet this can't be right, since it implies that the Pope is the dissenter rather than the one who says the Pope is wrong.
Pope John Paul II is no dissenter. Nor is his teaching in opposition to historical Church teaching. In fact, the Catechism — updated to incorporate the teaching of Evangelium Vitae — begins its treatment of the death penalty (in No. 2267) by stating:
“Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”
St. Thomas Aquinas says essentially the same thing in the letter's quote and in the quote from our editorial. The Catechism goes on to teach that we ought not kill when we need not kill.
“If, however, nonlethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.”
The Catechism's next sentence, taken from Evangelium Vitae, is not “keyed to an understanding of the penal system”; rather, it teaches that what a state ought to do when it has no good reason to resort to capital punishment:
“Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself — the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”
Under the circumstances, we don't think that St. Thomas Aquinas, were he alive today, would dissent from the Catechism's teaching.
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: Antonin Scalia ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: No More Potter Letters! ... Says Latest Potter Letter DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Now I would like to respond to Holy Harry in last week's Register by saying Harry Potter is no big deal! What I mean by that is that your last 100 Harry Potter letters have emphasized the good or bad things about the books and movie, by referring to Harry Potter books like it was a world threatening occurrence that would make every 8-year-old in the world practice witchcraft.
The point that I want to make is that the real substance in Harry Potter books is minimal (I mean moral and immoral), and a good Catholic newspaper must be having substance problems too if it runs repetitive Harry Potter letters week after week to fill in.
Now I would like to clear up a few things (I'm already sounding like other letters, so I won't stop now). Reading Harry Potter is like playing Nintendo games. Every time you finish one, you're bored and want to play, or in this case, read another.
What I mean by this is that Harry Potter is just cheap thrills. The good seems to be balanced out by the bad and the stupid by the intelligent, creating an uncertainty unrivaled by Pokèmon.
In every “kid craze” parents act like it will never end and their child will be caught up in a make believe world forever.
When Pokèmon went out, children chastised themselves about being wrapped up in it in the first place.
Harry Potter will be the same. I call for parents to not be jittery about a simple fad and to try to keep their minds on more important things.
PAUL SAMPSON
Stayton, Oregon
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Death Penalty Doubts DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding your Feb. 17-23 editorial on “Scalia's Dissenting Opinion,” I think you did an excellent job explaining the Church's position on capital punishment. You concluded with Aquinas's quote: “It is permissible to kill a criminal if this is necessary for the welfare of the whole community.” I find myself in the middle on this issue. On the one hand, I agree that the death penalty is sometimes applied inappropriately (e.g., crimes of passion). I am also troubled by a rate of erroneous convictions that appears to be unacceptably high.
However, on the other side are two arguments that may justify capital punishment. One is the fact that “life without parole” is sometimes not adhered to, even when guilt is beyond dispute. The second, and far more important argument, not discussed in your article nor in most Church statements on the subject, has to do with whether or not capital punishment serves as a deterrent to future murders.
There have been many studies done on this over the past 40 years; the results have conflicted. Some, like Professor Ernest van den Haag, concluded that each execution saved as many as seven innocent lives; others reported no measurable effect at all. What is needed now is a fair and valid study.
If capital punishment does deter a reasonable number of murders, relative to the number executed, and it is limited to truly those cases beyond dispute, then I think Thomas Aquinas's test justifying capital punishment is indeed passed. If not, I would be inclined to agree that it ought to be used in only very rare instances. What I find most troubling, however, are Catholics who view this issue on the same moral level as abortion — that is reprehensible.
FRANK J. RUSSO, JR.
Port Washington, N.Y
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Yes to West's Eloquence, No to His Hyperbole DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Although I like the fact that Christopher West is speaking about the beauty and nobility of sex and the body, I agree with Mark Lowery: West goes too far. Time does not permit me to go into detail, but perhaps we can address a few points of Mr. West's rebuttal (“Christopher West Responds: Christian Nuptiality and Nuptial Christianity,” Jan. 20-26) to see the type of errors he makes.
“Lowery believes the truth of the body is ‘not the center of Christian life,’” says West. “Yet John Paul believes it's the ‘fundamental element of human existence in the world.’”
To be the fundamental element is not to be the center. By analogy, as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith taught in its 1974 Declaration on Abortion, “Bodily life is a fundamental good; here below it is the condition for all other goods. But there are higher values for which it could be legitimate or even necessary to be willing to expose oneself to the risk of losing bodily life.” Bodily life is fundamental, but the spiritual life is central.
“Awareness of the meaning of the body,” as John Paul II put it, is indeed the fundamental element since we all have bodies, but holiness, the life of grace, is the “center of Christian life” (and includes an awareness of the nuptial meaning of the body).
As another example, West quotes the Pope as saying that living the truth of the body always means “the rediscovery of the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life.” In fact, what the Pope said was: “This appeal [to rediscover, and realize the nuptial meaning of the body] … always means — though only in the dimension of the act to which it refers — the rediscovery of the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life.”
By leaving out the qualifying phrase, West inflated the importance of the appeal. It's only one dimension of the meaning of the whole of existence.
As a fellow graduate of the Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, I would appeal to Christopher West to continue to wax eloquent about the theology of the body, but to please take care not to get too deep into hyperbole. This Theology of The Body is a great antidote to the dualism that was preached by the dissenters from Humanae Vitae, but it is not the center of the Christian life. It's only one essential part of it.
FATHER THOMAS G. MORROW
Wheaton, Maryland
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Parents of 'Taliban John' Sent Their Son Off to the Culture Wars DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:American Taliban John Walker Lindh has rightly become a symbol in America's ongoing culture wars.
Why? Because his case raises a crucial question: Is American culture capable of reproducing itself? Are we raising children who can preserve our society for future generations? Taliban John suggests the possibility that some of our children won't even stay on the right side of an overt military conflict.
Does a nation of individualists have reason to care whether society survives? Before I had children, I didn't have a very good answer to that question. I would have said that I prefer that it survive, because on the whole it is a good society. Then, too, a society that falls apart the day after I die would probably not be much fun to live in during the last years of my life. But if asked whether that preference imposed any obligation on me for actual action, I would have been hard pressed to figure it out.
Many people, in fact, reply with something like this: “I owe nothing to anyone. I don't have to have children at all. If I choose to have children, how I raise them is up to me. What do I care if society doesn't last beyond my own lifetime?”
After having children, I realize that this question is ill-framed. The more important question is this: Is it in the interest of a free society to allow people greater and greater liberty in a wider number of areas, at ever-earlier ages? Posed this way, it is easy to see that even the most free society must impose some limits on the behavior of its individuals. We can't turn a blind eye to stealing and murder. Economists know that we need reasonable compliance with reasonable laws of property and contract for the smooth operation of the market. We don't have to tolerate the “preferences” of con artists and gang members for their “lifestyle.”
So do these necessary restrictions on people's behavior extend to how we raise our children? A couple of recent books say Yes. Kay Hymowitz, in Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Threatens Their Future and Ours, argues that allowing children a greater range of choices at earlier and earlier ages actually undermines their ultimate maturity and autonomy. Children are not ready to make certain kinds of decisions. They need adult guidance and protection. Hymowitz points out that the children who receive the least adult input into the formation of their values are the most vulnerable to far less benign influences outside the family. She mentions influences like advertising and peer pressure, to which we can now add, thanks to John Walker's case, militant Islam.
In my own book Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work, I show that no one is born with a well-formed conscience. The groundwork for the development of the conscience is laid during the first two years of life, through the attachment between the infant and his mother. If that foundation is not laid during the pre-verbal, pre-cognitive period of the infant's life, it will be very difficult to install a conscience based on purely rational, abstract considerations of justice.
What do I care if society doesn't last beyond my own lifetime?
Children have to be raised with enough attachment to the rest of the human race that they will restrain themselves in the face of temptations to do wrong. Or, in John Walker Lindh's case, children need to have enough attachment to their own society to refrain from taking up arms against it.
Don't get me wrong. No one is talking about government monitoring bedtimes and breakfast menus. Instead, I am talking about creating a culture of reasonable conduct for parents and children alike. I am not advocating a culture of compulsion, but a culture of raised eyebrows, social ostracism and dirty looks.
Legal enforcement of social norms by the state is, in many cases, a substitute for informal enforcement of those norms by ordinary people. The state is not competent to enforce family behavior in very much detail. We leave to state enforcement the large, seriously dangerous activities that the private sector can't handle. We can't have private enforcement of laws against treason or espionage. But we have to count on mothers and fathers to instill a basic sense of right and wrong. Only parents can create the basic attachment to society and its norms that will allow the society to flourish with a minimum of state coercion.
Look at it this way. Someone in Marin County could have said some pointed and even downright judgmental things to Mr. Lindh and Ms. Walker when they paid their son's airfare to Yemen. Someone could have suggested to Mr. Lindh that leaving his wife to go live in a homosexual relationship might have a deleterious impact on his son. Someone could have mentioned to Ms. Walker that she could provide her son with a more solid structure as a practicing Catholic than as a dilettante in eastern religions. If some combination of those informal, albeit unpleasant, encounters had taken place, maybe they would be watching their son graduate from college instead of fearing for his life in a federal courtroom.
The parents and the culture around them failed to attach this boy to his society through affection. Now the state has to do that job with force. That is why a free society needs a robust culture of right and wrong.
Jennifer Roback Morse is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: J.R. Morse ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Arm Yourself With the Cardinal Virtues DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Following the reasoning available even to non-Christian moral philosophers, the Catechism of the Catholic Church lists four cardinal virtues necessary for our natural good: temperance, courage (fortitude), justice and prudence. Understanding these virtues can help us guide our Lent more fruitfully by putting our particular vows and sacrifices into the larger framework of the human good.
Now this might seem all very dull and academic, but there is nothing boring or merely theoretical about the pursuit of virtue. Becoming virtuous is a perilous adventure precisely because it is carried on in the theater of everyday life. In each moment of every ordinary day, we are making the most momentous choices — for good or ill — in regard to our eternal destination.
Lent draws our attention to this connection between our daily actions and our eternal destination by asking us to focus on those aspects of our character that are most in need of repair, for these stand as obstacles to the restoration of virtue in our soul.
Nothing makes this clearer than looking over the list of questions in a standard “Examination of Conscience” in a penitential manual.
Have I semi-deliberately made myself indisposed by overeating?
Have I given up prayer when prayer seemed difficult and uninviting?
Have I borrowed things from others, such as books, articles of clothing, etc., and never returned them?
Have I insisted upon my own opinion, to the offense of others?
These everyday failings, small as they may seem, are directly opposed to the four cardinal virtues. Deliberate overeating opposes temperance, giving up something that is good but difficult shows a lack of courage, borrowing and not returning is opposed to justice, and insisting on one's own opinion rather than taking counsel with others violates prudence.
But these small failings, and the countless others we could have named, are not small at all. Any time we act against a particular virtue, we act on behalf of a particular vice. Since vice and virtue cannot coexist, we are indeed taking ourselves further and further from our natural good. Thus, the better we understand this relationship between our particular actions and the cardinal virtues, the more productive our Lent will be.
Sweet Victory
Let's dig deeper, then, by looking at two fundamental and related laws of human action. The first we'll call the Law of Additional Ease. This law, written into our very nature, makes whatever we do easier the next time we do it. The third time is easier still, and the fourth, and so on, until the action becomes so easy, it is “second nature.”
This law brings both good news and bad news. On the good side, it means that the more we perform acts that make us temperate, courageous, just and prudent, the easier it becomes to do them. In this way, virtue is its own reward.
On the bad side, it means that every time we fail to do the good, or purposely engage in even the smallest vices, it becomes easier and easier to do so — until acting viciously becomes second nature.
And that takes us to the second law, the Law of Moral Gravity, which is quite simple: Climbing up is more difficult than falling down. The farther we have fallen, the more burdensome and unpleasant our climb back up to virtue.
SECOND IN A THREE-PART LENTEN SERIES
Becoming virtuous is a perilous adventure, for the endeavor is carried out in the hazardous theater of everyday life.
Let us illustrate by looking at a particular virtue, temperance, and its opposite, the vice of intemperance. Temperance, the catechism says, is “the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods” (No. 1809). To focus on the pleasure of eating, according to the Law of Additional Ease, if we eat nutritious foods in moderate amounts, we build up in ourselves the power to eat well. Eating well is easy for those who habitually eat good things.
But when we divorce the nutritional purpose of food from its pleasant taste, and chase madly after the pleasant taste alone, we find it easier and easier to eat more and more empty sweets and fatty foods.
The result? The vice of intemperance, specifically gluttony, of which obesity and poor health are only outward signs.
It is in this larger framework of the recovery of the virtue of temperance that we should see all our particular Lenten vows to give up desserts, snacks, coffee, chips, cigarettes and so on. Giving such things up for Lent should not be seen as a temporary sacrifice, but the beginning steps back up the hill from which we have tumbled, the summit of which is the restoration of the power of temperance in regard to food.
This also allows us to see how the cardinal virtues are not isolated, but essentially related. Since depriving ourselves of sweets, fatty foods or cigarettes proves quite painful — indeed, even to think of such deprivation scares many away from the task before it is even attempted — we need a power to do what we should even against such pain and fear.
We find ourselves needing another virtue, courage. Courage, or fortitude, as it is sometimes called, is “the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life” (Catechism, No. 1808).
What people often call a lack of “will power” in regard to food (as well as other pleasures) is actually a lack of courage, and what is needed in the face of such everyday temptations is the summoning of one's fighting spirit, the desire to conquer what degrades us and draws us away from our true good. To be temperate, then, we need courage.
We've Got the Power
What about the virtue of justice? Justice is “the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor” (Catechism, No. 1807). Justice, too, is built up and destroyed in the ordinary and everyday, and it is there that we should seek to build up justice in our soul during Lent.
For example, Lenten vows to go to a weekday Mass are vows that, if fulfilled willingly, strengthen our will to give God what is his due: praise and thanksgiving. Lenten vows to be kinder to our spouses and more patient with our children also allow the virtue of justice to grow, for we should desire to be both kind and patient, even though (given our moral backsliding) we'd rather look after our own comfort and lash out at all who interfere. Extra almsgiving during Lent, or resolving to tithe, are also acts that strengthen the power to be just; they do this by detaching us from material things and allowing us to be generous.
Finally, we must not only have the powers to do the good, but we need a power of judging, a virtue which allows us to discern what we should be doing each and every day, in things both small and large. That virtue is prudence, the “virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it” (Catechism, No. 1806). Obviously, this virtue directs our acquiring of the others.
To return, for example's sake, to the “Examination of Conscience,” if I have “allowed my eyes to wander in curiosity over dangerous objects,” a sin against temperance, then I must judge the danger of everyday situations accordingly. Should I turn this television program off? Shall I not look at this magazine? Shall I stay away from an immodestly dressed person?
On the positive side, the best way to train our moral judgment is to humble ourselves, and to imitate someone who is already an expert at being good. Lenten vows to read the Bible and the lives of the saints are particular ways that our judgment can begin to be cured, for (we assume) we are not engaging in such Lenten study merely to gain information, but rather to seek formation. As should be clear, the use of a well-written “Examination of Conscience” also forms our ability to discern the true good in everyday circumstances.
Much more could be said on behalf of the cardinal virtues. But as necessary and wonderful as these natural virtues are, our ultimate goal — becoming good — stretches beyond this life.
Benjamin Wiker teaches philosophy of science at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: You Can't Discern a Vocation by Sitting on a Fence DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:That's one of the most basic and important questions we can ask, and finding the answer to it should be at the heart of all our actions and decisions. Yet, while most of us plan how to find a job, get a raise and buy the things we want, fewer have a clear idea of how to answer this question. The issue is more pointed after the attacks of Sept. 11, when many Americans are rediscovering the values of family, religion and the need to make commitments.
As Catholics, we should be busy about the issue of vocation. The Church provides proven methods of discernment, but rarely do we hear them mentioned at Mass or other gatherings of the faithful. Traditionally, there are three categories, or states in life, which the Church presents to us. These states focus more on “how I will live” than “what I will do” — and thus are neglected in our practical, bottom-line culture. How often are children asked what state in life they want to enter when they grow up?
There is the married state, in which a man and a woman vow themselves as husband and wife for life, and are open to the gift of children. There is the celibate state, in which priests and men and women religious choose “the greater portion,” vowing themselves to the Lord and the service of his people. And there's the lay celibate state, in which a man or a woman gives up the chance of marriage to serve God and the Church as a person in the world. In the end, the question of vocation is a question of love. Where do I place my heart? How do I best live out the universal call to love God with my whole heart and my neighbor as myself?
We should approach these states in life as calls from God in their own right, rather than as conditions we find ourselves in as the result of other decisions. How often have you heard a young man say that he can't become a priest because he wants to get married? He may indeed be called to marriage, but he also may be failing to ask a deeper question: Does God want me to get married? If he finds the answer is No, the question of priesthood takes on another dimension. If the answer is Yes, he will see matrimony in a more sacred light, as both a choice and a calling.
With so little talk about the states in life, many young people are left in a state of suspension. The choices in our society can be overwhelming; the possibilities for careers, money and success, blinding. To keep options open, too many fall into lay celibacy and are not particularly happy or fulfilled. I say “lay celibacy” rather than the lay celibate state, because most of these young people still consider marriage or consecrated life a possibility, but fail to take the step. A state in life requires a state of commitment.
But, for many, it seems easier to sit on the fence, in this interim lay condition, not embracing celibacy as a vocation, but practicing it, sometimes with difficulty, as a way of avoiding sin. In this context, human sexuality can lose its dignity and drama and take on a sterile spin. I speak from experience.
I once thought I should be a priest. After avoiding the issue for a few years, I entered the seminary and was heart-broken when, after three years, I found I was not called. Why did God say No? Wasn't the Church in dire need of priests?
Obviously, he had another plan for me, one which I found a few years later when I met the woman I married. Now I see that, when I entered seminary, I saw priesthood as a noble profession that required the great sacrifices I was anxious to make. I viewed priestly celibacy not as a state to be lived and loved, but as an obstacle that could be overcome by positive thought.
I did not address the question of my state in life until I left the seminary. A priest asked me if I felt drawn to a particular state. I said I was open to all three, but when he mentioned marriage, joy filled my heart and a smile, which I tried to hide, broke out. That flash of insight developed into a conviction as I began to live as a man called to marriage.
The lesson of my experience is not to forget about seminary and find a wife. I am grateful for my time in the seminary, where I learned the discipline of regular prayer and forged lasting friendships. Rather, the message is: Don't be afraid to walk the wrong way on the road to vocation, and turn back and start again. But, by all means, make a start. Embrace the risk. Love with all your heart, and don't be afraid to look foolish. It's the Lord you serve.
There are young men who have said in all the time I've known them that they're thinking about priesthood, and others who insist they're meant to be married. Yet, year after year, they remain in the lay single state, not applying to seminary in the first case, not nurturing a serious relationship with a woman in the other. The same is true with women who constantly weigh the possibilities of consecrated life and marriage.
They all are faithful Catholics, active in their parishes, and do many works of charity. But they would be the first to admit that they're fence-sitters. Part of the problem, ironically, is that they're successful. They have good jobs, faithful friends, comfortable lives. It is difficult for them to hear God's call to leave their comforts and launch into the deep, the uncertain world of consecrated life or marriage.
Many in the Church are responding to the vocation shortage with calls for men to consider becoming priests or brothers, and women to consider becoming consecrated.
This is good. But these vocations can too easily be viewed as jobs to be considered against other jobs in the world. Maybe the vocation message would gain greater depth if young people were asked to consider the three states. We need to ask them: Are you willing to give up your comfortable seat on the fence in order to embrace the uncertain drama of life?
Brian Caulfield is managing editor of Columbia magazine.
----- EXCERPT: What does God want me to do in this life? ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Mother Angelica's Quick Recovery: Friends Credit Online Prayer Bouquet DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:HANCEVILLE, Ala. — When Spanish university professor Maria Luisa Rodriguez Lee of Morris, Minn., began praying for Mother Angelica in January, she certainly didn't expect her quick recovery.
Lee is one of thousands of people around the world that have offered their prayers in the form of a “spiritual bouquet” for Mother Angelica, the 78-year-old founder of the Eternal Word Television Network, who had suffered two strokes toward the end of last year.
And the nun is making what some are describing as a remarkable recovery. She has been “at home” at her monastery for nearly a month.
“Mother is constantly improving,” said Mother Vicar, Sister Mary Catherine. “She is now walking with the aid of a walker and is talking more and more.”
“The news is very encouraging,” added Scott Hults, director of communication with EWTN. “She has made tremendous progress in her speech. In addition, she no longer needs her eye patch and her mouth, which had been turned down following the first stroke, is back to normal.”
While Hults said he did not want people speculating about miracles as regards Mother's recovery, he did say that the prayers of many are being answered.
Mother Angelica was first admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital in Birmingham following a mild stroke last September. That stroke affected her left eye and the nerves on the left side of her face. Just before Christmas she fell, breaking her arm and elbow. She was again hospitalized following a second stroke on Christmas Eve, and underwent a two-hour surgical procedure to remove a blood clot from her brain. The second stroke left Mother partially paralyzed on the right side of her body and affected her speech.
Moved out of intensive care in mid-January, she returned late in the month to have a filter device inserted into her lower leg to screen and prevent the movement of a blood clot that had formed there. Finally, on Jan. 25, she was released from the hospital and greeted with a mixture of laughter and tears of joy by her fellow sisters at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery where she continues to receive physical and speech therapy.
Sister Mary Catherine said that Mother has responded very positively to therapy.
“One therapist is using music and is having Mother sing in order to improve her speech,” she said. “She has five 30-minute sessions with her physical therapist, three 30 minute sessions with her speech therapist, and ... sessions with an occupational therapist weekly. In addition, Mother Angelica has regained the use of her right arm and is using both hands to drink her tea.
“Mother is handling all of this with good humor and determination,” said Sister Mary Catherine.
Life of Pain and Healing
The events mark a life filled with painful ailments and seemingly miraculous healings.
Born Rita Rizzo, in 1923, in Canton, Ohio, her father abandoned her and her mother when she was an infant. By the age of 11, Rita was taking care of both her mother and herself. Eventually she entered a Poor Clare convent in August 1944, founded an order, and was joined by her mother, Sister Mary David, in 1961. Mother Angelica founded EWTN in 1981.
Her recent turnaround would not be the first time that she has experienced a dramatic recovery. On Jan. 17, 1943, at the age of 20, Mother Angelica was cured of severe stomach pain as the result of a nine-day novena to St. Thérèse of Lisieux. “That was the day I became aware of God's love for me and began to thirst for him. My life was changed,” Mother Angelica told the Register last year.
In 1946, she was paralyzed in an accident with a scrubbing machine while cleaning the floors of the convent in Canton, Ohio. Lying in a hospital bed, she prayed to God and promised that if she ever walked again, she would build him a monastery in the South. Soon she was walking, but with the aid of crutches and a back brace.
Then on Jan. 28, 1998, after 40 years of pain and difficulty in walking, Mother Angelica was healed during the recitation of the rosary in her office with a woman from Italy.
With her pain gone, she stood up and walked unaided, appearing on EWTN's live program, Life on the Rock, to dance with the show's host Jeff Cavins.
Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos
Sister Mary Catherine said that the nuns at Our Lady of the Angels requested that prayers for Mother's “spiritual bouquet” be directed particularly through the intercession of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos — a 19th century Redemptorist priest who worked in New Orleans.
“One of the priests from New Orleans was in the Birmingham area,” said Hults. “He unexpectedly wound up at the hospital and visited Mother. Remarkably, he had relics of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos with him.”
“Mother's progress is due totally to the prayers, rosaries and Mass intentions offered for her recovery from people around the world,” said Sister Mary Catherine.
In early January EWTN initiated a “spiritual bouquet” for Mother Angelica on its Web site www.ewtn.com allowing visitors to offer their prayers, Masses, and rosaries for Mother's full recovery. According to the network, more than 113,000 Masses, 206,000 rosaries and 382,000 individual prayers have been offered to date.
Lee, who has watched EWTN almost daily since first obtaining a satellite dish a year ago, said that she began to pray for Mother Angelica, through the intercession of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, as recommended by the nuns. In addition, Lee offered Mother Angelica a “spiritual bouquet” by offering her daily Mass for Mother's recovery.
“I include Mother Angelica in my daily Mass, my rosary, and my Divine Mercy chaplet,” said Lee. “I also placed her name on the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe Web page for prayers.”
Lee said that she recalls Mother Angelica telling viewers after her first stroke that, “Our Lord told her that she would be cured, but she would first face other handicaps.” “If she is cured,” said Lee, “it wouldn't be something that happens only behind the cloister walls. It will be a beautiful thing for the whole world to see, especially the incredulous.”
Tim Drake writes from
St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Youth Day Cross Comes to New York for Visit to Ground Zero DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — The schedule for taking the cross that symbolizes World Youth Day to locations across Canada was interrupted Feb. 24-25 for a pilgrimage to New York's Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Basilian Father Thomas Rosica, director of the World Youth Day scheduled for July 23-28 in Toronto, said 110 people gathered in Toronto for prayer at 11:30 p.m. Feb. 23, and then made the 12-hour bus trip to participate in the visit of the cross to New York.
Joined by youths and youth workers from the New York area, they came to St. Patrick's Cathedral the evening of Feb. 24 for a Mass that began with the processional hymn, “Lift High the Cross.”
Auxiliary Bishop Anthony G. Meagher of Toronto, who heads the Canadian bishops' committee for World Youth Day and traveled with the group, was celebrant and homilist for the Mass.
He said what happened at the World Trade Center was frightening, but that the cross was a sign that God would conquer the evil seen in that event.
The pilgrims were coming to New York to say that “not us but this cross will be a sign of hope,” the bishop said.
Father Rosica said the delegation included 75 young people from nine countries and 25 Canadian dioceses.
While the Mass reflected the bilingual English-French composition of Canadians, the international character of the World Youth Day was shown through the prayers offered also in Filipino, Italian and Spanish.
Also participating in the pilgrimage, Father Rosica reported, were representatives of the police, fire and emergency medical services who would assist with World Youth Day and who were coming to offer prayers for their counterparts who served and in many cases died at the World Trade Center.
He said the group also included the wife, children, parents and mother-in-law of Kenneth Basnicki, a Ukrainian Catholic who had come to New York from Toronto Sept. 11 on business and was killed at the World Trade Center.
“We have come as pilgrims,” Father Rosica said at the Mass. “We have come to express our solidarity, gathered around the cross.”
The cross, which is 13 feet high and made of wood, was originally given to the youth of the world by Pope John Paul II in 1984, and has come to symbolize World Youth Day events somewhat as the torch symbolizes the Olympics.
Last year on Palm Sunday, the Pope gave the cross to a group of Canadian youth, and it has since been taken to churches and other locations throughout Canada.
Just before coming to New York, it had been in Hamilton, Ontario, and on Feb. 26 was to go to Timmins, Ontario.
For the concluding journey, it is to be taken from Montreal to Toronto on a walking pilgrimage April 30-June 9.
The cross, carried in a case, was brought to New York in a special trailer pulled by a van, and set up at St. Patrick's Cathedral in the chancel near the archbishop's chair.
After the Mass, it was brought down to the congregational level for veneration during a prayer vigil that was part of the preparation for the visit to Ground Zero the next morning.
Father Michael Martine, CYO director for the New York Archdiocese, said 200 young people from the New York area, including some who would be going to the World Youth Day, had come to join the Canadian visitors for the Mass.
Concelebrants for the Mass included priests from the Archdiocese of Newark and the dioceses of Brooklyn and Rockville Centre, as well as Canada and the New York Archdiocese, he said.
Special music, including singing of the World Youth Day 2002 theme song, “Light of the World,” was provided by a youth choir led by the archdiocesan scouting director, Eugene Jaconetti.
Welcoming the visitors, retired Auxiliary Bishop Patrick J. Sheridan of New York called the visit “a wonderful gesture of prayer and solidarity.”
“You have touched us very deeply with this gesture,” he said.
Bishop Sheridan also commented jokingly that he was welcoming the Canadian visitors in spite of the fact that the Canadian hockey team had just beaten the United States that afternoon “fair and square.”
Bishop Meagher responded that he had not planned to mention the game because it might seem like gloating.
After spending the night at the Mount Manresa Jesuit Retreat House on Staten Island, the pilgrims returned to Manhattan for a Mass celebrated by Archbishop Renato R. Martino, Vatican nuncio to the United Nations, at Our Saviour Church, and then made the visit to Ground Zero.
Returning immediately to Canada, the visitors were making their New York trip totally as a pilgrimage of prayer — with none of the shopping, Broadway plays or restaurant dining of the typical New York tourist.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tracy Early ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Marching to Easter DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:It's hard to believe, but March this year is the month not just of St. Patrick's Day, but also of Holy Week and Easter.
Normally, a column like this, about liturgical celebrations in March, would dwell on Perpetua and Felicity — virgin martyrs who landed a spot in the First Eucharistic prayer. It would remember St. Frances of Rome, who led a holy married life and a holy life as a nun. We would meet St. John of God — who lost God in his misspent youth and then wept aloud in church when the words of a missionary transformed his life. And we might even meet the Norwegian St. Ludger, who got in trouble for keeping a powerful king waiting while he finished his prayers.
However, Holy Week and Easter will have to supplant these holy men and women this time, along with a few feasts that just can't go unmentioned.
March 17, St. Patrick's Day. In our home, St. Patrick's Day always includes a showing of the old standby cartoon video about St. Patrick. You may still have time to get it, by calling CCC at (800) 935-2222. We've also recently acquired a wonderful audiotape drama about the life of St. Valentine and St. Patrick. It's great in the car! Order it (and lots of other lives of the saints) from Regina Martyrum Productions at (800) 565-3123.
March 19, St. Joseph, Husband of Mary. On this day we honor the fidelity and righteousness of St. Joseph. What better way than to make your husband's special dinner and say a few words about his own virtues, in front of the children? This way you can connect the “spiritual” aspects of the Church's celebration with the natural, “human” aspects. Click on the “Liturgical” button at www.kofc.org (the Knights of Columbus) to find some great Italian ways to celebrate St. Joseph's Day.
March 25, the Annunciation. This is a perfect time to teach your children an age-appropriate pro-life message. Let them know that the Church celebrates Christ's coming into the world on this day, exactly nine months before Christmas. It's like a little Christmas: It has the poor carpenter's wife, the angel, and the message that her son would be King of kings.
Holy Week. My husband and I had our first full Nativity set this year — we had only the stable last year, and tended to focus on Advent calendars for our four children before that. We were surprised at just how powerful the crèche was in speaking of the faith to our children. Our 3-year-old son was the most vociferous admirer of what he called the “entivity set.” He tells and retells the story of the infant who was “the king of God.”
Our plans this year are to have a Holy Week version of a Nativity set. We've done it before; this year we'll do it with gusto. My husband will take down all the religious pictures in the house and place them in the fireplace in a paper bag (we don't expect to be making fires this warm winter). Then he'll “roll” a “stone” in front of the fireplace (the fireplace cover with a gray blanket on it), just like Jesus' tomb.
In the past, we've done this on Good Friday; perhaps we will do it on Passion Sunday instead this year, to stretch it out. Then we'll pray our daily rosary (we've been faithful ever since the Pope asked for them!) in front of the visual representation of the season, and eagerly await the empty tomb of Easter.
April Hoopes writes from Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: April Hoopes ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: 'Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Pray for Boston' DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:In my travels for the Register, I've visited scores of churches, shrines and pilgrimage sites.
All have left their mark on me, but when I came to this one, just two miles from downtown Boston, I was so in awe I couldn't help but drop to my knees.
Maybe the timing had a little something to do with it: The Diocese of Boston is going through one of the most trying chapters in its history right now. If ever the faithful of Massachusetts needed the Blessed Mother's intercession under her TITLE “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” it's now.
Be that as it may, this is one glorious sign of God's grace at work on earth, and has been such for more than a century. Well before Our Lady of Perpetual Help became New England's first basilica on Dec. 8, 1954, the last day of a Marian year and the 100th anniversary of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, it was already renowned across the country because of miraculous healings connected with it.
These began before this massive, 215-foot-long church was built from a local quarry's puddingstone and dedicated on April 7, 1878. It replaced the original wooden church that the Redemptorists had established as a mission to scores of German immigrants living and working in this section of town, Roxbury.
That's how the popular second name of the church — “Mission Church” — originated. (Ask any lifelong Bostonian where the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help is and you may draw a blank stare; ask where Mission Church is and you'll quickly be on your way there.) Shortly after the mission was founded, the mystical icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was solemnly enthroned on Pentecost Sunday, 1871, above the old church's altar.
Redemptorist Resplendence
That started a long succession of miraculous cures that have gone on for 131 years — close to 50,000 consecutive days without a breather. The cures of illnesses that specialists branded incurable were so widespread by the turn of the 20th century that newspapers around the nation were calling the church a “Lourdes in the Land of the Pilgrims.”
By then, readers had learned of Grace Hanley, a girl crippled in an accident. After she and her family made several novenas at the church's shrine, she was healed. Her cure drew wide attention because her father was a well-known Civil War officer who for years had taken her to many doctors, none of whom could help.
To this day we know of the family's unending thanks. By the magnificent shrine chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, two huge metal vases hold neatly arranged geysers of crutches and canes left by those cured. On one, the family donated a plaque that reads, “Miss Grace Hanley/cured Aug. 18, 1883.”
From the beginning, the shrine and icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help made Mission Church a spiritual beacon that summoned souls from near and far. In pre-high-rise days, the church's 215-foot-tall twin steeples could be seen from across the city. They were prominent landmarks for the thousands who filled the eight Wednesday novena services to overflowing. Redemptorist Father Joseph Manton, who lived in the rec-tory for 56 years and died here in 1998, directed these novenas.
The entire interior is a dazzling treasury of jewels. Four years ago, I saw the basilica as a rare beauty. But on my recent visit, after last year's major restoration, which returned the basilica to its pristine original condition, I thought I was given a glimpse of heaven's reception room.
Marble sparkles throughout, but especially in the intricately carved details of the towering white Carrara marble main altar — the focal point of the church's seven altars. This seems to glisten like an ice sculpture in no danger of melting.
Massive as it is, this high Gothic altar, with its tabernacles and spires, has a lace-like gracefulness. The Redemptorists enshrined a statue of Our Lady of Sorrows over the main tabernacle. Why? Because Our Lady of Perpetual Help is only represented as a painting, never in statue form, and Our Lady of Sorrows is thought to have the closest resemblance. To Mary's side, Carrara images of St. Michael and St. Gabriel accompany her, while two charismatic angels with wings outspread stand on the reredos, sounding their trumpets.
This inspiring beauty is but part of the basilica's perfectly orchestrated celestial symphony of statues, paintings, mosaics and marbles. The nearest side altars honor the Sacred Heart, St. Joseph, the Holy Family and St. Patrick — all in resplendent, larger-than-life mosaics of German design realized in fire-treated glass. At the St. Joseph altar, the strong family resemblance in the features of adoptive father and young son Jesus gave me extra pause for reflection.
Matter-of-Fact Miracles
The right transept's monumental Purgatorian altar pictures angels hovering near Jesus Crucified, escorting souls to heaven and guarding the tabernacle. Angels appear everywhere, even carved into the Corinthian capitals of marble columns along with the lion and ox. One huge angel shimmering in blue mosaic and another in pink hold a banner announcing “Ave Maria” above the majestic Shrine Chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Help that fills the left transept.
Here the eye is first to the miraculous icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She and the Child Jesus are enthroned above the tabernacle in awe-inspiring majesty within a dazzling golden frame of bursting sun-rays and cherub faces. Around Our Lady, the shining gold mosaic wall and dome radiate splendor and warmth.
The shrine is a visual canticle singing of Mary and Jesus who are so majestic, yet so approachable. Mary's basilica brings this out, too. Even with its size, it glows with the warmth of Mary's motherly protection and concern.
I thought of it as part of Mary's mantle enfolding us in a mother's love. No wonder so many miraculous cures, from spiritual to physical, originate here.
The reminder of Mary's intercession for restoration to health and redemption continues in a brilliant mural filling the soaring cupola. Victorious Christ the Redeemer (symbol of the Redemptorists) is the center; Mary as Queen of Heaven is right by him. She's surrounded by petitioning crowds that include a woman holding her child toward Mary and by the Redemptorist saints.
One group of three priests and a nun is unique because one is Father Manton and another is Redemptorist Father Edward McDonough — who is very much alive and, indeed, nationally known. He has conducted healing services here every last Sunday of the month for over 26 years now.
As if the visual hymn emanating from every nook and cranny of this magnificent house of God weren't enough, Mission Church augments it with an 1897 Hutchings Organ, 3,100 pipes strong, built in Boston. Recently restored, it spans the nave to fill the choir loft.
I have no doubt that the Archdiocese of Boston will emerge from its present trials even stronger than it was before they began, thanks to the prayers seeking the Blessed Mother's intercession from this beautiful and holy basilica.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Baptizing the Internet DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:The Pope knows the Web.
“For the Church, the new world of cyberspace is a summons to the great adventure of using its potential to proclaim the Gospel message.”
So says Pope John Paul II in his message for the 36th World Communications Day.
The theme of this year's communications celebration will be “Internet: A New Forum for Proclaiming the Gospel.”
In his message, the Pope points out: “The Internet can offer magnificent opportunities for evangelization.” But, like other communications media, the Internet is a means and not an end in itself. It has its strengths and its weaknesses. The Internet provides information about, and can stir interest in, the Christian message — making possible, for some, an initial encounter with the Gospel. This is especially true with the young, who spend an increasing amount of time in cyberspace and view the world through it. But our faith has to move from the virtual world to the real world. The Holy Father encourages us to find practical ways of getting these “first-contact” people involved in a real-world Christian community.
The Internet can provide continuing instruction and catechesis help to those already evangelized, especially for those living in unsupportive cultures. I have had e-mails from converts, even in other countries, who were struggling with unresolved questions or nagging doubts about the Catholic faith. Some of the difficulties were easily erased with just one e-mail. There is no doubt that the Internet provides a unique supplement and support for those in first contact with the Church and for those beginning the life of the Catholic faith.
“The Internet can never replace that profound experience of God which only the living, liturgical and sacramental life of the Church can offer,” writes Pope John Paul.
There is always the danger of people living only in the virtual world or using it to replace the real one. I remember receiving one e-mail from a woman doing a holy hour of eucharistic adoration in her church once a week. She wanted to know if doing a holy hour in front of her computer, set to a page showing our chapel live via Webcam, could substitute for driving to the church. Another person wondered if the Sacrament of Reconciliation could be received over the Internet. (Two Nos!)
Perhaps these same questions were asked when the telephone and television were still new. I begin to worry even more over virtual-reality confusion when I spotted a Web site, value.net/~bromike/diocese/, TITLEd “The Archdiocese of the Internet.” A scrolling message there tells you that this is “A Roman Catholic Church on the Net.” As technology advances — with upcoming innovations like holo-graphic monitors and other 3-dimensional viewing systems, tele-immersion (virtual reality + video-conferencing), voice portals, etc. — it becomes more and more tempting to turn to virtual Christian communities and away from real ones.
This, obviously, would be a mistake.
As the Holy Father spells out in some detail in his message for World Communications Day: “Electronically mediated relationships can never take the place of the direct human contact required for genuine evangelization.”
Pope John Paul II gives us a shining example of one who “puts out into the deep” of the Internet without fear — and with prayerful consideration of the medium's limitations along with its opportunities.
And he calls us to do likewise, saying, “I dare to summon the whole Church bravely to cross this new threshold.”
Brother John Raymond, co-founder of the Monks of Adoration, writes from Venice, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Art & Culture -------- TITLE: Monthly Web Picks DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Here are some Web sites specially chosen for reluctant Webmasters still feeling timid about putting up a Web site of their own:
“Catholic Exchange Can Build Your Parish Web Site — For Free!” so claims Catholic Exchange (catholicexchange.com/parishinfo). They'll not only build it, but host it, too — for free. They'll even throw in their Web portal information.
Liturgical Publications of St. Louis' Catholic Community Forum (catholicforum.com/community.h tml) offers free personal, church or organization Web sites. Build your site with their Web-page creation tool, accessible through your browser.
Catholic Life (diocese.net) has a similar setup with their “Page Creator” tool. They invite churches, schools and organizations to create a free Web site.
How about creating an EZWeb site for free with CatholicWeb.com (catholicweb.com/about_services.cfm) Free personal sites are available for CatholicWeb community members (membership is also free). For churches, dioceses, schools, missions, etc., they offer a free, professional EZWeb site. They say: “Anyone can do it and no special training, html knowledge or complicated software installation is required for you to build a professional, dynamic and engaging Web presence.”
This still isn't enough to get you evangelizing and catechizing on the Web? Go to my “Free Web Sites” category in my online Catholic directory at monksofadoration.-org/freesite.html and cast your net on the ’Net!
To order Catholics on the Internet by Brother John Raymond, call
Prima Publishing at (800) 632-8676.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Art & Culture -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Oliver Twist (2000)
A six-hour “Masterpiece Theater” adaptation of the novel dramatizes the cruel social conditions that confronted disadvantaged children in early 19th-century England. Oliver Twist (Sam Smith) is an orphan raised in a workhouse for the poor who's determined to rise above his lot. Screenwriter Alan Bleasdale and director Renny Rye cleverly expand the novel's backstory about the lad's dead mother (Sophia Myles) before launching into his adventures.
The Golden Seal (1983)
Based on James Vance Marshall's novel A River Ran out of Eden, this heartfelt, imaginative presentation is set in remote Aleutian Islands off the Alaska Coast. The 10-year-old Eric (Torquil Campbell) is lonely and wants a pet. He bonds with the real-life embodiment of a legendary golden seal who allegedly stays away from humans because of their greed.
The animal visits Eric's island every seven years to bear its young. A bounty hunter (Michael Beck) and Eric's father (Steve Railsback) are searching for the creature because of the $10,000 price on its pelt. But Eric decides to shelter it from its pursuers.
The Fighting Sullivans (1944)
In Waterloo, Iowa railway worker Mr. Sullivan (Thomas Mitchell) and his wife (Selena Royle) are raising five boys. Director Lloyd Bacon (Knute Rockne, All American) and screenwriters Mary McCall, Edward Doherty and Jules Schermer recreate the flavor of small-town life with feeling and depth. After the Pearl Harbor bombing, the five Sullivan sons (Ryan, John Campbell, James Cardwell, John Alvin and George Offerman) join the Navy and insist on serving together.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Art & Culture -------- TITLE: Where Has Campus Romance Gone? DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Courtship and healthy dating among young Americans belong on the endangered-species list.
So says Connie Marshner, chairman of the Cardinal Newman Society and a longtime pro-life and pro-family activist in the nation's capital. Marshner, who is also author of Decent Exposure: How to Teach Your Children About Sex (Legacy Communications, 1994), spoke with Zenit news service about the state of dating, circa 2002. Here's a transcript of the conversation.
Zenit: Is courtship in decline on U.S. college campuses?
Marshner: What kids mean by “dating” today is what previous generations called “going steady.” You go out with one person, but only with that person. And “dating,” as the secular youth culture currently defines the term, is little more than a euphemism for serial sex partnering. Every public high-school student knows that to be “dating” somebody is to be sexually active — with a few prominent exceptions, such as Mormon or Muslim students.
Unfortunately, diocesan high schools are far from exempt from these attitudes and problems. It is hard for [many Catholics] to even conceptualize how sex is viewed by the young generation — at least in the United States and probably most of the West. Sex is not something special or private, let alone sacred; it is really regarded as little more than a rite of passage, something you do to prove you're grown up.
And when one of these serial partnerships gets boring, then the way to win the freedom to associate with a different guy is to have a dramatic breakup with the first guy. Meet, sleep with, break up — over and over again, that is the cycle of dating in America, from junior high around age 12 until marriage around age 25. It doesn't prepare anybody for marriage. It prepares them for divorce.
Those are the basic problems with contemporary dating: the sexual activity and the exclusivity it implies. Even on the “good” Catholic college campuses, it is little different.
Can healthy dating and courtship be restored? Or is it by nature incompatible with Christian living, at least in the United States right now?
Of course, serial fornication is incompatible with Christian living. Does this mean that Catholic parents should refuse to allow their adolescent sons and daughters to be in the company of non-related persons of the opposite sex? I don't think so. That would be an overreaction in the opposite direction.
The goal should be the happy medium: Our sons and daughters should get to know each other naturally, as siblings of friends, as coworkers on practical projects, as partners in academic projects, in groups, mainly through normal activities.
It is through shared work and activities that a person gets to see many different facets of another. By contrast, in the exclusive dating game, each wears a mask that is designed to achieve a certain response. ...
It is the girls who must make the difference. I don't mean to sound sexist, but the fact is, girls do set the standards in the whole courtship and dating thing. They are the ones who bear, disproportionately to boys, the consequences of sexual activity outside of marriage. I wish that men set standards of chastity, but the men in our culture seem to have abandoned the job of setting standards at all — but that is a conversation for another day. The fact is: Get the girls on the side of chastity, and there is hope for the guys.
What signs of hope do you see?
Several, actually. First, there's human nature coming to the rescue. People can deceive themselves for one generation, but the next is not so easily fooled. Reality can be avoided only so long.
The infatuation of one generation with libertine sex extracts a price from the next generation — father-lessness, divorce and the like — and the pendulum begins to swing back. We are seeing the pendulum swinging back already: Reliable surveys have been finding that eight out of 10 girls and six out of 10 boys wish they had not had sex when they did. When they feel that way, they talk to their friends.
Second, there is the abstinence-education movement, which is sweeping through all the Christian churches, and the common sense of which is even pervading public schools. Thanks to George W. Bush in the White House, HHS [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] is spending some money now on real abstinence education. These funds are helping the authentic abstinence movement.
The pregnancy rate of teens aged 15-19 was lower in 1997 than any year since before 1972. These figures are just becoming available, but the trend has been headed down since 1991. In 1997, only 93 out of 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 became pregnant. That's still appalling, but it's a lot better than the 110 it was in 1982. The trend is moving in the right direction, so something is going right.
Unfortunately, at the same time the pregnancy rates are going down, STD [sexually transmitted disease] rates are going up and up and up. Ten thousand teens per day contract a sexually transmitted disease. Nationally, one in four Americans has an STD. And they're not all curable, either, as teens find out when they contract one. An STD is a strong dose of reality for a kid who feels that nothing bad can happen.
What can parents do to help teens in this area?
They have to start when the child is an infant, as I explain in detail in Decent Exposure. Hopefully, before the child reaches the teen years, he has learned right from wrong, has learned that his parents want what is best for him and know more than he does, and has developed some of the other virtues which enable him to practice self-control. Make sure they know that sex is beautiful and wonderful when exercised in marriage, something really worth waiting for.
I'm afraid some parents still manage to convey the idea that sex is merely some dirty secret that should never be talked about. That attitude does a youngster no favor — because if they can't talk with their parents, whom can they talk with? Be careful to not be sarcastic, don't use “put-down” tones of voice. Be willing to be flexible. Don't condemn them, help them. Just because you love your children does not mean that your children feel loved — and that is a crucial distinction.
Beyond that, parents need to continually remind themselves to be reasonable, realistic, loving and sympathetic — and provide lots of structure for the social lives of teens.
The next thing to do is to know their friends and their friends' parents, their group, their environment — what rooms are in the place they hang out, for instance. Then know their lives and the pressures on them.
Know what they need from you, which is your help to balance all the demands of the peer group, the school, overloaded schedules, the plummeting self-confidence, the wild ambitions, the body that changes from day to day, the moods that swing from day to day, and all the other complexities of their lives. Make sure they are continually receiving spiritual formation in some form, and getting regularly to a good confessor.
And be on your knees every day for each and every one of them.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Darwin Debated
THE PLAIN DEALER, Feb. 13 — The Ohio State Board of Education will hear testimony from experts on whether to include the theory of intelligent design in high-school discussions on creation, reports the Cleveland daily.
Backers of intelligent design — the theory that the world must have been designed by a purposeful being — claim that evolution enjoys a monopoly in the state curriculum. The board started drafting new science standards after previous guidelines were criticized by the Ohio Legislature as vague because they recommend covering “change through time” but are not specific about what that involves.
Catholic Collaborator
DEPAUL UNIVERSITY, Feb. 14 — The Vincentians' university in Chicago has announced that Msgr. Kenneth Velo, former president of the Catholic Church Extension Society, has been named to the newly created position of “senior executive for Catholic collaboration.”
Msgr. Velo, a former vice chancellor under Chicago's late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, will be responsible for forging closer ties between DePaul and the Archdiocese of Chicago and other Catholic institutions.
He also will work to expand the connections between the university and Catholic leaders.
Confessional ‘Stall’
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 6 — Penn State University is asking its architecture department to pay $800 for repairs to a bathroom stall that was redecorated to look like a confessional as part of a class project on the “metaphoric uses of garages.”
Christopher Rzomp earned an “A” for cutting a confessional window into the stall's wall and hanging curtains and a red light overhead.
While the AP points out that “a small number of complaints” were received, a Penn State spokesman said the university was prompted to action because it “was damaging university property, and someone has to pay for it.”
Barry Accredited
BARRY UNIVERSITY, Feb. 9 — The Catholic university announced that its law school was successful Feb. 4 on its fourth attempt to gain accreditation by the American Bar Association.
Barry, located in Miami, purchased the struggling Orlando University law school in 1998. It beefed up academic standards, increased enrollment qualifications and backed the school with $16 million in pledges. Barry finally won accreditation by submitting a plan for how it would compete with a new law school scheduled to be opened later this year by Florida A&M University.
Decline of Integrity
CNN.COM, Feb. 7 — A high-school science teacher has resigned in protest after being ordered by her school district to go easier on 28 sophomores who she had failed for plagiarizing a homework assignment, reports the Web site of the all-news network. The teacher, Christine Pelton, was originally backed by her superiors. But after parents complained, the Piper, Kan., school board ordered her to lift the failing grades. The event, “some say, reflects a national decline in integrity,” says CNN.
Bishop Honored
NATIONAL CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION, Feb. 15 — Bishop Frank Rodimer of Paterson, N.J., will receive the Msgr. Meyers Award during the association's convention in April. Bishop Rodimer will be honored for his efforts to raise millions of dollars that have been used for scholarships to attend Catholic schools.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:As a grandmother, I think too many parents these days are asking their children to cooperate rather than simply telling them what they expect. It sounds like they're constantly negotiating with their children.
Some years back, three of my children attended the same preschool class. Arriving a few minutes early to pick them up, I could observe how the other parents handled their children.
What I heard confirms your sentiment. Routinely parents would query their kids: “Are you ready to go now? Come on, let's put our coat on, okay? Why don't you say goodbye to your teacher?”
Now such questioning provides nowhere near enough evidence to diagnose that Mom has a case of parentus maximus wimpus. In fact, I would guess that most of these parents were just wanting to convey a pleasant, “Let's cooperate, okay?” tone. To the extent that they got cooperation, I would never question their style.
What I saw from the kids, however, was not cooperation. They didn't say, “Why thank you, Mother, for asking so sweetly. It just makes me want to listen all the more.” Instead, their reaction was “You're not really all that serious, are you?”
Putting expectations into question form is appealing. It does sound rather gentle and less bossy. Overall it just makes us parents seem like nicer people, don't you think?
But traps lie beneath the surface benefits. First, questions invite resistance. If Sherlock takes the question literally, he could respond, “No, I'm not ready to go now. It's not our coat. It's my coat. You can put yours on if you want. And I don't feel like saying goodbye to my teacher.”
Second, discipline by question sends a message most parents don't mean to send. It makes non-negotiable expectations sound open to discussion. I mean, does Taylor really have a choice about putting on his coat and leaving?
Third, and this is potentially the biggest danger, if a child senses, even incorrectly, that a parent may not mean what she says, the child is likely to ignore or resist the request, thus pushing the parent into command mode.
In and of themselves, commands are not bad. The trouble comes from the struggle to get cooperation after implying it wasn't all that important. This leads to frustrations, emotions and volume. In essence, discipline by question can easily evolve into bossy, mean discipline, the very thing the parent was unconsciously trying to avoid in the first place.
Certainly every mom and dad has the right to discipline as they see fit. And discipline by question can work for some kids — mostly the sweet natured Chastity and Oxford types.
Overall, though, my experience is that it's better to state your expectations quietly and confidently from the very start. It leaves little room for doubt. It reinforces your role as authority. In the long run, it really is a nicer way to discipline.
So why don't we all just try to do a little better on this, okay?
Dr. Ray Guarendi is a clinical psychologist and author.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Asking for Trouble ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Playing for Keeps DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:“Families that pray together, stay together,” could possibly read “Families that play together, stay together.”
Families that develop traditions of playing games together, often beginning as alternate forms of entertainment during Lent, have found that it can help teach the faith, avert boredom, expand creativity and strengthen family life.
“When families play together, they create their own joyful excitement. When they sit in front of the TV for entertainment, they are at the mercy of whatever is passively fed to them by the media,” said Christopher Ruff, who is director of the Office of Ministries for the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisc.
He and his wife, Clare, began playing charades with their first two sons when they were just four and two. It was a way to provide an outlet for their energy, said Clare. Today the Ruffs have five children, ranging in age from 2 to 12. John, the oldest, is still an enthusiastic participant but, Clare said, “is getting wise to the fact that I use the games as a tool to bring order and tranquility to an otherwise turbulent time.”
To play charades with children of varied ages, the Ruffs choose to stick with well-known books, movies or television shows. The younger children need suggestions for easy things to pantomime. For example, 5-year-old Chiara enjoys acting out Cinderella by pretending she is sweeping and then putting a crown on her head and dancing.
“The kids love it,” said Clare. “I think it helps them with public speaking, frankly, because they're used to getting up in front and having to do something on their own.”
The Ruffs also play 20 Questions, which is especially useful in a car. One of the children will think of an animal and the others have to guess within 20 questions what the animal is. You can only ask yes or no questions, like: “Does it swim?” “Does it have four legs?” The one who guesses the animal correctly gets to think of the next one. If no one guesses within 20 questions, the same person gets to take another turn.
Clare said this game helps bring the kids out of boredom, which she believes is a springboard for bickering.
“I used to say a Hail Mary or an Our Father, but I realized it wasn't producing the effects I wanted.” She added, “Board games have been a terrific failure for us. Too many age groups, too many pieces. The younger ones always walked off with the dice.”
The Ruffs have also discovered that their children thoroughly enjoy home videos, an alternative to their no-TV rule for Lent. “It's fun for them to see the affection, gentleness and tenderness that was lavished on them when they were small, too,” said Clare. “I think it helps root them in their identity as a person.”
Bob and Sharon Morris of Steubenville, Ohio, believe it is vitally important that children identify as a person who belongs to a family. From the time their seven children were babies, they would invite other families into their home on Saturday nights for dinner and games. The games, said Bob, were “somewhat of a gimmick on our part to make the tradition of having family life together a reality.”
The Morrises started the evening by reading the Sunday Scripture. Everyone at the table had to offer a comment, which led to some rich discussions about the faith. After dinner, the games would begin. They were simple enough for everyone to participate, like rolling golf balls toward a wall, and the one who got closest to the wall without touching it would win.
The “penny” game was played when there were lots of children around, said Sharon. One person places a penny somewhere in a room where it can be seen out in the open. Everyone walks around the room and when they see the penny, they walk to one side of the room and sit down. The idea is not to be the last one to find it.
The Morris children today range in age from 14 to 33. Thirty-one-year-old Joseph laughs when he recalls those Saturday nights, but says there was no question they had to be home. “I think there were many times when we rolled our eyes, but by the end of the evening everybody had a good time. Some of the fondest memories as a family were playing games. Even when we get together now, we still love to play.”
Barb Ernster writes from Fridley, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: How fun and games build families ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barb Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Support Grows for Pro-Life Candidate in California DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:LOS ANGELES — Michael Schroeder, former chairman of the California Republican party, said he was not surprised by the results of a Feb. 10 straw poll on candidates for governor taken at the Republican convention in San Jose.
The poll showed political neophyte Bill Simon as the favored son among GOP delegates.
Schroeder said he is heartened by Simon's candidacy: “I'm very excited as a conservative and as a Catholic.”
Simon is the son of William E. Simon, who served as “Energy Czar” under President Richard Nixon and as Secretary of Treasury under both Nixon and President Gerald Ford.
In spite of a general consensus among political pundits and reporters that Simon's bid for governor is a long shot, many Republicans think he is the man to beat California governor Gray Davis. State voters will decide in a primary March 5.
California Assemblyman Tony Strickland, Republican, echoed Schroeder's sentiments: “I was not surprised at all,” he told the Register. “Bill Simon has worked very hard at working the grassroots. He is running a fantastic campaign.”
Strickland said he was “1,000%” behind Simon. “Simon is surging in the polls, he's running that good of a campaign,” Strickland noted.
The ever-polite Republican newcomer to California politics is defying conventional wisdom among political insiders that former Los Angeles City mayor Richard Riordan would be a shoo-in for the Republican nomination. In addition to the GOP straw poll — which does not provide a scientific measure of voter support — a recent survey from Field Poll claimed Simon was “within striking distance of Riordan.” A Los Angeles Times poll said Simon was “closing in” on Riordan.
Another GOP candidate, Secretary of State Bill Jones, makes the run for nomination an increasingly close three-way race.
Throughout his campaign, Simon has stressed his Catholic faith as the cornerstone of his life. In a telephone interview with the Register, Simon said, “I've been a lifelong Catholic; I was one of seven children. Our Catholic faith was very important. I was blessed to be raised in a faith-driven environment.”
As a child, Simon attended St. Theresa School in Summit, N.J., where he also served as an altar boy. “I remember going to Mass on Sunday with my family, no meat on Friday, confession once a month.” At age 50, Simon can still easily recite the Latin Mass responses. “I was considered a good bell ringer,” he said with a chuckle.
Simon said that as a child he learned the kind of values he still cherishes — “respect your elders; be a good sport.” He hopes to bring this sense of values to the highest office in California, but he is aware that he is facing a difficult challenge. “If God wants this to happen, it's going to happen,” he says simply.
As an assistant U.S. attorney under former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, Simon managed to attend daily Mass at St. Andrew's Church in New York. “I would go to the 12:10 Mass; it was a nice, peaceful part of my day.” Simon often served as a lector at the Mass.
Simon also served on the board of PAX-TV until his California campaign began. He said he got involved in the network because raising four children made him realize “it was important to have family friendly entertainment.”
The PAX network reaches 85% of the U.S. market. Nancy Udell, its vice president of media relations told the Register that families want “programs that are free of sex or violence.” She said the network offers an array of programs that parents and children can watch together. “Our programming is entertaining,” she offered. “It's fun stuff.”
A member of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta, Simon has also participated in several trips to Lourdes. The Knights sponsor the pilgrimages in order to bring people who are suffering terminal illnesses to the famous Marian site.
“Usually we take 40 or 50 people to Lourdes,” Simon told the Register. “The mission of the Knights of Malta is to serve the sick and poor.”
Simon has also volunteered regularly with Covenant House, a Catholic outreach for runaway youth. In addition to serving on its board of directors, he has mentored kids in the program suffering through difficult times.
In the political arena, Simon has received the endorsement of groups whose philosophy mirrors the Church's teachings. Recently, the California Pro-Life Council announced their support for his candidacy. Jan Carrol, legislative analyst for the group, said she is excited about Simon's quest for governor. “He certainly has committed himself to the pro-life position,” she said in a phone interview. “During the debates, he said that the Republican Party must stand behind our principles”
Although running for any political office is difficult, running for governor of the state of California can be overwhelming at times. At the end of the day, Simon, after traversing the state, looks inward. “I'm hoping to say my rosary by tonight” he said, as he dashed off to a campaign stop at Catholic Charities in San Francisco.
California Republican Assembly chairman Richard Mountjoy sees Simon as the perfect person to take the helm of the state. “At this time we are in desperate need for moral, God-fearing men of high integrity in public office,” he said.
Maria Elena Kennedy writes from Covina, California.
----- EXCERPT: ProLife ----- EXTENDED BODY: Maria Elena Kennedy ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 03/03/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 3-9, 2002 ----- BODY:Replacement Level Birth Rate
FOX NEWS, Feb. 13 — For the first time since 1971, women are bearing enough children to offset deaths in the United States, the National Center for Health Statistics said.
The center reported 4,058,814 births in 2000, the latest year for which figures were available — up 2.5% from 1999. It was the first time since 1993 that births topped 4 million.
Researchers said the roaring economy of the 1990s probably fed the baby craze, with would-be mommies and daddies more comfortable about supporting a family.
The report showed birthrate increases among women of all age groups except teen-agers.
No Miscarriage-Cancer Link
LIFESITE DAILY NEWS, Feb. 14 — Having a miscarriage does not increase a woman's risk of breast cancer at any age, according to one of the largest ever studies, published in the British Journal of Cancer.
The research confirms the writings of Dr. Joel Brind, a world expert on the link between abortion and breast cancer, who noted that miscarriage does not lead to breast cancer as abortion does.
Abortion-Death Website
LIFE DYNAMICS, Feb. 11 — Life Dynamics, a Texas-based pro-life group has created a Website (http://www.lifedynamics.net/AboutLDI/dsp_WomenKilled. cfm) listing women killed by legal abortions, along with information regarding the circumstances of their deaths.
“The Blackmun Wall” project is named after Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Roe v. Wade decision.
Consent Cuts Abortions
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 14 — Abortions at two Kentucky abortion facilities decreased dramatically after Kentucky's pro-life informed consent law took effect 11 months ago, the abortion facility's administrator said at a Kentucky state Senate committee hearing.
There were 3,057 abortions performed last year, down from 3,828 the year before, at one facility in Louisville, executive director Dona Wells said.
About a third of the year's total — 1,015 — occurred in the first quarter of 2001. Then the pro-life law took effect, and abortions declined to 714 in the second quarter.
There were audible gasps from the audience, which included both pro-life and abortion advocates, when Wells announced the decrease.
Abortion Ship Loses License
CNSNEWS, Feb. 9 — A Dutch ship which offered abortions at sea for women in countries where abortion is illegal has lost its government license.
Dutch Health minister Els Borst has refused to issue a permit to the converted fishing trawler over safety fears.
Dutch government health inspectors were unable to regularly visit the ship and ensure standards were adequate.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Saudi Plan a Glimmer of Holy Land Hope DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM — The deadly spiral of Holy Land violence has escalated again this month, with 39 people killed in Israeli-Palestinian clashes in the first weekend of March. Against this backdrop of war, a peace initiative recently unveiled by the Saudi Arabian government is offering a glimmer of hope to some Christians in the Holy Land — but is alarming others.
Though details of the proposal remain sketchy, broadly speaking it calls on Israel to relinquish all of the land (the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights) it captured from Jordan and Syria during the 1967 Middle East War. The Palestinians would then establish an independent state in the first three territories, while Syria would regain control of the Golan.
In return, all Arab countries would recognize Israel's right to exist and fully normalize cultural and other ties with the Jewish state.
This formula isn't new. In fact, it was the basis of the failed July 2000 Camp David II negotiations between then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
What is new: For the first time, the push for a regionwide peace deal comes from an Arab country, not the United States or Israel. If successful, the deal would ensure Israel something it has never achieved during nearly 54 years of statehood — full recognition and peace with its Arab neighbors.
Upon hearing of the plan, which has yet to be formally presented to either the Israelis or Arab countries, the Vatican missionary news agency Fides said Feb. 26 that it was “a ray of hope.”
“The Saudi peace initiative could mark a turning point in Middle East history,” Fides said, adding that it “serves to lighten the very heavy atmosphere at present in the Middle East. Many hope world political leaders and diplomats will welcome and pilot the plan.”
Cautious Optimism
Local Church officials in the Holy Land also expressed cautious optimism.
“We can't give any official position because the plan is not very clear,” said Father Raed Abusahlia, chancellor of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem.
Speaking for himself, Father Abusahlia added, “we think it is a golden occasion for both sides, but especially for the Israelis. Here is a plan which will enable Israel to be integrated into the Arab world, to normalize relations with all Arab countries.”
Even where Israel already has diplomatic ties with Arab countries, namely Jordan and Egypt, “there is not real normalization,” Father Abusahlia said. “These agreements are only pieces of paper between states and governments, not in the hearts of the people.”
Although the two Arab countries have diplomatic relations with Israel, professional organizations in both countries forbid their members to travel to Israel or even to meet with their Israeli counterparts in a third country.
And the state-regulated Egyptian press is chock-full of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic articles and cartoons.
Asked whether all Arab countries, including Iraq, Syria and Libya, which have repeatedly called for Israel's destruction and which are known to sponsor terror groups, would agree to full normalization even after an Israeli withdrawal, Father Abusahlia conceded, ”It won't be easy, that's for sure.” But, he added, “There are psychological barriers that will eventually come down.”
Father Abusahlia, a Palestinian, said he could only speak for his own people.
“If we are really able to realize our own national aspirations, independence, the Palestinian people are ready to be good neighbors to the Israelis,” he said. “We see our fate and our destiny linked with theirs.”
But before that happens, Father Abusahlia said, Israel must withdraw from all disputed territory.
“We are afraid that the Israelis will play with this initiative in the sense that they will accept normalization and then try to negotiate modifications. We can accept nothing less than the full withdrawal from all Arab land occupied in 1967.”
Riah Abu El-Assal, the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, said that the proposal could be “a new opportunity … if it guarantees the national rights of the Palestinians and an independent state on their soil side by side with Israel in accordance with U.S. resolutions. If so, we're heading for a new chapter.”
For the initiative to be acceptable, the Anglican bishop said, it must “address the right of return for the Palestinian refugees in a manner that will respect the dignity of those who wish to return to their homes and compensate those who may not wish to return.”
According to news reports, the Saudi plan does not deal with the issue of Palestinian refugees, a fact that has angered many Arabs, including Christians.
Israel refuses to accept the return of Palestinian refugees who once lived within its borders, on the grounds that a newly created state of Palestine will ultimately be established for exactly this purpose. If 3 million to 4 million Arab refugees were to move to Israel, Israelis say, the 5 million Jews in Israel would become a minority within their own country within a few decades. The country already has more than 1 million Arab citizens.
Holy Places Oversight
Regarding the contentious question of who should administer the holy places once a Palestinian state is established in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where many such sites are located, Anglican Bishop Abu El-Assal said there should be no rush to judgment.
“In my opinion, this talk should take place in a time of peace,” he said. “I look to the day when the two parties will sit down and work out a formula in which the municipal services of Jerusalem will become a shared responsibility which will involved Christians, Muslims and Jews.”
While the Vatican earlier floated the suggestion that Jerusalem should be an international city, with no one nation ruling it, that hope has proved untenable. Israel considers all of Jerusalem its capital, and the Palestinians are demanding sovereignty over the eastern half of the city.
The Vatican now favors a negotiated settlement between Israelis and Palestinians that would provide international guarantees from both governments that the holy places will be protected and accessible to all worshippers.
Father Abusahlia said that the local Catholic Church welcomes Palestinian rule over holy sites in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
“As Christians we are part of the Palestinian people, and so we have no problems with Palestinian sovereignty over all the holy places,” he said.
Not all Holy Land Christians agree, however. Dave Parsons, information officer of the International Christian Embassy, an organization that represents evangelical Christians from around the world, said he was appalled by the notion of Palestinian control of sacred sites.
“If it were up to us, there would be a recognition that Israel is the proper custodian of the holy sites. Israel has an excellent record regarding protection and providing access. I don't want to see any Palestinian rule over any part of Jerusalem,” Parsons said.
Parsons cited several “incidents of harassment” of Christian pilgrims by Palestinian policemen in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, which is under Palestinian control.
“It's scary,” he said. “We don't want to have to pass Palestinian police to get to the Temple Mount or Gethsemane.”
Added Parsons, “Some of these police have trained in terror camps in Iraq and Libya and there's a lot of apprehension among Christian tourists going into Palestinian-ruled areas. The problem isn't getting through Israeli checkpoints, it's being in the midst of a hostile Muslim population.”
Pope's Plea
At the end of his March 3 Angelus address to pilgrims, delivered at the height of the weekend wave of violence in the Holy Land, Pope John Paul II called for an “immediate” cease-fire between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Pope said he was “profoundly saddened” by the latest news from Jerusalem, and asked the faithful to join him in prayer for this intention.
“Violence, death and reprisals cannot but push the civilian populations, whether Israeli or Palestinian, toward despair and hatred,” the Holy Father said. “May an immediate cease-fire, together with a renewed sense of humanity, in respect of international laws, silence the arms and make the voice of reason be heard!”
Michele Chabin writes from Jerusalem.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: In University's Shadow, School Opens in Protest DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:SAN FRANCISCO — The controversy that rocked the University of San Francisco's St. Ignatius Institute last year took a new turn Feb. 28. That's when Ignatius Press announced the foundating of Campion College — a new Catholic college in the mold of the former St. Ignatius Institute.
The new college has already received high praise. Vienna, Austria's, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, said Campion “will be a beautiful enrichment for the vast field of Catholic education. It will provide an excellent formation in the best tradition of Christian humanism. Campion College is truly full of promise.”
Even before it opens its doors and begins the accreditation process, Campion has already reached agreements with three universities to accept its credits: Ave Maria University in Ann Arbor, Mich., the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and the pontifical International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria.
The creation of a new Catholic college in San Francisco is the latest turn in a story that began in January 2001.
That's when Jesuit Father Stephen Privett ended his first semester as Univeristy of San Francisco president by firing longtime St. Ignatius Institute Director John Galten and Assistant Director John Hamlon, announcing that the Institute would be reorganized to “integrate it more fully into the university.” Father Privett described the Institute, which offered students of the larger university a four-year study of the Great Books to supplement their regular course of studies, as “too isolationist.”
In protest, the Institute's six core faculty members resigned, claiming that Father Privett's actions would radically change the program, which taught approximately 150 students and was known for its loyalty to the magisterium of the Church.
According to the Web site for Campion College, the Institute's staff created the new college because of their dissatisfaction with the university's remake of the St. Ignatius Institute.
But the idea was older than that, said fired Institute Director John Galten. “I first discussed the idea of a new, independent college a year or two ago,” Galten told the Register. “At that time the Institute was still going strong, but I posed the question to get people thinking.”
Galten last fall shared a stage with Cardinal Avery Dulles as winners of Cardinal Newman Society awards for preserving Catholic identity in higher education. Galten was honored for the 20 years he devoted to the St. Ignatius Institute before being fired. Cardinal Dulles, a Jesuit, was honored for his work at Fordham University.
At the time of his award, Campion's advisers had already spent months visiting potential sites for the new college, said Galten.
Galten stressed that Campion is not a copycat of the St. Ignatius Institute, but “represents something new.”
“We will have the ability to do our own recruiting and will have control over our own destiny,” Galten said.
Campion's faculty will draw from former St. Ignatius Institute faculty, said Father Joseph Fessio, who is Campion's key planner.
“They know the most about the curriculum,” he said, “and will be given first choice.” Five of the names mentioned in association with Campion were formerly with the Institute — director John Galten and professors Raymond Dennehy, Dr. Michael Torre, Kim Summerhays and Father Fessio himself.
The news of Campion's creation follows a February declaration of victory by the University of San Francisco. In a University of San Francisco press release, the university says that the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education rejected an appeal to preserve the St. Ignatius Institute.
The 2001 appeal by Institute supporters had proposed having Father Privett work with the Jesuit superior general, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, “to achieve a peaceful resolution, in which the university would allow true diversity and the institution could exist in its integrity,” Father Fessio told the Register last year.
Cardinal Schönborn supported the appeal. “I would regret very much if the Ignatius Institute should succumb to the mainstream,” he said last summer in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It would be a deep loss to the Church and to the academic community.”
The University of San Francisco has not released the text of the Feb. 11, 2002, letter from the Vatican's Education Congregation. The university claims that the letter expresses Vatican approval of the university's decisions to reconstitute the Institute's curriculum and replace its director.
In a March 1 press release, the University of San Francisco quotes the Vatican letter as saying, “We are asking all the parties involved in the tension to seek to collaborate in providing the best education possible to the young people who come both to the University of San Francisco and to the St. Ignatius Institute.”
The release states that the university is “disappointed that the leaders of the newly formed Campion College have chosen to disregard the Congregation's directive.”
“We have to say that they have won and that we just have to do it on our own,” said Raymond Dennehy, philosophy professor at the University of San Francisco and a former Ignatius faculty member. “Once we're free from any religious order, we cannot be held in thrall.”
Says the University of San Francisco statement: “The University will not support a program that duplicates its own.”
It adds, “parents and students must clearly understand that Campion is not accredited,” and it says that “students may be disappointed to find that Campion lacks the myriad benefits a full University can offer — including a fully stocked library, state of the art computer labs, the ability to join an ethnic club, play on an intramural team, participate in Third World immersion experience, or join student government.”
Answered Dennehy: “They're going to view us the way the lion sees a leopard — as unnecessary competition.”
Institute graduate Steve Ambuul added that “Every college starts small and has to be accredited. The University of San Francisco went through the same thing after its founding. The fact that one week after the concept was born, three universities are willing to accept their credits is proof of the potential of Campion.”
Ambuul, class of 2000, said he and other Institute graduates have high hopes in Campion College to reproduce the kind of education they once received at the Institute.
“The university has no idea what Campion can become, yet they are attacking it,” he said. “After the events of last year, it appears as if God closed a window and opened a door.”
Campion's Courage
The college is named for St. Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest who smuggled himself back into England after the Catholic faith had been banned there. After saying Mass clandestinely until, he was executed in 1581.
Campion professors see their work as akin to Campion's. Professor Dennehy says the St. Ignatius Institute has changed dramatically after its core faculty left. He describes the current program as a “Potemkin village,” in an allusion to the Russian general who built phony villages to impress Catherine the Great.
“The name is there, but its commitment to the teachings of the Vatican is no longer there,” said Dennehy.
Current St. Ignatius Institute student April Visperas said that she has seen noticeable differences in the program since last year. “Some of the classes that we were supposed to have taken have been waived because they couldn't find professors to teach them, such as modern philosophy. The only reason I've stayed at USF is the Institute,” said Visperas, who is a junior. “When we first learned of the changes at the Institute last year the deadlines to transfer elsewhere had already passed.”
“I think Campion is a good idea. Many of the classes that they will be teaching, and the ideals and values that the Institute held are going to be continued through Campion,” added Visperas.
The University of San Francisco said it was the Institute — not the university — which was ignoring Vatican directives.
Campion College is described as a two-year college with an integrated Catholic liberal arts, Great Books curriculum designed to prepare students to transfer into a four-year university of their choice. It will offer a single degree — associate of humanities.
Situated a half-block away from the University of San Francisco, administrative offices will be co-located with Ignatius Press, while classrooms, a library, and student lodging is available in or near the neighborhood.
“The program,” explained Galten, “will embody both the spirit and the curriculum of the original St. Ignatius Institute, free from the constraints of a larger university that does not share its goals.”
Although the college is getting a late start, Father Fessio feels confident that they will be able to start next fall. The college plans to limit its first class to 15 students.
“We will be offering full scholarships to every student who is admitted,” said Father Fessio. “We are looking for some pioneers.”
Information
Campion College of San Francisco 2515 McAllister St.
San Francisco, CA 94118
(415)-387-2324 www.ignatius.com/campio
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Opponents Tar Pro-life Judge In Senate Confirmation Hearing DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Civil-rights organizations are attempting to torpedo the nomination of Charles Pickering, a pro-life judge from Mississippi nominated by the White House to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
But others — including even The Washington Post and The New York Times — have suggested that the claims that Pickering is soft on civil rights are groundless. And many observers suspect the allegations are merely an excuse to allow pro-abortion Democrats on the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee to reject appointment of a pro-life judge.
Kweisi Mfume, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, insisted that Pickering's record made him unacceptable for advancement.
“We will continue to demand fairness on the part of those empowered to interpret the laws of our nation,” Mfume said in a statement to the Register.
Mfume added that Pickering's confirmation would force civil rights and equal protection of the law to take a “back seat to partisan politics and political affiliations.”
The NAACP has teamed up with other left-wing interest groups like People for the American Way, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and the National Organization for Women to oppose Pickering's nomination. The organizations have issued press releases and made hundreds of phone calls encouraging other groups to denounce Pickering.
On civil rights, the anti-Pickering forces cite an article he wrote in 1959 as a law student suggesting amendments that might prevent a law prohibiting inter-racial marriage from being found unconstitutional. They also criticize his voting record as a state senator against redistricting proposals that would have favored black candidates.
But the Bush administration counters that Pickering's overall record as a lawyer, legislator and judge comprehensively refutes the charges of bias.
“Charles Pickering is extremely qualified,” said White House spokes-woman Mercedes Viana.
She said any attempt to taint Pickering as a racist can't hold up to the facts.
“He testified against the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan back in 1967,” Viana said. Pickering served as county prosecutor at the time.
She also noted that Early Gray, whose son Pickering defended in a racially charged robbery case in 1981, supports his nomination. “The people who know him best, support his nomination,” said Viana. “He's dedicated his life to public service.”
Record of Reconciliation
The episodes cited by Viana were only two examples of Pickering's record of reconciliation, supporters say.
Pickering currently serves on the board of the Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. Prominent judge and former NAACP board member Henry Wingate joined Pickering on a lecture tour around Mississippi to promote racial harmony.
In a New York Times article, most blacks interviewed in rural Laurel, Miss., Pickering's home, said the judge was a champion of racial harmony.
“I can't believe the man they're describing in Washington is the same one I've known for years,” said Thaddeus Edmonson, a former local NAACP president. “If those people who are voting against him because of some press release would just come down here and talk to the people who know him, I think they would have a very different opinion.”
“I know Judge Pickering is a fair and impartial person grounded with Christian ethics and beliefs, who ought to be given this chance,” Rev. Arthur Logan, the black pastor of the Union Baptist Church and a city council member, told the Times.
Edwin Meese III, attorney general for President Reagan, told the Register the attacks against Pickering are ridiculous. Said Meese, “Judge Pickering is eminently qualified for elevation to the Court of Appeals. The delay in his confirmation and the false accusations being made constitute a potential blight on the Senate and indicate an attitude of unfair bias on the part of the Senate leadership.”
The Democrats' opposition clearly has a lot to do with Pickering's pro-life record. As a state legislator, Pickering supported a constitutional ban on abortion, and in 1976 he helped write the Republican Party's pro-life plank. NARAL President Kate Michelman cited that record in a Jan. 22 press release opposing Pickering's confirmation.
“Charles Pickering's nomination by President Bush is part of a continuing effort to hasten the reversal of Roe and the end of legal abortion,” Michelman said. “A lifetime appointment to the Court of Appeals for Charles Pickering may lead to a lifetime of disappointment and hardship for women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to choose. “
Pro-life activists wonder if the NAACP's criticism of Pickering is also linked to his position on abortion. “I can't comment on the sincerity of the NAACP, but you do have groups like NARAL grouped together with the NAACP,” said Doug Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
Johnson added that The New York Times article provides difficulty for groups like the NAACP and People for the American Way.
“It lays out the facts and they speak for themselves,” said Johnson. “But it was quite remarkable to be seen in that paper.”
He noted that even The Washington Post, while still opposing Pickering, denounced the tactics employed by the left-wing interest groups.
“None of these incidents, when examined closely, amounts to much,” the Post wrote in an editorial Feb. 17. “But opponents string them together, gloss over their complexities and self-righteously present a caricature of an unworthy candidate.”
The attacks against Pickering are apparently working. Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., said Feb. 24 on NBC's “Meet the Press” that all 10 Democrats on the 19-member committee will vote against Pickering, meaning his appointment would be killed before going to the Senate floor.
Pickering's supporters say he would be confirmed if the nomination went to the floor, because Democratic Senators Zell Miller of Florida and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina have already said publicly they will vote for confirmation. That would give Republicans the necessary majority if the rest of the Senate split on party lines.
Still a Chance?
Pickering's supporters expressed hope that the flimsiness of the charges against his civil-rights record will salvage his nomination.
One Republican aide said that Democratic votes on the Judiciary Committee might switch because of the press coverage, Pro-life Infonet reported Feb. 28.
Said the Republican aide, “If the vote were held right after the committee hearing [Feb. 7], we would have lost, but the Democrats are getting pressure from their own press. We are better off than we were a week ago.”
Josh Mercer writes
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Latin Americans Love the Faith, Busy Dallas Pastor Proves DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:DALLAS — On Good Friday, Catholics at Blessed Sacrament Parish here, as in many other gatherings around the world, will re-enact the Way of the Cross. They will accompany Jesus on his way to Calvary. But the day won't end at that.
Following a Latin American custom, the people of Blessed Sacrament will also accompany Jesus' mother on her way home.
A solemn drum beat accompanies the devout crowd, as they walk behind an empty cross and a statue of the Sorrowful Mother surrounded by torches. This marcha en silencio (the march in silence) is but one of the many customs Father Paul Weinberger encourages his Latin-American parishioners to observe at the church, some seven hours north of the Rio Grande.
Blessed Sacrament is in a tough area of Dallas, and when Father Weinberger became pastor in 1993, the church property was in disrepair. Sunday collections amounted to less than $2,000, hardly enough to help close a $500,000 parish debt.
The 42-year-old priest has shown what can be done to revive a dying parish, and his story might well be an inspiration for those seeking ways to keep Latin Americans in the United States from leaving the Catholic Church.
Father Weinberger does not seem too concerned about the growing number of Latin Americans apparently leaving the Church.
When he was studying Spanish in Victoria, Mexico, he noticed that American missionaries sometimes visited the Baptist congregation down the street. They gave out food and blankets, and a lot of the local Catholics attended the services. “But when they left, everyone went back to the Catholic Church,” he said.
“For Hispanics, it's less a case of going from the Roman Catholic Church to no church,” he said. But he does admit that people will go elsewhere if they're “not being fed” spiritually. That's paramount, as far as he's concerned.
Father Weinberger's parishioners get fed. He is the only priest at Blessed Sacrament, but he has overseen a dramatic rise in Sunday Mass attendance. Assisted by a permanent deacon, he performs about 100 baptisms a month, most of them of the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. There are 800 children in the religious education program, which Father Weinberger teaches in English.
To be sure, Blessed Sacrament is not the only church in Dallas experiencing growth, and much of it may be due to immigration. The Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is 95% Hispanic, has had a marked increase in attendance. And the percentage of Hispanics in the Diocese of Dallas last year went up from 69% to 72%, said Lynn Rossol, director of pastoral planning and research.
Nor is Blessed Sacrament the largest Latin American parish in town, and in fact it has a substantial Anglo community. But it has shown that immigrants from Latin America can find a home alongside Anglo worshippers and Catholics of Irish or German descent like Father Weinberger.
The priest has pioneered a way to serve English and Spanish-speaking congregations together. At his Masses, the Eucharistic Prayer is said in Latin, with translation cards provided in Spanish and English, and the homily is delivered in both English and Spanish.
Constant Teaching
Soon after he became pastor, Father Weinberger started a full program of spiritual and educational services at Blessed Sacrament. Whether or not anyone came to the church, he got into the pulpit every day and preached a lesson on the life of a saint, the Scripture readings from the day's Mass, the writings of Pope John Paul II or some aspect of the catechism.
He also sat in the confessional for three hours a day — and still does.
Eventually, word got around, and people started coming.
Now, his marathon schedule begins at 9 a.m. with morning prayer and includes Mass, eucharistic adoration and Benediction, two conferences, the Liturgy of the Hours and the rosary. Night prayer is conducted in Latin and sung in Gregorian chant.
Every Friday, he teaches an apologetics class called FAQs, or Frequently Asked Questions. The class helps Catholics to better respond to the questions of non-Catholics.
As he sits in the confessional, people line up to confess in English or Spanish. There are “so many confessions that the people don't notice but they are standing in line with people who only speak Spanish or only speak English,” he said. “But there they are in the same line for confession and they begin to see the others as real people also.”
Welcome Wagon
His parishioners help the parish efforts, too. One, Donald Schumacher, began potluck suppers recently to help bring the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking parishioners together. “Hunger is the universal language,” Father Weinberger said.
Charles Nipp, a social service worker active helping Latin Americans, also helps teach catechism.
It's important that the church maintain a “strong flavor” so people know where to go when they're ready to return, Father Weinberger said.
He described the scene in his parish on the first day of Lent, when some 6,000 people came to Blessed Sacrament for ashes.
Many people have come to know the church's schedule of services on Ash Wednesday throughout the day. “So many who have left the Church, their lives are a mess, and on that day of conversion they can walk up as if they are going to Communion, get ashes, hear a homily,” said Father Weinberger.
He summed up his mission this way: “I'll do my little part to put in the yeast and leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.”
Latinos Leaving
At 35.3 million, Hispanics make up 12.5% of the total U.S. population. That's up from nearly 23 million 10 years ago. Yet as America magazine reported in 1997, 1 in 5 Hispanics who were raised Catholic are no longer with the Church. A United States Conference of Catholic Bishops report showed that the percentage of Hispanics who are Catholic dropped from 71% in 1994 to 67% in 1998.
Last year, the Barna Research Center in Ventura, Calif., claimed that only 53% of U.S. Hispanics identify themselves as Catholic, down from 68% in 1991.
Some observers dispute that as being overstated. But there is no doubting the growing presence in Hispanic communities of storefront Pentecostal churches and proselytism on the part of Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and Scientologists. Even Islam is reaching out to the Hispanic community, with some success.
Ron Cruz, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Hispanic Affairs, points out that Hispanic immigrants from a strongly Catholic culture encounter an American culture with a lot of options. “They are looking for a place to belong, where they're wanted, where they can feel connected and pray in their language,” he said.
Small storefront churches often provide that, while Catholic churches are often large. “Not all of them are prepared to receive Hispanics,” he said.
— John Burger
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Talking Late at Night About Morality DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Author, radio host, former ambassador, and two-time Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes is the host of “Alan Keyes is Making Sense.”
It a new program airing Monday through Thursdays at 10 p.m. (EST) on MSNBC. Keyes and his wife Jocelyn reside in Maryland with their three children. Keyes spoke from Washington, D.C. with Register features correspondent Tim Drake about his new talk show.
Did you grow up in a Catholic family?
Yes, I grew up Catholic. I'm from all over. I was an Army brat and we moved every three years. We lived in Georgia, Italy, Texas and Missouri just to name a few. My father's family is originally from Maryland.
Why would MSNBC commit time and money to a program featuring traditional values?
You'll have to ask them that, but I think in the course of developing the show I have gotten the sense that they wanted a show that had integrity and would reach out to a different public. They thought this program might do that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the success of some of Fox's talk shows had something to do with it.
I've tried to put together a show that involves a lot of talking but is really about thinking. We deal with a topic and have a discussion that deals with the basic facts. The aim is to make sense of where people are. It isn't about just putting forth their views, but about listening.
The discussion is then followed by my taking a stand on the issue and featuring someone who disagrees. So often with these shows before you get into a topic it's all over with and you have no sense where they have been. I'm hoping to achieve integrity. We'll see if that has an appeal for folks.
Has MSNBC placed any restrictions upon what you can or cannot talk about?
No. I could only do this if I felt that I have what is needed to show the same kind of integrity to influence things in the direction that I've always done.
In the first three weeks, we've dealt with the California education curriculum and their pushing the tolerance of homosexuality. We also did a show on the principle of evil involved in Sept. 11 and compared that to the principle of evil operating with abortion. We also had a program on the marriage-based family with guest Dr. Laura Schlessinger, one on the fantasy movies of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and one on capital punishment.
What is your hope for the program?
Well I hope that we'll be able to look at subjects with integrity and interest and excite viewers so that we will develop a solid audience. Ultimately, we're looking at airing the program for several years. My own sense is that we'll try to make it work over that time period.
We've had good response from viewers. We had a strong opening week. We have ups and downs depending upon the particular topic, but there has been a pretty steady response over time.
Does this mean you're hanging up your political hat for a while?
Well, I'm going to try to support things that I believe in, and support people that are standing up for positions that can matter. That's what I've been doing for the past several years. I can't see myself doing anything political for some length of time.
My involvement in the last presidential go-round was based on my concern that the party hold to the pro-life and moral issues. I thought I could play a good role in articulating the issues to make sure we have stayed on track, and so far I think the party has done pretty well.
What was your reaction to pro-abortion fund-raiser Lewis Eisenberg's recent nomination as the Republican National Committee's finance chairman?
I think that in a general kind of way one of the problems that exist in the Republican Party is that you have a grass-roots majority which is largely pro-life, and a donor base that very often works against those things.
This example may be another instance of that in action.
Tell me about the work of your nonprofit organization — the Declaration Foundation.
The Declaration Foundation is a group I helped to start and will continue to support. Its aim is to spread the founding principles and documents, especially getting curriculum into the schools, to educate the young and old about the living relevance of the Declaration of Independence to our way of life today. There are many examples where we are now retreating from this.
For example, I gave an example recently on our television program where a New Jersey education program was put together that made no mention of Washington or Jefferson. Not knowing or understanding our founding would result, in the end, in the loss of our freedom. I believe it would be a tremendous loss to our nation and its future if we lost a sense of that era of human history. How will we be able to sustain this country without remembering the people that put these documents together?
The founders — a people that philosophic — gathered to deliberate under the pressure of historic events. How rare! That's why I believe that their work is so important to the history of this country. The Declaration Foundation is hoping to make a contribution to that.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alan Keyes ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Texas Parental Notification Law Works - But Is It Properly Enforced? DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:AUSTIN, Texas — Pro-life groups held a rally in late January to laud the state's parental notification law for causing declining numbers of teen abortions in Texas, but not everyone was cheering.
Leanor S., who was not notified of her teen-daughter's abortion despite the law, and the Texas Justice Foundation, which is representing her, filed a lawsuit on behalf of eight women the same week as the rally. The suit alleges that the parental notification law and other Texas abortion laws are improperly enforced.
Leanor, who for privacy reasons declined to give her last name even in the lawsuit, said her 16-year-old daughter was pushed into having the abortion last October by a local clinic. “They kind of talked her into getting an abortion,” Leanor said, adding that the girl was persuaded because she “had been drinking and smoking and they told her that her baby would be retarded or deformed and that she would have to take care of [the child] for the rest of her life.”
Her daughter did not apply for a judicial bypass, a loophole in the notification law that would allow her to get the abortion through a judge without notifying a parent. However, Leanor was not notified because the daughter put down her boyfriend's address, not her own, as contact information.
“[My daughter] was not in any condition to make a decision like that,” said Leanor. “And now that she knows what she has done, she is very angry.”
Kathleen Cassidy, an attorney for the Texas Justice Foundation, said that there is second plaintiff in the lawsuit with a similar story. In both cases, the girls “would have had the babies if they had talked with their moms,” Cassidy said.
The two mothers and their daughters who are suing over lack of parental notification are part of a larger group of eight women and two girls listed as plaintiffs in eleven causes of action against the State of Texas and an array of state agencies.
Along with the alleged failure to implement the parental notification law, the causes of action include “failure to enforce regulations that require abortion providers to give adequate information regarding the nature of abortion and its consequences to women,” and the alleged failure by state agencies to investigate clinics where unsafe or illegal abortions have occurred.
Pro-Lifers Pleased
Despite the lawsuit, pro-lifers are generally pleased with the parental notification law. Though he says the “law is far from perfect,” Joe Pojman, executive director of Greater Austin Right to Life, said that “what we have seen for year 2000 versus 1999 is a significant drop in births, pregnancies and abortions for [minor] girls.”
The number of underage abortions decreased from 4,798 in 1999 to 3,830 in 2000. Pojman credits the law, which was signed by then Governor George W. Bush in June 1999 and took effect in January 2000, for the 20.2% drop.
Unlike the sharp drop in the numbers from 1999 to 2000, “from 1998 to 1999 abortion [statistics] were pretty much flat,” Pojman said. “I can't say definitively that it's cause and effect, but it's consistent with what we predicted when we lobbied for [this law].”
The Texas law requires that parents be notified of an abortion on their underage daughter prior to the abortion, unless the girl obtains a judicial bypass. It was based on the parental notification laws passed in Minnesota and Ohio because, unlike some other notification laws, those two have withstood federal court scrutiny.
Pojman said that in 25 or so states that have parental notification laws, and that where data is available “we have seen a comparable decrease [in the number of teen abortions].”
“Even without proper enforcement,” Pojman added, it seems “to be having a deterrent effect.”
The Texas Justice Foundation's Cassidy remains skeptical, especially since in the case of her clients “[the abortion clinics] are not checking the girl's drivers licenses,” to make sure notification is sent to the parents. And she worries that girls may lie about their age, further skewing the data.
Cassidy said that the Texas Department of Health is required “to enforce the law as it is on the books,” and that the department has been “complacent.”
Doug McBride, spokesman for the Texas Department of Health, said that his department tries “to follow up” on complaints, but admitted that as to “enforcement, I don't know where that falls.”
“We do have oversight over abortion clinics,” conceded McBride, who added that by not following the law abortion providers could lose a license, I suppose.” But McBride also pointed out that in Texas “not everybody who performs an abortion is required to be licensed.”
“You must perform a certain number [of abortions] to be licensed,” he explained.
Another factor that makes enforcement difficult, McBride said, is that “some of the people doing abortions don't have any regard for the law at all.”
Susan Steeg, a lawyer for the Texas Department of Health, said that enforcement of the notification act is “the physician's responsibility governed by the Board of Medical Examiners.” She also said that it was unclear as to exactly what the Texas Justice Foundation's Lawsuit was suing over.
‘1,000 Lives Saved’
Pojman remains optimistic that even with a lack of enforcement, the law has been a good thing overall. “It is my understanding from talking to lawyers in other states that abortion providers are seldom prosecuted,” he said, but after a parental notification law is passed “the [abortion] statistics still decrease because the word gets out that parents are more likely to find out.”
As a result, Pojman said his group and other pro-lifers see the fewer abortions in 2000 in Texas as “almost a thousand saved lives.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Celibacy is Not the Issue, Glendon Argues
THIS WEEK, Feb. 24 — A married priesthood is not the solution to the problem of priestly pedophilia, said Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon.
Glendon made the assertion during a debate with Boston College theology professor Thomas Groome on the Sunday morning ABC News program.
Glendon, a member of the Boston Archdiocese's Social Justice Commission, cited a study by Penn State historian Philip Jenkins that concluded that the incidence of pedophilia is at least as high and perhaps greater in other denominations with married clergy.
“If we look at the example of other churches that have opened the priesthood to women and married clergy, we see that their memberships have declined precipitously,” Glendon added.
She agreed with Groome that a solution must come from a “serious renewal,” including a renewal of seminaries, making them “places where young men would happily go and where parents would happily send their sons.”
“If we look at the Legionaries of Christ, for example ... their seminaries are overflowing, their vocations are flourishing,” Glendon said, referring to the order founded in 1941 and which publishes the Register.
Rabbi Stands Up for Pius XII
COLUMBIA, February —David Dalin, a rabbi and historian, called Pope Pius XII “the closest Jews had come to having a papal supporter” in an article reprinted in the Knights of Columbus magazine.
A new film, “Amen,” by Franco-Greek director Constantin Costa-Gavras accuses the late Pope with silence in the face of the Nazi holocaust. Dalin writes that many of the attacks on Pope Pius constitute “an abuse of the Holocaust that must be rejected.”
“More than any other 20th century leader, Pius fulfilled that Talmudic dictum,” Dalin said, that “whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved a whole world.”
Fetal Heart Surgery in Boston Offers Hope
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Feb. 25 — A boy born last November became the first baby in the United States to be cured prior to birth of a fatal heart condition, thanks to a pioneering fetal surgery technique, the New York daily reported.
The doctors, who performed the surgery at Children's Hospital in Boston, believe that by opening a pinched valve during the 23rd week of pregnancy, they prevented hypoplastic left heart syndrome.
The disease causes the left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber, to stop growing and becomes scarred and useless.
An estimated 600 to 1,400 children a year are born in the United States with the condition.
Faced with the prospect of three expensive heart operations soon after birth, with a 30% death rate, some couples simply let the children live as long as they can or opt for abortion, according to the Times.
The Boston doctors believed the fetal surgery might be successful if done soon after diagnosis, before the damage was irreversible.
Through a needle inserted in the mother's abdomen, they inserted the same kind of balloon used to dilate blocked arteries in adults.
The boy might need more procedures as he grows, but doctors expect him to grow up normally, with no restrictions.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Crespi Society Helps Students Get a Head Start on Vocations DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:FREMONT, Ohio — Praying for and encouraging vocations has traditionally been an adult ministry, but high school students in two Ohio communities are taking responsibility for raising awareness about consecrated life among their peers.
“We're just teens who get together and pray about vocations,” said Elizabeth Halm, a junior at St. Joseph Central Catholic High School in Fremont, Ohio, and president-elect of her school's Crespi Society.
The 25-member group, which meets over the lunch hour each Thursday, was started four years ago by Halm's brother, David, who said he knew that high school can be a difficult time for students to be open about investigating a consecrated vocation.
The Crespi Society at St. Joseph has since spawned a second group at St. John's High School in Delphos, Ohio. Both schools are in the Toledo Diocese in northwest Ohio.
Elizabeth Halm said she thinks a youth vocations group is needed because adults in today's society tend to shy away from talking to young people about faith in general and especially consecrated life.
“Your faith is not something everyone talks about,” Halm said. “It's, like, not the cool thing, so nobody ever talks to us about it. They're afraid we're going to get turned off and we're not going to want to do it.”
She said Crespi Society members “just want people to know that there are other options out there besides getting married and having a family.” Even if students do not talk about having a vocation, she said, “The whole purpose is just to get people to think and pray about it.”
The group is named for Father Juan Crespi, a friend and co-worker of Blessed Junipero Serra, the “apostle of California” and namesake of the Serra Clubs, adult groups that seek to foster and affirm vocations.
David Halm, who is now an aspirant in the Congregation of the Holy Cross, said he would like to see Serra take Crespi on as a high school branch and complement to the Young Serrans, college students and young adults who encourage vocations among youths.
Edmund Verbeke, executive director of the USA Council of Serra International, said although his organization has no formal ties to the Crespi Society, he is very much aware of the group.
“What they're talking about is fostering vocations and getting people to know about the need for vocations as early as possible,” Verbeke said. “If that's what they're about, we're for them.”
David Halm, who is studying at John Cabot University in Rome as part of the Holy Cross undergraduate seminary program, said many adult groups, from political parties to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers have spin-off programs for high school students. “It makes sense for a group targeting young adults for vocations to have a satellite group of high school students,” Halm said.
Bearing Fruit
Since the Crespi Society began meeting at St. Joseph, David Halm said, several young men from the school have been talking with the local diocese about beginning seminary studies after college and at least two young women have expressed interest in consecrated life.
“This is due in large part to the effort of priests in our area, but Serra and Crespi no doubt fostered an environment in which students felt more welcomed to think of this possibility for their future,” he said.
Halm got the idea for a teen vocations group after he began attending Serra Club meetings in his community. “As I learned more of the objectives of Serra, I realized what a perfect opportunity was available to reach young Catholics and encourage them to pray to hear God's vocation. The Serra Club was very receptive and helped in so many ways, helping to organize liturgies, dinners and presentations for young people interested in ministerial vocations.”
In both Fremont and Delphos, Crespi is largely student-run, although each has an adult adviser or chaplain.
Mary Lou Pohlman, a parent volunteer who advises the Delphos group, said the 39 students in the St. John's Crespi Society gather on their own at 7:30 every Friday morning for prayer and discussion in the Sisters of Notre Dame chapel, which is attached to the school.
In addition to the weekly meeting, she said, Crespi members also have served an appreciation dinner for priests and religious in their community.
The Delphos group started with four students — two football players, the band president and the student council president — who in turn recruited other students by making presentations in religion classes.
“They all realize they want to have priests around to marry them, baptize their children, and to bury their loved ones,” Pohlman said. “We're just hoping that if anyone is called [to consecrated life], we're creating an environment that says we need you and it's OK to answer that call.”
Plant The Seed
Bud Oxley, president of the Fre-mont Deanery Serra Club, said he thinks it is especially important to lay a foundation about vocations in high school because many students do not start to seriously consider the priesthood or consecrated life until they graduate or spend a few years working.
Oxley, whose son, Tad, is a seminarian, said he knows of one student from Crespi's founding class who went on to attend a state university and now is thinking about a consecrated vocation.
Likewise, he said, some of his son's friends who now are candidates for priesthood spent two or three years in careers before realizing they had a call to be ordained.
The presence of a group like the Crespi Society, Oxley said, “plants a little seed that maybe a vocation could be there.”
Judy Roberts writes from Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: New Vatican Documents on Internet Mainly Approving, Says Archbishop DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — “The solution to the problems of the Internet is the Internet itself,” said Bishop Pierfranco Pastore, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, indicating that using the Internet for good was the only way to combat the evil uses of the same technology.
Bishop Pastore was speaking Feb. 28, along with Archbishop John Foley, president of the same council, about two new documents treating the Internet, Ethics in Internet and The Church and Internet, released the same day. Both documents are available on the Vatican website (www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_cou ncils/pccs/index.htm).
“The Internet is an opportunity and a challenge and not a threat,” said Archbishop Foley, addressing the attitude pastors in the Church should take. “A bishop is not a monk. He must pray, but he must also live and know the world in which his faithful live, in order to guide them and serve them.”
Ethics in Internet is part of an ongoing series on ethics in the media, following recent documents from the Pontifical Council for Social Communications on ethics in advertising and ethics in communications. The Church and Internet is focused on the Catholic use of the Internet, while warning against some of the dangers that exist. Both documents were drafted by Russell Shaw, an American journalist who has long written for the Catholic press, and who serves on the council.
The document notes moral failings present on the Internet, including hate sites, pornography, computer hacking and electronic theft, rumor and gossip masquerading as fact, and sensationalist journalism. In response, the document proposes self-regulation, backed up by international agreements which subject the Internet to the same standards expected in other media of communications, including television and newspapers.
Most interestingly, though, the Ethics document analyzes the Internet culture, and makes some critical observations about what one might call the “anthropology of the Internet.”
“An idealistic vision of the free exchange of information and ideas has played a praiseworthy part in the development of the Internet,” says a key passage of the document. “Yet its decentralized configuration ... also proved congenial to a mindset opposed to anything smacking of legitimate regulation for public responsibility. An exaggerated individualism regarding the Internet thus emerged. Here, it was said, was a new realm, the marvelous land of cyberspace, where every sort of expression was allowed and the only law was total individual liberty to do as one pleased. Of course this meant that the only community whose rights and interests would be recognized in cyberspace was the community of radical libertarians. This way of thinking remains influential in some circles, supported by familiar libertarian arguments also used to defend pornography and violence in media generally.”
“Fundamentally, we do not view the Internet only as a source of problems; we see it as a source of benefits to the human race,” the pontifical council hastens to add.
The document, however, also deplored “attempts by public authorities to block access to information” which embarrasses or threatens them, or the use of communication technologies to “manipulate the public by propaganda and disinformation, or to impede legitimate freedom of expression and opinion.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Quote of the Week DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:I urge you, in all your planning, to make room for Christ. In the print media, in radio and television, in the world of cinema and the Internet, seek to open doors to him who so mercifully is the door of salvation for us. Then the mass media will be a world of genuine communication, a world not of illusion but of truth and joy.
— Audience with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, March 1
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Kremlin Meets With Russian Catholic Archbishop
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 28 — Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz was encouraged by a meeting with the deputy head of President Vladimir Putin's domestic policy department. Invited to the Kremlin in the midst of a Catholic-Orthodox dispute and two days before Pope John Paul II's video link to Russia, Archbishop Kondrusiewicz told the news service that he felt Catholics in Russia had the “full support of the presidential administration.”
“We need to talk and keep talking, on the highest levels,” he said.
The Pope prayed via video link with Catholics gathered in Moscow's Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and elsewhere March 2 (story, next page). AP said he is intent on reaching out to Russia's 600,000 Catholics, a tiny minority in a nation of 144 million, where two-thirds of the population consider themselves Orthodox.
Orthodox leaders have been upset that the Vatican recently upgraded four apostolic administrations in Russia to the level of dioceses. But Archbishop Kondrusiewicz explained that the Church establishes such administrations only in extreme situations and that they are meant to be temporary.
Catholic-Muslim Dialogue Rejects Extremism
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 27 —Catholics and Muslims meeting at the Vatican said they would try to turn public opinion against extremism in religion.
A committee of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue met with the Permanent Committee of al-Azhar for Dialogue with the Monotheistic Religions. Al-Azhar is a mosque and university in Egypt that is considered to be the leading seat of learning on Sunni Islam.
The Vatican said participants observed how “extremism, from whatever side it may come, is to be condemned as not being in conformity with the teachings of the two religions,” according to the wire service.
“Extremists, particularly religious extremists, can sometimes be sincere in their intentions, yet they tend to see themselves as the only ones in the right and to show intolerance to those who do not agree with them, not accepting others with their differences, tending to violate the rights of others, and sometimes using or approving violence,” the Vatican said.
Former CIA Security Chief to Aid Vatican Security
CORRIERE DELLA SERA, Feb. 28 — Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counterterrorism operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, has been named a security advisor to the Vatican, the Italian daily reported.
The Vatican press office declined to comment on the report for Agence France-Presse, the French news agency. Cannistraro, who led the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, reportedly will provide a link between the U.S. intelligence services and the Vatican as part of a post-Sept. 11 security upgrade.
Separately, the Delegation of the Commission of the European Communities issued a statement saying all Italian cities of art are at risk of terrorist attacks and are under surveillance.
Italy is the European country with the highest concentration of masterpieces in the world, the delegation said.
But the Vatican is an even more important “target to defend,” the statement added, saying, “Extraordinary measures have been adopted.”
“Besides John Paul II, a few other prelates now have armed guards,” the delegation said.
In addition, visitors must undergo security checks, plainclothes detectives roam the crowds and the air force conducts constant surveillance from the sky.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Almighty God Is Not Indifferent to Our Tears DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:John Paul II urged Christians to recover an awareness of their limitations in order to be able to live in joyful dependence on God.
“The Lord does not remain indifferent to the tears of the suffering; he responds, consoles and saves us even though his ways do not always coincide with our expectations,” the Holy Father told thousands of pilgrims gathered in Paul VI Hall Feb. 27 for his midweek general audience.
Continuing his more-than-yearlong series of meditations on psalms and canticles of the Old Testament, the Pope reflected on the drama experienced by King Hezekiah of Judah, who was led by illness to the threshold of death.
When God restored his health, the king responded with an emotional prayer of thanksgiving — a prayer with which every Christian could identify “in the darkness of night and of trial” and “in the light of day and of joy,” the Holy Father said.
----- EXCERPT: Register Summary ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Almighty God Is Not Indifferent to Our Tears DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Among the various canticles that supplement the psalms in the Liturgy of the Hours is a hymn of thanksgiving enTITLEd, “The song of Hezekiah, king of Judah, after he had been sick and had recovered from his illness” (Isaiah 38:9). It was placed in a historical appendix to the book of the prophet Isaiah (see Isaiah 36-39), which, with a few variations, closely parallels the events recounted in chapters 18-20 of the Second Book of Kings.
Today at Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours we have heard, and transformed into prayer, two long stanzas of this canticle. The stanzas describe the two movements typical of any prayer of thanksgiving. On the one hand, they recount the nightmare of suffering from which the Lord delivered his faithful servant. On the other hand, they are a joyful song of gratitude for the recovery of life and salvation.
King Hezekiah, who was a righteous king and a friend of the prophet Isaiah, was struck by a serious illness that the prophet Isaiah declared was mortal (Isaiah 38:1). “Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord: ‘O Lord, remember how faithfully and wholeheartedly I conducted myself in your presence, doing what was pleasing to you!’ And Hezekiah wept bitterly. Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah: ‘Go, tell Hezekiah: Thus says the Lord, the God of your father David: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears. ... I will add 15 years to your life’“ (Isaiah 38:2-5).
Praise for Deliverance
At this point, a song of thanksgiving springs from the king's heart. He refers, first of all, to the past. According to an ancient concept in Israel, death ushered people into an underworld known as Sheol in Hebrew, where light was extinguished, life faded out and became almost ghost-like, time came to an end, hope died out and, above all, where it was no longer possible to turn to God and find him in worship.
For this reason, Hezekiah recalls, first of all, the bitter words he uttered as his life was slipping towards the threshold of death: “I shall see the Lord no more in the land of the living” (verse 11). The psalmist prayed a similar prayer when he was sick: “For who among the dead remembers you? Who praises you in Sheol?” (Psalm 6:6). Freed from the danger of death, Hezekiah could, instead, confirm forcefully and joyfully: “The living, the living give you thanks, as I do today” (Isaiah 38:19).
Light of Life
When the canticle of Hezekiah is read in the light of Easter, it takes on a new meaning, particularly regarding this point. A ray of light shines forth in the psalms of the Old Testament as the psalmist proclaims his certainty that “you will not abandon me to Sheol, nor let your faithful servant see the pit. You will show me the path to life, abounding joy in your presence, the delights at your right hand forever” (Psalm 16:10-11; see Psalms 49 and 73). As for the author of the book of Wisdom, he no longer hesitates to affirm that the hope of the righteous is “full of immortality” (Wisdom 3:4), because he is convinced that his experience of communion with God during his earthly life will not be broken off. Our eternal and infinite God will always sustain us and protect us beyond death, because “the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them” (Wisdom 3:1).
Moreover, through his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has sown a seed of eternity in our mortal nature and has made it germinate; and this is why we can repeat St. Paul's words that are based on the Old Testament: “And when this which is corruptible clothes itself with incorruptibility and this which is mortal clothes itself with immortality, then the word that is written shall come about: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is thy victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’” (1 Corinthians 15:54-55; see Isaiah 25:8; Hosea 13:14).
Life Quickly Over
However, King Hezekiah's song also invites us to reflect on our frailty as creatures. The images are thought provoking. Human life is described using the symbol of the nomad's tent: we are always pilgrims and guests on earth. He also uses the image of a piece of cloth that is being woven: it will remain incomplete if the thread is cut and work is interrupted (Isaiah 38: 12). The psalmist experiences the same feeling: “You have given my days a very short span; my life is as nothing before you. All mortals are but a breath. Mere phantoms, we go our way; mere vapor, our restless pursuits...” (Psalm 39:6-7). We need to rediscover an awareness of our limitations and know, as the psalmist says, that “Seventy is the sum of our years, or 80, if we are strong; Most of them are sorrow and toil; they pass quickly, we are all but gone” (Psalm 90:10).
Still Our Savior
Nevertheless, it is fitting that we address a lament to God during sickness and suffering. Hezekiah teaches us this with poetic images when he compares his weeping to the cries of a swallow and the moan of a dove (Isaiah 38:14). And though he does not hesitate to confess that he feels like God is his adversary, as if he were a lion that breaks all his bones (verse 13), he never ceases to call upon him: “O Lord, I am in straits; be my surety!” (verse 14).
The Lord does not remain indifferent to the tears of the suffering; he responds, consoles and saves us even though his ways do not always coincide with our expectations. In the end, this is what Hezekiah confesses, encouraging all of us to hope, pray and trust, sure that God does not abandon his creatures: “The Lord is our savior; we shall sing to stringed instruments in the house of the Lord all the days of our life” (verse 20).
Good Times and Bad
Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most representative mystics of Western monasticism, wrote a spiritual commentary on King Hezekiah's canticle that has been passed down to us from the medieval Latin tradition. In the third of his Various Sermons, Bernard, internalizing King Hezekiah's plight and applying it to each person's life, writes: “’I will bless the Lord at all times,’ that is, from morning to evening, as I have learned to do, and not like those who ‘only praise you when you do good to them,’ nor like those who ‘believe for a certain time but give up in the hour of temptation.’ But like the saints, I will say: ‘If we have received good from God's hand, should we not also accept misfortune?’ In this way, both moments of the day will be a time for the service of God, because ‘at night there will be weeping, and in the morning there will be joy.’ I will plunge myself into suffering at night, so that I can then enjoy the happiness of morning” (Scriptorium Claravallense, Sermo III, No. 6, Milan 2000, pp. 59-60).
St. Bernard, therefore, saw the king's plea as a portrayal of the prayerful song of a Christian, which must ring out with the same steadfastness and peace in the darkness of night and of trial as in the light of day and of joy.
(Translation by Zenit and Register)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Pakistani Prayers for Daniel Pearl DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:FAISALABAD, Pakistan — Catholic churches in several parts of Pakistan held special prayer services for an abducted American journalist recently murdered by his Islamic extremist captors.
As news of the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl spread, parishes in Lahore Archdiocese, Multan and Faisalabad dioceses and other areas held special prayers and Masses, reported UCA News, Church news agency based in Thailand.
Father Khalid Rashid Asi, chairman of the National Catholic Press Association, said Pearl's death strengthened Pakistani Catholics' resolve to fight religious extremism and terrorism in their country.
The priest said the Pakistani government has “come down hard” on religious extremism in the country.
“It is now time for us all to strengthen the hand of the government to fight the evils prevailing,” he said.
“The death of Pearl only points to the intensity of the crime. There is no easy way forward, but let us pledge to be peaceful and struggle together now that the government has declared equal voting rights for all,” he said.
Father Patrick Yousaf, a parish priest working with rural workers, told UCA News that Pearl's death “shows how extremist thinking is still prevalent in Pakistan.”
He called on people to help “the government fight this evil.”
Tariq Farooq, a Muslim human rights activist, said Pearl's death could provide additional impetus for Christian-Muslim collaboration.
“Pakistanis have been fighting terrorism in one form or another for a long time. The challenge for Christians and Muslims of this country is to jointly wage a struggle against evil elements in society,” he said.
Pearl was abducted in the southern seaport of Karachi Jan. 23; media sources confirmed his death Feb. 22.
A videotape containing footage of Pearl being killed reportedly was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:China Censors Bush Speech on Religious Freedom
LOS ANGELES TIMES, Feb. 23 — Hundreds of millions of Chinese saw President Bush on television calling for greater religious freedom in their country, but as far as the official Chinese news agency is concerned, the president never spoke the words.
About half of Bush's speech at a university in Beijing Feb. 22, which was broadcast live, was expunged from the transcript provided by the New China News Agency, the Los Angeles daily reported. Getting the ax were portions of the speech extolling American liberty and urging China to relax its political and religious restrictions.
Also cut were the president's comments about his own faith, his call for an end to religious persecution in China and his wish that Chinese might one day choose their own national leaders.
Russian Mufti Gets on Anti-Vatican Bandwagon
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 21 — Russia's chief Muslim cleric joined the dispute over the Vatican's decision to make its four administrative districts in the country into dioceses. Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin said during a press conference that the move is an invasion of Russia's “religious space,” the news service reported.
“Historically, the four major faiths of Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism have existed in Russia and have defined its culture and history,” the mufti said. “Any active promotion of an alien ideology may threaten the country's stability and integrity.”
“Alien ideology?” The mufti might wonder if Russia is happy with Islam's own “ideology,” which often supports the need for jihad to spread the faith into historically non-Muslim countries. In fact, in the south of Russia, up to 1,500 foreign fighters remain in the Islamic rebel territory of Chechnya, funded by al Qaeda and other groups, the Christian Science Monitor reported Feb. 26.
Sicilian Town Plans a 'Catholic Rushmore’
THE GUARDIAN, Feb. 27 — A 2,500-year-old Greek theater and temple are not enough for the Sicilian town of Segesta. In order to boost its tourist industry, it is contemplating sculpting a “Catholic Rushmore.”
Nicola Cristaldi, the town's mayor, announced plans for the faces of Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa and Blessed Padre Pio to be sculpted into the red-brown rock of Segesta's hills. He wants the faces to be large enough to be seen from outer space (65 feet high) and enough of a wonder to attract 250,000 visitors annually, the London daily reported.
The $4.3 million cost of the project is to be shared by private investors, the regional government and the nearby town of Calatafimi. But the plan may face opposition from environmentalists, who fear that Segesta's natural beauty will be destroyed, and archaeologists, who want the money to be spent on excavations around the Greek ruins.
Polish Priest Who Saved Jews Dies in Florida
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 27 — Msgr. Walter C. Bayer, a Polish native who saved Jews during World War II and later taught with the future Pope John Paul II at the University of Krakow, died Feb. 25 at his home in west-central Florida. He was 89.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, when the priest lost nine relatives, Msgr. Bayer hid about 50 Jews in his house, gave them baptismal certificates and helped them escape to other countries. A German officer searching for Jews broke three of his teeth with brass knuckles.
After the Communist government removed priests from teaching positions, Msgr. Bayer settled in the United States.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Latin-Americans Unwelcome? DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Latin American Catholics may be exactly what God has sent to renew the Church in the United States. As with any gift, the Church here should receive this one gratefully — without trying to Americanize it.
Many Latin Americans fall away from the Church when they come to the United States. This is something the Church here cannot afford to let happen. This new blood is exactly what we need, especially in a time when scandals are weakening the vigor of the faith.
As the front page story in this week's issue shows, it is more than possible for the Church to sustain the fervor of Latin Americans' faith. We won't do it by inventing new liturgies, having just the right smile, or getting in touch with Latin pop culture. Legitimate efforts to inculturate the Gospel to a community are a help, but they alone won't win the faithful. Only a return to the basics can win Latin Americans' hearts. Latin American customs that celebrate the fundamentals of the faith can then enrich the experience.
Is the Church in the United States ready for that?
When the Vatican announced that it would canonize Opus Dei founder Msgr. Josemaría Escrivá, Padre Pio and Juan Diego, some leading American Catholic lights showed that they are a bit out of touch with the common faithful. One columnist said that these three enormously popular holy men didn't have “universal appeal.” He went on to question each canonization decision in turn.
And yet the Spanish monsignor is a best seller ubiquitous in Catholic bookstores, Padre Pio's beatification set new attendance records for Rome events, and the Mass for the canonization of Juan Diego is expected to attract the largest congregation for any single Mass ever.
If the Latin American Catholics who are so enthusiastic about these saints — and the kind of popular piety practices that go with them — are meeting similar dismissive attitudes in their parishes, it's no wonder they feel unwelcome.
Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City spoke to this point last fall in the Vatican.
The cardinal, whose archdiocese includes the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, said that over the past four decades many theologians and pastors saw popular piety as a simplistic sign of uneducated faith “which was necessary to purify in most cases or to tolerate with condescension.”
But such “know-it-alls,” he said, ignored the deep faith of the people and the potential of popular piety to witness to and strengthen faith in Christ and to enrich the celebration of the Mass with true devotion.
As Pope John Paul II has done in the past, the cardinal called for the Church to accept and encourage popular piety, purifying it, directing it and deepening it. Cardinal Rivera cited the rosary, pilgrimages, processions and novenas, as obvious ways to prepare the people for a more intense celebration of the Mass on feast days.
Making the sign of the cross when passing a church, praying before the Eucharist and participating in a Corpus Christi procession strengthen people's awareness that Christ is present in the Eucharist, leading to a greater respect for the sacrament and for the Mass, Cardinal Rivera said.
And various Marian prayers and devotions, if they are motivated by a desire to live the faith like Mary did, can bring people to Christ and to a renewed commitment to dedicating their lives to him, he added.
The Mexican relatives of Derek Parra, the Olympic speed skater, erupted in applause when the skater crossed himself after his gold-medal winning performance. It is that faith the Church in America should encourage. Pious Latin-American families who have home shrines to Our Lady of Guadalupe are very enthusiastic about their faith. It isn't their fault if they have less enthusiasm for parishes which disregard, disdain or discourage their devotion.
The simple but profound expressions of faith by Latin-American Catholics may soon come to the rescue of the Church in the United States. We should do more than welcome them. We should join them.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: They Will Lead the Way DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Hooray for Father Antoine Thomas about whom you reported in “Children's Adoration: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven Belongs to Such as These.’” (Feb. 10-16) He is one of those sensitive, perceptive souls who, along with Robert Coles, Maria Montessori, Sofia Cavalletti and others, has understood that our children, who come to us directly from God, maintain a profound awareness of his presence to them.
It is up to us parents/teachers to foster this mysterious bond in very young children as, for example, do those practitioners of the Catechesis of the Good Shepard. Sofia Cavalletti who developed this catechesis states in the introduction to her book, The Religious Potential of the Child, “The manifestations of serene and peaceful joy the children display in the meeting with the world of God lead us to maintain that the religious experience responds to a deep ‘hunger’ in the child.” And further on, “In the contact with God the child experiences an unfailing love ... (and) finds the nourishment his being requires, nourishment the child needs in order to grow in harmony.”
Father Thomas is providing this nourishment in the adoration program. Parents can compare the level of peace and harmony in their children after an hour of adoration versus and hour of TV. Love is stronger than chaos. The power of love in the Eucharist, as Father Thomas has attested brings not only children to their God but also families back together.
Let us make bold to join or to form Eucharistic Adoration programs for children and adults in our own parishes.
Thank you for your wonderful paper. The articles in this same issue, “Why Enron should have listened to the Pope,” “A Farewell to Candy: Kids and Lent,” as well as others, also struck a positive note. Blessings to you all.
THERESE NOECKER
St. Louis, Missouri
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Get the Numbers Right DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Thanks for your editorial “The Abuse Crisis,” (Jan. 20-26). If we can believe the six o'clock news, there has been an epidemic of sexual abuse by many of the clergy. It is only fair and accurate to state that the problem is hardly confined to the Catholic community.
The book, Pedophiles and Priests by Philip Jenkins — a veteran Penn State historian — has this to say: “In reality Catholic clergy are not necessarily represented in the sexual abuse phenomenon at a rate higher than or even equal to their numbers in the clerical profession as a whole. The biggest difference between the Catholic and Protestant clergy in relation to this problem is due mostly to reporting procedures ... thence it is often difficult to make comparisons between the clergy of the two religions.
Notwithstanding the difficulties that such data comparisons hold, the available information on clergy sexual misconduct shows that the problem is bigger among Protestant clergy. For example, the most cited survey of sexual problems among the Protestants clergy shows that 10% have been involved in sexual misconduct and about 2% or 3% are pedophiles.
With regard to the pedophile problem, the figure for the Catholic clergy, drawn from the most authoritative studies, ranges between .2 percent to 1.1 percent. Yet we hear precious little about these comparative statistics.
JEROME SCHNEIDER
Jasper, Indiana
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Contraception, Public Policy and Laity DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Your article “Mandatory Contraceptive Coverage — Is Abortion Next?” (Feb. 17-23) speculated that forcing the Catholic Church to pay for abortions in their group health plans would be next. Well, that day has already arrived. As we all know, many contraceptive drugs and devices cause abortions.
Forcing the Church to pay for contraceptives and abortifacients is an outrageous injustice. However, it is a greater tragedy that the Church has elected to wage the war against contraceptive coverage on grounds of religious freedom instead of the destructive nature of contraception itself. This position says to the public that the immorality of contraception is just a “religious issue” and not something that degrades the human dignity of every person. It's like saying that we as Catholics should be exempted for contraceptive requirements but we don't have any problem with the rest of society violating itself.
Contraception is very much a public issue because it affects the common good of society. The Church's teaching against contraception in Humanae Vitae is based on a natural law understanding of the purpose of marriage and conjugal union. Because human nature is universal, contraception hurts everyone, not just Catholics.
Catholics have a civic and religious obligation, unpopular as it may be, to work against the promotion of contraception in public policy at all levels. And it doesn't matter whether the form of contraception is abortifacient or not. It still violates human dignity and undermines society.
This is what true lay vocation is all about. The Second Vatican Council promoted the role of the laity with the important responsibility of “engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God's will” (Lumen Gentium, 31). The laity are called to shape public policy so that it promotes God's plan for marriage and family, which can never include contraception. This also means that we should legislate toward this goal, because laws teach society what is right and wrong. Building the culture of life will simply be impossible without excluding contraception.
Some would say that we don't have the political capital to fight contraceptive coverage on the grounds of its destructive nature. So we can only try for a religious exemption. What most people don't realize is that the Church has a huge amount of political capital — it's called Catholic health and social services. We run more than 1,000 hospitals and health centers and more than 2,000 centers for social services. Catholic services extend to more than 100 million people in the United States. If the government wants to force us to pay for contraception and abortifacients, then we should shut down our health and social services and see what the government does.
Yes, such response might result in considerable hardship. But it also might show America that Catholics are serious about what we believe. Either way, even the ancient philosophers, well before the time of Christ, knew that it was better to suffer from evil than to contribute to it.
MO WOLTERING
Stafford, Virginia
The writer is director of public policy for American Life League.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Russia Is Ripe for Harvest DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:The Catholic press has, unfortunately, brought some dismay to the faithful by reporting Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei's angry denunciation of Rome's erecting four new dioceses within the Russian Federation (“Vatican Hardball With Orthodox In Russia,” March 3-9).
In fact, we are fighting the same fight and we are allies in this endeavor.
Indeed the Catholic Church sends its missionaries to Russia to bring the Gospel and the life-giving sacraments to the despairing and the sorrowful. Having spent much time over there, I report the Russian people are joyful and gladdened because of Western missionary activity. They are not resentful and abrasive like the words attributed to their so-called spiritual leader, the Patriarch Alexei.
Post-communist Russia spans a geographic area filling 10 time zones — an area the Orthodox hierarchy claims should be free from evangelical activity from “other churches.” While Jesus Christ would not object that we preach the truth to hungry hearts, the hierarchy, but not the common people of Russia, denounce what they take to be intrusions upon their turf.
One is reminded of the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' time who resented the Savior for pointing out their hypocrisies. They were concerned only with themselves, their power, their perquisites and their possessions. But the Church's mission is to save souls, and the only valid criticism of missionaries should be that they are not preaching truth and not helping to lead souls to salvation.
Over the past six years, I have spent 14 months in Russia and Ukraine, having traveled there 13 times on missionary travels. Representing an American lay Catholic association striving to live the prophecies of Fatima — and taking the Immaculate Heart of Mary to Russia with our hearts, our prayers and our sacrifices — we have traveled widely throughout the former Soviet Block, visiting 40 or more remote mission stations and delivering more than $900,000 in aid. Usually we stay with missionary priests coming from Germany, France, Ireland, Argentina and Poland — but also with Russian and Ukrainian clergy. Most of all, I must admit, we stay at an orphanage in Ukraine.
But the point I'm trying to make is that Patriarch Alexei speaks mostly for himself, not for the people of the former Soviet countries — notably Russia and Ukraine. The people over there judge you by your heart, not by whether you are Catholic or Orthodox — or something else.
That whole land mass is a spiritual waste-land of suffering and despair. The majority of people are still atheists or unchurched, and their spirit is so crushed they have no care at all about Orthodox-Catholic squabbles. There is so much healing to be done that the priests and religious over there could work tirelessly for years and never cross the path of a “rival” creed or denomination.
The fact is that the Orthodox and the Catholics are allies in this endeavor because we both make the same profession and we share the same sacraments. We are not enemies in the struggle to save souls but allies, and all of the clergy I have met in Russia, and all of the humble-hearted people understand this, even if Patriarch Alexei does not.
A. MATT WERNER
Denver
The writer is president of Queen of the Apostles Mission Association, Inc.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Scalia's Stance DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:The most striking thing about the recent pronouncements of Justice Scalia on capital punishment that you criticized in your recent editorial (Scalia's Dissenting Opinion, Feb. 17-23) is not his support of capital punishment, but his view of the relationship between the law of the United States and the moral law binding upon all men, as that relationship affects a Catholic judge.
Scalia insists that a Catholic judge who believes that capital punishment is morally wrong must resign because he cannot uphold the law of the United States, but he clearly does not believe that he or any other Catholic judge need resign when faced with upholding a law permitting (or funding or even requiring?) abortion — even though such a law is a heinous violation of the law of God.
It would appear, by his reasoning, that he could uphold in good professional conscience even laws authorizing, say, ethnic cleansing if they had been properly enacted, and any constitutional problems dealt with by appropriate amendments.
So here we see Justice Scalia, America's most prominent Catholic jurist, telling us that he can in good conscience go about his professional duties in complete abstraction from God's law. He is reputed to be an admirer of St. Thomas More — but it seems that, unlike St. Thomas, Antonin Scalia is God's own good servant, but the govern-ment's first.
JOHN A. MCFARLAND
Ellicott City, Maryland
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Virtue's Value Owes To its High Degree Of Difficulty DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:“Virtue,” said Lady Marguerite Blessington, “like a dowerless beauty, has more admirers than followers.”
The 19-century English author, who had a penchant for stating paradoxes, was not being cynical. She was merely observing a fact, one that raises the embarrassing question: “Why is it that we human beings do not imitate what we admire — if not most of the time, at least more often than we do?”
We praise virtue because of its excellence. But we also praise it for its difficulty. Saintliness, the fullness of virtue, is as rare as it is beautiful.
“O glorious virtue!” wrote St. Catherine of Siena. “Who would not give himself to death a thousand times, and endure any suffering through desire, to win you? You are a queen who possesses the entire world; you inhabit the enduring life; for the soul that is arrayed in you is yet mortal, you make it abide by force of love with those who are immortal.”
The scene is a park in Calgary, Alberta, on a cold November day. An automobile has broken through a fence, rolled over an embankment and plunged into the frigid waters of the Bow River. The driver, a 22-year-old woman by the name of Shannon Roberts, lost control of her vehicle due to a diabetic shock.
Startled onlookers yell to the woman, imploring her to get out of her car. Recognizing that their advice is not being heeded, and sizing up the gravity of the situation, one of them — a man with the unlikely name of Jeff Liberty — goes into action. He strips down to his boxers and dives into the numbing water.
Very quickly, Liberty comes in contact with the sinking car. He tries to open the door, but his efforts are in vain. He bangs on the car window and motions the woman to roll it down. She manages to get the window sufficiently lowered so that Liberty can open it the rest of the way. He then proceeds to unfasten her safety belt and eases her through the open window and out to safety.
The ordeal lasted approximately five minutes. The water was deep enough that Liberty never touched bottom.
During his life-saving rescue, he recognized that the woman had gone into a deep state of shock as the water began flooding into the car. He realized that he would have to shoulder the burden of the rescue.
When he surfaced and carried the woman to shore, the onlookers along the bank of the river applauded the hero, as did Canadians across the country once they heard about his daring exploits.
Saintliness, the fullness of virtue, is as rare as it is beautiful.
Liberty's act, visibly and unmistakably, had all the qualities of courage. Despite the dangers he faced, he remained attentive and in control.
It was a case of “grace under pressure,” as Ernest Hemingway once defined courage. There was the element of selflessness, as he focused on the needs of the endangered woman. And there was decisiveness. He knew what needed to be done and he did it — freely, effectively and without hesitation.
Almost instantly, Jeff Liberty became a national hero. “What was it like diving into the frigid Bow River, and how could you function so well under such adverse conditions?” He was obliged to answer this question again and again.
“I guess my adrenaline kind of set in and I didn't really notice the cold anymore,” was his modest response.
God equips us with remarkable capacities for doing extraordinary things under difficult circumstances. Our stress response in a time of crisis is far greater than we realize.
Courage in practice releases abilities within ourselves that lie dormant deep within us. Courage mobilizes them and we surprise ourselves, even “out-do” ourselves, so to speak. Like other virtues, courage transforms us into better, larger, more capable human beings. Unbidden by courage, extraordinary human powers remain latent, unexercised, unknown.
Jeff Liberty's story has two further pieces of information that add immeasurably to its charm. He is an Olympic swimmer who represented Canada at the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, in the year 2000. The woman was in the first trimester of her pregnancy (the accident has not appeared to harm either her or her unborn child).
Canadian readers have feasted on the story.
It will be a while before the child, now sleeping quietly in its mother's womb, will be able to appreciate it all. But what a story mom has stored in her heart to tell her child one day!
It's better than any fairy tale — how courage and a stranger with the improbable name of Liberty, on the day after Remembrance Day, saved both their lives and provided them with the conviction that virtue should be imitated in addition to being admired.
Donald DeMarco teaches philosophy at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Don Demarco ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Left Behind Is Best Left Alone DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:A few weeks back I had a hankering for some easy-to-read fiction.
Life was getting a little rough, and I wanted to escape to a comfy armchair with a cup of tea and a novel. Not a literary classic that would make me work too hard — just a fun detective story, clean historical romance or maybe a fascinating fantasy. Off to the library I went.
Once I got there, one of the first things to catch my eye was the Left Behind series. I knew these books had been best sellers since the appearance of the first volume in 1995, and that one was made into a movie that has proven quite popular as a video. I'd seen them on the shelves of K-Mart, a rare honor for works of religious fiction, being snatched up by housewives hungry, like me, for a little wholesome entertainment. I suppose it was the stark, black covers with their ominous TITLEs that attracted me. I knew that the eschatology — that is, the end-times theology — in these books was erroneous, but that didn't worry me. After all, I was just interested in pure escapism.
Returning home to that comfy chair, I quickly understood the mass appeal of the Left Behind series. (As of late February, the ninth installment in the series, Desecration, was still in the top 25 on the New York Times' best-seller list for hard-cover fiction.) Like many best-selling authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins don't waste time getting readers onto the edge of their seats. The first book opens with the mysterious disappearance of millions of people around the world. They've left no trace except for the clothing they were last seen wearing, which litters the earth in little piles.
This is a sign of the “Rapture” — which, in fundamentalist Christian eschatology, is a secret coming of Christ, prior to the last judgment, to save his flock from the anti-Christ and the seven years of tribulation he will usher in. (The “Rapture” theory comes from a semi-literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation subscribed to by many evangelicals and fundamentalists.)
A shocked and grieving world grasps for an explanation, but the only ones who know the truth are the heretofore “unsaved” friends and relatives of the vanished Christian believers. These people realize the error of their ways, “accept Christ as their personal lord and savior” and form new congregations of “tribulation saints” who must endure a world in long-term crisis. They do their best to convert others and throw a few wrenches into the plans of the anti-Christ.
Their hope is to survive for seven years until the “Glorious Appearing” of Christ, who will then set up an earthly kingdom for 1,000 years. Meanwhile, things are stirring in Israel, where 144,000 Jews accept Christ and start evangelizing the rest of the world, even as the anti-Christ begins cracking down on anyone who doesn't join a new one-world religion. This is headed by — who else? A newly elected Catholic pope, who moves his see to the rebuilt city of Babylon.
Novel Doctrines
Sound confusing? You haven't heard the half of it. I eventually plowed through six of the nine (and counting) Left Behind volumes. Although the characters kept me interested for quite a while with their unique personalities, personal crises and romances, I soon found myself skimming over page after page of overheated fire, brimstone and heavenly chastisement.
The blatant anti-Catholicism didn't do much for me, either. Indeed, the writers didn't even bother to learn enough about the Church they vilify to make their Catholic characters talk like Catholics. The liberal American bishop who gets elected pope calls the book of Revelation the “Apocrypha” and refers to his religion as “Holy Roman Catholic Mother Church.”
At last, I had had enough. My jaunt with escapism, it seemed, had awakened in me a craving for truth.
Providentially, this reversal of appetites coincided with my hearing about a new book from Ascension Press examining the Left Behind phenomenon from a thoroughly Catholic perspective: The Rapture Trap: A Catholic Response to ‘End Times' Fever by Paul Thigpen.
I soon learned that the rift over the “Rapture” is not about Catholics vs. Protestants. In fact, although a few early-American Protestant ministers suggested that Christians would be “caught up in the air” well before the last judgment, the idea was not well received until the 19th century, when John Darby, a British minister, began preaching a “secret rapture of the faithful.” His followers began spreading this teaching to North America, where it was readily accepted by non-denominational congregations. Rapture theology, known as dispensationalism, was taken up with enthusiasm by tent-meeting revivalists in the south and west.
Today, most fundamentalists and a great many evangelicals are the heirs of the dispensationalist system. According to these beliefs, God's dealings with man can be categorized into seven periods, called “dispensations.” With each dispensation came different revelations, covenants and laws. Therefore God's plan for the people of Israel has no connection to the historical Church. Because they rejected Christ, God set the Jews aside for the time being, and set up a new dispensation with the gentiles — the Christian church. Christian believers will eventually be removed from the face of the earth — that's the Rapture — in order to clear the stage for Israel to come to the forefront again. Then God will be able to pick up with them where he left off 2,000 years ago. Hence the fundamentalist obsession with fitting the doings of the modern state of Israel into their interpretations of the book of Revelation.
Suburban Messiah
Thigpen points out some of the flawed ideas behind dispensationalist theories. Among them is an unbiblical outlook toward suffering: “[The rapture doctrine] can be understood to imply that ultimately God wants to shield contemporary Christians completely from the injuries of those who oppose them for taking their stand with Him,” he writes. “Yet the life of Jesus Christ and the lives of His saints throughout history amply demonstrate otherwise. … The Left Behind series assumes a worldview that is seriously limited, displaying the cramped horizons of all too many comfortable, suburban, middle-class Americans. A broader range of vision would show that, even now, Christians in places such as China and Sudan are being imprisoned, enslaved, tortured, murdered, some even brutally crucified, for their faith. Could we dare to look them in the eye and tell them that God has promised to spare true believers from persecution?”
Along with showing up the rapture doctrine for the relatively modern aberration that it is, the author also accentuates the positive. He gives a Scripture-saturated overview of God's real plan for mankind, beginning with Christ's first coming and redemptive death, through the establishment of his Church as the sign of his continual presence among us. Later chapters detail all that the Church has taught through the centuries regarding the end of the world. A final section gives Catholics some guidelines for discernment regarding the many private revelations that purport to give information about various end-times events.
Thigpen concludes by reminding us that the second coming of Christ is something to be ardently hoped for by Christians. He suggests that we may even be able to hasten Jesus' approach by praying and working for the salvation of the “full number” of souls that God desires.
Left Behind was an interesting ride, but I don't know if I'll ever complete the series. Our local library hasn't acquired the last few volumes, and I'm not exactly holding my breath any more, waiting to find out what happens to the characters next. But, if I do succumb to a new fit of trash-fiction addiction, I'll remember to follow up each session in my armchair with a prayer for the many readers who have been caught in the rapture trap. May the light of Catholic truth set them free.
Daria Sockey writes from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
I was proud of my Toyota truck.
Got it used. 128,000 miles, but still sleek as a cow of Bashan.
Red with speed stripes down the side. Best of all, four-wheel drive. A Leviathan — jacked off the ground and invincible.
With my enviable chariot, I was ready for winter. Whenever I climbed up into that cab, I surveyed all before me with complete trust that nothing could stop this machine. Neither snow, nor ice, nor slush, nor gloom of mud.
That fateful snowy Monday morning, I locked in the four-wheel drive, my son and I pulled ourselves into the cab and I backed out of the driveway. We were off. Not a worry in the world.
Not a mile down the road, at the first right-hand bend past the railroad tracks, the truck went into a slide. In strange defiance of the laws of physics, instead of flying off to the left, following the trajectory of inertia, the goodly frame of my beautiful red Leviathan seemed to be hooked by some mysterious force. It was as though we were being yanked by an invisible cord straight into the ditch on the right.
No problem. Remain calm. Don't brake. Steer out of it, slow and easy. I learned to drive in snow. Lived two years in Wisconsin, six in Minnesota. I knew we — my truck and I — would prevail.
But no matter what I did, that invisible cord, pulled by something, so it seemed, bent on my destruction, reeled me straight toward the ditch. If I had been a better Catholic, I would have uttered some quick and efficacious prayer — to my guardian angel, to St. Joseph, to the Blessed Virgin, to God. Aristotle, the great pagan philosopher, remarked that you can judge a man by the actions he does quickly, without time for deliberation, for those actions spring directly from his character. I just kept trying to steer out of it.
The invisible cord, hooked into the mouth of my Leviathan, just kept reeling us, slowly and methodically, into the hungry ditch. “This can't be,” I thought.
Thunder on the right, as the mighty jaws of the car bit the bank, and the bank bit back even more savagely, hurling the truck around like a toy. The white of snow, the brown of freshly ravaged dirt, the red of metal, the gray of shadow, all whirling chaotically before our eyes.
More thunder as the wounded frame struck the bank again, and heaved over onto its roof. Crushing metal, bursting glass raining everywhere, my son shouting. “Stop! Please stop!” I screamed in my head, as the cab continued to collapse under the weight of Leviathan, now flipped on its great back, belly exposed, wheels spinning foolishly in the air.
And it did stop, just in time. Dangling in the air, I undid my seatbelt and fell, headfirst, onto the mangled roof. I felt for the handle, opened the door, dropped out. My son came after.
I stood staring at the wreck, feeling the grit and glass in my teeth, studying the iron crushed as straw. I slammed the inverted door. “My truck! It's gone!”
I should have been on my knees, right there in the road, thanking God, St. Mary, St. Joseph and our guardian angels for preserving us from harm. But all I could think of was my truck lying, mortally wounded, on its back.
“Do you have insurance?” the police officer asked.
“Just liability. It was a '90.”
“Too bad,” he said, shaking his head. “You're going to eat it all.”
I watched out the windshield of the police car as the wrecker hooked the side of the mighty Leviathan, and reeled in the cord until it flipped back over onto its feet. An $8400 piece of scrap metal, a mere carcass fit only for those who scavenge parts.
What did I learn? That life is fragile. Most of us have a misplaced feeling of immortality, believing that we are guaranteed at least three score and 10 years. But death can come at any time. That day, I entered, with my son, into the valley of the shadow of death. It was a cold and unforgettable moment. Was I prepared — really prepared — for death that day?
The second lesson I learned that day was that no man-made thing, however beautiful, sturdy and well-crafted, can protect us from the forces that can claim human life. As much as we boast in our technology — whether it be seemingly indestructible buildings, or a truck, or medical gadgets — we are still subject to death. Again, we must always pray: not only for protection of our fragile lives, but even more that we shall be prepared when, either suddenly or slowly, that moment arrives. Let our boast be in the name of the Lord our God.
Thirdly, it occurred to me, in the hours that followed our narrow escape from the clutches of death, how important it is to see that that, behind the very ordinary things of our day, and the extraordinary things as well, a great cosmic battle is underway. There are angels working both for our salvation and our destruction.
Finally, I have thought back over the accident many times, and two things continue to stand out. On the one hand, I was not speeding, I know how to drive in the snow and the truck was in four-wheel drive. Even stranger, the truck slid in the opposite direction it should have; no matter what I did, there seemed to be an evil force reeling me into that ditch (perhaps part of the hook being in my pride). On the other hand, some opposing powers, our guardian angels, saved us from harm, as would be clear to anyone who surveyed the demolished truck.
So the truck is gone, but some important lessons have been learned. I will soon be out on the road in a much humbler chariot, driving even more carefully. Praying. And remaining mindful, all the while, of Psalm 20:7: “Some boast of chariots, and some of horses; but we boast in the name of the Lord our God.”
Benjamin Wiker teaches philosophy of science at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin D. Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Roses on Ice DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Dear Adrienne,
Do you remember St. Thérèse from the 1998 Winter Olympics?
No, the saint didn't skate. But that was when we watched Tara Lapinski winning a gold medal and thanking the Little Flower for it.
Now, four years later, the skater still credits the saint. And she attributes another thing to her: help in “dealing with doubt.” She learned from Thérèse that “Faith is what you turn to and what gets you through no matter what.”
Tara Lapinski taught her St. Thérèse devotion to another skater, Matthew Goebel. Now he, too, has an Olympic skating medal.
And he also learned Thérèse's greater lesson.
“In the grand scheme of things,” he said, “what's more important — winning an Olympic medal or being a good person?”
To him, being a good person means being a good Catholic. “If you lose one part, then it all falls apart,” Goebel said. His advice: Don't be a “cafeteria Catholic.” His practice: Mass daily when possible, confession weekly when possible.
I understand, my dear daughter, that you also have some affection for St. Thérèse. Being a convert to the Catholic faith, she is one of those people I never learned about as a child. You are lucky to be growing up within the faith, attending a school where you learn about such wonderful people as St. Thérèse.
The Little Flower, as she was known, tried to do everything according to her little way. By our terms, she seems modest in her ambitions, to put it mildly.
It seems we're always looking for whoever is the most outlandish, the most stylish, the most willing to be wild and push back the border between decency and indecency.
St. Thérèse was really something special, Adrienne.
She knew she wanted to be a contemplative from an early age, devoted her life to prayer (including the suffering caused by her poor health) and wrote things that anyone would find, well, simple. She died when just 24 years old, leaving behind nothing of material value — just a record of fervent prayer and spiritual writings.
She was so obscure and apparently unproductive that, as her health failed and the sisters in her convent readied themselves for her death, one is reported to have said: “I really wonder sometimes what our Mother Prioress will find to say about Sister Thérèse when she dies ... she has certainly never done anything worth speaking of.”
St. Thérèse, being the paragon of humility, would have taken great comfort in such a statement. For she sought neither fame nor fortune, just the opportunity to pray and dedicate her suffering to Christ.
When she died just over a century ago, there were no parades or television specials. There was little notice.
Yes, Adrienne, the power of her faith, prayers and simple writing survived and carried her to sainthood and the eventual adoration by the Catholic faithful all over the world. She clearly remembered the good advice I so often forget that God doesn't call us to be rich, famous or successful — just to be faithful.
Ironically, of course, St. Thérèse sought nothing but obscurity and most certainly today enjoys all the spiritual riches of heaven, meeting Christ face-to-face.
When Tara Lapinski won, you'll recall, the ice was littered with roses. Maybe that was St. Thérèse smiling down.
But I like what I read about Tim Goebel. Someone said, “you can tell Tim is Catholic by the way he treats people in the Olympic Village.”
May St. Thérèse smile down on you so that people will say that — quietly, privately — of you. All my love, Dad.
Jim Fair writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Fair ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Prayerfully Yours: Paris in the Spring DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Nearly a century ago, the French Catholic poet Charles Péguy imagined what God might think of Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral.
“God says: I have seen ... the churches which are my own houses,” he wrote. “And Paris and Rheims and Rouen and the cathedrals which are my own palaces and my own castles. So beautiful that I shall keep them in heaven.”
While the cathedral may be the heart of Catholic Paris, there are other churches and basilicas to attract the Catholic traveler. And there's probably no better time to visit this great city than spring — now less than two weeks away.
Notre Dame isn't all there is to see, but it is an excellent starting point. The cathedral stands at the center of L'île de la Cité, one of the two islands in the middle of the Seine River, from which Paris eventually expanded. Today's Notre Dame, the cathedral-church of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, dates from 1163. The Gothic landmark, one of France's oldest medieval cathedrals, stands on a spot previously occupied by a Christian basilica and, earlier, a Roman temple. The cathedral itself took more than a century to build. Desecrated during the French Revolution (the cathedral was dedicated to Robespierre's cult of “the Goddess of Reason” while a prostitute was placed on the main altar) Notre Dame was reconsecrated in 1802.
Although the cathedral attracts its share of gawking tourists (there's always a line to scale the tower and roof), Notre Dame also retains the prayerful air of a true place of worship. While crowds might roam the nave in the afternoon, visitation is limited during services. A priest is usually available for “consultations.” There's a certain frisson in attending Sunday Mass in so historic a church, a sanctified space in which the powerful and the poor have prayed for nearly a millennium. Daily Vespers are also recited. The reserved Blessed Sacrament in a chapel off the ambulatory behind the main altar is a welcome place of refuge in busy Paris. On the Sundays of Lent this year, recollections are delivered by a bishop from each of the seven continents.
From its intricately sculpted portals, to the 30-foot rose windows to the exquisite, carved choir surrounding the main altar, Notre Dame is a testament to how Christianity has inspired art. The cathedral treasury, which holds many of Notre Dame's precious books and liturgical instruments, should not be missed.
Walk and Pray
Crossing the square from Notre Dame brings one to the Palais de Justice, which houses a Gothic masterpiece: La Sainte-Chapelle. Built by French King St. Louis in the 13th century to house the relic of Christ's crown of thorns, La Sainte-Chapelle is an outstanding architectural achievement. Its “walls” are almost completely made of 15 50-foot-high panes of stained glass. Almost 1,150 individual scenes from the Old and New Testaments are depicted. Like Notre Dame, you cannot visit La Sainte-Chapelle without appreciating just how powerfully Church life has shaped human culture.
Off the Rue de Rivoli side of the Louvre is the Church of St. Roch, a pretty, if somewhat neglected, Baroque church.
Take a walk along the other side of the Louvre, across the Pont des Arts and down Rue Bonaparte and you'll come to the Church of St. Germain-des-Prés. It's Paris' oldest church, built in the 11th century in a distinct Romanesque style.
Across Paris, on its northern side, rises the Basilica of the Sacred Heart (Sacré-Cœur). Its snow-white domes and modified Byzantine style crowns the hill of Montmartre. Built in fulfillment of a 19th-century national vow, Sacré-Cœur was consecrated in 1919. Beautiful mosaics, lovingly restored, illuminate the interior. Regularly a pilgrimage church, it hosts frequent Masses. The trek up the hill can be a challenge, but there's a railcar available for the price of a subway ticket.
Paris is a walkable city. Its great churches and most of its secular attractions (like L'Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower) are relatively centrally located. Even the secular attractions cannot evade France's religious past. The walls of the Pantheon, for example, the burial place of France's secular heroes, are still adorned with paintings of the life of St. Geneviève.
For those who prefer other transportation, the Metro is cheap and efficient (multi-day tickets, affording travel on all lines, are worth it). Near Notre Dame, at least in the summer months, is one of the loading points for Seine River cruises, generally one-hour tours that show you the highlights of Paris. Parisian cuisine is unparalleled and, as France adopts the devalued Euro, prices are even somewhat reasonable, at least on a European scale.
Péguy's God is so moved by the beauty of France's churches that he promises “to keep them in Heaven.” If you know where to look in Paris, you won't wonder why.
John M. Grondelski lives in Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: Finding sanctity and serenity along the Seine ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Vatican Film Fest in L.A. DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Michelangelo. Raphael. Bernini. These are the revered artists people have traditionally associated with the Catholic Church.
Now a growing group of film aficionados in the Los Angeles area is associating artists like Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Federico Fellini with the Vatican as well.
Led by Ron Lawson, 38, a free-lance graphic designer and an earnest amateur film buff, the Vatican Film Festival brings Catholics together to view and discuss each of the 45 films on the Vatican's list of great movies. (The Vatican released the list in 1995, on the centenary of the film industry's inception, culling selections from what it considered to be the top 15 films in each of three different categories — art, values and religion.)
“I thought it would be good to take a look at the films that the Vatican thought were notable,” Lawson says. “It's an impressive list. It's a great thing seeing films you wouldn't otherwise see.”
Inspired while taking a screen-writing class, Lawson inaugurated the festival during Lent of 2001 with a screening of Ingmar Bergman's classic meditation on mortality, The Seventh Seal (a Vatican “values” selection). “It's an incredibly challenging and well-crafted film where man questions God. ‘I can't believe — but will believe,’” Lawson explains.
Lawson promotes the festival throughout Southern California via e-mail and word-of-mouth. Each screening is held at a private home and attracts an average of 20 to 25 people. Following the success of the Bergman screening, Lawson's group presented William Wyler's Ben Hur (“religion”), Disney's Fantasia (“art”) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (“art”), directed by the late Stanley Kubrick. Lawson says the group plans to present around six movies in 2002.
That's Entertainment, Plus
“There's a great contrast among the films, which makes for an interesting project, too,” Lawson says. “Think of the difference between 2001 and its view of the world, man and his future and the heroic witness that Ben-Hur is all about.”
Disney animator Bill Waldman, 38, heard about the festival from a friend and attended the screening of The Seventh Seal. He enjoyed it so much that he agreed to host the presentation of Disney's classic animated feature Fantasia.
“Some people wondered why Fantasia was on the list,” Waldman says. “I don't think they realized that it was in the ‘art’ category. Fantasia is the first time they combined animation with classical music. Artistically, it was a bold statement.”
Susana Santana, 28, programming coordinator at Latino Public Broadcasting in Hollywood, learned of the festival from a Southern California young-adult group called The Catholic Chihuahuas. She came away from the screening of Ben Hur impressed both with the film and the festival's mission.
“I had never seen Ben Hur before,” she says. “It was good to see so many people watching it not just to be entertained, but looking for something deeper because it was on the [Vatican] list. It's interesting because [in Ben Hur] you see Jesus' life from the perspective of someone outside of his followers. Throughout the film, you hear people talking about Jesus. You don't see him, but the characters are influenced by his actions.”
Barbara Nicolosi, director of Act One, a screenwriting program for Christians in Hollywood, and a screenwriter herself, says she believes the festival is “a great idea. Most people don't know the Vatican issued a list.”
Although Nicolosi laments the list's somewhat “erratic” selections and its relative short-changing of American cinema, she admires what the Vatican is doing. “Clearly the Church is pointing us to this art form as the primary art form of the day,” she says. “It's unprecedented that the Vatican did this. It shows that the Church takes interest not just in religious practice, but in every aspect of human life.”
Santana and Waldman both look forward to attending future screenings. One festival enthusiast, Catherine McCabe, 30, a librarian at Thomas Aquinas College, is particularly eager to see Babette's Feast and Nosferatu, two films she has heard much about but has never seen.
Lawson himself is excited about showing Francesco, which stars Mickey Rourke as St. Francis of Assisi. “Francesco is a challenging presentation of St. Francis' life,” Lawson adds. “It's not Brother Sun, Sister Moon.”
Nicolosi encourages Catholics to view the films with an inquiring mind. “One thing Catholics could look for is why the Church put this or that movie on the list,” she adds. “Why would the Church [urge] me to watch this movie?”
Martin Mazloom writes from Los Angeles.
Editor's note: For the complete list of the Vatican's favorite 45 films, go to www.nccbuscc.org/fb/vatican-films.htm or call the U.S. Bishops' film and broadcasting office at (212) 644-1880.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Martin Mazloom ----- KEYWORDS: Art & Culture -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:The Great Race (1965)
Classic slapstick comedy is almost a lost art. Comics like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the team of Laurel and Hardy mixed well-timed pratfalls with moments of great pathos in a way that captivated audiences from silent films up until the 1940s. The Great Race is an affectionate homage to their work. Director Blake Edwards (The Pink Panther) and screenwriter Arthur Ross cleverly construct an episodic yarn around a 22,000-mile auto race from New York City to the Eiffel Tower in Paris set in 1908.
The two key competitors are the Great Leslie (Tony Curtis), a squeaky-clean hero always dressed in white, and the evil Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), who sports a black handlebar mustache and continually bullies his long-suffering assistant Max (Peter Falk). They are also rivals for the affections of a beautiful suffragette (Natalie Wood) who's also entered the race. Their adventures include a Western-style bar-room brawl, rampaging Indians, sinking icebergs; sword-fighting duels and an epic pie fight. Although it's occasionally overdone, the laughs are non-stop.
Bataan (1943)
The United States suffered several setbacks in the Pacific during World War II before the tide turned, and the courage and spirit of sacrifice our troops displayed during these dark hours helped lead to our later victories. Bataan is set in the Philippines in early 1942 when the Japanese forced the American forces commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur into a humiliating retreat. The stoic Sgt. Bill Dane (Robert Taylor) leads a heroic rear-guard action in the jungle to cover MacArthur's movements. Dane's hastily assembled unit must hold off the enemy by destroying a bridge that the Japanese keep rebuilding.
Director Tay Garnett (China Seas) pulls no punches as he shows how tactical miscalculations, enemy fire and disease slowly kill off many of Dane's men.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Art & Culture -------- TITLE: Thomas Aquinas College Keeps on Growing DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Thomas Aquinas College welcomed its first students to class 30 years ago. Now, at last, the construction of its campus is nearing completion.
If, that is, all goes according to plan — and prayer.
Originally, the founders of the Catholic liberal-arts school in Santa Paula, Calif., planned to erect 15 buildings.
As of today, nine are in service. Now, they hope, a newly launched $75 million capital campaign will enable them to finish what they started.
Set on a 131-acre former ranch, Thomas Aquinas is known for its use of a “great-books” curriculum: Instead of education textbooks, students study the works of history's leading thinkers, from Aristotle to Augustine, Euclid to Einstein. It also has a rightly deserved reputation for high fidelity to the Pope and magisterium.
“In August of 1968, we formed the corporation and received our first donation of $10,000 from oil magnate Henry Salvatori,” explains Peter DeLuca III, one of the college's incorporators and its first employee.
In the spring of 1970, the college held its first fund-raising dinner in San Francisco.
It was attended by 450 people; Bishop Fulton Sheen was the featured speaker. The day the school opened its doors in September of 1971, just 33 students were enrolled. For seven years, the college operated in facilities owned by the Claretian order near Calabasas, Calif.
In 1975, thanks to the generosity of another private donor, the college obtained the property upon which it now sits. The first of 15 planned buildings, St. Joseph's Commons, was dedicated four years later.
Lessons for Life
Aside from the campus, little has changed since the early '70s. Now, as then, all students must take a common curriculum — four years of theology, philosophy, math, science and literature; two years of Latin; and one year of music theory.
“The goal of the program isn't necessarily to prepare students for a job; it's to form their minds so they can lead a more fully human life,” said Glen Coughlin, the college's dean. “We're devoted to doing that one thing, and doing it well.”
The present student body seems to be made up of individuals who were sold on the concept before they ever got here.
“My brother has always been able to outsmart me,” says Judith Stachyra, a senior from Essex, Ill. “I came to Thomas Aquinas because I wanted my thinking to be clear. It was the only college I applied to.”
Veronica Rioux, a freshman from Lewiston, Maine, says she enjoys being with peers of like mind. “The college is a good teacher of virtue,” she says. “It's also an encouragement to see others succeed in the pursuit of virtue. It makes it easier to live out your faith.”
Not a few incoming freshmen arrive with an undergraduate degree already in hand, some from the most prestigious schools in the country, says Tom Dillon, president of the college. The SAT scores of those arriving straight from high school rank in the top 15th to 20th percentile in the entire country, he adds.
Half of Aquinas' graduates go on to graduate school, and the National Review College Guide placed the school on its list of the top 50 liberal-arts schools in America.
The student body, some 301 students strong, is at 86% of the campus' total capacity, but making do on half a campus, Dillon explains.
Thus the prayers for the success of the capital campaign. The jewel of the campaign, Dillon says, will be a new chapel modeled in the Spanish mission style that predominates on campus. A temporary chapel, adjacent to the dining room, has served the campus since 1979.
Yet, even with their desire to expand the campus, the administrators and board of governors are adamant about limiting growth; they believe the small-community environment enhances the open, interactive, dialogue-rich learning experience that is the heart of the great-books approach. Dillon says Thomas Aquinas will aim for a maximum of about 350 students.
“This school started with nothing but a great idea,” says President Thomas Dillon. “It's had extraordinary success since then.”
Here's hoping the school's success will prove contagious.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Faith and Foreign Policy DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:THE INFLUENCE OF FAITH: RELIGIOUS GROUPS & U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
Edited by Elliott Abrams Rowman & Littlefield, 2001 256 pages, $24.95
To order: (800) 462-6420 or www.rowmanlittlefield.com
Given that its editor could not have known how timely his book would be while he was compiling it — in the months prior to Sept. 11, 2001 — The Influence of Faith is uncannily appropriate to the situation the United States now faces in that date's aftermath. It's a situation in which religion is not just one aspect among many in the nation's foreign policy, but, arguably, the country's single most important consideration.
Adding weight to the book's gravitas is the fact that Abrams, who put together this collection of essays by leading political and religious thinkers while he was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, (a Washington, D.C. think tank,) has since become a special assistant to President George W. Bush.
“Why is the denial of religious freedom a daily occurrence throughout the world?” Abrams asks in his introduction. “Why do some governments perceive religious faith as threatening? Why are religious minorities ill treated, or forcibly converted, or even tortured and killed?”
Well, because “the power and salience of religion have increased,” as Abrams notes.
From Islam's bloody borders to the persecution of Christians in China, the contributors of The Influence of Faith look at problems involving religions abroad and religious crusaders seeking to end murder, suffering and injustice. No chapter is more timely than the one by Habib Malik, a professor at the Lebanese American University and a Christian living in an Islamic world, on “Political Islam and the Roots of Violence.”
As politicians constantly remind us that we are not at war with Islam but terrorists who have hijacked Islam, writes Malik, it is crucial that we know the reality of life in the Islamic world, “a reality steeped in antagonism and violence.”
Malik, while cautioning that there are many variations of Islam and, therefore, diversity among Muslims, notes that “a remarkable degree of uniformity is apparent among Islamic portraits of 'the other’” (non-Muslims). “Since Islam does not separate the realms of religion and politics, peculiar ingredients in the religion bear directly on the behavior of non-Muslims under Islamic rule,” he adds. “Taken together, these ingredients create a perception of the alien ‘other’ that becomes a handy excuse for violence and persecution.”
Presented as a collection of essays, each with accompanying commentary by world-renowned experts and scholars, The Influence of Faith brings together in-demand intellectuals like Arthur Waldron, Samuel Huntington, Daniel Pipes, Robert Kagan, Norman Ornstein and George Weigel, among others.
At the end of his introduction, Elliott Abrams writes: “The intersection of religion and world politics has often been a bloody crossroads.
If tomorrow it is to become the locus of a principled struggle for freedom and human dignity, we will require imaginative thinking and careful research.”
Tomorrow is here. Abrams' prescient Influence of Faith isn't a bad handbook to have.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of www.nationalreview.com
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Religious ROTC
TODAY'S CATHOLIC, Feb. 15 — In a unique program, the University of Notre Dame trains Reserve Officers' Training Corps students to be lay prayer leaders for the military units to which they will be assigned, reports the newspaper of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind.
The program, which may serve as a model for other ROTC programs, includes six 90-minute sessions in which students study the history and theology of the Eucharist and focus special attention on the rite for Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest.
Lay President
THE UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON, Feb. 18 — Daniel Curran, executive vice president at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, has been appointed Dayton's first lay president, according to a university announcement.
A sociologist by training, Curran will become the university's 18th president in its 152-year history when he replaces Marianist Brother Raymond Fitz, who completes a record 23-year stint.
Curran has spent the past 23 years in various administrative and faculty positions at St. Joseph's.
Closing Seminary College
THE DIOCESE OF OGDENSBURG, N.Y., Feb. 15 — Wadhams Hall Seminary College in Ogdensburg will close June 30, according to an announcement by Bishop Gerald Barbarito.
Bishop Barbarito cited low enrollment — 15 students — as the reason for closure. He also praised the college for a spirit that kept the school going even as “many other larger dioceses ... had to close such institutions many years sooner.”
‘Sense of the Tragic’
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, Feb. 9 — In a book review, Boston College theologian Alan Wolfe takes on what he considers an excessively optimistic view of religious life and studies in American higher education, which tends to be earnest, tolerant and service-oriented.
This reveals, he says, “the absence of a sense of the tragic” in the face of religious deformation that fails to challenge the relativism and self-centeredness of the larger culture.
He cites an unidentified Jesuit to illustrates the superficiality of religious understanding, even at Catholic colleges: Contemporary students are “dim, fourth-carbon copies of religious people. Certain things remind them of religion — crosses and statues. But theology is in desperate straits [at the Catholic university where he teaches]. It would die without Buddhism and other religions to discuss.”
Expanding Vouchers
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 14 — Florida lawmakers are considering a bill that would make every student in Florida eligible for a state-funded voucher to attend a private school.
Current law — the first-in-the-nation statewide school voucher program — limits state-funded vouchers to students at schools that receive failing grades two years out of four.
‘Monologues’ on Campus
WORCESTER TELEGRAM & GAZETTE, Feb. 15 — An Ash Wednesday staging of “The Vagina Monologues” at the College of the Holy Cross sparked protests by students and area Catholics who thought the play was not appropriate fare for a Jesuit university, especially on the solemn inauguration of Lent, reported the Massachusetts daily.
Many objected to the play's graphic language and sexual themes, including homosexuality.
Countered Susanne Calabrese, student director of the Holy Cross performance: “Ash Wednesday is not a holy day of obligation.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Money and Marriage
My fiancé and I are planning on getting married this spring. We both have some credit card debt and he has a student loan. Neither of us knows much about managing finances. Do you have any recommendations?
It's good that you're considering this area well before your wedding. Unfortunately, statistics show that disputes over money are among the primary causes of divorce in our country. By preparing to properly manage your finances now, you're eliminating one of the key problems for most marriages.
Here are a number of steps I encourage you to take:
E Get your spiritual life in order. You'll be amazed how this directly impacts your finances.
E Determine who will handle the basic financial duties, and focus on making finances an area of good communication.
E Create a financial plan — also called a budget — for the first year of your marriage.
E Learn how to manage your checkbook. E Discuss the use and misuse of credit. Let me share the contrasting stories of two young couples I know. You'll quickly see the difference proper money management makes.
The first couple didn't consider ahead of time the impact finances would have on their relationship. They entered marriage with $17,000 in credit card debt and $6,000 in student loans. They also had a 2-year-old born out of wedlock.
You can imagine the pressures they're facing. They're both working to have enough resources to cover their pre-existing debt, yet the wife would like to stay home fulltime with her child. While they're doing the best they can, finances will continue to be a sore spot in their marriage for at least a couple of years.
Contrast this with the second couple, who took time before the marriage to develop a financial plan. They set a standard of living that depended solely on his income because they wanted to start a family right away and they wanted mom to stay home fulltime. While this may sound easy, it's not. We all find it difficult to make a sacrifice today to achieve a greater good tomorrow. But as this young wife recently said, she can't imagine giving up the peace and joy of being home fulltime with her children — now two daughters.
So take the time now to develop a budget for your first year of marriage. In addition, develop a plan to pay down your consumer credit as quickly as you can. It's even possible you might want to delay the wedding until the debts are either eliminated, or at least reduced to a more manageable level.
Finally, be careful with your spending on the wedding, reception, honeymoon and first home. Many young couples fall into the trap of overspending and digging a deep financial hole.
See if you can locate a mentor couple who will review your budget on a monthly basis. In the event you can't find another couple, ask your parents, pastor or a friend. This will set the stage for effective financial planning and communication on money.
God love you!
Phil Lenahan is executive director of Catholic Answers.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: A Trip to Redwall Abbey DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:So your child has read the Harry Potter books, and seen the movie. Maybe, in view of all the recent controversy about the boy wizard, you are wondering if you did the right thing to permit this: She's now a devoted fan of fantasy literature, and longs to get her hands on more stories of strange worlds and wondrous events. You're afraid this taste may lead to a fascination with the occult.
Or maybe, given all the controversy, you've forbidden your child access to Potter and company. But you keep hearing how these books have turned reluctant readers into bookworms. If only there was some other series that could work the same “magic” with your child.
Try Redwall. Often appearing on the “young adult” shelf of bookstores and libraries, this 14-volume series by Brian Jaques (pronounced jakes) has been a delight to the 10- to 16-year-old set ever since it began appearing in 1986. And unlike many series, the quality of the writing seems to get better and better; the last five volumes — from The Long Patrol through Taggerung — have been New York Times bestsellers.
Jaques first began telling stories of talking animals to children at a school for the blind in England. As a result, the written versions of his stories have lushly detailed descriptions that paint vivid pictures for readers; and the many characters speak various British dialects, making it easier to distinguish among them.
Mossflower Country, where the stories take place, is reminiscent of medieval England, except that it is populated by talking animals. Redwall Abbey is the story's monastery — a place where the animal monks live a celibate life of study. They have no religion per se, but are committed to virtuous living and service to others. At the same time, the monastery is a communal home to many animal families, who work and play together under the leadership of the monks. Mice, badgers, hedgehogs, squirrels and otters live in idyllic harmony.
Does that sound too dull? Fear not. Marauding bands of barbaric vermin — weasels, foxes, and rats — show up regularly to pillage, plunder and enslave the more gentle species. But the peace-loving animals of Redwall are no pacifists. Whenever things look bleak, a hero rises to the occasion, rallies the good guys, and wins the day.
Jaques has managed 14 variations on this theme so far, with fresh personalities and plot twists every time. And those who shy away from too much magic will be pleased to know that beyond the help of an occasional prophetic dream or vision, Redwall animals solve their problems through their own courage, cleverness, strength and willingness to work with others. The evil animals, on the other hand, have “seers” who seem to be sly, self-serving individuals with powers that are largely bogus.
When Maryanne Smith was 9 years old, she didn't care much for reading. But her older brother told her about the talking mice and squirrels of Redwall and this young animal lover just had to give them a try. Here at last, was a reason to use those phonics skills her teachers had drilled into her, because these were stories worth reading: “The Redwall books are magical, and by that I don't mean spells and Harry Potter stuff,” says Smith. “They're magical because the author makes you feel like this world of talking animals really exists somewhere.”
Now a teen-ager, Smith has read all 14 books, some of them more than once.
A spokesman for Penguin Putnam, who wanted to remain anonymous, often accompanies Jacques on book signing tours. He confirmed this learning phenomenon: “It'll striking to me how many kids approach Brian, saying that they never liked reading before, and have gone from reading nothing to reading voraciously, thanks to his books.”
He also noted that, judging from Jaques' fan mail, young readers seem to absorb the books' emphasis on personal courage and responsibility. “Brian calls them ‘My Redwall Warriors.’”
Laura Berquist, home schooling authority and director of Mother of Divine Grace correspondence school, often recommends the Redwall series to clients whose children are reluctant readers. She knows of children who have advanced several grade levels in reading ability in a very short time. They loved the Redwall stories enough to struggle through them, making quick progress.
More than that, Berquist believes these fun and exciting books are good for children: “It's a mistake to oppose fantasy to realistic fiction. It's true that fantasy stories couldn't happen in the real world exactly as written, so in that sense they aren't 'true.’ But good fantasy does speak to the world we live in, because good and evil don't change.
“Often these stories highlight good and evil in a way that would get lost in a true-to-life story. A good book reflects truths about the real world and the moral order, and Brian Jaques' books do just that.”
Some have raised objections to the amount of violence and warfare in Jaques' novels. But it is the battle scenes that are a large part of Redwall's appeal to boys. Berquist doesn't see this as a problem. “These books don't saturate the imagination with gory details. Battle and warfare is part of reality, and the wars in Redwall are always just and purely defensive. The books don't teach a child to delight in the actual killing.
“Boys enjoy the planning and strategy involved in war, and seeing the good guys win,” she said. “It's a natural inclination, which we don't want to discourage.”
Jerry Lademan, 14, has that natural inclination for battle strategy. A Redwall fan for the last four years, he notes that these books don't insult his intelligence with “sterotypes where the bad guys are inept fighters whom the good guys beat with no difficulty. Both sides have good tactics and skill as fighters. And Brian Jaques shows that no one wins a war without terrible loss; often important [good] characters get killed. This makes it more suspenseful … you really don't know who's going to be left in the end.
“But he shows that honesty and integrity will prevail.”
Daria Sockey writes from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: Courage and Honor in a Monastery of Mice and Moles ----- EXTENDED BODY: Daria Sockey ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Redwall's Mice, Morals and Imagination DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Daria Sockey interviewed author Brian Jacques about the moral vision of his Redwall series. Their conversation follows.
My daughter recently told me that your books were “magical without there being any magic in them.” Can you comment on magic in children's literature, and why, aside from the occasional prophetic dream/vision, you don't make use of spells, magical objects or powers?
Well, Daria, I think you have a very perceptive daughter. While I wouldn't want to “put words in her mouth” I think what she was referring to are actually several elements.
Is it magical for animals to think, behave, and feel as humans do? Yes.
It's an ancient device in storytelling. Remember Aesop and his fables? And the French writer, Rabelais did the same thing. It is a genre in which moral lessons can be taught under the extremely clever disguise of “entertainment.”
While I didn't think of Aesop when I created the world of Redwall, I realized later that I was following in a noble tradition. So in that sense my books are “magical.”
Another element is that the children — I call them “dibbuns” in my books — of Redwall are always the ones who, one way or the other, are the true heroes of my tales.
They must confront a danger and solely by the use of their wits and working together, overcome that danger. This element is “magical” too in that in real life it is extremely rare for children, either singly or in a group, to act in a heroic way.
But the result of that particular element is that it empowers children who feel their lives are controlled to the “nth” degree by parents, by school, by after school activities, by society, by play dates, etc. It allows their imaginations to soar, and without imagination where would our culture and society be? We wouldn't have great art, advanced medicine or the technological marvels we enjoy today. All of this came from people who dared to imagine!
We need to dream, and we need to allow children to dream also. However, deep in the warp and woof of my books is a very clear moral code of right and wrong.
When I was a boy, morality was taught in school and in church but I think that is no longer true to the extent that it used to be. I try to create very clear moral signposts of what is right and what is wrong. The children who read my books are generally at an age where they need to have things spelled out in “black and white,” without ambiguity. I often tell my readers that my baddies are bad and my goodies are good. I won't have sympathetic baddies and schizophrenic goodies in my books.
I value my family ties in my personal life and in my books I try to create the sense that nothing is more important than the love of family and by extension, community. Redwall is really an extended family.
Another element in all of these books is a sense of great adventure, deeds of derring-do, of impossible feats accomplished (also very empowering to children) in which children identify themselves as the heroes. C.S. Lewis also wrote “moral fables.”
A great example is his The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. At the core of these books is always the epic and eternal battle of good versus evil. And good always wins. Always! Not just in books but in real life. If good didn't always win we would all be marching around with swastikas tattooed on our foreheads, wouldn't we? I don't think that the element of magic in children's books is a pernicious or evil one. I think it is how magic is used by the characters that define them as evil or good.
And finally but perhaps most importantly, there is really only one reason for children's literature to even exist, and that is to develop a love of reading in children. If a children's book doesn't accomplish that then a tree has been unnecessarily destroyed. There are truckloads of authors, myself included, who constantly receive letters from parents telling us that their little Johnny or Annie hated to read but after having read the Redwall books their child has learned to love reading.
I can't imagine my own life without books, and these letters are among the most gratifying I receive. Imagine! To have introduced a non-reading child to a lifetime of pleasure! It's all worth it to hear that! But if we are talking about “good” children's literature versus “bad” children's literature ... well, that's a pretty subjective call.
Something I might think is brilliant, someone else might think is perfect rot.
Catholic readers will enjoy the monastery, monks, and other monastic accoutrements. What is your experience of monks and monasteries that formed Redwall in your imagination?
I'm often asked this question and I always delicately point out that while Redwall is an abbey, normally a religious institution, in my books Redwall Abbey is actually a secular institution whose leader, the Abbot or Abbess, is a figure of experience and wisdom, sort of the heart and historical repository of a community and very much a kind and loving father or mother to all the people in his or her care. Only a very few of the inhabitants of Redwall are monks.
Most residents of the community are secular and have all of the human foibles and strengths that all of us have. It is how these strengths and weaknesses are tolerated and used which make Redwall a strong and loving community. So Redwall is populated with the absent-minded uncle, or the brash, overt neighbor, or the quiet introverted friend.
All have their place in Redwall and all contribute to the success and survival of the community in their own way, just as real families tolerate the cousin who is obnoxious, the aunt who tipples a little too much, the grandfather who roars but is really meek as a lamb. Implied in all of this is forgiveness and acceptance. We forgive our family members their weaknesses and accept them because they are members of our family. The same is true in Redwall.
I wanted to have a ‘structure’ against which the battle of good and evil could be played out.
When I first imagined Redwall, I didn't think of it as having a religious nature but I did think of it as having a moral one. There is a very fine distinction I suppose between a religious nature and a moral nature, but a very real one. I wanted to have a “structure” against which the battle of good and evil could be played out. Nothing is more “good” in the popular perception than an abbey — a place of quiet, peace, serenity, and study, each member contributing to the whole. A threatened abbey seemed to me to be more serious, more dramatic than any other institution because an abbey exists only for the betterment of its individual members — just as a society does, or should. And because of this, the evil of the abbey's enemies seemed to be even more evil ... so it served my narrative purposes.
While I grew up in an Irish Catholic background, my experience was limited to my parish in Liverpool, and the parish school — St. John's School for the Totally Bewildered as I call it. My family was one unit, my parish was another, my larger Irish community was an extension of the previous two, and all were threatened in a very serious and very real way by the outside world.
In my case, the threat came from a feeble-minded man who wore a little black brush of a mustache, Adolf Hitler.
During my youth Liverpool was one of the great seaports of the world and Herr Hitler bombed us daily and nightly for a very long time, taking lives and causing huge destruction. It was a threat I keenly felt. So I guess I thought of my real world as a threatened community and the evil-doers were the Luftwaffe. Redwall Abbey became the tapestry against which the fight of good against evil could be played out. It is a literary device in which the abbey is actually a metaphor for an entire society.
I have read that you made up your stories for children at a school for the blind.
Among today's writers for children, I may be the luckiest one of all. During my adult life I've had several careers, one of which was driving a milk lorry (a delivery truck, for you Yanks!). One of my stops was the Royal School for the Blind in Liverpool.
When I realized that there were people on the staff whom I had known when I was growing up, I asked if there were anything I could do to help the kids? I felt, I suppose, that children are the most defenseless beings in the world; they have no power, no money, no political lobby.
And to be deaf or blind made them even more defenseless. It was suggested that I might want to come and read to the children once a week, and I agreed. The books I was given to read were about dark subjects — alcoholic parents, teen-age pregnancy, drug abuse — all perfectly horrid and depressing. The children didn't like the books very much and I positively hated them. I wanted to give them the sense of adventure that I had when a boy, reading Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island. Something that could take them out of themselves and their situation.
So I went home and decided to write a story about defenseless mice — there's no creature on earth more helpless than a mouse, is there? I thought the children could identify with a mouse, and I also knew that I had to make the action of the story fast and furious to keep their interest.
It had to be highly descriptive so that the children would be able to “see” the story in their minds as much as they were able. Well, a published author, a friend of mine, read the raw manuscript and without my knowledge sent it to a London publisher and the Redwall books were born.
I'm still very active in supporting the Royal School for the Blind and I know that without them, the books never would have come into being. While I was lucky, I was also ready. If I hadn't had the ability to write stories it wouldn't have mattered; but I was given that gift and it all came right in the end.
I love reading to the children and I still do so from time to time as life and schedules allow. They're very dear to my heart. I play Father Christmas for them each year, although as soon as I say “Happy Christmas!” the children yell, “Hi Brian!” Not a very successful disguise I'm afraid. I learned a great deal from reading to the children. I learned where the story was flagging, how to pace it, what kind of characters the children responded to, and which situations made them laugh or cry. Perhaps I was trying to give them a little of the peace and pleasure which had escaped me when I was their age.
And the “mice” I originally told the stories about and to, have now expanded into millions of “mice” — my Redwall readers — all over the world.
For a poor kid from inner-city Liverpool, it's been a strange, exhilarating, exciting, exhausting, but ever so pleasing journey.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 03/10/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 10-16, 2002 ----- BODY:Philly Abortion Facility Closes
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, Feb. 21 — The Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center for Women, which opened in 1975 as one of the first abortion facilities in Pennsylvania, has closed due to financial troubles.
“The financial situation and the changes in the health care landscape did what the anti-abortion protesters could never do to us — shut us down,” said Jennifer Vriens, executive director of the abortion business.
“Praise the Lord, I can't believe it,” John Stanton, executive director of the Pro-Life Union of Southeastern Pennsylvania, said. “The fewer sources [of abortion] you have, the less women and babies will be victimized.”
N.C. Abortions Down 23%
WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL, Feb. 15 — Abortion rates have dropped dramatically across North Carolina since 1990, and no one can pinpoint an exact cause for the decline.
The number of abortions performed in the state dropped by 23% — from 34,565 in 1990 to 26,612 in 2000, according to the N.C. Center for Health Statistics.
The reason may be that more stringent standards were put in place in 1995, including limiting access to the state money to women who have been the victims of rape or incest or where the pregnancy would endanger the life of the mother.
Since the new standards were adopted, no one has used public money, state officials said.
W.V. Senator's Prayer
THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE, Feb. 16 — At the end of an hour long public hearing on state legislation to mandate informed consent and 24-hour waiting periods for women seeking abortions, the lead sponsor of the bill explained why his eyes were closed during much of the meeting.
Sen. Leonard Anderson, D-Summers, said that he wasn't sleeping, but was praying for God to “open the eyes of the opponents of the bill.”
“I'm totally opposed to abortion. I think it's sin. I think it's murder,” said Anderson, appearing to be on the verge of tears. “I can't imagine a heathen nation doing what we're doing in America.”
Nathanson in the Philippines
THE PHILIPPINE STAR, Feb. 17 — Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion practitioner and head of a pro-abortion organization, who later became a pro-life advocate, told residents of the Philippines not to legalize abortion.
Nathanson accepted an invitation from pro-life groups in the Philippines to help in their mission to persuade Filipinos “not to follow in the bloody footsteps of the United States and Western Europe with respect to abortion.”
Dr. Nathanson said there are innumerable alternatives to contraception and abortion, some of which are virtually fool-proof — natural family planning, for example.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Irish Voters Reject Abortion Referendum DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:DUBLIN, Ireland — Voters in Ireland have narrowly rejected a change to the republic's constitution that would have closed a loophole allowing abortions for women who claim they are suicidal because of their pregnancies.
Voters rejected the proposed amendment March 6 by a razor-thin margin of 50.42% to 49.58% — a difference of only about 10,000 votes in this nation of 3.8 million.
The amendment would have ruled out a mother's threat of suicide being used as a reason for abortion, as has been the case since a 1992 Supreme Court decision known as the “X case.” But the complexities of the proposal had left many people confused and even had pro-lifers in disagreement.
Under the amendment, put forward by Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, abortion except in cases of physical danger to the mother's life would have been forbidden after implantation of the embryo in the uterus, not from the moment of conception.
Pro-life supporters of the amendment argued that the amendment's unclear position on the sanctity of life between conception and implantation wasn't significant. It would not weaken the existing constitutional protection for all human life from the moment of conception, they said. But some other pro-lifers insisted that the amendment would be utilized to legitimize early-stage abortions and to facilitate the use of fetal tissue in research.
While the Irish bishops urged Catholics to back the government proposal, singer Dana Rosemary Scallon, a former EWTN television personality and now an Independent member of the European Parliament, led the pro-lifers who argued that the referendum would not adequately protect the unborn.
The Irish bishops are disappointed at the outcome, said a spokesman for the bishops’ conference.
The spokesman, Father Martin Clarke, said that Irish citizens missed an opportunity to tighten the country's abortion laws.
“Obviously, we are disappointed, particularly as the result means that the constitu tional protection of the unborn continues to be undermined by the ‘X case’ judgment,” Father Clarke said.
About 43% of the electorate voted, a figure Father Clarke called “disappointing.”
Said Father Clarke, “If there had been a bigger turnout in rural areas particularly, the referendum would be carried. A lot of the bishops said in their pastoral letters that it would be wrong if the referendum was decided by a relatively small part of the population because of a low turnout.”
Urban-Rural Split
The referendum result revealed an urban-rural divide, with voters in urban areas far more likely to vote No and voters in rural areas more likely to vote Yes. Voter turnout in urban areas was far greater than rural areas, observers said.
In Dublin and surrounding areas, home to one-third of the country's people, a preliminary count showed that up to 80% of voters had rejected the proposal, the BBC reported.
Before the election, some voters expressed confusion about the refer-endum's wording.
“The vote is a victory for the unborn child. If there had been a wording acceptable to the whole pro-life community, this would have been carried by a big majority,” Dana said.
A prominent commentator, Brendan Halligan, blamed the low referendum turnout on a mixture of general apathy towards politics and weariness with the abortion issue. “Abortion has been on the agenda for over a generation, and battle fatigue has set in,” he said. “Many voters were confused. The arcane nature of the debate [about life] as it developed was a challenge not only for ordinary voters but even for theologians.”
Halligan, of the Limerick Leader newspaper, said that with the narrowness of the vote, the fact that a section of the pro-life movement opposed the proposal was crucial to the referendum defeat. He said Dana's opposition had “undoubtedly lost the referendum.”
It was the fifth time in 20 years that Irish voters had been asked to vote on abortion.
Ahern suggested he would not immediately pursue another referendum to overturn the X case decision.
“My views are well known. But the people have spoken and the people's voice is the final word in democracy,” the prime minister said. “It will be the work of the next government to study and understand the results and implications of this referendum, and to act upon it. And above all, in doing so, the will of the sovereign people as expressed at the ballot box should be respected.” The issue of abortion will likely be prominent in the upcoming Irish election, expected in May. The opposition Fine Gael party, which opposed the amendment to close the suicide loophole, has said it intends to clarify — but not eradicate — the gray area left by the X case judgement if it defeats Ahern's ruling Fianna Fail party.
In a statement March 7, Dana called for pro-lifer voters to unite in demanding “the option to vote for clear and unambiguous protection of human life from the moment of conception.”
Said Dana, “As we approach a general election I will be working to make this principle a political priority thereby confirming, once and for all, the will of the people on this issue — protection for human life from the moment of conception which is fertilization.”
(From combined staff and wire reports)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Showdown: Pro-Lifer vs. Gov. Gray Davis DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:SANTA MONICA, Calif. — The morning after winning the California Republican Party's nod as its candidate for governor, an obviously tired but happy Bill Simon, holding a rosary in his hand, told the Register that his faith is central to him.
“I'm not ashamed of my faith, I'm proud of my faith,” Simon said on March 6. However, Simon stressed that while he is Catholic, he does not “wear [his religion] on his sleeve.”
That may be true, but a member of his campaign staff noted later that Simon always keeps a rosary in his pocket.
To those who doubt Simon can win the governor's race in California, his supporters have a two-word response: Ronald Reagan.
It is not only that Simon closely mirrors the conservative political views of Reagan. But there is also the uncanny similarity to Reagan's first race.
In 1966, California Gov. Pat Brown, a Democrat, had high hopes that Reagan, then a political neophyte, would defeat the mayor of San Francisco, George Christopher, who was seen as the stronger, “less conservative” candidate for the Republican nomination. Brown got his wish, but ultimately lost to Reagan in the general election.
Likewise, California's current Democratic governor, Gray Davis, spent an estimated $10 million running ads to help defeat Simon's Republican opponent, the pro-abortion former mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, in the March 5 primary. Davis, who is Catholic, attacked Riordan, also a Catholic, for not being authentically committed to abortion because Riordan once espoused pro-life views.
Davis’ hope was to eliminate Riordan, who billed himself as a moderate supporting abortion and homosexual rights, in order to face the more conservative, politically less experienced and pro-life Simon in the general election this November. Simon ultimately won the primary with 49.4% of the vote to 31.6% for Riordan.
Political reporter Timothy Carney, who works for the CNN show “Evans and Novak,” said from Washington that “there is a chance that picking a ‘loser’ as the ‘winner’ in the primary will backfire” on Davis in the general election.
Of a repeat of the 1966 scenario in which Reagan was elected, Carney added, “That is a definite possibility.”
For now, that is just speculation. But with the primaries now over, the choice for Californians is between two men who call themselves Catholic, but hold very different positions on Catholic issues. Davis is passionately pro-abortion and has been strongly supportive of the homosexual lobby while governor, and abortion has been Davis’ weapon of choice against both the 1998 Republican nominee, Dan Lungren, and against Riordan this year.
Simon, by contrast, is staunchly pro-life and supported California's Defense of Marriage Initiative, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Simon also opposes a “civil union” measure which would have given homosexual couples many of the same rights as married couples. Davis signed a bill last year that expanded the rights for “domestic partners.”
Simon Says
Simon, 50, is the son of former Treasury Secretary William Simon Sr. After working at Morgan Guaranty Trust in New York as his first job out of law school, in 1985 he became an assistant criminal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York serving under Rudy Giuliani, who is actively campaigning on his behalf in the current gubernatorial race.
In 1988, Simon co-founded the private investment firm of William E. Simon & Sons. One of the firm's investments is PAXTV, which Simon's campaign Web site describes as “a family-friendly broadcast network free of graphic violence, sex and inappropriate language.”
Simon boasts a long list of charitable commitments, and is also currently vice chairman of Catholic Charities of Los Angeles and chairman emeritus of Covenant House of California, a crisis shelter for youth.
According to several published accounts, Davis is preparing to cite abortion as one of the issues that prove that Simon is “too conservative.” Asked to comment on the prospect of facing attacks from a fellow Catholic for opposing abortion, Simon responded that he thinks that Davis is focusing on it because “he is trying to distract attention from the poor job he has done running California.”
Simon was referring to problems California has experienced under Davis. The state, which was running budget surpluses when he took office, is now in the red, and the economy has slowed considerably.
Davis has also been roundly criticized for his handling of last summer's state energy crisis, in which Californians suffered rolling blackouts. To stop the blackouts Davis committed the state to what many consider to be high-priced energy contracts — contracts that he is now trying to renegotiate.
As a result of that and criticism over what was seen as the premature announcement of a terrorist threat to California's bridges in November, the governor's approval rating in a late January field poll had dropped to 56%. Asked if they thought Davis was motivated more by political expediency than principle, 57% agreed.
Roger Salazar, a spokesman for the Davis campaign, disagrees with Simon's portrayal of Gov. Davis’ record as weak. “He will put his record up against Simon's any day,” Salazar said.
On abortion, Salazar said, “The governor does not believe that he has the right to impose his beliefs on other people. … From his perspective, women have the right to choose, and he won't abridge that right in any way.”
Salazar added that the Davis camp feels that “Bill Simon is sincere in his beliefs, but is out of step with California.”
Ugly Campaign?
Political reporter Carney believes that Davis’ vulnerability on economic issues will force him to highlight the abortion card against Simon, as he did against Lungren and Riordan. The mainstream media will be a willing accomplice in tarring Simon as “anti-choice,” Carney predicted, because “they want to make [the race] about abortion.”
Added Carney, “It will get ugly because Davis is one of the fiercest, most feisty politicians.”
Simon responded to such a scenario. “I've challenged Gray to run a campaign on the issues,” he said. “Voters don't want a lot of personal attacks.”
Simon said that his platform will concentrate on the nuts-and-bolts issues of providing “real solutions to real problems for real people,” including what he says voters care most about: “Reducing taxes, less traffic and better schools.”
But in response to the Davis campaign's allegations that he is a right-wing “extremist,” Simon showed he can play political hard-ball too. “When you look at the $17 billion deficit [in California], I am not the ‘wacko’ that got us into this mess,” he said, adding with a smile that “there is a ‘wacko’ — in Sacramento.”
The Catholic vote is key to the race. According to the California Catholic Conference there are approximately 9 million Catholics in California, making up almost a third of the state's population.
While one priest in Sacramento has publicly called for Davis’ excommunication because of his political record, Carol Hogan, spokeswoman for the California Catholic Conference, said the bishops of California have no comment on the good standing in the Church of either candidate.
Hogan did say that the bishops will continue to encourage people to “vote their conscience, keeping in mind the teachings of the Church.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Holy Church No Stranger To Scandal DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:BOSTON — To put perspective on the pedophilia scandals involving priests in the Boston Archdiocese and beyond, the Register is publishing an adapted excerpt from a recent homily by Father Roger Landry. A similar scandal saw the March 8 resignation of Bishop Anthony O'Connell in Palm Beach, Fla.
Father Landry delivered this homily Feb. 3 at Espirito Santo, a parish church in Fall River, Mass.
The headlines this past week did not focus on the Patriots’ march to the Super Bowl, or on who would QB, Drew or Tom, or even on the president's State of the Union address and his comment that there are many al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S. like “ticking time-bombs.” None of these was the top story. The headlines were captured by the very sad news that perhaps up to 70 priests in the Archdiocese of Boston have abused young people whom they were consecrated to serve.
It's a huge scandal, one that many people who have long disliked the Church because of one of her moral or doctrinal teachings are using as an issue to attack the Church as a whole, trying to imply that they were right all along.
Many people have come up to me to talk about it. Many others have wanted to, but I think out of respect and of not wanting to bring up what they thought might be bad news, have refrained, but it was obvious to me that it was on their mind. And so, today, I'd like to tackle the issue head-on. You have a right to it. We cannot pretend as if it didn't exist. And I'd like to discuss what our response should be as faithful Catholics to this terrible scandal.
The first thing we need to do is to understand it from the point of view of our faith in the Lord. Before he chose his first disciples, Jesus went up the mountain all night to pray. He had at the time many followers. He talked to his Father in prayer about whom he would choose to be his Twelve Apostles, the Twelve he would himself form intimately, the Twelve whom he would send out to preach the Good News in his name.
He gave them power to cast out demons. He gave them power to cure the sick. They watched him work countless miracles. They themselves in his name worked countless others.
Yet, despite all of that, one of them was a traitor. One who had followed the Lord, who had had his feet washed by the Lord, who had seen him walk on water, raise people from the dead, forgive sinners, betrayed the Lord. The Gospel tells us that he allowed Satan to enter into him and then he sold the Lord for 30 pieces of silver, handing him over by faking a gesture of love. “Judas,” Jesus said to him in the garden of Gethsemane, “Would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” Jesus didn't choose Judas to betray him. He chose him to be like all the others. But Judas was always free, and he used his freedom to allow Satan to enter into him, and he ended up betraying God and getting him crucified and executed.
Remember the Eleven
So right from the first Twelve that Jesus himself chose, one was a terrible traitor. Sometimes God's chosen ones betray him. That's a fact that we have to confront. It's a fact that the early Church confronted. If the scandal caused by Judas were all that the members of the early Church focused on, the Church would have been finished before it even started to grow. Instead, the Church recognized that you don't judge something by those who don't live it, but by those who do. Instead of focusing on the one who betrayed, they focused on the other Eleven, on account of whose work, preaching, miracles, love for Christ, we are here today. …
The media almost never focus on the good “Eleven,” the ones whom Jesus has chosen who remain faithful, who live lives of quiet holiness. But we, the Church, must keep the terrible scandal that we've witnessed in its true and full perspective.
Scandal is unfortunately nothing new for the Church. There have been many times in the history of the Church when the Church was much worse off than it is now. The history of the Church is like a cosine curve, with ups and downs throughout the centuries. At each of the times when the Church hit its low point, God raised up tremendous saints to bring the Church back to its real mission. It's almost as if in those times of darkness, the Light of Christ shone ever more brightly. I'd like to focus a little on a couple of saints whom God raised up in these most difficult times, because their wisdom can really guide us during this difficult time.
What should our reaction be then? Two great saints who lived during difficult times can guide us in this our own difficult time.
Once, St. Francis de Sales was asked to address the situation of the scandal caused by some of his brother priests during the 1500s and 1600s. What he said is as important for us today as it was for his listeners then.
He stated, “Those who commit these types of scandals are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder,” destroying other people's faith in God by their terrible example. But then he warned his listeners, “But I'm here among you to prevent something far worse for you. While those who give scandal are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder, those who take scandal — who allow scandals to destroy their faith — are guilty of spiritual suicide.”
They're guilty, he said, of cutting off their life with Christ, abandoning the source of life in the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist. He went among the people in Switzerland trying to prevent their committing spiritual suicide on account of the scandals. I'm here to preach the same thing to you.
What St. Francis Faced
Another great saint can help us further. St. Francis of Assisi lived in the 1200s, which was a time of terribly immorality in central Italy. Priests were setting terrible example. Lay immorality was even worse. St. Francis himself while a young man even gave some scandal to others, by his carefree ways.
But eventually he was converted back to the Lord, founded the Franciscans, helped God rebuild his Church and became one of the great saints of all time. Once one of the brothers in the Franciscans asked him a question. The brother was very sensitive to scandals.
“Brother Francis,” he said, “What would you do if you knew that the priest celebrating Mass had three concubines on the side?” Francis, without missing a beat, said slowly, “When it came time for holy Communion, I would go to receive the sacred Body of my Lord from the priest's anointed hands.”
What was Francis getting at? He was getting at a tremendous truth of the faith and a tremendous gift of the Lord. No matter how sinful a priest is, provided that he has the intention to do what the Church does — at Mass, for example, to change bread and wine into Christ's body and blood, or in confession, no matter how sinful he is personally, to forgive the penitent's sins — Christ himself acts through that minister in the sacraments.
Whether Pope John Paul II celebrates the Mass or whether a priest on death row for a felony celebrates Mass, it is Christ who himself acts and gives us his own body and blood. So what Francis was saying in response to the question of his religious brother that he would receive the sacred Body of his Lord from the priest's anointed hands is that he was not going to let the wickedness or immorality of the priest lead him to commit spiritual suicide.
Christ can still work and does still work even through the most sinful priest. And thank God! If we were always dependent on the priest's personal holiness, we'd be in trouble.
The Church's Response
And so, again, I ask, “What's should the response of the Church be to these deeds?” There has been a lot of talk about that in the media. Does the Church have to do a better job in making sure no one with any predisposition toward pedophilia gets ordained? Absolutely. But that would not be enough.
Does the Church have to do a better job in handling cases when they are reported? The Church has changed its way of handling these cases, and today they're much better than they were in the 1980s, but they can always be perfected. But even that is not enough.
Do we have to do more to support the victims of such abuse? Yes we do, both out of justice and out of love! But not even that is adequate.
Cardinal [Bernard] Law has gotten most of the deans of the medical schools in Boston to work on establishing a center for the prevention of child abuse, which is something that we should all support. But not even that is a sufficient response.
The only adequate response to this terrible scandal, the only fully Catholic response to this scandal — as St. Francis of Assisi recognized in the 1200s, and as countless other saints have recognized in every century — is holiness!
Every crisis that the Church faces, every crisis that the world faces, is a crisis of saints. Holiness is crucial, because it is the real face of the Church. There are always people — a priest meets them regularly, you probably know several of them — who use excuses for why they don't practice the faith, why they slowly commit spiritual suicide. It can be because a nun was mean to them when they were 9. Or because they don't understand the teaching of the Church on a particular issue — as if any of these reasons would truly justify their lack of practice of the faith, as if any of them would be able to convince their consciences not to do what they know they should.
There will doubtless be many people these days — and you will probably meet them — who will say, “Why should I practice the faith, why should I go to Church, since the Church can't be true if God's so-called chosen ones can do the types of things we've been reading about?” This scandal is a huge hanger on which some will try to hang their justification for not practicing the faith. That's why holiness is so important. They need to find in all of us a reason for faith, a reason for hope, a reason for responding with love to the love of the Lord. The beatitudes which we have in today's Gospel are a recipe for holiness. We all need to live them more.
Do priests have to become holier? They sure do. Do religious brothers and sisters have to become holier and give ever greater witness of God and heaven? Absolutely. But all people in the Church do, including lay people! We all have the vocation to be holy and this crisis is a wake-up call.
Great Time for Priests
It's a tough time to be a priest today. It's a tough time to be a Catholic today. But it's also a great time to be a priest and a great time to be a Catholic. Jesus says in the beatitudes we heard today, “Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you falsely because of me. Be glad and rejoice, for your reward in heaven is great.”
It's a great time to be a Christian, because this is a time in which God really needs us to show off his true face. In olden days in America, the Church was respected. Priests were respected. It's no so any more.
One of the greatest Catholic preachers in American history, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, used to say that he preferred to live in times when the Church has suffered rather than thrived, when the Church had to struggle, when the Church had to go against the culture.
It was a time for real men and real women to stand up and be counted. “Even dead bodies can float downstream,” he used to say, pointing that many people can coast when the Church is respected, “but it takes a real man, a real woman, to swim against the current.” How true that is! It takes a real man and a real woman to stand up now and swim against the current that is flowing against the Church. It takes a real man and a real woman to recognize that when swimming against the flood of criticism, you're safest when you stay attached to the Rock on whom Christ built his Church. This is one of those times. It's a great time to be a Christian.
This is a time in which all of us need to focus ever more on holiness. We're called to be saints and how much our society here needs to see this beautiful, radiant face of the Church. You're part of the solution, a crucial part of the solution. And as you come forward today to receive from this priest's anointed hands the sacred Body of your Lord, ask him to fill you with a real desire for sanctity, a real desire to show off his true face.
A Time for Great Priests
One of the reasons why I'm here in front of you as a priest today is because while I younger, I was underimpressed with some of the priests I knew. I would watch them celebrate Mass and almost without any reverence whatsoever drop the Body of the Lord onto the paten, as if they were handling something with little value rather than the Creator and Savior of all, rather than my creator and savior.
I remember saying to the Lord, reiterating my desire to be a priest, “Lord, please let me become a priest, so I can treat you like you deserve!” It gave me a great fire to serve the Lord. Maybe this scandal can allow you to do the same thing.
This scandal can be something that can lead you down to the path of spiritual suicide, or it can be something that can inspire you to say, finally, “I want to become a saint, so that the Church can show your true face, O Lord, to the world, so that others might find in you the love and the salvation that I have found.”
Jesus is with us, as he promised, until the end of time. He's still in the bark of Peter and will prevent its cap-sizing. Just as out of Judas’ betrayal, he achieved the greatest victory in world history, our salvation through his passion, death and resurrection, so out of this he may bring, and wants to bring, a new rebirth of holiness, a new Acts of the Apostles for the 21st century, with each of us — and that includes you — playing a starring role.
Now's the time for real men and women of the Church to stand up. Now's the time for saints. How do you respond?
(Originally published by Zenit
----- EXCERPT: Homily ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Roger Landry ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholics Make Peace Amid India's Religious Carnage DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW DELHI — Most parts of Ahmedabad — the largest city in its state — witnessed the brutal killing of Muslims by Hindu mobs in late February and early March. But not a single Muslim died at the hands of rioting crowds in the suburb of Gomtipur.
They can thank St. Mary's Nursing Home for that.
Nearly 5,000 Muslims in the neighborhood took shelter in the Catholic center Feb. 28 when the Hindu rioters surrounded the Muslim neighborhood calling for Muslim blood. They were enraged because dozens of Hindus had been killed when a train was burned, allegedly by Muslim extremists, Feb. 27 near Godhra, a town in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
“Our [compound] walls have been damaged. But we are happy our center has saved many lives,” said Dominican Sister Rose Mathew in a March 4 phone interview. “People could not wait to enter from the front gate. So, they made holes and entered from all sides.”
Bishop Stanislaus Fernandes of Ahmedabad also rushed to the Dominican home from the general meeting of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India in Jalandhar after Gujarat exploded in violence.
The Times of India reported March 11 that 632 people had been killed in the attacks on Muslims and their properties across Gujarat, mostly as a result of arsons. The attacks erupted in response to a call for protests issued by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, following the torching of the train in Godhra.
Fifty-seven Hindu karsevaks(volunteers), including women and children, were killed when attackers set their train on fire when it reached the station in Godhra, carrying hundreds of karsevaks returning from the city of Ayodhya.
Hindu activists have been flocking in recent weeks to Ayodhya, 450 miles southeast of New Delhi, after the council announced that construction would begin in mid-March on a grand temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram at the spot where Ram is said to have been born.
In 1992, defying court orders, Hindu karsevaks razed a 16th-century mosque that stood at the site, triggering countrywide Hindu-Muslim riots that claimed several thousand lives.
Hindu militants have continued to insist that the demolished Babri mosque was built at the site where Ram was born and have promised to build a grand temple there in defiance of any court orders.
The council, India's largest Hindu militant group, wields great influence within with the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, which currently governs the country under the leadership of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
More than 80% of India's 1 billion residents are Hindus and about 12% are Muslims, according to the CIA World Factbook 2001. There are an estimated 23 million Christians, or 2.3% of the total population, of whom about half are Catholic.
Bishops'Appeal
“We are saddened with the news of the burning of so many innocent people [in the train] but we are even more pained with the turn of events as they are now unfolding, particularly in Gujarat,” the Catholic bishops of India said in a statement at the start of their conference March 1.
The gathering of more than 150 Catholic bishops also appealed to the government “to take all possible preventive measures to check the violence from spreading further.”
However, the Indian Church's call for action seemed to fall on deaf ears. The Gujarat state government, which is also led by the BJP, showed little urgency in bringing the Hindu arsonists under control. Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat, alone accounted for over 200 Muslim lives lost in the initial weekend of violence orchestrated by Hindu fundamentalists, who appeared to enjoy virtual immunity from police action.
Thirty-eight Muslims living in a housing colony in Chamanpura suburb were burned alive in the presence of police Feb. 28 in Ahmedabad. Among the dead was Eshan Jaffrey, a former member of the Indian Parliament and leader of the Congress party, along with 19 members of his household.
“This is obviously state-sponsored violence,” said Jesuit Farther Cedric Prakash, spokesman for the ecumenical United Christian Forum for Human Rights in Gujarat, speaking from his office in Ahmedabad. “Eyewitnesses have told me that in some places [Hindu] policemen joined hands with the mobs in attacking the Muslims.”
Though Ahmedabad had witnessed earlier Hindu-Muslim riots, Father Prakash said that in terms of “ferocity, this is the worst ever.” Describing the violence against Muslim targets as “systematic and meticulous,” Father Prakash charged that “this was nothing but ethnic cleansing.”
“Among rows of shops, you will find that only the property of one community has been destroyed,” agreed Bishop Fernandes, echoing the widespread allegation of systematic targeting of Muslims. “This is totally unacceptable.”
Added the bishop, “What is important is that there should be strong message from the top. But unfortunately, I have not heard any strong condemnation [of the violence] from top leaders.”
In fact, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the state government of Gujarat, seemed to offer a justification for the attacks on Muslims when he said that the state's million people “have become aggressive and there was a reaction” to the train burning.
Federal Defense Minister George Fernandes, a Catholic who flew to Gujarat on March 4 to oversee an army deployment to control the violence, was quoted in the Indian media as saying that the state government had delayed the dispatch of vehicles to carry army personnel to the worst-hit areas.
While the deployment of over a dozen army battalions restored order to the urban areas by March 4, Father Prakash said that Muslims in the remote villages continue to be hunted ruthlessly. He cited the attacks in rural areas, where Hindu-Muslim violence previously was rare, as evidence that the current outbreak is “neither emotional or spontaneous but sponsored” by Hindu fundamentalists.
Christians Targeted
Christians have also been targeted. Two Divine Word missionaries, Father Chackochan and Brother Gnanarul, were injured in a stone-throwing March 2 while fleeing from attackers in Sanjeli, located in the northern Panchmahal district of Gujarat. When the two men returned to the mission house the next morning, they found that it had been looted and burned down by the Hindu mobs.
Earlier in a similar incident in neighboring Wakadi, a church and a hostel for tribal children run by the protestant Indian Missionary Society was stripped even of its wooden doors and windows by a rampaging mob.
Bishop Fernandes expressed concern about Christians, but said they were only a secondary target. Said Bishop Fernandes, “We are more worried about Muslims and the hatred the [Hindu] fundamental-ists have toward minorities.”
The bishop said that “the worse part” with respect to the threats against Catholics is that they have been warned by Hindu fundamentalists that “you will also be punished because you have sided with these people” because the Church is trying to deliver relief supplies to 150,000 Muslim refugees who are now living in camps.
Said Bishop Fernandes, “We are all upset by the Godhra tragedy. Enough is enough. Let us not create tragedies ten times worse than that in revenge.”
Anto Akkara writes from New Delhi, India.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Anto Akkara ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Miss America, Except on Sundays DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Angela Perez-Baraquio had stopped competing in beauty pageants.
She had become a physical education elementary school-teacher and coach. But at the age of 23, two of her students encouraged her to compete one last time. She was crowned Miss America 2001 and recently finished her term. She spoke with Registerfeatures correspondent Tim Drake from her home in Hawaii.
Did you grow up in Hawaii? What was it like?
I was born and raised on Oahu. My parents were both teachers in the Philippines and moved here in 1970. Today, my parents are small-business owners, operating a termite control business.
I am the eighth of 10 children. I have six sisters and three brothers. We took piano lessons, and I also took ballet lessons. We played a lot of sports and were a close-knit family. What we learned from each other was how to share. All of us went through Catholic schools and sang in the church choir, which we continue to do today. I attended Maryknoll grade school and then Holy Family Catholic Academy in Honolulu where I later ended up teaching.
Has there ever been a time when you fell away from the practice of your faith?
No, not really. My faith has really been my stronghold. There were times when I questioned it, but that only made my faith stronger.
How did you first get involved in pageants?
I never competed in pageants or modeled as a child. I was an athlete and I participated in basketball, volleyball, and cross-country. This experience led me to coach, and the coaching got me interested in elementary education. At the age of 18, a local pageant director approached me about the possibility of competing in the Miss Hawaii pageant. He told me that they were the only pageant that operated without an entrance fee, and that if I needed to I could borrow my sister's dresses. He also told me that they were the largest scholarship provider in the world.
The biggest deciding factors for my getting involved were knowing that I could make a difference and the opportunity to earn scholarship money. All of my siblings had gone on to private Catholic colleges, and money was tight, so I decided to compete. The director encouraged me to choose a platform statement, and I chose the issue of character education.
I first competed when I was 18-19 years old. Afterwards I received my teaching certificate and began teaching. When I was 23, I had two eighth-grade students that encouraged me to compete again. The cutoff age is 24, so it was the last year that I could run. I wanted the girls to try out for the basketball team, so I made a deal with them. I told them that if they tried out, I would run. In the end, they became team captains and I became Miss America. I ended up earning more than $100,000 in scholarship assistance.
What role has your Catholic faith played in your work as Miss America? My faith has played a huge role. The day after I won, they had a press conference and many other activities planned. It was a Sunday, and I told the organizers that I needed to go to Mass. They replied, “But your schedule is so busy.” I requested that I be able to take every Sunday off. Eventually, they said, “You can do whatever you want, you're Miss America.”
There were nine people as part of my entourage. We went to Mass that morning and the organist played “There She Is.” The Gospel reading was from the Book of Wisdom. It said, “I prefer her, which is wisdom, over scepter and throne.” That spoke to me and made me realize that that would be my goal for the year — wisdom, rather than the crown. My faith has given me strength when I was tired, scared or lonely.
Have you had an opportunity to talk about your faith as Miss America?
My platform, character education, goes back to my education of who I am as a Catholic. Respect, honesty, and integrity — these are Christian values. I was able to visit many schools, and also spoke with 24,000 youth at the National Catholic Youth Conference in Indiana to talk about my faith. My platform opened the doors for me to talk about my faith with the masses.
You recently stepped down as Miss America 2001. What were some of the highlights from your year as Miss America?
Actually, there are many. One was meeting my 80-year-old grandfather for the first time. He lives in the Philippines, and we didn't have enough money to travel there. When I won, the pageant asked me if I wanted to go to the Philippines. They flew me and my family, first class, to visit him. That was very touching.
I also had the opportunity to meet two national presidents in two weeks. First, I, along with 51 children with life-threatening illnesses, had the opportunity to meet President Bush and his wife as part of a Children's Miracle Network event in Washington, D.C. Later, I had the opportunity to meet President Gloria Arroyo of the Philippines.
I also got engaged on-stage last year. I'm currently doing many of the same things I was doing as Miss America, but not as extensively. I continue to travel and speak about character education; that is my job now. I also work with First Hawaiian Bank as their spokesperson. I'll be getting married sometime this year, and I'm also looking into graduate school in Educational Administration.
Another favorite story happened while I was visiting a Children's Miracle Network hospital in Florida. In one room, there was a teen-age girl that looked very sick. She was wearing a facial mask. She looked at my crown and said, “That's beautiful.” I asked her if she would like to wear it, but she responded, “I can't wear that. I'm not worthy. I'm not beautiful enough.” I insisted that she wear it and the nurse took a Polaroid photograph of the two of us. I signed the Polaroid with the inscription, “You are so beautiful!” She told me, “I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life.” That made an impact on me. I felt very blessed to be able to touch someone like that.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Angela Perez Baraquio ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Embryo Researchers Disregarding Adult Stem Cell Breakthroughs DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:MINNEAPOLIS — In spite of dramatic new evidence that adult stem cells can become virtually any tissue in the human body, supporters of embryonic stem cell research remain undeterred.
The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine,published March 7, reports that researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston have found that stem cells obtained from donor blood will travel through the recipient's bloodstream, and quickly transform themselves into liver, abdominal and skin tissue.
This latest finding reinforces other groundbreaking stem cell research reported late last year in the scientific journal Blood. Catherine Verfaillie of the University of Minnesota reported that adult mouse stem cells inserted into early-stage mouse embryos affected all the tissues of the mice when examined after birth.
That discovery was hailed by some as the most comprehensive evidence yet that adult stem cells have at least as much “plasticity” as embryonic stem cells, and therefore that they hold at least as much promise in curing human diseases and disabilities.
“Dr. Verfaillie and co-workers have done what is considered the ultimate test of a stem cell's ability to form any tissue,” said David Prentice, adjunct professor of medical and molecular genetics at Indiana University School of Medicine. “[The result] validates the contention that adult stem cells have the same plasticity [as embryonic cells] in being able to form any adult tissue.”
Adult stem cells, such as those found in bone marrow, are already used to treat leukemia, and research has previously indicated their ability to form bone, cartilage, muscle, liver, heart and brain tissues. Unlike embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells have not shown a tendency to produce tumors, and since they can be taken from a patient's own body, they are not subject to transplant rejection.
Embryonic stem cells also have one overwhelming ethical disadvantage: Their extraction causes the death of the embryos used.
But Michael West, president and Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., said that embryonic stem cell research must continue despite Verfaillie's findings. Said West, “It would be a grave disservice to humanity to vote for throwing penicillin in the trash can once we hear that a new antibiotic has been discovered.”
West, one of the leading advocates of embryonic stem cell research, made headlines around the world shortly before Christmas when he claimed to have created, and then destroyed, the first human clone. He said Verfaillie's research does not prove that adult stem cells are as versatile as embryonic stem cells.
“As just one example, despite trying to make her cells self-assemble into complex tissues such as intestine, skin, and so on — a property of embryonic stem cells — her cells would not show this property.”
The Vatican has repeatedly condemned embryo-destructive research, and the bishops of the United States have campaigned ardently against federal funding of such research.
In his Message for Lent 2002, Pope John Paul II said, “The beginning of life and its marvelous development: this is a gift. And because it is a gift, life can never be regarded as a possession or as private property, even if the capabilities we now have to improve the quality of life can lead us to think that man is the 'master’ of life.
“The achievements of medicine and biotechnology can sometimes lead man to think of himself as his own creator, and to succumb to the temptation of tampering with 'the tree of life’ (Genesis 3:24)…. Not everything that is technically possible is morally acceptable.”
Morals-Free Science?
Dr. Edward Furton, director of publications for the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, said that part of the problem in reaching a consensus on which branch of stem cell research to pursue lies in the kind of mindset prevalent in academic and scientific circles.
“If you go back in time a 100 years, a 150 years, you realize that there has been a movement among intellectuals in general to say that only science can give us truth, and if science doesn't say it exists then it's not real. So the whole of ethics, which studies the good, is supposedly a non-scientific discipline.”
Added Furton, “It's almost like a moral lobotomy that the scientific community has undergone. They're just not interested in thinking with that part of their brains.”
To the extent that scientists subscribe to a moral philosophy, Furton said, most are utilitarians: “Utilitarianism seems to fit well with the scientific mentality because it looks to consequences — what follows from my actions, what kind of results will this lead to. But there's no recognition of principles, the idea that there are principles and in particular that there are certain goods which are inviolable.”
As well, Furton said some scientists might not be deterred from pursuing embryonic stem cell research, even in the face of mounting scientific evidence that adult stem cells are at least equally promising, because scientists as a group tend also to be skeptical, even of the work of their peers.
He added that some lobby groups seeking cures for specific illnesses want to keep open any conceivable route to achieving their goals.
Pro-lifers are touting Verfaillie's research as a powerful new tool in the continuing congressional debates on outlawing all forms of human cloning, including so-called therapeutic cloning in which human clones are created and then destroyed to extract their stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells are usually obtained from “spare” embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures, but their clinical usefulness may be limited by the body's tendency to reject foreign tissue. Advocates of therapeutic cloning claim that this problem could be overcome by extracting stem cells from an embryo cloned from a patient's own tissue.
But if a patient's own adult stem cells can be used to treat the same diseases and disabilities, therapeutic cloning should not be seen as necessary from a scientific point of view to solve the problem of rejection.
Scientist David Prentice said Verfaillie's research “should provide additional evidence that using a patient's own adult stem cells provides the best alternative for obtaining matched tissue.”
Added Prentice, “It is in fact interesting that according to respected scientific journals, most scientists — including Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, the one who first derived human embryonic stem cells — believe that cloning human embryos to obtain matched tissues is impractical.”
David Curtin writes from Toronto.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew Finds Church Leaders and Bush Receptive in Visit DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople called for more grass-roots dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox at a meeting with top Catholic leaders in Washington March 6.
Patriarchan Bartholomew, who arrived in Washington March 4 for a six-day U.S. visit, met with President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell March 5 and with a delegation of U.S. Catholic leaders the following morning.
The head of the Greek Orthodox Church and spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide expressed hopes that the international Catholic-Orthodox theological commission will get past its current impasse over the status of the Eastern Catholic churches.
“We are in the process of establishing a small commission, composed of members of the larger international commission, in order to find an exit from the impasse,” he said.
Heading the Catholic delegation were Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore, a member of the international Catholic-Orthodox dialogue, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington.
Among those accompanying the patriarch were Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, and Archbishop Leo of Karelia and All Finland.
In a brief address opening the one-hour meeting, Patriarch Bartholomew said, “We, as Christians, are charged by God himself to restore our unity, so that the world will believe in the divine mission of the church of Christ.”
He acknowledged that “certain inherited differences remain unbridged” in the high-level dialogues seeking unity among the churches. “Nevertheless, these differences do not render dialogues useless, but on the contrary they are the reason why continuous dialogue between representatives of the various churches, at whatever level, is useful and necessary,” he said.
Emphasizing the importance of grassroots and spiritual ecumenism, he said that “the unity among the churches is not only helped by the representatives who participate in formal dialogues, but also by those participating in informal meetings. Moreover, it is added by those practicing self and historical criticism, and more so by those who sanctify themselves while communicating with Christ secretly and in silence.”
Holiness brings one “to see Christ clearly,” he said, and “the understanding of the truth in Christ … is the only way that will securely lead to the much-desired unity.”
The media were ushered out of the meeting after the patriarch's opening address, but the patriarch and Cardinal Keeler spoke about the discussions and the state of Catholic-Orthodox relations at a brief press conference afterward.
Cardinal Keeler said Catholic participants took the opportunity to express appreciation to Patriarch Bartholomew for his participation at the recent meeting of world religious leaders to pray for peace in Assisi, Italy, for his statement on the events of Sept. 11 and for his work promoting joint Christian efforts in the Holy Land.
After his March 5 meeting with Bush, Patriarch Bartholomew said they discussed the status of Middle East peace efforts, Associated Press reported.
“He said that much hatred exists there, and that he will continue his efforts until he is able to bring peace there and worldwide,” the patriarch said.
Another member of the delegation at the White House, Archbishop Dimitrios, said Bush displayed “real love, real appreciation, for what the ecumenical patriarch does” in fostering “universal peace and universal friendship.”
(From combined wire services)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:OB-GYN Group Pushes Emergency Contraception
Some women apparently encounter difficulties getting a prescription and finding a pharmacy stocking the so-called morning- after pill in time. The concentrated dose of birth control pills must be taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse.
Journal health writer Tara Parker-Pope claimed that the regimen works primarily by preventing ovulation. And while she acknowledged that, “The drugs may also prevent fertilization or implantation of the egg in the uterus even if ovulation already has taken place,” she claimed the pills won't induce abortion, as does RU-486.
In fact, medical authorities agree that the pills can irritate the lining of the uterus, making it hostile for a newly fertilized egg — a human being in its first stage of life — to attach itself and begin its journey toward birth, thereby inducing an early abortion.
Parker-Pope may know more about business than biology — or she may be promoting the politically correct but scientifically flimsy view that conception happens not at fertilization but implantation.
The normally conservative, astute newspaper should have caught this one. Eggs don't implant; embryos do.
Researcher Advises Care on Pedophilia Accusations
“Priestly pedophilia” may be a handy term to use in referring to dozens of accusations that have cropped up since the Geoghan-Boston affair. But pedophilia is a psychiatric term referring to sexual interest in children below the age of puberty, Philip Jenkins, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has extensively researched the matter, wrote in the Pittsburgh daily.
Jenkins stressed that Church officials should not place a pedophile priest in a position where he has access to children. But the vast majority of clergy misconduct cases involve priests who have been sexually active with a person below the age of sexual consent, often 16 or 17 years old.
Though this is wrong, Jenkins said, “it does not have the utterly ruthless, exploitative character of child molestation.”
Jenkins, a non-Catholic whose studies have shown that these problems affect non-celibate clergy and lay people as well as Catholic priests, warned that the phrase “pedophile priest” is “wildly misleading” and can be used to “launch blanket accusations against the Catholic Church as a whole.”
Tom Monaghan's Crucifix Idea Faces Opposition
To crown his Catholic empire of a law school, newspaper, two radio stations, church, school, day-care center, two convents and a foreign mission, the founder of Domino's Pizza wants to move Ave Maria College to Ann Arbor from nearby Ypsilanti, turn it into a university and erect a 250-foot crucifix.
But the town's planning commission, citing burdens on firefighting, police, water and sewage resources, recommended that the town board reject the proposal.
Monaghan has already demonstrated a willingness to sue the town, and a spokesman said litigation in this case “is an option.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Outside the Beltway, Bush's Faith-Based Initiative Forges On DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Even as President Bush's faith-based bill languishes in Congress, the effort to partner religious groups with government has quietly made progress where it may matter more — in federal, state and local government agencies.
At Bush's command, five Cabinet-level agencies are identifying and removing barriers that prevent religious groups from receiving government grants to help fight social problems.
And a soon-to-be-published study of 15 states found governments are already contracting nearly $124 million worth of social services work to 726 faith-based organizations. Of those, about half had not had a previous financial relationship with government.
“People are sort of judging the prognosis of the faith-based initiative on a reading of the political tea leaves inside the Beltway. But that's not the entire story. You have to look outside Washington, and if you do, you find the faith-based initiative is alive and well,” said the study's author, Amy Sherman, a longtime researcher of faith-based programs and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
High Priority
When he took office, Bush made federal funding of poverty-fighting religious groups one of his top priorities, immediately creating a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bush's bill to implement his initiative passed the House but has been stuck in the Senate.
While government funds have flowed to large religious nonprofits for years — the Salvation Army has received money since 1902 — Bush wanted smaller faith groups to be given a fair chance to deliver government-funded social services.
In the five Cabinet departments targeted by Bush — Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor and Justice — bureaucrats are making it easier for religious groups to get government funding, according to a different study of how Bush's faith-based office has changed the country in its first year.
“In the long run, the most profound impact will lie in the rewriting of hundred of regulations that would shift the flow of federal funds to religious groups,” wrote the study's author, Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.
In states and counties across the country, government agencies are making it easier — under existing rules — for religious groups to get government funding.
A personal contact with a county executive led the Rev. Kenneth Reed and his Evangelical Church of God in Christ in Syracuse, N.Y., to a government contract. The church will receive $70,000 if it meets performance standards in finding and helping needy families who, for whatever reason, have fallen off the Onondaga County Department of Social Services’ welfare roll.
The county has never before funneled federal welfare money through a church, synagogue or mosque, said David Sutkowy, the county's social services commissioner. Sutkowy saw an opportunity when he encountered Reed at a meeting of community leaders fighting poverty.
“They'll call, knock on doors and see what's going on,” said Sutkowy of the church members. “What's happening with the family? Are they better off? Are they worse off? If they're worse off, what can we do to help them?”
Sutkowy has put several demands on the congregation — including not proselytizing — that many religious organizations might be unwilling to accommodate.
“You live out the Gospel instead of always preaching the Gospel, that's what I say,” said Reed, whose Pentecostal, largely African-American church attracts about 200 wor-shippers every Sunday. “Talk is cheap anyway.”
Sherman of the Hudson Institute found other partnerships in the 15 states that she studied — Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.
‘Cultural Shift’
Mark Chaves, a University of Arizona sociologist who has questioned Bush's faith-based plan, has not seen Sherman's study, but agrees that Bush has engineered a “cultural shift” in how government bureaucracies perceive religious groups.
An August White House report TITLEd “Unlevel Playing Field” identified some of what the administration saw as “widespread bias” against faith-based groups seeking federal money for social services.
Since then, the five Cabinet departments targeted by Bush have been busy making adjustments.
For example, Health and Human Services informed states in a Feb. 26 directive that state welfare plans would have to include a strategy on how they will include faith-based organizations.
It marks the first time states “will be held accountable” to include faith groups, said Stephen Lazarus, senior policy analyst for the Center for Public Justice, a Washington nonprofit that has monitored and criticized states for excluding faith groups.
In addition, Health and Human Services is encouraging states to consider church-trained counselors, not just counselors with psychological and medical credentials, when granting federal money to fight drug and alcohol abuse.
“We don't want to present the same medical model over and over as if that's the definitive measure,” said Elizabeth Seale-Scott, director of faith-based efforts at the department. “Anything short of a statutory change we can do internally,” she added.
That's exactly what those advocating a stricter separation of church and state worry about.
“If you believe like I do,” said Chaves, “that the field is already level in respect to religion, then any regulatory change would be tilting the playing field in favor of religion. But they just might succeed in doing that.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mark O'keefe ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What's Important to a Country? Euro Coins Are Etched With Answers DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Thousands of Italians lined up outside the Vatican for hours on March 1. A new encyclical? Hardly. They had their eyes on the money.
They were after the new Vatican City State euro coins, to be exact, or what most referred to as the “pope euro” given that the image of Pope John Paul II appears on the reverse side.
The Vatican City State's official currency was the Italian lira, and it has now followed Italy in adopting the euro. Those lined-up were most likely after an investment — some Italian media reports said that the new sets of Vatican euro coins would be worth thousands (of euro, not lire!) as collectors’ items.
Whether that is true remains to be seen, but the new coins from across Europe are of interest from a Catholic perspective on how the nations of the Old Continent — including several major Catholic countries — understand themselves and their history.
March 1 marked a historic day for European currencies. The 12 currencies of countries participating in the euro ceased to be legal tender (though still exchangeable at central banks) — meaning that Italian lire, German deutschemarks, French francs and Greek drachmas are now a thing of the past. The euro debuted on Jan. 1, but a two-month transition period allowed the old currencies to circulate until Feb. 28.
The new currency comes in seven notes (500, 200, 100, 50, 20, 10, 5) and eight coins (2 euro, 1 euro, and 50, 20, 10, 5, 2, and 1 cents). While the notes are the same throughout Europe, the coins have one common side, marked by a map of Europe with the 12 stars of the European Union, and another “national” side which varies from country to country. Hence the new “pope euro.” Vatican City decided to put John Paul's image on all its coins. The Vatican coins, like all euro coins, will be legal tender throughout the common currency zone.
The Vatican opted to follow the pattern set by the Low Countries in choosing the reigning monarch for all the coins — Belgium (King Albert), the Netherlands (Queen Beatrix), Luxembourg (Grand Duke Henri). Which is fitting in a sense, given that the pope is Europe's last absolute monarch insofar as the governance of Vatican City is concerned.
“The Supreme Pontiff, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, has the fullness of legislative, executive and judicial power,” states Article 1 of the Fundamental Law of the Vatican City State, the local “constitution.”
A change of currency is primarily an economic act, but the design of currency is a cultural act, and is expressive of national identity. While the novelty of the “pope euro” has put it in high demand, the choices made by other nations were more creative, and rather illustrative.
Spain chose three figures for its coins, King Juan Carlos for the twoand one-euro, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) for the middle coins, and the Cathedral of Santiago for the three smallest. The combination of king, culture (Cervantes is Spain's greatest author, whose works include Don Quixote), and religion indicate that Spain understands its history as something more important than just politics.
Austria, another Catholic country, was the only other nation to opt for a church, putting Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral on one of its coins. Mozart (1756-1791), Austria's greatest composer, represents the world of culture on another coin, and various examples of Austrian architecture bespeak Austrian accomplishment in that field.
Ireland opted for culture alone, using the celtic harp on all its coins, preserving the imagery used on its previous currency. The Portuguese, who deposed their last king in 1910, two years after assassinating his father and older brother, chose stylized versions of the royal seal — albeit the royal seal of the 12th century. Republicanism apparently could not compete with the glories of Portuguese kings past.
France, true to form as the host nation of radical philosophies, opted for an abstract image of a tree for its most popular coins. The Finns went in for berries, swans and a heraldic lion. (This may reflect the northerly latitudes of Scandinavia — recent currency designs in Canada have heavily featured animals and birds.) The traditional symbol of the German nation, the eagle, marks their new coins, but lest anyone take that the wrong way, the Brandenburg Gate is also used as a symbol of unity and the oak twig as symbol of peace.
Divine personages make an appearance on only one coin – the Greek 2-euro coin, which features Zeus in the form of a bull. It's hard to symbolize millennia of history, but the Greeks make an admirable attempt in honor of their ancient role as shipbuilders for the world, including an ancient Athenian corvette and modern oil supertanker on their three smallest coins.
And what of Italy, Europe's other ancient nation? The philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180) appears on the 50-cent piece as a reminder of Italy's understanding of itself as heir to the Roman Empire. The Colosseum also makes an appearance (5-cent coin) from the classical period, but the major coins are reserved for the triumphs of Italian culture and science. Raphael's portrait of Dante (1265-1321) was chosen for the 2-euro, a sort of twofor-one tribute to Italian culture. Another Florentine touch is added by Leonardo da Vinci's (1452-1519) sketch of the perfectly proportioned man, representing the magnificence of the Italian Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) completes the hat-trick for Florence with his Birth of Venus chosen for the 10-cent piece.
This Catholic worldview of the contribution of both faith and reason to a culture of beauty was a feature of the old lire notes too, which Catholics will miss. Caravaggio (1573-1610) appeared on the 100,000 lire note, and Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) on the 50,000, complete with the Scala Regia from the Apostolic Palace and his equestrian statue of Constantine seeing his vision of the Cross in the sky: in hoc signo vinces— in this sign you will conquer.Italy's Catholic imagination embraced science and education too; Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), a physicist who built the first chemical battery and was the first to produce electric currents, was featured on the ten-thousand lire note, and Maria Montessori (1870-1952), the pioneer of children's learning, used to grace the 1,000.
North Americans, accustomed to currency marked mostly by political figures — and sometimes rather mediocre ones at that — would be surprised what countries with more history and culture than economic power do with their currency design. Money is not only about economics — even if the collectors waiting outside the Vatican last week were looking to make a quick profit.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Vatican Has No Plans to Seek Full U.N. Membership
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, March 5 — The Holy See has no plans to follow Switzerland's example in seeking to upgrade its status at the United Nations from non-voting observer, the news agency reported.
By a narrow vote, a Swiss referendum called for the traditionally neutral country to seek full membership at the United Nations The move would leave the Holy See the only observer state at the organization.
Msgr. James Reinert, an attachÈ at the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations, explained that the Vatican wants to remain “absolutely neutral in political questions, but still have the part of a permanent observer to deal with those social issues that we are involved with.”
Were it to come to seeking an upgrade, however, it would be up to the Pope or the Vatican Secretary of State to decide.
Bulgarian Orthodox Bishop to Meet With Pope
The tentative schedule of the Pope's visit also includes talks with the heads of the Jewish and Muslim communities in Bulgaria, visits to the Rila Monastery and Plovdiv, where the Holy Father will meet with representatives of the Catholic community, and celebrating a Mass in honor of Sts. Cyril and Methodius.
State Bishop in China Makes a Novel Request
ANSA, March 7 — It's long been noted that the Chinese state-run Church cannot formally acknowledge the authority of the Pope. Now, a government-recognized bishop is demanding that the Vatican recognize the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.
Beijing Bishop Michael Fu Tieshan urged the Vatican to take “concrete steps” to improve relations with China, according to the Italian news agency. He also said the main stumbling block remains the Holy See's relations with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province.
It's not well known, however, that Taiwan chooses bishops for the Catholic Church there, without the approval of Rome, as is the practice in the People's Republic.
Bishop Fu said Pope John Paul's recent apology for some of the past behavior of missionaries in China was a good start but not enough for Beijing to enter into talks with the Vatican.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Vatican Spokesman's Comments Highlight Problem Priests DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — A Vatican official's comments on the priest-hood and homosexuality have drawn public attention to an issue that has been quietly debated at the Vatican for several years.
Vatican sources said that, in general, Church leaders are pressing harder so that people of permanent homosexual orientation are screened out as candidates for the priesthood.
So far, this has been handled through prudent local decisions rather than explicit orders issued from the Vatican, they said. But it is something Vatican officials have emphasized to bishops in recent discussions on priestly vocations and seminary programs, the sources added.
A new document on the issue also is being considered. A study on the question of homosexual candidates to the priesthood was completed last year at the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, and sources said a set of guidelines for seminaries may follow.
In January, the same congregation examined proposed guidelines on psychological testing for seminary candidates. Church officials view homosexuality as a potential problem that could be disclosed by such testing.
Last year, a top Vatican doctrinal official spoke of the negative effects of homosexuality within the priesthood and said: “The Holy See views this as a very serious problem and is determined to take steps to correct it.”
The issue was raised again in early March when Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told The New York Times that “people with [homosexual] inclinations just cannot be ordained.”
“That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality,” he said. “But you cannot be in this field.”
In response to questions by Catholic News Service, NavarroValls declined to elaborate on his comments. He said he did not want to draw more attention to this topic, especially while U.S. church leaders were dealing with the more immediate problem of sex abuse by clergy.
Yet many at the Vatican see the two issues as related — if not causally, then at least circumstantially. Most publicized cases of sex abuse by clergy against minors have involved homosexual acts.
Church officials, who asked not to be named, said the Vatican was not trying to impose an arbitrary norm against homosexuals, but was trying to make “prudential decisions” based on individual cases at the seminary level. They noted that the Vatican views the issue as mainly dealing with future priests, not those already ordained.
As for objections that screening homosexuals would violate their rights, the sources said the priest-hood was a question of vocation or divine grace, not human rights. In the Church's view, no one has a “right” to be ordained, they said.
Some Church officials have questioned whether some ordinations might even be considered invalid, when a homosexual who did not intend to renounce practicing homosexual acts accepted ordination as if he did. But the sources said that is not how the Vatican plans to approach the issue. For one thing, the validity of orders is a thorny church law question that would in turn raise pastoral problems — such as the legitimacy of past sacramental acts carried out by a priest whose ordination was judged invalid.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are a grave sin against chastity and that the homosexual orientation is “intrinsically disordered.”
In an interview in 2001 with CNS, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, explained why Church leaders view a homosexual orientation as a potential problem in a seminarian.
Archbishop Bertone said that while the homosexual inclination is not sinful in itself, it “evokes moral concern” because it is a strong temptation to actions that “are always in themselves evil.”
He defined the homosexual inclination as “a temptation that, for whatever reason, has become so predominant in a person's life as to become a force shaping the entire outlook of the person.”
“Persons with a homosexual inclination should not be admitted to the seminary,” Archbishop Bertone said.
In 1961, a Vatican document on the selection of candidates to the priesthood said much the same thing. The instruction was issued by the then-Sacred Congregation for Religious and concerned those entering religious orders.
“Those affected by the perverse inclination to homosexuality or pederasty should be excluded from religious vows and ordination,” it said. Community life and priestly ministry would constitute a “grave danger” or temptation for these people.
The document recommended that any person with serious unresolved sexual problems be screened out, saying that the chastity and celibacy required by religious and priestly life would constitute for them a “continuous heroic act and a painful martyrdom.”
The 1961 document has never been abrogated, officials said. But now, the Vatican is considering a reformulation of these principles, so that the message gets through more clearly to local churches.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Thavis ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Thanksgiving for God's Blessings DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II was unable to attend the weekly general audience on March 6 due to an arthritic condition in his right knee. However, the meditation that he had prepared on Psalm 65 for the gathering was read to the audience on his behalf. Afterwards, the Pope appeared at the window of his study for about three minutes to greet pilgrims hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
“Psalm 65 actually has a broader structure where two different themes are intertwined,” the Pope explained. The first part, he said, develops a historic theme that highlights God's forgiveness and the divine intimacy that this affords repentant sinners. The second part develops a cosmic theme that emphasizes God's power over creation, including the power to “wipe out chaos and evil in the world and in history” and to overcome the moral evil in people's lives.
Finally, the psalm end with a charming description of springtime, “full of freshness, ablaze with color, and replete with joyful voices,” which recalls God's loving care for his people and the blessings he bestows on them. Springtime represents new life for those who have experienced forgiveness. “As the earth is revived in springtime through the work of the Creator, so, too, man rises from his sin through the work of the Redeemer,” the Holy Father noted.
Our journey through the psalms of Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours now leads us to a hymn that captures our attention because of the charming picture of springtime it presents in its last part (Psalm 65:10-14), a scene that is full of freshness, ablaze with color and replete with joyful voices.
Psalm 65 actually has a broader structure where two different themes are intertwined. First of all, a historic theme emerges where God forgives our sins and warmly welcomes us in his midst (see verses 2-5). Then, reference is made to a cosmic theme where God confronts the mountains and seas (see verses 6-9a). Finally, the description of spring is developed (see verses 9b-14). In the Near East, with its sunny and arid terrain, fertile rain is the expression of the Lord's faithfulness to his creation (see Psalm 104:13-16). In the Bible, creation is where humanity dwells and sin is an attack against the world's order and perfection. Conversion and forgiveness, however, restore integrity and harmony to the cosmos.
The Joy of Repentance
The first part of the psalm takes place inside the Temple of Zion. The people gather there, in their moral depravity, to ask God to deliver them from evil (see Psalm 65:2-4a). Once their sins have been forgiven, they feel welcomed by God, close to him, and ready to be seated at his banquet table in order to take part in a celebration of divine intimacy (see verses 4b-5).
The Lord who dwells in the Temple is then portrayed in glorious and cosmic terms. Indeed, as the psalmist says, you are the “hope of all the ends of the earth and of far distant islands … you set up the mountains by your might. You still the roaring of the seas, the roaring of the waves … Distant peoples stand in awe of your marvels” from east to west (verses 6-9).
Master of Creation
At the heart of this celebration of God the Creator, we find an event that we would like to highlight: The Lord succeeds in taming and silencing the roaring waters of the sea, which symbolize chaos in the Bible — the opposite of the order found in creation (see Job 38:8-11). This is a way of exalting God's victory not only over nothingness, but also over evil. For this reason, the psalmist also associates the “roaring of the seas” and the “roaring of their waves” with the “tumult of the peoples” (see Psalm 65:8), which is the rebellion of the proud.
St. Augustine comments on this in a very effective way: “The sea is the figure of the present world: bitter with saltiness, rocked by storms, a place where men, in their perverse and unbridled greed and lust, are like fish that devour one another. Look at this stormy, cruel and bitter sea with its waves! Let us not behave like this, brothers, because the Lord is our hope to the ends of the earth” (Esposizione sui Salmi, Roma, 1990, p. 475).
The conclusion that the psalm suggests is simple. The same God who wipes out chaos and evil in the world and in history can conquer and forgive the sin and malice that the psalmist bears within himself and that he presents in the Temple, certain of God's cleansing action.
God's Loving Care
At this point, other waters enter the scene, those of life and fertility that bathe the earth in spring and represent new life for the faithful who have experienced forgiveness. As we have already noted, the final verses of the psalm (see Psalm 65:10-14) are beautiful and rich in meaning. God waters the earth, cracked by dryness and the winter ice, by pouring down rain. The Lord is like a farmer (see John 15:1), who makes the grain grow and the grass sprout through his labor. He prepares the earth, drenches its furrows, levels its ridges, and waters every part of his field.
The psalmist uses 10 verbs to describe this loving action of the Creator on the earth, which is transformed into a sort of living creature. Indeed, the works of creation “cheer and sing for joy” (Psalm 65:14). Three verbs associated with clothing are rather noteworthy in this regard: “the hills are robed with joy. The pastures are clothed with flocks, the valleys blanketed with grain” (verses 13-14). The image he presents is that of pastures dotted by the whiteness of sheep; hills that are girded — probably with vines — that are a sign of joy because their wine “gladdens our hearts” (Psalm 104:15); valleys that are blanketed with the golden mantle of wheat. Verse 12 also refers to adornments, which make us think of the wreaths that were placed on the heads of guests at festive banquets (see Isaiah 28:1,5).
God's Saving Grace
Together, all creatures turn to their Creator and King, as though they are in a procession where they are dancing, singing, praising and praying. Once again nature becomes an eloquent symbol of God's action: it is a page that is open to everyone, ready to manifest the message that the Creator traced on it, because “from the greatness and beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (Wisdom 13:5; see Romans 1:20). Theological reflection and poetic license blend together in this lyrical song to become adoration and praise.
However, the psalmist looks forward throughout his song to an intense encounter where creation and redemption become one. As the earth is revived in springtime through the work of the Creator, so, too, man rises from his sin through the work of his Redeemer. In this way, creation and history are under the caring and saving gaze of the Lord, who conquers the roaring, destructive waters and gives us water that purifies us, makes us fruitful and quenches our thirst. Indeed, the Lord “heals the broken-hearted, binds up their wounds,” but also “covers the heavens with clouds, provides rain for the earth, makes grass sprout on the mountains” (Psalm 147:3,8).
Thus, this psalm is a song about God's grace. Commenting on this psalm, St. Augustine reminds us of this unique and transcendent gift: “The Lord God says to you in your heart: I am your wealth. Do not go after what the world promises, but after what the Creator of the world promises! Pay attention to what God promises, if you will observe justice; disdain what man promises in an effort to keep you from justice. Hence, do not go after what the world promises. Rather, consider that which the Creator of the world promises” (Esposizione sui Salmi, Roma 1990, p. 481).
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Mexicans Ponder Ambiguous High-Court Abortion Ruling DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:MEXICO CITY — On July 30, when Pope John Paul II visits Mexico to canonize Juan Diego before a predicted crowd of 5 million people, he will have to address an issue he never faced in any of his four previous trips: the de facto legalization of abortion in Mexico.
Mexico's Supreme Court declined in late January to support a challenge by Mexico's federal government against a Mexico City law allowing abortion in cases of fetal deformity, rape and danger to the health of the mother. But in the same ruling, the court for the first time acknowledged that a constitutional right to life exists from the time of conception.
Mexico City, known as the “Distrito Federal” (Federal District), has a significant level of autonomy and its mayor is nicknamed “the little president” for his independent power. In August 2000, the city approved legislation known as the “Robles law” — named after current mayor Rosario Robles — that legalizes abortion in cases involving danger to the health of the woman, fetal deformity and rape. It also reduced from five to three years the maximum prison sentence for women who illegally obtained an abortion.
The legislation was put on hold, however, after President Vicente Fox's federal government challenged it before the Supreme Court. But in its Jan. 29 ruling, the court held that while fetuses have a constitutional right to life, birth defects “absolved and excused” abortions.
Stated the justices, “We are not authorizing or encouraging abortions. Abortion will continue to be considered a crime; those who commit [abortions] are breaking the law, but they will simply not be punished.”
Bishops’ View
Mexico's bishops are highlighting the ruling's positive elements. In a Feb. 17 statement, the Family Pastoral Commission of the Mexican Bishops’ Conference said, “For the first time in Mexican history, the 11 Ministers [judges] of the Supreme Court almost unanimously recognize that there is a human life from the moment of conception and therefore, the conceived child is a human person with full rights.”
A source within the bishops’ conference, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the bishops recognize that by not striking down the Robles Law the court has allowed a dangerous door to remain open. They say that's outweighed by the fact that the ruling acknowledges the sanctity of human life from the moment of conception. (Unlike other Latin American countries, that principle is not clearly stated in Mexico's Constitution.)
“For many years, pro-life organizations have feared the legal void created by a Constitution that does not establish clearly and unequivocally the sanctity of human life,” said the source. “That is why many pro-life organizations were looking to include explicit references to the right to life from the moment of conception in several state constitutions.”
Three years ago, in fact, the state of Guanajato approved a reform to its Constitution recognizing the sanctity of life from the moment of conception. Fox was the state governor at the time.
Church leaders believe the Jan. 29 ruling should pave the way for similar laws in other states. Bishop Francisco Chavolla Ramos of Matamoros, head of the bishops’ pro-life office, said that the judgment “is a clear statement that establishes a new and definitive legal framework for any future state legislation.”
According to the bishops’ conference source, “the bishops believe that the Robles law is a ‘guerrilla fight’ that must be fought, but the legal war has been won unexpectedly, thanks to the court ruling.”
Bishop Chavolla Ramos agrees with that assessment. “It is now up to Mexico City's legislators to review the [Robles] law and make it coherent with the court ruling, but that is a discussion that must take place at the legislature,” the bishop said.
Some pro-life groups have taken a less favorable view of the Supreme Court ruling. “The court basically said ‘killing babies is illegal but just go ahead,’ thus renouncing their duty to act in coherence with their own convictions,” said Maribel Germ·n, a leader of the Red Familia (Family Network) organization, one of 50 pro-family organizations that staged a sit-in protest after the decision.
Added Guadalupe Arellano of the AsociaciÛn Nacional CÌvica Femenina, “If the Court admits that human life is the first right that must be recognized, how can it calmly accept a local legislation violating that ruling?”
The 50 pro-family groups have begun a legal initiative to force the Supreme Court to reverse its own decision. They argue that it is inherently contradictory to affirm the constitutional right to life from conception while at the same time allowing abortions.
As well, Miguel Angel Torrijos, a federal legislator from Fox's ruling Partido de AcciÛn Nacional party, has announced that members of his party and the Green party have filed a case against the Supreme Court before the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, an autonomous agency of the Organization of American States based in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Said Torrijos, “Mexico's Supreme Court has violated the Constitution and has practically legalized abortion in this country. By allowing abortion in cases of deformity, the justices of the court are discriminating against the rights of the handicapped.”
Pro-Life Unity
Despite the difference of opinion between the bishops and the more militant Mexican pro-life organizations, there has not been an open split among pro-life ranks similar to the one in Ireland over how to vote in that country's March 6 abortion referendum.
“There are obviously different interpretations regarding what has happened and how to proceed from now on,” Torrijos said. “But I find these differences healthy. They have created two different courses of action and we don't know which one will finally work.”
Said Torrijos, “The only important thing is to make sure that abortion is illegal in all Mexican territory, now and always.”
Alejandro Berm˙dez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermudez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Holocaust Film Causes Uproar Across Europe
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,Feb. 27 — “Amen,” a film about a Nazi officer who tried to get the Vatican to intervene in the Holocaust, even as he approved gas shipments to concentration camps, is causing a firestorm of controversy in Europe, the French news agency reported.
German bishops have denounced the film, which claims Pope Pius XII did nothing in the face of the Nazis’ hoped-for elimination of the Jews, as an “outright defamation and a distortion of history.” The bishops said the “numerous people who, within the Catholic Church, risked and lost their lives to fight National Socialism must feel posthumously scorned.”
The film will be released in English-language markets under the TITLE “Eyewitness.”
Agence France-Presse itself seemed to pass judgment on Pope Pius. The film, it said, highlights “one of the most notorious chapters in the history of the Catholic Church: Pope Pius XII's refusal to defend Jews or condemn their extermination.”
But the Paris daily Le Figaro published a defense of the Pope, saying he admonished the Nazis and aided the Jews in his own way, through “thundering declarations,” diplomatic action and “quiet assistance” to Jewish refugees.
Numerous historians and Jewish leaders have also rejected the charges against Pius XII as being entirely without substance.
Swedish Study Finds IVF Presents More Problems
But the study, published in the British medical journal, said the risks are due largely to the high frequency of twin pregnancies, low birth weight and premature births among “test tube babies” and recommended that only one embryo should be implanted in such procedures.
That's unfortunate for the other embryos that are ordinarily created during IVF. But they are normally put in a frozen state of limbo anyway, a circumstance that the Church has condemned as an offense against human dignity.
IVF babies also may be subject to developmental delay, impairment and handicaps, the Swedish study said. It did not rule out the possibility that problems may arise due to the IVF procedure itself.
Orthodox Protesters Want Lenin Out, Religion In
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, March 6 — A group calling itself “Mothers Grieving for Holy Russia and the Salvation of Children” called for the removal of Vladimir Lenin's corpse from Red Square, a ban on advertising that encourages sin, and religious instruction in schools, the news agency reported.
About 100 Orthodox, mostly women, rallied March 6 in front of the Russian Parliament. One organizer said Lenin killed 320,000 priests and that removal of his body from the tomb where it has been since 1924 is “the will of God and the Christian thing to do.”
The debate about burying the Communist leader's remains has quieted down since Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was opposed to it.
Mexico Arson Turns Attention to Religious Dispute
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 4 — A group of homes belonging to Indian Protestants in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, were set ablaze, flaring religious tensions in the area.
Police were investigating, but a spokesman said the arsonists were likely Catholics angered by the presence of a vocal Protestant evangelical community, the wire service reported. Clashes between the groups have become common in Chiapas since 1997, when hundreds of locals began converting to evangelical Christianity.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Columnist Says Advantage Goes to Pro-Abortion DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Ireland's pro-life referendum, held March 6, has been lost by the tiniest of margins. Just 0.8%, or 10,500 votes, separated those in favor of the proposal from those against it. From here on in, every legislative and constitutional initiative will belong to the pro-abortion side.
The tragedy is that it could have been won, and handsomely, had the pro-life movement in Ireland not been split. In support of the government proposal was the main pro-life group, the Pro-Life Campaign, as well as Family & Life, and most importantly of all, the Catholic bishops with the backing of Rome. Against it, was a proliferation of smaller pro-life groups, chief among them the Mother and Child Campaign, plus Ireland, main conservative politician, Dana Rosemary Scallon, the singer who once hosted a show on EWTN.
Dana and her allies campaigned against the proposal because they felt it did not go far enough, and because they felt it actually withdrew some the legal protection the unborn child currently enjoys.
The main aim of the measure was to rescind the X-case decision of 1992 in which the Irish Supreme Court judged that where a woman threatened suicide, and could win the backing of a psychologist, she could have an abortion in Ireland.
All Irish pro-life campaigners were agreed that once you allow psychological grounds for abortion, you soon end up with abortion-on-demand.
The proposal was also concerned with defining abortion for the purposes of criminal law. It said that abortion was the intentional destruction of human life after implantation in the womb. This led some pro-lifers to believe that human life between conception and implantation in the womb was being left legally exposed. They thought the way was being paved for embryo experimentation and other similar horrors.
The arguments that raged back and forth would take a much longer article than this to explain. Suffice it to say that those pro-life campaigners opposed to the government proposal were, in effect, saying to the mostly conservative Irish hierarchy:
Either you are mistaken in supporting this measure, or you are engaged in a massive moral compromise. Neither of these positions ever seemed very plausible.
In the end, enough loyal and faithful Catholics believed what Dana was telling them to make the difference on the day. Who can say how many, but certainly enough to account for the 10,500 vote margin by which the measure was defeated. The true figure was probably several times that number. Also, anecdotal evidence suggests that many pro-life voters stayed at home because they were simply confused about the whole thing.
There was, however, no split, and no confusion, on the pro-choice side. They could see clearly that what was on offer was a pro-life measure, one that would firmly close the door on abortion in Ireland for years to come.
They ran a skillful campaign in which they tapped deeply into the fears of young women and their parents. They asked voters to trust women. They said we must not abandon “raped, pregnant and suicidal women.” They said that if passed, the measure could result in the “Morning-after pill” being banned.
Crucially, they pointed to a provision in the proposal that would send to prison for up to 12 years anyone who had an abortion, or who assisted in one. This angered and frightened huge numbers of women. What was never properly appreciated is that the present sentence is life in prison. Therefore those who voted against the proposal out of fear of the 12-year sentence voted, in effect, to retain a much longer one.
The Yes side in this campaign were never able to properly get their message across. All of the main media, including the public broadcaster, RTE, were against the proposal. They consistently played up anything that benefited the No side, and played down anything that might have benefited the Yes side.
There were only a handful of live radio and television debates. The Yes side usually did well in these. Had there been more, they would probably have won the day.
The vote showed a country deeply divided between its liberal urban centers, and its more conservative heartland. In fact, the political map of Ireland post-the-referendum looks remarkably like the political map of America post-the-presidential election. That showed a handful of blue, Democratic clusters in the big urban centers where al Gore carried the day, and then a huge red swathe across the rest of the country where George W. Bush prevailed.
Politically, Ireland now looks exactly like that. Dublin is liberal. So are three or four other big towns. The rest of the country is conservative.
What of the future? There is no chance whatever that pro-lifers will get the strictest sort of amendment we want, or if we did, that the electorate would accept it.
The bishops and the Pro-Life Campaign have no hope of being given a further chance either. So as I say, the initiative is with the pro-abortion side, and pro-lifers are now engaged in a rear-guard action. This will prevent abortion-on-demand entering the country today or tomorrow, but thanks to this defeat, it is probably 10 to 15 years closer than it might otherwise have been.
David Quinn is editoe of theIrish Catholic.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Make the Internet Ours DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Archbishop John Foley, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, released “The Church and the Internet” document Feb. 22. In it, the council offered practical recommendations to Catholics in various fields of endeavor. An excerpt follows.
To Church leaders: People in leadership positions in all sectors of the Church need to understand the media, apply this understanding in formulating pastoral plans for social communications together with concrete policies and programs in this area, and make appropriate use of media. Where necessary, they should receive media education themselves; in fact, the Church would be well served if more of those who hold offices and perform functions in her name received communication training.
This applies to the Internet as well as to the older media. Church leaders are obliged to use the full potential of the ‘computer age’ to serve the human and transcendent vocation of every person, and thus to give glory to the Father from whom all good things come. They ought to employ this remarkable technology in many different aspects of the Church's mission, while also exploring opportunities for ecumenical and interreligious cooperation in its use.
A special aspect of the Internet, as we have seen, concerns the sometimes confusing proliferation of unofficial Web sites labeled ‘Catholic’. A system of voluntary certification at the local and national levels under the supervision of representatives of the magisterium might be helpful in regard to material of a specifically doctrinal or catechetical nature. The idea is not to impose censorship but to offer Internet users a reliable guide to what expresses the authentic position of the Church.
To pastoral personnel: Priests, deacons, religious, and lay pastoral workers should have media education to increase their understanding of the impact of social communications on individuals and society and help them acquire a manner of communicating that speaks to the sensibilities and interests of people in a media culture. Today this clearly includes training regarding the Internet, including how to use it in their work. They can also profit from Web sites offering theological updating and pastoral suggestions.
As for Church personnel directly involved in media, it hardly needs saying that they must have professional training. But they also need doctrinal and spiritual formation, since in order to witness to Christ it is necessary to encounter him oneself and foster a personal relationship with him through prayer, the Eucharist and sacramental reconciliation, reading and reflection on God's word, the study of Christian doctrine, and service to others.
To educators and catechists: The Pastoral Instruction Communio et Progressio spoke of the urgent duty of Catholic schools to train communicators and recipients of social communications in relevant Christian principles. The same message has been repeated many times. In the age of the Internet, with its enormous outreach and impact, the need is more urgent than ever.
Catholic universities, colleges, schools, and educational programs at all levels should provide courses for various groups — seminarians, priests, religious brothers and sisters, and lay leaders .. teachers, parents, and students — as well as more advanced training in communications technology, management, ethics, and policy issues for individuals preparing for professional media work or decision-making roles, including those who work in social communications for the Church. Furthermore, we commend the issues and questions mentioned above to the attention of scholars and researchers in relevant disciplines in Catholic institutions of higher learning.
To parents: For the sake of their children, as well as for their own sakes, parents must learn and practice the skills of discerning viewers and listeners and readers, acting as models of prudent use of media in the home. As far as the Internet is concerned, children and young people often are more familiar with it than their parents are, but parents still are seriously obliged to guide and supervise their children in its use. If this means learning more about the Internet than they have up to now, that will be all to good.
Parental supervision should include making sure that filtering technology is used in computers available to children when that is financially and technically feasible, in order to protect them as much as possible from pornography, sexual predators, and other threats. Unsupervised exposure to the Internet should not be allowed. Parents and children should dialogue together about what is seen and experienced in cyberspace; sharing with other families who have the same values and concerns will also be helpful. The fundamental parental duty here is to help children become discriminating, responsible Internet users and not addicts of the Internet, neglecting contact with their peers and with nature itself.
----- EXCERPT: From the Vatican ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Babies for Life
I read Ireland's Moment of Truth? Two Views on the Abortion Referendum (March 3-9) last night. I wondered why we are missing one of the most effective arguments against abortion. Defending the unborn is our first defense of truth. But what about the other lives involved? Who is speaking up for the mothers? Abortion doesn't help women; it hurts them.
The Finland study on suicide will cut down the rationale of Ireland's suicide clause. The lowest rate of suicide was with women who had given birth. The highest rate was found in women who aborted. It seems having a baby gives a reason to live, but destroying your baby doesn't.
As program coordinator of Project Rachel for the Archdiocese of Kansas City, I see firsthand what abortion does to women, and this devastation must stop — for the sake of the babies and mothers!
PAT KLAUSNER
Kansas City, Kansas
Voucher Values
Regarding Bush Plan: Tax Credits, Not Vouchers (Feb. 24-March 2):
There are good arguments for vouchers. As a former public-school teacher, I can agree that the public system has a deeply entrenched inertia that will probably change only in the direct challenge of significant competition. If the public system were good, or even adequate, inertia might be a good. Stability is a good.
But the public system is a disaster, and worse than a disaster, because it inflicts disability upon those it is supposed to serve.
I want to promote Catholic education, whether or not the government chooses to help us financially. We do not support Catholic education as we should in the Church here in America, and that must change. If the price tag to us is cut by voucher subsidies, well and good. But, whatever the cost, it must be paid. The cross was not cheap for Christ. Christianity is not cheap for any who would follow him.
There is the issue more fundamental than money, however, that must be addressed: the secularization you described in our Catholic schools. Many of our Catholic schools have all but lost their Catholic identity. Many have become adequate private alternatives to the public system, but this is not their vocation. A Catholic school is called to be far more than a mere alternative to the public system. It is no wonder that financial support dwindles in the pews: Those who are truly concerned for Catholic education are conflicted. The Catholic education that our support is providing is a troubling mixture that is often far from the consistent, solid and substantial formation in the truth that our children deserve.
Our Catholic schools need to regain their Catholic uniqueness and identity. Our teachers need more than public certification and a personal formation in the faith that stopped for them in adolescence. In fact, speaking from experience, most training toward state certification is at best a waste of time and money and, at worst, malformation and disinformation in the latest politically correct myths. The crucially important and essential requirements for good Catholic teachers should be designed and evaluated by well-formed Catholic educators, not by secular experts.
Vouchers might help Catholic education. Then again, without true reformation in our entire Catholic system, they might make no real difference at all.
THOMAS RICHARD
Norwich, Connecticut
Perpetrator Priests Pay
Plenty
Why, in our Catholic papers at least, do we not read about the internal judicial system of the Catholic hierarchy? You and umpteen million other newspapers leave the impression that an errant priest suffers no consequences at all. The truth is that they are called in to confess their wrongdoings (outside and inside of confession), they are reprimanded, they are counseled and, yes, they are moved to a parish where they can do the least harm while they are also sent to a psychiatrist and/or other doctors. They are even sent to monasteries where they can be rehabilitated (tantamount to prison!).
I agree it is all geared to save the sinner and does nothing for the victim, but the point is, they do not go scot-free. This was always acceptable before in a world where molestation was something that just happened … and, like date rape, was lightly considered. It was something you got over. Attitudes and knowledge of psychological damage have brought out the horror of the wrong and the Church must tighten its scrutiny. However, her job is still to save the sinner, and she does this very well.
CHARLOTTE HUTCHENS
Ralston, Oklahoma
Discipline Makes Disciples
I was delighted and relieved to see Dr. Ray Guarendi encouraging parents to not apologize for being parents (Asking for Trouble, Family Matters, March 3-9). He stressed that parents should gently, yet firmly, demand and expect cooperation from their children.
Our culture has slowly been losing confidence in the rights of authoritative teachers. This forfeiting of fatherly and motherly strength has left too many young people unchallenged and less than respectful and obedient to parents and God. Discipline and disciple, after all, come from the same root word.
BROTHER MARIO PARISI, OSB
Latrobe, Pennsylvania
Hard Labor for Evildoers
I would like to add something to the discussion about Justice Antonin Scalia and the death penalty (Letters, March 3-9). The question here is not only the effectiveness of preventing crime; it is also a question of justice. When someone commits a particularly atrocious crime, justice is called for, not a mere prevention of further crime.
Consider the grotesque instance of Richard Speck, murderer of eight student nurses in 1966. His victims and their loved ones are virtual non-persons in the memory of society, but we know Mr. Speck quite well. He spent the final years of his consecutive life terms doing drugs, growing breasts and starring in homemade porno movies wherein he let himself get sexually degraded by his male lover. That he was not sentenced to die, fine — but he should have had to spend the rest of his life at hard labor, without any chance at parole.
The same should apply to every other criminal guilty of comparably grave evils. Albert Camus, a zealous opponent of capital punishment, wanted to see it replaced with hard labor; so does Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News channel.
I ask respectfully of our great Pope, would he find such an alternative to the death penalty acceptable? Would the editor of the Register and all other Catholics who oppose the death penalty? Finally, however hackneyed it might sound, the greatest share of our compassion and concern should go to the victims of these particularly horrible crimes. I am all for some measure of mercy toward even the worst criminals, but not if the result is neglecting their victims — which is exactly what happens all too often.
JOHN LORANGER
Sparks, Nevada
Thank you so much for the excellent article by Daria Sockey on the Redwall book series and the related interview of the author, Brian Jacques (A Trip to Redwall Abbey, March 10-16).
Our children love the series as well. If I could add one additional point, the books are available on audiotape as well. They are read by the author, and the various English accents, dialects and personalities are captivating. We listened to an entire three-book Redwall set, borrowed from our local library, on our drive to and from the March for Life with six of our children this last January. They didn't want to stop unless it was the end of a chapter and we practically had to start the tape before we started the van.
DAVE NORTON
Kokomo, Indiana
The Pope, Chris West and Marriage
I have read the latest letter regarding the writings of Christopher West (Yes to West's Eloquence, No to His Hyperbole, March 3-9) and probably all of the preceding articles and letters. You are to be commended for giving this topic much attention — it [reflects] a most important teaching of the Holy Father, I think.
It is from this point that I think those commenting on Mr. West's writings are missing something big. There is a place for scholars to work out the nits on the teachings of a [pope]. But for those of your readers who are not familiar with John Paul II's teaching on the theology of the body — or West's book and tapes commenting on this teaching — are being deprived of something very special and most needed. That being what the Holy Father has said, and is saying, about human sexuality and the vocations of celibacy and marriage.
The Holy Father has given Christianity and the world a whole new insight and vision into human sexuality that goes right at the misguided thinking offered by the secular world. His teaching is practical for every couple! His wisdom has given my wife and me a whole new way of understanding our marriage vows, the marriage embrace and the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. We have been married 32 years, yet this thinking had been absent for most of those years. Talk about suffering — and I know we are not alone.
Hey, can we refocus and discuss the revolutionary message of the Holy Father's theology of the body and how this message can truly help couples live their marriages in truth and joy? As I understand it, the theology of the body is the New Evangelization: By couples living this teaching, our Catholic families will see a great transformation to the joy of Christian living that will change lives and will even be the source of growth in vocations.
So, cease the banter about where West may not have been as rigorous a scholar as some think he might have been. Rather, please bring the laity the message of the Pope and change lives.
MICHAEL FAULKNER
Middletown, New Jersey
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: The Real Mr. Rael DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:I am writing with regard to the picture accompanying your article Senate Gearing Up for a Battle Over Human Cloning (March 3-9).
According to the caption, the picture is of Canadian Claude Rael, the founder of Clonaid, the first company to offer a public cloning service. Your readers deserve to know more about this person.
Actually, Mr. Rael (whose real name is Vorilhon) is also the founder of the Raelian Movement, an odd UFO cult founded on the belief that earthlings are actually the children of aliens by human mothers. Mr. Rael himself claims to have been visited by aliens, who revealed the facts about his ancestry to him. In his book The Final Message, Mr. Rael claims that all life forms on Earth were created by advanced extraterrestrial scientists, using advanced genetic manipulation techniques — the source, it would seem, of the Raelians’ interest in human cloning. They claim that their efforts to produce human clones are at the direction of the aliens, whom they expect to return within the next few decades.
Mr. Rael and his followers cannot be considered legitimate participants in the debate about human cloning. Instead, they should be left to the peculiar world of supermarket checkout tabloids, where they belong.
EDWARD T. MECHMANN
Yonkers, New York
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward T. Mechmann ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Look for Trouble When Ceasar Pays the Church DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:The statistics are appalling.
Close to 15 million young people have fallen prey to drug abuse and crime; 1.5 million children have a father or mother in prison; more than half a million children are in foster care; at least one out of six American families with children lives on an annual income of $17,000 or less. Hundreds of thousands of Americans live on the streets.
“A great and prosperous nation,” President Bush recently exhorted us, “can and must do better.” Accordingly, the president recently endorsed legislation supporting his faith-based initiative, which will funnel about $12 billion in government aid over the next two years to religious institutions that operate social programs for the needy.
Polls show that 75% of Americans support the president's faith-based idea, but many religious leaders refuse to throw their support behind it. Why would religious leaders oppose legislation designed to help fund their charities?
I think the evangelical minister Pat Robertson — sometimes controversial, always colorful as he is — answered this question quite well. “If government provides funding to thousands of faith-based institutions but … demands in return that those institutions give up their unique religious activities [such as prayer, Bible study, worship, etc.],” he said, “then not only the effectiveness of these institutions, but possibly their very raison d'Ítre, may be lost.”
Rev. Robertson was not speaking from speculation, but from experience. Here's an example that illustrates the point he was trying to make.
The Volunteers of America, founded in 1896 and patterned after the Salvation Army, preached the Gospel in prisons, ran free hospitals for the poor and operated rest homes for the elderly. By the 1980s, 40% of the organization's funding came from the government. Respecting the civic nature of the government's assistance, the Volunteers of America have made it a point to clearly distinguish their religious activities from their social programs.
Today they no longer wear military-style uniforms or use job TITLEs emphasizing their militant Pauline spirituality. Instead, their mission is to work toward “a more active role in shaping national policies on human-services issues.” The Volunteers of America recognize that, if they were to evangelize through their works of charity, the government would define their “charity” as a form of religious proselytism. The government, of course, cannot fund such proselytism; that would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …
Should we just say ‘No, thank you’ to government dollars?
Here's another example to consider. Catholic Charities started up in 1910 as a network of Catholic organizations offering works of charity to Catholic families, immigrants and the elderly, all within the context of Catholic spirituality. Today, Catholic Charities gets 64% of its $2.1 billion budget from government funding. Can any religious institution remain independent of governmental control while receiving well over half its funding from the state? The Church needs to discern carefully, in light of the Gospel, if a growing partnership between its works of charity and government funding is in the best interest of its primary mission: to bring the salvation of Christ to souls.
A fundamental, and common, misconception needs to be cleared up. It's easy to think of Christian charities and the government's social programs, such as welfare, as essentially the same thing. They are not. The objective of the government's welfare programs is to promote the common good of the social and temporal order: quality education, better housing, adequate health care, employment, and so on.
The aim of Christian charities is to be a compelling sign of God's love. Through their works of mercy they make God's compassion, mercy, kindness and generosity tangible. It's true that Christian charities contribute to the social good of society by serving the needy. But their number-one priority is not the temporal good of the social order, but to help every human being achieve union with God in Christ Jesus.
To put it another way: Christian charities are, by nature, works of evangelization. What they do and what they are as Christian charities cannot be separated for pragmatic purposes to comply with state or federal regulations to receive government funding.
Another point should be made. Given the religious nature of Christian charities, they should depend on the Christian principle of solidarity for support and not on government funding. Solidarity, understood in a Christian sense, implies the voluntary sharing of spiritual and material goods. The Catechism refers to solidarity as “an eminently Christian virtue … a direct demand of human and Christian brotherhood.”
I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink … In so far as you did this to the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.
President's Bush faith-based initiative deserves credit as a good and noble intention to help our nation's weakest citizens. Nonetheless, the Christian community's past experience with government-Church partnerships reminds Christians today that it would be better to say No, thank you to such a generous, but dangerous, offer.
Legionary Father Andrew McNair teaches at Mater Ecclesiae International Center of Studies in Greenville, Rhode Island.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew McNair ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Faith, Hope, Love - and Lent DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Eternal happiness — our supernatural goal — is so far beyond our wildest hopes for earthly happiness that our merely natural powers catch only the very faintest glimmer of it. How can we strive for something so distant and so difficult? What virtues could possibly carry us so far? How could we begin such a journey in these last days of Lent?
The Church numbers three virtues given to us, by grace, to transform our merely natural powers so that we may strive for our supernatural end: the virtues of faith, hope and love. As St. Paul said, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
What are these virtues, and how do we get them?
Faith Feeds
The Catechism defines faith as “the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself” (No. 1814). Faith is a new and supernatural power that allows us to believe that which is above our ability to grasp using reason alone. It is not an act of the will on our part, but a transformation of the intellect by God.
The profession of faith is the most concise expression of what Christians hold as the truth about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Church. When we recite the profession of faith — We believe in one God … — we are making a declaration about reality, not a statement of wishful thinking or arbitrary preference. We are saying, in effect, that all who believe in many gods or no gods, all who believe the universe was created by an evil god or is merely an accident of chance, all who reject the material aspects of reality as illusory or deride the existence of spirits, are wrong.
Faith isn't merely information, however. The truth revealed to us, and presented in our profession of faith, answers to our deepest desire for happiness. The foundation of that hope is the “one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father” who “came down from heaven,” was “born of the Virgin Mary and became man.” Only through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ can we “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”
Precisely because the truths revealed by God concern our ultimate goal, the bare act of professing our belief in these truths is insufficient. We must act upon them, striving by grace to reach eternal life. Lent is the time when we renew all our efforts in regard to this greatest of goals.
Now that sin has both darkened and weakened our intellect, grasping these truths is a continual struggle. Acting on them is harder still. This struggle is captured in the Greek word for faith, pistis, which also means “trust,” for we must often trust what God has revealed to us as true even when sin has darkened our sight. And we must act accordingly.
So far this Lent, have you …
Fasted from the distractions of television and the computer, and fervently studied sacred Scripture as actually containing the very highest, most important written truth?
Studied, with a prayerful, humble spirit, whatever aspects of Church doctrine you struggle with the most?
Prayed the rosary, with the help of Blessed Virgin Mary, attending carefully to each mystery as actually revealing the profound depths of our salvation?
Been more reverent during Mass, treating both the place of the church and the time of the liturgy as actually sacred?
Trusted in God's providence even amidst sorrows, trials and setbacks, remembering that God sent his only Son to die for our salvation?
Hope Heals
“Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (Catechism, No. 1817). Since it is not enough to know the truth, but we must desire the truth as well, we need the virtue of hope, which transforms our will, lifting it to eternal life as its new goal.
Even on the natural level, our will, the will of a rational being, desires to know the truth about things; it desires happiness. In God, both desires meet, for God is Truth and our union with him is our ultimate happiness. When our will is transformed by grace, we are given a new, supernatural power, so that we hope to know and love God in the union of eternal blessedness, where every longing of the purified heart is filled to overflowing.
But, as with faith, the gift of hope is perfected through struggle, for sin has weakened our will. The greatest enemy of hope, the greatest vice against this grandest of desires, is despair. Thus, during these last days of Lent, we must not only fuel our desire to know and love God the most holy Trinity, but battle against every inclination to despair of reaching that goal.
So far this Lent, have you …
Embraced the sacrament of penance as truly mediating God's forgiveness and the grace to persevere, even though your struggles against your failings seem hopelessly ineffective?Not given in to excessive worry or gloom amidst difficulties, but strived to manifest the real joy bought by Christ in his death and resurrection?
Meditated on the love of God manifested in Christ, and in the lives of the saints, as the spiritual food that feeds the virtue of hope?
Love Liberates
“Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God” (Catechism, No. 1822).
Love is greatest of all virtues because it, alone, abides forever. When we are face-to-face with God, and no longer looking “in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), we will have no need for faith any longer. Nor will we hope for the God who is present. But love remains always.
Contrary to popular belief, love is not easy. It demands that we love as God has loved us; therefore, our love must be purified. Given the effect of sin on our will, such love entails great struggle and sacrifice.
“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). Such love as this needs grace.
We can appreciate the difficulties of love if we look at love not in the abstract, but in particular, as everyday acts — acts which should be a part of our Lenten strivings:
Love means being patient with the demands of our children, especially our most demanding children.
Love means being kind to our spouses when we would rather be cross.
Love is meek, not pushy or arrogant; it is humble, knowing that God himself took the form of a slave to snatch us from the cauldron of our own sins.
Love cannot abide where there is irritation, sarcasm or anger.
Love believes all things proposed by faith, hopes for salvation by the blood of Christ and endures all things that lead to eternal salvation.
Easter in our Grasp
As Christians, we know that our lives are measured by this great cycle, this yearly renewal of faith, hope and love that occurs during the seasons of Lent and Easter.
For each of us, the cycle will one day end. In our own passion, we too shall meet death in our Lent of Lents.
May all that we do, this and every Lent, be a preparation for that Good Friday — so that, by grace, we might rise to the Easter that never ends.
Benjamin Wiker teaches philosophy of science at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Benjamin Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Afghan Women's New Source of Pressure: Western Feminists DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Maybe you've seen them on the lapels of feminists since Sept. 11. Where others have taken to wearing an American-flag lapel pin, folks like Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority and frequent guest on political talk shows, have taken to sporting a square, blue swatch of fabric.
It's supposed to represent a burka, the veil many Muslim women wear. The Feminist Online gift shop sells “Burqua Swatches” for $5 apiece.
When the Taliban was in control of Afghanistan, women had no choice but to wear a burka any time they went out in public. That's not the case anymore. Yet some Western — mostly American — women insist on continuing to wear the burka swatch.
Why?
Evidently, Western feminists are irritated over the fact that many Muslim women want to wear the burka.
Thus this strange and ironic twist of events: Where the Taliban once told Afghan women that they had to wear the cloak, American feminists would tell them that they have to stop.
In both cases, the women are pressured on their choice of dress by someone who has a strong opinion on the matter. Someone other than themselves.
We should pause for a second before we go on. The Taliban was an evil, murderous regime. It persecuted the people of Afghanistan, harbored the men who killed so many Americans and changed our lives forever on Sept. 11.
But the burka should not be a symbol of the Taliban. And the West should not try to impose a burka ban on the East.
Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York strolled onto the floor of the House of Representatives recently, donning a head-to-ankle burka, complete with mesh panel to conceal her face. The scene smacked of 1960s-era, “burn-the-bra”-type feminist activism. As such, it would be easy enough to write off as a cheap, loud publicity stunt, aimed more at gaining attention for the activist than the cause.
But it's not that simple.
Take for instance, the legitimate complaint that women have been prohibited from attending schools in Afghanistan. Westerners would like to see —some even want the United States to demand — that women attend the same classes as men.
There are a few things to realize here. First of all, it is in many of those classrooms where the young men are learning to hate the West so passionately. And rewind a bit, too, to consider why women wore the burka in the first place.
Contrary to popular Western belief, veiling is not a Koranic requirement. In fact, historically it is more a symbol of class rank. It's been said, though, that if you ask 500 women what the veil is about, you will get 500 answers.
In fact, as you travel through the Arab world, you will find different laws and customs involving the burka. In Turkey, veiling is illegal. In Iran during the reign of the Shah, women would wear burkas as a form of protest against the ruling regime.
Ironically, there is something actually very feminist about the burka. Some women like to wear it because it helps keep men from making unwanted advances. That's one reason why many Muslim women — particularly the more modern ones, who find themselves among men in school, at work, shopping, or in the streets — choose to wear the burka.
Even under the Taliban, women in rural parts of Afghanistan would often never wear the burka, because most days they would be among only relatives. (Cousin-to-cousin marriages are common among fundamentalist Muslims, so as to keep extended families together.)
For others, there's something liberating about the burka, about having a clothing choice that affords a defense against being sized up according to physical appearance.
Thanks to the burka, many women are better-able to be seen as equals in classrooms, offices and markets; they know that they will have a greater chance to be valued for their gifts and abilities rather than their looks — to be appreciated for their depth as a person rather than ogled (or not) for their superficial appearances.
It's important for Westerners to “get” the veil, and not only in the interest of tolerance.
It is in our best interest as Americans to better understand the East. And here's hoping that swatch-sporting Western liberals will finally calm down about what they feel the burka represents. There's no point in micromanaging women's choices in Afghanistan and whatever other countries the war on terror takes us to.
The burka itself is not worth waging war for — or on. Not only is it deeply entrenched in Arab culture, but it also represents something singular to every woman who chooses to wear it.
Thanks all the same, Ms. Smeal, but here's one American woman who believes America's focus needs to be on winning the war on terror. And that using the present situation to advance our pet causes, whatever they may be, only distract us from that life-and-death objective.
We're in a war that has nothing to do with social engineering and everything to do with countering terrorism before it has a chance to do more damage on a mass scale. We're fighting not only for women and children, but for men, too.
It's time the Feminist Majority moved on to a new cause — or at least a new lapel pin.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online and an associate editor of National Review magazine.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Bible Catholics DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:In door-to-door mission encounters, one subject that often comes up is the Bible. What do you say to a Protestant about the Bible? How about a Catholic whose faith has started to slack?
The next time you're discussing the Bible with a Protestant, you might ask him to explain to you how they got the Bible.
Remember, Protestants accept Scripture as the only spiritual authority. Evangelical Protestants will often reference 2 Timothy 3:16. Notice that the word “only” is nowhere to be found in this verse. Make sure to point out (always with gentleness and respect — 1 Peter 3:15) that the oldest book of the New Testament (1 Thessalonians) was not written until at least 50 A.D.
During those first years after Christ when there was no New Testament, what authority guided the earliest Christians? There must have been some other authority. Sacred Tradition guided the Church before the New Testament was written and Sacred Tradition guided the Church to officially approve the canon of Scripture we use to this day.
Perhaps a brief history lesson will help.
The Bible is composed of two Testaments — Old and New. The Old Testament Catholics use today was established by 70 Jewish leaders sometime between the years 285 and 246 B.C. These leaders identified 46 books that they believed to be inspired by God. Later, this “canon” (official list) became known as the Septuagint, which means 70.
The canon used by our Protestant brothers and sisters is taken from the Hebrew or Palestinian canon established by Jewish leaders in Palestine around 100 A.D. Primarily because the books Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Baruch, Tobit and 1 and 2 Maccabees (at that time) had no Hebrew counterpart, the Jewish leaders determined that they were not inspired. Recent archaeological discoveries (The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran) have recovered these ancient texts in their original Hebrew. The primary criterion for their rejection has now been eliminated.
Theologically speaking, we can have confidence that all the books of the Bible are truly the inspired Word of God based on the doctrine of sacred Tradition. In 2 Thessalonians, St. Paul tells us to “hold fast to the traditions you were taught by word of mouth or letter.” St. Paul is saying that Sacred Tradition, which is the constant teaching of the Apostles and their successors, has just as much authority as Scripture (Catechism, No. 80-83).
The Church used the authority of Sacred Tradition to determine which books belong in the Bible. The Council of Hippo in 393 A.D. approved the present New Testament and Old Testament Canon of 73 books. This was later affirmed by the Council of Carthage in 397 A.D. and finally by Pope Innocent I in 405. It is from the Church that we get the Bible. What if you're speaking to a Catholic? The same history lesson will be a great help to them. Be sure to point out that Catholics must love both sacred Scripture and sacred Tradition. It is important to develop a hunger for God's Word. St. Jerome said “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
Encourage Catholics to love Scripture. One suggestion is to join a Bible-study group. Or, better yet, start one.
If you want to hunger for and love Scripture but don't seem to have the time or motivation, recognize that “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” You can't make yourself hunger for and love Scripture. It's a gift from God. You have to pray for it.
God will answer that prayer and soon you won't be able to get enough. Get ready for an exciting adventure as you discover the transforming power and richness of the Word of God.
Christina Mills is an apologetics trainer for Youth for the Third Millennium.
(301) 365-3205
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christina Mills ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Stations of the Lenten Way DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:An ancient Roman custom comes alive every Lent, thanks to the efforts of American priests and seminarians resident in the Eternal City.
In the early-morning darkness of Lent, a long black line can be seen snaking its way from the Janiculum Hill through the cobble-stoned streets to one or another of Rome's historic churches for a 7 a.m. Mass. Janiculum Hill is the present-day site of the North American College, the Rome seminary for Americans and Canadians.
In the first Christian centuries, a bishop would preside over the liturgy in one of his churches, which would be designated as the “station” for that day. In this way, the bishop would celebrate Mass in various churches of his diocese, and the people would get a chance to see him.
As this developed, the “station” churches became a sort of pilgrimage through the territory of a bishop.
In Rome, the “stational” Mass became most highly developed during Lent, in which every day came to have its own church assigned to it. Dating from early in the first millennium, the station church practice died out during the Avignon period of the papacy, and a 16th-century attempt to revive it failed.
“By the fall of Rome in 1870, the stational liturgy had all but died out,” notes Father Gerard O'Connor, a doctoral student in liturgy in Rome and former seminarian at the North American College.
Pope Pius XI attached indulgences to attendance at the Lenten station churches, sparking a revival, he said.
It was Pope John XXIII who did the most to restore the tradition of an occasional visit to the station churches by the bishop of Rome. Following John XXIII's lead, Paul VI continued to visit St. Sabina, the assigned station for Ash Wednesday.
And now John Paul II has continued the tradition of visiting the first station church of Lent.
On Ash Wednesday, the St. Sabina station Mass is big event, given the papal visit. But after that, the daily “official” station Mass, celebrated each day at 5 p.m., preceded by a procession, is a rather desultory affair. Only a few dozen people, mostly elderly, frequent the station churches and, while important relics are usually on display, most station churches mark their day rather quietly.
A more vibrant scene can be witnessed in the morning, when usually more than 100 English-speakers, mostly young Americans, are on hand for the 7 a.m. Mass, organized by the North American College.
The Mass is held early so that everyone can get to university classes, which usually start at 8:30. The seminarians walk from the college, often leaving at about 6 a.m. in order to reach churches farther afield.
The rosary is prayed along the route, something possible on Roman streets only before the roar of traffic begins.
This year, the pilgrimage has been joined by the new American ambassador to the Holy See, James Nicholson, who has been attending daily. In fact, if stragglers get separated from the group walking across town, they can find the right church by looking for the ambassadorial car with police escort parked out front.
The station churches are distinguished by antiquity rather than current importance or beauty. Therefore, newer churches (meaning 16th century) of great importance like St. Philip Neri's Chiesa Nuova or St. Ignatius of Loyola's Gesu are not included, but there are four station churches dedicated to St. Lawrence, a third-century Roman deacon whose cult was one of the most popular in the early Church.
The station church for each day can often be found in older editions of the Roman Missal, indicating the central part that it used to play in the Roman liturgy.
Each year, two or three students are put in charge of organizing the pilgrimage, which means contacting six weeks’ worth of sacristans, organizing celebrants for each day and, most important, leading the walk each morning so that nobody gets lost and everyone arrives on time.
“It's a great opportunity to interact with other English-speaking priests, seminarians and lay people in Rome,” says Kevin Martin, a Maine seminarian who is this year's chief organizer. “We have the chance to venerate some of the seldom-displayed relics, and to walk in the footsteps of the martyrs and saints who have trod through this ancient city. It is, on the whole, an awesome experience.”
Raymond J. de Souza writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: Station-church pilgrimage upheld by Americans in Rome ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. de Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Joseph, the Just Man, the Greatest of Saints DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:On March 19, 1980, the Holy Father delivered the following address during the General Audience in the Paul VI Hall.
Let us dedicate our meeting today, which falls on March 19, to the one whom the Church, according to a very ancient tradition, surrounds on this day with the veneration due to the greatest saints.
Let today's meditation prepare us for prayer, in order that, recognizing the great works of God in the one to whom he entrusted his mysteries. we may seek in our personal lies the living reflection of these works in order to carry them out with the faithfulness, the humility and the nobility of heart which were characteristic of St. Joseph.
“Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:20-21).
We find these words in the first chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew. They — especially in the second part — sound similar to those that Miriam, that is Mary, heard at the moment of the Annunciation. In a few days — March 25 — we will recall in the liturgy of the Church the moment in which those words were spoken at Nazareth “to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary” (Luke 1:27).
The description of the Annunciation is found in the Gospel according to Luke.
Subsequently Matthew notes again that, after Mary's marriage to Joseph, “before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:18).
In this way, therefore, there was accomplished in Mary the mystery which had had its beginning at the moment of the Annunciation, at the moment when the Virgin replied to Gabriel's words: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
As Joseph became aware of the mystery of Mary's maternity, “being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, (he) resolved to divorce her quietly” (Matthew 1:19), as Matthew's description goes on to say.
And precisely then Joseph, Mary's betrothed and before the law already her husband, receives his personal “Annunciation.”
During the night he hears the words we quoted above, the words, which are an explanation and at the same time an invitation on the part of God: “Do not fear to take Mary your wife” (Matthew 1:20).
Mystery Entrusted to Joseph
At the same time God entrusts to Joseph the mystery, the fulfillment of which had been awaited for so many generations by the race of David and the whole “house of Israel,” and at the same time He entrusts to him everything on which the fulfillment of this mystery depends in the history of the People of God.
From the moment when these words reached his consciousness, Joseph becomes the man of divine election: the man entrusted with a special responsibility. His place in the history of salvation is defined. Joseph takes this place with the simplicity and humility which reveal the man's spiritual depth; and he fills it completely with his life.
“When Joseph woke from sleep — we read in Matthew — he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him” (Matthew 1:24). In these few words there is everything, the whole description of Joseph's life and the full characteristic of his holiness: “He did.” Joseph, the one we know from the Gospel, is a man of action. He is a man of work. The Gospel has not preserved any word of his. It has described, on the contrary, his actions: simple, everyday actions, which have at the same time a limpid meaning for the fulfillment of the divine Promise in the history of man; works full of spiritual depth and mature simplicity.
Hidden in the shadow of Joseph
Such is Joseph's activity, such are his deeds, before there had been revealed to him the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, which the Holy Spirit had effected in his betrothed. Such also is Joseph's subsequent work, when — already aware of the mystery of Mary's virginal maternity — he remains at her side in the period preceding the birth of Jesus and above all on the occasion of the Nativity.
Then we see Joseph at the moment of the presentation in the Temple and of the arrival of the three Wise Men from the East. Shortly afterwards the drama of the newborn babies in Bethlehem commences. Joseph is again called and instructed by the voice from above on what to do.
He undertakes the flight into Egypt with the Mother and the Child.
Shortly afterwards, he returns to his native Nazareth.
There he finds again at last his house and the workshop, to which he would certainly have returned before if Herod's atrocities had not prevented him. When Jesus is twelve years old, he goes with him and Mary to Jerusalem.
In the Temple of Jerusalem, after they have both found Jesus whom they had lost, Joseph hears these mysterious words: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?” (Luke 2:49).
Thus spoke the 12-year-old boy, and Joseph, like Mary, knows very well about whom he is talking.
Nevertheless, in the house at Nazareth, Jesus was obedient (Luke 2:51) to them both, to Joseph and Mary, just as a son is obedient to his parents. The years of the hidden life of the Holy Family of Nazareth pass. The Son of God — sent by the Father — is hidden from the world, hidden from all men, even from those nearest. Only Mary and Joseph know his mystery. They live in his circle. They live this mystery daily. The Son of the eternal Father passes, before men, as their son, as “the carpenter's son” (Matthew 13:55). When the time of his public mission begins, Jesus will refer in the synagogue of Nazareth to Isaiah's words, which are fulfilled in him at that moment, and neighbors and his fellow townsmen will say: “Is this not Joseph's son?” (Luke 4:16-22).
The Son of God, the Word Incarnate, remained hidden for 30 years of his earthly life — hidden in the shadow of Joseph.
----- EXCERPT: Saints' Days ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: A Kind of Taliban Homecoming DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:With the defeat of the Taliban, Afghanistan is slowly receding to the margins of our national consciousness. The horrors of its fundamental-ist Islamic regime risk being treated as ancient history. But the cultural and political forces that produced the monstrosity are still active in the region — a similarly repressive government could pop up at any moment.
Kandahar, which was released and roundly ignored in the West before Sept. 11, will keep our memories fresh. Its Iranian writer-director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Cyclist), is a Shiite Muslim with a revolutionary past. He was imprisoned during the Shah's reign for his support of the Ayatollah Khomeini. In recent years, the filmmaker has become critical of Iran's hard-line clerical government, but he hasn't abandoned his basic political and religious beliefs. This makes his unforgiving portrait of life under Afghanistan's mullahs absolutely credible.
The movie is set in 1999, when the Taliban still ruled with an iron hand. Nafas (Nelofer Pazira) is an exiled Afghan journalist living in Canada. A letter brings word that her sister, who couldn't escape, has lost both her legs after stepping on a land mine. She plans to kill herself during an approaching solar eclipse.
Nafas flies to the Afghanistan-Iran border, planning to smuggle herself back into her homeland and rescue her maimed sibling. She learns she only has three days. Her thoughts as she travels are preserved on a portable tape recorder in English. This means American audiences will find it easy to follow her story.
The movie's premise has great potential for melodrama and suspense: a lone woman racing against the clock in a hostile environment. Instead the filmmaker chooses a more documentary-like approach. Nafas’ story unfolds in a series of sharply observed episodes rather than a tight narrative arc.
Nafas’ goal is to reach Kandahar, where the ruling mullahs, including the munkrat, or religious police, are headquartered. It's a fearful place; most travelers do their best to avoid it. The different guides who accompany the exiled journalist represent various aspects of present-day Afghan society.
At a refugee camp in Iran, Nafas hooks up with Afghan families who still live in accordance with traditional tribal customs. An elderly trader agrees to let her join his party and pose as his fourth wife. To do so, she must don a burkha as a disguise.
The filmmaker effectively communicates the garment's discomfort and the way in which it symbolizes the Taliban's oppression of women. The burkha renders its wearers nondescript from the outside, but inside the women furtively use lipstick and nail polish, and carry musical instruments and books. The garments’ bold colors have a terrible beauty when set against the harsh desert background.
The Westernized Nafas constantly lifts her veil to look around. The merchant posing as her husband rebukes her. He's afraid of the religious police.
After the group is robbed by bandits, the trader and his three wives decide to return to Iran. Nafas is stranded in a remote village whose center of activity is the madrassa, or religious school, where, of course, no women are allowed. In an electrifying sequence, we watch the mullahs train young boys for the Taliban. Rocking back and forth, the students recite militaristic, pro-regime slogans while brandishing their rifles.
The 12-year-old Khak (Sadou Teymouri) is expelled from the madrassa for failing to memorize certain verses from the Koran. Having no means of support, he hires himself out to Nafas for $50.
The duo stumble upon a skeleton with a ring on its finger; Khak snatches it and tries to bully Nafas into buying it from him. She realizes he's not to be trusted. The violent, chaotic times have hardened him into a combination of criminal street urchin and half-formed religious fanatic.
Nafas gets sick and Khak takes her to a doctor, Tabib Sahid (Hassan Tantai). In order to be treated, she must stand on one side of a blanket while the doctor stands on the other. He talks to her through a hole in the fabric. Taliban law won't allow any closer contact between unmarried men and women. Proper treatment under these conditions is impossible.
The doctor, who speaks perfect English, has his own secret. He's a black American convert to Islam who came to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets a decade earlier. Now disillusioned, he quips that “weapons are the only modern thing in Afghanistan.” (After the film's American release, it was alleged that the actor Tantai was a former Howard University student wanted for the real-life murder of an anti-Khomeini dissident in the United States.)
Khak's curiosity about everything frightens Tabib, and he insists Nafas get rid of the boy. The doctor takes Nafas to a Red Cross station where landmine victims are waiting for artificial limbs. As a helicopter makes a parachute airdrop of prosthetic devices, the Afghan amputees hobble across the desert on crutches to collect them. These surreal images are riveting.
Tabib persuades a one-armed amputee, Hayat, to take Nafas the rest of the way. The physically handicapped man also doesn't seem completely trustworthy. Fearing for his safety, he disguises himself as woman under a burkha, and he and Nafas join a bride's traditional wedding party. But when the religious police stop them, they must figure out how to survive the search.
As Kandaharprogresses, it becomes clear that Makhmalbaf is more interested in Nafas’ rediscovery of the world into which she was born than in creating suspense about her sister's fate. His intent is to use her journey to record the Afghan population's suffering and poverty under the Taliban. Without ever preaching, the filmmaker leaves us with the sense that something must be done to help these people.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: Overlooked prior to Sept. 11, Kandahar resonates with relevance now ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAYS IN MARCH
Pledge-Period Specials
PBS; check local listings
On the last three Sundays in March, look for these and more specials on PBS. In Bobby Vinton Live: Songs from My Heart, taped Oct. 14, 2001, the Polish-American singer and his orchestra do polkas, big-band and pop favorites, and his hits “Roses Are Red” and “Blue Velvet.” A Tribute to Victor Borge has the best routines of the beloved pianist and comedian, who was born Borg Rosenbaum in Denmark in 1909 and died in 2000. Visions of Italy: Northern Style uses lovely music and spectacular film shot from a helicopter to create a serene and unforgettable tour of Florence, Tuscany, Pisa, Portofino, Venice, Genoa, Verona, Lake Como and the Italian Alps.
MONDAY, MAR. 18
Mary Jane Colter: House Made of Dawn PBS, 4:30 p.m.
From 1902 to 1948, the Fred Harvey architect Mary Jane Colter designed striking Southwest-style luxury hotels, rest stops and curio shops for tourists in New Mexico, Arizona and California, many of them along the Santa Fe railroad line. Her eight buildings in the Grand Canyon National Park are among her best-known structures.
TUESDAY, MAR. 19
Beyond Human
PBS, 10 p.m.
Anyone who follows medical morality will want to watch this two-part series. Tonight Body Electric covers cancer-fighting microscopic robots in the bloodstream, virtual vision systems that project into the cerebral cortex and computers that interact with the nervous system. Part 2, Living Machines, airs next Tuesday at the same time.
WEDNESDAY, MAR. 20
A Symphony of the Faithful
EWTN, 11 p.m.
Irish and other Catholics settled in the American South sooner and more extensively than most people realize. This documentary, shot largely during the 150th anniversary of the Diocese of Savannah, Georgia, proves that as it memorializes early Franciscan martyrs and shows Savannah's big St. Patrick's Day parade and Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.
THURSDAY, MAR. 21
The Sweet 16
CBS, 7:30 p.m.
Tonight and tomorrow night, enjoy regional semifinal games of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's annual championship basketball tournament.
FRIDAY, MAR. 22
The Edge of Europe
EWTN, 3 a.m., 11 p.m.
In the first decades and centuries after St. Patrick, holy Irish monks slaked their thirst for God by going to live and pray in remote places such as the rocky Skellig islands.
SATURDAY, MAR. 23
Room by Room for Spring
Home & Garden TV, 9 p.m.
Here are good ideas for spring decorating — and for storing winter-dÈcor items.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Lagaan(2001)
Bollywood is the nickname for the Indian film industry that currently produces more movies each year than Hollywood.
Its most popular products are lush musicals in which dramatic credibility is usually sacrificed for high-camp melodrama.
Lagaan, a surprise nomination for this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film, uses the expected ingredients to make a witty commentary on British colonialism. The action takes place in 1893 in a rural India village where the locals have been so impoverished by a two-year drought that they can't pay the lagaan, a tax on crops owed to their colonial masters.
When the villagers make fun of the British game of cricket, the ranking British officer, Capt. Russell (Paul Blackthorne), challenges them to a match. If the Indians win, the tax will be suspended for three years.
If they lose, it will be tripled. Russell's independent sister (Rachel Shelley) works with the village's star athlete (Aamir Khan) to organize the local team. Writer-director Asutosh Gowariker skillfully mixes comedy and songs with action and intrigue.
The Day After (1983)
Recent events have proved that the dangers of a nuclear conflagration didn't disappear with the end of the Cold War. Rogue nations like Iraq and North Korea, along with the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, have replaced the Soviet Union as the most probable threats. The Day
After, a TV movie whose cautionary message is still relevant, is set during a fictional Cold-War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that's triggered by a Middle-East crisis.
The nuclear attacks that follow are devastating.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Pope John Paul II 101 DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:As Pope John Paul II's pontificate approaches the start of its 25th year, one group of theologians and Catholic intellectuals has begun setting priorities and mapping out directions for the Church's coming decades.
In their view, the Church's future will look a lot like the present. In fact, the focus and touchstone of their theological agenda is the teaching of the current Pope.
“This has been such a rich pontificate in ideas, and it's going to take the Church another generation, at least, to absorb those ideas and develop them and give them pastoral impact,” said George Weigel, a papal biographer and senior fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center.
“We're looking at the work he'll leave the rest of us to do, building on the foundation he has laid,” Weigel added. He said developing this Pope's teachings calls for new theological creativity, which is already surfacing.
Weigel presided over a Feb. 21-22 conference in Rome to discuss the main theological and moral challenges of the new century. It was cosponsored by Rome's Regina Apostolorum University; a follow-up conference is scheduled for April.
Speaking on the theme “Pope John Paul II and the Christian Proposal in the 21st Century,” participants ranged far and wide over this Ppe's teaching legacy, including his Christo-centrism, his emphasis on personal conversion and his strong moral pronouncements on the sanctity of life.
“I am very struck as I've gotten around to universities [n the United States] with how much this pontificate is now a reference point in theology,” Weigel said. Indeed, he added, some young Catholic scholars now call themselves part of the “JPII generation.” This Pope is the only Pope they have known, and he has exercised a strong influence on their thinking.
‘We're looking at the work he'll leave the rest of us to do, building on the foundation he has laid.’
— George Weigel
That doesn't mean dissent in the Church is disappearing, Weigel said. “But I think some boundaries have been established, particularly in moral theology. And I think we are now going to move beyond that,” he said.
The conference identified present and future challenges to Catholic theology and suggested how the Pope's teaching could be applied or deepened. They included:
E The religious relativism dominant in many Western cultures versus the Church's renewed insistence on the universal validity of Gospel values and basic moral truths. The Pope has dedicated much of his teaching ministry to this question, defending the concept of universal truths in an age of doubt.
E The Church's relationship with biological sciences and medicine has reached a crossroads, with utilitarianism clashing with the teaching on the dignity and value of every human life. The Pope repeatedly has engaged in dialogue with the scientific community while spelling out the ethical and moral responsibilities on such questions as in-vitro fertilization, euthanasia and embryonic research
E The Church's own shifting demographics have shown it to be a “world church” in the true sense, raising a host of new issues, including interreligious relations where the church is a minority. In those places, the Pope has emphasized an approach that values dialogue but still presents evangelization as the overriding task for all Christians.
Weigel pointed out that some of the most vibrant Catholic communities in the world are those in Asia and Africa, while the Catholic faith in its historic center of Western Europe is “on life support.” He cited China as potentially the “greatest field of Christian mission since the European discovery of America.”
E Communicating with the Catholic faithful, especially on some of the more difficult moral teachings. According to Father Sherwin, “there are educated, sincere Catholics who have a hard time understanding aspects of Catholic moral teaching, so we have to renew the language of moral theology” to make it more comprehensible.
Father Thomas Williams, a U.S. member of the Legionaries of Christ, told the conference that one issue tirelessly promoted by the Pope, but with little echo so far, has been the idea that moral theology and personal holiness go hand in hand.
Father Williams said that, when moral theology was separated from spiritual theology centuries ago, there came “an unfortunate emphasis on obligation, permission and prohibition as the fundamental categories of moral life, while the pursuit of excellence was consigned to the domain of spiritual theology.”
He said one of the major challenges facing theologians today is teaching that the essence of the Christian moral life is “not merely the avoidance of sin, but the perfection of love for God and neighbor.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Thavis ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Rare Courage
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Feb. 26 — In contrast to many other Catholic colleges, Gonzaga University did not permit a production of the play The Vagina Monologues on its Spokane, Wash., campus, reports the wire service.
Gonzaga's president, Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer, said cultural events sanctioned by the university “speak volumes about who we are, what our mission is, what we believe.” He objected to much of the play's content, including a monologue about a lesbian affair between a 16-year-old and an older woman that a speaker in the play describes as a “good rape.”
Terrorist Grant
B E N E D I C T I N E UNIVERSITY, Feb. 28 — The university in Lisle, Ill., says it has received a $100,000, two-year Grace Bersted Foundation grant to develop a model for the emergency management of a terrorist attack in a suburban community. The project will be headed by Dr. Margaret O'Leary, an emergency-medicine physician who is an associate professor of business administration.
‘Under God’
The American Civil Liberties Union opposes not only the use of the motto, but also the pledge, which speaks of one nation “under God.” The first two months of 2002 saw the introduction of legislation in 13 states that would require the pledge, a display of the national motto, or both.
Protecting Failure
Just War
FOXNews.com, Feb. 13 — Some 50 prominent American scholars have signed a statement justifying the U.S. war on terrorism on moral grounds and calling it necessary for the defense of universal freedom and dignity for all humans, says the all-news network's Web site. The group includes former Sen. Daniel Moynihan, now of Syracuse University, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School, Clair Gaudiani of the Yale Law School, and Thomas Kohler of Boston College.
Tainted
The university said it “may be open” to renaming the fund, which benefits students active in public service and supports programs designed to foster productive conflict-resolution exercises.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Death in the Public Square DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:AS I LAY DYING: MEDITATIONS UPON RETURNING
by Richard John Neuhaus Basic Books, 2002 172 pages, $22
To Order: (800) 386-5656 or www.basicbooks.com
Father Neuhaus is well-known to many Register readers as the erudite editor-in-chief of First Things, the monthly journal of religion and public life. Thanks largely to his pithy “Public Square” column, along with his well-regarded books, the former Lutheran has by now established himself as one of the Church's most influential thinkers and one of its most gifted popularizers of faith-based intellectual inquiry.
His newest book, in which he recounts his fight to survive overlapping health failures, reveals a great mind reckoning with its own powerlessness against a “problem” it cannot, finally, solve — death.
The book is a series of reflections on the exterior experience of suffering and death, and the interior journey toward God that the experience occasioned.
Father Neuhaus does not shy from describing the particulars of the hospitalization experience; indeed, he makes a point to show just how humiliating it is to turn yourself over to virtual strangers when your mind remains sharp while your body falls apart. In one particularly memorable passage, he recalls an embarrassing afternoon when he was visited by a young colleague who looked up to him as something of a mentor. The young man, distraught and uncomfortable with the writer-priest's abject weakness and dependence, could not bring himself to look Father Neuhaus in the eye.
Perhaps the most surprising passage in the book is Father Neuhaus’ description of a near-death experience he had shortly after leaving intensive care. “I had always been skeptical of such tales,” he writes. “I am much less so now. …
“I could hear patients in adjoining rooms moaning and mumbling and occasionally calling out; the surrounding medical machines were pumping and sucking and bleeping as usual. Then, all of a sudden, I was jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness. I was sitting up in the bed staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat. What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two ‘presences.’ I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that. But they were there, and I knew that I was not tied to the bed. I was able and prepared to get up and go somewhere. And then the presences — one or both of them, I do not know — spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: ‘Everything is ready now.’”
Then follows Father Neuhaus’ ruminations on the strange experience — eminently reasonable and carefully thought-through, as one would expect from Father Neuhaus, but also strikingly childlike in their sense of wonder and possibility.
Elsewhere Father Neuhaus recounts childhood memories, relationships with family and friends, professional duties and personal exchanges — all in the context of the finality which impending death fore-shadows. For those living with a terminal or even chronic illness, this book will be like the hand of a warm, wise and witty friend for the holding. For the rest of us, it's an enlightening reminder that our current good health is never anything more than a temporary condition.
Michele Howe writes from LaSalle, Michigan.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Howe ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Husband's Chores DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:Q I'm an overwhelmed mother of three young children. I'd like my husband to help around the house, but am reluctant to ask him since he views his paycheck as his contribution and he comes home exhausted.
ATOM: Hard-working dads do deserve leisure time, but so do moms.
It would be great if I came home to an immaculate home with dinner waiting. (Sometimes, this actually happens!) But I've seen enough to know that when this doesn't happen, it isn't because Caroline took the day off.
That's because after feeding the boys breakfast, getting them dressed, putting the baby down for his morning nap, taking the kids to the store/park/library, making lunch, reading stories before afternoon naps, using nap time to return phone calls and do laundry, spending post-nap time outdoors watering flowers while the kids play — well, you get the idea.
When the children are more self-sufficient, things will be easier. But for now, the only way we can maintain an orderly existence is if both of us view it as our task together. I clean the kitchen; she cleans the bathrooms. I vacuum; she irons.
Any day now, our oldest will be able to work into that rotation. Until then, I cannot expect her to bear the brunt of the household chores. It's true that my paycheck is my contribution, but Caroline's contribution, which is equally as important (and more tiring) is mothering our boys.
So, dads, if you come home from a long day, frustrated with the disorder, don't hassle your better half. Ask her: “What can I do to help around here?” Don't worry, she'll have plenty of ideas.
CAROLINE: When we were still teaching, I said I'd worry about keeping an orderly house when I was home with the kids. Ha! Now there are days when taking a shower is an accomplishment.
After working outside and inside the home, I know the secret to an orderly household: Dad. Tom is right — it's our husbands who make it possible.
Dad's good example paves the way for teen-agers. Once children reach middle-school age, there is no reason large parts of the house upkeep can't be done by them — girls and boys, both. My brothers polished their share of silver, washed plenty of dishes — hope they still do!
Now, ladies, do not wave this under your husband's nose and break his ribs with your elbow.
Instead, think about a specific task or two that he could take on regularly, and sweetly ask him to do it. Then, move out of the way. It may not be done perfectly, but no matter. He may buy a ridiculously expensive, powerful gadget to get it done, but no complaining. Be grateful, and tell him so.
Tom and Caroline McDonald are family life directors for the archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
To reach Family Matters: familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom and Caroline Mcdonald ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Patrick, First of a Great Cloud of Witnesses DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:When we think of Ireland, St. Patrick comes to mind. Millions throughout the world celebrate his feast day on March 17. But St. Patrick has plenty of Irish friends. Called the land of “Saints and Scholars,” Ireland boasts numerous saints. These are just a few.
ST. PATRICK (387-493) St. Patrick was actually born in Britain. At the age of 16 he was enslaved in the north of Ireland to a druid chieftain and while in captivity tended sheep. He escaped after six years and fled to Gaul, where St. Germain introduced him to monastic life. There, he studied for the priesthood and after ordination thought often of Ireland. Once, he had a vision that Irish children called to him saying, “Come back, holy youth, and walk among us once more.”
St. Patrick did return to Ireland in 432, when Pope St. Celestine entrusted him with the mission of converting the Irish. His task was not easy; druids raised their sword against him. But St. Patrick's peaceful spirit prevailed. He clarified the mysteries of the Church to his flock with simple examples and won them over. He explained the Trinity with a shamrock, saying the plant's three leaves represented the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
ST. BRIGID (451-525) A close friend of St. Patrick, St. Brigid was born in County Louth. Her mother was a slave woman and her father an Irish chieftain of Leinster. After becoming a nun, she traveled with seven women to Druin Criadh, where she built the famous convent of Cill-Dara (Kildare) under a large oak tree. The oratory in her convent became a hub of learning, which is one reason St. Brigid is called the patroness of students. The scriptorium at her convent created beautiful illuminated manuscripts, including the renowned “Book of Kildare.”
ST. KEVIN (498-618) Known for his love of animals, after ordination, this former nobleman became a hermit in a cave at Glendalough in County Wicklow, where he wore animal skins, ate what grew in the forest around him, and prayed. One legend claims that when a blackbird laid an egg in his hand, St. Kevin carefully held the egg until it hatched.
ST. FINNIAN OF CLONARD (470-549) While a layman, he founded three Irish churches. He later became a monk and in 520 founded the monastery at Clonard, Meath, which schooled numerous Irish saints, among them St. Columba of Iona.
He is known as the father of Irish monasticism.
ST. ITA (475–570) Called, the “Brigid of Munster,” St. Ita was born in County Waterford. She boldly refused a marriage arranged by her royal father. Eventually, an angel persuaded her father that she had a religious vocation. She founded a community of nuns and a school for boys. When St. Brendan, one of her pupils, asked her what pleases God most, she replied “faith, simplicity and generosity.” She named greed as one vice God detests.
Legend has it that once, after a rich man placed money into her hands, she immediately washed them.
ST. COLUMBA OF IONA (521-597; known in Ireland as St. Colum Cille) Born in County Donegal, this nobleman became a priest and founded numerous monasteries in Ireland, the most famous in Durrow, County Offaly, which became known for its illuminated manuscripts. Some say he caused the battle of Cul Dreimne in 563 when he secretly copied a rare book of psalms. After the battle, St. Columba with 12 disciples sailed to the island of Iona, Scotland. Legend claims he drove the Loch Ness monster out of the Ness River with the sign of the cross.
ST. MALACHY (1095-1148) St. Malachy helped reform the Irish clergy, by insisting they maintain celibacy. In his 30s he became first a Bishop of Connor, and then archbishop of Armagh. A family that controlled the Church in Armagh for over a century opposed him for several years, but eventually peace prevailed in the diocese. St. Malachy became papal delegate for Ireland in 1137 and, helped by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, established the first Cistercian abbey in Ireland.
ST. LAURENCE O'TOOLE (1128-1182) Born in County Kildare he was given to the king of Leinster as a peace hostage in 1138, but two years later was traded back to his father, who was so grateful that he promised to send one of his sons to be educated at the abbey of Glendalough. Laurence agreed to go and eventually became the abbot of Glendalough, opening the abbey doors to the sick, orphaned and starving. He became archbishop of Dublin in 1162, and the papal legate for Ireland in 1179. King Henry II exiled him to Normandy in 1182, where he died.
ST. COLMAN (560-632) In his youth a poet bard for the king of Munster, St. Colman left palace life and became a priest.
He lived as a hermit in Arranmore and then sought even greater separation from the world in the woods of Burren. The king of Cashel gave him grants of land on the eastern shore of Cork harbor where he founded the Diocese of Cloyne in 560.
ST. DYMPNA (12-13th century; also spelled Dymphna) In childhood she became a Christian and, unknown to her pagan father, a Celtic chieftain, she was secretly baptized. After his wife's death, the chieftain became desirous of his daughter Dymphna. She escaped to Belgium with her chaplain, St. Gerebernus, but was tracked by her father, who traced the coins they used during flight. When he found them, the father killed St. Gerebernus and cut off St. Dympna's head. She is known as the patron saint of those with mental illnesses.
BLESSED THADDEUS MCCARTHY (1455-1492) At the age of 27, Blessed Thaddeus was appointed Bishop of Ross by Pope Sixtus IV. But, when he arrived at Munster to assume his position he found that Bishop Hugh O'Driscoll was already bishop there. Bishop O'Driscoll accused Thaddeus of forgery and a great confusion ensued, which led to the excommunication of Blessed Thaddeus. St. Thaddeus appealed to Pope Innocent VIII for an examination of the facts, and it was found that his excommunication was void. Blessed Thaddeus was then appointed Bishop of Cork and Cloyne. But, when he arrived in Cork to assume his bishopric, he found a relative of the Earl of Desmond occupying that position. He appealed again to Rome and was vindicated, but died soon after. Because of the suffering he endured attempting to fulfill his role as bishop, he is called the “White Martyr of Munster.”
ST. OLIVER PLUNKETT (1625-1681) Born in County Meath, Ireland, he studied for the priesthood in Rome, where because of persecution in Ireland he was obliged to remain. In 1669, he returned to Ireland after being appointed primate of Ireland and archbishop of Armagh. In 1673, an edict that banned bishops from Ireland, forced Archbishop Plunkett to hide under austere conditions. He kept in touch with his people by letters. In 1679, he was arrested, brought to London and falsely convicted of treason. Before he was hanged, drawn and quartered, he forgave those responsible for his death.
VENERABLE MATT TALBOT (1856-1925) Born in Dublin's inner city, Matt Talbot, the second of 12 children, became an alcoholic after beginning to drink at the age of 12. His first job, at a winery, contributed to his addiction. At the age of 28, Venerable Matt, encouraged by a priest, entered a rehabilitation program. Through much prayer and sacrifice he gained sobriety and dedicated the remaining 41 years of his life to God, praying and attending Mass daily.
SERVANT OF GOD, FRANK DUFF (1889-1980) Frank Duff founded the Legion of Mary in 1921, an organization devoted to lay apostolic and social work. Under his guidance the Legion first founded a hostel for destitute men and then one for unmarried mothers and their babies. The Legion of Mary quickly spread to almost every country in the world and now has nearly 3 million active members. Pope Paul VI invited Frank Duff to the Second Vatican Council as a lay observer in 1966. In response to an enormous worldwide petition by Legion of Mary members, Archbishop Desmond Connell of Dublin introduced the cause for Frank Duff's canonization in July 1996.
VENERABLE EDEL QUINN (1907-1944) Born in County Cork, she longed to be a cloistered nun, but could not because of ill health. She joined the Legion of Mary in Dublin, and dedicated herself to good works. Despite being diagnosed in 1936 with tuberculosis, she pleaded with Frank Duff to send her to East Africa as the Legion's envoy.
Duff allowed her to go. She established numerous branches of the Legion of Mary in Africa before she died in Nairobi at age 37. Pope John Paul II issued the decree of her sanctity in 1994.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ann Sullivan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Hard Work, Plus Prayers, Equals Lives DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:SACRAMENTO, Calif. – When Jerry Mamola started doing pro-life work in the 1980's, he felt a subtle current of anti-Catholic sentiment from others in the local movement.
“It was as though people wanted to save babies first, then save us Catholics,” he said.
So in the fall of 1991, Mamola joined Mary Schaefer and June Schott to approach Bishop Francis Quinn and ask him what Catholics could do to help the pro-life cause in the Diocese of Sacramento.
Thus was born Catholics for Life.
A regular group of 12 to 15 leaders meet monthly to plan the organization's events and activities, which draw the participation of hundreds of pro-lifers from all over the Sacramento area.
The group's first challenge was to create a maternity home for women in crisis pregnancies.
“I was recruited by my wife,” said Mike Schaefer, who participated in that project and later served a term as the group's president. “The diocese owned an old two-story house in Sacramento that they gave to us. It was in pretty deplorable condition, but with a lot of work, sweat and elbow grease, we fixed it up with fresh paint, carpet and new linoleum floors.”
The Bishop Gallegos Maternity Home opened its doors to its first six residents in the spring of 1993. Linda Mardis, 46, was one of its first residents.
“I was living in Reno when I got pregnant, and I took a Greyhound bus back to California,” said Mardis, who is now a student at California State University Sacramento, pursuing a bachelor's degree. “I was homeless and spent two months at the Salvation Army shelter where I started my sobriety; then I moved to the Bishop Gallegos Maternity Home.”
“The median age of the women who come here is 35,” said live-in director Lenore Mullarkey. “Most of them are homeless and drug addicts in recovery. Since we first opened, we have helped 300 women and their babies.”
Mardis said the center “was a real home, with love and commitment. It was just like a family.” She contrasts its atmosphere with what she experienced in an area homeless shelter that “pushes through hundreds of people every month, and you are just a number and a name in the system.”
Mardis’ daughter, Natanya, is now 7 and a student at St. Philomene School. Msgr. Edward Kavanagh, a long-time supporter of Catholics for Life, confirmed Mardis and baptized her daughter at St. Rose Parish, where he is pastor.
“The people in Catholics for Life are very committed,” said Msgr. Kavanagh. “When a crisis comes, they respond to the call.”
Sometimes that response comes in the form of legislative action.
In a diocese of 98 parishes that comprises 20 counties covering 43,000 square miles, Catholics for Life has begun to develop a telephone tree — with the goal of having one contact person in each parish — so phone calls can go out quickly to legislators when a pro-life issue needs rapid input from constituents.
Last year, Msgr. Kavanagh sent a letter to the 27 California legislators who have publicly identified themselves as Catholics, calling for them to vote against any legislation in favor of abortion or abortion funding.
“We write, we call and we go down to legislators’ offices,” said Msgr. Kavanagh. “We're all in this together.”
Each January, Catholics for Life holds a special pro-life Mass at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in downtown Sacramento, near the state capitol building. It is held on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. This year, it drew nearly 500 participants and was held in conjunction with the California Pro-Life Council, who also hosted a prayer breakfast and a rally on the state capitol steps.
In addition, Catholics for Life hosts a table at the annual diocesan youth rally.
“Kids are by nature pro-life,” said founding Catholics for Life member Mamola. “They have an innate sense of the sanctity of life. They get corrupted as they are indoctrinated with the pro-abortion message.
“When we started doing pro-life work back in the 1980s,” Mamola continued, “we realized that this is a spiritual battle first, and a physical battle second.”
As part of their spiritual work, Catholics for Life coordinates a monthly rosary prayer procession from St. Elizabeth Church in Sacramento to a Planned Parenthood Clinic about a mile away.
“We stand or kneel outside of the clinic on public sidewalks. We don't block anything,” said newly elected president Carol Schoner.
“We get a lot of positive reaction from people who walk or drive by — they honk, smile, wave or give us a thumbs-up,” continued Schoner. “But when people come out of the clinic, they have yelled at us. They are very angry — there's a lot of hurt there.”
The need to pray has also been set in stone, thanks to a monetary donation from an anonymous patron of Catholics for Life — along with a black marble tombstone — specified by the unnamed donor for use as a memorial to the unborn victims of abortion.
Engraved with images of a rosary and a rose plus the words, “Memorial to Victims of Abortion,” the monument was dedicated by Bishop William Weigand on Nov. 3, 2001. It is located in a section of St. Mary's Cemetery in Sacramento called the the Holy Family Gathering Area.
Catholics for Life also hosts the March of the Innocents every Dec. 28, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
“It is a solemn, prayerful procession from the cathedral to Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish,” said Schaefer. The parish is run by Legionaire of Christ priests. “We carry two little coffins and lots of candles. We pray the rosary, and Mass is celebrated at the end. Even though it was raining last year, we still had 150 men, women and children participate.”
In addition to their many projects and activities, Bishop Weigand has also asked Catholics for Life to serve as an advisory board to the diocesan Respect Life Office.
“When we started our pro-life work, we knew we needed to put it under the mantle of prayer,” concluded Mamola. “How many years did it take to stop slavery? It may take 50 to 100 years to change the conscience of a nation. We need to continue to pray.”
Dana Mildebrath writes from Chico, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Mildebrath ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Notes DATE: 03/17/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 17-23, 2002 ----- BODY:N.Y. Withdraws Subpoenas
AMERICAN CENTER FOR LAW AND JUSTICE — Pregnancy resource centers across New York proclaimed victory Feb. 28 in light of news that New York attorney general Elliot Spitzer, just two weeks after the centers had initiated legal action against him, decided to withdraw the broad, non-judicial subpoenas his office had served them.
The pregnancy centers maintained the subpoenas were unfounded. In an historic move two weeks ago, they initiated legal action against the N.Y. attorney general, each filing a motion to quash the subpoenas in light of the fact that Spitzer had not provided any factual basis for serving them.
Infiltrating Pregnancy Centers
WORLDNETDAILY — Bolstered by the New York attorney general's investigation of crisis pregnancy centers, the National Abortion Rights Action League is training abortion-rights activists to “investigate” California pregnancy centers.
On Feb. 7, NARAL's California state affiliate, the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, held a “special training” session in Los Angeles on “Unmasking Fake Clinics.”
A reporter for WorldNetDaily registered for the conference, obtained an information packet, and then was asked to leave by the CARAL political director.
Inside the information packet were a CARAL policy report TITLEd “Crisis Pregnancy Centers in California: The Hidden Threat to Women's Health,” a companion “Action Kit” booklet and a “tip sheet” for abortion activists on “visiting” pregnancy centers.
Unborn Baby Saves Mother
REUTERS — An Israeli woman who was shot late in her pregnancy may well owe her life to the healthy baby girl doctors delivered shortly after the attack by Palestinian gunmen. Tamara FischLifshitz, 33, was traveling in a car near her home in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank Feb. 25 when shots rang out.
A bullet that pierced her stomach narrowly missed the unborn baby but did not hit vital organs, which doctors said had been shifted by her pregnancy.
“If she hadn't been pregnant the injuries would have been a lot more serious,” Dr. Alon Pikarsky said.
Osteopaths Oppose Assisted Suicide
Dr. Thomas A. Cavalieri and colleagues at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey School of Osteopathic Medicine, conducted a study published in the January issue of the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.
Of the 1,028 osteopathic physicians responding, 58% said they would not be willing to write a lethal prescription for a competent, terminally ill patient and 63% viewed writing a lethal prescription as immoral.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Editorial Draws Comments of Scalia and Dulles DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — The Church's teaching on the death penalty is tough for many Catholics to accept.
In this issue of the Register, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Cardinal Avery Dulles, Father George Rutler and University of Notre Dame Law School's Charles Rice explain why.
This death penalty symposium began when Scalia didn't take lightly what he read in a Register editorial about himself.
In his letter to the editor, he said that the editorial “Scalia's Dissenting Opinion,” which criticized remarks he made at Georgetown Universtiy about the death penalty, “is full of mistakes.”
He concludes by writing, “I protest your portrayal of me as ‘supporting the death penalty.’ I do no such thing. I support the proposition that it is not sinful for a Catholic to support it, and indeed to participate in its imposition.”
The editorial had taken exception to Scalia's remarks at a Georgetown Jesuit Heritage Day function, at which a student asked him about capital punishment.
Scalia answered by suggesting that Catholics need only assent to papal teachings when a pope speaks ex cathedra (from the chair) on a matter of faith or morals, a method of papal teaching last used by Pope Pius XII in 1950 when he declared that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven at the end of her life on earth.
“If I agreed with that encyclical I'd have to resign,” he continued, explaining that he did not agree with it.
Commented the editorial: “One can hardly fault Scalia for voicing his dissent [at the University of Chicago Divinity School], in an academic forum that was set up specifically for scholars to debate such things. But Justice Scalia must realize that the kind of public dissent he voiced at Georgetown … wasn't an example of appropriate dissent.”
The editorial also accused Scalia of using the same modus operandi as other dissenters, like the cloning scientist who said he can reject anything that isn't taught ex cathedra.
“In various ways the Register editorial gave Justice Scalia a bum rap,” says University of Notre Dame Law's Charles Rice, in this issue of the Register.
Nonetheless Rice takes exception to Scalia's arguments overall, just as Cardinal Dulles does. On Scalia's side, Father Rutler sees nothing significantly wrong with the justice's arguments.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Father Fessio Barred At San Francisco College DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:SAN FRANCISCO — Just two weeks following the announcement by Ignatius Press of the creation of Campion College, Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio has been barred from having any role with the college. The Provincial of the Society of Jesus has reassigned him to be assistant chaplain for a hospital nearly 400 miles away.
The college was looking to become a new success story for the priest who founded Ignatius Press, the St. Ignatius Institute, Catholic World Report, Catholic Dossier the Adoremus Society. Before it has even opened its doors, three schools have agreed to accept Campion credits; Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, editor of the Catechism has praised it; and it is attracting students and donors.
The news of Father Fessio's transfer comes on the heels of the controversy that began at the University of San Francisco's Great Books program, the St. Ignatius Institute, just over a year ago. That's when Jesuit Father Stephen Privett ended his first semester as University of San Francisco president by firing longtime St. Ignatius Institute Director John Galten and assistant director John Hamlon. In protest, all six core faculty members of the Institute resigned and an appeal was made to the Vatican about their concerns.
The University of San Francisco then created a new, revamped St. Ignatius Institute. San Francisco Archbishop William Levada agreed to lecture on the campus at a forum of the new Institute. Then, this January, the Congregation for Catholic Education sent a letter to the university listing conditions under which the Institute should proceed. Father Privett claimed that the letter was “Vatican approval” of his actions.
Less than a month after the Vatican sent its letter, Father Fessio and Ignatius Press announced that Campion College would open just a half-block away from the University of San Francisco campus.
In a March 11 letter, California Jesuit Provinicial Father Thomas Smolich told Father Fessio, “Campion College was not and is not part of your assignment from the Society of Jesus, as determined by me as your provincial. You are to have no role, public or private, in Campion College, just as Campion has no relationship with the Society of Jesus.”
It reassigned him to Santa Teresita Hosptial in Duarte, Calif., effective May 1.
Father Fessio will remain director of Ignatius Press, but “[i]f your work as director of Ignatius Press cannot be kept separate from the affairs of Campion College,” the provincial's letter stated, “I likely will not permit you to continue with Ignatius Press.”
Father Fessio founded Ignatius Press with Carolyn Lemon in 1978, and saw it grow every year of its existence and become a top Catholic publisher.
The reassignment “will not stop Campion College in any way,” said University of San Francisco philosophy professor Raymond Dennehy, formerly of the St. Ignatius Institute and a faculty member of Campion. “The curriculum is set up, the faculty are in place, the Web site is up, the money is there, and they already have had many inquiries from interested students.”
At Santa Teresita hospital, Father Fessio will be assistant to Father C.M. Buckley, a friend of Father Fessio's who was himself assigned to the hospital three years ago after a controversy over a student Mass he was offering off-campus.
“We had been looking for someone for about a year,” said Carmelite Sister Michelle, associate administrator of Santa Teresita Hospital. “Father Buckley has been very busy. He says two Masses daily and handles code blues. Having an associate will allow one to be here while the other is away.”
“I doubt that [Father Fessio's] reassignment is punitive,” said Father Buckley. “The provincial probably feels he is doing me a great favor.” At the same time, he added, “no one's motives are as pure as Ivory soap.”
Father Fessio told the Register that he was not given a reason for the reassignment, even when he pressed for one. He added that it is the first time he has been given an assignment that he did not personally desire.
Father Smolich, the provincial, didn't give a reason either. “If people want to link it to [the founding of] Campion they can go ahead and do that,” Father Smolich told the Register. “I'm not going to make any comment.”
Canon law instructs religious priests to be obedient to their legitimate superiors “who stand in the place of God when they command according to the proper constitutions” (Canon 601).
But it adds that superiors must exercise their power “in a spirit of service.” Superiors are to dialogue with those they direct and “are to listen to them willingly and foster their working together for the good of the institute,” says Canon 618.
Why?
The reassignment of Father Fessio, known nationally for his frequent talks and appearances at Catholic events, took many others by surprise.
“I was shocked,” said Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, chairman of the Ave Maria Foundation, and a colleague of Father Fessio's on many projects. “I just don't understand it. … Here you have one of the most famous Jesuits, with the possible exception of Cardinal Avery Dulles, and he is practically being silenced.”
Stanley Kurtz, a non-Catholic contributing editor of National Review Online, and George Neumayr, a Catholic writing for the American Prowler, both denounced the provincial's decision within two days of the news.
Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, saw the decision as antithetical to his own organization's aims — his group promotes Catholic identity at Catholic universities.
“From this day forward, Father Fessio will be known as the martyr of the renewal of Catholic higher education,” said Reilly.
At the University of San Francisco, theology professor Jesuit Father Francis Buckley was not surprised at the news of Father Fessio's reassignment. “I don't see anything sinister in this,” he said.
But Aileen Alonzo, a St. Ignatius Institute student from Los Angeles, said “a lot of students are upset,” by the news.
Ignatius Press’ Mark Brumley will see his own managerial duties increase at the company when Father Fessio leaves, but says Father Fessio will be able to do much even from his new post.
Brumley said that he is perplexed by the reassignment, though. “I personally have to question the judgment of a superior that would take someone with Father Fessio's abilities and make him an assistant hospital chaplain when he has God-given gifts that would be far more effective for the Church.”
‘I Am a Jesuit’
Tom Monaghan said he has been surprised by Father Fessio's willingness to take on the new assignment.
“I am at peace,” Father Fessio wrote to his provinicial. “I am a Jesuit. I will obey. I will strive to fulfill both the letter and the spirit of this new mission.”
Said Monaghan, “It's amazing to me that he can be so obedient and faithful to his vows. He probably feels that he is married, for better or worse.”
Father C.M. Buckley explained Father Fessio's reaction. “It is the vocation of the Jesuit to move any place,” he said. “You can find God anywhere, especially in the suffering and dying.”
Catholic apologist and Ignatius author Steve Ray said that the emphatic “I am a Jesuit” part of Father Fessio's response says a lot about the priest.
“People see Father Fessio as this Italian stallion, yet he has a real tender spot,” said Ray. He recalled driving Father Fessio to dinner after a talk the priest had given. During the drive, Father Fessio realized that it was his 40th anniversary of his installation as a Jesuit and so called up a friend who had helped bring him into the Jesuits.
“Do you realize what today is?” Father Fessio asked on the cell phone. “This is the 40th anniversary of my initiation as a Jesuit.”
And then, said Ray, Father Fessio wept.
But isn't it a terrible thing to let his unique talents go to waste in an assistant chaplaincy?
No, said Father Fessio. “It's a very good thing,” he said. “I have a chance to do something that I didn't want to do. I'm looking forward to doing what I have been asked to do as a Jesuit. That will make me a better Jesuit and will be pleasing to God.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Catholic League Scores Victory In Red Cross Ban on 9/11 Songs DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:SANTA ANA, Calif. — Their symbol may be a cross, but this month the American Red Cross instructed middle school student Nicholas Boragno that his choir couldn't sing “America the Beautiful” and other songs containing the word “God” at a Red Cross gathering for Sept. 11 volunteers.
Rather than accept those orders, the Orange County High School of the Arts choir canceled its March 10 performance. The incident, parent Cindy Boragno said, left her young son Nicholas “totally stunned and confused.”
After the incident drew a firestorm of negative publicity, including from the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Liberties, national Red Cross officials apologized, but the affair has further tarnished the embattled charity's image.
Last fall, the Red Cross drew intensive criticism for a short-lived plan to redirect to other beneficiaries some of some of the hundreds of millions of dollars raised to help victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Then last month it made headlines when its Salt Lake chapter co-sponsored a program distributing 250,000 condoms at the Olympics. The Red Cross hastily canceled its involvement in the “Safe Games 2002” initiative after pro-family groups and local donors complained that volunteers were indiscriminately handing out condoms to minor children, including kids as young as 12.
Now the Red Cross has a new public relations problem. The Orange County High School of the Arts choir declined to sing rather than change its program for a Red Cross luncheon March 10 for Sept. 11 volunteers. The Red Cross had objected to certain elements of the group's program, which were deemed “too religious.”
The choir had planned to sing a special “Heroes Trilogy,” containing the songs “America the Beautiful,” “Prayer of the Children,” and “God Bless the U.S.A.” The trilogy was arranged specifically as a Sept. 11 tribute.
According to a statement from the school, “The words ‘God’ and ‘prayer’ in the songs ‘America the Beautiful,’ Kurt Bestor's ‘Prayer of the Children,’ Lee Greenwood's ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ and The Fifth Dimension's ‘Declaration’ [containing verbatim text from the Declaration of Independence] … were deemed too religious and political, and therefore in violation of the Red Cross's neutrality policy.”
Cherilyn Bacon, the teacher whose vocal group of seventh-through ninth-graders was initially slated to perform, said that the group's appearance was scheduled for several weeks. Then suddenly on March 5, she was informed by a representative of the Orange County chapter of the Red Cross that several elements of the program were too religious.
Bacon said she spoke with two different officials about the order that the choir must drop songs with religious references. Bacon added that she was also told that the director of the Orange County chapter would call to discuss the matter further, but when she had heard nothing for two days, she decided to go public March 7.
Said Bacon, “People need to know that the Red Cross stands for absurdity.” After Bacon made her objections known, the Orange County Red Cross issued a statement March 8. It said, “The dispute center[ed] only on our sensitivity to religious diversity, and a preference for a music program that would be inclusive and not offend different populations participating in this particular event.” The March 8 statement directed further inquiries to the national office of the Red Cross in Washington.
“We need to remain a neutral organization,” Lynn Howse, public affairs director for the Orange County Red Cross office, told Fox News Channel March 8.
The Red Cross finally backed down the day following the event, which took place as planned March 10 — minus the student choir.
“Principles should remain invio-late,” said a March 11 statement from the Orange County office. “But like many things in life, it is important to use reasonable judgment in applying principles to the everyday circumstances we confront. So, while our principles remain sound, the judgment we made to exclude certain songs from the Sunday program was a mistake. We want to apologize to the community and to any people who were hurt or disappointed by our actions.”
Mitch Hibbs, a national spokesman for the American Red Cross, characterized the incident as a “mis-communication,” explaining that while the Red Cross is committed to a principle of impartiality, in this case an single erring volunteer in the local chapter “took it too far.”
However, Hibbs admitted that that the March 8 statement, while written by the Orange County chapter, had been shown to the national office before it was released. And Bacon stands by her account that more than one local Red Cross official was involved in the decision.
Patrick Scully, communications director for the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, said the Orange County incident was an example of “political correctness run amok.” He said the subsequent apology was triggered by the Catholic League's threat to contact more than a 100 organizations to organize a boycott.
“We are satisfied with the outcome,” Scully said, because the Red Cross “apologized for trying to censor religious [freedom].”
During the dispute, Bacon said she received solid support from parents and school administrators. The school, which initially offered a replacement group to the Red Cross, backed away from that compromise and released a statement fully supporting Bacon.
Cindy Boragno said her son Nicholas asked her why there was a problem with their program if “the president says ‘God Bless America,’ and our money says ‘In God We Trust.’” But, the mother added, Nicholas had learned a valuable lesson about the importance of standing up for one's beliefs.
In the wake of the public relations fiasco, Red Cross spokesman Hibbs wishes he had become involved sooner. Said Hibbs, “Lord help me, if I had heard that volunteer say that [the program needed to be changed], I would have said ‘Hold on!’”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: When Holy Week Is Passover, Too DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:David Moss grew up in a Conservative Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York.
Before becoming Catholic, Moss became Baptist. Today, Moss serves as the president of the Association of Hebrew Catholics, based in Ypsilanti, Mich. He recently spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
Tell me a bit about your family growing up.
Two younger sisters, Rosalind and Susan, and I were born into a Conservative Jewish family in Brooklyn, N.Y. Like many others, we celebrated the Jewish feasts and holidays at home and attended the Synagogue on various occasions, especially for the High Holy Days.
What first led you to Christ?
Shortly after my bar mitzvah, in my 14th or 15th year, I completely lost whatever faith I had. But, in giving up my belief in God, I also gave up the foundation for the values and meanings that would have informed and directed my life.
So, I began a search for this foundation that would last for 23 years. In turn, I studied mathematics, the liberal arts and finally philosophy. Early on, I associated with many liberal and radical causes.
My studies and experiences eventually moved me from the liberal to the conservative camp and from a pro-abortion position to that of a pro-life activist.
During these years, I married and became father of four children. To help inculcate the basic moral values in our children, we all began attending a local Baptist Church.
After 22 years of study, I had reduced all my questions to three: How do we explain 1) the very fact of existence, 2) sacrificial love, and 3) the human sense of ought?
Though I could find no answers to these questions, I was convinced that in the answers I would find the meaning and purpose of life. I was at the point of despair and one day in my office at IBM I cried out to God: “If you truly exist, then I need to know now!”
And there at that moment, God touched me and I knew he existed. To my great surprise, I also knew that Jesus was his Son and I now had the answers to my questions. This occurred during my fifth year at the Baptist Church.
What specifically led you to become a Catholic?
Over the years, especially after my entry into the pro-life movement, I had become aware of Catholic teaching. Nonetheless, I was baptized in the Baptist church in September 1978. About a month or so later, all that I had studied and experienced over 23 years suddenly came together like a big jigsaw puzzle. At age 38, in February 1979, I entered the Catholic Church through a Franciscan monastery in Beacon, N.Y.
How did your family members react?
Each member of my immediate family had already embarked upon their own spiritual journey. My parents, now deceased, had became Baptists. Of my sisters, Rosalind became an Evangelical Christian and Susan a Lutheran.
Over a period of 14 years, Rosalind tried to draw me out of the Catholic Church. About six years ago, Rosalind entered the Catholic Church.
Do you consider yourself a convert?
Yes. I had turned away from God, and then I turned back to him.
Observant Jews, on the other hand, have not turned away from God. I don't believe the word conversion accurately describes what they experience when they recognize Jesus and enter his Church. Rather, their faith becomes transformed, with new depth and meaning.
How will you be celebrating Easter?
In previous years, I have experimented with different ways of integrating the joyful celebration of the Passover with the Lenten disciplines. This year, we will celebrate Easter in London, Ontario with my son, Matthew, as he enters the Church.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Moss ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Boston Archdiocese Reaches Settlement With Sexual Abuse Victims DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:BOSTON — Catholic leaders in Boston have reached a settlement agreement between the archdiocese and scores of victims of a defrocked priest.
Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer representing 86 victims of former priest John Geoghan, said he reached a settlement after meeting March 11 with lawyers for the archdiocese and a mediator.
Garabedian did not disclose the amount of the settlement, but it is between $15 million and $30 million, Associated Press reported. The Boston Globe reported that each victim would receive between $232,000 and $348,000.
“It's a giant step in the healing process of my clients to settle this matter,” said Garabedian, who represents 70 alleged victims and 16 family members of victims. “This settlement helps my clients regain some dignity. … The agreement itself is a sign of a recognition the Church has done something wrong.”
Since the Globe first broke the scandal in January, the archdiocese has been harshly criticized for its cover-up of molestation cases involving clergy. Critics have demanded that Cardinal Bernard Law resign after he reassigned Geoghan despite knowledge of his pedophile past. Law vowed not to resign.
Geoghan has been accused by 130 people of abuse over several decades. He is now serving a 9-to-10-year sentence for groping a 10-year-old boy and faces another criminal trial. A judge last week threw out two rape charges against Geoghan because the cases were too old.
Although the terms of the agreement were not immediately available, the archdiocese has previously agreed not to require victims to sign confidentiality agreements, and they dropped a demand that Garabedian not represent victims in future cases against the archdiocese.
The agreement comes just days after Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly told the Church he wants unprecedented influence in the way the Church recruits, trains and monitors clergy, according to the Globe.
“How do you build in a comprehensive program that prevents this from ever happening again?” Reilly said. “That's what we're looking for. We intend to stay very involved in that until it's accomplished.”
Legal scholars questioned whether Reilly has the legal authority for such a move, and an archdiocesan spokeswoman said she could not comment on the idea because Reilly made the suggestion during a meeting with Globe editors, and not in a public forum.
Bush's Remarks
At a White House press conference March 13, President Bush expressed confidence that Cardinal Law and other U.S. bishops will deal effectively with the pedophilia issue.
Said Bush, “I know many in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. I know them to be men of integrity and decency. They're honorable people. I was just with Cardinal Egan today. And I'm confident the Church will clean up its business and do the right thing.
“As to the timing, I haven't, frankly — I'm not exactly aware of how fast or how not fast they're moving. I just can tell you I trust the leadership of the Church.”
Asked if Cardinal Law should resign, Bush added, “That's up to the Church. I know Cardinal Law to be a man of integrity. I respect him a lot.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Media Acknowledge Daniel Pearl's ‘Unborn Child’
WORLD NET DAILY, March 1 — When Heath and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson announced an expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program to unborn children, there was a hue and cry from many journalists about chipping away at a “woman's right to choose.”
But the media seems to have “turned radically pro-life” since the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, commentator Dean Karayanis wrote on the Internet site.
“News writers routinely drum up sympathy” for the “unborn child” of Daniel and Mariane Pearl, wrote Karayanis, content producer for RushLimbaugh.com. A Nexis search for Pearl's name and “unborn child” returned hundreds of hits, including some from the most liberal sources, he said.
“Though it surely wasn't the media's intention, their coverage had to make some people wonder, ‘Wait a minute. That tiny ultrasound blur is alive ?” Karayanis wrote. “Maybe the bottom line is that, until the media tells me so, I'm not sophisticated enough to understand which fetuses I'm supposed to pity for never knowing their fathers and which ones I'm supposed to pity for never knowing life at all.”
St. Patrick's Day Parade Honors Sept. 11 Heroes
Cardinal Edward Egan, archbishop of New York and this year's grand marshal, was to lead millions of spectators and parade participants in turning south at 12:30 p.m. March 16, toward the site of the former World Trade Center, to take a minute to remember the 2,800 people who died there Sept. 11.
Many of the victims, including financial-service traders who worked on the upper-most floors of the twin towers and firefighters and police officers, were Irish-Americans. The parade was dedicated to those uniformed heroes.
But a group that has been a thorn in the side of parade organizers for years, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, wanted everyone to know that there were “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender” heroes, too, the Times said. The group, which has been prohibited from marching in the parade under their own banner because their viewpoint contradicts Catholic teaching, planned to hold its usual sideline protest.
Simon Gives Heavily to Catholic Causes
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 3 — After he won the Republican primary for governor in California, Bill Simon's contributions to Catholic causes were scrutinized by the wire service, which found that the candidate generously supports Catholic causes.
Through his Cynthia L. and William E. Simon, Jr., Foundation, Simon donated $1.5 million from 1998 to 2000. “Simon's charitable giving before he became a candidate, detailed on federal tax forms for private foundations, reveals a wealthy, religious activist eager to fund and promote a generally conservative brand of Christianity,” writes AP's Jim Wasserman. “He and his wife, Cynthia, also show interest in scholarships and physical fitness for inner-city students, hospitals, the homeless, Catholic broadcasting and Christian content in movies and films.”
Frances Kissling, director of the dissident group Catholics for a Free Choice, is worried that Simon's charitable giving record reveals a man who is a threat to abortion rights and “family planning.”
The article also points out that Simon wrote an opinion article ranking Pope John Paul II as the 20th century's greatest leader alongside Winston Churchill. It also noted that he is a member of the Knights of Malta, whose roots are in the “Church's medieval crusades.”
We look forward to a similar article about the nature of the causes to which Gray Davis donates, though the piece did point out that the Democratic governor's “Catholic religious affiliation is largely unknown publicly.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Abortion Survivor Gives Human Face to 'Born Alive' Legislation DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:DENVER — Taune Winter survived an abortion attempt, and she's thankful for the chance at life. Today, she's 15 and lives with her adoptive mother in Deer Trail, Colo.
“I thank God every night for my family, for the world, for my cousins, my friends, and everything that pops into my head,” Taune said.
Taune spoke in February to a committee of the Colorado House of Representatives, urging them to embrace a bill that would give protection to other children who survive abortions but are left to die with little or no medical care. Called the “Born Alive” bill, the legislation would define a child as “every human being who is born alive at any stage of development.”
The issue took center stage nationally March 12, when the federal House of Representatives approved the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act by a voice vote. The federal bill would amend the legal definition of “person,” “human being,” “child” and “individual” to include abortion survivors outside the womb who have a heartbeat or are breathing on their own.
An identical bill is pending in the U.S. Senate.
Taune's birth mother was a teen whose parents forced her to have an abortion, so they wouldn't be burdened and embarrassed. She had an early term abortion, but the abortionist didn't notice she was pregnant with twins.
When the teen's parents learned of the other child, still alive, they demanded a late-term abortion. The procedure failed, and Taune was born premature but alive.
“Taune's birth mother was very grateful that Taune survived,” said Taune's adoptive mother, Jodi, who kept in touch and sent the birth mother photo albums of the baby.
Left to Die
Colorado State Rep. Ted Harvey introduced the Born Alive bill to protect children like Taune who survive abortions, and others born prematurely or with defects. Harvey says he was shocked to learn that it's not uncommon for hospital physicians to offer minimal care, known as “comfort care,” or virtually no care at all to children who are born with defects, or are considered likely to develop defects, or who survive abortions.
Like the federal bill passed March 12, the Colorado proposal would not preclude a mother from seeking abortion, even in the third trimester. Nonetheless, abortion advocates are hostile.
“If it is, as I suspect, designed to limit, restrict or abolish all abortion, it should say so and not rely on stealth,” said Sylvia Clark, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.
Other opponents argue that saving such infants will cost society too much, as doctors and nurses will treat some premature babies and abortion survivors who would otherwise be left to die of neglect. Colorado officials estimate a state law would cost $2.6 million next year, the price of medical and foster care for children who would otherwise die.
Some of those children, said Dr. Joe Toney of Denver's Rose Medical Center, would live with complications such as cerebral palsy, deafness, and retardation. Taune, for example, has an IQ of 65. Toney said it's common practice among Colorado doctors to use “less aggressive” efforts to save the lives of children born with complications, or the likelihood to develop them, if that's the wish of the parents.
That's a practice that disgusts Jodi Winter, who says Taune would not have come into her life had it not been for aggressive medical procedures after the failed abortion. She said that a growing number of abortion survivors are organizing through the Internet to tell their stories and build support for state laws.
An icon of the “Born Alive” legislation drive is Giana Jessen, a woman in her mid-20s who survived a saline-injection abortion in 1977. Jessen has cerebral palsy as a result of the failed abortion, yet she's an accomplished musician, writer and public speaker.
Jessen is an inspiration to Taune, who aspires to a teaching or singing career despite her disability. Taune is home schooled, and has developed an above average vocabulary despite a below average IQ.
Not Rare
Failed abortions that result in “born alive” children aren't that rare. Although no statistics are kept, first-person witnesses are easy to find among the ranks of those who staff hospital nurseries and delivery rooms.
Mary White, a registered nurse, watched the slow deaths of two abortion survivors at Community Hospital in Boulder, Colo., in the 1970s. The experience changed her life, and has haunted her ever since.
At the time, White was working in the hospital's nursery. A married couple had checked in for an abortion, and the mother was five months pregnant. A doctor injected saline into the mother's uterus and waited for the baby to die.
“When he delivered it, the baby started to cry,” White remembered. “A nurse came hurriedly into the nursery and she had this baby wrapped in blue Chux [plastic-coated paper that covers a medical table]. She opened the incubator and said ‘Mary, I'm sorry.’ In the incubator was a kicking and crying baby that was supposed to have been aborted. Everyone was in shock. We just watched in horror as this baby died.”
A doctor came in and the baby was put on oxygen. He told White the baby would have irreparable damage from the saline, if it lived. No other efforts were made to sustain the life of the baby, who died in three hours.
“If it had been any other preemie, we would have started an IV in the umbilical cord, we'd have used assisted ventilation, and we would have injected fluids and antibiotics,” White said, crying as she recalled the ordeal. “The baby would have been stabilized and airlifted to Children's Hospital, where every effort would have been taken to save her life.”
Later, White watched another baby who survived an abortion die in about an hour.
Despite White's turmoil over seeing the two babies die, her own daughter grew up to become a leading advocate of abortion rights in Colorado. As editor of the Colorado Daily, a large Colorado newspaper, Pamela White's abortion rights advocacy has been praised by renowned late-term abortionist Warren Hern. She is also widely credited for helping defeat laws proposed by pro-life legislators, such as parental notification and a proposed 48-hour mandatory cooling off period for women who seek abortions.
She does not, however, oppose the “Born Alive” bill. The bill makes sense, White said, because she grew up watching her mother grieve for the two babies who survived abortions and were allowed to die.
Said Pamela White, “My commitment to preserve the right to terminate a pregnancy does not extend beyond birth.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope Sends Assisi 'Decalogue for Peace' to World Leaders DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Pope John Paul II has sent to all heads of state and government a document produced at the interfaith prayer meeting in Assisi in January, and his representative at the United Nations has republished it for all delegates there.
“Our mission here is to make sure his words reach the ears of U.N. listeners,” said Archbishop Renato Martino, permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations. “For it to reach their hearts, we pray to the Holy Spirit.”
Pope John Paul feels that is important, as the Assisi meeting took place against the backdrop of terrorism and war. He sent the meeting's Decalogue for Peace on March 4 expressing his conviction that it will be able to inspire political and social action.
The decalogue is a list of 10 things religious leaders have committed themselves to, including the proclamation that violence and terrorism are “incompatible with the authentic Spirit of religion.”
James Nicholson, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, expressed confidence that, coming from “such a highly respected moral voice” as Pope John Paul, the decalogue will inspire the political and social action the Holy Father hopes for.
“The Pope is right on target,” Nicholson said from his New York office. “We need to develop a mentality of humanity and of making a choice to try to reconcile and love one another rather than submit to hatred, fear and paranoia.”
But agreeing with the decalogue that governments must address the root causes of terrorism, Nicholson said the U.S. leadership does not condone pressure on governments such as the new one in Afghanistan to liberalize its abortion laws.
Humanity Must Choose
In his letter accompanying the Decalogue, the Pope wrote that the Assisi participants were “more committed than ever to a common conviction: Humanity must choose between love and hatred.”
“I hope that the spirit and commitment of Assisi will lead all men of good will to the search for truth, justice, liberty, love so that every human person will be able to enjoy his/her inalienable rights, and every nation, peace,” the Holy Father wrote. “For its part, the Catholic Church, which places its confidence and hope in ‘the God of love and peace (2 Corinthians 13:11), will continue to be committed so that loyal dialogue, reciprocal forgiveness and mutual concord will guide the course of men in this third millennium.”
Archbishop Martino said the decalogue and the Pope's letter take up matters that are discussed daily at the United Nations, including the need for dialogue.
Ideally, government leaders should call a world meeting to respond to the Pope's appeal, the archbishop said, with a hint of humor in his voice.
But he did express some optimism about the fruits of a similar world gathering, the Millennium Summit, called by the United Nations in 2000. Participants said “beautiful things” there concerning the elimination of poverty and the need for greater dialogue, much in the spirit of Assisi. But unlike other such gatherings, where the “beautiful things” are often forgotten after everyone goes home, leaders at the United Nations, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, have kept the Millennium Summit before the delegates, reminding the General Assembly of things decided there. “It's something that was not done before,” Archbishop Martino said.
“All of this contributes to changing minds and hearts of people,” he continued. “It should be seen in the long-term effect of the conversion of world leaders.” Pope John Paul has spoken of the need for a “globalization of solidarity” to be present along with any other globalizing trend. “Repeating these appeals again, people will start to hear and meditate” on them.
The decalogue speaks of the need to promote friendship between peoples. “We are convinced that, in the absence of solidarity and understanding between peoples, technological progress exposes the world to a growing risk of destruction and death,” it says.
Assisi participants also committed themselves to doing everything possible to eliminate the root causes of terrorism, and Archbishop Martino pointed out that this has been a common theme for the Pope.
“He has said many times, and so have I since Sept. 11, that you can't eliminate terrorism with a simple police operation,” the papal representative said. “You don't eliminate 10,000 terrorists and it's over. You have to investigate the causes. So you see there are people who are hopeless because of social and political reasons. Their future is bad. If we try to modify their conditions, perhaps we won't have terrorism.”
The archbishop acknowledged the need for justice for terrorists but predicted that at the end of a long war against terrorism people will see that “the problem is bigger than a simple cleaning.”
Exporting Injustice?
Nicholson agreed that the war on terrorism is “multidimensional.”
“We have to eradicate terrorism,” he emphasized. “They prey on totally innocent, hapless people. It's murder in the worst form.”
He added that the United States is also committed to working on the injustices that give rise to terrorism. “The problem is to make the extremists realize and appreciate that.” In some parts of the world, he pointed out, children are taught to hate people in the West.
Nicholson credited President Bush in leading and encouraging dialogue. The president has stressed that Americans should not harbor hatred of any religion because some of its members have practiced terrorism. He has tried to show that “people have a tendency for goodness and peace,” Nicholson said.
The ambassador also defended the United States’ record in helping to establish a stable government in Afghanistan, protecting Muslim minorities in Eastern Europe and being a leading supporter of the World Food Program.
He said the United States does not condone efforts to get governments to legalize abortion. The interim government in Afghanistan legalized the procedure, which is condemned by Islam.
Earlier, the United Nations Population Fund launched a $20 million “reproductive health campaign” for Afghan refugees and is working to increase “reproductive health care,” a phrase normally understood to include abortion, and increase the use of contraceptives. A similar campaign in Kosovo in 1999 imported abortion machines, abortifacient drugs and outdated IUDs with no provision for safe removal, according to the Population Research Institute.
The institute is establishing a pro-life office in Kabul.
According to the UNFPA, the United States has pledged a contribution to the Afghan reproductive health campaign. That fact is not encouraging for those who want to see Bush refuse to make the annual U.S. contribution to the agency, which is also suspected of being in collusion with China's coercive population-control programs.
“The big picture,” however, Nicholson said, “is that our government is very interested in working together with theirs and sharing resources so they can have a better life, and realize that we can be good allies and we're not out to dominate them with our culture and religion, and they shouldn't be trying to do that to us.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: The Ten Commitments DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Assisi Decalogue for Peace
1. We commit ourselves to proclaiming our firm conviction that violence and terrorism are incompatible with the authentic spirit of religion, and, as we condemn every recourse to violence and war in the name of God or of religion, we commit ourselves to doing everything possible to eliminate the root causes of terrorism.
2. We commit ourselves to educating people to mutual respect and esteem, in order to help bring about a peaceful and fraternal coexistence between people of different ethnic groups, cultures and religions.
3. We commit ourselves to fostering the culture of dialogue, so that there will be an increase of understanding and mutual trust between individuals and among peoples, for these are the premise of authentic peace.
4. We commit ourselves to defending the right of everyone to live a decent life in accordance with their own cultural identity, and to form freely a family of his own.
5. We commit ourselves to frank and patient dialogue, refusing to consider our differences as an insurmountable barrier, but recognizing instead that to encounter the diversity of others can become an opportunity for greater reciprocal understanding.
6. We commit ourselves to forgiving one another for past and present errors and prejudices, and to supporting one another in a common effort both to overcome selfishness and arrogance, hatred and violence, and to learn from the past that peace without justice is no true peace.
7. We commit ourselves to taking the side of the poor and the helpless, to speaking out for those who have no voice and to working effectively to change these situations, out of the convinction that no one can be happy alone.
8. We commit ourselves to taking up the cry of those who refuse to be resigned to violence and evil, and we are desire to make every effort possible to offer the men and women of our time real hope for justice and peace.
9. We commit ourselves to encouraging all efforts to promote friendship between peoples, for we are convinced that, in the absence of solidarity and understanding between peoples, technological progress exposes the world to a growing risk of destruction and death.
10. We commit ourselves to urging leaders of nations to make every effort to create and consolidate, on the national and international levels, a world of solidarity and peace based on justice.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Kateri Devotees Hope for Canonization in Toronto
Pope John Paul II will canonize Blessed Juan Diego on July 30 in Mexico City and Blessed Pedro de San Jose de Betancur on July 31 in Guatemala.
But the Ontario daily raises the possibility that while he is in Toronto for World Youth Day on July 23-28 he might raise to the altars Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. The Lily of the Mohawks was born in Auriesville, N.Y., and died at the age of 24 in Quebec, after escaping persecution. Her people had rejected her after she converted to Christianity.
Blessed Kateri has been declared a patroness of this year's World Youth Day gathering. Proof of one more miracle due to her intercession is needed for canonization.
Pope Paul Had Letter of Resignation Ready
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, March 7 — Revelations of a letter of resignation Pope Paul VI had written, mean little as regards Pope John Paul II's situation, said one Vatican official.
Pope Paul's former secretary, Italian Archbishop Pasquale Macchi, wrote in a new book that the Vatican II-era Pope prepared a letter of resignation to be used if he became too ill to continue running the Church. Canon lawyers had assured him there were no impediments to a Pope resigning.
The French news agency pointed out that the book came out as “the current Pope is clearly ailing” due to an arthritic knee and Parkinson's disease-like symptoms.
But Cardinal Roberto Tucci, head of Vatican Radio, said the Pope would never resign as long as he could work. Cardinal Tucci, who knows Pope John Paul well after years as organizer of his foreign trips, said the Holy Father is “holding up well.”
“I believe that John Paul II can count on a great internal strength,” he said. “His physique is well used to austerity. But I think that his strongest support is prayer. That's where his strength is.”
The Pope, who turns 82 in May, said he has no intention of stepping down. He joked with journalists last year, “I wouldn't know whom to present my resignation to.”
Russian Duma Hears Debate on Vatican Relations
NTV, March 7 — The tension between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church has spilled over to the Duma of the Russian legislature. A member of the Union of Right Forces party, Vladimir Semenov, urged that Pope John Paul II be invited to visit Moscow.
“Instead of attempting to establish a dialogue with the Vatican, for over a month the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church have shown nothing but hysteria,” he said during a debate broadcast on the Russian television station. “This reaction on the part of the Russian Orthodox Church reminds one of death throes.”
He pointed out that the Pope already has visited many of the former Soviet countries, where the Orthodox Church is also very strong.
But Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the Liberal Democratic party, replied, “It is the West that is in death throes, where all religions have collapsed and now they are trying to creep in here — to the world's only spiritual land.”
He remarked that if someone wants good relations with the Vatican, “Please help yourself — there are excellent tours to Italy available. … We are a Russian Orthodox country.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: God Will Return to Save Us DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
During his general audience on March 13 in Pope Paul VI Audience Hall Pope John Paul II continued his series of talks on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours. In his remarks to the 8,800 pilgrims in attendance, he focused his meditation on Psalm 77, where the psalmists asks why God often seems to be silent amid suffering in our personal lives.
Recognizing that these times of silence can lead to a crisis of faith, the Pope pointed out that the psalmist does not lose faith. He renews his hope by recalling God's saving work in the past, when he led his people through the Red Sea by the hand of Moses and Aaron. “The bitterness of the present is illuminated by this past experience of salvation,” the Pope noted.
“Professing faith in the mighty deeds of salvation history leads us to faith in what the Lord is, constantly, and therefore still is, even now,” he added. “God will return to lead us to salvation.”
By setting Psalm 77, which we have just proclaimed, in Morning Prayer, The Liturgy of the Hours intends to remind us that the beginning of the day is not always bright. Just as there are gloomy days when the sky is cloudy and a storm looms overhead, there are also days in our life that are filled with tears and fear. This is why — though it's only dawn — this prayer is already a lamentation, a plea, and a call for help.
This psalm is actually an insistent plea to God that is profoundly driven by trust in — or rather by the certainty of — divine intervention. So, the psalmist does not see the Lord as an impassive ruler who is confined to his luminous heaven and who is indifferent to what happens to us. Such an impression, which grips our heart at times, gives rise to some very painful questions that could lead to a crisis of faith: “Is God denying his love and his choice of his people? Has he forgotten the times when he sustained us and made us happy in the past?” As we will see, renewing our trust in God, our Redeemer and Savior, will sweep away such questions.
The Darkness of Trials
So, let us follow the development of this prayer, which begins dramatically on a note of distress, but then leads us little by little to peace of mind and hope. We have before us, first of all, a lamentation on the sadness of the present day and on God's silence (see verses 2-11). The psalmist lets out a cry for help to a seemingly silent heaven; his hands are raised in pleading and his heart is faint from distress. During a sleepless night, which is full of tears and prayers, he tells us in verse 7, “I meditate in my heart,” as a discouraging refrain resounds continually in the depths of his soul.
When the pain reaches the peak where he wants the cup of suffering to be taken away (see Matthew 26:39), he explodes into words that pose some penetrating questions, as we noted earlier (see Psalm 77:8-10). His cry calls into question the mystery of God and his silence.
The psalmist wonders why on earth the Lord is rejecting him, why he has changed his attitude and the way he acts toward him — forgetting his love, his promise of salvation and his merciful tenderness. “The right hand of the Most High,” which had performed wonders of salvation in the Exodus, now seems paralyzed (see verse 11). This is truly a “torment” in the full sense of the word, which causes a crisis of faith for the psalmist.
If this were the case, God would not be recognized; he would become a cruel being or a mere presence like that of the idols, which are unable to save anyone because they are incapable, indifferent and powerless. These verses in the first part of Psalm 77 are a dramatic portrait of faith during times of trial when God is silent.
Grounds for Hope
There are, however, grounds for hope. This is what emerges in the second part of the plea (see verses 12-21). It is like a hymn where he seeks to courageously confirm once again his own faith, even in the dark day of pain. He sings about past salvation, which had its shining epiphany in creation and in the deliverance from slavery in Egypt. The bitterness of the present is illuminated by this past experience of salvation, which is a seed planted in history: it is not dead, but only buried, so it can sprout later on (see John 12:24).
The psalmist is making use, therefore, of an important biblical concept, that of the “memorial,” which is not simply some vague, consoling memory, but the certainty of divine action that will not fail: “I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, your wonders of old I will remember” (Psalm 77:12). Professing faith in the mighty deeds of salvation history leads us to faith in what the Lord is, constantly, and therefore still is, even now. “Your way, O God, is holy; … You alone are the God who did wonders” (verses 14-15). So the present, which seemed dark and with no way out, is illuminated by faith in God and opened up to hope.
Our Path to Salvation
In order to sustain his faith, the psalmist probably quotes an older hymn, which people might have sung in the liturgy at the Temple of Zion (see verses 17-20). It is a spectacular theophany where the Lord enters the stage of history and upsets nature, particularly the waters that symbolize chaos, evil and suffering. The image of God's path through the waters, a sign of his triumph over negative forces, is very beautiful: “Through the sea was your path; your way, through the mighty waters, though your footsteps were unseen” (verse 20). Our thoughts turn to Christ walking on the waters, an eloquent symbol of his victory over evil (see John 6:16-20).
Finally, recalling that God guided his people “like a flock under the care of Moses and Aaron” (Psalm 77:21), this psalm leads us implicitly to one certainty: God will return to lead us to salvation. His powerful and invisible hand will be with us through the visible hand of the shepherds and leaders chosen by him. This psalm, which opened with a cry of pain, evokes at the end feelings of faith and hope in the great Shepherd of our souls (see Hebrews 13:20; 1 Peter 2:25).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Indian Bishops Seek To Foster Interreligious Dialogue DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:JALANDHAR, India — Franciscan Father Mani Alakkot has a firsthand understanding of the need for the Church in India to promote dialogue with other religions.
Two years ago, the Franciscan priest was entrusted with the dangerous duty of protecting an orphan boy, Vijay, who was the eyewitness to the cold-blooded murder of Father George Kuzhikkandathil.
Speaking at the March 1-8 meeting of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, held in Jalandhar on the theme of “Church in Dialogue,” Father Alakkot said, “Only through dialogue can we convince others what Christianity and missionary work aim at.”
Added the priest, “Hindu militant groups misunderstand the mission work.”
Father Kuzhikkandathil was brutally murdered by Hindu militants in June 2000 at Madhura, the ancient city where Hindus believe the god Krishna was incarnated. Father Kuzhikkandathil was the principal of the Franciscan school there and was killed on its premises.
The assailants locked Vijay in a room before taking Father Kuzhikkandathil out and beating him to death. The boy was threatened with death as well if he reported the incident to police.
Hindu militant groups were unhappy because the missionaries started schools and hospitals around Madhura. The groups alleged that Christians are trying to convert Hindus.
Church leaders believe that the best way to counter such hostility is through meetings with leading Hindu militant organizations, such as Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (called RSS).
“The Church has taken the right stand regarding the dialogue with Hindu militant groups like RSS,” said Archbishop Cyril Mar Baselios of Thiruvanathapuram, the president of the bishops’ conference. Archbishop Mar Baselios was instrumental in starting the dialogue with Hindu militant groups.
Madan Vaidya, an RSS spokesman, welcomed the idea of dialogue. Vaidya said that the first meeting between RSS and Christian leaders, held last August at the bishops’ conference offices in New Delhi, was “a new experiment that helped us to know each other.”
Added Vaidya, “Such dialogue will continue.”
The Jalandhar conference was attended by 150 bishops, 24 archbishops and two cardinals, including Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the prefect of the Congregation of Evangelization of Peoples. “Christianity in India seeks to adopt to different cultures in which it finds itself and work in harmony with other religions,” Cardinal Sepe told the gathering.
Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh leaders also spoke at the conference, and the bishops went on a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest place of Sikhs. Jalandhar is located in the Punjab, the homeland of the Sikh religion.
A March 6 interreligious meeting was presided over by Giani Joginder Singh Vedanti, the Jetedar or chief priest of the Sri Akal Takht, the Sikh religion's highest body. Vedanti expressed “full confidence” that “the interreligious meeting will be a rewarding enterprise.”
Professer Sandog Ripoche, a senior advisor to the Dalai Lama, offered similar sentiments. A dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity will “enrich both the religions,” Ripoche said.
A Muslim representative said that Islamic leaders intend to follow the Catholic bishops’ lead and start their own dialogue with other religions. Maulana Akthar Husain of Anjuman Minhaj-E-Resul, a conglomeration of Muslim organizations, said the dialogue will begin “soon.”
On March 3, the bishops visited Wagah, located on the border between India and Pakistan, to pray for peace. The two countries have been close to war in recent weeks over Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim Indian state that has been the site of terrorist violence. India charges that the violence has been supported by the Pakistani government.
The bishops also condemned the Hindu-Muslim communal violence that claimed more than 600 lives in the northwestern state of Gujarat in late February and early March. The violence was triggered by the plan of Hindu militants to build a temple in the city of Ayodhya on a site where a mosque was destroyed 10 years ago, in an incident that sparked communal riots across India.
Said Archbishop Mar Baselios, “We are saddened with the news of the burning of so many innocent people.”
Bindu Milton writes from New Delhi.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bindu Milton ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Study Finds ‘Family Planning’ Encourages Sex
Family planning services have had no impact on pregnancy or abortion rates in girls under 16 and may even increase sexual activity, according to the Glasgow, Scotland, daily. A study published in the Journal of Health Economics found that girls in that age group who used “family planning services” were more likely to be sexually active than other teen-agers.
“Family planning seems to encourage more people to have sex which, teamed with a high contraceptive failure rate, can cancel out any gain,” said David Paton of Nottingham University, who led the 14-year, Britain-wide study. His work showed that pregnancy rates fell when access to family planning was temporarily restricted under a 1984 court ruling.
A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland, Peter Kearney, said society ought to suggest that teen-agers should not have casual sexual relationships, and that the government, which freely “moralizes” about alcohol and tobacco use, should not be afraid to moralize about sexuality as well.
Philippine Senators Push Ban on Death Penalty
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, March 13 — Fifteen members of the Philippine senate filed a bill calling for abolition of capital punishment, and the country's top prelate voiced his support for the measure.
Said Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila, “I am very happy to join our senators in this humanitarian step for the sake of our men and women on death row.” The cardinal said the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime.
After a 23-year moratorium on capital punishment was lifted in 1999, the country executed seven convicts by lethal injection. But in 2000, amid appeals from the Church, then-President Joseph Estrada froze executions.
Scottish Parents Worry About Losing Catholic Schools
In Dalkeith, outside Edinburgh, there are plans to replace two rundown high schools, one Catholic, the other nondenominational. They would be rebuilt side by side, each retaining its identity but sharing some facilities, such as a cafeteria and assembly hall. Catholic and non-Catholic students will be able to mix at school for the first time.
The head of a group of 300 parents argues that the plan is part of an agenda to “get rid of Catholic schools by diluting what they are.” In addition, the group is concerned about the way the nondenominational school promotes knowledge of contraception.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Holy Land Foundation's Father Vasko: 'A Crisis in the Cradle of Christianity' DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK— Father Peter Vasko is president of the Holy Land Foundation, which assists Christians in Israel and the Palestinian territories with housing, education and jobs. He spoke to Register staff writer John Burger while touring the United States Jan. 14 to Feb. 6. He also reported to bishops on the situation in the Holy Land.
How have recent world events impacted Christians in the Holy Land?
Father Vasko: Christians are a minority within a minority in the Holy Land. There are 3.9 million Muslims in Israel, including the occupied territories; there are 4.7 million Jews. And there are 165,000 Christians. There's been a steady decrease in the number of Christians in the Holy Land. A lot has to do with the birth rate. For Christians it's 2.2%; for Muslims, 4.8%, and for Jews 3%. The majority of young Christians are leaving, so it's likely the growth rate will become smaller. By 2020, the growth rate of Christians will be 0% if it continues like this. These figures are from a 1999 study, “Why the Christians are Leaving,” by Bernard Sabella, a leading sociologist at Bethlehem University
Why
In Israel, not including the occupied lands, they're leaving first of all because of the Islamization influence. Fringe groups, radical Muslims, are coming in. Secondly, there's an economic factor.
To encourage them to stay, we have a scholarship grant, and if someone wins one, he promises to stay in the Holy Land for four years. We then try to secure them employment.
But because of the second intifada, the West Bank and Gaza has been closed off to many principal Israeli cities to keep terrorists from entering — although we've seen over the years that there are all sorts of ways to get in.
But what price do you extract to punish a nation because of a dozen or so criminals? They're stereotyping the average Palestinian who has to have a job to feed his kids and pay for their education. They've made things impossible.
We just finished a 13-unit housing facility in Beit Hanina. Couples will be paying a symbolic rent, living with other Christian couples — and not emigrating. We're very proud of that. Because we're such a minority, they feel safe with other Christians around them.
For the last four or five years, Christians have been asking, if there is a Palestinian state, will there be discrimination against them in jobs and housing because they're Christians?
Why is it important to stem the flow of Christians from the Holy Land?
If we don't have a sense of who we are as Christians, of our religious roots and heritage, how can we call ourselves followers of Christ? This is where Christianity began. Its founder was born here. Abraham was born in Iraq; Mohammed in Mecca. The Church is not an external façade but a living community. If we don't do something about this there will not be a living community, but a collection of empty monuments.
What is the Muslim attitude toward Christians in the Holy Land?
At this point, there is basically a good rapport. But for the last four or five years there's been an under-current of fundamentalism coming from Algeria, Sudan and Egypt, making the road bumpier. In Nazareth, there were no problems between Muslims and Christians. But at the end of 1997 members of the Islamic Movement came in and took over a plaza outside the Basilica of the Annunciation, which the municipality had designated as a public square for the many Jubilee Year pilgrims. There was to be an information center there and a dropping off point. The Muslims squatted, put up a huge tent and said, “We're not leaving.” The local police did nothing, and the Israeli government looked the other way.
Without impunity, the Muslims have been attacking the Christians going in to the Basilica. In 1998, they burned Christian-owned shops, and the police simply looked on. Now they're building an illegal mosque in spite of a court injunction. Once again, law enforcement has looked the other way.
On Jan. 9, we, along with the International Coalition for Nazareth, protested, and construction came to a temporary halt. But it's not permanently stopped. If the mosque is built, it will be a permanent source of extreme tension between Christians and Muslims, Jews and Christians and, in the end Muslim and Jewish relations. This radical group doesn't represent moderate Muslims in Nazareth. Israel is very well aware of them, that their publications are anti-West and anti-Israeli. It will have a very detrimental effect on Christians’ trust in Israel, which promised to protect them and their places of worship.
The basilica is now under siege. Stones are thrown at worshipers as they go in. There will be further Christian emigration from even Israel proper if this mosque is allowed to be built there. The Islamic Movement leaders have said, “If the mosque is not built, the Christian leaders and Israel's leaders will pay the consequences.” A week later they indicated that there would be a bloodbath.
This is why this thing has to stop. If not, they will have created a vacuum of power that is considered very dangerous, with volatility against citizens and violence in a city that never before experienced violence.
We're not opposed to Islam, but we are opposed to violence and intimidation, to squatting on public property. Under [former Prime Minister Ehud] Barak they received government approval but had to wait for a building permit. We're asking [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon to take away that approval and go back to the original plan.
There are 11 mosques in Nazareth. Why do they need to build one under the Basilica of the Annunciation?
Saudi Arabia, King Faisal and Yasser Arafat are against it. Bush and the Pope asked them not to build there. Faisal offered $10 million for them to build it anywhere else in Nazareth, and they said no. It's more than, “I want to build it here.” It's a statement that they are here to stay and people will be under the control of their understanding of what government is instead of a democracy.
How would you characterize Israel's response to the plight of Palestinian Christians?
There's a general indifference on the part of officials and a majority of the population. They don't identify you as a Christian or a Muslim but as a Palestinian. And as a Palestinian you are the enemy. There's an advantage for the Israeli government to keep Christians here — it's the connecting link they have with the rest of Christianity, and Christianity exists mainly in the Western world. Israel is the cradle of Christianity. The Jews are our elder brothers; they have to take care of their younger brothers — but there's no great interest to do so.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:British Clergy Getting Self-Defense Lessons
THE PRESS ASSOCIATION, Jan. 22 — Responding to an increased threat of violence against members of the clergy, an advocacy group has begun offering self-defense classes to priests, vicars and rabbis, the national news agency of Great Britain reported.
Tae kwon do lessons were being organized by the Amicus union for skilled and professional people.
The union reported last year that church workers were more vulnerable to physical attacks than doctors or probation officers. The research showed that one in eight had been assaulted in the previous two years.
Australian Archbishop Laments Abortion of Handicapped Baby
Archbishop Hart complained that the law in Victoria, which prohibits abortion unless a doctor believes it is necessary to protect a woman from serious danger to her life or mental health, seemed to permit ever-widening boundaries for abortion, the Melbourne daily said.
A spokesman for coroner Jacinta Heffey said the aborted baby, at 32 weeks gestation, was stillborn and that the coroner's court only has jurisdiction over reportable deaths. Since there was no birth, there was no death, the spokesman said. Archbishop Hart called that a “serious misjudgment.”
Said the archbishop, “If it is true that our laws do not protect children in such cases — indeed do not even allow a full coronial inquest — there is something seriously wrong with our laws.”
Messianic Groups Reaching Out to Russian Israelis
The Bible had been given to a student by Jewish Christians who believe that Jesus is the messiah.
The Post that there are an estimated 1,500 adult, Russian-speaking immigrants who belong to messianic congregations. The number of messianic groups in the country has more than tripled in the decade since mass Soviet Jewish immigration began, it said.
A Conservative rabbi who leads a Russian-speaking congregation said that one of the key factors attracting Russian immigrants to messianic groups is the social distance between them and native Israelis.
The U.S. State Department reports that evangelical Christian and other religious groups have complained that police in Israel are slow to investigate incidents of alleged harassment, threats and vandalism committed by an anti-missionary organization.
Ban Abortion, Cardinal Tells South African Government
SOUTH AFRICA PRESS ASSOCIATION, Feb. 5 — Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban, South Africa, said the government should suspend abortions as a gesture of its seriousness in calling for a moral renewal in society, according to the South African news agency.
Cardinal Napier made the appeal in the church newspaper Southern Cross. Commenting on President Thabo Mbeki's request to religious leaders to help address the nation's “moral decline,” especially in terms of violence, crime and corruption, the cardinal said suspending abortions would demonstrate the government's seriousness about the value of life.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pope John Paulís Teaching on Capital Punishment DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Seven Reasons America Shouldn't Execute
The Register asked several scholars to comment on Justice Antonin Scalia's arguments about the death penalty, the Register's critical editorial about those arguments, and Justice Scalia's rejoinder.
It is with great reluctance that I take issue with Justice Scalia, who is rightly regarded as one of the outstanding legal experts of the nation and an exemplary Catholic. I agree with what he says about the constant Catholic tradition in favor of the death penalty and the harmony of that tradition with the system of criminal justice that undergirds the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But I differ with Justice Scalia in his interpretation of Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae.
In Evangelium Vitae the Pope enunciates as an absolute principle that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral (No. 57). He also says that capital punishment ought not to be imposed except “when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society” (Evangelium Vitae, No. 56).
Following the Catechism of the Catholic Church (No. 2109), I interpret the defense of society as including not only physical defense against the criminal but also the vindication of the moral order. This interpretation agrees with the principle that the primary purpose of the punishment that society inflicts is “to redress the disorder caused by the offense” (Evangelium Vitae, No. 56).
If the Pope were to deny that the death penalty could be an exercise of retributive justice, he would be overthrowing the tradition of two millennia of Catholic thought, denying the teaching of several previous popes, and contradicting the teaching of Scripture (notably in Genesis 9:5-6 and Romans 13:1-4).
I doubt whether the tradition is reversible at all, but even if it were, the reversal could hardly be accomplished by an incidental section in a long encyclical focused primarily on the defense of innocent human life. If the Pope were contradicting the tradition, one could legitimately question whether his statement outweighed the established teaching of so many past centuries.
I believe that the Pope, without contradicting the tradition, is exercising his prudential judgment that in our time adequate punishment, including the moral and physical defense of society, can generally be accomplished by bloodless means, which are always to be preferred.
“Prudential” has a technical theological meaning, possibly unfamiliar to Justice Scalia. It refers to the application of Catholic moral doctrine to concrete cases in which it is necessary to make a human estimate of what is appropriate. Since Christian revelation tells us nothing about the particulars of contemporary society, the pastors of the Church have to use their personal judgment as spiritual leaders.
As a reason for severely limiting the death penalty today, the Pope mentions steady improvements in the penal system. Here in the United States one could name additional reasons. Speaking at the same conference in Chicago where Justice Scalia delivered his remarks, I proposed the following seven reasons:
1. The inequitable application of the death sentence by courts and juries that are prejudiced against certain groups;
2. The inability of poor and uneducated clients in many cases to obtain adequate legal counsel;
3. The likelihood that innocent persons might be put to death, even in the absence of the two factors already mentioned;
4. The difficulty of judging the subjective guilt of the defendant, especially in cases where the defendant is very young, mentally retarded, or psychologically impaired.
5. The tendency of executions to inflame an unhealthy appetite for revenge in society. Personal vindictiveness, according to Christian standards, is immoral;
6. The failure of modern democratic society to perceive the judgment of the State as embodying a transcendent order of justice;
7. The urgency of manifesting respect for the value and dignity of human life at a time when assaults on innocent human life through abortion, euthanasia and violent crime are widely prevalent.
My sixth reason requires a word of explanation.
As Justice Scalia in his Chicago speech recognizes, the traditional rationale for the death penalty has been undermined by modern democratic theory, which tends to depict the State as a pliant instrument of the will of the people. I still hold that the court may and should embody a transcendent moral order, but I note that the symbolic or pedagogical value of its decisions, which has been so important in the past, has been largely eroded.
Justice Scalia seems to concede too much to the new mentality when he writes to the Register, regarding the imposition of the death penalty: “It is my job to administer whatever response American people give to that question” (emphasis added). Does this mean that if the American people want the court to follow public opinion polls rather than a transcendent moral order, the court can no longer serve as a minister of divine justice (cf. Romans 13: 4)? I do not believe we have sunk so far.
Justice Scalia raises the question whether a judge who accepts current papal teaching could in good conscience hear cases involving the death penalty. If the Pope (as I believe) allows for capital punishment in some rare cases, to be determined by prudential considerations, his position is not contrary to the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and raises no problems.
Even a judge who believed that capital punishment should never be used in our country today, and that such was the expressed belief of the Pope, might still affirm the death penalty in certain cases on the ground that, although the law was bad, the decision was nevertheless constitutional, legally correct, and not manifestly opposed to the moral law. One can legitimately implement a law that one regards as prudentially wrong. Capital punishment, after all, is legal in the United States, and is not murder.
Cardinal Avery Dulles is a professor at Fordham University in New York.
Many Americans dismissed Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he criticized the decadence of Western Culture. Others more recently ignored his plea for a restoration of the death penalty: “There are times when the state needs capital punishment in order to save society.” This is Christian doctrine. Since popes are preserved from essential error by “grace of state,” none has wrongly claimed authority to call capital punishment morally evil.
“Development of doctrine” does not apply here.
As the Church's teaching on contraception cannot “develop” in a way that would declare its intrinsic evil to be good, so the right of a state to execute criminals cannot “develop” so that its intrinsic good becomes evil. For Cardinal John Henry Newman, development of doctrine involves “preservation of type.” Changes in the way a doctrine is expressed and applied cannot alter its essence.
Some Catholics, who once pointed out the flaws in the “seamless garment” argument, now rush to put on that garment as though there has been a sudden development. By definition, the development of doctrine cannot happen overnight. The new edition of the Catechism revises the section on capital punishment. This was not a development of doctrine. It was, however, problematic for placing a prudential judgment in a catechetical text, more problematically so than in an encyclical like Evangelium Vitae. Paragraph 2266 of the Catechism names the primary consideration of retribution, but No. 2267 ignores it.
That the vast majority of opinion has turned against capital punishment is irrelevant to the case and is not universally so. Nor is it universally so that penal systems have improved in a way that renders capital punishment unnecessary. There are many very different systems.
There has been a development, not in essential doctrine, but in moral criticism. Here, I am edified by the fine scholastic logic of Justice Scalia, as when he identifies the mistaken modern equation of private morality and governmental morality.
Catholics have distinguished between peace and pacifism. They disserve systematic theology when they fail to make a parallel distinction between the dignity of life and a total ban on capital punishment. The cogency of Catholic apologetics crumbles when reason is abandoned for sentimentality in consequence of philosophical idealism and subjectivism. We also may be witnessing here some tension between personal-ist phenomenology and Thomist realism.
Absolute rejection of capital punishment weakens the cogency of pro-life apologetics. Some churchmen cite skewered statistics on the execution of innocent victims.
Since 1973 the present U.S. system has overturned about 33% of all convictions, although only .6% of those criminals were found to be factually innocent. DNA testing makes justice ever more secure, and capital offenders receive due process far more deliberately than other offenders. In numerous instances, e.g. the defeat of Senator John Ashcroft, strongly anti-abortion politicians have lost elections to pro-abortion candidates who were against capital punishment. This gets worse when criminals, freed in response to ecclesiastical appeals for mercy, kill again.
The pastoral commentary of the Church guides moral method, but the prudential calculus, in punishment as in the declaration of war, rests in the civil government whose authority pertains to natural law and is not granted by the Church. To propose otherwise under the guise of doctrinal development would be a species of clerical triumphalism that post-Enlightenment humanists claimed to abhor. Few see this as clearly as a distinguished Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Father Rutler is pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York.
In various ways the Register editorial gave Justice Scalia a bum rap. Also, contrary to the editorial, Evangelium Vitae no obstacle to abolition of the death penalty.
According to Scalia, if a judge thinks the death penalty is immoral he should resign. There are other options but that issue is beyond the space available here.
Scalia said that because Evangelium Vitae “does not represent ex cathedra teaching … it need not be accepted by practicing Catholics.” Many liberal Catholics advanced this tired argument to support their sit-in schism over Humanae Vitae. Canon Law and the Catechism adopt the teaching of the Second Vatican Council's document Lumen Gentium that “loyal submission of will and intellect must be given … to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he does not speak ex cathedra.”
Cafeteria Catholicism is wrong, whether the pick-and-choose customers are liberal or conservative, judges or peasants.
We have two questions: First, does the state have authority to impose the death penalty? John Paul affirms the traditional answer: Yes.
Second, when may that penalty be used? John Paul has given us a development of the teaching on that point. The “primary aim” of punishment is still retribution, “redressing the disorder introduced by the offense” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2266).
Because of the importance of the conversion of the criminal, however, retribution will not justify execution unless the new test for the use of that penalty is satisfied. It must be “the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor” (Catechism, No. 2267). If this were merely John Paul's personal opinion and not a binding teaching, he would not have put it in the Catechism.
I agree fully with that teaching, which caused me to change my former support for a limited use of the death penalty. But even if we disagree with it, we are obliged to give it “loyal submission of will and intellect.”
A Catholic can no longer argue for the use of the death penalty on grounds of retribution, deterrence of others from committing crimes or for any other reason unless the execution is “the only possible way” of protecting others from this criminal. The decision as to whether it is “the only possible way” depends, of course, on a prudential judgment. John Paul was correct in saying that, “Today… the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Evangelium Vitae. 56).
Although that factual judgment must be made as to each penal system and each case, the new test according to which that judgment must be made is a universal criterion, binding in all places and in all cases. If the death penalty in that system in not an “absolute necessity,” that is, “the only possible way” to protect others from this criminal, it is immoral to impose it.
The death penalty might still be justified in cases such as a maximum-security life inmate who murders another inmate, or in a condition of unrest where the security of imprisonment cannot be guaranteed or perhaps in cases involving violations of the laws of war by leaders of international terrorist networks. These cases are debatable.
John Paul asserts the primacy of the person over the claim of the state to be the arbiter of the ending as well as of the beginning of life. Each person and each society has to have a pope, a visible, authoritative interpreter of the moral law. I hope Justice Scalia, whom I admire, will come to accept this teaching of the Church. And I hope he will not conclude that his agreement with that teaching will oblige him to resign from the Supreme Court.
We need him on the court. We already have a Pope.
Charles Rice is a professor emeritus at University of Notre Dame Law School.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Justice Scaliaís Letter to the Editor DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:A friend sent me a copy of your editorial of Feb. 17-23, enTITLEd “Scalia's Dissenting Opinion.” It is full of mistakes — beginning with the remark that I should “stick to being a jurist.” I am being a jurist when I ask whether the performance of my job (I participate in imposition of the death penalty) is forbidden by authentic Catholic doctrine.
Or do you think that authentic moral imperatives announced by the Church have no real-life consequences? Perhaps so, because I cannot imagine any other explanation for your acknowledging that disagreement with Evangelium Vitae is permissible, while simultaneously criticizing me for voicing such dissent in response to a student at Georgetown who asked (quite reasonably) “How, as a Catholic judge, can you participate in the process of imposing the death penalty, which the Church says is immoral?” You say that my response — to the effect that I do not believe immorality of the death penalty to be authentic Catholic doctrine — was “an example of a powerful man persuading a crowd of people that the Church is wrong.”
What was I supposed to say? “I am a judge, not a theologian”? Or perhaps “Well, the Church says that, but it really doesn't expect anyone to act upon it”? (In any case, I was of course not asserting that the Church was wrong, but that the Church in fact teaches the opposite of what recent, non-ex cathedra, pronouncements have said.)
Perhaps you do not appreciate the moral dilemma that the new teaching has forced upon Catholic judges, prosecutors and jurors because you do not understand the new teaching. You amazingly say that it provides no more support for completely abolishing the death penalty than it does for continuing the death penalty. All Evangelium Vitae teaches, you assert, is “that the cases where the death penalty must be used are extremely rare, practically nonexistent” — as though it tells the faithful that only rarely (if ever) is the death penalty morally required.
That is quite wrong. The encyclical says that the death penalty is only justified — only moral — “in cases of absolute necessity: In other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today, however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”
In other words, the death penalty is rarely, if ever, morally permissible.
This represents a fundamental change from the (infallible) universal teaching of the past 2,000 years, because it proceeds from the premise that the only justifiable purpose of the death penalty is to “defend society” in the manner that prisons defend it — that is, to disable the offender and deter future offenders. Prior teaching, from St. Paul forward, was that retribution is a valid objective. Whereas, St. Paul says, individual Christians must “give way to wrath,” the government “carries the sword” as “the minister of God to execute vengeance upon him that doeth evil.” (By the way, your editorial accuses me of “selectively” quoting St. Paul. Perhaps you would like to tell your readers which portions of St. Paul contradict the morality of the death penalty. Of course there is none.)
Your equating of my refusal to accept the new teaching regarding the death penalty with the refusal of the Catholic Massachusetts lab scientist to accept the new teaching regarding human cloning is utterly absurd. The teaching that cloning is immoral is new, but does not contradict two millennia of authoritative teaching that cloning is OK.
With regard to the death penalty, by contrast, your editorial acknowledges that Church doctrine, “voiced by popes, saints and doctors of the Church around the world,” “has consistently held that the state has the right to execute criminals.” Today is different, you say, because the modern state “Denies a transcendent moral order and denies that its authority over life is delegated from God.” “[H]ow,” you ask, can such a state “justly apply the penalty? Would St. Thomas Aquinas look at the Supreme Court Scalia sits on and blithely hand it more power over life?”
Well, I cannot say about Aquinas, but I do know that the “minister of God to execute vengeance” that St. Paul was referring to (the ruler at the time he wrote his letter to the Romans) was Nero — who many think was even less devout than the Supreme Court. The notion that only good Christian rulers derive authority from God is as unorthodox as the notion that the only valid objective of the death penalty is “to protect society.”
Finally, I protest your portrayal of me as “supporting the death penalty.” I do no such thing. I support the proposition that it is not sinful for a Catholic to support it, and indeed to participate in its imposition. Whether it should be imposed — whether such severe retribution is desirable — is a question I do not address. It is my job to help administer whatever response the American people give to that question, and I do not accept that performing my task (in either direction) is morally wrong.
ANTONIN SCALIA
U.S. Supreme Court
Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Defend the Pope DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:In this week's Register, a distinguished panel discusses the Church's teaching on the death penalty: Cardinal Avery Dulles, Justice Antonin Scalia, Notre Dame Law Professor Charles Rice and Father George Rutler.
We believe it's important to discuss Pope John Paul II's teaching that supportable uses of the death penalty have all but disappeared — understandably, many Catholics struggle with the teaching.
But the Pope's teaching shouldn't just be discussed and debated — it should be defended and adopted.
Many readers have written us to argue that they needn't agree with every prudential judgment of a pope. They inform us that they have considered his prudential judgment about the death penalty and rejected it.
They should reconsider. The Pope's teaching on capital punishment doesn't seem like a mere “prudential judgment.” John Paul opposed the Gulf War, for instance. His opposition to the Gulf War was something that Catholics ought to have taken seriously; since it came from the Pope, we at the Register even felt it was important to adopt it. But Catholics weren't bound in any way to do so.
In the case of capital punishment, however, the Pope hasn't merely called for capital punishment to be opposed by Catholics (which is already more than he did in the case of the Gulf War). No, he has put the highest level of Vatican diplomacy behind that call, including personally interceding on behalf of men and women on death row. And he hasn't merely written about the matter in general audience or Regina Caeli addresses; he has codified it in an encyclical, which carries nearly the heftiest possible doctrinal weight. And he didn't just write it in an encyclical: He saw that it was incorporated into the Catechism.
Some have been disappointed by the Register's strong words in defense of that teaching. Catholics ought to be even more disappointed with those who blithely oppose the Pope.
We should press for fidelity to the magisterium on every subject. When the Holy Father tells us in nearly every imaginable way — from pep talks to encyclicals to personal action — that he wants capital punishment stopped, and we treat that teaching as a casual thing, we only encourage the dangerous modern tendency to shrug off the teachings of the Church.
That's why our original editorial objects not to discussion of the teaching, but to the manner in which it is discussed. It is well and good to raise serious questions about Church teaching in forums that are meant to help Catholics better understand the teaching. But to simply convince people that the Pope is wrong is inappropriate and irresponsible.
Think of it this way: If a scientist believed that the drinking water used by most Americans was carcinogenic, no one would question his right to press the matter in scientific journals and in discussions with peers. But if he held a press conference to tell the world about it, rather than subjecting his theory to peer scrutiny that might disprove it, he would be guilty of dangerous sensationalism.
If the way we air scientific theories is important, then the way we air our opinions about faith and morals is even more important, because they touch on the soul. And if we're worried about someone saying drinking water is poisonous, we should be even more worried about someone who says papal teachings are at variance with Catholic truth.
Some argue that Pope John Paul II is too influenced by his experience of 20th century Poland — which fell under the grip of Nazis and Soviets during his lifetime — to see the death penalty issue clearly.
Perhaps it's the opposite. Perhaps, since he has seen what the culture of death is capable of, he wants to stop it in its tracks.
There's a reason we have a pope, and there's a reason this one is warning us with full throat about capital punishment. We ignore him at our peril.
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Scalia Models St. Thomas More DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:As a longtime subscriber to the National Catholic Register, I was surprised to see a harsh and unjust attack on Justice Antonin Scalia given such prominence in its Letters section (“Scalia's Stance,” March 10-16).
John A. McFarland, noting that Scalia admires St. Thomas More, accuses Scalia of turning More's Catholic principles on their head: “It seems,” he says, “that unlike St. Thomas, Antonin Scalia is God's own good servant, but the government's first.” Nonsense. Has not Mr. McFarland read the life of St. Thomas More? What did More do on May 16, 1532? He resigned the office of chancellor. That is, he did precisely what Justice Scalia is saying a good Catholic must do if he finds that the requirements of his office conflict with God's law.
Like St. Thomas More, Scalia does not believe in forswearing himself. Judges are required to take an oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States. And the Constitution only gives judges limited powers. To strike down a statute duly enacted by Congress that is consistent with the provisions of the Constitution is to contravene the constitutional arrangements a judge is sworn to uphold.
Mr. McFarland says that Scalia's reasoning would allow him to uphold laws authorizing ethnic cleansing if duly enacted and made constitutional by Constitutional Amendment. Again, nonsense. Scalia is saying that he would have to resign his office rather than do such a thing.
To those who want a better understanding of magisterial teaching on the death penalty, I recommend the lucid analysis by Avery Cardinal Dulles in the April 2001 issue of First Things (and the “Exchange” in the August-September issue). These can be obtained from the First Things Web site (www.firstthings.com).
STEPHEN M. BARR
Newark, Delaware
The author is a professor at the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware and a member of the editorial advisory board of First Things magazine.
Our Priests Need Prayers
The news report citing Bishop Wilton Gregory's Feb. 19 statement on clerical abuse (“U.S. Bishops on Clergy Sex Abuse: ‘Much for Which We Need to Be Forgiven,’” March 3-9) misses the essential issue in dealing with sexual abuse.
Pederasty is a serious crime and no one has the right to hide knowledge of the action from the authorities. A legal response, police action, and appropriate judicial assessment are a necessary first step. The circle-the-wagon mentality of our clerical leaders must stop.
The bishop's comments on seminary screening is on the money; that is where priestly formation begins. As Flannery O‘Conner, the great American writer, observed: “At times Catholics are called upon not only to suffer for the Church, but to suffer by the Church.” Today, this is certainly true.
Sadly, many Americans have known of this abuse for decades. Members of the Catholic press, e.g., The Wanderer, have published numerous comprehensive and accurate articles regarding both sexual abuse and seminary misconduct.
Finally, our dedicated and committed priests need our prayers as this is a terrible challenge for them.
EDWARD J. FITZPATRICK
Blauvelt, New York
Problem Priests
Regarding “Vatican Spokesman's Comments Highlight Problem Priests” (March 17-23):
It is noteworthy that the secular press is covering the matter of priestly pederasty and pedophilia quite widely. For example, Omaha's Sunday World Herald on March 10 reserved page 5A for this matter, running four news items on homosexual priests, pedophilia and the damage sexual abuse cases present the Church.
The items were from Boston and the Associated Press, one by the Boston Globe, which broke the original story on sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese. To strengthen its stories, two articles offered specialists on sexuality and the priesthood — both were quoted quite liberally. Both are former priests, one is a psychotherapist, the other a former psychology professor. Both proffered dire consequences for the Catholic Church if — yes, if ? the Catholic Church's opposition to homosexual priests rules the day.
Yet the Bible states quite clearly in both its Old and New Testaments what the Catholic Church must accept in the matter of homosexuality. The fact is that the practice of homosexuality is not acceptable, and never has been, and can never be. Both former priests should have gleaned this bit of biblical knowledge while in seminary.
We Catholics must live with the tragic situation presented us in these times. But, we Catholics know our history. Our Church was brought into being through the passion and crucifixion of Our Lord. Here, in Lenten season, we live again the times that lead us to the Resurrection and Easter. As for the past 2,000 years, give or take a few, we Catholics made it through untold numbers of wars and persecutions — through the Hundred Years’ War, the Reformation, through fascism and communism.
We will make it through these times, too. Many do worry that this attack of evil on the Catholic Church will further wilt its numbers of priests. But, no — it won't. Rather, the new policies advanced by our great and charismatic Pope will attract more and finer priests. Catholic history teaches that poverty, persecution, and holiness always — yes, always — strengthen Christ's Church. The Church will make it through; after all, God is in charge.
ALLEN O‘DONNELL
Wayne, Nebraska
Men Aplenty, All Right
I was amused to see in the Register that Crowley County, Colo., is listed as a place where men outnumber women by 205 to 100 (“Where the Guys Are,” Facts of Life, Mar. 10-16).
I hope women won't be flocking to Crowley County in search of a mate. You see, Crowley County is home to two large prisons — one privately operated and one operated by the State of Colorado. Each prison houses approximately 1,200 men — but none of them are “available!”
JUDITH SMITH
Fort Collins, Colorado
China's Fear
Regarding “New Report Documents Beijing's Systematic Crackdown on Religion” (Feb. 24-March 2) and “Bush To Communist China: Stop Persecuting Church” (March 3-9):
There are many areas of contention between the United States and communist China: human rights, trade deficit, religious freedom and Taiwan, to name a few. The leaders of Red China invited President Bush to visit their country and give speeches.
Now America has the most powerful military in the world.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has no military. Yet they won't allow the Pope into their country. Why is that? The answer is obvious. This stooped, frail, infirm man is too dangerous. It is clear they are afraid of him. And they should be. Look at what our Polish Pope did to the Soviet Union. If our next pope turns out to be Chinese, they will be in big trouble.
LAURIE BATEMAN
Hugo, Colorado
Why War?
It was encouraging to read “Pope Interrupts Lenten Retreat to Meet With Syrian President” (March 3-9). This meeting should indicate to all Catholics in the United States that the Vatican supports Jerusalem's status as a city of Jews, Muslims and Christians. These ideas are contrary to our news media and the militant government we have in Washington D.C.
Pat Buchanan, in his book The Death of the West, makes this statement: “Sept. 11 was a direct consequence of an interventionist U.S. policy in an Islamic world where no threat to our vital interests justifies our massive involvement.”
In other words, one can say that terrorism started with our military actions in the Muslim countries. The beginnings started in 1991 by the first President Bush, and it was known as the Gulf War. Action was in Kuwait so as to settle the question of who controls the oil in that country.
I recall no noticeable Catholic opposition to that Desert Storm war in 1991, except from an officer in the Army: Capt. Yolanda Huet-Long, a medical officer. Because of her Catholic faith, she believed the war in Kuwait as being unjustified and immoral, resulting in her refusal to participate. She was court-martialed and sentenced to two and a half years in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Had our leaders in Washington chosen the same Christian heritage as Yolanda did in 1991, I'm certain the events of Sept. 11 would not have occurred. Military reprisals are not the solution to our present problems, only peaceful negotiations, as suggested by Pope John Paul II.
LEO KIMMETT
Canon City, Colorado
Lauding Doctors for Life
Thank you for the Brian Caulfield report “Transforming Catholic Doctors, One by One” (Feb. 10-16).
The leadership of Drs. Robert Saxer and David Harris with the Catholic Medical Association in Florida is encouraging. Ethics in the association and, for that matter, in all services and life in general, is both courageous and desperately needed for the welfare of humanity.
Freedom is obtained by truth, truth is in the person of Jesus Christ.
This comes from God, the source of all truth. In the absence of truth, man establishes the guidelines and our present state in this country reflects the peril when God is left out of the equation. Our U.S. Supreme Court has given us several decisions disregarding divine law.
TOM H. LINCK
Muskegon, Michigan
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Rehabilitating Russia DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Raymond De Souza's news analysis “Vatican Hardball with Orthodox in Russia” (March 3-9) was excellent.
The Holy Father's consistent policy of paying close attention to Orthodox sensibilities has proved fruitless. This is tragic. John Paul II has done everything possible to alleviate Orthodox fears, but to little avail. Moreover, his treatment by the Orthodox has been cool to outright insulting. (e.g., the snub by the Georgian catholicos.) Put simply, most Orthodox “jurisdictions” are not interested in dialogue with the Universal Church.
The establishment of the four dioceses in Russia was long overdue. The Vatican's estimate of 1.3 million baptized Catholics in Russia, as quoted in your article, is short by at least half a million.
One question remains. When will the Holy Father in Rome establish a diocese of Byzantine Catholics in Russia? According to the 2001 Annuario Pontificio, an Apostolic Exarchate was established for Russians of Byzantine Rite in 1917. It is time this ecclesiastical jurisdiction was reconstituted.
FATHER DAVID M. LOGAN
Spokane, Washington
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Born of Mary, Crucified by Pilate; Now forYou and Me DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Miryam of Nazareth would not, by most standards, seem to be a memorable person.
She lived an obscure life. She is mentioned barely a handful of times in the documents of the Church her son founded. She turns up briefly, playing a bit part in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts and then vanishes (with the exception — perhaps — of a cameo in Revelation).
During her earthly life she was a peasant woman, living on the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire, in a town of no importance, widowed, and with a single son who would die brutally under the double condemnation of both her countrymen and her foreign political oppressors. She never wrote a book, made a scientific discovery, won a battle, made a fortune or demanded rights for Jews, women, peasants or oppressed peoples anywhere.
Indeed, the opprobrium that her countrymen attached to her son seems to have rebounded on her, so that she was whispered of among some of the chattering classes as having conceived him under shady circumstances. Her chances of success in this world were simply non-existent and it is quite literally a miracle that she did not wind up as utterly forgotten as all the other nameless, toiling peasants who spend their days in the dust and diapers of ordinary life and flop down at night, worn out, to catch an old movie on the tube and turn in early.
Pontius Pilate, on the other hand, was a very big fish at the top of the food chain. There was nothing he did not know about Roman power politics and What It Takes To Make It In The World. He had a long resume of accomplishments in the Roman bureaucracy and led a life of distinguished public service.
If Barbara Walters had shown up at his door to do a profile on him and asked, “What will you be remembered for?” he would have given a sober, thoughtful assessment of his economic policies, his achievements in the military, his grace under political pressure from special-interest groups. The camera would have zoomed in on his handsome, tanned face, his distinguished gray temples, his dark brown eyes, his sharp aquiline nose. It would have panned over the certificates and awards on his wall and then past the pictures of the wife and kids (essential adornments for every politico).
There would be the brief photo montage of his rise to success. There would be the shots of him walking along the Sea of Galilee with his dog and talking about his days on the football team or his early career as a crusading reformer against the Italian wine cartels.
In the end, Mary and Pilate image the only two possible destinies we ultimately can choose.
Barbara would lob him some softball questions about his marriage and his wife's struggle with sleep disorders. There would have been the normal probing about his alleged involvement with the secretary and the titillation this involved for the gossip columnists. He would shrug it off with a “let's not talk about what happens in private. I'm not perfect, but I believe in family values and my wife stands by me.”
There would be the reverent retrospectives on Pilate's brave support of the Roman “choice” to expose infants, his deep pride over the new aqueduct system (“I knew I had to stand tall on those issues”). There would be the controversy over his “alleged” harsh treatment of fundamentalists (“Barbara, there are times when you have break a few eggs to make omelets”). There would be interviews with friends (“Ponty's always been a straight shooter. We don't always agree. Heck! Sometimes I think he's dead wrong. But he's a hard worker and a dedicated public servant”).
We'd hear from local religious fanatics about some alleged unfairness in handling the trial of an up-country preacher a few years back, but we would be assured with nods and winks that this is just sour grapes from a few wackos. It would end with the faux humility we expect from “public servants”: “I'm not saying I'm perfect. But I know I've tried to do the best darn job I know how.”
Then Babs would sign off with an appropriately empty TV coda: “Pontius Pilate: a man to remember.”
And so he is — every day, in every Mass and rosary, in every language of the world: “Crucified under Pontius Pilate.” It's a passage that seals him into our memories as surely as a slightly earlier passage in the same creed reminds us that God was “born of the Virgin Mary.”
The Virgin Mary and Pontius Pilate are the only two mortals mentioned in the Nicene Creed. In the end, these two people image the only two possible destinies we mortals ultimately can choose. Whether we are rich or poor, talented or klutzy, lowborn or high society, mighty or weak, we shall be remembered for displaying either the power of the powerless virgin who said Yes to God — or the powerlessness of the powerful Pilate, who bowed to pressure to crucify Christ.
How will we be remembered?
Mark Shea writes from Mountlake Terrace, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mark P. Shea ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: For the Children DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:One of the effects of the disturbing reports from Boston of minors who were abused by Catholic priests — some of them repeat offenders — has been to make Catholics nationwide wonder: How bad is this problem in my diocese? Last month the Archdiocese of Philadelphia publicly addressed these concerns, and in a way that may be helpful and instructive to others.
On Feb. 26, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua issued a statement condemning all sexual abuse, especially sexual abuse of minors by priests, and apologizing to the victims of such abuse. He also described the archdiocesan policy for responding to allegations of clerical sexual abuse and announced a new rule: No priest who has had sexual contact with a minor will receive an assignment to any ministry whatsoever.
The statement and texts of the Archdiocesan “Policy on Clergy Sexual Abuse” and “Procedure for Cases of Pedophilia/Ephebophilia” were published Feb. 28 in the Philadelphia arch-diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Standard and Times. (Read the statement online at www.archdiocese-phl.org/cs&t.)
Facing the Facts
Cardinal Bevilacqua's statement condemns the sexual abuse of minors in no uncertain terms as “a grave sin and a serious crime … a detestable violation of body and spirit.” The cardinal sorrowfully admits that there have been cases of sexual abuse of minors by some priests of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Data released by the archdiocese indicates 35 credible instances of sexual abuse by its priests over the last 50 years. “Certainly,” said Cardinal Bevilacqua, “the main priority in addressing [such instances] is caring compassionately for the well-being and protection of the victims. In each case, the archdiocese has attempted to be as responsive as possible toward the victims by offering assistance with appropriate therapeutic counseling.”
“We are looking always to enhance the care of victims,” said the director of the archdiocesan office for communications, Catherine Rossi. “We recognize victims face a difficult healing process. It is important that we address their needs.”
Rossi noted that 2,154 diocesan priests have been in service since 1950. “That works out to about 1.6%,” she said. “Many of the 35 affected priests have since retired, died or left the priest-hood.” Rossi estimated that, in the 1980s and ’90s, about $200,000 was paid to victims from an archdiocesan insurance fund. She added that the past two decades have seen no repeat offenders.
In responding to accusations of clerical abuse, the archdiocese obeys Church and state law. Cardinal Bevilacqua emphasized: “We have not discouraged people from going to law-enforcement or civil authorities with allegations. It has, in fact, been our preference that civil authorities investigate these matters.”
The archdiocese refuses media requests for the names of perpetrators or their victims. “We have remained sensitive to the wishes of the victims and their families for confidentiality,” Cardinal Bevilacqua explained. While acknowledging that clerical sexual abuse is a “reprehensible breach of trust,” the cardinal recalled the Church's “responsibility to care for the priest perpetrator himself.” Just as one would continue to care for a family member who exhibited deviant behavior, the Church demonstrates Christ's justice and also his compassion to her clergy who have fallen.
Cardinal Bevilacqua emphasized that ‘all of us must be vigilant to protect young people from abuse’ — and praised ‘the overwhelming majority of dedicated priests who serve the Lord faithfully.’
The archdiocesan “Policy on Clergy Sexual Abuse” denounces such criminal misconduct, yet recognizes that, pending investigation, all persons accused of alleged clerical sexual abuse must be protected. In 1993, existing procedures were elaborated in written form to ensure that allegations would be handled expediently. The policy has been revised periodically to reflect developments in Church and state law, and to take into account recent medical findings about sexual disorders.
The archdiocesan policy, written in non-technical language, is widely available. A telephone number and mailing address are given for anyone who intends to contact the archdiocese about a claim of clerical sexual abuse.
“The archdiocese treats all complaints as serious,” the policy states. Anonymous or vague allegations are usually impossible to investigate. The archdiocese complies with the reporting requirements of Pennsylvania law. “Decisions regarding any public statement must be made on a case-by-case basis,” it adds.
Upon receiving a complaint, the archbishop appoints a delegate (normally the secretary for the clergy) to investigate promptly. First, the one making the complaint has the opportunity to speak to the delegate in person. Then the accused cleric is informed of the complaint and meets with the delegate to discuss it. An assistant accompanies the delegate during interviews.
The investigation may develop in one of several ways. If the accused cleric admits to wrongdoing, “he is immediately referred for clinical evaluation,” according to the policy. “He is also removed from his ministry.”
Whenever the complaint is credible, appropriate pastoral care and other assistance (which may include professional treatment) is provided for the victims. If the complaint initially appears to be credible but there is no admission of wrongdoing, the cleric is referred for psychological evaluation, partly for his own protection. He may be placed on administrative leave.
If a cleric is removed from his assignment, the appropriate person(s) from the affected ministry may be informed of the reason, so as to respond to the pastoral needs of the community. If the complaint proves to be unfounded, the cleric will receive counseling and assistance; if on leave, he will be returned to ministry.
“If the complaint is founded … the Delegate will meet with the alleged victim and/or her or his family to offer financial assistance with the services of a qualified … counselor,” states the policy. “The cleric is financially responsible for counseling for the victim and her or his family.” The archdiocese guarantees that counseling is not denied because of the cleric's inability to pay.
The delegate then arranges for therapy for the cleric, informs him of his right to have a canon lawyer and recommends that he obtain legal counsel at his own expense.
The archdiocesan “Procedure for Cases of Pedophilia” clearly states that “The diocese cooperates fully with civil authorities as indicated by local law.”
Forward-Looking
The Philadelphia archdiocese's policy on clergy sexual abuse was recently modified to eliminate the possibility of “desk jobs” for priests who have had sexual contact with a minor. Six diocesan priests were dismissed under this revised policy. “Consequently,” said Cardinal Bevilacqua in his Feb. 26 statement, “I do not know of any priest who has had sexual contact with a minor who is in a current assignment.”
The Philadelphia ordinary mentioned other safeguards: the screening process for seminary applicants, which includes psychological testing and criminal background checks; the formation program, which focuses also on the human and sexual development of candidates for priesthood; and ongoing clergy-education programs.
Cardinal Bevilacqua praised “the overwhelming majority of dedicated priests who serve the Lord faithfully,” and defended the Catholic clergy against the baseless charge that sexual abuse is endemic in their ranks. He emphasized that “all of us must be vigilant to protect young people from abuse.”
He noted that, for many years, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has had appropriate policies governing employees of its schools and of the Catholic Social Services network.
In concluding his statement, Cardinal Bevilacqua asked the faithful of his archdiocese to join him in praying especially for the victims of clergy sex abuse and their families. He also requested prayers for priests, even those who have caused such harm. “I pray that God's forgiveness will renew us, that his grace will sustain us and that, together, we may work to make present the love, healing and truth of our merciful God.”
Michael J. Miller writes from Glenside, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: One archdiocese's model response to clergy abuse ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael J. Miller ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Holy Week's Call to Holiness Never Seemed So Timely DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:We have looked sin and death in the face in ways many of us could not even have imagined.
We have seen large-scale terrorism within our borders. Indeed, thousands of family and friends of its victims still live daily with the sorrow and fear that it brought. (Keep them in your prayers this Easter holiday. Almost anyone who has lost a spouse or parent can tell you that it is six months later, after everyone else has “moved on” to the real demands and distractions of life, that the sorrow really hits you.)
In the wake of the terrorism, we have seen full-scale war. Our military has killed many and, while surely justified, that fact ought at least to sober us, regardless of our politics.
And we are, each of us, targets of terrorists who still wish us harm. The Pentagon reported last month that half a dozen terrorist plots have recently been thwarted.
As time passes, other news has begun to share the headlines. There's the story of corporate deception and greed, the thousands who lost their life savings and the company heads who plead the Fifth Amendment rather than tell the truth about how it happened.
There has been the murder trial of a mother who drowned her five young children in the bathtub at home. As a father, I find that words simply fail me every time that topic comes up.
And, of course, there have been the priest sex-abuse scandals.
We have looked sin and death in the face, perhaps more in recent months than in a very long time.
Which is to say: It is a very good time for Holy Week.
If you are like me, you often try to be positive about the world around us and the people and events that fill it. You look for the good news that so often gets little coverage. I would suggest, though, that this is not the week for that. This is a week to be intensely aware are the very real, very sad events going on like the ones I've just mentioned.
Why? Because these are the sins — these and countless others — that Jesus took upon himself. This is the burden borne by the Suffering Servant of God who, the Catechism teaches, “bears the sin of the multitudes” (No. 608). Is it any wonder that Jesus sweated blood in Gethsemane as he consented to the Father's will that he take that sin to the cross the next day? Is it any wonder that he died there sooner than the other two criminals crucified with him? The wonder is that there was a body to bury at all, that it was not utterly consumed by the acidity of our sin.
Awareness of the world's corporate sin — and our own personal sins — will teach us the true greatness of what Jesus did in the events we remember and celebrate this week. It will remind us how very amazing is the grace we receive. It will make Easter all the more joyful a feast.
Think of it this way. A man who is cured of a typical headache is mildly relieved that there is aspirin to help. He soon forgets he ever had one. A man who is cured of a nagging toothache is appreciative of his dentist and thanks him.
But a man who is cured of cancer or saved from the grip of a heart attack feels forever indebted to his doctor and, if he has any sense, thanks him profusely. He does not forget it, because he knows how things might have gone.
We need to be aware of the burden of our sin if we are to fully understand the greatness of the gift we received in the sacred events we remember this week.
Pope John Paul II, in his Lenten message to the Church this year, refers to this gift of salvation, the “free and total gift to us of the only begotten Son.” In the first three paragraphs alone, he calls it “so great a gift of love,” “this stupendous mystery of love,” “the measureless gift of grace,” and “this mystery of infinite goodness.” He is clearly aware of having received something of immense value. He wants us to be aware of it, too.
We have looked sin and death in the face, yes. But Holy Week, which is the expression of a faith so unique among the religions and philosophies of the world, has much light to shed on what we see. It proclaims Christ who died, in the words of one of the Church's most ancient eucharistic prayers, “in order to destroy death and to break the chains of the devil, to tread down hell beneath his feet.”
Don't let that dramatic truth become too abstract. Read it again, but this time in place of “death,” put the killing and depravity that fill news stories too numerous to mention. In place of ”the chains of the devil,” put the warring that we seem unable to avoid, no matter how often we say never again. And in place of “hell,” read Sept. 11.
We have looked sin and death in the face. This Holy Week, which reaches its apex this Saturday night, offers us a glorious foretaste of the day, the eternal day, when we will look love and life itself, forever, face-to-face.
Barry Michaels writes from
Blairsville, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: Much has happened since the last Holy Week. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barry Michaels ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Morning Is War DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:You overslept. The baby's sick. The covers are hugging too closely. We all have impediments to praying in the morning. Yet how we rise sets the tone and direction of the day. Well begun is the morning won.
Ideally, we should wake with a prayer on our lips and thoughts raised to God. We've all heard stories of monks and nuns leaping from bed in an act of prostration and prayer. But this is heroism that the Apostles themselves were not up to at the appointed hour. As our Lord said, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Creatures of comfort, we are prone to turn over, at the ring of the alarm, and utter not a prayer but the words: “Five more minutes.”
The key to prayer in the morning is to be practical, flexible yet persistent, and to know thyself. If your mind is foggy as an English bog before the first cup of coffee, don't attempt a rosary. Settle for a simple aspiration as you shuffle to the kitchen: “Lord Jesus, I give you this day.” God hears the intention of the heart. Save more formal prayers — Morning Offering, the daily meditation — till you've showered.
If you're a morning person, seize the quiet moments while others sleep. Have a prayer book on the night table with holy cards slipped into favorite pages. Choose uplifting prayers of praise and thanksgiving that acknowledge God's love and protection, and express your dependence on his goodness and guidance. Personally speaking, I begin the Divine Praises as my feet hit the floor and conclude with an Act of Contrition, placing my sinfulness before God and asking forgiveness.
For Internet lovers, a number of prayer resources are online. Try the site of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (www.nccbuscc.org) and click on “daily readings” for a wealth of scriptural meditations and the day's Gospel reading.
Time is key. How much you have in the morning frames the depth and extent of your prayer. Rising earlier is laudable, especially as a sacrifice during Lent, but much can be accomplished in little time if you have what you need at hand, including images of Jesus and Mary to focus the mind. Be fervent but flexible.
Chesterton's adage “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly” should not be your constant guide, but it does highlight our need at times to settle for less than perfection. Keep in mind, though, that you are before Christ, who deserves the devotion of our lives.
Commit to at least ten minutes, if you're just starting out. Posture is important. Kneeling is ideal. If you sit, pick a chair that is not too comfortable, lest sleep creep back. Begin with a prepared text such as the day's Gospel or one of the Psalms, but remember that prayer is not reading. It is a dialogue, a gift of God to help us draw closer to Him. (For more prayer tips, see the Register's “How to be a Catholic: Part III” at www.ncregister.com.)
You may be in no mood to recognize it as you slip from the covers, but you are preparing for battle. The day awaits with its various temptations. Prayer is your first defense. If you don't see your morning routine in this light, perhaps you have not entered the battle and are slipping toward sloth. The surest way to become a foot soldier of the Lord is to order your morning toward Him. Obstacles will arise. As you strive to overcome them, you grow stronger, and get to know yourself better.
Have a good morning.
New Yorker Brian Caulfield now wakes in his new home in West Haven, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Barnabites and the Blessed Mother DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:In the early 1950s, the Barnabite Fathers, newly arrived from Italy, were looking for property in western New York. They wanted to build a seminary.
As it happened, a Niagara Falls couple, Walter and Helen Ciurczak, had recently pledged to give a portion of their farm to a religious institution that would use it in Mary's honor. It would be their way of thanking the Blessed Mother for her intercessory prayers on their behalf.
The two parties managed to find one another: In 1954, the Ciurczaks gave 15 acres on Swann Road in Lewiston, N.Y., to the Barnabite Fathers. The couple's only stipulation was that the Fathers include a shrine to Mary, along with their seminary, on the land.
The following year, another local donor, Frank Sciabella, provided statuary of Our Lady of Fatima with the three Portuguese children she had appeared to between May 13 and Oct. 13 of 1917 — Lucia and her two cousins, Jacinta and Francisco. Soon after this development, Our Lady of Fatima Shrine became very popular among locals looking for a place to pray and contemplate the goodness of God.
The site's near-instant popularity was helped, no doubt, by the fact that 1960 was just a few years away. What was so special about 1960? That was the year many expected the Church to reveal one of the “secrets of Fatima” which Mary had told to the children back in 1917. Thanks to this expectation, strong devotions to Our Lady of Fatima were springing up all around the world.
For the fledgling shrine, it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time with the right message.
Visions of Love
At Fatima, Mary asked for prayer and penance “for the conversion of sinners and for the reparation of offenses to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” She also asked Catholics to pray the rosary every day to obtain peace in the world and to make special devotions on the first Saturday of each month. During one of her apparitions, the Blessed Mother also gave the children a view of those suffering in hell.
In addition, Mary told the three children that war is a punishment for sin. She told them that World War I, which was still raging as she spoke, would come to an end — but, if men did not return to God, there would be a second world war and, if men still did not return to God, there would be a third world war in which many nations would be annihilated.
It was also at Fatima, on Oct. 13, 1917, that the “Miracle of the Sun” took place. Seventy thousand people reportedly watched as the sun danced in the sky and then plunged earth-ward, terrifying all of the spectators. The sun then returned to its place in the sky. It had rained considerably before the miracle, and everyone and everything was quite wet. After the miracle, everyone and everything was quite dry.
As for the long-awaited secret expected to be revealed in 1960, Pope John XXIII decided to keep it sealed after all.
It would be Pope John Paul II, in the Jubilee year 2000, who would disclose the secret's contents to the world. It turned out to be a symbolic prophecy of the church's 20th-century struggles with evil political systems and of the Church's ultimate triumph. Intriguingly, it also included a vision of “a bishop, dressed in white,” fired upon with “bullets and arrows.” Some interpreted this as a prophetic witness of the attempt on John Paul's life on May 13, 1981 — anniversary of the first Marian apparition at Fatima.
This interpretation was given credence by the fact that Pope John Paul had long had a very strong devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, having credited her with his survival of the assassination attempt
In any case, the disclosure of the secret of Fatima coincided with the beatification of Jacinta and Francisco, who had died young not long after seeing Mary.
Gradually a church, which is now a basilica, developed on the grounds of the shrine. And a striking edifice it is: Lewiston's Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary features a glass-covered dome, striking from outside as well as inside, which has configurations of the continents of the northern hemisphere on the glass. The dome represents the world.
Within the basilica, one of the most impressive sights is a mural by the late Polish artist Joseph Slawinski. The “Peace Mural,” as it's called, is an ancient art form called Sgraffito, in which pictures are scratched out from layers of wet cement. Also eye-catching inside the basilica are chapels devoted to the Blessed Sacrament and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Walking Rosary
Construction of the basilica began in 1963 and was completed in 1965. The sanctuary measures 100 feet in diameter and is 55 feet high. On top of the basilica is a 13-foot, 10-ton statue of Our Lady of Fatima carved out of Vermont granite.
Mary's statue on top of the dome of the world is to represent the fact that Mary is a spiritual bridge for us between heaven and earth. With her hands clasped in prayer, she looks down upon the world and its peoples and constantly intercedes for everyone. By the same token, visitors to the basilica look up to Mary as she watches out for the world. Each year on the second Sunday of August, called Coronation Sunday, a crown is placed on her head.
Visitors can also take a stairway to the top of the basilica's exterior. From there, they have an angel's view of the grounds of the shrine. One of the most moving sights is a “walking” rosary: The 60 beads encircle a pathway around a reflection pool in front of the basilica.
The reflection pool is shaped like a heart in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The rosary ends with a corpus of Our Lord nailed to a marble cross. Surrounding the reflection pool are life-size statues of Christ and the 12 Apostles.
Elsewhere on the grounds are more than 130 life-size statues along what is called Avenue of the Saints, which is shaped like a cross. The Stations of the Cross are etched in glass on another part of the grounds. A replica of the Chapel of the Apparitions in Fatima, knows here as the Little Chapel of Fatima, rounds out the site's main attractions.
Each year, hundreds of Catholics come by the busload to see the shrine's annual Festival of Lights, which includes not only beautiful light displays, but also nine-foot figures of the Nativity, plus many other liturgical designs and scenes. The display is in place from the Saturday before Thanksgiving until the first week of January.
This year is a good one to visit the Lewiston shrine because 2002 marks the 500-year anniversary of the Barnabite order's founding, in Italy, by St. Zaccaria. He named the order after St. Barnabus, who accompanied St. Paul on his missionary apostolate to the gentiles. The shrine and basilica are staffed by Barnabite fathers and brothers, along with helpful lay volunteers.
There's no time like the present to stop by, wish the staff a happy anniversary and pray for the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima.
Joseph Albino writes from Camillus, New York.
----- EXCERPT: Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, Lewiston, N.Y ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Albino ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Oscar, Drowning in Dollars DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:The frenzy surrounding the Academy Awards, coming to you live March 24, has gotten out of hand.
More money has been poured into the campaigns to win an Oscar than ever before.
What's also new are the allegations of smear tactics deployed by publicity departments against rival films. This take-no-prisoners competitive spirit tends to obscure the importance of the movies themselves and what their content might tell us about the current state of popular culture.
Overall, the films nominated reflect a movement away from the “edgy” choices of the last few years. The impulse to test the limits of traditional morality seems to have somewhat receded. It's tempting to read this as an indication of how the events of Sept. 11 have altered the cultural climate even though all the productions were completed before the catastrophe.
Certainly, no one could mistake the current crop of nominees for the family-friendly fare of Hollywood's Golden Age (1932-67). However, it is worth noting that there are far fewer R-rated films are up for Oscars this year than in the recent past.
Most encouraging are the 13 nominations (including Best Picture) received by The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Based on the first novel of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, it is grounded in a transcendent view of the struggle between good and evil that most Hollywood films discarded four decades ago.
A band of knight-like warriors embark on an epic quest to return a golden ring with dangerous powers to the volcano where it was forged. Set in a 7,000-year-old fantastical world of men, hobbits, elves, dwarfs and wizards (Ian McKellen and others), the film has both majestic battle scenes and carefully dramatized interior struggles. The Academy seemed to have had no difficulty distinguishing it from the more superficial but similarly themed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (only three nominations).
Three of the films with multiple nominations are deeply felt pleas for tolerance in dealing with persons with mental disabilities, and they all underline the virtues of compassion, charity and love in an uplifting way. A Beautiful Mind (eight nominations, including Best Picture) is an intelligent, passionate drama that chronicles the descent of real-life mathematical genius John Nash (Russell Crowe) into schizophrenia, and his heroic efforts to recover his sanity with the help of his long-suffering wife (Jennifer Connelly).
For Sentimental Reasons
Both I am Sam (two nominations) and Iris (three nominations) have their hearts in the right places in dealing with the subject, but neither can resist sentimentalizing the effects of their protagonists’ disabilities. Sam is an old-fashioned weeper masquerading as an issue film about the problems of child-raising as faced by a service-industry worker (Sean Penn) with the mental and emotional age of seven.
Iris plunges us into the real-life struggles of aging novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (Judi Dench) as she succumbs to Alzheimer's disease. Its most satisfying sequences are the efforts of her devoted husband (Jim Broadbent) to care for her. But the flashbacks to his steamy courtship of the young Iris (Kate Winslet) become clever tricks that prevent the filmmakers from digging deeper into their material.
Amelie (five nominations including Best Foreign-Language Film) also focuses on the positive side of human nature. The TITLE character dedicates herself to intervening, sometimes intrusively, into her Parisian neighbors’ lives to make them happy. Though its tone is sweet and its highly stylized look original, its Gallic eroticism is uacceptable and unnecessary.
Patriotism is back in fashion, and Black Hawk Down (four nominations) and Pearl Harbor (two nominations) fit into the prevailing mood.
Black Hawk is a brilliant, brutal, documentary-style re-creation of a real-life 1993 U.S. combat mission in Somalia. The extraordinary bravery of our soldiers is brought home. Their spirit reminds one of the courage and camaraderie displayed by the police and firemen at the World Trade center on Sept. 11.
Pearl Harbor, though equally well-intentioned, looks like a hundred-million-dollar video game in comparison. Its cardboard romantic triangle and flashy special effects don't add up to the tribute to those who died during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack that its producers intended.
The addition of a new category — Best Animated Feature — opens the field to two family-friendly films of artistic quality equal to their live-action counterparts. Monsters, Inc. (four nominations) is a computer-animated Disney fantasy that remains true to the spirit of Walt, not something to be taken for granted these days. The setting is Monstropolis, a city whose energy sources are children's screams much as electricity and oil power real-life urban environments. The screams are provoked by scary monsters who turn out to be more frightened of the kids than vice-versa.
The computer-animated Shrek (two nominations) has a postmodern spirit. Unlike Monsters, Inc., it deconstructs its genre. Though visually inventive, its fairy tale about a princess, an ogre and a fire-breathing dragon sanitizes the differences between good and evil and becomes a relativistic, pop-psychology parable about self-esteem.
Another exercise in deconstruction is Moulin Rouge (eight nominations, including Best Picture). This musical comedy combines innovative MTV-style editing and narrative techniques with a deliberately anachronistic use of contemporary songs (the Beatles, Elton John, Madonna, etc.). Set in Paris in “1899, the summer of love,” its familiar story centers around a romance between a penniless writer and a courtesan-dancer (Nicole Kidman) with a heart of gold. Its message is typically postmodern, namely that freedom is best expressed through sexual liberation.
Training Day (two nominations) and Monsters’ Ball (two nominations) appear to endorse the tenets of existing moral values but end up subverting them through their excessive use of sex and violence. The former takes place during the 24-hour probation period of a young under-cover police officer (Ethan Hawke). His charismatic mentor (Denzel Washington) has pursued gangs and drug dealers with such single-mindedness that their moral code has become his. Monster's Ball is an intense love story between a white prison guard and the African-American wife (Halle Berry) of an inmate he recently executed.
Gosford Park (seven nominations, including Best Picture) and In the Bedroom (five nominations, including Best Picture) are two of the year's most challenging films. Each has murder as one of its dramatic high spots.
Gosford Park is a masterful ensemble piece set on an English country estate in November 1932, where a party of aristocrats (Maggie Smith and others) and their servants (Helen Mirren and others) are gathered for a weekend hunt. When their host is murdered, the attempt to solve the crime reveals a cesspool of snobbery, sexual exploitation and Darwinian class warfare bubbling beneath that society's seemingly smooth surface. The audience starts to conclude that the murdered man may have deserved his fate and is glad that probably no one will be apprehended.
In the Bedroom is an intelligently observed, intimate drama about the efforts of a Maine doctor (Tom Wilkinson) and his school-teacher wife (Cissy Spacek) to cope with their 21-year-old son's murder. When it appears that the perpetrator will get off lightly, this genteel couple takes the law into their own hands. Their vigilante justice is made to seem as ominous as the original crime, but the film's point is that we should withhold judgment of their actions.
Both of the movies’ treatment of these crimes is morally ambiguous in a manner that characterizes much of present-day popular culture. While they don't goad us to push the edge of the envelope any further, they don't endorse traditional morality, either.
Apart from The Lord of the Rings, Black Hawk Down and Monsters, Inc., the films with multiple nominations this year fall mainly into this category. For those who believe in traditional values, this is progress of a sort. But they shouldn't forget that Hollywood still has a way to go.
John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: What this year's choices say about Hollywood ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies (2002)
In 1995 the National Security Agency began to declassify the Venona transcripts, which revealed the depth with which Soviet spies had penetrated the U.S. government during the Cold War. By and large, our media and academic elites have refused to acknowledge these revelations. Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies, a PBS “Nova” documentary produced by Tug Yourgrau, is a first step in the revision of our understanding of the Cold War based on these transcripts. The Venona project was a 1940s top-secret effort to break the Soviet codes sent from the KGB's Moscow Center to its American agents. It was highly successful until compromised in 1948 by a Soviet operative working for U.S. Army intelligence.
The film focuses on the personal stories of the American agents the code-breakers uncovered. Highlighted is Theodore Alvin Hall, a Harvard-educated scientist who passed secrets about the atomic bomb to the KGB. Because Venona's existence had to be kept secret, Hall couldn't be prosecuted and fled to England, where he continued his scientific career unmolested.
Sergeant York(1941)
War heroes are inspired by a variety of motives. Alvin York, a celebrated World War I Congressional Medal of Honor winner, was a religious pacifist who eventually found a reason to fight. Sergeant York dramatizes this Tennessee country boy's interior journey from alcoholic and troublemaker to brave patriot. York (Gary Cooper) is a sharp-shooting hunter who's converted to Protestant Christianity by Pastor Rosier Piles (Walter Brennan). But his previous bad reputation temporarily derails the courtship of his true love, Gracie (Joan Leslie), who lives on a nearby farm. When drafted, York at first claims conscientious objector status and refuses to serve. After a change of heart, he's shipped overseas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, MARCH 24
Where Easter Began
Travel Channel, 8 p.m.
On Palm Sunday, make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and meditate at the holy places connected with Christ's Passion and Resurrection.
MONDAY, MARCH 25
Ultimate Guide: Iceman
Discovery Channel, 9 p.m.
This world premiere updates scientists’ opinions about “Otzi,” the Neolithic man whose mostly intact body was found high in the Italian Alps ten years ago. His copper axe, well-made clothing and intricate equipment continue to fascinate researchers, as does the question of what caused his death in the mountains many thousands of years ago. To be rebroadcast Saturday, Mar. 30, at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
TUESDAY, MARCH 26
Samurai Warrior
History Channel, 8 p.m.
This show traces the centuries-long history of Japan's samurai (professional warriors) and their bushido code, which emphasized facing death squarely and living according to honor and loyalty. Incidentally, in the mid-16th century, many samurai saw something of a kindred spirit in St. Francis Xavier, the bold and zealous Jesuit missionary.
TUESDAY, MARCH 26
The Wheel
History Channel, 10 p.m.
This show examines the history and incalculable influence of the wheel, perhaps the world's greatest invention (unless you count microwave popcorn).
WEDNESDAY, MARCH
27
Must-See Rome
Travel Channel, 9 p.m.
Rome wasn't built in a day, but you can tour it in an hour thanks to this jaunt to the Vatican, the Coliseum and other famed sites in the Eternal City.
THURSDAY, MARCH 28
Baseball Parks
History Channel, 1 p.m.
With the new baseball season right around the corner, don't miss this enjoyable history of ballparks from 19th-century sandlot times right up to today's retro-look stadiums. The show gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the jobs of the many people it takes to run a modern park. It also delves into the design and construction of baseball stadiums by interviewing the architects who create them and the ballplayers who star in them.
FRIDAY, MARCH 29
Solemn Way of the Cross
EWTN, 8 p.m. (live)
“Jesus said, ‘If a man would follow Me, let him deny his very self, take up his cross daily and follow in My steps.’” (Luke 9:23) Thanks to this two-hour Good Friday broadcast, we may accompany Pope John Paul II as he walks the Way of the Cross.
SATURDAY, MARCH 30
Easter Vigil Mass
EWTN, 8 p.m. (live)
This three-hour Holy Saturday broadcast takes us to Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: How to Acquire Self-Esteem The Old-Fashioned Way DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:One of the most dominant articles of faith pervading the modern curriculum is the notion that children can't achieve and won't succeed unless they have high self-esteem.
In parochial as well as public schools, in reading and writing, in health class and on the sports field, making students feel good about themselves has become a foundational goal in the modern classroom.
Yet thousands of psychological studies have failed to demonstrate that high self-esteem reliably causes anything — or, at least, anything desirable. In fact, some researchers are even suggesting that the “I love me” movement has done real harm to kids, families and education in general. Having seen the effects at close hand, I tend to agree.
So does Paul Vitz, professor of psychology at New York University, the most authoritative Catholic voice on the new psychological faiths. With regard to self-esteem, Vitz believes educational psychology has the cart before the horse.
“Self-esteem should be understood as a response, not as a cause,” he wrote in Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship (Eerdmans, 1994). “[L]ike happiness, and like love, self-esteem is almost impossible to get by trying to get it. Try to acquire self-esteem and you will fail — but do good to others and accomplish something for yourself, and you will have all the self-esteem you need.”
In the Catholic school where I taught for seven years, our staff regularly commented on the fact that, every new school year, the kids coming in seemed less able to work in a sustained and concentrated manner and, by and large, exhibited poorer self-control and less civility. Because of this, teaching was becoming more difficult — class-management and behavioral problems were stealing a larger and larger amount of time and energy from instructional time. In addition, a number of previously unheard-of problems were cropping up.
Probably the most difficult of these was that of “problem parents.” In previous times, parents almost always supported teachers in their administration of discipline. Now, more and more, parents were raising strong objections to the entirely appropriate and relatively mild disciplinary efforts of teachers and administrators to bring unruly children into line.
One didn't have to listen long to realize that the natural instincts of parents were being overridden and corrupted by the ideology of self-esteem. Parents of some of the worst-behaved kids we had were insisting that their child's acting out was the result of poor self-esteem and required not discipline — what in a saner age was called “tough love” — but more support, encouragement and “understanding”.
As anyone who works with kids will tell you, it doesn't take long for some kids to figure out the lay of the land and begin working the system.
I remember one little girl I had in grade four. Let's call her Shelley. Despite the fact that Shelley was blessed with above-average intelligence and ability, she had failed two tests in a row in social studies. I watched her response as I handed back her third test — also with a failing grade marked on it. Without a word, tears filled her eyes and Shelley ran into the cloakroom, crying. I went after her, spoke to her gently and, after a minute or so, led her back into class. I told Shelley I wanted to speak to her and her mother during the lunch period.
After the bell rang, Shelley stood with me outside my classroom as the girl's mother walked up and greeted me warmly. Shelley was still upset as I explained to her mother what had happened. I told her how Shelley had responded after having failed her third test.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Mom asked her daughter.
“I don't know what to say,” said Shelley. “Somehow I just don't feel good about myself these days. I don't seem to like myself anymore.”
I didn't know what would happen at this point. I had no clue as to how her mother would respond.
“That's a bunch of nonsense,” said Mom. “You didn't study.”
A parent with proper perspective — what a relief! “Your daily work hasn't been up to the standard I know you're capable of,” I said when the mother turned to me as if giving me permission to continue her point. “If you had felt good about yourself even though you hadn't done your job I would say you have a serious problem. Now why don't you get down to business, do the job you're capable of, and get a good mark on the next test?”
Good teachers and good parents show their love by caring enough to use discipline and by telling kids the truth. That's what kids need and that's what kids ultimately want. That's also why, in many high schools, the most-admired teachers, and the best-respected, are the athletic coaches — the authority figures who expect performance and rarely worry about self-esteem.
With a Godly context, a little “reality therapy,” some encouragement and the firm refusal of both her mother and her teacher to let her off the hook, I believe Shelley learned an important lesson that day.
I remember her looking excited and a little anxious as I handed back her fourth test. Then Shelley looked up at me from her desk, beaming and proud, as she saw the mark and realized she'd “aced” the test. Her good work had resulted in a natural sense of pride in her hard-earned accomplishment — in other words, a rightly ordered sense of heightened self-esteem.
J. Fraser Field is executive officer of the Catholic Educator's Resource
Center (www.catholiceducation.org).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: J. Fraser Field ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: The Lion That Contemplated Christ DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope Pius XII once called Dietrich von Hildebrand “our 20th-century Doctor of the Church.” More recently, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger referred to him as “one of the great Catholic philosophers of the 20th century.”
Although his numerous books have been highly regarded in Catholic intellectual circles, little has been known about von Hildebrand's inspiring and courageous life. Until now: Alice Jourdain von Hildebrand, Dietrich's widow, has written a marvelously evocative biography covering the first five decades of the man's life. Von Hildebrand was born in 1889 into a loving, artistically gifted and thoroughly secular family in Florence, the only son and youngest of six children born to Adolph and Irene von Hildebrand. His father was a renowned sculptor; he and Irene often entertained such artistic notables as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Henry James.
Dietrich was only 15 when he determined to pursue philosophy as his life's work after reading Plato's dialogues and realizing “that he had an innate talent for detecting errors and equivocations in arguments and for unraveling a confused line of reasoning, and he set his mind to develop this gift.”
At Munich University, he met the brilliant but thoroughly undisciplined Max Scheler, who became his close friend. From the moment they met, Scheler's limber mind and dazzling personality captivated von Hildebrand. But he was indebted to Scheler above all else for the latter's intricate Catholic analysis of philosophical and theological questions, which eventually convinced von Hildebrand that the Church had received, and still retained, the fullness of revealed truth.
Mrs. von Hildebrand insists that her husband's conversion to the Catholic faith in 1914 was the most important and the most decisive moment of his life. “Every time he mentioned this event his face lit up with joy,” she tells us. “Beautiful and rewarding as his life had been … he was now entering into a radically new world, the world of the supernatural whose radiance, sublimity, and beauty were such that all his previous experiences paled by comparison. He was overwhelmed by a light, the existence of which he had never suspected previously. He could not learn enough; he could not read enough. Every day brought new discoveries; every day was more uplifting than the preceding one. Every instruction was received with attentiveness and gratitude.”
Purely philosophical questions continued to interest von Hildebrand, but he delighted much more now in meditating on the transformation that occurs in one's life when thought is illuminated by revelation. This spiritual transition became the theme of his masterwork Transformation in Christ, first published in 1940 under the pen name Peter Ott, because the publisher could not market the book in Nazi Germany under von Hildebrand's own name, since he had been sentenced to death in absentia.
Von Hildebrand had courageously denounced National Socialism from its earliest days. Much of the second half of this book concerns his terrifying flights and repeated narrow escapes from his Nazi pursuers in Germany, Austria and France until, at the book's conclusion, he and his wife arrive, at last, in New York. They are greeted on the pier by a fellow refugee from Nazism, Msgr. John Osterreicher, with the welcome news that a professorship awaits von Hildebrand at Fordham University.
One reservation: The book ends too soon. Von Hildebrand was only a little over 50 when he landed in the United States in 1940; he continued to live a productive and eventful life until his death in 1977. Much detail is excluded from the present, excellent work. Where are the firsthand insights on his distinguished career at Fordham, his marriage to Alice Jourdain following the death of his first wife, Gretchen, and his founding of the Roman Forum? One hopes that Mrs. von Hildebrand is at work on a second, equally absorbing, volume.
Carroll McGuire writes from Wayne, New Jersey.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carroll Mcguire ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:School Role Models
The newspaper reports that a church-school organizer in St. Louis was receiving more than a dozen calls per day “from groups that want to duplicate the effort in their communities.”
“Similar church-inspired schools already are taking shape in states from Georgia to California,” says the Monitor.
Nice Gift
‘Coercive’ Prayer?
VMI says it will appeal the ruling, which was rendered in response to a suit brought by the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and.
PC in NJ
TOWNHALL.COM, Jan. 31 — Columnist Suzanne Fields reports that the New Jersey Legislature recently nixed a requirement for students to daily recite the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Civil-liberties groups questioned the phrase “unalienable right” to life, suggesting it was a sneaky euphemism for “anti-abortion” sentiment; one legislator objected to the word “creator” because it would force students to accept a “state-sponsored religion.”
Vineyard Workers
An annual practice at the school through the 1960s, the tradition had faded. Parents who remembered the event brought it back three years ago and hope to restore it as a tradition.
Church-State Charters
Some accuse religious groups of advancing non-sectarian charter schools in the inner cities because it is “their only means of obtaining public education dollars,” writes the Times’ Richard FaussetAdvocates say religious groups can be ideal sponsors because they have classroom space, provide social services, and have “a strong sense of community and mission.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Bang the Gavel Slowly DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:CHRISTIANITY ON TRIAL: ARGUMENTS
AGAINST ANTI-RELIGIOUS
BIGOTRY
by Vincent Carroll and David C. Shiflett Encounter Books, 2001 244 pages, $15.95
To order: (800) 786-3839 or www.encounterbooks.com
Going strictly by the numbers, Christianity is as mainstream as a religion gets, and yet, as Carroll and Shiflett show, its members are generally content being treated as a barely tolerated minority.
They document how anti-Christian bigotry comes in a kaleidoscope of flavors, from the play Corpus Christi, which depicts a homosexual Christ having sex with the Apostles, to the liberal magazine The Nation referring to Communion hosts as “crackers.”
They also quote John Leo, the U.S. News and World Report columnist and media critic, who argues that “the bashing of mainstream Christian symbols is so mainstream that it's barely noticed.” His litany of examples is too explicit and perverted to reproduce here.
And they show that such examples are not limited to art museums and left-wing political magazines. When, for example, President Bush used the word “crusade” to describe the war on terrorism after America was attacked on Sept. 11, a wave of outrage overwhelmed the daily political discourse.
Citing potential offense to Muslims still smarting from the Crusades of many centuries ago — which themselves remain vastly misunderstood — the offended parties and their protectors saw to it that the president had no political choice but to never use the word again.
Carroll and Shiflett write: “Americans who have never cracked a history book are likely to have heard a great deal in the mass media about the church's suppression of Galileo and the horrors of the Inquisition, but next to nothing about Christianity's role in ending infanticide and slavery.”
Here is where Christianity on Trial is so useful. The authors could have easily and appropriated subTITLEd their book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Christianity But Where Afraid to Ask.
“It is safe to say that fewer Americans appreciate the role of John Paul II in the fall of communism than the number who correctly lay blame for the Inquisition on the popes of the Middle Ages,” write Carroll and Shiflett. Contemporary historians, they show, are generally unfair to Christians. “While there is nothing wrong with remembering the evil that men do, there is something altogether perverse in consistently disregarding the good that men do.”
They have a point: It would be nice to see a few historians catching Christianity doing something right every once in a while.
“The history of Christianity is replete with the likes of John Paul II and the members of Solidarity,” write Carroll and Shiflett, “men and women whose faith inspired them to accomplishments every bit as worthy of our memory.”
Amen, brothers. May we never forget, in spite of the cultural establishment's best efforts to see that we can hardly remember.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Racial Tension
Bill ‘Ripped’
College Web for Catholics
The site's main attraction is the Tuesday evening live chat sessions with a campus minister. In operation since January, the site “is useful because Catholicism is the least understood Christian religion. It's not even understood well by Catholics!” said Scott Hajek, a student at the University of North Carolina.
The Tough Issues
Simon, director of research and professional development at the Coalition of Essential Schools in Oakland, Calif., has studied how educators address or avoid moral and existential questions that are integral to such classroom staples as Shakespeare's MacBeth. She “takes the current public-school structure to task,” says Paulson, for its “increasing emphasis on high-stakes graduation tests and content-heavy curricula” and for its avoidance of deeper meaning.
Legal Studies Degree
FRANCISCAN UNIVERSITY OF STEUBENVILLE, Mar. 4 — The university has announced formation of a new legal-studies program leading to a bachelor of arts degree. The program is designed to prepare students to become paralegals. The need for the program had also been identified by the legal and judicial organizations in the Ohio Valley.
Running for Kids
Q
There seems to be a lot of petty fighting at my job. A coworker whom I respect says that conflict in a dynamic and growing company is normal and I should just accept it. He says I should fight for what I want or I'll be left behind. Should I?
A
I was listening to some cassette tapes on leadership that Tim, a good friend of mine, sent me recently. (Hmmm, I'm now wondering. Is Tim questioning my leadership style?) The tapes are about leadership gaps and needs in the churches today and they highlight certain qualities of leaders that the churches need to move forward.
They are really excellent, but one thing about the tapes bothered me: the author's casual attitude toward conflict and sparring that “inevitably” results when leaders are leading. He was saying that, since you need different leadership styles to grow, and since different leadership styles tend to clash (e.g. a strategic leader with a people leader, etc.), then problems are inevitable and nothing to worry about.
While I agree that such problems are common at work, and in a certain sense as inevitable as sin, I am hesitant to agree that we should be casual about their occurrence. And I don't think we should be cavalier or endorsing of conflict that is in any way disrespectful or too assertive.
Why? Because charity for Christians is for us a commandment. We too easily invent a “romance of struggle” in which animosity, bickering or quarrelsomeness is somehow more genuine or authentic. But it's not true.
This kind of acrimony is false to who we are — you can tell, because it provides added stress, acrimony and confusion.
As Christians it would be odd, wouldn't it, to think that we can pick and choose when to be charitable and when to skip it?
As Christians we should prioritize unity and esprit d’ corps with our colleagues; we should commit to always treating people with respect and with dignity no matter how they treat us or how much we disagree with them.
But does that mean we have to be Mr. Niceguy and let people roll over us? No. We stand up for what is just and right — but we do it charitably. Great men lording their power over others is the old order. We are something new (Matthew 20:25-28).
Besides, the charitable way is usually the most effective also. In the short term it does seem like the bad guy sometime wins. But in the long haul isn't it often those organizations and programs that treat people fairly and are led by humility and in a spirit of service that have the most staying power?
It certainly is. But we'd be foolish to try to fulfill that ideal on our own. Christ is radically available to help us.
The one who loved the men who crucified him will certainly be able to handle your office bickerers.
Sit him down next to you at work.
Art Bennett is a licensed marriage, family and child therapist.
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Career Moms DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:More women are giving up their careers in favor of their children. Women at the very peak of their careers are quitting to stay home with families — the first time labor force participation among new mothers has dropped since 1976. According to the Department of Labor, the number of working, married women with children under 3 has dropped from an annual average of 4 million in 1999 to 3.9 million in 2000.
Percentage of mothers with children working
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: NEWYORK'S WAY OF THE CROSS DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Each Good Friday for the past seven years, members of the lay Catholic movement Communion and Liberation have conducted a Way of the Cross over the Brooklyn Bridge. There's always been the temptation to admire the Manhattan skyline rather than meditate on the Lord's Passion. This year it will be possible to do both.
New York City firefighters and policemen, some of whom lost friends and coworkers in the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, will escort the group and help carry the cross. The procession will pause at mid-span on the century-old bridge connecting Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, and Auxiliary Bishop Ignatius Catanello of Brooklyn will offer a reflection. And, as a gesture of solidarity with Sept. 11 victims and their families, the via crucis will make its way to St. Peter's Church, near the site of the former World Trade Center.
“Sept. 11 was an occasion in which one saw what was involved in Good Friday,” commented Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, national spiritual director of Communion and Liberation. “Stations of the Cross have been held long before 9/11 and will be held long after. It is what life is all about — the struggle for redemption, the struggle to achieve what we have been created for. All life seeks fulfillment. And the Church discovers in Christ, especially in his redemption through death, that only he can overcome the forces in us that prevent us from reaching that fulfillment.
“On Sept. 11, people caught a glimpse of those forces,” Msgr. Albacete added.
Personal suffering, like that which so many people have experienced since Sept. 11, can help people better understand the sufferings of Christ, said James Monti, author of The Week of Salvation: History and Traditions of Holy Week. The sufferings of Christians in communist Lithuania and China, for example, have helped give Holy Week added significance, he said.
But the Way of the Cross is a devotion that also draws Christians into the Lord's Passion, and in a very physical way. It is an ancient tradition, with roots possibly in the first century, when the Blessed Mother herself was said to make daily visits to the sites connected with her son's passion. A fourth-century account says that pilgrims regularly visited those sites, while a fifth-century bishop erected a series of chapels in Bologna commemorating the various stations of the Via Dolorosa.
Conducting the devotion in an outdoor setting blends private spirituality with a public witness to one's faith in Christ's death and resurrection. “When you get on top of the bridge and look at the skyline — that's the city where we struggle to live,” said Mary Szymkowiak, a member of Communion and Liberation. “There you are with the cross in your hand, and there is the city, and you think about what life is and what it means to be a Catholic in this city. It's tough to live in this city, especially recently. How do you face it? I face it through my faith.”
“Our daily life is work,” added Jonathan Fields, one of the U.S. leaders of Communion and Liberation. “The faith is what impacts life, what's at the bottom of our daily life. It's not that we're Catholic and we do our thing in church and you do your thing in church. The suffering and loneliness of the city are summed up in the cross.”
For Szymkowiak, taking the cross to Ground Zero is a clear way to express what the past six months have been all about, “the suffering of Christ and this city, but also the hope that comes because of Christ's suffering on the cross.”
The crowds who gather to hear Father George Rutler preach about the Seven Last Words of Christ on Good Friday at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel ballroom will hear him speak of the Christ-like “passion” the city and the culture have undergone since Sept. 11.
“Our generation has suddenly had a dose of reality,” he said. “The vast majority of those killed were in their 30s, and 75% of them were men. So a couple of thousand young men were killed. That's a microcosm of World War I, when a whole generation was killed, and that devastate Europe. It has reminded us of life's fragility.”
This year's Brooklyn Bridge Way of the Cross is especially a moment to share with people the reality of the forces that were at work on the first Good Friday — the drama of Christ's triumph over sin and death, Msgr. Albacete said.
And because of Sept. 11, many people may be more ready to hear that Gospel, he said. The event brought people to an awareness of a deeper meaning in life and helped them “see through to the original and powerful meaning of words we always use, like tragedy, evil, good, hero.” Some people were “able to see an interiority, a hint of what we mean by the spiritual life.”
Tom Cashin, chief of the New York Fire Department's First Division, which covers lower Manhattan, said the walk will be a “wonderful moment to stop and reflect on what took place.
“It's always been the Catholic way to acknowledge the cross we have to bear and to put our faith in God and acknowledge the fact that we depend on him for everything,” Cashin said.
“There are things in this world — I don't know if you want to call it evil, but the human family suffers many tragedies, and Good Friday is a good time to remember that.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: LIFE NOTES DATE: 03/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Soaps Feature Abortion
In “Days of Our Lives,” Jan (Heather Lauren Olson), after learning she is pregnant following a rape, says she wants to have an abortion. A male friend pleads her not to, saying, “You can't kill your baby.” When he offers to marry her, pretending the child is his, she agrees.
In “Passions,” a young female character wants to have an abortion when she learns she's pregnant by someone who took advantage of her while she was semi-conscious.
Her mother becomes hysterical when she learns of the planned abortion, saying it's a sin to take an innocent life. The character doesn't go through with it.
Post-Abortion Book Reissued
ELLIOT INSTITUTE, March 8 — When it was first published 15 years ago, Aborted Women, Silent No More, quickly became a best seller in pro-life circles.
The book has just been reissued by pro-life publisher Acorn Books.
Written by leading post-abortion researcher Dr. David Reardon, Aborted Women, Silent No More, chronicles the physical and emotional impact of abortion on women and includes personal testimonies from more than 20 women about their struggles after abortion.
Virginia Passes Ban
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 8 — Legislation that would ban partial-birth abortion in Virginia, and possibly set an example for other states, is headed for pro-abortion Virginia Gov. Mark Warner's desk. The Senate voted 26-12 Thursday for the legislation, said AP.
If Warner signs it, Virginia could be the first state to ban the abortion procedure since the Supreme Court ruling three years ago voided bans that had been adopted by 31 states.
Abortion-Breast-Cancer Ad
COALITION ON ABORTION/BREAST CANCER, March 7 — The Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, an international women's organization, announced the availability of two new television commercials informing women about the existence of medical research linking abortion with breast cancer.
The commercials can be viewed on the group's Web site www.AbortoinBreastCancer.com.
West Va. House Passes Bill
CHARLESTON DAILY MAIL, March 6 — Members of the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee voted 15-8 to advance a bill championed by pro-life advocates.
The bill requires abortion practitioners to provide women considering abortion with information about abortion's risks and alternatives.
Similar bills have dramatically reduced the number of abortions in other states.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Strong Words: Pope Again Condemns Clergy Abuse DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II used his annual Holy Thursday Letter to Priests to again address the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Church in the United States. Vatican officials also took the occasion to outline the canonical penalties faced by clerics who are guilty of sexual abuse of minors — and to point out that Church actions were ignored.
“We are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of Ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis at work in the world,” wrote the Holy Father, using the Latin term he often uses when speaking most solemnly about the reality of evil.
The letter, dated March 17 and released March 21, is an annual tradition begun by John Paul in 1979. Since then, he has written every year to priests to commemorate the institution of the priesthood on Holy Thursday, the “feast day of priests.” It is a departure from the usual practice to address current issues in a letter otherwise aimed at exhorting priests to zeal in their ministry.
“Grave scandal is caused, with the result that a dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity and often with heroic self-sacrifice,” the Holy Father continued by way of encouragement to other priests and to underline the severity of the sin.
“Scandal” in this context does not mean public embarrassment, but rather as defined by the Catechism (No. 2284) as “an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal become his neighbor's tempter.”
“Scandal takes on a particular gravity by reason of the authority of those who cause it or the weakness of those who are scandalized,” continues the Catechism (No. 2285). “Scandal is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others.”
“As the Church shows her concern for the victims [emphasis in original] and strives to respond in truth and justice to each of these painful situations, all of us — conscious of human weakness, but trusting in the healing power of divine grace — are called to embrace the mystery of the Cross and to commit ourselves more fully to the search for holiness,” John Paul continued, calling for an increase in priestly virtue. “We must beg God in his Providence to prompt a whole-hearted reawakening of those ideals of total self-giving to Christ which are the very foundation of the priestly ministry.”
The 19-page letter was devoted in large part to the sacrament of confession, continuing the theme of last year's letter, and was prepared months in advance (see sidebar). The additions regarding sexual abuse were understood as an indication that the Vatican was aware of the depth of the crisis in the United States — though no country was mentioned by name. It was the first official Vatican statement on the recent controversy.
Though in the American media, the Pope's Holy Thursday remarks were reported as the Pope “breaking his silence” on the question of clergy abuse, he — and his curia — have actually had much to say about these problems all along.
The Pope condemned sexual abuse by clergy last November in the Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Oceania, noting that it “has caused great suffering and spiritual harm to the victims.”
“[We wish] to apologize unreservedly to the victims for the pain and disillusionment caused to them,” he wrote then. “The Church in Oceania is seeking open and just procedures to respond to complaints in this area, and is unequivocally committed to compassionate and effective care for the victims, their families, the whole community, and the offenders themselves.”
The current crisis has made John Paul's language more severe, as was noted by many in clerical circles in Rome. Using theological language in addressing priests, it was the most serious condemnation possible, accusing guilty priests of sinning gravely, betraying their ordination, and damaging the faith of the faithful.
That was underscored by comments by Cardinal Darios Castrillon Hoyos, head of the Vatican Congregation for Clergy, the body which handles disciplinary cases against priests if they cannot be dealt with in the local diocese.
While declining to comment upon specific cases of what he called the “most grave crime of sexual abuse” he outlined the existing penalties in canon law, which call for suspension and may include dismissal from the priesthood. Castrillon noted that both the 1917 Code of Canon Law and the 1983 revision contained serious penalties for what are referred to in canon law as “offenses against the sixth commandment with minors.”
Castrillon, a Columbian, struck a more combative tone than is usually heard from prelates in the Anglo-American world, saying that the Church had taken steps long before the issue “reached the front pages of the world's newspapers.”
He noted that in April 2001, the Holy Father approved new procedures for dealing with such charges, assigning them to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees canonical trials for the most serious offenses. The updated procedures put sexual abuse of minors into the most serious category of offenses that can be committed by priests, alongside offenses including profanation of the Blessed Sacrament and violation of the confessional seal.
According to Castrillon, all the bishops of the world were informed of the changes and asked to be vigilant. The new norms also raised the age of “minor status” to 18 in such cases from 16, and extended the period in which charges against a priest could be brought.
“The laws of the Church are serious and severe,” said Castrillon, adding that internal Church penalties did not mean “removing oneself from any civil regulation that is in force in various countries.”
Castrillon did not indicate that any new procedures were envisaged, the last revision taking effect only last year. No indication was given of whether the current crisis would provoke further Vatican action.
The reaction to the letter itself though was evidence that the issue has already taken its toll both in Rome and in the United States — questions about sexual abuse completely overwhelmed the rest of the papal message.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. Desouza ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Bishop's Murder Brings Colombia To Brink of Chaos DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:CALI, Colombia — The March 16 murder of Archbishop Isaías Duarte Cancino of Cali is “a statement against peace and civility that has brought Colombia to the edge of the abyss.”
So said Archbishop Alberto Giraldo Jaramillo of Medellin, president of the Colombian bishops’ conference, commenting on the brutal death of his fellow archbishop.
The slain 63-year-old archbishop of Cali, a key leader in the effort to foster dialogue between the Colombian government and the war-torn country's guerrilla groups, was gunned down outside the Church of the Good Shepherd in one of Cali's poorest areas, where he had just conducted a massive marriage ceremony.
“Two guys, no older than 20, came and opened fire and hit him three or four times, maybe even six times,” said Edilberto Ceballos, the archbishop's driver. Archbishop Duarte was pronounced dead on arrival at Carlos Holmes Trujillo Hospital.
The style of the Archbishop Duarte's murder seemed characteristic of Colombia's notorious drug lords, but most Colombian officials and citizens blame the leftist guerrillas for creating the chaotic circumstances in which any violent act is possible. “We believe this was the work of the subversives,” said a spokesman for Police General Heliodoro Alfonso Roa, “and we are preparing to act accordingly.”
Despite President Andrés Pastrana's personal commitment to finding the murderers, and the establishment of a reward of almost half a million dollars for anyone providing critical information in the case, the minister of the interior, Armando Estrada, said finding the murderers would be difficult because “the list of possible suspects is too long.”
In fact, Archbishop Duarte's huge popularity in Colombia was due partly to his outspoken style. He frequently criticized the leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, for what he regarded as their “lack of seriousness and commitment” in peace negotiations.
A smaller rebel group, the National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, also earned the arch-bishop's ire for conducting mass kidnappings in Cali.
He even ex-communicated a number of ELN members after they kidnapped 150 worshippers from a Cali church in May 1999. Ten years earlier, the ELN murdered the bishop of Arauca, Jesús Emilio Jaramillo.
Archbishop Duarte also earned the rancor of the right-wing paramilitary group United Self-Defense of Colombia, known as AUC, after he publicly denounced its leader, Carlos Castaño, for his brutal tactics.
And most recently, the archbishop said publicly that money from drug traffickers was being used in the campaigns of some candidates in Colombia's March 10 congressional election. According to the daily El País, this denunciation “undoubtedly frustrated the political career of not a few candidates as well as their puppeteers.”
Peacemaker
At the same time, Duarte was well known for several successful initiatives he launched to achieve peace through promoting dialogue among Colombia's many violent factions.
As a pastor in his native archdiocese of Bucaramanga, he started a peace campaign that sharply reduced gang-related crime in the city's shantytowns. And after he was appointed as the first bishop of Apartadó, a new diocese created in the Urubá region — regarded as one of the most violent regions in the country — he became a national figure because of his creative peace initiatives.
Courtesy of the “Dialogue Table” he created and presided over, Bishop Duarte resolved several local conflicts, especially those stemming from land disputes among banana growers.
When he was announced in 1985 as the new Archbishop of Cali, Colombia's second largest city, the people of Apartadó gave him a hero's farewell, with a double row of people waving white handkerchiefs to escort him from the chancery to the airport. Upon arrival in Cali, he was greeted as “the peacemaker archbishop.”
Said Archbishop Giraldo, “By killing him, the murderers have tried to kill hope in the hearts of Colombians. When shooting at him, the killers were aiming at the heart of all those who believe in peace, since he was a living symbol of the right kind of dialogue for peace: realistic, demanding, effective and prayerful.”
The Archbishop of Bogotá, Cardinal Pedro Rubiano Sáenz, said he was devastated by Duarte's killing. “It is inconceivable that a good man, a man who dedicated his life to loving God and serving his brothers and sister, has become a victim of the terrible violence which is ripping apart this country,” Cardinal Rubiano said.
During the archbishop's funeral, which attracted more than one million people to Cali's Cathedral and the neighboring Caicedo park, banners demanded “Death to the terrorists.” Others asked “Where is the government?” and “Until when will this last?"
Presidential candidate Noemí Sanín said the murder of Duarte “is so grave for the nation that something dramatic must be done, especially from the government's part.”
Alvaro Uribe, another presidential candidate who is currently leading the polls by more than 20 points in the campaigning for the May 26 election, said during a Cali campaign swing that “the Archbishop is irreplaceable.” Uribe also reiterated the political promise that has made him so popular: no more dialogue with the guerrillas and full-scale counter-insurgency efforts.
Military Action
A poll broadcast by the prestigious radio network Caracol found that 72% of Colombians believe it is time for military action against the guerrillas. Indeed, the debate now is primarily concerned with how that should be undertaken.
Recent military operations have shown it is possible to put the guerrillas on the defensive. Michael Shifter of the U.S.-based think-tank Inter-American Dialogue, which had a heavy influence in designing the Clinton administration's “Colombia Plan,” said recently that “the military's aim is to apply enough pressure on them to convince them to negotiate. Nobody talks about a military victory.” Shifter noted how similar military actions prompted Central American guerrillas to participate in negotiations.
But pro-life leader Carlos Corsi Otárola, one of the country's most popular independent senators, believes this approach is naive. “There are critical differences between the Colombian guerrilla and their Central American peers,” he said. “After 38 years FARC and ELN have completely lost any sense of long-term goal or strategy and [guerrilla war] has become more of a way of living.”
Corsi also points out that the collapse of the Soviet Union left Central American guerrillas without financial resources, whereas FARC and ELN earn significant money through drug trafficking and the “industry” of kidnapping. In the last decade, FARC and ELN have raked in up to $300 million annually by taxing the illegal drug industry, using the revenue to buy arms and equipment.
Said Corsi, “This makes the guerrilla not only uninterested in peace, but also incapable of figuring out what proposal to bring to the dialogue table.”
Consequently, many analysts see little alternative to a complete military defeat of the guerillas. But to accomplish that, the next Colombian government will need critical help from the United States.
Recently, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he might ask Congress to lift long-standing restrictions limiting U.S. military aid to Colombia to the fight against narcotics, and the House passed a nonbinding resolution supporting broader aid for Colombia.
But Colombia will need more. Its 150,000 not-so-well armed soldiers have to wage a three-front war against well-trained and well-equipped guerrillas and paramilitaries, which total some 30,000 men in arms.
Although Clinton's “Colombia Plan” earmarked 1 billion dollars for the military and the police, budgetary constraints imposed by a deal with the International Monetary Fund forces Colombia to spend only 1.9% of its gross domestic product on defense, much less than many other Latin American countries.
Presidential front-runner Uribe believes broader U.S. help will be necessary, but not any kind of military deployment, which all agree would be politically devastating both for the Colombian president and the Bush administration. But sharing intelligence information, such as satellite data, could help the Colombian armed forces pinpoint insurgent concentrations much more quickly, analysts say.
While Uribe proposes also to arm the populace, building a nationwide network of civil defense groups modeled on those he instituted as governor in Antioquia, Colombia's bishops aren't comfortable with a full-blown military campaign.
“The bishops acknowledge that the guerrillas are provoking a dead end with no escape but a full military action,” a source within the Colombian Bishops’ Conference told the Register. “Nevertheless, they want to try to convince the guerrillas to look long-term and start negotiations. That is the last homage we owe to Archbishop Isaías.”
Alejandro Bermúdez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermúdez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Dying and Rising in New York DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Sean O'Brien couldn't sleep. Ever since both his brother and brother-in-law were murdered in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, rest came fitfully, if at all.
Sean's brother Tim, 40, of Old Brookville, on Long Island, and his brother-in-law, Stephen Tighe, 41, of Rockville Centre, N.Y., shared a desk at Cantor Fitzgerald, a global securities company that lost 700 staffers. The two worked on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center.
They were fathers of seven young children and shared a passion for sports. Stephen, coached young soccer players, where “unlucky” was the harshest thing he ever said to a player. Tim, a big Giants fan, was a member of the board of a cystic fibrosis research foundation headed by Boomer Esiason, a former Cincinnati Bengal.
For months after the attacks, Sean called his brother at work, each time getting Tim's recorded voice and nothing more. Late at night, lying in bed, Sean couldn't stop thinking about their final minutes and the mindless callousness of humankind.
“Were they in pain? Were they struggling? Were things falling on their head?” Sean repeatedly asked the enclosing darkness. Soon his questions turned into a silent brain-scream and he felt like he was shouting into a field of cotton. Sean's sorrow became a daily, adhesive pain.
Then one night, at 3 o'clock in the morning, out of his pain cascaded a brainstorm of a poem. Now Sean is on a one-man mission to distribute his composition and he's doing so with an open-pored passion. The piece is about the power of God to console the living and guide the dying to a place free of anguish. And it's about how people can be awakened from the sleep of a mechanical existence and summoned to give themselves in the clarity of love.
Already, Sean's poem is selling out at Catholic gift shops in Rockville Centre, and Charlotte, N.C., where he lives with his family. Priests are using it for homilies, preachers, for their sermons and Christian radio stations are broadcasting it on the air. The newspaper, The Charlotte Observer, says it's been swamped with reprint requests after running the poem and a story about Sean on Dec. 29. And Sean has launched a Web site, www.fromdarknessintolight.com, to showcase the poem as well as photos of Tim and Steve and their families.
St. Francis Xavier liked to say that when we pray, what we are really doing is warming our hearts over the fire of God's love. That's what people are now saying about Sean's poem.
A Town
Sean's experience is of a piece with the stories of the families of dozens of other terrorist victims from his hometown of Rockville Centre, a leafy Long Island bedroom community forty-five minutes from Manhattan by train.
Like most places, the pain runs thick and deep in Rockville Centre, a town of New York City firefighters, police officers, securities traders and financial service professionals. Many Cantor Fitzgerald employees live in Rockville Centre. Thomas Von Essen, former New York City fire commissioner, lives there with his wife Rita. Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room, is a native.
Rockville Centre is a place, where, on hot summer days in the ‘60s and ‘70s, local priests blessed cars exiting from the church parking lot on the way to the beach with dashes of holy water.
And Rockville Centre is unique in that its residents have been wracked with grief over losing loved ones in not one, but two terrorist attacks. John Ahern, 26, a Rockville Centre native, was murdered along with 188 others in the attack on Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
Rockville Centre is also a place where neighbors are taking comfort in their grassroots heroes. Like Terence Hatton, 41, a native and captain of the city fire department's Rescue 1 squad. Terence commanded 25 firefighters and three lieutenants as they entered the first tower shortly after it was attacked. It was the ultimate act of bravery in a long string that spanned a 21-year fire-fighting career, where Terence received 19 medals, almost one for every year he served.
Since the World Trade Center attacks, Rockville Centre families have openly grieved, read, talked or just sat in each other's company, unusual approaches for this unsentimental town. Residents say the process they have endured runs something like this.
Disbelief first gave way to anger, which gave way to a vacuum of a dense, unrelenting sadness. Lumps rose in residents’ throats, people doubled over in pain, on the streets, in their homes, at night. Many felt like they were living an anxiety dream. Many said they had lost faith.
There were 51 families of Rockville Centre who lost a loved one on Sept. 11, and over 70 children who will now go through life without a mother or father.
Marilyn and Bernard O'Brien lost their son-in-law Steve Tighe on Sept. 11; he was 41 and left behind his wife Kathy and his four children, Lindsay Michael, Patrick and Elizabeth. They also lost their son Tim. He was 40 when he died on Sept. 11 and left behind his wife Lisa and their three children, Jacie, John and Maddie.
But Sean O'Brien and John Ahern's families are turning things around. What has plummeted them into the dust of despair has not taken away their hope.
Like Sean, the Aherns decided to do something with their grief. John's older sister, Bonnie O'Connor, became active with the Lockerbie victims’ group, which lobbied for tighter airport security.
“We just can't believe it happened yet again,” Bonnie says. “After tragedies like these, your perspective changes. So many people waste their time complaining about stupid things. You really want to make the most of life.”
Sean's father, Bernard O'Brien, would agree. He spoke at nine Masses the weekend after the attacks, and made this his final remark.
“I asked everybody to make themselves a promise,” Bernard says. “I asked that they would never let a day go by that they wouldn't give their loved ones a hug and tell them that you loved them, because you never know when the opportunity won't present itself again. The tissue papers came out, I then cracked.”
Elizabeth MacDonald is a senior editor at Forbes Magazine.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Elizabeth MacDonald ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Head of Liturgy Panel Resigns: New Direction for the Mass? DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — There have been few noticeable changes in the Mass since new Vatican guidelines concerning liturgical language was issued last May. But key changes are afoot among the personnel responsible for interpreting the way Rome wants the Mass to be celebrated in the United States.
Those changes take on added significance with the publication of the new Roman Missal, which was presented to Pope John Paul II March 18 and released four days later. Along with the new missal, a new set of instructions on the celebration of Mass will contain stricter rules about things like kneeling, the materials to be used for sacred vessels and altars, and the role of the ordained and lay ministers.
The latest change in personnel is the resignation of a key figure in the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), which some observers have criticized for a history of poor translation of the Latin liturgy into English. John Page, ICEL's longtime executive secretary, has announced that he will leave Aug. 15.
Other recent changes include the dismissal of ICEL translation committees and the selective use of individual translators; last year's firing by Cardinal Francis George of Chicago of Gabe Huck, director of Liturgy Training Publications, and the resignation of Father Michael Spillane, executive director of the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions.
“There has been a significant turnover in ICEL's advisory committee,” said Franciscan Father Gilbert Ostdiek, former chairman of ICEL's subcommittee on translation and revision of texts.
Overseeing the work of translation now will be people like Cardinal George, the U.S. representative to the ICEL board, who was elected chairman of the U.S. Bishops Committee on the Liturgy in November. He takes office later this year.
And Msgr. Francis Mannion, director of the Liturgical Institute in Chicago, founded by Cardinal George in 2000, serves on the new ICEL consultants committee.
Cardinal George was not available for comment. Adoremus, a society promoting a more traditional celebration of the liturgy, hailed his election to the liturgy committee chairmanship, saying he has been a “strong voice for a thoroughgoing reform” of ICEL. That organization, Adoremus said on its Web site, had become a “self-perpetuating and substantially ungovernable group of liturgists, theologians and translators, with a distinct agenda incompatible in important ways with authentic liturgical reform.”
ICEL's new direction does not suit Gabe Huck, who complained that ICEL worked hard on the revised Sacramentary for 10 years, producing texts “unequalled in the Catholic world” but ones that apparently will not be accepted by Rome.
“There are better translations in that book. They are pastorally workable. But it will all be wasted or sit on a shelf maybe until a new Pharoah rises over Egypt,” he said.
New Direction
The changing attitude toward translation has given Page some frustration as well, according to one observer, who asked not to be identified. Page was reluctant to comment on his resignation, other than referring to a statement by ICEL's chairman, Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway, Scotland. Bishop Taylor said that since the two-year trial period for implementing ICEL's new constitution will be reached at the end of July, Page felt that August would be a good time to leave.
But Page, speaking from his office in Washington, did admit that the new direction toward more literal translation influenced his decision to call it quits after 22 years.
That direction was codified last year, when the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments issued Liturgiam Authenticam (Authentic Liturgy), the fifth instruction on implementing the Second Vatican Council's constitution on the liturgy. The instruction called for liturgical texts to be more faithful to the original Latin.
At the same time, ICEL, which was formed in the 1960s by bishops of the world's English-speaking countries to provide common English liturgical texts, has been undergoing a restructuring.
Msgr. Mannion called Page a “consummate professional” who has “dedicated his scholarship, given his heart and soul to the work of ICEL.” But, he admitted, “the program now being espoused is not one I think he'd be completely enthusiastic about.”
“Liturgiam Authenticam reverses a good deal of ICEL's translation practices,” said Father Jerry Pokorsky, a priest of the Arlington, Va., diocese, who co-founded Credo, a society of priests dedicated to faithful translation of the liturgy. ICEL's work, he said, has “not been accurate and faithful.”
'Starbucks’ Language?
As an example, he said the opening prayer for the third Sunday of Lent sounds “Protestant” in asking for the grace to “rise above our human weakness.” A more literal translation might read: “Pour forth, kind Lord, we beseech, Thy grace into our hearts that we may always draw back from human failures, and we may be worthy to adhere, by Thy granting it, to heavenly admonitions.”
Most liturgists and pastors would bristle at the 19th-century character of language like that. Page said that in the past dozen years or so ICEL has taken “great care” in translating from the Latin and using “elevated language” but still had a “pastoral” concern about the language that people would use. He believes the translations should be language that “people can relate to,” that people pray in language that is “recognizable as their own language.”
But William Leininger, president of the Latin Liturgy Association, which promotes the use of Latin in the liturgy, said that so-called archaic language helps people recognize that the liturgy is God-given. Orthodox and Eastern-rite Catholics have no problem in using language that is clearly removed from everyday speech, he said.
“Archaic language is used to set the liturgy apart, to remind us that we are not at Starbucks chatting with our friends,” Leininger said. “There's a different cadence in the language and the use of words.”
Page said that because language is constantly changing, there will always be a need for new translations. “That doesn't mean you need a new translation every five years, but every few generations you have to look at what you've done.”
Dominican Father Frank Quinn, a former chairman of the ICEL music subcommittee and member of its advisory committee, defended Page, saying he has a “wonderful knowledge of the English language” and “wouldn't allow vulgar things to go through.”
Father Quinn said that criticism of ICEL's work focuses largely on translations that were hurriedly done soon after the Council. Those have since been revised.
And Father Gilbert Ostdiek, who worked with Page for 15 years, most recently as a member of the editorial committee revising the Sacramentary, said the retiring executive secretary had a “wide knowledge of the tradition and of the Latin Prayers.”
“He loves the liturgy and is not trying to do damage to the tradition,” said Father Ostdiek, professor of liturgy at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Page, he said, took “Comme le Prevoit,” the 1969 Vatican instruction on translation, as his guideline to ensure that prayers were translated into language that was good for proclamation.
But the Vatican has declared “Comme le Prevoit," with its looser norms, outdated, Father Pokorsky countered. ICEL has not acknowledged that, he added.
Now, however, it looks like it will. Msgr. Mannion said that at the first meeting of the new consultants’ committee, he found people whom “one would expect to have difficulty with Liturgiam Authenticam.“
Gradually, though, Msgr. Mannion said, “They made peace with it.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News ------ TITLE: What He Found in Jesus’ Tomb` DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Raised in a Baptist family, Steve Ray and his entire family were received into the Catholic Church in 1994.
Ray owns a building services company, which he started right after high school in 1975 which now employs over 500 people. A Catholic apologist, he is the author of Crossing the Tiber and Upon This Rock. Ray recently launched an ambitious 10-part video series TITLEd the “Footprints of God,” which examines the story of salvation from Abraham to Augustine. He recently spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
You grew up in a devout Baptist family and your father was a deacon. What led you to consider the Catholic faith?
Well, it was not primarily an attraction toward the Church. It wasn't on my radar screen. It was not an option. The journey began when we saw the weaknesses in Protestantism, the 33,000 denominations, the confusion in theology and wondering who had the proper interpretation of Scripture. It was more a dissatisfaction with our denomination, and only later did we consider Catholicism. When my friend Al Kresta converted I told him that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard of. He was way too smart to be a Catholic. That was my opinion.
I had never allowed Catholics to speak for themselves. I was raised in that kind of home — hostile to Catholicism. I have more than 100 commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and over 100 on John — over 15,000 books in our house. That led me to wonder how do you know what the Bible says. My wife and I began to read the Fathers and about apostolic succession. As we grappled with the issue of authority, the Catholic Church began to loom very largely as a possibility. Originally, I was under the impression that the early Church was Protestant in its theology and only became corrupted by Catholicism later. When I began to go back and read what the early apostles taught it turned my world upside down.
Was there one particular issue that propelled you into the Church more than any of the others?
Yes, it was the issue of authority and the inadequacy of the Bible-alone position. I realized that Christianity was Jewish and the Jews always had the Scriptures, their tradition, and their magisterium in the Chair of Moses. All of that passes over into the New Covenant.
Your book Upon this Rock makes the case for the Church's teaching on the primacy of Peter. Why do you feel this teaching is such a central one for Protestants to understand?
I realized that among the early Church, as it developed from the beginning, Peter stood among the 11 Apostles as the leader. His are the only words of the original Twelve that we have in the Acts of the Apostles. He immediately took charge of the Church and as the Church grew it is clear from the early writings that the Church looked to Rome for pastoral direction from the bishop of Rome. Peter's life and the papal office was like a bud, and from it the flower, the papal office bloomed.
An army needs a general and every company needs a CEO. Without a leader a people is directionless. Protestantism has proven this. When people go in different directions you have chaos. While we do not hear about abortion or cloning in Scripture, God has his mind and a will concerning these things. There is right and wrong. Where do we go to find the answer? I could see the necessity for the kingdom of God to have a visible leader. The pope is the unifier of all Christians. The one and only thing that all Protestants can agree upon is that the pope does not have authority over them.
Peter is also the subject of the first of your 10-part video series “The Footprints of God.” Was that done on purpose?
It was the topic that I knew the best. When the series is complete, it will be in historical sequence. Peter will be number seven in the series.
Tell me about the series overall. What is the hope for such an ambitious project?
I know that a lot of people don't read. We live in a society that lives by impressions and sound bites rather than content. We're competing with MTV, so our series combines maps, sound bites, images and music all rolled into one. These videos are fast-paced adventures. It's something that a 10-year-old can watch and not be bored, but an adult can learn from it as well. Our hope is to help Catholics understand their faith, to excite both young and old.
I don't come across as a theologian because I'm not one. I am an adventurer taking you on a trip of discovery. Each video is a biography set in the context of salvation history. It's also a travelogue — I take the viewer to the actual locations. I touch things and climb around and include the viewer so that they can feel like they are there. The series is also a Bible study. We're dealing with issues like faith and works, tradition, and Scripture. And it's also a fun adventure.
The series is filmed entirely in the places where these people lived and walked. How does being in those places bring Scripture alive for you?
I visited the Holy Sepulcher again last summer with my brothers and I cannot walk in there without my eyes welling up with tears. Had I gone as a Protestant I would have wanted to see it as a tourist, but as a Catholic it has a sacramental effect upon me. It is a holy site and when I visit I feel like Moses, that I should take off my shoes and fall on my face and repent.
Only about six people can fit in the tomb in the center of the church. Each time we visit we get up early in the morning so that we can attend the 5:30 a.m. Mass in the Holy Sepulcher. Every Mass celebrated inside the tomb is the Easter liturgy Mass. As we kneel in the tomb I am able to place my hand on the rock where Jesus’ head was placed. Eternity touched that very place and there I can kneel with my hand on that slab of stone. I tear up even now thinking about it. It is the holy point of all of history. Space and time settle on that spot.
How many times have you visited these places?
I've been to Egypt three or four times. We've been to Israel about 10 times and to Rome between 12-14 times. All of these trips have happened only since becoming a Catholic. As soon as I converted I said that we should go to Israel every year, and we have.
What do you have planned next?
The next video in the series, on Mary, will be out by June 1, 2002. In that video I fall flat on my face into a mud puddle and a hand pulls me out, then the video rewinds and the second time I approach the puddle of mud a hand stops me. We do that to describe the Immaculate Conception.
In September, we head back to the Holy Land to film Moses and Jesus. I also have a St. John's Gospel Catholic Study Guide and Commentary coming out this autumn from Ignatius Press.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steve Ray ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Constitution Does Not Grant Right to Abort, Says Scalia
The court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling found a constitutionally protected right of privacy that covers abortion.
Quoting George Bernard Shaw, Scalia said that those who believe in judicial reshaping of the Constitution “dream things that never were,” the Buffalo daily reported. Issues that demand updating judicial precedent or the Constitution should be taken care of by legislative action or a constitutional amendment. “We have an enduring Constitution, not a living one,” he said.
While the Constitution does not protect abortion, it does not explicitly prohibit it either, and the issue should ultimately be decided by a constitutional amendment, Scalia said.
Catholic League Criticizes Call for Cardinal's Resignation
In an editorial, the daily said that because of his handling of sex abuse cases involving priests in the archdiocese, Cardinal Law has “lost the trust of too many in his flock.”
The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, however, charged that the editorial has “more to do with marketing than morality.” The league noted that The Herald's competition, The Boston Globe, beat it to the punch in uncovering documents detailing the history of the John Geoghan affair.
“If a Catholic prelate called for the resignation of a public official, newspaper editorialists would be the first to cry that he crossed the line, overstepped his authority and violated the separation of church and state,” a statement from the league said. “The future of the Archdiocese of Boston is a decision for the Pope, not for Editorial Page editor Rachelle Cohen.”
The league added, “If you want some idea of The Herald's moral credibility, one need only turn to pages 71 and 73 of today's edition and read that newspaper's usual ads for strip clubs, sex shops and pornographic videos.”
Nebraska Lesbian Adoption Case Leaves Door Open
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 18 — A woman, her son and her lesbian lover will move to a state more sympathetic to homosexuals rather than challenge a Nebraska court decision denying them legal adoption rights, the wire service reported.
But the court is getting ready to consider another adoption case involving two lesbians, and the Thomas More Law Center, a public interest law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., has warned that the first case left open the constitutional issue of whether homosexual couples are prohibited from adopting in general.
The mother wants her lover to adopt her son, who was conceived through artificial insemination. The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the boy cannot be adopted because the mother has not relinquished her parental rights.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Welfare: Washington Mulls Content of Next Round of Reform DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — “Thank you, sweetness, thank you.”
Not the words you expect to hear from a welfare recipient to her caseworker. But at 508 Kennedy St., one of Washington, D.C.'s many welfare offices, a client had just learned that a welfare-to-work program is hiring. “I'll go down there right now,” she declared optimistically.
When President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, reformers hoped for millions of scenes like this. But Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Peter Edelman and two other high-ranking officials in his department resigned to protest the reform, and critics prophesied disaster: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., warned, “Those involved will take this disgrace to their graves,” while the Urban Institute predicted 2.6 million people, including 1.1 million children, would be impoverished.
That didn't happen. Instead, as the 90s economy boomed, child poverty fell and women leaving welfare saw their incomes rise. Even Edelman now thinks Congress should reauthorize welfare reform before its Sept. 30 expiration date, though he has a string of caveats.
But reform must now move to its toughest problems — the people left on the rolls tend to be the hardest cases, and the recession has led to a tight job market.
Work Is Not Enough
Karen Czapanskiy, a law professor at West Virginia University School of Law who has represented welfare clients, said her clients didn't get much help in the welfare office.
“The bureaucratic barriers to getting help have been raised to the point that people give up,” she said. “Their economic condition becomes so bad that they become dependent on other family members, on the underground economy, on very temporary and unreliable sources of help. They become homeless; their children experience enormous disruptions; they become dependent on churches and other charities.”
Even when welfare recipients find jobs, child-care problems and attitude adjustments make the transition harder. Shirley Riley, a vivacious woman who runs several day-care centers in Washington, moves people from welfare to jobs in her centers. Only about 14% of the people who enter training stay past the first six months on the job.
Lateness was the biggest problem. That fits with the prescriptions of reform critics who claim that transportation and child care difficulties make it all but impossible for welfare recipients to hold jobs, but Riley said she adjusted workers’ schedules to fit their needs.
One woman came in a half-hour after she was supposed to start. Riley moved her to a later shift. She turned up a half-hour late to that. Riley moved her twice more, and when she still came in late, Riley met her at the door.
“I said, 'This is enough. Goodbye,'” she recalled. “Jobs don't accept this.”
Eloise Anderson, director of the Program for the American Family at the Claremont Institute, former food-stamp recipient, and former welfare administrator in Wisconsin and California, noted that many people on welfare have a complex set of problems that existing programs are not equipped to handle. Such people, she said, belong in “child protection or mental health or alcohol and drug programs,” not in a welfare office.
Like many observers, Anderson believes the 1996 reforms focused on mothers but not neglected fathers. “There's a whole slew of programs that are designed to help the custodial parent go to work,” she said. “Those same programs should go the non-custodial parents.”
Families and Fathers
One solution being strongly promoted by the Bush administration is reinforcing marriage. Bush asked Congress to earmark at least $100 million for experimental marriage-promotion programs.
Anderson suggested, “This is where the churches could be extremely important — they need to have inexpensive family counseling available. You need mentors, particularly for young married couples. … This is what families used to do for each other, but now you've got to pay someone to do it.”
She added, “A lot of people who get pregnant and go on aid are cohabiting. And surveys say they're hopeful about marriage but they don't know what to do. This is where the community could step in. Let's talk about why you're not marrying.”
“Government can't do that kind of work,” Anderson cautioned, “because government can't get in people's faces.”
Patrick Fagan, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that welfare reform accords with Catholic social teaching in two ways: work requirements and marriage promotion. “No poor person should go to bed hungry or should lack medical care,” he said. “In return, what should the poor person do? [With work requirements], the welfare package becomes like the minimum wage package, and in exchange for it you work.
“That's a just solution — it's reciprocal, and in Catholic social teaching there's always reciprocity. It's not just how the government treats someone; it's how the person responds,” Fagan said.
Fagan added that emphasizing marriage is equally in tune with the Church's beliefs. “The restoration of marriage is a huge social justice issue that the Church should get out in front of,” he said. “The present welfare system massively penalizes poor couples who marry — up to 15-25% of their annual income. That is indefensible. If they cohabit, the welfare will continue to flow.”
Many observers believe that poor communities are already undergoing a pro-family cultural shift that outweighs anything the Bush administration could do. Some, like sociologist Ted Goertzel of Rutgers University, credit the first wave of welfare reform with this change.
Goertzel has conducted a series of in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in the low-income areas of Camden, N.J. “When I started interviewing welfare recipients they felt welfare was just a fact of life, that it would always be there,” he said. “With welfare reform the welfare department started making more demands on recipients, and they got the idea that welfare was time-limited. That had a big effect, particularly on young women who hadn't yet gone on welfare.”
Goertzel noted, “We've seen a decline in teen pregnancy. People in interviews say it's not viewed as quite as smart a move [to get pregnant out of wedlock].”
Charting Progress
Mickey Kaus, author of The End of Equality and a columnist for Slate, has come up with an unorthodox way to track welfare reform's
progress. “You can chart the whole course of welfare reform” through rap songs, Kaus said. Songs like TLC's “No Scrubs” are reactions to women's higher incomes post-reform; the message of Jagged Edge's “Let's Get Married” is even more obvious.
By September, Americans should know if Congress is singing the same tune.
Eve Tushnet writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Eve Tushnet ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Juan Diego's Canonization Moves to Guadalupe DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:MEXICO CITY — The canonization Mass for Blessed Juan Diego will be held at a Mexico City basilica after church officials scrapped plans to host a Mass for 5 million people.
The July 30 Mass will be held in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, constructed on the site where the indigenous peasant's visions of Mary occurred in the 16th century.
The original plan, endorsed by Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City, called for paving more than 2,500 acres of a dried lake bed in the diocese of Ecatepec, on the northeast border of Mexico City.
Ecatepec Bishop Onesimo Cepeda Silva, who maintained an intense media campaign in promoting the Mass, talked about “passing ‘round the hat” to raise the tens of millions of dollars needed for the project, as well as handing out millions of rain coats to protect the faithful from seasonal thunderstorms.
But local media soon began to question the feasibility of busing millions to the dusty and windswept site. According to one calculation, the operation would have needed 100,000 buses that, bumper-to-bumper, would have stretched well beyond the Mexican-U.S. border.
Meanwhile, part of the area previously was used to leach caustic soda, raising issues about potential contamination. Much of the land belongs to an environmental reserve it is hoped will one day provide much needed greenery to this generally grimy and poverty-stricken part of metropolitan Mexico City.
Msgr. Renato Boccardo, the Vatican's adjunct head of protocol, told reporters in mid-March that the site “doesn't correspond” to the needs of the visit. He spoke upon his arrival in the Mexican capital for a series of meetings to discuss alternative sites with church and government authorities.
Shortly after, the papal nuncio's office issued a statement announcing that Pope John Paul II would canonize Blessed Juan Diego in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an option originally ruled out because of the structure's limited capacity.
The basilica, built at the bottom of Tepeyac Hill, where in December 1531 the olive-skinned Virgin appeared to Blessed Juan Diego, holds about 8,000 people. Another 45,000 can fit into the plaza outside. Plans also call for giant screens to be set up in nearby streets as well as at eight other points around the city.
The Pope is scheduled to celebrate two Masses in the basilica. On July 29, he will proclaim as martyrs of the faith two Indians, Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Angeles, from the southern state of Oaxaca. Blessed Juan Diego will be canonized the next day.
The announcement was reported in the Mexican press as a victory for the so-called “institutionalists,” bishops whose low profiles contrast with figures such as Bishop Cepeda and Archbishop Rivera.
Bishop Luis Morales Reyes of San Luis Potosi, president of the Mexican bishops’ conference, said, “In these days when television can take a clear image of the event into any home, we must no longer think in terms of great multitudes.”
Bishop Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel of San Cristobal de las Casas in the southern state of Chiapas said the basilica was a more appropriate venue “because of the symbolic meaning that the basilica has for all of Mexico,” the Mexican press reported.
The passion raised over the site was only the latest of the controversies that has dogged the canonization process of the Nahuatl Indian whose visions of the Virgin are at the root of Mexican Catholicism.
First and foremost is the long-running debate over whether Juan Diego actually existed. Some prominent members of the Mexican church have sought to halt the Indian's ascendance to sainthood by arguing that he was not a real person, but a beautiful metaphor for conversion during the Spanish colonial period.
Bishop Cepeda said even if the Mass were in the basilica, he still would be in the front row to see the Pope declare Blessed Juan Diego a saint.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jo Tuckman ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Vatican's Man at U.N. Scores Population Control
ANSA, March 15 — The United Nations is trying to impose a distorted American vision on the developing world in its birth control policies, Archbishop Renato Martino charged.
Archbishop Martino, the Holy See's permanent observer to the United Nations, said that forecasts of spiraling populations in many poor countries has been proven wrong and women's fertility was dropping because of disease, poverty and government policies, the Italian news agency reported.
The archbishop, speaking to Fides, the mission news service, after a U.N. population forum, said the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) should rethink its policies.
President Bush is deciding whether to continue funding the UNFPA in light of charges that it turns a blind eye to coercive population control programs in places like China. The agency recently began instituting birth control programs in Afghanistan.
Abuse No Longer Regarded as American Problem
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 20 — The wire service maintains that for years the Vatican has regarded the issue of sexual abuse by the clergy as a distinctly American problem and has been used by people with an agenda to discredit the Church.
But Vatican officials are beginning to express alarm as the problem has shown up in many other countries as well. Several mid-level officials said that seminaries must do a better job of screening candidates for the priesthood, AP reported.
The article also quoted Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls as saying Pope John Paul II is fully informed about the scandal. He is said to be particularly saddened by allegations against Archbishop Juliusz Paetz of Poznan, in the Pope's native Poland. Archbishop Paetz, who worked with Pope John Paul at the Vatican until 1982, denied the allegations of sexual abuse.
China Said to Ignore Bush's Plea on Religious Freedom
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 14 — President Bush's public appeal to the Chinese government to relax religious persecution apparently has fallen on deaf ears. A month after the president's state visit to Beijing, the People's Republic has “accentuated its hard-line policy toward the Catholic Church and other religions,” the wire service reported, quoting Fides.
Shortly before the president's visit in February, Fides release the names of 33 bishops and priests either being detained or kept under strict police surveillance. It said 20 other priests, whose names were not known, also were being held.
But if the Chinese won't listen to the American president, perhaps a higher power will put things aright. Fides said that more than 5,000 nuns in Italy have joined a campaign of prayers for the release of those being detained. The missionary news agency said the sisters are “praying night and day” with the conviction that “prayer and sharing in the suffering of so many of China's Christians will in the end bear fruits of evangelization.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: The Magnificat of the Old Testament DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
During his general audience on March 20, Pope John Paul II reflected on the Canticle of Hannah, which is found in the First Book of Samuel. Hannah, mother of the prophet, was barren for many years before God finally blessed her with a son, whom she immediately consecrated to the Lord. Hannah expressed her immense joy in a poetic song that describes God's work with feminine sensitivity.
“It is called the Magnificat of the Old Testament,” the Holy Father noted. He pointed out that it is very similar to the hymn of praise that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, sang after the Annunciation.
“This is a profession of faith that two mothers express when they meet the Lord of history, who stands ready to defend those who are the lowest, those who are poor and unhappy, and those who have been offended and humiliated,” the Holy Father said. He pointed out that this canticle is a foreshadowing of the Resurrection, when life definitely triumphs over death.
Today a woman's voice leads us in our prayer of praise to the Lord of life. In fact, Hannah sings the hymn that we have just heard from First Book of Samuel after having offered her little son, Samuel, to the Lord.
He will be a prophet in Israel and with his ministry will mark the transition of the Jewish people to a new form of government, a monarchy, where the main characters are the unfortunate King Saul and the glorious King David. According to the story, Hannah had a long history of suffering because the Lord “had made her barren” (1 Samuel 1:5).
In ancient Israel, a barren woman was considered to be a dry branch or a dead presence because she prevented her husband from being remembered by subsequent generations, an important element within what was still an uncertain and nebulous vision of the hereafter.
A Woman of Faith
However, Hannah had placed her trust in the God of life and had prayed the following words: “O Lord of hosts, if you look with pity on the misery of your handmaid, if you remember me and do not forget later repeat in very similar words the song of thanksgiving that flowed from the lips of this mother. Indeed, we can catch a glimpse of the Magnificat of Jesus’ mother in Hannah's canticle, and for this reason it is called the “Magnificat of the Old Testament.”
A Song of Hope
In fact, scholars tell us that the sacred author has placed a kind of royal psalm on Hannah's lips, which is interwoven with quotations and allusions to other psalms.
In the foreground, we see the image of a Jewish king, who is being attacked by more powerful enemies. In the end, he is saved and he triumphs because the Lord who is at his side, breaks the bows of the mighty (see 1 Samuel 2:4). The ending of the song is significant. At this point the Lord enters the scene in a solemn epiphany: “…the Lord's foes shall be shattered. The Most High in heaven thunders; the Lord judges the ends of the earth. Now may he give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed…” (verse 10). This last word in Hebrew is “messiah,” which means “the anointed one,” thereby transforming this royal prayer into a song of Messianic hope.
Defender of the Poor
We want to highlight two themes in this hymn of thanksgiving that expresses Hannah's feelings. The first theme is also a dominant theme his arm, he has dispersed the arrogant…he has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped Israel his servant” (Luke 1:51-54).
This is a profession of faith that two mothers express about the Lord of history, who stands ready to defend those who are the lowest, those who are poor and unhappy, and those who have been offended and humiliated.
A God of Life
The other theme that we want to highlight is even more related to the figure of Hannah: “The barren wife bears seven sons, while the mother of many languishes” (1 Samuel 2:5). The Lord, who can change human destiny, is also at the origin of life and death. Hannah's barren womb was like a tomb; yet God was able to make life spring forth from it, because in “his hand is the soul of every living thing, and the life breath of all mankind” (Job 12:10). Along these lines, Hannah's canticle sings immediately afterword: “The Lord puts to death and gives life; he casts down to the nether world; he raises up again” (1 Samuel 2:6).
At this point, hope is not only related the life of the child that is being born but also to the life that God can restore after death. Hence, it opens up before us an almost “paschal” horizon of resurrection. As Isaiah will sing: “But your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise; awake and sing, you who lie in the dust. For your dew is a dew of light, and the land of shades gives birth” (Isaiah 26:19).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Jesuit Apostolate Reaches Romania's Street Kids DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:PLOIESTI, Romania — It's no picnic living as a homeless child on the harsh streets of the cities of post-Communist Romania. Just ask 8-year-old Marcel, a featured speaker at a March 17 ceremony to inaugurate Concordia Children's Town, a Jesuit-sponsored home for street kids in Ploiesti.
Marcel was found by staff of Concordia two years ago, living inside the sewers of Bucharest.
“Our house burned down,” Marcel recounted at the Ploiesti ceremony. “After my mother died we had to leave. I remember I led the carriage with my mother's body. I left with my dad. We took the train and we got off at Arad [a city in western Romania].”
“I got lost from my dad,” Marcel continued. “I went to the police and I told them that I lost my dad but it got late and I couldn't find him. I took the train and I went to Bucharest and I stayed in the sewer because it was winter and it was cold. There were many other children. One day Carmen and Claudiu gave us something to eat and asked if we wanted to come to Concordia.”
Sadly, stories like Marcel's are not rare in Romania, an impoverished eastern European nation of 23 million people. But since 1991, Concordia has been extending a hand of Christian charity to the country's street kids.
Concordia's latest addition is the Children's Town in Ploiesti, a city of 250,000 located 35 miles north of the Romanian capital of Bucharest. The Children's Town contains four new units housing 100 former street children.
Romanian President Ion Iliescu attended the March 17 inauguration ceremony, which included a blessing performed by both Catholic and Orthodox religious leaders. The ecumenical blessing reflected Pope John Paul II's historic 1999 visit — the first by a Pope to a predominately Orthodox country in 1000 years — during which he encouraged a closer union between the two Christian faiths.
“We are Catholics but we want to work with Orthodox,” said Ruth Zenkert, a Concordia project manager. “Our children are mostly Orthodox, some Catholic, one is Muslim. We respect their religions and want them to be educated in their own religion.”
In all, Concordia administers 15 permanent houses for former street children, two day centers, a winter soup kitchen and five social apartments. The principal aim of each house is to build a family like structure, with small groups between 6 and 8 children ranging in different ages. A pair of in-house guardians assume the role of parents.
Currently 400 former street children are enrolled in the Concordia program. Meanwhile in Bucharest alone, an estimated 1,000 children still live out on streets.
Said Zenkert, “I am sure that we will build more houses but what we really want to create is a model which the state and other organizations can copy.”
Beginnings
Concordia began in 1991 with a visit to Romania by Zenkert and an Austrian priest, Jesuit Father Georg Sporschill. “I remember very well my first visit to the train station,” Zenkert said. “There were little girls playing with a dead rat. It was horrible to see how they live. It was wintertime and they had no shoes and my first thought was that we have to help them.
Added Zenkert, “We took them home with us and in two days the house was full and so we had to buy a new house and now we have this — a town.”
But the situation has changed, said Zenkert, who now lives in Romania. The street children used to be strictly runaway orphans, but due to increasing economic hardships they are coming from poor families as well.
“They are adults with the bodies of children,” said Gerlinde Gabler, director of Children's Town, “and with all experiences — bad. They have been hit, violated, drugged and so on. We have one girl who if you touch her she will violently push you away. She is defending herself. Automatically she is doing it!"
Drugs have played a role in the delinquency of many of the runaways, and Concordia's staff must deal with their refusal to accept discipline. “We have children 12 and 13 years who have lived years on the street and they aren't used to order,” said Gabler. “You tell them do this, don't do that and they scream, ‘I am going back to the street.’ You can't make them stay with force. There are some who come and go but we try and give them the chance to come back.”
The vast majority of the 1,000 guests at the Children's Town inauguration on March 17 were children from Concordia facilities and surrounding neighborhoods. “The main principle was to make a party for the children,” said Mihaela Istoc, another Children's Town staffer.
Hot dogs and soda stands were set up, and a variety of performances took place, including children's chorus made up of Concordia's former street children who performed their own original song about being delivered from street life.
“Oh Concordia, Concordia, we have a family,” the children chorused. “I am not alone anymore, I have a home.”
Successes
Romona Moise is one of Concordia's success stories. At age six, Romona ran away from home along with her seven-year-old brother to escape an abusive father. After four years living on the street, she was finally rescued by Father Sporschill in 1991.
With the help of Concordia's tutorial program she caught up with her studies, and at age 21 she is now enrolled in university studying psychology.
“As far as we know she is the only former street child to reach university,” said Concordia administrator Matei Plesu. “We are very proud of her, but she is just one. There are thousands and thousands more still out there.”
Chuck Todaro writes from Bucharest, Romania.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Chuck Todaro ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Holy Thursday Letter on Confession DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — Noting that in recent decades the sacrament of confession has “passed through something of a crisis,” Pope John Paul II used his annual Holy Thursday Letter to Priests to urge Catholics, both priests and laity, to “rediscover the beauty” of the sacrament.
The importance of the topic was underscored by the fact that last year's letter was also dedicated to the same theme, a theme that the Holy Father wrote “warrants further reflection.”
Advising priests themselves to go to confession frequently “in order to restore vigor and enthusiasm to our journey of holiness and to our ministry,” he also warned them against being either too lenient or too severe when hearing confessions.
“Severity crushes people and drives them away,” wrote John Paul. “Laxity is misleading and deceptive.”
John Paul used the letter to restate Catholic doctrine on confession, including its necessity for the forgiveness of mortal sins. The letter also stressed the importance of individual confession as the norm, while noting that general absolution is only for “exceptional circumstances.” Yet the letter as a whole is a meditation on the “personal encounter” that marks confession. Drawing upon the biblical image of Zaccheus, the Holy Thursday letter is replete with John Paul's personalist approach.
“[Individual confession] not only expresses well the truth of divine mercy and the forgiveness which springs from it, but also sheds light on the truth of man in one of its most fundamental aspects,” writes the Pope.
“Although human beings live through a network of relationships and communities, the uniqueness of each person can never be lost in a shapeless mass. This explains the deep echo in our souls when we hear ourselves called by name,” wrote the Pope. “People ordinarily want to be recognized and looked after, and it is precisely this nearness to them that allows them to experience God's love more strongly.”
“The appeal [of confession] is enhanced by the need for personal contact, something that is becoming increasingly scarce in the hectic pace of today's technological society, but which for this very reason is increasingly experienced as a vital need,” the letter says.
Reminding priests of the “classical principle which holds that the suprema lex (supreme law) of the Church is the salus animarum (salvation of souls)” the Holy Father encourages, based on the experience of the Jubilee Year, a renewed effort to propose confession to young people.
“We must be close to [young people], able to be with them as friends and fathers, confidants and confessors,” he urged. “They need to discover in us both of these roles, both dimensions.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Suffering and Rising With the Church DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Catholics are meant to suffer during Lent and, this year, boy, did we ever. Week after week, headlines and television news announced sexual abuse scandals involving bishops and priests, and it hurt to see the Church's good name tarnished. This suffering, unfortunately, won't end at Easter.
The significance of these scandals would be hard to overstate. When men consecrated to God are revealed to have done sick and evil things, and to have been protected by our shepherds, the devastation and disillusionment of the victims quickly becomes shared by those who hear of it.
But precisely because the problem is so horrifying, it is all the more important for believing Catholics to put it in its proper perspective.
There's an old story of a Muslim who was about to become a Christian in pre-Reformation days and wanted to go to Rome to see how the leaders of his newfound faith lived. “Don't do that,” said his Christian friends, thinking that, if he saw how the Pope and cardinals of the time lived, he'd never convert. He went anyway and, when he came back, he asked for baptism. “But didn't you see the decadence in Rome?” his friends asked. “Yes,” he answered. “If that's how your leaders live, and your Church has lasted this long, I know the Holy Spirit must be in charge.”
He's right. Not men, but the Holy Spirit is in charge of a system instituted by Christ whereby he reaches his people in seven sacrament — sacraments that pass through the hands of priests, priests who come via the hands of bishops.
If the Church is just a collection of men of varied degrees of sinfulness, then we should have abandoned it long before these scandals broke. But if the Holy Spirit is in charge of the Church, then our role is clear:
Trust the Holy Father. Many writers had lapses of memory worthy of John Cornwell (who claimed Pius XII was silent about the Nazis) when Pope John Paul II's annual Holy Thursday letter mentioned the abuse scandals. They claimed he was “breaking his silence” with an inadequate response. Lest we forget (or forget to check), the Holy Father expressed great sorrow at priests’ sex abuse last November in Oceania, where he apologized to victims and said the Church must have open and just procedures to deal with sexual abuse complaints. He proclaimed the Church “unequivocally” committed to compassionate care for the victims and their families. The Vatican recently toughened guidelines for dealing with sex abuse by clergy. The curia — the Pope's “administration” — has been in a flurry of activity on the problem. John Paul's own spokesman has had quite a bit to say about what the solutions are. Years ago, the U.S. bishops moved decisively against problem priests — though, unfortunately, not all dioceses enacted their orders to remove all such priests from duty. The Church is addressing these problems; expect (and ask for) even more action.
Promote the Church. When secular journalists look at the Church — and when Catholic journalists look at it with secular eyes — they tend to see its blemishes predominantly. Imagine if someone wrote a biography of your life based only on information obtained by secretly taping your confessions. Even if everything in the book were true, the book would not give an honest picture of your life. So, too, with the Church. Yes, the injustices that members of the institutional Church do cannot be wished away. But the story of the Church is fundamentally a story of Christ living and acting in his body through the Spirit and, consequently, of great good — from charitable works to the eternal good of the sacraments — being done daily for great numbers of people.
If we don't tell this story, who will?
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Right of Recusal DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:I hadn't intended to weigh in on the issue of Justice Antonin Scalia's remarks regarding Catholic judges and the death penalty. However, after reading the Register's editorial and the letters in the March 3-9 edition, I believe an important point needs to be made.
All of your theological arguments are very entertaining, but they overlook a very practical consideration. Justice Scalia asserted that Catholic judges who agree with the Church's position on the death penalty should resign. This simply is not necessary. Any judge who is assigned a case where he feels he has a bias or a conflict of interest needs only to recuse himself. The case then is assigned to a different judge.
This happens quite frequently in both criminal and civil cases. Often, the two judges involved will swap some cases in order to even out the workload. A resignation is both unnecessary and ridiculous. If every judge who had a conflict in a particular case resigned, we soon wouldn't have any judges on the bench.
Justice Scalia is one of the best of the Supreme Court justices and I almost always agree with him. However, in this particular case, he is wrong.
MICHAEL LANE
Fontana, California
Helpful Homily
Thank you for your excellent newspaper. I enjoy it each week. I hope you will put the homily by Father Roger Landry, “One Priest's Answer to the Scandal” (March 17-23), into your archives so I can print it out and share it with friends.
As a mother of a priest, this scandal weighs heavy on my heart. I pray daily for the victims of abuse and for all our good priests who also bear the pain.
Father Landry's words gave me hope for a better tomorrow. He gave some practical ideas on how we can help the Church by increased holiness.
Thank you, Father Landry and thank you, National Catholic Register. You have both helped me in my faith journey.
JUDY COZZENS
Littleton, Colorado
Editor's Note: An abridged version of the homily is posted on our Web site: www.ncregister.com
For a printout of the full homily, call (714) 744-0336 or write St. Joseph Radio, P.O. Box 2983, Orange, CA 92859.
Holiness Before Healing
It was refreshing to receive the common sense homily written by Father Roger Landry ("One Priest's Answer to the Scandal,” March 17-23). It is also time that the moral issues of our daily lives be set out in the open where we can deal with things sensibly and reasonably.
Do we all expect God's graces to be bestowed on us a hundredfold by simply extending our hand to receive, never once taking an early departure from our beds to awake, open our eyes on a given morning in a church, where we can let God know that we care as much about him? Beats me how the good Lord can continue doing what he is doing for each and every one of us — yet where are the thanks?
Equally commendable was Father Richard Neuhaus’ quote: “The problem is not with celibacy … the problem is with priests who aren't celibate. The problem is not with the teaching of the Church … the problem is with the people who don't live the teachings of the Church.”
It would be totally disastrous for the Church to throw celibacy out the window. It would seem to me that any one of us who choose to serve God to our fullest would not look in any other direction but in how we could serve our God first and then our neighbor for the love of God. God is the best lover of us there is and any priest who is honest in his vocation simply could not veer from the path. God will always provide the strength. And, believe me, if marriage were allowed, a priest would only then (perhaps?) observe how very difficult that way of life is to one of serving the flock in the manner they should be served — yes, every hour of a given day.
The priesthood is not for wimps! There is entirely too much talk these days about how tired and worn-out our priests are. In many families each parent has to work — sometimes at two to three jobs to keep the family afloat.
Perhaps we should take a good look at ourselves — all of us — and see how we can do better in our lives. This is a wakeup call for sure.
L.E. MERKER
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Of Mice and Mixed Messages
Thank you for “A Trip to Redwall Abbey” (March 10-16). It was nice to read an interview with Brian Jacques, and to see a whole new side of his Redwall saga. But I still have my reservations on the books.
As you pointed out, many kids have begun reading more thanks to the Redwall stories. My reading habits have increased thanks to Redwall. I've never really craved fantasy, but I thoroughly enjoyed the books, and their epic battles and action sequences. I was never really a person who enjoyed reading or watching violence until I stumbled upon Redwall, which piqued my interest.
From then on, I liked watching violence in movies, and didn't really care how bad the plot was, as long as the fight scenes were cool.
Eventually I was tired of Redwall, and stopped reading … again. I enjoyed the good-guy versus bad-guy genre seen in Redwall up to a point, but I realized there is no such thing as good guys and bad guys. We are all good people in the eyes of God — even Osama bin Laden! Now I find myself preferring stories of good people doing bad things, but redeeming themselves in the end. People often get blinded by today's message that there are good and bad men. Many, many stories, including Redwall, typecast beings as “pure evil,” without showing us any of their feelings or concerns.
I do not find Redwall books as a pure evil influence. I just think their outlook on life can influence good children into doing bad things out of rage, as the characters in the books do. I know Redwall helped me to enjoy reading, but it also helped me into a downhill spiral of angry thoughts.
I enjoy the books, and would recommend them to many. But I would warn them about the negative moral messages contained in them. Anything can impact you negatively, if you don't know what to avoid.
WILL GROSS
Boise, Idaho
Borking Pickering In the article “Opponents Tar Pro-life Judge in Senate Confirmation Hearing” (March 10-16) about the mistreatment that President Bush's pro-life judicial nominee, Charles Pickering, is receiving at the hands of Democrats in the U.S. Senate, there is a comment by Edwin Meese III, attorney general under President Reagan.
Mr. Meese said that the false accusations against Judge Pickering “constitute a potential blight on the Senate.” Actually, it is not the entire Senate that is the problem, but, more specifically, the Catholic Democratic senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is one of those fiercely pro-abortion legislators. In January, 2001, he led the savage Democrat assault on then attorney-general nominee John Ashcroft because of his pro-life, anti-contraceptive positions.
In response to his and others’ despicable tactics used against Ashcroft, Cardinal William Keeler, chairman of the Bishops’ Committee for Pro-Life Activities, said: “It is arrogant and unacceptable to make unswerving allegiance to Roe v. Wade a litmus test for high public office in the United States.”
Cathy Cleaver, director of planning and information for the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, described Sen. Leahy's tactics as a new brand of “McCarthyism": “When did a belief in the inalienable right to life become grounds for denying people the opportunity to serve their country? In effect, pro-life nominees for public service are being put on trial for their beliefs — trials whose tactics resemble those usually described as ‘McCarthyism.’"
Yet these rabidly pro-abortion senators are often invited to speak to Catholic groups. Leahy spoke to 597 Catholic social-ministry leaders at the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering organized by the Bishops’ Social Development and World Peace Department in February 2001.
Having Sen. Leahy speak to one of the bishops’ groups shows an acceptance of his virulent pro-abortion position, emboldens him in that position and undermines the work of the bishops’ pro-life group. It is enough to make pro-lifers, who suffer abuse by proabortionists such as Leahy and have been inhibited in defending life and helping women by his legislative initiatives, turn away in disgust.
RICHARD A. RETTA
Rockville, Maryland
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Leave the Rapture Behind DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:The commentary “Left Behind is Best Left Alone” by Daria Sockey (March 10-16) was perfect. A used-to-be Baptist person, now Catholic, gave me a couple of Jerry B. Jenkins books to read plus other books. The author, as well as the fundamentalists reading the books, extracts quotes from the Bible and interprets them to their own narrow-minded way of thinking.
I placed the Register on the coffee table and the person who was a Baptist for 25 years read the article. The person no longer argues about “the Rapture” to me, or about the secret coming of Christ. Your headline has been fulfilled; such doctrines are “best left alone.”
PATRICIAN FRANCIS KUSSIN
Parma Heights, Ohio
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: The Men Who Changed My Life DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:The men who changed my life have now been dispersed around California, sent away from the place where they saved me.
John Galten is a junior high school teacher. Father C.M. Buckley is chaplain at a relatively obscure Catholic hospital. Father Joseph Fessio is scheduled to become his assistant there.
When I first met them, at the St. Ignatius Institute at the University of San Francisco, I hadn't gone to Mass regularly for years. I enrolled in their program knowing but not caring that it was Catholic. I just wanted to live in San Francisco and read great books. I didn't have even a passing interest in the faith.
The St. Ignatius Institute changed that.
The curriculum these men built taught me to embrace the faith naturally and almost effortlessly, simply by starting with Aristotelian logic and ending with Flannery O'Connor and reading the greatest works that came between. A clincher for me was Father Fessio's “Revelation and Christology” class, a class where I saw the lecturer get misty-eyed describing how God made wine inevitable when he made grapes, passionate when describing the beauty of marriage, dead serious when discussing miracles, and distracted when baseball playoffs coincided with class-time.
With this curriculum and by their personal attention, these men gave me nearly everything I have.
John Galten (and John Hamlon, assistant director) spurred me on to use my writing talent, and Father Buckley helped me find a place to do it. It was through him that I made the contact that got me my first writing paycheck — from the National Catholic Register.
In my senior year, Father Buckley put me in charge of signing up men and monitoring all-night eucharistic adoration. He planned to invite a woman to be in charge of signing up women and monitoring them. Whoever it was would stay up with me all night every month. “Who do you think that should be?” he asked, significantly.
“April Beingessner,” I answered. Our organizing meeting was our first date. Two years later, I mentioned to Father Fessio that I was going to propose to April.
“How are you going to do it?” he asked, and was shocked to find I hadn't thought it through.
He helped me plan the evening, which would end at a beautiful chapel in a nearby town's convent, and he told Mother Superior when to expect us. A week later, I proposed to April beneath golden lamps as a choir of nuns sang night prayers across a grill, nudging each other and pointing to us knowingly.
“Father Fessio arranged for this chapel to be kept open for a special purpose,” was the absurd first sentence of my proposal.
When we married we moved to Washington, D.C., where April earned her master's degree from the John Paul II Institute — a place John Galten had helped her discover.
Without these men, my life would be totally different, and impoverished.
These men taught me that truth existed, introduced me to my wife and my closest friends, and taught me to have self-confidence and to strive. Most importantly, they reintroduced me to Jesus Christ and his sacraments. Without them, I shudder to think where — and who — I'd be.
The three men were split up first a few years ago, when Father Buckley was reassigned to the hospital in Duarte, Calif., because he was “divisive.” ("Faithful, gentlemanly and long-suffering” are good descriptors for him; “divisive” isn't.) Then Galten was fired from the St. Ignatius Institute which he had served tirelessly for 20 years. Now Father Fessio has been sent to work at the hospital as well.
Sometimes this makes me so angry I can't sleep for hours.
Other times it breaks my heart to think of all the students who will never know them.
Because, the fact is, mine is a typical story of an Institute student.
There are hundreds of people who have been touched and bettered in the deepest possible way because of these men — doctors, teachers, housewives and lawyers; businessmen, priests and nuns. People who think of these men the way sons and daughters think of their fathers.
Now, by quietly taking on a new mission in a faraway place, Father Fessio and Father Buckley are teaching us another lesson.
They're teaching us the counter-cultural lesson of obedience: God works through his Church and we are to obey, even when obedience is cold, thankless and difficult.
Even in a time like ours, when those we are meant to obey disappoint us.
It is from the bitter winter suffered by men such as these that the new springtime of the Church will arise. If we learn their lessons well.
Tom Hoopes is executive editor of the Register.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom Hoopes ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: He Is Risen - With Scars to Show for His Love DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:I was 18 and begging. The very life of my bright, energetic dad was slipping through our fingers. We scratched and clawed to hold on to him, my family and I, knowing full well that, even if he did survive, he would never be the same. He wouldn't be able to talk. And he would lose all use of one of his arms.
I couldn't bear to see him that way.
So it was that I found myself on my knees in a hospital chapel, imploring God for a miracle to heal my father of the horrifying effects of a massive stroke.
“Give my father back the use of his hand,” I bargained with God, “and I will give you both of mine. Give my father back his words, and I will give you mine — I will speak of you always and everywhere.” My pleas were met with silence. My father died.
At the funeral, I heard the whispers: “Well, he was very sick. It was God's will.” I thought that was a rotten thing to say. Tobacco, an unhealthy diet and too much worry had killed my dad. Not the Lord, who'd always been my unfailing friend.
I was angry at God's refusal to use his omnipotence to carry out my requests, but I knew the Lord hadn't killed my father. Dad just died. He was 54 and, to an 18-year-old, 54 seems old. Old people die.
I thought back on this chapter of my life in the weeks after Sept. 11, when we were hearing a lot about God's judgment. A number of people claiming to know God's will were saying that the Lord of life, the God of all creation, had devised — or permitted, or approved — the fiery deaths of thousands that day.
I say that's blasphemy. It is the culture talking, the culture of death. It wants to make God an agent of death, too.
Death happens to us because we invited death into the garden, the good Earth, at the dawn of time. We share our lives with it because, day by day, we make little choices that propagate the reign of death in our world.
We choose death when we curse someone, when we indulge in gossip, when we are mealy-mouthed about life issues, when we look across the seas to Afghanistan, demanding that its citizens be “bombed back to the first century,” instead of getting behind our prayerful president with the patience to pull terrorism up by its roots and destroy it.
As I suffered through the loss of my father, I knew I had three choices.
I could shun the darkness by plunging into my schoolwork and staying busy, never dealing with Dad's death at all.
I could enter the tomb and stop there, never ceasing to mourn, becoming half a person as I became permanently preoccupied with nursing the wounds this loss would leave on my heart.
Or I could enter the tomb and grieve — and then, at the calling of God, come out of that tomb and, like our Lord, stand before my friends, wounds and all.
It was this third path that I chose.
I think it is because of my having made that choice that, to this day, I deeply appreciate the significance of Jesus’ appearing to his disciples, after the Resurrection, with his wounds intact.
He never said, “There, there now, I'm all better — it was all a nightmare. Forget that any of that horrible stuff ever happened.”
No. He said, “Put your fingers in my wounds, and believe.” He meant for us to believe in the Resurrection, yes. But he also wanted to reinforce the fact that the horror and despair of Good Friday was real. It happened and, without that reality, the Easter miracle would lack the fullness of its saving power.
For many of us, dawn on this Easter morning will be slow coming, and a little tougher to face than most years: The wounds of Sept. 11 are still fresh.
For some, this Easter may be full of pain and fear for the future. But, through the gloom, our God will stand before us, wounds and all, saying, “Come out of the tomb. Rise, and let us leave this place of death.”
Years have passed now since my father died. We still miss him, and often remark on how proud he'd be to know he has 20 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. My oldest sister, with whom I shared that fervent prayer back in that hospital chapel, often reminds me of this.
“You ended up giving God your hands and your words,” she says. “I guess that's evidence he answered your prayer and that, somewhere, Dad is well and happy again.”
I think she must be right. God's love reaches fearlessly into the darkest night, resuscitating our faltering hearts with his love and his fire.
If we agree to stop looking for the living among the dead, we can receive the peace Christ wants to give us: in my case, the assurance that Dad and all his beloved are safely in Jesus’ arms.
If we live resurrected, if we follow his voice out of the darkness and answer his call to life, we will meet the Lord in good company, with our beloved — where there is only love and fellowship. And where even God has scars.
Susan Baxter writes from Mishawaka, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Susan Baxter ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: 'Why Are You Weeping? Whom Do You Seek?' DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Mary of Magdala stood weeping outside the tomb and, as she wept, she stooped to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet.
They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Saying this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?"
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).
Jesus said to her, “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”
Mary went and said to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
(John 20:11-18)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Grandma on Enron: Don't Invest In Fool's Gold DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:My grandmother told me that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
I've been thinking about that adage as I've followed the amazing rise and fall of Enron. I'm a former employee of an energy company, so the story has had particular interest for me.
Prior to the company's collapse, Enron's business strategy was extolled in many business seminars as “brilliant.” Enron was the example of the business of the future, a creative company of vision.
I confess that Enron was just a little too creative for my wee brain. I was a public-relations guy, with little technical or financial training. The genius of Enron appeared to be beyond my understanding. I mean, the management folks seemed impressed with all the Enron talk about value-added market creation, about mission and vision and values — and on and on and on.
I can understand how an oil company makes money: Find oil, get it out of the ground, make it into gasoline and sell it to people with cars. I understand how a car company makes money: Buy a bunch of steel and plastic, make parts, assemble them into cars and sell them to people with someplace to drive. I understand how a hamburger stand makes money: Buy beef, grind it up, make burgers, cook them and sell them to people who are hungry.
And I certainly understand how the coffee shop down the street makes money: Take two cents worth of coffee beans, four cents worth of milk, add a little hot water and steam, call it latte and charge me $3.31. But, unlike Enron, at least I know what I'm getting, even if it is over-priced.
But buying and trading energy, shifting assets among myriad subsidiaries, investing in power schemes to build plants sometime in the future and somehow showing billions in profits — I think Grandma would have had her doubts on that stuff right from the get-go.
A former boss of mine thought much like my grandmother. He was an extremely bright and successful corporate manager. He had a corner office and a big staff. He wore expensive suits and flew first class. But, in his spare time, he remodeled buildings — starting with his own classic Victorian house. By day, a mogul of modern industry. By night, a house painter, carpenter and gardener.
His supposed hobby became a very profitable side business. He would buy a house or building in the city that needed lots of work. He would set about making repairs and remodeling, then rent out the finished product. The money rolled in. Since he was a smart, sophisticated guy, I figured he had all sorts of clever schemes worked out so he would get tax deductions on mortgage interest and take advantage of fancy financing deals.
One day, probably around the time I was refinancing my modest mortgage, I asked him how much of his success on one of his remodeling projects depended on the income-tax deductions. His reply: zero.
The potential income from the property, he said, had to offset the cost of the property, his improvements, taxes and a nice profit. Otherwise, he didn't do the deal. It would never have occurred to him to hide the real profit or loss through some elaborate accounting scheme.
In other words, he kept his business deals open and honest. Success was the result of smart decisions and hard work, not retaining a creative accountant.
True, he never became the seventh biggest corporation in the United States. He was just one little guy fixing up a few old houses. Yet he made a few million bucks at it and never hurt a soul in the process. He'll never need to take the Fifth Amendment when questioned about his work. And he'll never be the nation's largest bankruptcy.
Grandma also said I should always tell the truth, even when it hurts. She would amplify this point with her rendition of the Golden Rule. Then she would re-state her conviction that honesty is always the best policy.
Obviously, the folks at Enron didn't follow these simple rules. As a result, they got into a heap of trouble and hurt thousands of innocent people. And as a result of this mess created by the smart, slick folks at Enron, we'll now have years of smart, slick folks in Washington trying to sort out who gets the remains of Enron and who gets to go to jail. Meanwhile, the politicians will try to figure out how to avoid blame and how to prevent this from happening again.
This will require spending millions in taxpayer dollars for investigations, hearings and special reports. There will be new accounting rules. There will be stricter record keeping and reporting requirements. Government-oversight commissions will be created and hundreds of people hired to help the politicians help the shareholders watch the accountants watch the corporations.
This will get complicated and expensive. Oh, this might get messy. And all this to get people to be honest.
Things would have been a whole lot easier, and cheaper, if they'd done that from the start.
If only, in other words, they had listened to Grandma.
Jim Fair writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Fair ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Sean O'Brien's Poem DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Religion — and the Catholic faith — is providing solace to Sept. 11 victims’ families. A poem written in the middle of the night by a man who had never written a poem before in his life has become popular in Rockville Centre, N.Y., and Charlotte, N.C., where he lives with his family. It has shown up in homilies, on radio broadcasts and in newspapers. It's also available on the Web site, www.fromdarknessintolight.com.
To make sense of what happened to the men and women who died in the World Trade Center, the poem looks at the scene from Christ's perspective.
Take my hand and I'll lead you home, I'm right here beside you, you're not alone Now darkness surrounds you, as the smoke billows up But soon you'll see clearly and drink from my cup So be not afraid, this promise I've made before That I'm the way, the truth and the life You'll need nothing more Right now the world is watching you, in shock and dis-belief Their hearts are filled with fear, with pain, anger and grief But I will bear their burden and lighten their load Though the journey for peace will be a long winding road And for your family whom you love, your concern is so high How will they handle this, how will they get by? The answer to this question lies within me It will take time, but I'll set their hearts free I'll send you all the angels, to be by their side To watch over them, protect them and act as their guide So struggle no more with concerns of this life For where you are going there's no worry or strife It's time to come home now, your last breath you have taken As you lay down in peace, your soul I will awaken It's then you'll bear witness, to a truly amazing sight It's then you'll know I've taken you From darkness into light.
— Sean O'Brien
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sean OíBrien ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Roll Away the Stone DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Jesus is present Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Blessed Sacrament. Contemplating this doctrine of the Real Presence always makes me think: God is inside the church in his humanity as well as his divinity. I should go visit him often.
I think our response to the Real Presence should be dynamic, determined and with the ardor of someone in love. We should all go visit him often.
I met a young man who told me he sometimes parked his car outside locked churches. He wanted to be physically close to Jesus. Another young man explained how he once found the church locked, but its basement unlocked. He got into the church by crawling through the heating duct and pushing off the grate. And I knew a hermit who ate his supper right next to, but not in, his chapel. He sat where he knew the tabernacle was located on the other side of the wall.
Some would say to all these people: What nonsense! I would say: What wisdom!
I realize that not everyone can spend as much time before the Blessed Sacrament as I can.
After all, I am a monk in a community devoted to eucharistic adoration. But we all can spend more time than we do.
How about you? Spend some time before the Blessed Sacrament and you'll see what I mean. You'll catch the fire. As Blessed Padre Pio wrote: “A thousand years of enjoying human glory is worth even an hour spent in sweet communing with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.”
The Real Presence causes us to put things into perspective. Reading, watching a video, playing baseball — all these activities can be enjoyable. But being with Jesus is awesome. You need to relax? Do so with Jesus in church. Choices have to be made. You can live a dull life or make the time to spend with Jesus.
And you can make the time. Pope Paul VI wrote, “There is no better use of your time than that in fervent adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.”
Make time to visit Jesus. Pope John Paul II stated, “The Church and the world have a great need of eucharistic worship. Jesus waits for us in the sacrament of love. May our adoration never cease.” This great man also stated, “The best, the surest and most effective way of establishing peace on earth is through perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.” Awesome.
Jesus waits for and enjoys out visits. When we don't bother to show up he can't enjoy them. (I'd say he is lonely in many churches, but then theologians will get all excited and write long letters to the editor with footnotes to correct me.) Jesus is really present in the Blessed Sacrament.
Are we present often enough there with him?
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, once wrote to his son, saying: “I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning and by the Mercy of God never have fallen out again.”
You're invited to fall in love with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, too. He's waiting for you right now. Go!
Brother Craig Driscoll of the
Monks of Adoration
in Venice, Florida, welcomes
e-mail at monkadorer@catholic.org
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Craig Driscoll ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: Easter in the ëPolish Jerusalemí DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Christians have sought to retrace Jesus&’ steps on the first Easter, and in the days leading up to it, ever since the earliest days of the faith.
For many, the problem has been in getting to Jerusalem. And, for many, the solution has been to bring Jerusalem to the faithful.
That's exactly what Mikolaj Zebrzydowski, a Polish aristocrat, did in the 17th century. The result was the shrine of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, 25 miles southwest of Kraków.
Post-Tridentine Catholic spirituality (that is, Catholic life after the Council of Trent closed in 1563) emphasized Jesus’ passion and death — and Zebrzydowski was a man of his times. Having read descriptions of the Holy Land, he was moved to donate land on his estate to build what was to become a replica of Christ's Way of the Cross. In 1600, he laid the cornerstone for a Chapel of the Crucifixion on Mount Zar, a hill on his property. An adjacent Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre soon followed.
Eventually, the Zebrzydowski family funded chapels to mark each of the stations of the Cross and then some, too: Among the additional chapels designed were “Herod's Palace” and “Gethsemane.” The layout was intended, as far as possible, to replicate the original Via Crucis.
With such a proliferation of chapels, Zebrzydowski needed someone to care for them. In 1602, he entrusted his Calvary to the Bernadine Fathers. That event is usually taken as the foundation of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. This year the shrine is marking its 400th anniversary.
The Passion in Polish
Although Kalwaria Zebrzydowska originated as a shrine dedicated to the Passion of Christ, from its very earliest days it also acquired a Marian dimension. Already in Zebrzydowski's time, a parallel network of Marian chapels began to be erected over the grounds. These chapels focused on the “Sorrows of Mary” as well as her Dormition and Assumption.
The Marian dimension of the shrine was reinforced in 1667, when the miraculous painting of Our Lady of Kalwaria was placed in a special chapel of the Bernadine monastery. The painting had been in the possession of a neighboring estate and, in 1641, was said to have cried tears of blood. After the Archdiocese of Kraków investigated and confirmed the cult (veneration) of the painting, it was transferred to its present home, where it is a focal point for pilgrimage groups.
Kalwaria Zebrzydowska thus has both Christological and Marian dimensions. Contemporary pilgrims are invited to walk either or both of the two paths linking various outdoor chapels spread over perhaps a two-mile area. “Christ's Avenue” takes the faithful from the seizure in Gethsemane over the Kidron Bridge to Pilate's Pretorium and through the whole Way of the Cross to the Holy Sepulchre. “Our Lady's Avenue” wends through the key events in Mary's life, focusing on her sorrows, to her “falling asleep” and Assumption.
One can walk alone or ask for a guide from the adjacent Bernadine seminary. When done prayerfully, each “avenue” takes four to five hours.
All along the “avenues” are individual chapels — each unique in design as well as focus — depicting the particular mystery on which one is meditating. Some of the chapels are open; others are grated except on feast days, but one can readily look in through the grills and windows.
Twice a year there are multi-day pilgrimages at which a member of the Polish hierarchy usually officiates. During Holy Week, the focus is on Christ's Passion. On Good Friday, pilgrims go from station to station. At each chapel, a special homily is preached. In mid-August there is a similar commemoration of Our Lady, including a “Dormition Procession” of a figure of Our Lady in a coffin. Both events assume something of the form of medieval mystery plays. Regional orchestras and locals decked in colorful folk costumes assist.
Where Wojtyla Wept
Karol Wojtyla was a frequent visitor to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska: The shrine is just eight miles from his native Wadowice. As a priest and bishop in Kraków, he prayed there frequently.
His last recorded visit before becoming pope was Sept. 28, 1978. He arrived at 10 a.m. and stayed till 6 p.m. In that way, at prayer, he marked the 30th anniversary of his episcopal ordination. That night, Pope John Paul I died.
John Paul II visited Kalwaria in 1979, during his first pilgrimage to Poland, asking pilgrims “to pray for me here, both during my life and after it.” Mass for the intention of the Holy Father is celebrated in Kalwaria daily.
The current year is an especially fitting time to visit the sanctuary. The main Marian celebrations occur Aug. 10-15, with the procession of Our Lady's Dormition on Tuesday, Aug. 13, presided over by Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Moscow. A plenary indulgence is available to pilgrims visiting during these celebrations, under the usual conditions.
Marian and Christological, a place of encounter with the God of Revelation and the God of Nature, spiritual path of the present Pope — that's Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, the Polish Jerusalem.
John M. Grondelski writes from Warsaw.
----- EXCERPT: The Passion in Polish Zebrzydowska ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: Jerusalem in New Jersey DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Most everyone is at least somewhat familiar with the events of Holy Week.
And that's just one of the challenges faced by those who set out to dramatize them.
The folks behind the Passion Play in Union City, N.J. — the staff and volunteers of the Park Theatre — have had lots of practice to get things just right. They've been staging Jesus’ death and resurrection for 87 years now. Their latest adaptation even adds a reverent, powerful musical score to enhance the drama of the events.
Modeled after the mother of all Passion Plays — the one that's been playing in Oberammergau, Germany, since 1634 — the American version started as a prayer for peace as World War I raged on. Gradual changes over the years included the elimination of anti-Semitic tones (and praise for this realization in 1988 by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs), a black Jesus that made national news and a contemporary musical score that added theatrical dimension and appeal.
Most major changes have come under the guidance of Father Kevin Ashe, the play's producer since the early 1980s. Father Ashe is also executive director of the Park Theatre Performing Arts Center, a 1,400-seat, Broadway-style theater about 15 minutes outside Manhattan. (The center presents a variety of entertainment programs the rest of the year; especially popular are its ethnic concerts.)
The result? This Passion Play becomes a first-rate reenactment of the greatest story ever told. Swift scene changes, strong acting by an experienced cast and stirring original songs by Marty Rotella, Jules Rotella, Jr., and Ed Sansanelli — all come together to transport patrons to first-century Palestine.
One of this presentation's greatest strengths is its success in fleshing out multiple dimensions in well-known characters.
Take Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, the two Jewish leaders who were sympathetic to Jesus. In an absorbing, well-constructed scene that carefully speculates how the plotting of the Sanhedrin might have unfolded, these two cite Christs’ teachings as they forcefully reason with Caiaphas and the Pharisees about the true nature of God's law. Then they launch into a song called “Let Your Light Shine Before Men” that beautifully sums up the basic tenets of Christian doctrine.
The pacing seems just right, too. The show opens with a big number, “There's a Man,” that establishes Jesus as a popular figure with the enthusiastic crowds. Then, as a prelude to Palm Sunday, three years of his public ministry are condensed into four short scenes. In the Beatitudes, Jesus at once becomes compassionate, concerned, approachable — a figure who projects a merciful love for the people as he circulates among them.
Next come the wedding at Cana in Galilee, the conversion and forgiveness of Mary Magdalene, and the teaching of the Our Father.
Because the Passion Play is folk art handed down from the days of the Renaissance, plenty of dramatic license is taken. That doesn't mean accuracy is compromised, just that the emphasis is on evoking a tone of reverence and awe, not on recreating the events in the hyper-realistic style American moviegoers have become accustomed to.
For example, Jesus’ discourse at the Last Supper combines the account of the event in St. John's Gospel with a beautiful ballad, “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled.” The scene opens in a pose clearly modeled after Leonardo da Vinci's painting; a female narrator sets the scene using verses from the Gospels.
Later, in a stark Garden of Gethsemane rendered in sharply delineated light and shadows, an angel of consolation sings a mournful, yet hopeful, duet with Jesus about doing the Father's will.
Throughout the show, the music alone — live singing accompanied by a taped, yet deeply resonant, orchestral score — is worth the price of admission.
A song even pierces the steel of Pilate's cold heart after he tries to wash his hands of Jesus. Pilate stands as a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense administrator balancing Rome's demands with keeping the Jews in line. He reflects on the warped morality of his own actions as his wife, Claudia, unwaveringly defends Jesus. He pauses, but is not swayed.
The play's few special effects are modest and effective: peals of lightening and claps of thunder as Jesus dies, billowing clouds of celestial smoke when the risen Savior ascends.
If forced to find one element with which to quibble, I would cite the rather limited role given the Virgin Mother of God. Apart from a heart-wrenching solo performance of “Jesus, My Son,” which she sings as she holds the dead Christ in her arms, Mary is either missing or a silent observer for most of the production.
Come to think of it, the Pieta performance is so strong that I believe it makes up for Mary's seeming absence the rest of the time.
The full cast ends the production by singing “Jesus Touched Me” and, in a rousing Easter finale, “Alleluia” — just what we want to say about this Passion Play.
Joseph Pronechen writes from
Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Passion Play USA - ‘America's Oberammergau' ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
VARIOUS DATES
The Fifth Gospel: The Land and Sea of Galilee
PBS; check local listings
Follow the footsteps of Jesus around Galilee in this Family Theater Productions hour-long documentary. It uses beautiful photography to show how Benedictine Father Bargil Pixner matched Galilee's topography with the Gospel accounts.
SUNDAY, MAR. 31
Nature: Obsession with Orchids
PBS, 8 p.m.
“I see His face in every flower,” wrote the Irish poet and patriot Joseph Mary Plunkett. This show focuses on people who love orchids — and on the insects that love the flowers, too.
SUNDAY, MAR. 31
Tomb of Jesus
National Geographic
Channel, 8 p.m.
“Resurrexit sicut dixit” — “He is risen, as He said” (Matthew 28:6). In this world premiere, Bible scholars and archaeologists examine sites in Jerusalem that are associated with Christ's passion, death, burial and Resurrection, including ancient gardens and caverns.
MONDAY, APR. 1
America's Walking
PBS, 9 p.m.
This new 13-part series on healthful living, physical fitness and travel debuts tonight. Topics in the first episode include what to take on hikes, whether water or sports drinks are better, and weight-bearing exercises and weightlifting for women.
TUESDAY, APR. 2
Nova: Vanished
PBS, 8 p.m.
The “Stardust,” an airliner converted from a World War II bomber, was heading to Santiago, Chile, from Buenos Aires with 11 aboard on Aug. 2, 1947, when it disappeared. This show tells how climbers finally discovered the wreckage in the Andes.
THURSDAY, APR. 4
Frontline: Battle for the Holy Land
PBS, 9 p.m.
Armed with exclusive access to units of Palestinian guerrillas and Israeli commandos, “Frontline” reporters uncover strategy and tactics in the uprising that has raged since Sept. 2000, the month of the appearance at the Temple Mount-Al Aqsa Mosque area in Jerusalem by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and hundreds of heavily armed Israelis. Advisory: Scenes of bloodshed.
FRIDAY, APR. 5
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly
PBS, 5 p.m.
Deryl Davis reports on Rising Hope Mission Church in Alexandria, Va. Most in the congregation are unable to work, and many are homeless or indigent and have mental, emotional and addiction problems. Content subject to late change.
SATURDAY, APR. 6
Ocean of Mercy
EWTN, 8 p.m.
Jesus told St. Faustina that on Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday after Easter, he will give “complete forgiveness of sins and punishment” to all who receive Communion that day and go to Confession, preferably beforehand. This documentary on St. Faustina, St. Maximilian Kolbe and Pope John Paul II focuses on their love of God and his mercy.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: From Rock to Bach DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:According to Plato, nothing gets deeper into the soul than music. According to the 85-member student body of Magdalen College, truer words were never spoken.
They ought to know. They sing in the choir. Every one of them.
“We take the effect of music seriously,” says Thomas Pendergast, the college's choir director and music tutor. “We've seen firsthand that participation in choir draws the student into the liturgy.”
The school mandates musical development, and wastes no time in orienting students to music most have never heard before. A required freshman course on the fundamentals of music provides an introduction not only to sacred music, but also to such Church documents as “Sacrosanctum Concilium” and “Musicam Sacram “ — both of which urge Catholic schools to have student choirs to sing at on-campus liturgies.
Drina Spalding, a freshman from Louisiana, says she listened to ‘70s and ‘80s rock and country music in high school. Now words like neume, podatus, qualisma and punctum — Gregorian chant terms — roll off her tongue with ease.
Spalding has noticed that that liturgical music elicits a completely different response than rock does — in the singer as much as the listener. “Hymns and polyphony bring out glory to God,” she says. “And in glorifying God, you get a fullness in yourself.”
But the students’ repertoire is not limited to liturgical music. Several choirs at the college offer an opportunity for diverse style development. There's a performance choir, a polyphony choir, a chant schola and what students jokingly call the “second-string” polyphony choir.
Liza Costin, a senior from Ontario and organist for the choir, explains: “The 'second-string’ group has all the rejects who didn't get into the polyphony choir. It's a great group. Everyone here loves to sing, regardless of skill.”
And regardless of time and place. “In the lounge earlier this morning, a bunch of students spontaneously started singing ‘McNamara's Band’ and ‘Go Lassie Go,'” says John Lindsey, a junior from Pleasant Hill, Calf. “Singing creates a spirit that brings people together. It's like a sports team. It helps create a sense of group unity.”
Like most of his classmates, Lindsey listened to contemporary rock and pop music during his high-school years. It took some time for the new sounds he was hearing at Magdalen to get their hooks into him.
“When I was a freshman, I used to dread choir practice,” he admits. “I didn't think I was cut out for singing. I didn't sing on key or pitch, and I saw my own deficiencies. But there was one thing I really liked about choir. It's where all the classes come together. It's a place where freshman and sophomores lean on the upper-classmen. When everyone comes together like that, your self-consciousness about singing fades away.”
It also helps to have a music director who's been there himself. In his younger days, Pendergast played lead guitar for a rock band in Albany, N.Y., called Road House 61. When he headed off to Magdalen as a student in 1989, he decided to leave his electric guitar behind. Literally.
Pendergast recalls how his love for liturgical music grew quickly at the school — how natural it felt to trade searing riffs on the fretboard for the soaring sounds of sacred music.
Under his tutelage, the Magdalen choir gradually expanded to include eight Gregorian chant Masses plus polyphonic motets, Masses by Haydn, Mozart and Palestrina, and traditional sacred music including Mozart's “Ave Verum” and Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.
Magdalen College may be synonymous with music these days, but music is just a part of the school's story. All courses there are taught as Socratic seminars to small classes — 20 or so students each. Students study the “great books” — classics of philosophy, math, science, history, literature and art — by reading the works themselves, rather than studying textbooks about them.
Magdalen was established in Bedford, N.H., 1973, in response to the Second Vatican Council's teachings on the universal call to holiness. The three founders of the college wanted to pass on the holiness vocation to young people. The school grew and moved to its larger campus in Warner in 1991. The college currently has 85 students, which means it has 85 members in its choir.
Because the liturgy is at the heart of its curriculum, Holy Week is truly the high point of the year. Classes stop on Tuesday and the choir begins practicing in earnest for ceremonies that culminate with a rich and reverent celebration of Easter.
It's no wonder that local Catholic citizens from Warner and neighboring towns eagerly anticipate the school's Holy Week and Easter liturgies.
The choir also sings at nursing homes, makes appearances at St. Joseph Cathedral in Manchester and has sung with the Granite State Symphony Orchestra. And, on April 18, the students will appear on EWTN's “Life on the Rock,” thus sharing their musical heritage with teens throughout the world who, themselves, might consider making the joyous passage from Rock to Bach and beyond.
Mary Ann Sullivan writes from New Durham, New Hampshire.
----- EXCERPT: Magdalen College turns students intomusical evangelists ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ann Sullivan ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Father Smyth Medals
NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY , March 10 — Father John Smyth, an athlete, priest and humanitarian, has been named the 124th recipient of the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal for his work with Maryville Academy, according to a university announcement. Founded in 1883, the academy in Des Plaines, Ill., is one of the largest residences for orphaned and homeless children in the country. Father Smyth took over as executive director in 1970, presiding over most of its growth. An All-American basketball player, Father Smyth is a 1957 graduate of Notre Dame. Spurning the NBA draft to pursue a religious vocation, he entered the seminary and was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1962.
Law Not Enough
Vouchers’ New Friend
According to the report, “The Untold Story of America's Newest Democratic Revolution,” Milwaukee has made changes once thought impossible. They include the removal of ineffective principals and faculty, a non-seniority system of assigning teachers and funding schools according to student enrollment, which has gone up overall. The district is also receiving 24% more funding from the state, not less, as voucher opponents had warned.
Author Honored
THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION , March 15 — Children's author and illustrator Charlotte Zolotow will receive the Regina Medal from the Catholic Library Association at the association's 99th annual convention April 2-5, at the Atlantic City Convention Center, according to a press release. More information is available at www.ncea.org.
Embracing Controversy
Intelligent design acknowledges “that the earth is billions of years old and that organisms evolve over time,” writes Clines.
But they argue “that life is so complex that only some sort of intelligent designer, whether God or something else, must be involved.” He explains that proponents of the theory, who recently testified before the Ohio State Board of Education, do not want to replace Darwinism or even require that intelligent design always be taught alongside it.
In an appeal for fairness, they ask that teachers simply be permitted to teach design as one of several theories that are currently debated within the scientific community.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Scent of the New Springtime DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:THE WISDOM OF JOHN PAUL II:
THE POPE ON LIFE?S M OST VITAL
QUESTIONS
compiled by Nick Bakalar and Richard Balkin
Random House/Vintage 2001 150 pages, $12
To order: Available in retail and online bookstores
This book provides a broad overview and a clear, simple distillation of Pope John Paul's thinking, vision and hopes for these momentous times. It is the first paperback edition of a volume that appeared in hardcover six years ago and includes significant new and updated material, including the Holy Father's perspectives as we enter Christianity's third millennium.
The book is divided into subject categories from the Pope's enormous oeuvre of writings, sermons and addresses (the latter two of which
alone add up to some 20 volumes) with an editorial backgrounder introducing each theme. He speaks on such topics as the modern world, morality, faith, family, the poor, peace, women, science and religion. The superb work of the editors is to provide a representative sampling of pertinent passages with the intention of capturing the essential mind, spirit and soul of this most prolific of popes in his own words.
On the subject of contemporary spirituality, for example, John Paul says: “When individuals and communities do not see a rigorous respect for moral, cultural and spiritual requirements, based on the dignity of the person and the proper identity of each community, beginning with the family and religious societies, then all the rest — availability of goods, abundance of technical resources applied to daily life, a certain level of material well-being — will prove unsatisfying and in the end contemptible.”
John Paul believes that the Church can learn from contemporary movements in spirituality, but he also advocates strongly on behalf of the experience of the past two millennia of Christian tradition.
In the area of ecumenism and interfaith relations, the Pope (or bridge-builder, as this TITLE implies) has not only reached out significantly to other Christians, but also to persons of other living faiths. He has enthusiastically visited the religious sites of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Shintoists, Hindus and followers of primal religions all over the world and embraced religious diversity and dialogue with animation provided by the Second Vatican Council. He has emphatically called for an end to religious prejudice, racial antagonism and xenophobia in a way that speaks clearly and passionately to world developments in light of the terrors of Sept. 11.
In the spirit of brotherhood, he opposes proselytizing in favor of an evangelism that celebrates the truths about God found in other faiths. At the same time, the Pope has been a tireless advocate for Christian witness in a world which so much needs to see the spirit of Christ in action.
During a 1995 dialogue with Muslims, he said: “All the motives and expressions of the phenomenon of fundamentalism must be examined. The analysis of political, social and economic situations shows that the phenomenon is not only religious, but that in many cases religion is exploited for political ends or, indeed, to compensate for problems of a social and economic nature. There can be no really lasting response to … fundamentalism as long as the problems that create or sustain it are left unresolved.” If there is a weakness in this book, it is in the limitations dictated by available space, given the vast body of thought available for excerpting. Truly, this pope has been universal and encyclopedic in his interests and commentary. Nevertheless, here is a handy compendium, carefully selected, of kernels of wisdom from the pope who sees a new springtime of the Christian faith coming into bloom despite the darkness of our times.
Wayne A. Holst teaches religion and culture at the
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne A. Holst ----- KEYWORDS: Books ----- TITLE: 'Why I Love Being Catholic' DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Essay contest winners show vibrant faith
WEST CHESTER, Pa. – When Christ returns will he find any faith left on earth?
“If he returns anytime during the next generation, the answer is a resounding Yes,” said Ascension Press’ president Matthew Pinto. The Catholic publishing house recently named the winners of their first annual National Catholic Education Essay Contest. The winners, in grades 5-12, paint a refreshing picture of the future of the Catholic Church.
Last November, Ascension Press asked Catholic students across the nation to write a 500- to 750-word response to the topic, “Why I Love Being Catholic.”
Each entry had to be an original composition about the student's personal understanding and life experience on what is special and life-changing about being Catholic. Contest organizers expected 200-300 essays. Instead, they received more than 2,000 from students in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Among the essays, the Eucharist figured largely. Fifteen of the top 20 finalists wrote of their appreciation of the Eucharist in the life of the Church. “We are … the only Church with the Eucharist,” noted Emily Bissonnette, a home schooled student from Cincinnati. She said she entered the contest because she was seeking funds to attend Franciscan University of Steubenville next fall. She took seventh place.
Third-place winner, Erin Doyle, of Alto, Mich. compared her faith to a precious treasure in her poem “The Treasure Box.”
“In the heart of the Treasure Box, You will find Jesus, Truly present in the Eucharist, Body, blood, soul and divinity. There He has been since the Church began, His presence is the reason why I truly am proud of my Treasure, Without it, the Church would not be as strong. In the Eucharist, Christ fulfilled His promise To be with us and guide us always,” Doyle wrote.
Bethany Stokman, of Crosby, Minn., grand prize winner in the fifth- to eighth-grade category, wrote of her family's departure from the Catholic Church when she was 5 years old, in part because her parents did not believe in the Eucharist. She also wrote of their eventual return. “Even though we don't always feel God's presence in the Eucharist or see it, we believe and know in our hearts that it is true,” wrote Stokman. Furthermore, she cited it as the reason she loves being Catholic. “I am being fed… fed from the banquet of heaven!” said Stokman.
Church Authority
Several students also wrote about their appreciation for the Church's authority.
Grand prizewinning 12th grade student Stephen Tillotson wrote: “I am thankful to be a Catholic because the Catholic Church has the authority to teach, to sanctify, and to rule. Although many dissidents resent the authority of the Church, it is necessary for her well-being. An illustration of this is the numerous and diverse Protestant churches. The reason for the vast number of them is the fact that they have rejected the authority of the Church. In doing so, they have placed each man in the position of pope. Therefore, there is no one to explain the truths of religion and to render moral judgments for the Protestant who seeks the truth. Instead he must decide for himself what he will believe.”
Tillotson, of Petoskey, Mich., hopes to use his scholarship to attend either Christendom College or Ave Maria University next fall.
Wrote fifth place finalist Mary Anderson of Alpine, Calif.: “We have the magisterium, the authority, to guide us through hard times and questionable moments. This is probably one of the greatest things we have, for Jesus gave us spiritual leaders through Peter, our first Pope, when he said, ‘and so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.’"
Fifth grade student America Yamaguchi, of Belmont, Calif. grew up Buddhist. She writes not only of her joy in attending church, but also of her deep love for Mary.
“There is a mural of our Blessed Mother, Mary, over the altar at our church. It is my favorite object in the church. I love Mary because she is the one who said ‘Yes’ to God so that all of her children could live in heaven,” wrote Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi added that she will be baptized a Catholic this Easter.
Surprises
A seven-person judging panel included, among others, Friendly Defenders flash cards creator Katherine Andes, award-winning Catholic journalist Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda, home schooling author Laura Berquist, Joseph Lewis, the secretariat for religious education for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and Martha Fernàndez-Sardina, director of the office for evangelization of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC.
Two grand-prize winners, in each of the 5-8 and 9-12 grade groups, were awarded $500 scholarships for their Catholic education. Nine runner-up winners in each of the two grade-groups were awarded $100 and $50 scholarships and other prizes.
Contest judges were surprised to find, after completing the judging process, that 85% of the finalists, including the two grand prize winners were home schooled. In fact, four of the 10 finalists in the fifth-through eighth-grade category had all taken an Excellence in Writing course developed by Andrew Pudewa. “These factors were completely unknown to judges during the anonymous voting process,” said Ascension spokesperson Christine Valentine-Owsik.
Among the winners, judges also noted some regional trends. Three of the finalists were from Cincinnati, three were from San Diego, and two were from Lansing, Michigan.
Contest coordinator Lynn Klika said that the contest was a blessing for everyone involved. As coordinator, she was responsible for reading all of the 2,017 entries. “While not every child is a great writer, the fervor of students’ faith really came across in their essays,” said Klika. She said she was particularly inspired by the number of essays that came from students in classes at Spiritus Sanctus Academy in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Although none of their essays came in the top 10,” said Klika. “It is amazing, as a body, what those students wrote.”
The essays inspired not only the coordinators, but also student's parents. “Eddie will often say that we inspire him to be a good Catholic, but little does he realize that he
continually inspires us,” said Jeanette Goodwin, mother of second-place winner Eddie Goodwin of Pipersville, Pa., a student at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic School in Doylestown.
“His faith in the Lord is so deep. To know Eddie is to know Jesus. He is never afraid to let others know of his never-ending love for God and all that it means,” added his father, Edward Goodwin. “This essay was another way for him to share the feelings he has about God with the world. We know God has great plans for Eddie and we can't wait to see what they are.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: Children Who Fear DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Q
Some experts say a child should never fear a parent. Isn't some fear healthy? Or is it always bad?
A
If it is, then I must have a few buried hang-ups still lurking in my psyche. As a kid I felt safe knowing just exactly where mom and pop drew the line. As an adult, I'm hearing I could have been emotionally damaged. Now I'm really scared.
The psalmist says: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Didn't God know someday his words would become outdated with the advent of 21st century childrearing theory?
If the Author of life says some fear is healthy, then parents needn't fear rear. No matter that Dr. Justin Case proclaims fear to be bad, God proclaims in its place it is good. “Fear” has become another of many once respectable words now considered psychologically incorrect. Others are guilt, bad, shame, humility, worry and sin.
This explains why many parents, rather than calling bad or wrong conduct bad or wrong, now whitewash it with the more value-neutral “inappropriate” or “unacceptable.” Aware of it or not, they've incorporated modern childrearing jargon into their discipline, and possibly the anxiety that any negative emotion is to be avoided lest the child's fragile self-image evolve into multiple daytime talk-show appearances 15 years down the road.
As in so much of life, the key word is balance. Certainly you don't want Little Conan to cringe every time you walk by or glance in his general direction. If children see day in and out how desperately we love them, then fear — some might call it respect — is in its proper context. I fear a police officer's power to arrest me, and if guilty, I'm really terrified of a judge's authority to incarcerate me. Yet I don't fear law authorities per se. Some of my best friends are police officers and judges.
A 3-year-old doesn't know to fear walking into the street. Teen-agers — those embodiments of self-considered invulnerability — seldom give a thought to the risks inherent in many of their actions. They'd do well to fear what they can understand: our reaction.
Some years ago, I was being interviewed on television, along with a child development expert who believed that just about any parent who ever swatted a bottom was psychological evil incarnate. The host asked me, “Ray, do you spank your children?"
“Yes, they all pretty much have gotten some spankings here and there.” The specialist couldn't take any more. She practically spat out, “Then your children fear you.”
I wanted to say, “Gee, Lady, I fear you. Here, take some aspirin. Tone it down, would you?"
Instead I said, “How can you say that? You don't know my children. Besides, I want my kids to fear my response under certain circumstances. That in no way means they fear me. As they get older, they'll know better why I do what I do.”
The expert wasn't my real concern, though. My son, Andrew, age 6 at the time, was watching the show with his mother, who asked him, “Do you fear Daddy?” Like all kids, who in their innocence have the ability to deeply hurt parents without knowing it, Andrew incredulously replied, “No.”
Now, that's what upset me!
Dr. Ray Guarendi is the father of 10, a psychologist and an author.
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: Winning Essays Show Youths’ Struggles and Confidence DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Bethany Stokman
Crosby, Minn.
Home School Grade 8
$500 Scholarship
Heavenly Banquet
Why do I love being Catholic? Sometimes it's hard for me to understand why anyone would love being Catholic in the small parish I attend. Looking from the outside in, it looks like nothing worth loving at all! We have an older congregation, a squeaky sounding choir, and even squeakier group of kneelers. We sing songs over and over yet no one seems to know the tune. Why would I love being Catholic in this parish?!
Aside from the lack of excitement in our parish, there's another side to being Catholic … it's hard! Other Christians ask me. “Do you really believe communion is the Body and Blood of Christ?” “Don't Catholics worship Mary?” “Why do you Catholics have such strict rules against birth control?” “Why can't your priests marry?"
I struggle to answer these questions because I'm not sure what the right answers are, or I can't explain them. I'm learning how to study the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” in this struggle. Yet some of the questions are still a puzzle. How can anyone really explain the Eucharist? Jesus Christ really present in the bread and wine, this is beyond us. It is incomprehensible to humans, a mystery. How can anyone truly explain it? Doing this essay has challenged my faith and made me wrestle with the questions.
I was five years old when my family left the Catholic Church. My parents left for a number of reasons, but the main one was because they didn't believe in the Eucharist. We started attending an Evangelical-free church, in a larger town. There was lively music, interesting teachings, and no squeaky kneelers to even worry about. Yet even at this young age, I could tell something was missing in the Protestant service. Maybe it was because I was so young and close to God, that I recognized the Catholic Church had something that I once again can't explain: the Eucharist.
Even though we don't always feel God's presence in the Eucharist or see it, we believe and know in our hearts that it is true. At the Last Supper Jesus said to his Apostles; “This is my Body, and this is my Blood, do this in remembrance of me.” As the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” says; 'The Eucharist is the heart and summit of the Church's life’ (CCC 1407). The Eucharist brings us together to form a single body, the body of Christ.
The Catholic Church has an order and history that no other religion has. We are the only church that can trace ourselves right back to Jesus. We have order because we follow the person Jesus has placed to lead us, our Pope. To follow what the Catholic Church teaches is to follow Christ.
There are 28,000 Christian denominations today. Can there really be 28,000 truths? No. We know that the Catholic Church is the true Church Jesus passed down because it has 2,000 years of unbroken tradition from St. Peter all the way to Pope John Paul II.
After three years of attending a protestant church, my family came back to our squeaky kneelers, squeaky choir, Catholic Church. I know people from the Evangelical church thought we were crazy going back to our little church in our little town, ‘What about good sermons and Sunday school and what about being fed?’ Yet Jesus was drawing us back, how could we resist?
Now, back in our older congregation, I realize how blest I am by these people. After every Mass, someone is ready to give me a hug and say hello. They really do care. I found out that four of these women prayed the rosary daily for our family to come back to the Church. God is faithful!
Our parish is looking up, more families are moving in and a new choir is forming. Just last week my brothers helped put in new kneelers. But that's not why I love being Catholic. Regardless of what's happening on the outside, one thing has not changed, I am being fed … fed from the banquet of heaven!
Stephen Tillotson
Petoskey, Mich.
Mother of Divine Grace
Home School
Grade 12
Grand Prize Winner $500
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Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam!
The Catholic Faith is inherently lovable because it is the true religion. For this alone I would love it, yet my love for it is also inspired by its beautiful liturgy, its defense of reason, its patronage of the arts, and its ceaseless defense of human life.
The Catholic Faith offers the most help of any religion to a person in attaining Heaven. Although those who are not Catholics will not be denied Heaven if they are not Catholic through invincible ignorance, they will not receive the benefits of Catholicism in this life. Examples of the aid that the Catholic Faith offers to those who seek heaven are the bountiful graces of the sacraments and the acknowledgement of the reality of the intercession of the saints. The primary reason that I love being a Catholic, therefore, is that it is the true religion, and by living according to its direction I may come to eternal happiness.
Catholicism, of all the religions and philosophies, offers the most help in attaining freedom. Before one can establish that Catholicism is the most free, a definition of freedom must be found. Freedom is the ability to do what is right and good. The reason that freedom is the ability to choose good rather than merely the ability to choose is that when a person, through repeated bad choices, develops a vice, he becomes a slave to it, and only with much effort can he destroy the habit. Therefore, sin and error are tyrants, for they hinder a man's pursuit of truth, virtue, and happiness. From this we see that the religion which best aids man in destroying his vices and finding the truth is the religion which best helps him find freedom.
I am thankful to be a Catholic because the Catholic Church has the authority to teach, to sanctify, and to rule. Although many dissidents resent the authority of the Church, it is necessary for her well-being. An illustration of this is the numerous and diverse Protestant churches. The reason for the vast number of them is the fact that they have rejected the authority of the Church. In doing so, they have placed each man in the position of pope. Therefore, there is no one to explain the truths of religion and to render moral judgments for the Protestant who seeks the truth. Instead he must decide for himself what he will believe.
The Catholic Faith is the defender of the innocent and of traditional morals. It is no coincidence that the few western countries which outlaw abortion are predominately Catholic. Tirelessly, the Catholic Faith defends the dignity and sanctity of marriage. It was the Catholic Faith that ended pagan Roman slavery after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Catholic Faith shall be an instrument in the end of the wicked slaughter of unborn babies, or the end of the world shall come first.
I am proud to belong to a religion that countless tyrants and governments have striven to destroy, and have failed utterly in their attempts. Napoleon, who conquered the majority of Europe, said that there are two powers in the world, the sword and the spirit, and that the spirit always triumphs in the end. He chose the sword, and nothing more remains of his empire than when he had begun.
I love the Catholic Faith above everything save God, the Faith which is lead by the successor of St. Peter, and which can claim as its founder him who said, “Before Abraham was, I AM.”
I shall live in that faith, and shall die in it, unless Christ should return before my death. Come Lord Jesus!
— Stephen Tillotson
----- EXCERPT: Stephen Tillotson ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Tillotson ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life ----- TITLE: LIFE & NOTES DATE: 03/31/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: March 31-April 6, 2002 ----- BODY:Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough
“For years, the school of thought was that when tissue was injured, the repair came from the tissue itself. But we can prove the existence of a systemic supply of stem cells distributed via the blood that are capable of tissue repair,” said Dr. Martin Korbling, a bone-marrow-transplant specialist. Korbling is the lead author of a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
‘Morning-After Pill’ Prohibited
LIFESITE DAILY NEWS , March 6 — The Supreme Court of Argentina ruled the “morning after pill” known as “Imediat,” produced by the Argentinian laboratory Gador, may not be manufactured, distributed or sold in Argentina because the pill acts as an abortifacient and therefore violates the Constitutional protection of human life “from the moment of conception.”
The decision was the result of a court case brought by a pro-life organization, Portal de Belen (Stable of Bethlehem), which argued that the authorization previously given for the drug by the Ministry of Health was unconstitutional. The Court agreed and ordered the Ministry to suspend the authorization.
Imam Condemns Condoms
In strong language, Oustas Kujabi deplored the assertion that condoms are a suitable bulwark against HIV/AIDS as being purported by the media, which in his own words, were only instigating sexual misconduct among the targeted group, the youths.
He also called on the media houses to distance themselves from what he called a propaganda. “If the call to use condoms is adhered to, it will be within a matter of ten years before the whole Gambian population would become HIV/AIDS patients.”
British Lawsuit Against 'The Pill'
BBC NEWS , March 4 — A test case involving more than 100 women who say they were exposed to potentially lethal side effects of the third generation contraceptive pill has started at the British High Court.
Lawyers representing the families are taking action against three pharmaceutical companies, saying the women were not warned of the possible dangers of the pill.
They claim the third generation pill caused the women to develop blood clots which led to long-term damage to their health, and in around 10% of cases proved fatal.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture Of Life -------- TITLE: Pope: 'No Place' for Priests Who Abuse Minors DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — A week of high drama in Rome concluded with the American cardinals proposing “zero tolerance” for priestly sexual abuse of minors and joining with Pope John Paul II in calling for a new crackdown on theological dissent, especially in the formation of priests.
The message being delivered from Rome: Dissent, and the failure to screen out homosexual candidates for the priesthood, are at the root of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
The American cardinals met April 23-24 in the Apostolic Palace with the heads of the eight most senior Vatican departments, including the Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who chaired the sessions.
The Holy See had never before convened such a meeting, and while the atmosphere inside was described by Cardinal Francis George of Chicago as “very serious, even somber,” pandemonium reigned outside as the full weight of the American media descended upon Rome. Cardinals faced media stakeouts at their residences, and otherwise obscure Vatican journalists became hot properties for American television.
The library of the papal apartment was the site for John Paul's address to the cardinals, which minced no words. Calling sexual abuse of the young a “crime” and an “appalling sin in the eyes of God,” the Pope said that some decisions taken by bishops have been “shown to be wrong.”
While the Holy Father was not specific about which bishops' decisions have been errors, the two most egregious examples of priestly misconduct in the current scandal have involved two former priests in the Archdiocese of Boston, John Geoghan and Paul Shanley. In both cases, the priests remained in active ministry for many years after allegations of repeated abuse of young boys were presented to archdiocesan authorities.
“People need to know that there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young,” said the Holy Father. “They must know that bishops and priests are totally committed to the fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality, a truth as essential to the renewal of the priesthood and the episcopate as it is to the renewal of marriage and family life.”
“You are now working to establish more reliable criteria to ensure that such mistakes are not repeated,” John Paul said. “At the same time, even while recognizing how indispensable these criteria are, we cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depths of a person's soul and can work extraordinary change.”
Zero Tolerance
In their final communiqué (available on the Internet at www.-vatican.va/roman_curia/cardinals/doc uments/rc_cardinals_20020424_final-communique_en.html), the cardinals echoed the Holy Father's words, and then proposed a “set of national standards” that would be binding upon all “dioceses and religious institutes” in the United States.
National standards can only be binding with the approval of the Holy See. Cardinal Sodano indicated during the closed sessions that he would be “receptive” to such a proposal.
“Zero tolerance” for the sexual abuse of minors was the key issue in the standards, and there remained uncertainty about what the cardinals have actually proposed to take to the June meeting of the U.S. bishops' conference, which will vote on new policies. Zero tolerance refers to permanent removal from ministry, not necessarily “defrocking,” which means “dismissal from the clerical state.”
At a concluding press conference, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington said that zero tolerance would apply to all future cases of sexual misconduct with a minor. Cardinal George opposes such a blanket approach — likening it to “mandatory sentencing” policies which do not take into account the particular circumstances of a crime — but acknowledged to reporters that the bishops would likely adopt it.
“There is a difference between a moral monster like John Geoghan and a priest who, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, is involved with a 17-year-old girl who returns his affections,” said Cardinal George. “Both are crimes, but in terms of the possibility of reform, they are very different sets of circumstances.”
On the question of the retroactive application of the so-called “one strike and you're out” policy, again there was disagreement. But Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill., president of the U.S. bishops' conference and chief spokesman during the week, said that there was a “growing consensus” to apply it to all cases, no matter how long in the past.
Asked whether a priest who has ever had a credible accusation of sexual abuse made against him could remain in ministry, Bishop Gregory relied, “No. Personally, I would say no.”
In addition, the cardinals proposed quicker procedures for dismissing priests guilty of sexual abuse. While a bishop has full power to immediately and indefinitely remove a priest from ministry, dismissal of a man from the “clerical state” requires due process in a canonical trial and the approval of the Holy See.
Like baptism, the “sacramental character” of ordination remains forever in the soul of a priest, but dismissal means that he no longer enjoys the rights of priests, nor does his bishop have any further obligations to support him.
Cardinal McCarrick said the Americans wanted “expeditious” procedures for dismissals and a “reasonably rapid response” to any subsequent appeals.
Reporting of accusations to the police would become mandatory under the proposals, even where local law does not require it.
“If all that we have proposed were implemented, many dioceses would not have to do anything new,” said Bishop Gregory, noting that his own diocese was one of many that adopted such procedures in the early 1990s.
Dissent and Homosexuality
While the center of attention was on notorious pedophile priests, the final communiqué pointed out that “almost all the cases involved adolescents and therefore were not cases of true pedophilia.”
“Together with the fact that a link between celibacy and pedophilia cannot be scientifically maintained, the meeting reaffirmed the value of priestly celibacy as a gift from God to the Church,” the cardinals said.
The fact that most cases involved homosexual relations between priests and teen-age boys brought the delicate issue of homosexuality in the priesthood to the fore.
On the eve of the summit, papal biographer George Weigel made the case for an even broader discussion, linking what he called the “serious problem of homosexually oriented clergy who are not living chaste celibate lives” to the wider “culture of dissent that has contributed immeasurably to the ecclesiastical atmosphere in which sexual misconduct festers.”
The final communiqué supported the Weigel analysis, with the cardinals saying that there are “doctrinal issues underlying the deplorable behavior in question.” While ignored for the most part by the world press, it was a landmark statement. It was the first formal — albeit implicit — admission by members of the hierarchy that American bishops have not been sufficiently vigilant on matters of doctrine.
“The Pastors of the Church [the bishops] need clearly to promote the correct moral teaching of the Church and publicly to reprimand individuals who spread dissent and groups which advance ambiguous approaches to pastoral care,” wrote the cardinals.
Looking toward root causes, the cardinals also proposed that a “new and serious Apostolic Visitation of seminaries” be made “without delay.” An apostolic visitation is the periodic formal appraisal of seminaries. This proposed special evaluation would focus particularly “on the need for fidelity to the Church's teaching, especially in the area of morality, and the need for a deeper study of the criteria of suitability of candidates to the priesthood.”
Observers understood this as a thinly veiled call for cleaning up those seminaries which may turn a blind eye, or even encourage, sexual activity, particularly homosexual activity. During the course of the week, stronger words were spoken on homosexuality than ever heard before in such a public forum.
“[We have to make sure] that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men,” said Bishop Gregory.
Bishops' Responsibility
Perhaps because the cardinals headed toward the most severe option available in dealing with clergy sexual abuse, they issued a message of support to all the priests of the United States, expressing “deep gratitude for all that you do to build up the Body of Christ in holiness and love.”
The cardinals also admitted that it was the bishops who bore responsibility for the crisis.
“We are fully aware that the focus is on the credibility of bishops and our leadership,” said Bishop Gregory.
“This is a crisis of the holiness of priests and the honesty of bishops,” agreed Cardinal George.
“We regret that episcopal oversight has not been able to preserve the Church from this scandal,” confessed the bishops in the message to priests. “The entire Church, the Bride of Christ, is afflicted by this wound — the victims and their families first of all, but also you who have dedicated your lives to the priestly service of the Gospel of God.”
Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who has been at the center of the storm because of criticism of his handling of Geoghan and Shanley, never appeared before the press during the summit. But he reportedly took responsibility for much of the current crisis in a preparatory meeting with his brother cardinals.
“He said that if he had not made some terrible mistakes, we probably would not be here,” revealed Cardinal George. “He apologized for it. He said nothing about resignation and we did not ask him.”
Day of Penance
The cardinals' summit stressed that prayer and penance must be at the core of the Church's response to sexual abuse.
Earlier, in response to a question, Cardinal McCarrick said that he had personally been fasting for a month and a half as penance.
Stated the final summit communiqué, “It would be fitting for the bishops of the USCCB to ask the faithful to join them in observing a national day of prayer and penance, in reparation for the offenses perpetrated and in prayer to God for the conversion of sinners and the reconciliation of victims.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Supreme Court to Consider Pro-Life 'Racketeering' Case DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court hears the case National Organization for Women (NOW) vs. Scheidler, the right of political groups to protest will hang in the balance, according to protesters from nearly every political persuasion.
The appeal, which the court on April 22 agreed to consider during its upcoming fall term, contests the legality of the finding by a lower court in 1999 that Joseph Scheidler, Operation Rescue and the Pro-Life Action League were engaging in a “racketeering enterprise” under the RICO statute and “extortion” under the Hobbs Act in their activities outside abortion clinics.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute, passed in the 1970s, was designed to ease prosecution of “organized crime,” while the Hobbs Act dates from the 1940s and covers “extortion.”
“To put it bluntly,” said one of Scheidler's attorneys, Thomas Brejcha of the Chicago-based Thomas More Society, “what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as peaceable, nonviolent, direct action is now being considered the crime of extortion.”
Dozens of other political activists agree that a great deal is at stake, and groups as diverse as the Seamless Garment Network, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Leadership Conference and even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have filed or supported “friend of the court” briefs on behalf of Scheidler.
“This is not an abortion case, it's a protest case, and the issues [involved] are compelling to pro-life groups and all protest groups,” Brejcha said. That, he added, is the reason so many different groups have supported the appeal.
The stakes are also high for Scheidler personally. Scheidler said that while the case is being appealed, he has paid the bond with a loan on his house.
In the case, a jury in 1999 awarded $258,000 and an injunction against the defendants for “crimes” which largely consisted of blocking the entrances to abortion clinics, according to the Pro-Life Action League.
Fay Clayton, pro-bono counsel for NOW and the clinics, characterized the actions of Scheidler and the Pro-Life Action League as violent and dangerous.
“The defendants were held liable for 121 crimes, all based on acts of force,” Clayton said, though she conceded that some individual acts were considered to violate more than one law and thus to be multiple crimes. Clayton further attacked Scheidler and his organization when she said, “They lie all the time.”
‘Semantics’
Those claims of “acts of force” are semantic distortions, Brejcha countered. Most of the “physical acts” were acts of protesters blocking clinic doorways with their bodies, and that can be twisted into being called a “physical act.”
“The court only found four acts or threats of violence” covering protests all over the United States during a 12-year period, Brejcha said. Moreover, NOW's star witness, who testified anonymously that she was beaten by protesters, was paid improperly by the plaintiffs. And when her identity was accidentally uncovered by the defendants, it turned out that she contradicted her own testimony in another case, Brejcha and Scheidler said.
But the so-called violence is not the real issue, according to Brejcha and the briefs filed on behalf of Scheidler. Any act by any person even loosely associated with Scheidler or the Pro-Life Action League was considered part of the anti-abortion “conspiracy.”
Brejcha said the court in 1999 found that “as many as a million people” might be involved. That breadth of scope, Brejcha said, shows how troubling RICO is because its guilt-by-association application can be almost limitless.
The appeal also asks for a stricter reading of the Hobbs Act, which forbids extortion “to obtain property.” This, according to the appeal filed with the Supreme Court and Brejcha, should not cover Scheidler and the Pro-Life Action League since they did not seek to profit by their activity. Nor, according to the appeal, should the act be broadened to cover “intangibles,” as Clayton argued.
‘We think it's a very positive thing that the court [agreed to hear the appeal]; we are encouraged to see that.’
And despite the claim by NOW President Kim Gandy that “the court did not even give Joe Scheidler and Operation Rescue the time of day on their claim that the First Amendment justifies their violent acts,” Brejcha said that First Amendment protections are still very much at the heart of the other issues in the case.
Catholic Reaction
Cathleen Cleaver, director of planning and information at the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said she is cautiously optimistic about Scheidler's chances.
“We think it's a very positive thing that the court granted cert [agreed to hear the appeal]; we are encouraged to see that,” she said. But she said she is “cynical” because abortion is involved.
“Abortion cases seem to have their own rules,” she said, “and when you are talking about using laws against violence and corruption against peaceful demonstrations, you know you must be talking about abortion.”
Scheidler, too, is cautiously optimistic. “The granting of cert was very important to us because [the Supreme Court] only takes a few cases,” he said.
Scheidler founded the Pro-Life Action League in 1980 “with the aim of saving babies' lives through nonviolent direct action.” Activities of the group include “sidewalk counseling,” “picketing” abortion clinics and putting on “seminars and lectures.”
Whatever the outcome of the case, you can count on Scheidler to continue to work as a pro-life activist.
“They won't stop me; this is my calling,” he said. “I intend to do it until the day I die.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vatican Creates Watchdog for English Translations DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — A high-powered new committee met in Rome April 22-24 to advise the Congregation for Divine Worship on English translations of liturgical books, especially the new Missale Romanum, issued last month.
The 12-member committee, Vox Clara (Clear Voice), is chaired by Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, Australia. Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile, Ala., is vice chairman, and Archbishop Justin Rigali of St. Louis is treasurer. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago and Archbishop Alfred Hughes of New Orleans are the two other Americans on the committee.
All the members were appointed by the Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW) and represent the vast English-speaking world. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster and Bishop Colin Campbell of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, are also members.
The creation of such a formidable group immediately led to speculation that the Congregation for Divine Worship was preparing to sideline the work of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), the troubled body which has principal responsibility for translating texts into English.
“Vox Clara is simply an advisory body within the CDW,” Archbishop Pell said. “We are very hopeful that ICEL will survive and prosper after its reformation.”
“ICEL now faces a major challenge to renew its statutes and structures, in light of the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam, to send an unmistakable signal that the goal of good liturgical translations is in sight,” said a Vox Clara press release.
Liturgiam Authenticam is a Congregation for Divine Worship document released in March 2001 that laid out new guidelines for translations.
The procedure for translations will remain the same. The International Commission on English in the Liturgy will produce drafts that will be sent to episcopal conferences for approval. Once approved by local bishops, the texts are then sent to the Holy See for final approval, termed a recognitio. Vox Clara will advise the Congregation for Divine Worship on whether to grant that recognitio, which is necessary before any translation of any liturgical book may be used.
While the procedure remains the same, the creation of Vox Clara is clearly an attempted solution to the problems of English translations, which have dragged on interminably as the Holy See has repeatedly refused to approve the work of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy without major revisions.
“Obviously there is dissatisfaction on the part of CDW and a goodly number of bishops with the quality of some of the translations, and this touches upon the fundamental philosophies of translation,” Archbishop Pell said.
Archbishop Pell was involved as an adviser to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the revisions demanded by Rome to the new lectionary used in the United States. With a doctorate in patristics, he also has a “very thorough background in Latin,” he said, which is “mandatory if you are going to talk about translations from Latin into English.”
“The task is a translation of the Roman Missal, not an adaptation, and it must be precise, theologically faithful and easily proclaim-able,” Archbishop Pell said. “Our goal is to have translations that are beautiful.”
While the key factor is the reformation of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy and the speed of its work, Archbishop Pell said Vox Clara is hopeful that an English translation of the Roman Missal might be ready in two years. Before the new Roman Missal was released, the commission had been working on a revised translation of the previous missal — an unfinished task that had already dragged on more than 10 years.
In a message to the Vox Clara committee members April 20, Pope John Paul II commended “to the pastors of the Church the important task of making available to the faithful, as quickly as possible, the vernacular translations of the editio tertia of the Missale Romanum.”
The Holy Father said that the role of the committee is to assist “the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in ensuring that the texts of the Roman rite are accurately translated” into English, and he stressed that the committee must carry out its work “in accordance with the norms of the instruction ‘Liturgiam Authenticam.’”
Outspoken Archbishop
The appointment of Archbishop Pell as chairman is only the latest significant appointment the Vatican has given to the outspoken Australian. He served as a member of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace from 1990-95, as a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1990-2000, and is a Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family.
In October 1999, he was chosen by Pope John Paul II to represent the bishops of Australia and Oceania at the Special Synod for European Bishops in Rome, and in 2001 he was named archbishop of Sydney, the senior Church position in Australia.
“A bishop is to serve his local Church firstly, but we are Catholics, so we also serve the universal Church,” Archbishop Pell said. “A beautiful and faithful translation of the Roman Missal would be an inestimable gift to the whole Church.”
(With files from Zenit)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Is President Bush Wavering at U.N. On the Family? DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:UNITED NATIONS — Pro-family groups were alarmed when an April 22 Washington Times story claimed that the Bush administration was going to join European countries in recognizing homosexual partnerships in a document to be adopted at the U.N. Special Session on Children scheduled for May 8-10.
The controversy stems over the phrase “various forms of families,” which homosexual lobbyists and many European countries interpret to include homosexual couples.
“The pro-family groups are very upset that this could go wrong and they are looking for a fix,” said Austin Ruse, president of the New York-based Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, a pro-life and pro-family U.N. watchdog.
The U.N. negotiations on children, known informally as the Child Summit, have been under way for more than a year and will conclude with this month's special session of the U.N. General Assembly. The special session was originally scheduled for last September, but was canceled after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The special session is expected to ratify a document that formulates international objectives in issues affecting children. As in other recent U.N. negotiations, homosexual and feminist activists have pushed for substitution of the phrase “various forms of the family” in place of references to “the family,” a term that has long been recognized in international human rights law as referring only to the heterosexual family.
Ruse noted that if the White House backpedaled now, after adopting a staunchly pro-family stance in earlier Child Summit negotiations, it could seriously injure President Bush's standing with pro-family organizations.
“This paragraph is going to be looked at by very important constituencies of the president,” said Ruse.
Thomas Jacobson, who handles U.N. issues for Focus on the Family, agrees.
“We think that [various forms of the family] is a problem because some delegations think that includes two men and two women, or homosexual partnerships,” Jacobson said.
He added that his organization had been in “direct contact” with the Bush administration over this issue, and has received an encouraging response.
“The Bush administration wants to renew the language” referring to “the family,” Jacobson said. “If they fail to do that, they will put in a reservation.”
A reservation is an addendum to the text of a U.N. document, entered by a country to state its formal disagreement with a certain portion of the document's language. It can also include an explanation of what that country interprets the disputed language to mean.
“We are very pleased that the administration has come out against this language,” said Jacobson.
Fence-Straddling?
Jacobson said that the Washington Times story missed the mark, but he placed some fault on the White House for the controversy.
“The Bush administration could be partially at fault for that because they are straddling the fence on the homosexual issue,” said Jacobson. “We have to encourage the Bush administration to stay strongly pro-family.”
That concern was echoed by Wendy Wright, spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America.
“On a broader scale the Bush administration has not been good at fending off the homosexual agenda,” said Wright, citing especially the State Department, which is responsible for foreign affairs.
She noted that before leaving office, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright conferred benefits to domestic partnerships. The Bush administration didn't reverse the policy, Wright noted.
Bush, like Clinton, recommended an openly homosexual man to become an ambassador. Michael Guest serves as Bush's ambassador to Romania, while Clinton nominated James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg.
But the Bush administration actually went a step further than Clinton, Wright said. “At least [under Clinton] there was an agreement that his partner would not go,” said Wright.
Not so with Michael Guest and his “partner.” “[Secretary of State Colin] Powell recognized them as if they were a married couple,” Wright said.
Given the administration's mixed record on homosexual issues and the constant push by other U.N. delegations from developed countries for pro-homosexual and pro-abortion agendas, it is understandable that pro-family groups are concerned about the Bush administration's diplomatic efforts.
But Wright remained confident that the Bush diplomats would not turn their backs on America's families.
Bush's Family Man
“We expect that any problems are going to be fixed,” said Wright. “We expect that the United States will be consistent with our laws, with the Defense of Marriage Act.”
Wayne Besen, spokesman for the pro-homosexual Human Rights Campaign, admitted that he hadn't read the Washington Times article, but maintained that a shift in the U.S. policy was unlikely.
“I don't think there has been any monumental changes,” Besen said, adding that sounding the alarm “may be a fund-raising ploy” by pro-family groups.
“I don't think there's some gigantic change in the family language,” he said.
Bill Saunders, who works at the Family Research Council and serves on the administration's delegation to the Child Summit negotiations, remained confident that the United States would not endorse language that supports homosexual “marriage.”
“The administration is not supporting, in conjunction with the European Union, a change in the definition of the family to promote gay marriage,” Saunders said.
“It's important to link family to marriage,” he added. “It's been in all the UN documents since the [1947 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] and it needs to continue to be upheld.”
Saunders said that while he could not reveal the exact diplomatic strategies that the United States has planned, he insisted that the Bush administration remains in close consultations with pro-family groups.
Said Saunders: “The administration is aware of, and takes seriously, the concerns of pro-family groups.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Hope From History DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Harry Crocker is author of the recent book Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History.
He is an editor at Regnery Publishing by day, and he is a convert to the faith. Register correspondent Kathryn Jean Lopez talked to Crocker about his new book, his faith and much more.
You've written a number of books, editing many more. What got you into the book business?
Serendipity. I started life as a newspaperman, an editorial writer. I left that job and went to England to get a master's degree in international relations so I could credential myself as a foreign correspondent, which is what I thought I wanted to do. But somehow, while I was in England, I decided I wanted to be a book editor.
When I came back to the states, my friend, author Dinesh D'souza, introduced me to Al Regnery, who had just taken command of Regnery Publishing and was moving its editorial offices to Washington, D.C. Next thing I knew I was the editor in chief of Regnery Publishing.
Which do you prefer, writing or editing?
Writing.
You are a convert. What were the previous Crockers?
Episcopalians.
Why are you Catholic?
Well, there are several overlapping answers to that, but here are the three most important: First, when the Anglican church ordained women, I felt that Anglicanism had forfeited any claims to orthodox Christianity. Second, I was taken by Chesterton's defense of the faith — among others — and, like Newman, another Anglican convert, I came to understand that the Catholic Church is the Church of history, the Church founded by Jesus and his Apostles. Finally, the woman who is now my wife asked me to place my bet, which I did, on the Church. And I have never regretted it.
Why write a history of the Church? You're not a Church historian. Aren't there other things you could have been doing?
It's true that I'm not an academic historian, but I am a professional writer whose interest is in historical subjects — rather like Paul Johnson in that regard. Moreover, I thought a Catholic history such as Triumph needed to be written because there is nothing else out there like it. The usual one-volume history you'll find in most Borders and Barnes & Nobles is dull and oddly dated precisely because it tries to be hip.
And then there's the torrent of anti-Catholic best sellers that keep pouring out of New York. I wanted to write an affirmative, accessible, exciting one-volume history that gloried in the drama of the Church and focused on great battles and extraordinary men and women — after all, that is the history of the Catholic Church. I relied as much as possible on secular sources and published the book with a secular press (a division of Random House) because I wanted to meet the critics on their own ground. I also wanted to speak not just to Catholics but also to secular and Protestant readers because I believe the historical argument for Catholicism is irrefutable. Of course, people will deny it, but they'll do so for reasons of prejudice or convenience or other reasons.
Did anyone try to discourage you?
Yes. Well-meaning friends told me that I was attempting the impossible, but I kept at it like a diligent soldier — boots, boots, boots, marching up and down again. And to keep the reader eagerly marching with me, I tried to shoot off fireworks on every page.
How did you land a secular publisher?
Triumph is published by the same publisher — Prima Publishing — that did my first book, Robert E. Lee on Leadership, which was a success. My editor there and I had a very good — and non-bureaucratic, an essential thing for me — relationship. He was eager to get another book out of me, and he liked this outrageous idea of doing an accessible, affirmative, swashbuckling, one-volume history of the Church. In between Lee and Triumph I published a comic novel, The Old Limey.
How long does it take to write a 2,000-year history?
In my case, a year and a half of working weekends, at least 16 hours per two-day break from my day job.
In the process of writing, were there things that surprised you to learn about Church history? Anything you're glad to know you didn't? Anything you wish you hadn't learned?
Eastern Christianity and its discontents surprised me. I had expected, in the Pope's words, to treat the East as the second lung of the Church. What I found in history among those Eastern Christians not in union with Rome was fanaticism and the sort of rhetorical and nationalistic extremism that we saw when the Pope visited Greece last year and was compared by a group of Greek Orthodox priests to the “two-horned grotesque monster of Rome.” Or [it was similar to what] we've seen in the Russian Orthodox response to the re-establishment of Catholic dioceses in Russia. This is a historical continuum, and I regret to say that I think the Eastern Churches suffer from what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.
Short of writing a history of your Church, how does your faith make its way into your daily professional life?
Like the Teutonic Knights that made Prussia and the Baltic States safe for Christianity, I pray the rosary. Though in my case, I pray it before and after work rather than before and after Crusades. And I keep the Litany of Humility posted in my office. I call it “The Editor's Prayer.”
In a book review for the Register, Father John McCloskey likened
I take the comparison to Belloc as a compliment. He was a literary pugilist for the faith. Among Catholic writers, Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon Waugh, Graham Greene and Siegfried Sassoon have all had a big impact on me. I'm also very fond of Kipling. Among living novelists, I'm quite partial to the profane adventure-comedies of George MacDonald Fraser.
How old are your children now?
Seven, 5, 3 and 2 months — all boys.
If your oldest were to ask you about Father So-and-So in the news about clergy abuse, what would you say?
I would say that he was a “bad guy.” My boys think in cowboy terms — bad guys and good guys.
As a convert, I imagine you have friends who say, “How can you remain Catholic?” in light of the recent scandals. What do you tell them?
The only thing to say is what we know to be true: The Church is a divine institution served by fallible human beings who are as subject to sin as everyone else. Even the Pope has his confessor.
But however sordid and terrible the current scandal, I'm convinced the Church will come out of these troubles stronger and renewed, because the moral laxity and confusion that allowed these crimes to occur will be repudiated. We need to take the long view. Every age is an age of crisis. Right now we have a crisis of faith, which includes faithfulness to holy vows — from priest-ly celibacy to marriage.
As I say in Triumph, we have fallen a long way from the days of the Crusades when the Pope could count on the response of Christian knights from the Mediterranean to distant Scandinavia. But the Church is a great force and a great and proven force of renewal. Perhaps through it — indeed, only through it — Christendom will rise again.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online and an associate editor of National Review.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Harry Crocker ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Homosexual Prom 'Date' Stirs Church-State Debate in Canada DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The headline on Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, read, “The Boy Who Beat The Catholic Church,” and some Catholics wonder whether that could be the case.
A 17-year-old homosexual student at an Ontario Catholic high school is waging a very public battle to bring his 21-year-old boyfriend to this month's school prom. The battle is pitting the school board — which refused him permission — against just about every other group willing to get publicly involved, including politicians, homosexual rights groups and community leaders.
Of broader concern is whether the pressure being exerted on the school board marks a new threshold in state interference in Church matters in Canada.
The controversy surrounds Marc Hall, a student at Monsignor John Pereyma Catholic Secondary School in Oshawa, Ontario, who asked for his principal's permission to bring his male partner to the May 10 prom. When the principal said no, Hall went public.
At an open meeting April 8, after hearing from Hall and his supporters, the Durham Catholic District School Board stood behind the principal, saying the teachings of the Catholic Church on homosexuality are clear and well-understood.
Board chair Mary Ann Martin said at the meeting the Church “accepts homosexuals as persons who should be treated like any other person: with respect, compassion and sensitivity.” At the same time, she said, “homosexual behavior is unacceptable and cannot be approved.”
A storm of protest, including press conferences and public denunciations of the board, has greeted the decision. At its annual gala in Ottawa, the homosexual rights group Egale gave Hall a special award.
In addition to several homosexual members of Parliament present at that function, Canada's Industry Minister Allan Rock, a Catholic, endorsed Hall's campaign. “Marc Hall is a young man who didn't seek this confrontation,” Rock told the crowd. “This issue was thrust upon him — a 17-year-old young man, going about his life, who met discrimination along the way.”
Dalton McGuinty, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party in Ontario and a Catholic, also weighed in on the issue. He called the board's decision “unfair,” saying it “offends the freedoms that have made Canada a welcome home for people in all their diversity.”
Neither Rock nor McGuinty accepted an invitation from National Catholic Register to explain how they reconcile their stance with their faith.
Opposition
Meanwhile, the teen-ager's crusade does not have the universal support of homosexuals. John McKellar, a homosexual and head of the Canadian organization Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism, said he has “thorough contempt” for the way Hall is being manipulated.
McKellar accused special interests and the media of “canonizing and distracting a naive 17-year-old,” with the goal of making the Catholic Church conform to their “self-styled progressive enlightenment and feel-good, secular fundamentalism.”
Toronto Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Meagher is also defending the board. In a letter to McGuinty he said, “There is no doubt in my mind that if permission by a principal in our Catholic school system is given for any 17-year-old boy to take another male as his 'date’ for the prom this will be a clear and positive approval not just of the boy's ‘orientation,’ but of his adopting a homosexual lifestyle.”
He said many young teen-agers who question their sexuality will one day “thank the faith or the institution that encouraged them not to pursue these inclinations, which, as it often turns out, are not a true indication of their sexual orientation.”
Instead, however, Hall is suing. His lawyer, David Corbett, wants an injunction to force the board to allow Hall and his boyfriend to attend.
Corbett, who is offering his services for free, is described by McKellar as a “well-practiced litigant for gay and lesbian issues and thus is motivated more by self-interest than by genuine compassion.”
The court case will be heard this month, just before the prom.
Amid all the talk of rights, there has been little discussion of the rights of a Catholic school to establish policies according to its religious beliefs. In fact, some critics say it is time to dismantle Ontario's constitutionally protected and publicly funded Catholic school system.
Douglas Elliott, a homosexual lawyer acting as an intervener in Hall's case, said if Hall loses his court case “people will begin to question the special rights that the Catholic Church has under our Constitution — whether our law should permit public funding of religious schools that enforce discrimination that is contrary to the public policy of Canada.”
‘Orchestrated Campaign’
Talk like that doesn't surprise Thomas Langan, president of the Catholic Civil Rights League. He said that the battle against the school board is “a well-orchestrated campaign which we've been expecting, the beginning of an effort to destroy the Catholic public schools in Ontario.”
While Langan does not object to public leaders involving themselves in the prom debate, he is alarmed at the “unbelievable one-sidedness” in the way it's being presented, preventing the Church from defending its position.
Michael Markwick, a Catholic communications consultant who formerly worked for the Ontario Human Rights Commission, said the issue is graver than one of politicians simply speaking their minds.
“The intervention of politicians into this issue is, I think, a form of grandstanding because ultimately in law the state does not have power to bully religious communities,” he said.
Religious believers have a right to “preserve their identities and shouldn't be subject to pressure to be something they're not,” Mark-wick added..
While discussion of Hall's rights to associate with whomever he wishes seems to be trumping the Church's right to hold to the faith, Markwick pointed out that Canadian courts have refused to establish such a hierarchy of rights. More often, court judgments have reflected a “balancing” of rights, such as the recent Trinity Western University case, in which the right of a Christian university to require that its students abide by biblical standards of behavior was recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Said Markwick, “I think what they've found again and again is that public power can't be used to change religious practice.”
Paul Schratz writes from Vancouver, British Columbia.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Schratz ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Florida Company Gives $1 Million for Parochial Tuition
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES, April 18 — Mike Fernandez, chief executive officer of Physicians Health Care Plans, has offered $1 million to Florida's Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program for low-income children, the Florida daily reported.
The Cuban-born Fernandez was raised in the Bronx, where he went to Catholic schools on scholarship. In gratitude for his own education, Fernandez decided to help other impoverished students attend parochial schools.
Said Fernandez, “People are enTITLEd to choice and options.”
The Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program allows companies to make donations and receive an equivalent tax credit. The program has garnered around $30 million from 15 Florida companies.
Teachers unions and many Democrat politicians want to abolish the program, which they say drains money from public schools, and have targeted some of the companies for protests.
But the Times pointed out that “a recent analysis by the nonprofit Collins Center for Public Policy concluded that the program does not divert money from public schools … [T]he center found that the maximum scholarship of $3,500 is smaller than the amount spent on a typical pupil in the public schools.”
St. Patrick's Rector Calls for Straight Seminaries
ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 22 — On April 21, as Cardinal Edward Egan of New York prepared to travel to Rome along with other American cardinals to consult with Pope John Paul II and his staff about the handling of sexual abuse cases, his regular Sunday Mass was left to the cathedral rector, Msgr. Eugene Clark. Msgr. Clark used that pulpit to offer a stinging analysis of contemporary threats to the priesthood, the news service reported.
The rector reminded parishioners of the Church's teaching that “The tendency to homosexuality is a disorder, not a sin. … But the practice of homosexuality is truly sinful.” American society is “very protective” of homosexual conduct, he said, adding that men with that temptation ought not to be ordained.
Msgr. Clark also discussed reasons why clerical celibacy might be hard to practice in America, pointing to the sexualization of the mass media and suggesting that the United States is “probably the most immoral country, certainly in the Western Hemisphere.”
The remarks sparked controversy in the New York and national press, and on April 22 Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the New York Archdiocese, noted that Msgr. Clark had been speaking on his own behalf. However, Zwilling's quoted remarks did not suggest that Msgr. Clark's comments were in any way at variance with Church teachings
Intact Marriage Is Safest for Women and Children
CULTURE FACTS, April 18 — In its biweekly newsletter, the Family Research Council reported on a study of the incidence of abuse in various family types.
The study, conducted by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, found that never-married women who have children are more than twice as likely to suffer domestic abuse as married mothers. They are also nearly three times as likely to be victims of violent crime.
As well, children living with their mother and a man who is not their father are 33 times more likely to be victims of child abuse than those raised by married, biological parents, the study found. The child abuse rate is 20 times higher for cohabiting-biological families, 14 times higher in single-mother families, and six times higher in step-families.
The study's author, Patrick Fagan, commented: ”It's time for the government to adopt policies that reflect this knowledge and rebuild — rather than undermine — the institution of marriage.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Wrong Number: Cellphones and Church Services Collide DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:MENLO PARK, Calif. — Father Bill Nicholas was offering Mass as a nervous new priest. He was a few bars into singing the preface to the Eucharistic prayer when a phone rang out in the assembly, echoing through the parish.
“It was really just kind of funny, in a way, because I was so caught off guard by it that it threw me off pitch. It was quite apparent to everyone that this had thrown me off,” said Father Nicholas, parochial vicar at Church of the Nativity in Menlo Park — smack in the middle of California's cellphone-abundant Silicon Valley.
Added the priest, “I'm not the kind of priest who stops the Mass and admonishes someone, and it wasn't necessary in this case because it was so obviously distracting. Hopefully the person with this phone learned from it.”
It's an event playing out with alarming frequency in parishes around the globe, as even teenagers and children in their Sunday-school years possess cellphones. And increasingly, parishes are banning the phones from Mass and even asking parishioners to check them at the door.
Stories of cellphone abuse are frequently exchanged in Internet chat rooms, including outrage over ringing phones and conversations that take place during funerals. Katrina Boguski was attending Mass at Holy Rosary Cathedral, in Vancouver, British Columbia, when phones began to ring. It disrupted her focus on the presence of the Lord.
“The word ring does not quite capture the essence of the moment, nor the essence of the sound; it was more like a movement than a ring,” Boguski said of the experience.
Unfortunately, polite requests that phones be turned off, checked or left in the car, often don't work. At Church of the Nativity, a sign, a bulletin notice and the church Web site tell parishioners in no uncertain terms that cellphones in Mass, on or off, are unacceptable.
“Please check it, even if you're sure it's off,” the notice reads. And still, a phone occasionally rings in the church, followed by whispered conversation.
Acoustics Count
Often during Mass, the whispered conversation following a cellphone ring is amplified, unbeknown to users, by the sophisticated acoustical nature of traditional Catholic church and cathedral architecture.
“They think they're whispering, but everyone in the parish can hear it,” said Mary Reneau, who recently endured cellphone abuse during a friend's child's baptism in Colorado. “The phone rang, drawing attention away from the child and the priest. Then the phone was answered, and a conversation ensued. It was a quick, hushed conversation, but distracting and unfortunate nevertheless. Now my friends, whenever talking about the baptism, always talk about the cellphone call right before the water was poured over their baby's head.”
Although he was interrupted while saying Mass, Father Nicholas said he more frequently finds himself annoyed by loud phone conversations at Silicon Valley stores and movie theaters.
“I was trying to watch a movie recently, and right in front of me this man's cellphone rang, and he carried on a conversation,” he said. “Then it rang again and he talked. I decided that if it rang a third time I'd ask him to turn it off.
“Just today I was at Costco, and someone was on the phone asking ‘should I rent this video, or that video?’ ‘And what kind of onions should I get?’ These are the types of important conversations people seem unable to resist when they're speaking loudly on a cellphone in public.”
At Holy Rosary Cathedral, Boguski suspected the person interrupting Mass was also talking about onions.
“Whose profession or lifestyle is so important that it is given precedence over the Eucharist?” Boguski asked in a letter to the parish newsletter. “What was it that could not have waited until after the Mass had ended? I could not help but think perhaps the person on the other end needed help with a question about onions!”
Jamming Priest
Cellphone distraction became such an issue at the Church of the Defenseless in Moraira, Spain, that Father Francisco Llopis took dramatic action and installed an electronic jammer to block cellphone signals.
“I ensure that the religious service is celebrated within the parameters of prayer,” Father Llopis explained.
Don't count on pastors in the United States to follow suit. Some priests have resisted requests from annoyed parishioners to have cellphones checked at the door, or left in cars, or electronically jammed.
“I have had many complaints about cellphones in church,” said a Colorado priest who asked to remain unnamed. “But I don't want to be responsible for someone not getting an emergency call at Mass. It becomes an issue of potential liability for the parish and the diocese.”
Besides, the signal jamming device that has restored peace and reverence to the Church of the Defenseless is illegal in the United States, leaving Father Llopis' American colleagues somewhat defenseless themselves.
Cellphone proponents counter that the answer to inappropriate phone ringing and conversation lies in public education about proper etiquette, not in signal jamming. But to Boguski, a phone conversation during Mass clearly flies in the face of proper etiquette.
“When the right to worship is taken away by cellular interruptions, things have gone too far,” Boguski said. “Reflect for a moment on how many valiant martyrs gave their lives in order to be counted among the faithful. How sad they and Christ himself must be to witness the contempt with which too many of us treat Mass. As Catholics, we should be focused on Communion at Mass, not mass communications and cellular technology.”
Proper Focus
Father Nicholas agrees, but he's also sympathetic to the plight of, say, an on-call surgeon who can attend Mass at certain times only if the cellphone is on. He encourages worshippers not to become too dependent upon pastoral regulations to protect them from distractions.
“Our focus should be on God, or on the word of Christ, depending on which part of the Mass we are in,” Father Nicholas said. “Cellphones detract from our ability to focus. But there are many other elements that can do that. The moment we say ‘turn the cellphone off,’ a firetruck drives past with sirens wailing. So it's important that we learn to focus, and not be distracted, no matter what may be going on around us.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Pius XII Praised at Holocaust Conference
INSIDE THE VATICAN ONLINE, April 19 — The debate over Pope Pius XII's reaction to the Holocaust may be shifting to favor the wartime Pope, Inside the Vatican reported in its coverage of the 22nd annual Conference on the Holocaust.
The conference, held April 14-15 at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., featured historians strongly critical of Pius, as well as his defenders. Speakers included James Carroll (Constantine's Sword), Susan Zuccotti (Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy), Jose Sanchez (Pius XII and the Holocaust), John S. Conway (The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945), and almost a dozen others.
David Dalin, a distinguished American rabbi and historian, spoke about Pius' wartime assistance to Jews and described Pius' outspoken denunciation of Nazi atrocities.
Dr. Michael Feldkamp of Germany engaged in a careful rebuttal of the central thesis of John Cornwell's best-selling Hitler's Pope, accused Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII) of engaging in reactionary policies, as Pius XI's Secretary of State, that enabled Hitler to come to power.
Said Inside the Vatican, “As Feldkamp noted, citing unimpeachable evidence from German and Church archives, there is not a shred of truth to these charges, and that, if anything, Pacelli was a moderate realist who was open to progressive thinking, and always pursued a path compatible with an honorable Christian conscience.”
Sign of Hope From Russian Orthodox?
ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 18 — Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, leader of Russia's Latin-rite Catholics, discerned some hope of an ecumenical opening among Russian Orthodox in the recent statements of Moscow Patriarch Alexy II, the news service reported.
Pope John Paul II has long wished to visit Russia, but his proposed pilgrimage there is vigorously opposed by nationalist Russian Orthodox clergy, who regard Catholics as foreign interlopers.
“I have said more than once that I am prepared to meet with the Pope, but it would have to be a meeting that really allows us to solve the problems,” Patriarch Alexy told a Russian paper in mid-April.
That's a hopeful statement, in Archbishop Kondrusiewicz's view. “Before, he said they couldn't meet until all the problems were resolved,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “Now, he's saying they can meet in order to solve the problems.”
God Save the Queen
THE TIMES, April 20 — As Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her golden jubilee — the 50 years since her coronation in 1952 — and mourns the death of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, the Vatican Museum will pay her a special, ecumenical tribute.
The London daily reported that “the museum will host an exhibition on ‘Anglicanism and the Western Tradition’ — the first display dedicated to a non-Roman Catholic denomination in the museum's history.”
The British ambassador to the Holy See, Mark Pellew, came up with the idea after an Italian congratulated him for knowing the “Our Father.”
The Times reported that “the Dean of Norwich, the Very Rev. Stephen Patten, who will open the exhibition, said he hoped it would dispel the view that Anglicanism was ‘a curious eccentricity on the northwestern edge of Europe.’”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: God's Last Word Is Love and Forgiveness DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Over 17,000 pilgrims, including large groups from 17 different countries, attended Pope John Paul II's general audience on April 24 in St. Peter's Square. The Holy Father continued his catechesis on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours by commenting on Psalm 81, which is an invitation to a joyful liturgical festival, a celebration of Israel's deliverance from slavery, and a summons to renewed commitment to the covenant.
“The words of the psalm are simple and revolve around two ideas. On one hand, we see God's gift of freedom,” the Holy Father noted. “On the other hand, the psalmist introduces another significant element in addition to this gift from God.” He went on to say that the religion of the Bible “is a dialog, a word that is followed by a response, a gesture of love that calls for our assent.” In the psalm the Lord invites Israel to faithfully observe the first commandment, which is the foundation for the Ten Commandments. “Only by faithfully hearing and obeying can people fully receive the Lord's gifts,” the Holy Father said.
“The Lord clearly wants his people to convert and to respond with a sincere and concrete love to his love that is even more lavish,” Pope John Paul II pointed out. “The last word in the dialog between God and his sinful people is never one of judgment and punishment but love and forgiveness. God does not wish to judge and condemn, but to save and deliver humanity from evil.”
“Blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon, on our solemn feast” (Psalm 81:4). These words from Psalm 81, which we have just heard, refer to a liturgical celebration in the lunar calendar of ancient Israel. It is difficult to say exactly which festival this psalm refers to. What is certain is that the liturgical calendar of the Bible, even though it is rooted in the cycle of seasons and, therefore, in nature, is firmly anchored in salvation history, especially in that central event of the exodus from slavery in Egypt, which is linked to the full moon of the first month (see Exodus 12:2,6; Leviticus 23:5). It was there God revealed himself as liberator and savior.
As verse 7 of this psalm says in a very poetic way, God himself relieved the Hebrew slaves in Egypt from the burden of carrying the baskets full of bricks needed for the construction of the cities of Pithom and Raamses (see Exodus 1:11,14). God stood at the side of his oppressed people and freed them with his power from the bitter sign of their slavery — the basket of sun-baked bricks, which was a sign of the labor that the children of Israel were forced to do.
God's Gift of Freedom
Let us now look at the development of this canticle from Israel's liturgy. It begins with an invitation to festivity, song and music. It is an official convocation of the liturgical assembly according to an ancient precept for worship, which was already established in Egypt with the celebration of Passover (see Psalm 81:2-6a). After this appeal, the Lord himself speaks through the prophecy of a priest in the Temple of Zion, and these words from God make up the remainder of the psalm (see verses 6b-17).
These words are simple and revolve around two ideas. On one hand, we see God's gift of freedom, which was offered to an oppressed and unhappy Israel: “In distress you called and I rescued you” (verse 8). Reference is also made to how the Lord sustained Israel as it journeyed through the desert during a time of difficulty and trial with the gift of water at Meribah.
On the other hand, however, the psalmist introduces another significant element in addition to this gift from God. The religion of the Bible is not a monologue that God carries on in solitude or an act that remains inert. Rather, it is a dialogue, a word that is followed by a response, a gesture of love that calls for our assent. This is why so much space is devoted to the invitations that God directs at Israel.
Above all, the Lord invites Israel to faithfully observe the first commandment, the foundation of the Ten Commandments — faith in the one Lord and Savior and the rejection of idols (see Exodus 20:3-5). The words that the priest speaks in God's name are marked by the verb “listen” that is so dear to the Book of Deuteronomy. It expresses an obedient assent to the Law of Sinai and it is a sign of Israel's response to his gift of freedom. Indeed, it is repeated throughout the psalm: “Listen, my people … If only you will obey me, Israel … But my people did not listen to my words; Israel did not obey me … But even now if my people would listen” (Psalm 81:9,12,14).
Man's Unfaithfulness
Only by faithfully hearing and obeying can people fully receive the Lord's gifts. Unfortunately, disappointed, God has to note Israel's numerous infidelities. The journey through the desert to which the psalm refers is studded with these acts of rebellion and idolatry that culminate in making the statue of the golden calf (see Exodus 32:1-14).
The last part of the psalm (see Psalm 81:14-17) has a melancholic tone. In fact, God expresses a desire that up until now has not been satisfied: “But even now if my people would listen, if Israel would walk in my paths” (verse 14).
This melancholy, however, is inspired by love and is connected with a burning desire to pour out happiness upon the Chosen People. If Israel would walk in the ways of the Lord, he would be able to give them immediate victory over their enemies (see verse 15), feed them “with the finest wheat” and satisfy them “with honey from the rock” (verse 17). It would be a joyful banquet of the freshest bread, accompanied by honey that seemingly runs from the rocks of the Promised Land and represents the prosperity and total well-being that the Bible repeatedly speaks about (see Deuteronomy 6:3; 11:9; 26:9,15; 27:3; 31:20). By offering this wonderful perspective, the Lord clearly wants his people to convert and to respond with a sincere and concrete love to his love that is even more lavish.
God's Lavish Love
In the Christian interpretation of the psalm, God's offer reveals its abundance. Indeed, Origen offers us this interpretation: the Lord “made them enter the Promised Land; he fed them not with manna as in the desert, but with the wheat that fell to the earth (see John 12:24-25), that has come back to life…Christ is the wheat; he is also the rock that satisfied the people of Israel with water in the desert. In the spiritual sense, he satisfied them with honey, and not with water, so that all who believe and receive this food will taste honey in their mouth” (Omelia sul Salmo 80, n. 17: Origene-Gerolamo, 74 Omelie sul Libro dei Salmi, Milan, 1993, pp. 204-205).
As is always the case in the history of salvation, the last word in the dialog between God and his sinful people is never one of judgment and punishment but love and forgiveness. God does not wish to judge and condemn, but to save and deliver humanity from evil. He continues to repeat the words that we read in the Book of the prophet Ezekiel: “Do I indeed derive any pleasure from the death of the wicked? … Do I not rather rejoice when he turns from his evil way that he may live? … Why should you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Return and live!” (Ezekiel 18:23,31-32).
The liturgy becomes that special place in which we hear God's call to conversion and we return to the embrace of a “merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity” (Exodus 34:6).
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Clergy Among 'Righteous Gentiles' Honored by Israel DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM — Outside Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, in the shadow of an old wooden Polish railroad car and tracks that once transported Jews to death camps, a series of marble walls bear testimony to the good that sometimes stands alongside evil.
The walls, which are bordered by large shade trees and rock fences constructed out of Jerusalem stone, are inscribed with the names of more than 18,000 individuals who helped save Jews during the Holocaust. Many of the rescuers, recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles or Righteous Among the Nations, are Catholics. A striking number were clergy.
Not long ago a small group of people, most of them elderly, stood before one of the walls and lovingly traced with their fingertips the latest names to be added.
Two of those assembled, Svetlana Shukaliuk, a Ukrainian Christian woman, and Yafim Sklarsky, a Ukrainian Jew who moved to Israel in the mid-1990s, were on hand to posthumously honor Svetlana's adoptive mother, Valentina Varavina, who saved Yafim when he was just a toddler. On her deathbed four years ago, Valentina pleaded with Svetlana to find Yafim, whom her mother had not seen since the end of the war.
In 1941 Valentina met Yafim, then 3 years old; his brother, Ilya, then 9; and their mother, Bluma Shtraim, on a train going east, away from the Nazis. The boys' father had been drafted into the Red Army a month earlier.
In central Ukraine the train was bombed and Bluma was killed. Intent on saving the children, Valentina grabbed them from the wreckage but became separated from Ilya. Valentina took in Yafim and introduced him as her nephew, hiding him in her home until the liberation by the Soviet army in 1943. Shortly after the liberation, Ilya found his way to Valentina's home, and in 1946, their father returned and reclaimed the two boys.
In July 2001, Svetlana appeared on a Russian TV program and asked if anyone had information about her mother's “other child.”
Yafim, who was by then living in Israel, saw the show. Soon afterward, he gave his testimony to Yad Vashem in the hopes of having Valentina honored as a Righteous Among the Nations.
Svetlana said her visit to Israel was bittersweet.
“I feel great joy but also great sadness,” she said. “My mother wanted to see Yafim and Ilya [who is now deceased] but it never happened.”
Few Survivors Left
Sadly, ceremonies like the one honoring Valentina Varavina are occurring less and less frequently and could all but disappear within a decade. The number of Holocaust survivors dwindles every year, and most of those still alive were either too young to recall who saved them or are now too old to recall the details with certainty.
Under Yad Vashem's stringent guidelines, only those cases that can be documented — almost always through a survivor's firsthand testimony — can be considered for the “righteous” designation.
The fact that so many — perhaps most — of the rescuers were Catholic should come as no surprise, experts said, because several of the countries where Jews lived and sought refuge were Catholic.
Catholic clergy saved the lives of thousands of Jews, especially young children, by shielding them in convents, orphanages and other Catholic institutions. Sometimes they arranged for local Catholic families to take in Jewish children and raise them until after the war, when it was hoped their parents would return.
Although Pope John Paul II has acknowledged that some individual Catholics did not do enough to save Jews — and in some cases actually caused their death — the Jewish community acknowledges its debt to the numerous Catholics who risked their own lives to assist their Jewish neighbors. Without their help many more would have perished.
Michael Paldiel, director of Yad Vashem's department of the Righteous Among the Nations, estimated there were several hundred thousand survivors at the end of World War II. Today no more than 100,000 are believed to be alive. Even fewer rescuers are alive today since they tended to be older than the people they saved.
“For every person who survived the concentration camps, at least two others survived in the open,” Paldiel said. “For a Jew to survive on his own was unusual. I'd say that for almost every survivor, there was at least one person who helped him survive.”
Paldiel said he believes only a tiny percentage of those who saved Jews have actually been recognized.
“Look at the statistics,” he said. “In Holland, 22,000 out of the Jewish population of 140,000 were hidden or helped, yet only 4,000 Dutch have been honored. In Italy, almost 300 have been honored, but we know that 30,000 Jews were saved.”
Catholic Heroes
Among the recorded acts of heroism are the actions of Msgr. Guiseppe Nicolini, Father Rufino Niccaci and Father Aldi Brunacci, who saved hundreds of Jews in Assisi by providing shelter and new identities.
Mother Marie Skobzova, a Russian revolutionary-turned-nun who resided in Paris, suffered martyrdom in the Ravensbruck concentration camp for directing a network of aid to Jews in the Paris region.
Anna Borkowska, a Polish nun in a convent outside Vilnius, Lithuania, hid resistance fighters in her convent.
According to Yad Vashem, a person cannot be considered righteous unless his actions “risked the rescuer's life and freedom”; any aid he rendered “was not conditioned by monetary or other tangible rewards”; and took place at a time when the fleeing Jew needed the help of a nonJew to avoid arrest by the Nazis or collaborators.
Father Michael McGarry, the rector of the Tantur Institute in Jerusalem and a Holocaust scholar, notes that religious faith played a role for some, though not all, Christian rescuers.
In most cases, Father McGarry said, the rescuers did not spend days or weeks contemplating whether or not to provide assistance. They simply did it.
“The vast majority responded to a knock at the door, a furtive whispering in a crowd, and people had to make an immediate decision,” he said. “It's not as if they pored over books and thought of their catechism. Rather, their decisions resulted from a long life filled with altruistic behavior.”
Michele Chabin writes from Jerusalem.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Le Pen Makes Electoral Breakthrough in French Elections
NEW YORK TIMES, April 22 — Controversial pro-life French nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked observers by placing second in the first round of France's presidential elections, effectively ending the career of Socialist President Lionel Jospin.
Jospin, who finished third and failed to qualify for the run-off election May 2, announced his retirement from public life after the vote.
Le Pen will face Gaullist candidate Jacques Chirac in the second round, which Chirac is widely expected to win easily. But even if he loses, Le Pen's first-round success marks a new era for his long-marginalized National Front.
Le Pen has gained notoriety through his blunt, provocative public statements, such as minimizing the historical significance of the Holocaust. He has also consistently raised the taboo subject of illegal immigration, principally by Muslims from former French possessions in North Africa. Many such immigrants are unemployed and live in vast government housing projects, where crime is a major problem.
Crime and unemployment were major campaign issues and contributed to Jospin's defeat, the Times reported.
Le Pen has also been attacked by French feminist groups for opposing abortion. Virtually alone among major political parties, the National Front favors restricting abortion, using the slogan “Kill the infant, and you kill France.”
Juan Diego's Canonization Highlights Ethnic Tensions
ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 19 — Pope John Paul II's planned canonization July 30 of Blessed Juan Diego, the visionary of Guadalupe, has exposed underlying ethnic tensions that divide Mexican Catholics.
The Associated Press' Mark Stevenson commented that “the debate over 16th century Indian Juan Diego touches on delicate issues of ethnicity, faith, foreign meddling and respect for Indians, and threatens one of the few things that unifies Mexico: national symbols.”
The Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego in 1531 and left behind her image, miraculously imprinted on the Indian's “tilma,” which is now preserved in Mexico City's basilica. Before the apparition, most Indians had rejected as a foreign implant the Christian religion the Spanish conquistadors were trying to impose. But when Mary appeared, with olive skin and a claim to be their protectress, the conquered natives embraced Christianity as their own.
Controversy has flared at the basilica gift shop over the skin color given the Virgin and the visionary. Images of the two are now available in several skin tones, from European white to Aztec brown, to suit a variety of customers.
Colombian Guerrillas Release Kidnapped Priest
EFE NEWS SERVICE, April 22 — Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas released Father Carlos Yepes on April 22, one day after he was kidnapped along with Guillermo Gaviria, the governor of the province of Antioquia, and former government minister Gilberto Echeverry.
When he was kidnapped, Father Yepes was accompanying Gaviria and Echeverry at the head of 1,000 peace marchers traveling from the city of Medellin to the municipality of Caicedo. But FARC guerrillas set up a false roadblock, the news service reported, and took the two government officials and the priest hostage.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: EDITORIAL DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:For the sensation-hungry secular American media, the cardinals' summit in Rome on sexual abuse by U.S. priests must have been a major disappointment. No heads of American cardinals were served up on a platter to the waiting horde of reporters, and there was no instant “quick fix” on display at meetings' end. But for those looking for hope and direction from the Church, the gathering was anything but disappointing.
Pope John Paul II, whose own love and concern for youth is legendary, made it unmistakably clear that there is no place in the clergy for those who would misuse their priestly vocation to exploit young people sexually. Gone forever are the days when abusers could rely on a muddled understanding of sexual psychology to duck responsibility for their crimes.
A second unequivocal message was delivered, too. Rome has no intention of allowing Church dissenters to use the abuse scandal to launch an assault on priestly celibacy. Let no one claim that this is an example of the Church clinging to dead dogmas in the face of contemporary reality. As was repeatedly noted at the summit, there is no connection between a celibate priesthood and an increased risk of abuse. Indeed, all available data suggest that Catholic priests are considerably less likely than the general public to offend in this way.
As well, the rate of abuse among priests, at less than 2%, is only half that among married people — indicating that allowing more married men to become priests would yield no benefit in reducing such crimes.
Even less can the abuse scandal be used as an excuse to launch a new attack on the Church's immutable teaching that the gift of sexuality is expressed properly only within heterosexual marriage. If there is one thing that is crystal clear in this ugly mess, it is that reckless sexual behavior outside of marriage causes incalculable harm.
A key aspect of the Rome meeting was the growing consensus among Church leaders that the problem is primarily an issue of homosexual behavior, not of pedophilia. While the two highest-profile incidents in Boston involved predatory pedophiles who victimized scores of young boys, the vast majority of reported cases involve misconduct between homosexual priests and teenagers. This points toward action in two directions.
One, it is time to clean house vigorously in any seminaries that continue to admit homosexually inclined candidates and turn a blind eye to homosexual conduct among seminarians. U.S. seminaries must have zero tolerance toward disordered sexuality. The official Vatican communiqué issued at the end of the abuse summit instructed that bishops must visit seminaries to assure their fidelity to the Church's moral teachings and to study the “criteria of suitability of candidates to the priesthood.”
Two, the bishops must address the larger climate of dissent, within which prominent American Catholics have freely attacked Church teachings about homosexuality, abortion, contraception and other sexual issues. In this regard, the Vatican communiqué said that “the Pastors [that is, bishops] of the Church need … publicly to reprimand individuals who spread dissent and groups which advance ambiguous approaches to pastoral care.”
It will take time for the U.S. bishops to fully address these issues, but the housecleaning can begin right away.
Work also remains to be done to formulate national policies on implementing the new “zero tolerance” policy toward priests who commit sexual abuse.
Catholics can have faith that our bishops, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, will rise to the challenge. Lay Catholics can play a key role in the process by reaching out in charity to abuse victims, and by striving to unite themselves with the Church through prayer, penance and personal holiness.
Although this is a time of profound trial for the Church in the United States, let us also remember that we continue to celebrate the Easter season. We rejoice in the resurrection of Jesus and his triumph over sin — all sin, even that committed by his own priests.
And we can be confident that, in his own time, Jesus will lead us to the right solution to the scandal of sexual abuse — just as he has led his Church through countless other trials over the last two thousand years.
Of course, this attitude of patient trust isn't well suited to the needs of the news media, which require an unceasing stream of controversial soundbites for tonight's TV broadcasts and tomorrow's newspaper headlines.
But the Church has a different deadline — eternity. And, no matter what the circumstances, the Church proclaims the same Good News of salvation, purchased for every human soul through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Father Fessio' Obedience
I would like to add a footnote to the fine article “Father Fessio Barred at San Francisco College” by Tim Drake (March 24-30).
It is not widely known that Father Fessio was the founder, in the truest sense, of the American edition of Communio. A student and assistant of Father Henri de Lubac, he attended the meeting in Rome in the early '70s of a small group of theologians — including Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, among others — who issued in the founding of the review. He eventually contacted me (we had been classmates in the seminary) and a couple of others to help him organize an American edition. Having gotten the American edition underway, with James Hitchcock and Father John Sheets installed, respectively, as the first editor and first chairman of the board, Father Fessio moved on to his founding of Ignatius Press, Ignatius Institute and other works.
I mention this, inter alia, because, in the founding of Communio, Father Fessio manifested a quality to which all who know him well can attest: In the zeal and vigor with which he initiates such projects, he always puts them clearly and unequivocally in the service of the Church — and is quite free in turning over control to others. The same detachment from any desire for self-aggrandizement has informed his ever-present courage in defending what he judges to be the good of the Church.
All of which brings us to the present moment. It is not at all surprising to me, and I think again to anyone who knows him, that, in response to the injustice of being assigned by the California Jesuits to a hospital some 400 miles from Ignatius Press and the newly founded Campion College, Father Fessio simply obeyed, and began to look for the hand of God in his new work. His obedience confirms the integrity of the vocation of this man in his significant work for the Church in the United States.
If I may pass along a further anecdote in this connection: Several years ago, in Rome, I was involved in a short conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger in which Father Fessio's name came up. Cardinal Ratzinger remarked briefly as the conversation continued: “He is an obedient priest.” I have always been struck by that comment, and curious as to why that quality was singled out by the cardinal. I now have my answer, and know why the comment was so perceptive.
DAVID L. SCHINDLER Washington, D.C.
The author is editor of the North American edition of Communio and Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at The Catholic University of America.
Archbishop Chaput's Chutzpah
I could hardly believe my eyes when I read the article in the April 21 issue where Archbishop Chaput calls Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a “Cafeteria Catholic” like pro-abortionist Frances Kissling (“Denver's Archbishop Chaput: Cafeteria Catholicism Found in All Flavors,” April 21-27). I have long admired Archbishop Chaput and have hoped that someday he would be Pope! But this insult to Justice Scalia, a devout Catholic and our best hope for overturning Roe v. Wade, is outrageous. Frances Kissling is an excommunicated Catholic by her own choices and actions.
Archbishop Chaput needs to check the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church who were virtually unanimous in their support for capital punishment.
The Catholic Church has always upheld the state's right to use the death penalty. In 1954, Pope Pius XII supported that right saying, “the effectiveness of vindictive penalties is in no way opposed to the function of punishment, which is the re-establishment and restoration of the order of justice.”
The fact that so many of our Church leaders are out there beating the drums for an end to capital punishment, which is given to very few hardened killers, when our nation has killed over 42 million babies through abortion, defies all logic. Never once have I heard a bishop come out and openly attack any pro-abortion Catholic by name! But to have an archbishop come out and compare Antonin Scalia to Frances Kissling makes my blood boil.
Archbishop Chaput, you owe Justice Scalia an apology!
MARY L. MYERS Mankato, Minnesota
The Church is a Wounded Healer
Many people, non-Catholics as well as Catholics, have reacted to the sex-abuse scandals with statements against the Church itself. One Catholic man who was interviewed said he would never participate in the sacrament of confession with a priest again. A women stated she just couldn't bring herself to attend church this Easter. Such attitudes and actions are not against the guilty priests or the bishops they serve under, but against the Church that Christ founded.
Jesus warned that weeds would be among the good fruits of his Church, the Body of which he is the Head. We are to leave the weeds, for final judgment is God's alone (Matthew 13). Jesus, who is fully man and fully God, selected imperfect men to be his Apostles. The first bishops of his one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church included Judas who betrayed him, Peter who denied him, and his Apostles who abandoned him. These sins of the first bishops of Christ's Church did not destroy it, for Christ promised that the gates of the netherworld would not prevail against his Church (Matthew 16).
I pray that Christians, especially Catholics, and people of all faiths do not use the sinful actions of some to try to tear down Christ's pilgrim Church on Earth. Such attempts by the media, people interviewed, even the victims of the sexual abuse, I believe, are immoral in the eyes of God. God knows the guilt of all those involved; he knows the suffering of all those involved. Only he can bring true healing and forgiveness if we seek his healing and forgiveness. Condemning or abandoning his Church will not bring about reconciliation. I pray that faith in God and the Church he established on Earth (although imperfect) will lead us all to the one, true, eternal, heavenly Church.
JOAN R. MORRIS Clarkesville, Georgia
No Compromise for Cardinal Law
I think it is good that Cardinal Bernard Law has decided not to resign. I say this because I believe him to be an orthodox prelate and I would not make that claim for every bishop in the American hierarchy. This does not mean that I support the way he has handled the sex-abuse crisis in his diocese. But I believe that he has handled this crisis no better or worse than any other bishop in the American Church. There appears to have been a sort of modus operandi in the way these cases were handled in the American Church.
With hindsight now, we can all look back and say that this was not the way to go since it involved the recycling of priestly abusers. But, in fairness, I do not believe that one Catholic bishop, in dealing with these cases, is guilty of any malfeasance. Each bishop who faced a sex-abuse claim had a very unpleasant task to deal with. A task which most of us, myself included, would not wish to deal with at all. These men had an impossible juggling act to accomplish — an alleged charge of sex abuse, a priest presumed to be innocent, the reputation of the Church, the Church's treasury, the salvation of souls.
Let us all, as Catholics, stop throwing rocks at the bishops for the manner, flawed as it was, in which these cases were handled. Let us move forward as a Church to reform the seminary system so that only orthodox, psychologically balanced and chaste young men can be accepted and trained as future priests. There can be no compromise on the necessity of absolute sexual abstinence for our priests. And only those who clearly have the charism of celibacy can be ordained as future priests. [Let there be] no compromise on the absolute necessity for our priests to be good and holy men, for they are a channel of God's grace.
PAUL A. TROUVE Montague, New Jersey
Praying for Priests
David Pearson's commentary on the present crisis in the Church was, indeed, most heartening and appreciated (“Pray for the Priesthood,” April 21-27). Loved the story of St. Francis kissing the hands of the sinner-priest because “those hands hold God.” Hopefully we all will do likewise by bringing all of our priests before Christ in prayer as he suggests — we need to allow God to work through the hands of our priests. The great miracle of transubstantiation, performed through the hands of our priests, allows the power and the grace of God to create the Eucharist for us. Yes! We need to pray for our priests — that they may be purified in body, mind, heart and soul through the water that flowed from the side of Christ at His crucifixion. Yes! I did pray for all of our priests today and will forevermore.
BOB BUNSA Basking Ridge, New Jersey
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Morass in the Middle East DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:The necessary condition for achieving peace in the Middle East is not exorcizing the demon of mutual hatred (“Driving Out a Demon,” editorial, April 14-20), but taking up Pope Paul VI's famous challenge: “If you want peace, work for justice.”
For a generation, the Palestinians have been under an occupation that has broken every relevant rule of international law, flouted dozens of United Nations condemnations, and been condemned by virtually the entire world community except Israel and the United States. It has involved denial of fundamental rights; dispossession in favor of fanatical Zionist “settlers” who generally settle on the ruins of bulldozed houses; and brutal reprisals, extra-judicial murders, torture, and other acts of state terror. Small wonder that the Palestinians hate Israel so much that they have taken up the weapon of the completely powerless, suicidal vengeance against innocent civilians. To expect the hatred to dissipate while the oppression continues — and, indeed, intensifies — is to render justice meaningless.
In Israel, the ruthlessness of a few and the fear of many have given birth to a determination to do anything that the United States and world opinion will let Israel get away with, in order to reduce the Palestinians to complete subjection and thereby spare Israel from reaping the whirlwind. Ariel Sharon has waited a long time for this opportunity — and, indeed, triggered it by his infamous provocation on the Temple Mount; and he is not letting it go to waste. In the early '80s, his barbarism in Lebanon made him a pariah; now still greater barbarism has made him Israel's undisputed master.
We should indeed be praying and fasting; but our intention should be the withdrawal of Israel and the working out of a just system of government for the Palestinians. That is, to be sure, a tall order; but the alternative is to let Israel, using American weapons and secure in American support, to continue its monstrous campaign to drown Palestinian hatred in blood.
JOHN A. MCFARLAND Ellicott City, Maryland
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Suddenly, We Have Nowhere To Look But Up DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Reading the newspapers these past few months — described by one bishop as this year's lenten penance — leaves me sad, anxious and angry.
I go through them each morning during the train ride to work in Manhattan. This is just before I go to a quiet downtown church to pray before the Blessed Sacrament.
Eucharistic adoration has never been harder, or more meaningful, than in these days of trial and scandal for Catholics and their priests. I pray constantly for the Church as I learn once more that there is nothing like suffering to bring a person to his knees, for showing a suffocating soul that prayer is its only true lung.
The drumbeat of news makes me want to act. Or, at least, to talk about the problems, assess the damage and come up with the reasons why we are in this mess. I am inclined to see prayer as futile or of benefit only to me, a daily pick-me-up at best.
But a truer understanding of the necessity of eucharistic prayer for Christian survival is found in this prophetic observation, written in 1867 by Redemptorist Father Michael Muller: “When the most holy sacrament of the altar is not revered and loved, scandals will abound, faith will languish, and the Church will mourn.
“On the other hand,” he wrote, “if this sacrament be worthily frequented, peace will reign in Christian hearts, the devil will lose power, and souls will be sanctified.”
We have forgotten these truths — at all levels of the Church and for a host of reasons, some misguided and some downright evil.
It's not so much that we have to start from scratch, but to understand that scratch is all we can ever produce. Prayer that comes from a spirit of total poverty, without any safety net, is sublime and attractive to God.
Because of its apparent limits, prayer can seem secondary at a time like this. While other solutions seem to make sense, legal and public relations strategies, “zero-tolerance” policies, and earnest reforms of one stripe or another cannot liberate and redeem our hearts. Only the cry of the spiritually poor can save us, individually and collectively.
I kneel before the Blessed Sacrament in that Manhattan church, St. Andrew's by name, and I begin, once more, to adore the Eucharist.
The visible evidence tells me that, here, I touch no one. I help no one. I am no one. I am tempted to think that what I do here has no impact on anything. My desire for good brings no visible change. The swirl of so many sad events goes on and on.
The experience takes place in solitude and is something that would generate neither hostility nor admiration from most of the people who will soon pass me by on Broadway.
But I am God's instrument in that church and this work is tremendously important, a fact that makes me shudder. It humbles me and amazes me. Though impoverished, this effort is also priestly because I approach the sanctuary and kneel in the place where intercession is made.
I pray for priests good and bad, for the faithful, for renewal, for the enemies of the Church. If only every Catholic knew that he shares the priesthood of Christ!
And I know that God delights in this, in seeing his Son loved and petitioned. I beg him to give thousands of people the grace to follow the saints who, with only these paltry means, have time and again convinced God to snatch the Church from the jaws of death.
The prayer from my hopeless lips and broken heart is without human support and the consequences cannot be verified or known, not even by the one who prays. They are ephemeral, a wisp in the wind. I am transformed — reformed — one day only to be confounded the next by an unexpected crisis, more bad news. Does my fractured prayer influence the world? I strive to go on as all seems lost and hopeless, a great waste.
Still, I cannot simply fold up the newspaper, do my 9-to-5, and climb back aboard the commuter train for the evening trip home. I resolve each day never to quit, never to rest on the sidelines.
Like a baby who can only reach for its mother's face, I grope in that church to clear my mind and make some kind of plea. Halting and distracted though I am, my suffering opens God's heart. It unleashes mercy. St. Faustina said that, from the tabernacle, “rays of mercy” go out to the whole world every time a person adores this sacrament. Prayer is made grand and wonderful — perfect, really — because it starts out so little, so uncertain, so tentative in my poor hands.
The baby does not know what a mother is or why this special person draws close. But the child still seeks to make contact, to draw even closer. By doing so, the infant experiences its utter helplessness, its total dependence on the loving parent who inspires love. Wordlessly, because he has no words, the child touches her. Though fleeting, that touch changes everything.
Joe Cullen, a former Register editor, writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: From Russia With Hope DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Register readers might remember me. I was a staff writer at the paper for a couple of years before leaving, last May, to get a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York.
Since January, I've been taking a course in religion reporting. Last month, the class took a study tour of Russia. What I saw there shattered just about every assumption I had about that nation and its religion.
I returned with a clear sense of why Pope John Paul II has found reconciling within the Orthodox church even more awkward, in many ways, than dealing with the communists ever was. But I also took back a sense of optimism. With Orthodox Easter upon us — May 5 — I thought I'd consider why.
To visit Russia is to see how exotic a place it really is. Cultural indicators like architecture, fashion, language, commerce, manners — all were in some way unlike anything I'd seen in Europe or America. Western styles seemed pinched and out of place. Gargantuan squares instead of piazzas. Wide streets instead of quaint alleyways. Vodka rather than wine. There was something more expansive, more risky about Moscow than the typical European city.
What is true of civic culture is even truer of religious culture. In Moscow, Catholic churches (there are only two in a city of 8 million; one, St. Louis, is tiny) stand out the way a Buddhist temple might in Pittsburgh. Before visiting Moscow, I thought Roman Catholic churches there would reflect something of the native religion. They don't.
Religious differences between Catholics and Orthodox go deeper than church design. Particularly pronounced is the contrast in liturgies. For the Orthodox, worship and belief are, in a certain sense, indistinguishable. The reason for this is simple. Unlike the Catholic faith, Orthodoxy has no magisterium, no binding teaching authority. Rather, for the Orthodox, faith is transmitted primarily through the practice of devotions and by participating in the Divine Liturgy. Russians prize their liturgy the way Catholics prize the Eucharist — or the deposit of faith itself.
The deep attachment of Russians to their liturgy can be seen in the common suspicion among them that when the Pope speaks of reconciliation, what he really means is reformation. This, despite his repeated insistence to the contrary. An incident in Kiev toward the end of our trip illustrated this double fear of the West, this fear, that is, of its culture and its religion.
‘Why can't Catholics and Orthodox just get together? What's the problem?’
Dubious Disputes
Our group had just finished a long day of visits to the important religious sites of Kiev with a trip to St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church. A tiny minority in Eastern Ukraine, Byzantine Catholics are identical to the Orthodox in worship, but faithful to Rome.
After visiting St. Nicholas for vespers, our guide, Andrei, a Moscow-based journalist and faithful Russian Orthodox, stopped us for an impromptu lecture. “I just want you to notice the differences between the Catholic liturgy and the Russian Orthodox liturgy,” he said. “Notice that the priest's cassock was slightly different from the cassocks we saw in Moscow. And the prayers — they were shorter.”
After more than a week of daily trips to Russian Orthodox churches, our group was familiar enough with the Orthodox liturgy to know that the differences our guide was pointing out were no greater than those among some of the Orthodox churches we had visited. Andrei's lecture betrayed his own fears.
I mention the lecture because it typified for me the atmosphere of mistrust and anxiety Russians have toward the West. I also mention it because I liked the man who gave it. After ten days of following Andrei through church after church, I had become frustrated with his subtle, yet insistent, comments about Catholics.
Here was this young father, a talented journalist who was struggling to live out his faith in a society that is becoming more brutally secular by the day. At every church we entered, he strode purposefully toward a prominent icon to venerate it. Afterward, he'd rejoin us to offer a journalist's take on religious affairs and a believer's view of the mysteries we would soon witness. I respected him and I admired him.
One day while we were in Moscow, I took him aside. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “Why can't we just get together? The Orthodox have so much more in common with Catholics than either of us do with Protestants. What's the problem?”
His answer was curt. “Well, if we were to sit at an ecumenical conference, sure, you and I would be at one side of the table and the Protestants would be at the other,” he said, without offering much by way of sympathy. I was annoyed. I wanted to tell him to let his guard down.
I didn't have to. A few days later, Andrei pulled me aside. “Brian,” he asked, “what do you think the Pope means when he talks about Fatima and Mary's promise that Russia will be converted? Does he mean to Catholicism?”
I told him No, I didn't think so. Catholics pray that Russia will convert to faith in Christ and his Church, not that they’ll install pews in their churches and whitewash the walls. He seemed relieved. From that point on, our conversations became friendlier, more relaxed.
Two Lungs, One Heart
The night before we left for good, several of us were asked at a farewell dinner to say a few words about how the trip had affected our faith. I spoke about how, as a Catholic, I had found myself praying, almost involuntarily, for unity between Catholics and Orthodox each time I entered an Orthodox church. I said the Pope's desire that the Church “breathe with both lungs” had become my own. As I spoke, Andrei nodded his head beside me.
The following morning, as I boarded the bus that would take me to the airport, Andrei grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me on both cheeks, back and forth three times. I was the only one who got the treatment. I was a little embarrassed.
But I was also encouraged. My initial confidence about Russia and its future had been effaced soon after arriving in Moscow. Now it was being restored, just as I was leaving. If this Russian Orthodox guy can soften to a Catholic, I thought, then maybe Patriarch Alexei can soften to the Pope.
This Pope can move mountains. I am confident that, eventually, his powerful prayer will draw East and West together. He has shown his willingness to give everything he has to honor the Lord's fervent prayer that “they all may be one” (John 17:20-23). All it would take is for Patriarch Alexei to look at us, as Andrei briefly looked at me, as brothers and sisters in Christ. And see that there's nothing to be afraid of.
Brian McGuire writes from New Yorrk.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Mcguire ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: 'Joined in Many Ways' DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:The Church knows that she is joined in many ways to the baptized who are honored by the name of Christian, but do not profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the successor of Peter.
Those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in a certain, although imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church.
With the Orthodox Churches, this communion is so profound that it lacks little to attain the fullness that would permit a common celebration of the Lord's Eucharist.
— Catechism, No. 838
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Catholics Lack X-Ray Vision in Cuba Hunger Strike DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Catholics like to have things in black and white.
It's fun to think that we can answer any question on faith or morals by reaching for the Bible, the Catechism or the Summa.
That's not always the case, as I found while considering the situation at Camp X-Ray in Cuba, where the U.S. military is holding prisoners from the war on terror. The ethical quandary is this: Was the United States justified in force-feeding hunger-strikers to prevent them from starving themselves to death?
The situation arose after camp authorities banned turbans for fear that they might conceal weapons. On Feb. 26, guards removed a turban from a praying prisoner. Other inmates, seeing this as a violation of religious freedom, began refusing food. Two prisoners continued the fast for 30 days. On March 31, these men were forcibly fed through a tube.
I contacted two experts on Catholic medical ethics. Both pointed out that a Catholic hospital would not forcibly feed an anorexic patient, so long as he could freely choose to refuse nourishment. Once the patient fell unconscious, a Catholic doctor might seek an injunction to force-feed.
I was unsatisfied. Wouldn't this create a never-ending cycle in which the patient would pass out, be revived through the stomach tube, then refuse food and collapse again? More to the point, why should the hospital, or the state, permit someone to commit suicide, which is a grave violation of the natural law?
Then someone at a party pointed out a more exact analogy: The Christian Scientist or Jehovah's Witness who declines life-saving medical treatment. I scurried to my books of medical ethics to see what the Church had to say.
Again, the presumption in Catholic ethics and in law favored the free choice of the patient to refuse treatment for reasons of conscience. The only exceptions were for minor and unborn children.
This has to do with the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life. Catholics are generally obliged to accept ordinary means of prolonging life, including nutrition and low-risk therapies. But they may avoid extraordinary means, such as experimental or painful treatments, if the inconvenience is out of proportion to the expected good result.
The Jesuit ethicist Thomas O'Don-nell, in Medicine and Christian Morality, argues that ordinary means, such as nutrition, become “subjectively extraordinary” if a patient has “a grave subjective abhor-rence” towards them. This would apply to the Jehovah's Witness who rejects a blood transfusion for religious reasons and, according to Catholic medical ethics, to the Muslim who refuses food in a religious protest.
In this case, however, circumstances keep us from seeing the hunger strike as a purely medical issue. O'Donnell affirms that “one must prevent evil insofar as one can reasonably do so.” Surely the action of force-feeding the prisoners not only prevented the evil of their deaths, but also worked against the great social evil of terrorism? Since suicide was the means al-Qaeda used to attack the United States, the prevention of suicide might interfere with the terrorists' strategy.
In my opinion, the unusual circumstances of the Camp X-Ray case downgrade the argument for free choice from a true to a doubtful proposition. In doubtful cases, my books tell me, another set of criteria kick in.
If a person is in doubt as to whether he may perform an action like force-feeding, then he ought not to act. First, he should test his judgment against three “reflex principles,” none of which are decisive here. If he is still doubtful, then he may resort to the fourth reflex principle, “probabilism.”
Here it is: One may take action in a doubtful situation as long as there is a solidly probable opinion in favor of acting. It doesn't matter if the arguments against acting are even more probable. One can act as long as there is a solidly probable way to justify the action.
Here, then, are my arguments in favor of force-feeding the Camp X-Ray hunger strikers.
E In a time of national emergency, the common good outweighs certain natural rights of the individual. Even a citizen may be imprisoned without the writ of habeas corpus in wartime.
E Prisoners forfeit some of the personal liberty that pertains to a patient in a hospital setting.
E Liberty is not license. For the French philosopher Montesquieu, liberty is “the power of doing what we ought to will.” Suicide falls outside the scope of ordered liberty.
Vatican II's “Declaration on Religious Liberty” states that “within due limits,” no man should be “forced to act against his convictions.” This holds true even for those whose consciences are in error, as long as “the just requirements of public order are observed.”
Concern for the common good, the “general welfare” mentioned in our Constitution, sets “due limits” to religious freedom in the case of the Muslim prisoners. After all, a Jehovah's Witness may refuse a blood transfusion for himself, but not necessarily for his minor child. The principle here is that liberty of conscience obtains as long as no one else is unwillingly injured. Many people may become unwilling victims of terrorism if the United States permits prisoners to employ the suicide tactic.
Pro-lifers, having experienced government repression, are understandably reluctant to let the state interfere in matters of conscience. However, we need the state to uphold natural law and the common good when they are attacked. Martin van Creveld argues in The Rise and Decline of the State that, in today's world, national states are losing power to multinational organizations. At times we must uphold governmental power, especially since every law that is in keeping with natural law binds on pain of sin.
The Guantanamo Bay hunger strike, with its maddening complexity, poses a challenge to Catholic moral decision-making. As in many other situations, even Catholics do not have X-ray ethical vision. Sometimes we find ourselves in a gray area. Then we must use our right reason and strive to inform our consciences in truth, while praying — and trusting — that God's will be done.
Scott McDermott writes from Nashville, Tennessee.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Scott McDermott ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Mothers and Memorials
May is the month we honor mothers (on Mother's Day, May 12) — and the mother, Mary. Make sure you remind the children that her day is coming up … and plan something appropriate for her.
You may want to organize a huge May crowning that draws your whole neighborhood together … or you may just want to do something small in your own home.
Here's one thing you can try: Pick a favorite image of Mary, either in your house or in your yard, and put together a little ceremony. Teach the children the words to your favorite Marian hymn. Talk about Mary and what her virtues were. Have each child write down one thing he or she plans to do in the month of May that will imitate one of Mary's virtues. The child can even include the resolution in a “letter to Mary,“ sealed in an envelope.
Put older children in charge of helping the younger children, or in charge of decorations —but don't let them off the hook with the May resolution! Then, on a day in May — perhaps even Mother's Day, May 20 — the whole family can sing the song as each child places a flower and his resolution in front of the image of Mary. Afterwards, serve the family's favorite treat.
During the month of May, remember to pray the rosary. The Pope asked for daily rosaries to end terrorism and war. To those intentions we could add “and for the Church in the United States.”
On Ascension Thursday, May 9, remember to start your Pentecost Sunday Novena (especially if it's Ascension Sunday, May 12, in your diocese). We add novena prayers on at the end of our rosary. There are many such novena prayers available. My husband likes the one by Edith Stein (St. Sister Benedicta of the Cross) available at www.praiseofglory.com. One thing to do during the Pentecost novena: Go fly a kite! Read about the Holy Spirit when you do — how he is like the wind, and appeared in tongues of flame like a big kite.
It might be fun on Pope John Paul II's birthday, May 18, to plan ahead and send birthday cards to the Pope. Or there are several children's book you might want to get for your kids. Our kids like Karol From Poland: The Life Of Pope John Paul II for Children by M. Leonora Wison, FSP, and the new comic book “Karol Wojtyla: Pope of the Third Millennium” available at www.stpauls.org.uk/bookshop. Cream puffs are a childhood favorite of the Pope's. Why not start out the day celebrating his birthday by buying some special treats at the bakery? Then you can read up about his life while you eat them.
Memorial Day, May 27, will be filled with significance this year because of Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan. One Web site about Memorial Day reprints an e-mail from a woman who described her Memorial Day plans this way:
“I am going to buy some carnations each day and go to one of the nearby cemeteries and walk through the sections for soldiers. When I find a grave that has no flowers, I'll leave one and say a prayer for the family of that person, who for some reason could not bring their soldier flowers. I will pray for our country and all who serve or have served. For their families, who also serve by losing precious days, weeks and months spent with their loved ones who are off serving, preserving peace and the freedom we have in this country. . I'll pray for the families who paid the ultimate price, who's loved ones died, or were taken captive and never returned. I'll pray for anyone who may still be held in captivity and thinks perhaps they are forgotten. I do not forget.”
April Hoopes writes from Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: April Hoopes ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Most Hospitable Church in the Hub? DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:One misty Massachusetts morning, while strolling not a half-mile from Boston Common, the oldest public park in the country, I found beautiful Our Lady of Victories Church.
It's tucked into Isabella Street, a block-long haven of calm between two busy thoroughfares — and quickly found out why Our Lady of Victories calls itself “the friendliest church in Boston.” It happens to be among the most historic and beautiful ones, too.
I couldn't help but think that it's also dedicated to the Blessed Mother under a TITLE the Boston faithful — no, all of us — need to invoke often these days.
The longtime pastor, Marist Father Richard LaPlante, greeted me with the kind of amiable welcome you'd think would be reserved for a VIP. Together with the humble, yet stately, appearance of the church, the warm hospitality must be a chief reason why a number of couples from outside the city opt to have their weddings here.
Our Lady of Victories attracts its share of out-of-towners, too. With nine major hotels in this busy Back Bay section of the city, it's a first choice, come Sunday morning, for many Catholics visiting from other parts of the country. Add in the many Catholics who commute to the city from the suburbs each day for work, stopping in for daily Mass or to pray during lunch hour, and it's one popular place.
Life wasn't like this for Our Lady of Victories when the present structure was completed in 1891. Eleven years earlier, Father Leon Bouland, the city's first monsignor, had founded it as Boston's first French national parish. But, by 1883, the priests and brothers of the Order of Mary, better known as the Marists, were appointed to take over the parish. The Marists are in their 119th year here now.
In those first years, the church served thousands of French Canadians pouring into the greater Boston area. In 1906, one of the priests estimated his confreres heard more than 70,000 confessions that year alone. Later on, Father Hernin Perennes, pastor from 1932-43, regularly spent six to eight hours a day in the confessional and continued doing so long after his retirement — indeed, all the way up until his death in 1960. No wonder he was called “The Cure of Ars of Isabella Street.”
A French Connection
The sacraments were going strong, but the full French identity started to dissipate around the turn of the century, as more French parishes popped up in outlying suburbs and the cascade of Canadians emigrating to the area slowed to a trickle after 1900. In the 1930s, when the Back Bay began sprouting posh hotels, theaters and offices, Our Lady of Victories started a major swing. It gracefully arced from being primarily a parish church to taking on more the identity of an urban shrine church.
All the while, even until today, the church is still technically a French national parish and sometimes referred to as “The French Church.” Then, too, there's the fact that its very name represents a connection to the church that inspired its construction: the famous 17th-century Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris.
Mary is honored under this TITLE in not one, not two, but three major representations in the inspiring Neo-Gothic interior. Life-sized images of Our Lady of Victories fill major side altars both in the main upper church and in the large lower church. The third striking representation of Our Lady of Victories appears in a riveting stained-glass win window in the apse high above the main altar.
What makes the window especially stunning are its blends of colors and the huge sanctuary arch that frames the window and telescopes our sight toward Mary and Jesus. The Gothic steeple on top of the centered tabernacle seems to point to the window, too.
The lovely shades of blues and rosy pinks for Mary's dress also tint much of the window, even the clouds. The tones have a calming, maternal effect. Mary is there in triumph for us, showing us that we will be victorious if we look to her and Jesus. Son and mother wear royal crowns, and the Child Jesus stands on a globe that's gently held aloft by billowy clouds. Mary holds Jesus, who extends his arms to us.
How lovely and colorful is the same image of Our Lady of Victories as a statue enshrined within the large left altar. The cloud-supported globe that Jesus stands on is encrusted with gold stars. Both he and Mary, wearing royal crowns, look unmistakably regal — yet they remain welcoming and approachable. The same holds true for the similar life-sized image enshrined in the brilliant gold mosaic altar niche in the lower church.
Upstairs, the main church is bright with renovations, recent and not-sorecent, that have preserved and even enhanced the sanctuary's historic character and liturgical artistry.
The focal point is the white Carrarra marble main altar, beautifully carved with three church-like structures complete with their own tall Gothic steeples. The highest, on the center “church,” graces the tabernacle.
Eloquent Elevation
So much beauty lifts the mind and heart to higher realms. Cherubim and seraphim abound. Huge angels, hands folded in reverential prayer, stand over the Corinthian columns between the Gothic arches that march down the sides of the nave. These angels “flew in” during the early 1920s.
Two enormous angels in relief along the sanctuary arch joined them. So did many cherubs that appear above the wide, intricate entablature that lines the perimeter of the walls just under the clerestory. These smaller angel figures, hovering over petite windows that appear in trios in the arches decorating the clerestory, pair up to display medallions with crosses.
Around the nave, the stained-glass windows filled with the most intricate of details looked to me like the splendid artistry of the German-Bavarian studios of the early 20th century. They're paired as Gothic arches within arches. As is fitting and natural in this church dedicated to Our Lady, several windows depict scenes from the Blessed Mother's life. Mary's betrothal to Joseph is here, as are the Annunciation and the wedding at Cana.
Some of the pairings prompt unexpected meditations. For example, the deaths of Jesus and Joseph appear sideby- side. I couldn't help but think about the picture of the Holy Family in which an angel seems to help young Jesus, who's working on wood shaped like a cross. Subtly as well as explicitly as in Mary's statue, I saw eternal victories ever before us.
In both the upper and the lower church, I noted the large-scale, highly detailed wall-relief shrines of Mary's apparition at Lourdes. The main Cassavant organ is among the finest of such instruments to be found anywhere. Meanwhile, in the lower church, with marble altar and full Communion railing, there stands a replica of the Vatican's statue of St. Peter, a gift from Pope Leo XIII in 1881.
Here, and throughout this lovely church, a spirit of friendliness abounds.
When the Holy Name Societies from around the country held their national meeting here this year, they got a friendly welcome. Nearly 500 homeless whom the church cooks for and feeds at Boston's Long Island Shelter surely appreciate the friendly outreach. The many listeners of the Father LaPlante Radio Program, aired every Saturday for 20 years now, get spirituality with affability. And the countless itinerant mariners the pastor also cares for in his role of Boston Catholic seaport chaplain since 1991 find victorious friendliness at every docking.
Like them, I was grateful for the chance to see why Our Lady of Victories calls itself “the friendliest church in Boston.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Our Lady of Victories, Boston ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Sculpted Sanctity DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:If you visit the Knights of Columbus Museum in New Haven, Conn., this spring or summer, prepare to be comforted, surprised and challenged.
And that's just when you first walk in.
In the museum's featured exhibit gallery a beautiful bronze sculpture of Mother Teresa, looking you in the eye with great love, steps toward you. The saintly nun carries a dying child in her arms; at her feet, a second suffering child implores her help. The work captures her features and radiates her compassion enough to stop you in your tracks.
This powerful sculpture is part of a show TITLEd “Gismondi: A Journey Through the Art and Faith of a Remarkable Italian Sculptor.” This exhibit, which runs through Sept. 2, marks the only U.S. presentation of the works of Italian master Tomasso Gismondi.
“We've brought his museum in Anagni (Italy) to New Haven for the people in the United States to see,” explains Larry Sowinski, director of the Knights' museum. “These are the artist's favorite pieces.”
Among the most striking are a marble Resurrected Christ and a series of bronze bas-relief Madonnas. The latter radiate the love of mother for child that Gismondi, now 96 years old, has favored as a major theme throughout his long career.
The sculptor has always insisted that art must be “clear, intelligible and real.” His vision, carried out over a 70-year career, has attracted hundreds of commissions for statues, reliefs, portals, medallions and coins. His patrons have included the Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica, the town of Assisi and Lanciano's eucharistic-miracle sanctuary.
Gismondi, I learned on my tour of the impressive show, crafts beautiful, evocative images that tell striking stories of the Catholic faith. This show presents 48 of these stories.
Divinity on Display
In one bronze bas-relief, Gismondi interprets the centuries-old icon of the Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland's most sacred image. While Gismondi sculpted his original for Pope John Paul II, on display here is the artist's one and only duplicate, which differs from the original merely in its patina. In 1986, the Holy Father showed his high regard for Gismondi by paying a visit to the sculptor's museum-studio south of Rome.
The sculptor's third favorite theme is nature. Even in exploring this theme, he often brings in the sacred, at least indirectly. He concentrated on sculpting horses because he considers their proportions, graceful movements and vitality as God's perfect creation. This exhibit's quartet of large bronze horses, the Quadriga, rear up as though about to gallop off their display.
Gismondi's art is also serene. The show's studies of the Madonna and Child and interpretations of the Annunciation give off a peaceful glow. But even they aren't motionless. They embody the gentlest movement, as if the breath of the Holy Spirit is whispering their details and emotions to us.
In one, the artist captures the warmth of Mary's motherly affection in bronze relief as she tenderly kisses the tiny hand of baby Jesus.
Jesus' Crucifixion and Resurrection accounts for one-fourth of this exhibit. No one walks away unmoved by the nearly life-sized figure of the Savior on one wall. Jesus' crucified body is without the cross, yet we can't help but feel his pain and the weight of his body pulling against the nails as he looks up to heaven.
This show gives us a rare opportunity. We can examine Gismondi's small study model for the monumental Carolingian cross he completed for the Chapel of the Three Saints (Benedict, Cyril, and Methodius) under St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Then we can see his changes in the enormous “original” just five minutes from the museum in St. Mary's Church in New Haven — Gismondi actually made two exactly alike.
This second six-foot, 400-pound Carolingian cross, modeled after the one Charlemagne donated to the Vatican, is suspended above the altar in St. Mary's, where the Knights of Columbus was founded in 1882.
Speaking of Columbus, we can marvel at what should have been a modern-day colossus. In the Christopher Columbus Model, a 52-inch high bronze, Columbus stands atop a half globe. It was Gismondi's dream for Europe's own 250-foot tall “Statue of Liberty” in Genoa for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World. But the Italian government, under pressure by various political interests, decided to put the kibosh on any such monument.
In “Gismondi: A Journey Through the Art and Faith of a Remarkable Italian Sculptor,” the artist gets his due — and we're all the richer for it.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: 'Gismondi' celebrates a contemporary Catholic master ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:The Face: Jesus in Art (2001)
The Christian message has been spread throughout history by painters and sculptors who link beauty to truth. The Face: Jesus in Art, a two-hour PBS documentary, reverently examines the different ways Jesus Christ has been represented in art from the early third century until today. Director Craig MacGowan and writers James Clifton and Charles Oliver Cooper give a global scope to their subject, taking us from ancient Rome and the Sinai desert to medieval Europe, Japan and elsewhere. They use the latest digital and motion-control technology to capture the varied images of Our Lord.
We view Michelangelo's Pieta and the treasures of Chartres Cathedral and hear the stories behind the Byzantine icons of St. Catherine's monastery and the Mandylion of Edessa. The film shows us pilgrims climbing the stairs of St. John of Lateran to worship Jesus and then takes us deep into the catacombs beneath Rome. The informative commentary is narrated by Mel Gibson, Ricardo Montalban, Edward Herrman, Patricia Neal, Juliet Mills and others.
Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella (1965)
“Impossible things are happening every day,” the fairy godmother (Celeste Holm) declares. Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella, first shown as a TV special, captures the spirit of her words with sweetness and charm. The handsome Prince (Stuart Damon) wants to marry for love, but the King (Walter Pidgeon) and Queen (Ginger Rogers) care only about producing a suitable heir. The good-hearted Cinderella is cruelly mistreated by her stepmother (Jo Van Fleet) and stepsisters (Pat Carroll and Barbara Ruick). But her innocence and kindness shine forth when she offers a drink of water to the tired and thirsty Prince without knowing his true identity.
When the royal family throws a ball to introduce the prince to the most eligible maidens in the land, poor Cinderella is, of course, excluded until the fairy godmother waves her magic wand. The sets and special effects may at times seem lowbudget and corny by today's standards. But the wonderful score, which includes “Impossible” and “Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?” still casts its spell.
The Flying Tigers (1942)
It seems likely that future generations will get their history form Hollywood. If so, they may conclude that John Wayne won World War II. The Flying Tigers, the Duke's first war movie, sets the pattern for the films that followed. It's a fictionalized account of the American Volunteer Group which flew against the Japanese for Chiang Kai-Shek's China under the command of Gen. Claire Chennault before Pearl Harbor. Squadron leader Jim Gordon (Wayne) is a true-blue hero — two-fisted but fair. Each pilot receives $500 for every Japanese plane shot down. Gordon's second-in-command, the experienced Hap Davis (Paul Kelly), has failing eyesight. The new recruit, the wise-cracking Woody Jason (John Carroll), is a lone ranger who cuts in on the kills of his fellow pilots to grab the reward. Gordon pulls everything together to make the enemy suffer, grounding Jason until he gets his head right. Director David Miller mixes the personal conflicts with well-staged aerial combat footage. The American pilots come off as mercenary and patriotic, carefree and brave.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, MAY 5
Homes of the Gold Rush
Home & Garden TV, 5 p.m.
This one-hour special tours seven homes of successful Forty-Niners, prospectors who struck it rich in the California Gold Rush of 1849. Some of the houses are back east, built by miners who saved up their earnings and then went home.
SUNDAY, MAY 5
NBC's 75th Anniversary Special
NBC, 8 p.m.
In this three-hour black tie event from NBC's Studio 8-H in New York City, the “peacock network” will salute its favorite shows, reunite stars and present dignitaries. Advisory: Any broad survey such as this might include non-edifying moments.
MONDAY, MAY 6
The Honeymooners 50th Anniversary Celebration
CBS, 10 p.m.
The beloved stars Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows have gone to their eternal reward, but their early TV sitcom characters, portly New York City bus driver Ralph Kramden and his wife Alice, live on in specials like this one. CBS says it will show never-beforeseen footage, as well as digitally re-mastered clips from episodes never re-shown after their original air dates in the 1950s. Also promised: Film of Audrey Meadows’ first appearance as Alice, in 1952, and commentary by co-stars Art Carney and Joyce Randolph, who played the Kramdens’ best friends, Ed and Trixie Norton.
TUESDAY, MAY 7
Favorite Stars Then and Now: An E! Entertainment Television Special
ABC, 9 p.m.
This “scrapbook on video” will bring back lots of TV memories.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 8
The Police Car
History Channel, 7 a.m.
Little children love to play with toy police cars — but grownups, too, are fascinated with the real vehicles and their design, equipment and lore.
THURSDAY, MAY 9
Life on the Rock
EWTN, 8 p.m.
Jeff Cavins hosts Mary Beth Bonacci of Real Love Productions. A popular columnist, speaker, author and producer of videos, she is an effective promoter of chastity and the right to life. To be rebroadcast Friday at 10 p.m., Saturday at 1 a.m. and Sunday at 11 p.m.
FRIDAY, MAY 10
Great Lakes:
Secret Playground of the USA
Travel, 8 p.m.
Explore some of the world's greatest natural wonders and discover their rich recreational and vacation opportunities.
SATURDAY, MAY 11
Fatima: Altars of the World
EWTN, 8 p.m.
This new hour-long documentary tells the history of Our Lady of Fatima and explains the Blessed Virgin's message of conversion, repentance, reparation and prayer. To be rebroadcast Tuesday at 3 a.m., Wednesday at 11 a.m. and Thursday at 1 p.m.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: 'Notre Damers' Consider Taking a Vocation DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:When most people hear the word “vocation,” they think of a calling to the priesthood or religious life. But a new program at the University of Notre Dame promotes a broader interpretation of the term.
According to Steve Camilleri, director of the Notre Dame Vocation Initiative, everyone has a vocation to respond to God's call through our life's work and our state of life, whether it is religious life, single life or marriage.
The initiative was born just over a year ago with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. The goal of the program is to assist young people in determining what God is calling them to do and how they can make God's presence visible in the world through this call.
Camilleri told Today's Catholic, newspaper of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, that Notre Dame and several other universities were approached by the Lilly Endowment in 1999 and asked to submit a proposal for a program to explore all the theological ramifications of what vocation means.
“It's a hot topic, something parishes, youth ministers, bishops are talking about,” Camilleri said.
Notre Dame was one of 37 schools given a seed grant of $50,000 from Lilly to develop the proposal. The Notre Dame proposal was accepted, and on Dec. 1, 2000, Notre Dame received a five-year, $2 million grant from Lilly to put its program into operation.
Two more rounds of Lilly grants have provided various levels of funding for similar individualized vocations programs at more than 60 other colleges and universities.
After a year of planning, the three components of the Notre Dame program are getting underway this spring and summer and involving young people from high school age into their 30s.
The first component, TITLEd Vocare (the Latin word for “to call”), is geared to young graduates of Notre Dame across the country. It consists of a weekend retreat followed up with a day of study and reflection and ongoing small-group meetings and discussions.
The first Vocare retreat took place in Chicago in late March and drew 30 young alumni. Other retreats are to take place in Atlanta; Boston; Columbus, Ohio; Denver; Indianapolis; Los Angeles; New York; Portland, Ore.; Minneapolis-St. Paul; San Francisco; Washington; and South Bend. Plans are to expand Vocare to 10 more cities in the fall.
The Vocare retreats are facilitated by young alumni themselves — two in each city — who were trained at Notre Dame last December. A Holy Cross priest is chaplain for each retreat.
The format consists of a Vocare video, talks by the facilitators and the chaplain, and group discussion. A follow-up day of reflection will tie together the groups in the various cities through a satellite link-up.
The Vocare groups then are encouraged to meet occasionally in their respective cities to continue the discussion, to encourage one another and to invite other interested young people to join them.
“I hope this enables them to get in touch with what it is they are called to do with the gift of their life,” said Sheila Provencher, assistant director of the initiative.
The second component of the initiative is Calling and Ministry Programs for Undergraduate Student Leaders. Through this component, Camilleri said, “We hope the word ‘vocation’ becomes a cultural currency on campus.”
This component includes:
E Fellowships that support faculty in researching and developing new courses or course modules related to vocations. Currently, some of the professors in theology, business and fine arts are adding this dimension to their curricula.
E Summer vocation internships for undergraduates to do volunteer work in their potential fields while engaging in theological study and reflection.
E Grants for undergraduate and graduate students to work with a faculty mentor on research or field work on vocation-related topics.
E Residence hall programs in which faculty and young professionals discuss vocation and Christian discipleship.
The third component of the initiative is ND Vision, a summer program on the Notre Dame campus to help high school students discover God's call to them. In each of four one-week sessions, national speakers, bishops and Notre Dame faculty and students will talk with the students about Christian vocation, prayer, Scripture and social justice.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ann Carey ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Ecumenism by Civil Debate DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:CHALLENGING CATHOLICS: A CATHOLIC-EVANGELICAL DIALOGUE
by Dwight Longenecker & John Martin Paternoster Press, 2001 205 pages, $19.95
To order: (+44) (0) 1228 611746 or www.paternoster-publishing.com
When I sat down with this volume, I was expecting the classic Catholic vs. evangelical Protestant debate — a befuddling game of “My Scripture verse can beat your Scripture verse.”
The conventional choice of subjects, laid out in the table of contents, seemed to confirm my expectations: apostolic authority, the Real Presence, salvation, last things, the saints, the Reformation and, of course, Mary. To my surprise and delight, I quickly caught on that this dialogue is anything but dry. In fact, the words “refreshing” and “entertaining” came quickly to mind.
The book's appeal has everything to do with the personality of each of the “contestants” — and the fact that the chapters are transcripts of lively, spoken conversations. The authors, John Martin and Dwight Longenecker, both come from non-Catholic backgrounds. Longenecker is a convert to the Catholic faith and Martin is an active member of the Anglican communion.
Thomas Aquinas College
As I made my way through their debate, one thing that repeatedly surprised me was the vast common ground the two share on many doctrinal issues. I often wondered if I might be mistaking which one was the Catholic.
For example, Martin opens the chapter headed “Bible Only” with a quote from John Calvin, affirming that the Bible is clear enough on its own account to be understood by all. Yet he clarifies this later, saying, “I may of course, resort to reason, tradition and experience to assist me in the task [of interpretation].” Longenecker replies, “I like the quote from Calvin. There's nothing there the Catholic Church would disagree with. From the beginning the Catholic Church has venerated the Bible as the supernatural word of God.”
This is typical of Longenecker's approach throughout. He consistently affirms Martin's faith, and uses it to develop Catholic thought and doctrine. Martin's statements are often startling, but they rarely seem to throw Longenecker off his stride.
“When it comes to the question of the canon,” Martin says, “you've put your finger on a weakness in the armoury of many Protestants. Frankly, very few have thought deeply about it. … [W]hile many of us claim to be Bible people with a high doctrine of Scripture, our standards of exegesis and interpretation don't match our claims. One of the blights of the Protestant churches is the tendency to be lazy or even downright sloppy in the way they handle Scripture.”
This kind of self-disclosure prompts you to wonder if Martin is actually a Catholic dressed up like a Protestant for the sake of a good show. But, just when you think the Church has won a new convert, he tenaciously returns to his primary defense: He wants the absolute assurance of salvation.
“There must be a way on this side of the grave for me to know that I belong to Christ,” he says at one point.
In response, Longenecker invites Martin not to change his point of view, but to add to it. “The Catholic Church teaches that we should have every confidence and hope of our salvation,” explains Longenecker, “but that God alone is the judge. Like you, we believe that because of our baptism and faith we are part of the body of Christ, but that we need to persevere to the end to be saved.”
Turning the pages, I hoped that the end of the book would resound with Martin's final fiat to the Catholic Church. But this book surely reflects one reality of ecumenism: Dialogue and disclosure don't necessarily result in an individual's instant conversion to the fullness of truth. Meaningful and worthwhile discussions, however, can — and must — be had. Challenging Catholics can show you how to have them.
Caroline Schermerhorn is on the editorial staff of Envoy Magazine.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Caroline Schermerhorn ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:‘Not CNN's Day’
THE HEIGHTS, April 21 — In a reflection on Boston Cardinal Bernard Law's decision not to attend this spring's commencement exercises at Boston College, the editor in chief of the campus's student newspaper said the graduates “don't deserve [the media] turning the campus into a zoo. It should be the seniors' day, not CNN's day.” Lawrence Griffin, a Catholic, said that most students have not spoken out about the controversy involving sex abuse by priests but have dealt with it “individually, quietly reflecting.”
Wither Latin?
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, April 23 — The beleaguered Philadelphia public-school system plans to eliminate one of its more successful and emulated programs — Latin instruction for elementary students, reports the Philadelphia daily. Copied by schools in the United States and abroad, the highly regarded Latin program teaches Latin vocabulary to help students learn the roots of many English words. “It has been proven through a lot of research that this helps students do much better on standardized verbal tests,” said J. Patricio Concha, the program's administrator.
Poetry in Motion
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, April 19 — David Ebenbach, an adjunct psychology professor at the Christian Brothers' La Salle University dubbed himself the “Philadelphia Poetry Provider” last year and since then has been tucking original, one-page poems into the odd nooks and crannies of the metropolis.
He sticks them on the wind-shields of cars, in newspapers at newsstands, in books at bookstores, and on cereal boxes in grocery stores. The former creative-writing instructor, 29, chiefly pens free verse on workaday themes without political or social agenda.
First Class
AVE MARIA COLLEGE, May 3 — The college in Ypsilanti, Mich., founded by philanthropist Tom Monaghan in 1998 will graduate its first class on May 3. According to a college announcement, the class of six includes three men, all of whom have announced that they will enter seminaries in the fall, and three women. Honorary degrees are scheduled to be conferred upon Father Michael Scanlon, chancellor of Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and Mother Angelica, founder of EWTN, the Catholic cable TV network.
Hispanic Religion
NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY, April 16 — The university announced a $1 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts for a two-year study of how religious institutions strengthen Hispanic communities. The Hispanic Church Research Initiative will be administered through Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies. It will include development of a Hispanic Church Community Impact Study, publication of research on Latino church ministry, and conferences of scholars and religious leaders.
New Programs
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION — Benedictine University, in Lisle, Ill., will offer a certificate in administration of health care institutions beginning in the fall. The Sisters of St. Joseph's Nazareth College of Rochester, N.Y., will offer a master's degree in liberal studies beginning in the fall. Ursuline College, in Cleveland, administered by the sisters of the Order of St. Ursula, will offer a bachelor's degree in biotechnology beginning in the fall.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:The Risks of Co-Signing
Q My son is planning on buying his first car, and the finance company has told him that, due to his lack of credit, he will need to have a co-signer. While my husband and I would like to help, we are concerned as to whether co-signing would be wise. What do you think?
A In reaching an answer, you'll want to consider the following issues. I would encourage you and your husband to discuss these together before sharing your decision with your son.
• When co-signing, it is as though you are taking on the debt yourself. Are you prepared to accept this obligation?
• Is the dollar amount of your financial commitment fixed?
• Has your son shown himself to be sufficiently mature to handle the responsibility of a car loan?
The Book of Proverbs provides great insight into the issue of surety and co-signing. Let's look at two references, which provide food for thought:
Proverbs 6:1-5: “My son, if you have become surety to your neighbor, given your hand in pledge to another, you have been snared by the utterance of your lips, caught by the words of your mouth; So do this, my son, to free yourself, since you have fallen into your neighbor's power: Go, hurry, stir up your neighbor! Give no sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids; Free yourself as a gazelle from the snare, or as a bird from the hand of the fowler.”
Proverbs 22:26-27; “Be not one of those who give their hand in pledge, of those who become surety for debts; For if you have not the means to pay, your bed will be taken from under you.”
These verses get right to the point of what your primary consideration should be. When someone co-signs on a loan, they are accepting responsibility on that debt just as though they had taken out the loan themselves. The debt will be listed on your credit report, and in the event your son was to be late with his payments, that information would be listed on your report as well. Finally, if your son fails to meet his obligation, the finance company will come to you for payment, and you will be responsible for meeting that obligation.
While the dollar amount in your situation is fixed, there are cases where you may be taking on a greater obligation than you think. For example, if a college student were to ask his parents to co-sign on a credit card, the bank could increase the credit limit without notice to the co-signer. That could be a recipe for disaster.
Finally, you know your son. Has he managed his finances (checkbook, etc.) well? If so, you may have a greater level of confidence that he will properly handle the obligation. While this allows him to build a positive credit record, you still need to be prepared to take over the debt obligation if he, for whatever reason, fails to make the payments. God love you!
Phil Lenahan is executive director of Catholic Answers.
Reach Family Matters at: FamilyMatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Fact of Life DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:AMERICAN s OPPOSE CLONING
In a survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, Americans overwhelmingly oppose the cloning of human beings. The survey also showed that, of those who object to human cloning, 72% do so because they feel that it is morally wrong.
Do you favor or oppose scientific experimentation on the cloning of human beings?
Oppose
77%
Favor
17%
Source: ScottPolls.com, March 2002.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Gearing Up for Vacation Bible School? DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Catholics are just beginning to realize that there is something strangely “un-Catholic” about many Vacation Bible School (VBS) programs. It should not be surprising. Only in this generation have Catholic parishes joined in the summertime VBS phenomenon.
What is surprising is that some Catholic parishes continue to use VBS programs whose teachings are not in agreement with the Church.
The primary purpose of Vacation Bible School publishers is to provide an out-reach tool during the summertime to share the Gospel with children. However, a non-Catholic gospel may not be faithful to the authentic truth of Christ. A non-Catholic gospel is often a bare-bones introduction to knowing Our Lord. A Catholic VBS program, conversely, is an opportunity to introduce families to a lifelong pursuit of holiness.
A few programs purport to be Catholic (or to offer a Catholic version), but they fall short of handing on our rich heritage of sacred Tradition along with sacred Scripture. A cursory overview reveals such programs to be the original non-Catholic teaching material, with some bullet point material from the Catholic Catechism.
While the materials used are often not wrong in a doctrinal sense, they can be incomplete.
Many “Catholic” programs are anything but, says Michael Barone, coordinator of religious education for St. Francis de Sales Church in Newark, Ohio. “It's as if these programs are primarily produced with the fun, campy stuff in mind — the religious values are secondary. They'll use a few references to the Catechism to stitch it up, and introduce it as a ‘Catholic’ product.”
Barone adds that our children's daily lives demand deeper religious training: “We expect a child to know about AIDS, drugs and sex education,” he says. “Then we think they can't handle the fact that we talk to Mary as Our Mother. Our children learn about condoms at an early age — and we neglect to tell them of the saving protection of the brown scapular. They are taught about the negative influences of secondhand smoke, and yet we don't think they can grasp the fact that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ. Believe me, kids in our culture are ready for something more. They need something more,” says Barone.
It's not like there aren't more complete programs out there. For example, Our Lady of the Rosary, a Catholic home school organization based in Bardstown, Ky., has two programs, “Joys of Jesus” and “Magnificence of Mary,” that are Catholic from stem to stern. And Traditions Of Roman Catholic Homes, an association of lay Catholic home schoolers popularly known by its catchy acronym, TORCH, also produces a VBS kit. The $5.95 kit contains lesson plans, plays, song suggestions and organizational tips.
Perhaps one reason for the lack of publicity around these two good programs is their lack of flash. Because they don't have the slick packaging of many evangelical Protestant VBS programs, the perception can be that they do not fill in all the gaps.
My faith was ignited through a truly Catholic vacation-Bible program pulled together by a group of Catholic moms'
Also, programs that do not come ready-to-roll-out right out of the box can seem intimidating to VBS teachers. Many prefer fun to substance because they may not feel competent to be handing on truths that they do not really know themselves. This underscores the importance of authenticity. Michelle Mazelin of Oviedo, Fla., says her first real experience with the Catholic faith was at an authentically Catholic vacation-Bible school. “My faith was ignited through a truly Catholic vacation-Bible program pulled together by a group of Catholic moms,” she says. “It wasn't until I signed up as a group leader for this program that I began to learn about the truths of my faith.” Her eyes were opened, she adds, as she attended VBS classes each day and heard teachings on the Eucharist and the saints.
A little Catholic guidance can go a long way toward providing a solid solution. Faithful, concerned, well-versed Catholic parents need to volunteer for program selection committees. The following tips can help you with a program that has already been purchased:
E Put well-formed, knowledgeable Catholics in teaching roles. Teachers should have an excellent grasp of Catholic teaching, especially regarding the various myths that surround the Catholic Church. A good teacher can use VBS to bridge the CCD gap for Catholic youngsters; they may also have opportunities to correct misunderstandings non-Catholic children bring with them.
E With the help of a well-formed priest or director of religious education, find ways to bring the sacraments into the lessons. Lessons on forgiveness should encourage children to receive the sacrament of reconciliation. Lessons about a meal with Jesus are natural segues into the Eucharist. References to water often lead to the significance of the sacrament of baptism.
E Look carefully at the words of the music in the program. Often, you can simply alter a word to correct the meaning of a song. If the only option seems to be to remove the song from the program, look through the missal for popular songs that might appeal to children.
E When choosing crafts, look to sacred Tradition for inspiration. Rosaries, scapulars, holy cards and other distinctly Catholic items have natural kid appeal. Pope John Paul II has referred to our homes as the “domestic church.” A decorated holy water bottle or font, personally decorated missals, Stations of the Cross and liturgical banners can bring the Church home to the family. Use Catholic art of Our Lord and Our Lady wherever possible. Be sure to have your crafts blessed by a priest — and teach families what it means to have a blessed item.
E Build in some time for each class to be in close contact with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Classes held in the sanctuary will give guides an opportunity to teach proper reverence before the Blessed Sacrament. (It will also give some holy help to your teachers.) Daily Mass is a powerful beginning for each day. Teen guides could also be on hand to introduce children to eucharistic adoration during the week — and to encourage the children to make more visits on their own.
E Buy Catholic sacramentals for the children. One program found that by not buying the take-home newsprint worksheets, they were able to buy holy cards, scapulars, rosaries, holy water bottles and other traditional sacramentals for all the children in the program. Christian-soldier action figures were popular items at one VBS program. Ascension Press' “Friendly Defender” flashcards are another fun resource children will appreciate.
Putting together a great VBS program can be time-consuming and difficult — particularly if you have to stitch in Catholic patches to make for a complete, well-rounded presentation of the faith. However, a program that presents deep truths in a fun way will have eternal benefits.
Caroline Schermerhorn writes from Newark, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: Don't let summer be a missed opportunity ----- EXTENDED BODY: Caroline Schermerhorn ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Empire State Stopover for Praying Sojourners DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Sonia Salerni was recently sitting at the kitchen table of her bed and breakfast, talking to two new guests who had stopped by, when she heard a familiar late-afternoon sound. From across the street, the bells of St. Mary's Catholic Church were ringing, reminding the faithful that it was 6 p.m. “It's time for the Angelus,” she announced.
And then — in commemoration of the Incarnation — she, her husband Tom and their guests began to pray.
When the prayer ended, she resumed the conversation, as if praying with strangers were the most natural occasion in the world. In fact, it is. The Salernis are not shy about sharing their faith. Consider the name of their business: Holy Family Bed and Breakfast.
Or, more accurately, consider why Tom views it more like “our little call,” rather than a business.
“As just strictly a business, it wouldn't make sense,” he says. “Because the amount of work, time and care that go into this, you can only give because you think you're doing what you should be doing in response to the [Holy] Spirit.”
Their ministry involves praying, discussing and sharing their faith with guests, about 80% of whom are pro-life Catholics and Protestants.
When hosting the latter, or non-believers, the couple say they are “tactful” in talking about their faith.
“My approach is to listen,” Tom says. “If they want to hear some thoughts, I'll give what my heart is hearing. But mostly I listen. That's the best way I can share my faith, by sharing my ears. And then if there is a word to be said, hopefully I'll respond to the promptings of the Spirit.”
Inconspicuous Entrance
From the outside, it's impossible to tell that the three-story, red-brick townhouse, situated minutes from midtown Manhattan, is run by a devout Catholic couple. The building is plain; it doesn't even have a sign. The only hint of what the place is about comes near the front door, where there's a small statue of the Blessed Mother and a St. Francis holy water font. But open the door, and you immediately realize that this is no ordinary bed and breakfast.
On the walls of each floor are crucifixes, paintings and statues of angels and Jesus, St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary. There are also several bulletin boards, filled with pro-life items — articles, bumper stickers, prayers and photos of guests and posters, including a large Knights of Columbus sign on the first floor that says “The Natural Choice Is Life.”
Even the names of the rooms have a Catholic connection: St. Mary, Gesu Bambino, Sacre Coeur, St. Joseph, and Sts. Ann and Joachim. For those who want to relax, the Familyland and Eternal Word Television Networks are available for viewing in each of the guest rooms, while books by Catholic authors line the shelves in the Holy Trinity sitting area, which has a five-foot-tall statue of the Blessed Mother.
When the Salernis, along with Tom's father and brother, bought the vacant building in 1996, the original plan was to use it as office space for a business partnership between Tom and his now-deceased father, who was an architect.
“We more cooperated with the unfolding events rather than planning it naturally,” says Tom, 50, who now works as an architect for Queens College in Flushing, and helps his wife at Holy Family in his free time. “I don't think we could have planned this.”
Tom hadn't even planned on becoming a Catholic. Even though he is of Italian heritage, his grandparents' religious backgrounds were Waldensian Protestant and his parents, who immigrated to New York City, ended up marrying in the Methodist Church. Growing up in the Astoria section of Queens, he and his family rarely went to church. They only celebrated the major feasts — though he says his parents had a deep reverence for God, mainly from centuries of the Catholic faith permeating their culture.
When Tom was in his 20s, he started on a spiritual quest, trying out a number of different denominations.
In 1984, at age 33, after “seven years of blessed investigation,” Tom was baptized a Catholic.
Sonia, 54, meanwhile, grew up in Manila with a father who was a cultural Catholic and a mother with a Marian devotion. “Magnetized” by the Eucharist, she felt an intense devotion to the Catholic faith and, by the time she was 14, she dreamed of becoming a Carmelite nun.
She never did, but she learned a lot about America from an American priest in Manila who was her spiritual confessor. She remembers him telling her about the Roe v. Wade verdict and calling it “a dangerous time.” He predicted that it would lead to a lot of killings of unborn babies. The seed of her pro-life activism had been planted.
When Sonia moved to America in 1979, she worked several jobs before taking a job at the United Nations in 1980. She lived for almost a decade at a woman's dormitory in the Times Square area run by Polish nuns and was active in church activities. Then, one day in 1990, she attended a Legion of Mary lecture. The speaker: Tom Salerni. The topic: the Sacred Heart of Jesus. They married in June of 1991 and, during their four-week honeymoon, visited Marian pilgrimage sites throughout Europe, staying primarily at bed and breakfasts. Another seed was planted — their love of bed and breakfast lodgings.
The only hint of what the place is about comes near the front door, where there's a small statue of the Blessed Mother and a St. Francis holy water font.
Although she was well compensated at the U.N., Sonia wasn't finding spiritual fulfillment in her job — especially since most people there favored population control. So she began leading novenas to Our Mother of Perpetual Help and the Sacred Heart at Holy Family, a church near the U.N. She also began praying the rosary in front of abortion clinics and attending March for Life rallies in Washington, D.C., with her husband.
Then, in 1996, still unhappy at work, Sonia quit the United Nations, where she had been working in the General Assembly, preparing the agenda and informational materials for officials. The buyout money she received went toward renovating the three-story townhouse that housed Tom and his father's architecture office. Since the top floor wasn't being used, it became a place that the Salernis rented out. Their first guest was a Polish priest.
Homelike Hospitality
After Tom's father died in 1997, Tom didn't want to continue the architect's business without his partner. That's when the Holy Family Bed and Breakfast idea solidified and became a full-fledged reality.
Over the years, some guests have arrived and then departed because the bed and breakfast is a bit too Catholic for their tastes. There was the time when two Muslim men asked that religious images be removed from their room. The Salernis refused, and the men left.
Other guests like the environment. “It feels more like home,” says Maureen McGeary, 30, who lives on Long Island and stays at Holy Family usually one day a week because it's close to the Catholic church she attends in Manhattan. She added that she likes the Salernis' friendliness and warmth and the fact that they believe in God and Jesus, like she does.
Meanwhile the Lockes, a retired couple from Connecticut, searched the Internet for lodgings close to Manhattan and picked Holy Family because it seemed like “a nice, safe place,” says Judith Locke, who adds that she and her husband happen to be pro-life Catholics. She considers Holy Family's Catholic environment to be “a plus,” but that didn't factor into the final decision of where they stayed. Mainly, she likes the fact that it's a “quiet and clean” place.
Guests, who come from all over the world, usually hear about the bed and breakfast through word-of-mouth referrals, the Internet, local church bulletins, and through the Salernis' involvement in various Catholic groups, such as the Apostolate for Family Consecration and the American Life League.
Sonia says owning Holy Family is “a 48-hour-a-day” job. Still, she feels like she's “doing something for the greater glory of God.” And, to her, that's the best work in the world.
Carlos Briceño writes from Woodside, New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carlos BriceÒo ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Life Note DATE: 05/05/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 5-11, 2002 ----- BODY:Filipinos Sue ‘Catholics' for a Free Choice
CATHOLIC FAMILY & HUMAN RIGHTS INSTITUTE, April 19 — A group of pro-life and pro-family advocates in the Philippines is suing Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC) for deceptive advertising.
For the past few months, CFFC has purchased billboards and newspaper advertisement in cities worldwide, which claim that Catholic bishops “ban” condoms, and that the Church is responsible for the deaths of millions of people due to HIV/AIDS.
In response, the Filipino group has lodged a court complaint against CFFC, stating the ad campaign breaches the country's code of ethics in advertising.
According to the complaint, the CFFC advertisements are guilty of “dishonest advertising” and “open and direct disparagement” of religious beliefs.
Canadian Court Rejects Appeal
THE LONDON FREE PRESS, April 19 — The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the case of Toronto homo-sexual/AIDS activist James Wakeford who was requesting legal assisted suicide.
The case, James Wakeford vs. Attorney General of Canada was dismissed without comment. The Supreme Court of Canada had already decided on the assisted suicide question in 1993 when it rejected the appeal of Lou Gehrig's disease sufferer Sue Rodriguez, noting that laws against assisted suicide did not infringe her constitutional rights. Wakeford's lawyer, David Corbett, insisted that the case was different from that of Rodriguez since Wakeford is able to self-administer the lethal drugs whereas Rodriguez was unable to do so.
Adult Stem Cell Therapy May Stall MS
ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 17 — Adult stem cell therapy has helped to delay multiple sclerosis symptoms in some patients with a severe form of the disease.
University of Washington Medical Center researchers reported initial success with an experimental therapy in which they filtered stem cells from the blood of 26 patients with MS using a new magnetic method.
Then they wiped out the patients' faulty immune systems, reintroduced the stem cells into the patients' bloodstreams, and within nine days, new immune cells had begun to grow.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: White House Scores Pro-Life Win at U.N. DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:UNITED NATIONS—Family activists cheered as the United States delegation won major pro-life and pro-family victories at the May 8-10 U.N. Special Session for Children.
“The U.S. delegation did a wonderful job. It's almost miraculous, really,” said Jeanne Head, director of Manhattan Right to Life.“It was a win for the pro-life, pro-family movement.”
The intensive two-day negotiations finished just before a midnight deadline May 10. More than 180 countries attending the General Assembly special session approved the document called“A World Fit For Children” by consensus and a round of applause.
The United States convinced the other delegations to remove references to“services” from language about “reproductive health.” The United States successfully demanded that the word “services” be removed, citing an admission last June during Child Summit preparatory negotiations by a Canadian delegate that “services” included abortion.
Head credited other pro-life delegations for supporting the United States, but she stressed that the Americans led the charge.
“The U.S. delegation, the Holy See, and some developing countries including Muslim countries, kept language that could be construed to include abortion out of the document,” she said.
The United States also demanded that references to sexual and reproductive health include language respecting the laws, religion and custom of the home country.
“They took the floor to defend religious values and to defend family and to try to put marriage into the document,” John Klink said of his colleagues on the U.S. delegation. The Bush administration asked Klink, who has served previously on Holy See delegations at numerous U.N. negotiations, to join the American delegation for the Child Summit talks.
The reference to “reproductive health services” was finally removed only after the United States had threatened a floor vote stating that “services” could not mean abortion.
“These countries playing the‘fence game’ would have to decide one way or the other. It [the U.S. tactic] was brilliant,” Klink said.
Rather than face tough questions back home for supporting pro-abortion language, he added, Latin American countries dropped their support for “services.”
Klink predicted that those Latin American countries could soon become more enthusiastic supporters of Bush's pro-family, pro-life international outlook.
“The Bush administration made it clear, in all the [Latin American] capitals, its policy. It had a major impact,” said Klink. “It seems absurd that Catholic countries hold positions that are diametrically opposed to their people. I think there will be an adjustment in position over the next few years.”
Other pro-family and pro-life language promoted by the United States was defeated, however. The United States tried unsuccessfully to include abstinence to language on sexual education and it also failed in a bid to have marriage defined as only a union of a man and a woman, but the U.S. delegation remained unwavering in its pro-life and pro-family commitment throughout the week.
Not everyone was pleased with the sea change in United States foreign policy. During the Clinton Administration, the United States frequently led the international community in pushing for pro-abortion and anti-family language in U.N. documents.
The Child Rights Caucus, a collection of left-leaning non-governmental organizations involved in the Child Summit, called the agreement “weak” because it didn't stipulate “the rights of adolescents to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education, information and services.”
The pro-abortion Canadian delegation also complained about the final wording on sexual and reproductive health, saying that “this is a critical issue for children and adolescents and falls significantly short of what we wanted.”
But Bill Saunders, who serves on the United States delegation, said that his colleagues were right to focus on strong families and not making abortion legal for young children.
“I think it was a huge win for us,” Saunders said. “It's the first time in over eight years that there's a significant win for the pro-life, pro-family cause.” Saunders noted that the United States also added a strong addendum to the Child Summit document, known as an interpretive statement that clarifies to other countries what America defines certain terms to mean.
“The U.S. statement made it clear that [reproductive health] doesn't cover abortion or that‘various forms of the family’ does not mean homosexual unions,” said Saunders. “We can always refer to these reservations in future negotiations.”
Saunders said that the Bush administration's attempt to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman won significant international support, which can be built up further in future U.N. negotiations.
“Now is the time for the United States and its allies to begin an aggressive family agenda to make clear that marriage always is between a man and a woman, and [to ensure] that terms are always defined so that abortion cannot be smuggled in an ambiguous ways,” said Saunders.
He noted that key U.N. documents support America's position.
“We have to have direct references to marriage and the family as the building block of society,” said Saunders. “And that's right out of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. This isn't a new thing.”
Joshua Mercer writes from
Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Vocations Summit Ends With Hints of New Hope DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:MONTREAL—It was the best of times and the worst of times to talk about Church vocations, but many of the 1,133 delegates to the North American vocations congress here said they were encouraged by what they heard, especially from the young Catholics who attended.
Even in the midst of the crisis created by the clergy sex-abuse scandals, Bishop Paul Loverde of the Diocese of Arlington, Va., one of 63 bishop delegates to the Third Continental Congress on Vocations to the Ordained Ministry and Consecrated Life in North America, said he left with a great deal of hope.
“We cannot deny the terrible mistakes that have been made,” he said, “but despite that, we can be people of hope and I think that's what the delegates felt.” Bishop Loverde said he thinks the congress will prove to be a “moment of grace” for the Church in North America.
Sister Catherine Bertrand, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference, said the scandals were on everyone's mind at the summit.
“Some looking at us would say this is the worst time to be focused on vocations. Some would say it was the best time,” she said. “My comment was that this is the only time we've been given. This is the moment to look at the challenges and see how to respond.”
Those attending the conference cited the presence of 130 young-adult delegates and the statement they produced as among the highlights of the four-day congress, which met here April 18-21 at the invitation of Pope John Paul II.
“The young people had a way of bringing honesty from the depths of their heart and it was accepted,” said Sister Eva-Maria Ackerman, co-vicar for religious in the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
“One sister said they don't come with the residue of the past,” she said. “They're just coming, almost like they're a clean slate. They don't know what's gone on 20 or 30 years ago. So what they're coming and asking for is something very much from their hearts. They're not reacting to anything. They really have a very deep desire to follow Christ and to give authentically their lives to him and to the church.”
Sister Eva-Maria said she found the younger delegates very open to the possibility that God may be calling them to religious life. “It's kind of nice to know there's a generation being raised up today.”
Young-Adult Statement
The young-adult delegates' statement, which was forged in an all-night session that started late on the congress's third night, was the first to come out of the meeting and was done completely on the young people's own initiative, said Father Raymond Lafontaine, chaplain and professor of theology at Concordia University in Montreal and co-chair of the congress's executive committee.
It began by saying, “We desire a covenant relationship with our Church. Everything we ask of the Church we will offer in return. … We strive to be saints of today and come to cultivate saints of the next generation. Please give us the resources we need to be what God has called us to be!”
The statement called for the creation of discernment teams and mentors in parishes and on college campuses to support and nurture vocations and opportunities for meaningful catechesis, ongoing formation and education.
“Please openly witness to your faith, by being available,” the statement said. “Specifically, to you who live the consecrated life and serve as ordained ministers, offer us authentic joyful witnesses to your way of life, that we may experience the passion of your service. Invite us to share your excitement and deep love of Christ and the church.”
Lisa Moran, a 24-year-old delegate who is director of religious education at St. Robert Bellarmine Parish in Union Grove, Wis., in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, said the young adult group tried to avoid using political language in the document while expressing a desire for more solid catechesis and for religious to live authentic, joyful lives in fidelity to the Church. “We wanted to let them know what's attracting us to religious life and what's not,” she said.
Moran said most of her peers at the congress seemed to be interested in Christ-centered communities that were not self-promoting. “They're so hungry for the truth,” she said. “They want more opportunities to pray and go on retreat and to check out the communities. They want solid catechesis, solid food. They want to know why they're Catholic, why pursue this life, why be Catholic. It gave me a lot of hope. It seemed like a microcosm of the new springtime that [Pope] John Paul is talking about.”
Sister Barbara Anne Gooding, coordinator of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, said for her, another strong positive was the camaraderie among people celebrating priesthood and consecrated life, particularly in the table discussions. “I think that's what made people go away thinking something had been accomplished.”
Father Michael Sis, a Catholic campus minister at Texas A & M University, said he was especially struck by a talk by Father Ronald Rolheiser, general counselor for Canada for the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who said the Church needed saints more than the right vocations strategy. Likewise, he said, a talk by Father Gilles Routhier, professor and vice dean of studies of the School of Theology at Laval University in Quebec City, resonated with his own experience of helping young people discern their vocations.
“What I found so helpful was his claim that the Church needs to inspire young people with a new missionary project, risking, bringing the Gospel to our people today,” Father Sis said. “Young people need a sense of adventure, risk, venturing out into the deep, not just staying on the shore we know so well. It was so true from my experience working with young adults. If they're going to commit their life to something, they need to have a sense of direction where they will go.”
Successes?
After Father Sis's efforts to create an atmosphere conducive to the discernment of vocations, 42 former Texas A & M students are now in seminaries or in formation for consecrated life.
Despite the congress's more upbeat moments, some delegates said they were disappointed that no forum was provided for those who, like Father Sis, are having success with vocations.
“I did not think the talks addressed the objective, which was to give a lot of good ideas for increasing vocations,” said David Craig, who was a parent delegate representing the Diocese of Norwich, Conn., with his wife, Brigid.
Craig said he also thinks an annual meeting and Web site focusing on ideas from those who are generating vocations would be helpful to bishops and vocations directors.
Sister Catherine Bertrand said information about various kinds of vocations strategies was collected in regional gatherings in Canada and the United States leading up to the congress and will be incorporated into a plan that should be available by late summer or early fall. “Obviously we drew on what we have seen working,” she said. “We didn't want to just get stuck in everybody telling success stories.”
The Craigs, who have promoted eucharistic adoration for vocations in the Norwich Diocese, also were disappointed that their efforts to arrange adoration during the congress were unsuccessful.
Both were encouraged, however, by interest from other delegates in starting adoration specifically for vocations. In their diocese, each of three perpetual adoration sites devotes one week a month to adoration for vocations.
Judy Roberts writes from
Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Celibacy Isn't the Problem - It's the Answer, Say Priests DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:The Church's tradition of priestly celibacy has been called into question in the past. But recent revelations that some priests have engaged in sexual abuse of minors have led some people to allowing priests to marry would solve the problem.
In a statement after their meeting with Pope John Paul II last month, the U.S. cardinals noted that a link between sexual abuse and celibacy “cannot be scientifically maintained.” They said their discussions with the Pope “reaffirmed the value of priestly celibacy as a gift of God to the Church.”
Statistics seem to back up their claim. While 4% of married people and 7% of the general lay population have engaged in sexual abuse of minors, less than 2% of priests have been involved in the behavior, noted Norbertine Father Thomas Nelson executive director of the Institute on Religious Life and professor of philosophy at the Norbertine seminary in Orange, Calif. A recent Associated Press report found that less than a half of 1% of priests have been convicted or even accused of sexual abuse of minors in America in the past several decades.
“So celibacy helps to decrease the problem,” said Nelson.
In interviews with the Register, several priests spoke of the value of celibacy as central to the meaning of the priesthood. Some echoed the cardinals' words that it is a gift, not an unbearable burden, and said it would be “disastrous” if the Church dispensed with the requirement or made celibacy optional.
But they also said that more must be done both by the individual priest and by the Church to reaffirm the meaning and practice of the priestly vow.
A Former Priest's View
Robert McClory, a former priest and a member of the national board of Call to Action, acknowledged that celibacy is a “marvelous charism” but maintained that it is a gift given to only a very few. Call to Action advocates discarding what it calls the “medieval discipline of mandatory celibacy.”
But celibacy goes all the way back to Jesus and the early bishops, like Paul, Timothy and Titus. The argument that celibacy was imposed in the Middle Ages to prevent Church property from being handed down to priests' sons is “invalid,” said Father Thomas McGovern, author of “Priestly Celibacy Today.” (See interview, page 10.) From early on in the Church's history, the married men who sought ordination were required to commit to perpetual continence for the rest of their lives, a requirement that was codified in the early 300s, he said.
The link between celibacy and the priesthood was established in Christ himself, said Father McGovern, a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei in Dublin. Jesus went against the socio-cultural and religious climate of his time, which saw the lack of descendants as a curse, and freed himself to be “totally available to do his Father's will.”
“By sacramental ordination every priest is configured to Jesus and shares his priesthood in such an intimate way that he acts in the person of Christ,” he said. “The sacrament of Orders gives the priest a share in the mystery of Christ as Spouse of the Church. The priest, as icon of Christ, has then to love the Church with the same spousal love, loving her with an exclusive, sacrificial love which results in the fruitfulness of spiritual paternity, generating new children of God through his sacramental and pastoral ministry.”
McClory said that polls and sociological studies find that celibacy is the biggest obstacle for young men considering the priesthood. More specific polls, however, find that while celibacy is a serious issue, it is not a deterrent to young men pursuing a call to the priesthood. A 1997 survey of youth and parents conducted by the U.S. Bishops Committee on Vocations found that those who have seriously considered a vocation are more likely to fear parental or peer reaction to their inclination to the priesthood than the challenge of celibacy.
Though he wasn't ready to assert that it is at the root of the sex abuse crisis, he said that mandatory celibacy “does violence to human nature.”
“You have a lot of priests who thought they had the gift (of celibacy) but don't ,” he said, asserting that a man ordained at age 25 or 26 is too young to know. If after ordination he finds out that he doesn't , he is stuck. Priests then go on to “lead lives of intense loneliness and anguish.”
McClory was laicized in 1971 after 13 years as a priest and then married.
A Catholic University of America survey of priests' attitudes in February found that only 11% of priests feel that celibacy is a great problem to them on a day-to-day basis.
The Meaning of Celibacy
Simply put, celibacy is the state of being unmarried. But priestly celibacy is a consecration, which entails freely renouncing the goods of marriage and family. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting Matthew's Gospel, explains that priests are chosen from among men of faith who “intend to remain celibate‘for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.’”
“Called to consecrate themselves with undivided heart to the Lord and to‘The affairs of the Lord,’ they give themselves entirely to God and to men,” the Catechism says (paragraph 1579). “Celibacy is a sign of this new life to the service of which the Church's minister is consecrated; accepted with a joyous heart celibacy radiantly proclaims the Reign of God.”
Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, explained that priestly celibacy is a model of what heaven will be like, where there is no marriage.
Priestly celibacy has a triple motive:
P The relationship of the priest to Christ the High Priest, who voluntarily chose to be celibate and invited others to do so.
P The relationship of the priest to the Church, the Bride of Christ.
P The relationship of the priest to the core of his message: the future goods of Heaven, where they neither marry no are given in marriage.
Priestly celibacy is thus essentially different from the celibacy of a religious, who is celibate primarily in order to imitate Christ more closely.
Once ordained, a celibate priest is never free to marry, and a married priest, if his wife dies, cannot remarry.
Not all Catholic priests are celibate. As in the Orthodox Church, it is possible for married men in the Eastern Catholic Churches to be ordained. And the Eastern Churches have a strong tradition of celibate monks. Bishops in the Eastern Churches are chosen only from among the celibate priests.
Also, there have been exceptions made in recent years in the Roman Catholic Church. A number of married Protestant pastors or ministers who entered the Catholic Church have been permitted ordination. But in both East and West, a man who has received the sacrament of holy orders can no longer marry, and a widowed priest may not remarry.
Celibacy entails, as an essential element, renouncing love, marriage and family for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The important thing is not so much the necessary renunciation as on the motives for doing so.
It is questionable whether a homosexual can be a proper subject to receive the charism of celibacy, since a homosexual cannot truly renounce the goods of marriage and family—they are not goods which he desires.
Some of the priests interviewed for this article regard celibacy as entering into a life of sacrificial love, marriage to the Church and the begetting of spiritual children. Father Nelson, a priest for 21 years, regards it as a matter of “undivided love.”
“When you enter into marriage, your whole center of gravity shifts to your wife and children, as it should,” he said. “For the priest, your center of gravity shifts to Christ and the Church. (Being a married priest) would put a strain on your relationship. You can't give the totality of a commitment to two people. St. Paul speaks of the undivided heart, of being concerned about the things of the Lord.”
Screening and Forming
Seminary personnel and professionals who help priests experiencing difficulties say there are issues other than celibacy involved in sexual abuse. These include a lack of maturity and a loneliness that is deep-seated in childhood experiences but responsive to therapy. And they stress the essentials for living celibate life successfully, including prayer and the proper motivation.
At St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, psychological screening looks for problems in a candidate that might make it difficult for him to live a celibate life. Admissions personnel look for a man's ability to maintain mature, healthy relationships and “whether there is a spiritual calling to celibacy,” said Capuchin Father David Songy, a psychologist on the faculty.
“Quite a number of people apply for the priesthood who have sexual difficulties,” he said. “Many don't know where to go in life and haven't done well with relationships… So they might say,‘I'll try the priest-hood.’ That's not a good motive, and we screen them out.”
Candidates begin seminary with a spirituality year, focused mainly on prayer, and hear presentations on Pope John Paul's “theology of the body.”
Throughout their education, celibacy is discussed regularly in meetings with spiritual directors. “We teach them how to pray about it,” Father Songy said. He consults with students about a range of human issues, including how to interact with a variety of people while exercising proper boundaries. From time to time he asks them, “How do you think you're doing with celibacy? Do you think it's possible for you?”
Father Songy tells seminarians they have to develop “a tremendous love for the people.” But he advises future priests to maintain a healthy distance from those they might be counseling and “not to get in over their heads.” An example of a danger would be in counseling a couple going through marriage difficulties. “It is possible that the priest's feelings of sympathy for the wife may lead to an increasing emotional investment,” he said. “He may find himself attracted to her if the marriage breaks up.”
Meeting Challenges
For Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, spiritual director of Communion and Liberation, it is vital to live celibacy not as a principle but as a “response to being asked by Jesus Christ to follow in this way.”
“If you're doing it to hide from your sexual desire or even for good motives like having more time to serve people or help the poor, it's not enough.”
Msgr. Albacete said he “highly values” his celibacy. Yet he recognizes that there are challenges, including loneliness.
“Rectory after rectory has priests living alone or living as if they are in dormitory rooms, saying hello to each other only in passing, in some cases not even eating together,” said Msgr. Albacete, former president of the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico.
In answer to the loneliness, priests need “more chances to live friendships,” he said.
But don't blame celibacy for loneliness, says psychiatrist Richard Fitzgibbons, who has treated scores of priests over 25 years. Loneliness is the most common complaint he treats in people of all ages and states of life, including married people.
Fitzgibbons, of West Conshohocken, Pa., has identified several causes of loneliness: not having had a warm relationship with one's father or growing up in a home where “there wasn't a flow of love between your mother and your father,” for example. The most common type in priests who have made sexual mistakes with male adolescents and children stems from isolation from their childhood and adolescent peers, he said.
“This loneliness and peer rejection is most often a result of an inability to play baseball, basketball or soccer due to a lack of eye-hand coordination,” he said. Their attraction to adolescent males is an “unconscious attempt to gain acceptance, warmth and affirmation.”
Community Life
In addition to therapy, many priests need to improve their lifestyle, observers say.
The Institute on Religious Life's Father Nelson, who has lived in a religious community for nearly 30 years, finds that in the diocesan priesthood celibacy “no longer seems to be connected with the common life with other priests, as Our Lord intended.” Christ called 12 men, who left their wives and children and lived a life in common, he noted.
Diocesan priests could cluster into communities and have a common life of prayer and meals and drive to their respective parishes to celebrate Mass, Father Nelson suggested. That way, they would enjoy a camaraderie centered on prayer and a rule of life such as in a religious community.
This arrangement would provide a sense of belonging, which is “a very deep need we all have,” he said. It also would provide a safeguard from sinful actions.
“The way we live community life here, it would be very difficult for a priest to get in trouble,” he said of the Norbertines he lives with. “We'd notice small problems before they turned into larger ones. And we'd correct them.”
Celibacy does not cease to be a challenge, priests say, but the nature of the challenge changes over time. Not being able to have sex is not the biggest obstacle, if one is “psychologically healthy,” said Father Nelson. The temptations and desires can be overcome with the help of prayer and asceticism—spiritual effort or exercise in the pursuit of virtue.
“But then there's a challenge coming from the idea that you'll never have a wife, a female companion sharing your life, someone to share on a deep level,” he said. “You have to develop that companionship with the Lord.”
There's also the aspect of father-hood, not having one's own children. Over time, this can be a deeper problem than that of intimacy.
Companionship with the Lord becomes real for the priest in four ways, which all have counterparts in marriage, Father Nelson explained. Communication is as essential between spouses as it is for the celibate priest and the object of his faith. For the celibate, it's called prayer. The Norbertines spend several hours a day in community prayer, including two hours beginning at 5:15 a.m. But Father Nelson also advises a daily holy hour for the individual priest, such as an hour of Eucharistic adoration.
As a husband and wife live under the same roof, sharing the same table and the joys and hardships or raising children, priests live a commitment to the common life and to the Lord, he continued. “We have the Blessed Sacrament right in our home, which is a great privilege. We can live with the Lord in a way that lay people can't .”
Third, there is a “conversion of wills” both in marriage and the celibate life. In marriage, husband and wife mutually submit to each other in Christ, he said, while celibates submit themselves completely to Christ. “We must be obedient to him in being obedient to his law and to the Church, which regulates clerical life.”
Finally, while there is conjugal union in marriage, “the priest has given his body to the Lord—and to no other person.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Charismatic Renewal Moves Into Church Mainstream DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:PITTSBURGH—When a group of Catholic college students gathered here in 1967 for a retreat on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, they never imagined they were on the threshold of a new movement in the Church.
The 25 Duquesne University students and faculty, who sang “Veni Creator Spiritus” before each of their talks, experienced the “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” a phenomenon they had learned about from Protestant Pentecostals, but believed was available to them as Catholics.
What happened at “the Duquesne Weekend” forged the beginnings of the Catholic charismatic renewal, a movement that, according to researchers David Barrett and Todd Johnson, embraced more than 119 million Catholics in 235 countries in the year 2000.
Thirty-five years later, the charismatic renewal continues to impact Church life both in places like Brazil and Italy, where it is flourishing, and in the United States, where its numbers have diminished in recent years, except among certain ethnic groups like Hispanics.
The Italian bishops' conference now officially recognizes the statutes of Renewal in the Spirit, which in Italy has more than 200,000 members in 1,800 communities or prayer groups, Zenit reported May 3.
According to Bishop Giuseppe Betori, secretary of the Italian bishops' conference, this recognition has transformed Italy's charismatic renewal from a “current of grace” into an “ecclesial movement.”
The movement is most visible in its style of worship, marked by hands lifted in praise to God and spontaneous prayer, often in tongues, the prayer language referred to in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. But traces of its influence can be found nearly everywhere in the Church from liturgical music and parish healing services to various renewal ministries and institutions like the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.
Leaders also cite its impact in the larger Church in a greater openness to evangelism, a renewed awareness of the existence of spiritual warfare, more freedom and joy in liturgical celebrations and in the language ordinary Catholics use to describe their relationship to God.
In addition, many people who have experienced personal conversion as a result of the charismatic renewal are now serving in parishes, dioceses and schools as priests, deacons, catechists and lay evangelists or working in ministries that may or may not be directly tied to the movement.
Although the charismatic renewal, whose members were first called Catholic Pentecostals, started at the fringes of the Church, its leaders say that over the last 15 years it has inserted itself into the main of ecclesial life, enjoying the support of both Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II.
“We went to Rome in 1975 and said we wanted to be at the heart of the Church and we now are,” said Fther Michael Scanlan, chancellor of the Franciscan University of Steubenville and a former chairman of the renewal's National Service Committee.
Father Scanlan said Pope John Paul II's recent comments to a group of charismatics on the 30th anniversary of the renewal in Italy are an indication that the movement has achieved a place in Church life.
“Born in the Church and for the Church,” the Pope said in the March 14 address, “in your movement one experiences in the light of the Gospel the living encounter with Jesus, the faithfulness of God in personal and community prayer, confident listening to the Word, the vital discovery of the sacraments, as well as courage in trials and hope in tribulations.”
Pentecost 1998
Renewal leaders also point to the Holy Father's speech on Pentecost of 1998 as evidence that the Holy Father considers the charismatic dimension essential to the life of the Church.
In an address to more than 500,000 representatives of church renewal groups, including Cursillo, Focolare and Regnum Christi, Pope John Paul said, “Today, I would like to cry out to all of you gathered here in St. Peter's Square and to all Christians: Open yourselves docilely, to the gifts of the Spirit! Accept gratefully and obediently the charisms which the Spirit never ceases to bestow on us!”
Ralph Martin, an early leader in the charismatic renewal in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a lay evangelist with Renewal Ministries, said the Pope wasn't suggesting that everybody join the charismatic movement, but rather that Catholic life should be open to the charismatic while remaining firmly rooted in the institution.
An effort to better ground the renewal in the Church began in the 1980s when leaders began to relate the charismatic experience to aspects of Catholic life like the sacraments, said Walter Matthews, director of CharisCenter USA, the national office of the renewal in the United States.
Before then, Matthews said, many Catholics who had come into the charismatic movement suffered a “psychic divide” between the week-night prayer meeting and Sunday Mass because they had not been taught, for example, about the richness of the Eucharist. As a result, some left to join Protestant Pentecostal churches.
Similarly, an early weakness of the movement was an emphasis on the emotional experience of the baptism in the Spirit at the expense of knowledge of Church teaching. The Pope referred to this in his 1998 address on Pentecost when he said, “Love of the Church and adherence to its Magisterium, in a way of ecclesial maturation supported by a permanent solid formation, are the eloquent signs of your commitment to avoid the risk of remaining, unwittingly, in a merely emotional experience of the divine.”
Spiritual Maturity
Martin said an unbalanced, immature response to spiritual experience is always a problem when people encounter God and bring along their own maturity or lack of it.
“It was such a new thing for a lot of people to feel God's love, to find joy in faith and a relationship with other people, they tended to want to hold on to the experience of that and not go through the deepening, maturing process that, once the feeling went away, felt like it wasn't real.”
Patti Gallagher Mansfield, who was at “the Duquesne Weekend” and now works in the charismatic renewal office of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, said the movement has struggled because of its loose structure and lack of a clearly defined body of principles. She said the movement also has suffered from tension between the broader renewal, which was seen in parish prayer meetings and diocesan conferences, and covenant communities in which members made a deeper commitment to the renewal, the church and each other.
“To be involved in charismatic renewal is to not necessarily sign on the dotted line,” said Mansfield. “We haven't always had the inner unity that some other movements have. Because we did not have a founder, a program, we're like other movements in some ways, but in others so very different. There is no one personality around whom everyone else would gather … We're kind of out there in the Church.”
Bruce Yocum, a presiding elder in Servants of the Word, an ecumenical group of consecrated, celibate men that grew out of the Word of God charismatic community in Ann Arbor, said the movement's greatest weakness has been a naÔve acceptance that has provided a platform for “a lot of flukey stuff,” such as phony healing and crazy prophecy. Along with that have been some liturgical and doctrinal distortions.
In the area of healing, for example, the Vatican recently moved to correct some abuses that had occurred and to restore order to the ministry of healing. This was handled at a colloquium held in November by the Pontifical Council for Laity, the charismatic movement, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Yocum said that despite such weaknesses, he remains convinced that what happened in the charismatic renewal is significant and that God intends to influence the entire Church with it to a greater extent than has happened so far.
Yocum, who lives in Monterrey, Mexico, said that the movement in the western world may need to take into account changing circumstances by adopting strategies that are better suited to the times. “The vehicles look too much like they did 30 years ago for a situation that has changed so much.”
For example, he said, when he received the baptism in the Holy Spirit in 1968, he knew the tenets of his faith and was thus prepared for an experience that built on his knowledge. “Today, younger kids are not well catechized, but are more used to a Church where a lot of exciting things are happening. They are not looking as much for experience. They get excited when they begin to understand why the liturgy is like this. It gives them an understanding of the world, a way of dealing with people, an identity. So they are much less interested in the baptism in the Holy Spirit.”
Something to Give
Yocum said he thinks the charismatic renewal still has something to give the larger Church. “But if we are exaggerating it, trying to make it be everything, it's not going to make the contribution it should make,” he said.
CharisCenter's Matthews said when he first became involved in the renewal in 1972, the mentality was that everybody would eventually become charismatic. Cooler heads, he said, held that the renewal would fade into the life of the Church when the Lord had done with it what He wanted to do.
“It still has some work to be done from our perspective,” Matthews acknowledged. “I believe the Baptism in the Spirit has something that's related to this moment that the Holy Father has been talking about—this new springtime of Christianity. We have something to continue to contribute to that flowering of that springtime.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Wrestler Takes on God DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Originally from Cuba, Father Lorenz Gonzalez is a former Latin American champion wrestler and two-time Cuban national champion.
Originally from Cuba, Father Lorenz Gonzalez is a former Latin American champion wrestler and two-time Cuban national champion.
Father Gonzalez was ordained for the Diocese of Venice, Florida last October. He currently serves as parochial vicar of Sacred Heart Church in Bradenton and associate director doing Hispanic pastoral ministry for the diocese. He told Register culture of life editor Tim Drake about his journey to the Church.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Varadero, Cuba. I have one older brother and a younger sister. My mother still lives in Varadero. My father retired in 1993 because he had heart problems. He died in 1999.
Did you grow up Catholic?
No. My family were believers, but they are not Catholic. They never went to Church. I first went to Church at age 15. I decided to go on my own after a friend had a positive experience going.
How did you family react?
They reacted strongly. I had opposition from my entire family. I have five older cousins that work in hotels and different government offices and so it was very hard for them.
I began wrestling at age 12 and continued practicing and wrestling for six years. I attended a special school where young people were trained in different sports. During that time I was twice national champion in Cuba and won the Central American championship once.
At the time, all of the important people in the school - my coach, my teacher, and the principal - held a meeting with me. They talked with me about my “new” life and said that if I continued to go to Church I could not continue in wrestling. My first vocation was wrestling. However, I wanted to explore my faith and going to Church was a dangerous thing. They didn't want to have a sports figure with religious ideas.
Once I left wrestling, I finished high school at another school.
What led to your vocation?
After almost six years of attending the Catholic Church I felt I had a call to a vocation, so I approached my bishop in Cuba. That began a three-year process of working with him at the Catholic center in my province. In 1990, I decided to begin in seminary. While I received some protection from the Church, I frequently had difficulties with the government. I received my philosophy education in Cuba, and after that the bishop sent me to the Dominican Republic to study theology.
What brought you to the United States?
While in the Dominican Republic I interrupted my seminary process and worked in different jobs for about five years. Eventually I returned to the seminary and finished my theology. My legal permission to be outside of Cuba had expired and therefore I had a difficult time going back. Bishop Primo, who had retired to Venice, Florida invited me to come work with the Hispanic people there, so that is the reason I am here. I came in March of 2000 and was ordained on October 25, 2001.
Tell me about your Hispanic out-reach work.
I help to organize retreats, courses, and other preparations for our diocese's Hispanic leaders. According to the 2000 census, 55% of the Catholic population in this diocese are Hispanic. Ninety percent are immigrants.
What kind of challenges does that pose for the diocese?
One of our projects is to help the American community to understand, receive, and help the Catholic brothers and sisters from Latin America who want or need to live in this country. We need to involve every Hispanic priest and all of the American pastors from this diocese. It also involves offering the sacraments in both languages.
While we have different cultures and languages, we are one Church. If you remember the history of this country, there were many immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and Poland. For the first and second generations, the language barrier was difficult. It will grow easier for future generations.
In addition, the Latin American people need to understand everything they can about this culture and the Catholic Church in this country—about participation and contribution.
What contributions do the Hispanic people bring to the Catholic Church?
The Hispanic concept of family is one of our best gifts or graces to the Catholic Church in America. I see this as a contribution. Secondly, the Latin American people are a joyful people. It is very easy for us to talk with strangers on the street. Another important aspect regards liturgy. In America, liturgy is very organized and structured. Latin American liturgies are more spontaneous. In the Mass we do not come to the Church to repeat words, but to communicate with Jesus and express our faith. Among Hispanics this manifests itself through song, spontaneous prayer, and more active participation in the liturgy.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: lorenz Gonzalez ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Choosing Life: Hawaiian Senate Narrowly Kills Assisted Suicide Bill DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:HONOLULU—Hawaii looked euthanasia in the eye this month, and said no.
Despite the support of the governor and the state House and virtually all the local media for legalizing euthanasia, Hawaii's state senate rejected attempts to make Hawaii the second state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. The procedure, denounced by the Catholic Church, became legal in Oregon in 1997.
“We were so concerned about the impact this would have on Hawaii's elderly and sick populations, that this so-called right to die would turn into a duty to die,” Kelly Rosati of Hawaii Family Forum told the Register in a statement.
Three state senators changed their vote at the last minute, killing the suicide bill 14-11 on May 2. That last-minute change had little to do with a rejection of the practice, however.
“What bothers me about this decision, Mr. President, is that I am forced to make it in such a short time,” said Donna Mercado Kim, a Democrat who changed her mind just hours before the final vote.
“I have read this bill,” Kim continued, “and there are a couple of areas in which I am not comfortable with the bill. I would like to see amendments made to it.”
Hawaii's Democratic Governor Ben Cayetano blamed the rise of the conservative activists, like the Hawaii Family Forum, for the bill's defeat.
“The religious right in this state is very well organized, not only here in Hawaii, but throughout the rest of the nation. That had to have an impact in an election year,” said Cayetano.
The governor reiterated his support for physician-assisted suicide and remained optimistic that he, or another future governor, would sign such legislation.
“I think even though it failed today, it came very close and one day, perhaps in the next five years or so, this will become the law in the state of Hawaii,” Cayetano said.
Rosati acknowledged that the fight to prevent assisted-suicide in Hawaii was not over.
“This is just the beginning,” she said in response to the governor's comments.
Portland-based physician Gregory Hamilton has seen the affects of physician-assisted suicide in his home state of Oregon. Hamilton co-founded Physicians for Compassionate Care in order to advocate aggressive pain management without intentionally ending patient's lives.
After the May 2 vote, he told the Register: “The Hawaii legislature has done their duty. It has protected the vulnerable and disabled people who count on it to represent them.”
He applauds Hawaii for not legalizing a procedure he says is “fundamentally flawed.”
“The Hawaii legislature has duly noted the abuses already documented in Oregon and heeded their own medical, nursing, and hospice organizations to reject this dangerous, irresponsible and discriminatory law,” said Hamilton.
Hamilton said Oregon has become dangerous for seniors. He noted that an Oregon HMO has admitted that it caps in-home palliative care at $1,000, thereby giving terminal patients a financial motive to kill themselves to avoid burdening their families financially.
“Letting Oregon HMOs restrict hospice funding is a far cry from good palliative care,” Hamilton said.
HMO abuse doesn't stop there, he said. One Oregon woman, Kate Cheney, suffered from dementia and her psychiatrist said she lacked the competence required by law to elect physician-assisted suicide.
But Cheney's HMO received the approval of another doctor and ended her life.
Hamilton said Cheney's daughter apparently wanted to end the life of her 85-year-old mother.
“When the psychiatrist said she was not eligible for assisted suicide, the daughter and the new doctor did not accept the opinion as the safeguard it was supposed to be. Instead, they sought another opinion from a second mental health professional, since there is nothing in the Oregon law to stop them from doing so,” said Hamilton.
Alternatives
Advocates of physician-assisted suicide lamented the Hawaiian bill's defeat, saying it would mean unnecessary suffering for terminally ill patients.
“For persons to talk about just one person being killed—I know of several people who are going to suffer terribly because this law did not pass,” said Hawaii Hemlock Society president Andi van der Voort.
Hamilton rejected the argument that assisted suicide is required to help patients who must endure excruciating pain. In reality, he said, doctors have effective medical treatments to alleviate suffering. “Physicians in Hawaii know they can provide patients with the pain treatment and palliative care patients need without ever resorting to assisted suicide,” he said.
Hamilton noted that advocates for euthanasia had predicted political success but have nothing after Oregon to show for it.
“The majority of state legislatures have considered the issue and all of them have rejected assisted suicide. More than a dozen states in the past 10 years have strengthened laws against assisted suicide rather than following Oregon's lead,” said Hamilton.
He noted that voters after the Oregon experiment have consistently rejected the practice.
“California, Maine, Michigan and Washington have all defeated assisted-suicide referenda,” said Hamilton. “Liberal state supreme courts in Florida and Alaska have rejected assisted suicide. The U.S. Supreme Court found in 1997 that there is no constitutional right to assisted suicide.”
Pope John Paul II has expressed his profound concerns on the trend to legalize physician-assisted suicide. In a 1998 ad limina address to bishops from western states in America, including Hawaii, the Pope strongly condemned political activity to legalize the procedure.
“The Church likewise offers a truly vital service to the nation when she awakens public awareness to the morally objectionable nature of campaigns for the legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Euthanasia and suicide are grave violations of God's law (cf. Evangelium Vitae, 65 and 66); their legalization introduces a direct threat to the persons least capable of defending themselves and it proves most harmful to the democratic institutions of society,” said the Pope.
“The fact that Catholics have worked successfully with members of other Christian communities to resist efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide is a very hopeful sign for the future of ecumenical public witness in your country,” John Paul added, “and I urge you to build an even broader ecumenical and inter-religious movement in defense of the culture of life and the civilization of love.”
Joshua Mercer writes from
Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:More on Virginia's Apology
THE WASHINGTON POST, May 2—When did the state of Virginia stop forcibly sterilizing people in the name of eugenics? Was it 1929? 1939? Try 1979, reported the Washington daily.
Virginia Governor Mark Warner issued a formal apology May 1 for the state's abusive policy, which began in 1927 and affected at least 8,000 people. The apology came on the 75th anniversary of a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the state's 1924 eugenics law.
A few key facts that don't appear in the Post: At the time, the Catholic Church was one of the few opponents of such eugenics legislation, which was heavily promoted by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, and eagerly emulated in Nazi Germany, in the name of science and progress.
Involuntary sterilization was aimed, according to model legislation proposed in 1914 by a eugenics group, at “the feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed and dependent,” as well as “orphans, ne'er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless and paupers,” the Post reported. It was practiced by 30 states, and victimized some 65,000 Americans, before being largely discredited after the Second World War.
Sly Stallone Keeps the Faith
ASSOCIATED PRESS, May 7—Sylvester Stallone told the news service that his projected fall television series, Father Lefty, about a street-smart Catholic priest, will not be derailed by the scandals in the Church. In fact, he thinks that America's Catholics have had quite enough negative publicity, and are “looking to exhale.”
Stallone said of the abuser priests, “We know the police are on it, the public is aware of it and they are all being rooted out.”
Stallone created and produced the show, which will star Danny Nucci as an offbeat Miami padre who takes on crime in his gang-infested parish. It's based on the adventures of an actual priest, Father Robert Lefrack, whom Stallone described as “Bruce Springsteen with a collar.”
CBS has not yet scheduled the program, and some have drawn the conclusion that recent scandals doomed it. “People have come up to me and given me their condolences,” Stallone admitted. “They said, ‘Boy, talk about timing. Who wants to see a story about a good priest?’” To which Stallone, creator of Rocky, responds, “Well, who wants to see a story about a punch-drunk boxer?”
Stallone told Associated Press that he is a practicing Catholic, who trusts his local parish priest.
Cardinal Law's Unexpected Defenders
THE BOSTON HERALD, May 8—The Boston Herald has been tracking the coverage of child-abuse cases, and found that embattled Cardinal Bernard Law has unsuspected supporters in Boston's African-American community.
The Herald reported on a meeting of the Boston Baptist Social Union, where Cardinal Law was defended by Black Muslim and Protestant leaders.
“Somebody wants that Church toppled,” warned Don Muhammad, local head of the Nation of Islam. “It has become too powerful in the eyes of some people and they absolutely want to see it toppled. … Do not lose sight of the fact the Catholic Church has done a whole lot of good, and we're about to lose that in this community unless more of us stand up and say what we know is right.”
Gordon Abbott, the Social Union's longtime treasurer, also defended the Church. “I think of the commercial that says, ‘We measure our success one investor at a time,’” Abbott said. “I feel that's the way the rest of us should judge the Catholic clergy—one priest at a time; I think we'd find most of them are pretty good guys.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Confessional Secrets Kept Safe, Despite Connecticut Threat DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:HARTFORD, Conn.—After a nearly weeklong debate, Connecticut legislators passed stricter sexual abuse legislation without a controversial passage about priests reporting what they hear in the confessional.
The bill, which increases penalties for the sexual abuse of minors and extends the statute of limitations for prosecution of such crimes, originally contained a provision that some thought would have required priests and other clergymen to report information they learn in private conversations if they felt that someone was in imminent danger of being abused.
In the case of Catholic priests, that would have jeopardized the sacramental seal of Confession.
The provision would have allowed a clergyman to reveal privileged communication, such as the matter of a confession, in a civil or criminal proceeding if the person who told him that information gave his consent. But that consent would not be required if the clergyman believed there was “risk of imminent personal injury to the person or other individuals of if child abuse, abuse of an elderly individual or abuse of an individual who is disabled or incompetent is known or in good faith is suspected.”
The provision came to light during a debate in the state House in Hartford the night of May 2. Rep. T.R. Rowe, a Republican from Trumbull, made an unsuccessful attempt to amend the bill so as to exempt privileged communications made to a member of the clergy during “a religious ritual.” He and Thomas Conway, a Waterbury Democrat, were the only two to vote against the bill, with 144 representatives in favor.
The Connecticut Catholic Conference alerted people to the provision, prompting an avalanche of phone calls to legislators' homes over the weekend.
When it took up the measure May 7, the Senate struck the controversial provision with an amendment offered by Republican Sen. William Aniskovich, the minority leader pro tempore, and 17 others. With hours to go before the official midnight adjournment of the spring legislative session, and without agreement on a state budget, the House overwhelmingly passed the amended sex abuse bill May 8. Gov. John Roland was expected to sign it.
In a statement, Aniskovich, a Catholic, called the original legislation “nothing short of a reactionary device to bring even more attention to the horrible issues currently surrounding the Catholic Church.” But, he said, “in their effort to target Catholic priests, supporters of the measure took direct aim at the freedom to practice religion as is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution.”
There were other amendments in the Senate that attempted to protect confidential sessions between layper-sons and clergy. One would have specifically protected Catholic priests from having to “disclose privileged communications made to him during the sacrament of reconciliation.”
A measure offered by Sen. Kevin Sullivan, a Democrat who is president pro tempore, would have exempted clergymen from revealing information learned in confidence during areligious ceremony” when that revelation would have conflicted with tenets of the faith involved.
Seal is Sacrosanct
Clashes between the sacramental seal of Confession and public law are not new. The 14th-century St. John Nepomucene was martyred when he refused King Wencelslaus IV's demands that he reveal the contents of his queen's confession.
In 1996, jail officials in Oregon recorded a sacramental confession of an inmate imprisoned for a triple murder. The uproar over the taping led to a 1997 circuit court ruling that the taping was an act akin to undue search.
A bill recently was signed into law in Massachusetts that adds priests to the list of professionals who must report possible cases of child sexual abuse to the Department of Social Services. But it exempts information gained in Confession or“similarly confidential communication in other religious faiths.”
Connecticut law has long required certain professionals who have some degree of contact with children to report suspected abuse, neglect and at-risk situations to the Department of Children and Families. Priests have been“mandated reporters” since 1971.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that“every priest who hears confessions is bound under very severe penalties to keep absolute secrecy regarding the sins that his penitents have confessed to him.”
“He can make no use of knowledge that confession gives him about penitents' lives,” the Catechism states in No. 1467. There are no exceptions.
“If an exception is made, a person won't have confidence in the sacrament,” said Legion of Christ Father Walter Schu, who teaches at the Legionaries of Christ novitiate in Cheshire, Conn.
Rep. Rowe, a Catholic, said he was offended by the attempt to“impact a Catholic's right to a sacrament.” He felt that the language might have slipped in because of“insensitivity” to religious issues on the part of those who draft legislation but that his colleagues should have been more diligent in correcting the error.
“This seemed to tread new ground,” he said.“The seal of Confession had always been recognized by governments.”
But Rep. Michael Lawlor, a Democrat from Branford, contended that the provision would not have required a priest to break the seal of Confession but would simply have allowed him to report what he heard in Confession without violating the legal confidentiality protection.
Rep. Ernest Newton, a Democrat from Bridgeport, said he was opposed to removing the provision but voted for the final bill because he believed in strengthening penalties against child abusers.“If we're serious about preventing the sexual assault of minors, then we've got to undo a lot of privileges we've given to certain people with regard to children,” he told Associated Press.
But, in an interview, Newton agreed that the provision would have interfered with the free exercise of religion.“Up to this point the state has respected that right [the priest-penitent privilege]. But with all that's going on now, what do we do to protect children?”
Not to protect the seal of Confession would be to“allow the legitimate concerns over child sexual abuse to devolve into a church-state scandal of its own,” said Catholic League president William Donohue, as the House was set to take its final vote on the bill May 8.
“It has long been respected that what is said between a penitent and a priest is no one else's business,” Donohue said.“That would certainly include agents of the state.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope Creates New Dioceses, Bishops in Ukraine
ASSOCIATED PRESS, May 4—As the Vatican announced its plans to carve two new dioceses out of existing dioceses in Ukraine, in the regions of Kharkiv-Zaporizhia and Odessa-Simferopol, the Associated Press highlighted the tensions this might cause with defensive Russian Orthodox clerics. The AP suggested that papal decisions last winter to raise four apostolic administrations in Russia to the status of dioceses“provoked the ire of the Russian Orthodox Church,” noting that“Pope John Paul II has made improvement in relations with Orthodox Christians a goal of his papacy, but the Orthodox Church has pointed to alleged Catholic poaching for converts as a top obstacle to a papal visit to Russia.”
Pope Recovers from Tensions at Spa
REUTERS, May 5—After the grueling events of recent weeks, including the unprecedented emergency summit with U.S. cardinals, Pope John Paul recuperated and spoke about the quest for a peaceful world, on Italy's exquisite island of Ischia. Reuters New Service cited“bishops who took part in the meetings” as saying that“the Pope was profoundly saddened by the scandal which enveloped the U.S. Catholic Church.”
Reuters highlighted the Pope's appeal for an end to conflict in the Holy Land, quoting his homily and noon address:“It is unshakeable faith which inspires the followers of Jesus in every period of history to think thoughts of peace and open up horizons of forgiveness and harmony,” he said, invoking the Blessed Virgin's intercession, in answer to the“cry for security and peace which rises ceaselessly from so many parts of the world, especially the Holy Land.” Citing divine love as the only force which can reconcile enemies, the Pope said,“This is the love that humanity needs today perhaps more than ever because only love is credible.” Pope John Paul turned 82 on May 18.
Vatican Distinguishes Penance from Therapy
The New York Times, May 2—As the Vatican issued an apostolic letter reminding priests that group absolution is no substitute for private confession, The New York Times noted with surprise“the timing of the letter… given the perception of American Catholics coping with sexual abuse scandals involving priests that it is Church leaders who should themselves be asking for forgiveness now.” In answer to reporters' persistent questions on that theme, Josef Cardinal Ratzinger reported that“American bishops have already decided they will have a day of expiation, probably on the Feast of the Sacred Heart (June 7), which is traditionally a day of expiation for our sins.”
The Vatican letter was accompanied with important observations by Ratzinger, limning the differences between therapeutic approaches to healing the human psyche—however important—and the sacramental acts of penance and absolution.“In psychotherapy, people take upon themselves the burden of deep and often dangerous revelations about their interior lives,” Ratzinger noted.“In the sacrament of penance, one trusts God's merciful goodness in the simple confession of one's own guilt.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Laity Must Not Be Clericalized Nor Clergy Laicized, Says Pope DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY—Wary of a clericalization of the laity and a laicization of the clergy, John Paul II insisted that the relation between priests and faithful is one of complementarity, not equality.
The Holy Father clarified the Church's position on this matter when he met with the bishops of the Antilles at the end of their quinquennial“ad limina” visit to the Holy See.
In his farewell address to the bishops, the Pope reminded them that“first and foremost, you are priests.”
“[You are] not corporate executives, business managers, finance officers or bureaucrats, but priests,” he said.
“This means above all that you have been set apart to offer sacrifice, since this is the essence of priesthood, and the core of the Christian priesthood is the offering of the sacrifice of Christ,” the Holy Father added.
John Paul reminded the bishops that the Second Vatican Council resulted in“the awakening of the lay faithful in the Church,” but that this does not signal an alteration in the laity's irreplaceable role.
Specifically, the Pope said, some“persons, we know, affirm that the decrease in the number of priests is the work of the Holy Spirit, and that God himself will lead the Church, making it so that the government of the lay faithful will take the place of the government of priests.”
“Such a statement certainly does not take account of what the Council Fathers said when they sought to promote a greater involvement of the lay faithful in the Church,” the Holy Father stressed.
“In their teachings, the Council Fathers simply underscored the deep complementarity between priests and the laity that the symphonic nature of the Church implies,” the Pope explained.
“A poor understanding of this complementarity has sometimes led to a crisis of identity and confidence among priests, and also to forms of commitment by the laity that are too clerical or too politicized,” the Holy Father continued.
John Paul II warned that the involvement“by the laity becomes a form of clericalism when the sacramental or liturgical roles that belong to the priest are assumed by the lay faithful, or when the latter set out to accomplish tasks of pastoral governing that properly belong to the priest.”“It is the priest who, as an ordained minister and in the name of Christ, presides over the Christian community on liturgical and pastoral levels,” the Pope pointed out.“The laity can assist him in this in many ways.”
However,“the premier place of the exercise of the lay vocation is in the world of economic, social, political and cultural realities. It is in this world that lay people are called to live their baptismal vocation,” the Holy Father stressed.
At a time of“insidious secularization,” it might“seem strange that the Church insists so much on the secular vocation of the laity, but it is precisely this Gospel witness by the faithful in the world that is the heart of the Church's answer to the malaise of secularization,” the Pope emphasized.
“The commitment of lay persons is politicized when the laity is absorbed by the exercise of ‘power’ within the Church,” John Paul II added.“That happens when the Church is not seen in terms of the mystery of grace that characterizes her, but rather in sociological or even political terms.”
The clericalization of the laity and laicization of the clergy occurs when“it is not service but power that shapes all forms of government in the Church, be it in the clergy or the laity, [when] opposing interests start to make themselves felt,” he warned.
What“the Church needs is a deeper and more creative sense of complementarity between the vocation of the priest and that of the laity,” he concluded.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: The Miserere: A Prayer of Repentance DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Due to inclement weather, Pope John Paul II's general audience on May 8 took place in the Paul VI Audience Hall instead of St. Peter's Square. Over 10,000 pilgrims were present. The Holy Father resumed his cycle of teachings on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours.
His teaching focused on Psalm 51, the best known of the penitential psalms.“The psalmist confesses his sin clearly and without hesitation: ‘For I know my offense … Against you alone have I sinned,’” the Holy Father noted. While acknowledging his sinfulness, the psalmist never loses hope in God's promise of mercy, love and forgiveness,
Quoting Origen, Pope John Paul II pointed out that it is unfortunate that many people do not recognize their sinfulness:“Acknowledgment and awareness of sin is, therefore, the fruit of sensitivity we acquire thanks to the light of God's Word.” The Holy Father said that sin, besides being an offense against men, is first and foremost a betrayal of God. Nonetheless, he said,“The power of God's love overcomes the power of sin, and the disruptive river of evil is less forceful than the fruitful water of forgiveness.” God saves us not because of any righteous deeds we have done, but because of his mercy, the Holy Father noted.
Pope John Paul II ended the audience by asking prayers for the special session on children of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Every Friday during Morning Prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours, we recite Psalm 51, the Miserere, a penitential psalm that is very dear to our hearts and that we often sing and meditate on—a hymn that a repentant sinner raises to his merciful God. During an earlier teaching, we already had the opportunity to present a general picture of this great prayer. First of all, we enter into the darkness of sin, upon which the light of man's repentance and God's forgiveness is cast (see verses 3-11). Afterwards, the gift of God's grace is exalted, which transforms and renews the spirit and heart of the repentant sinner. This is an area of shining light, full of hope and trust (see verses 12-21).
We will take time in our reflection to consider the first part of Psalm 51 and examine certain aspects of it at greater length. First of all, however, we wish to make special note of God's marvelous proclamation on Mount Sinai, which is very similar to the portrait of God depicted in the Miserere:“The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity, continuing his kindness for a thousand generations, and forgiving wickedness and crime and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7).
Acknowledging Sin
The psalmist directs his initial cry to God in order to obtain his gift of purification that will make his sins—as the prophet Isaiah said—”white as snow” and“white as wool” even though they are in themselves more like“scarlet” and“crimson red” (see Isaiah 1:18). The psalmist confesses his sin clearly and without hesitation:“For I know my offense … Against you alone have I sinned; I have done such evil in your sight” (Psalm 51:5-6).
Thus, the sinner's own personal consciousness comes into play as he opens his heart to clearly perceive his sinfulness. It is an experience that involves freedom and responsibility, and leads him to admit that he has broken his commitment in order to make an alternate choice in life with regards to God's Word. A radical decision to change ensues. All this is implied in the verb“know,” which in Hebrew includes not only intellectual assent but also a life-giving choice.
Unfortunately, many people do not do this. Origen warns us:“There are some who after having sinned are absolutely at peace and do not give a thought to their sin, nor are they touched by an awareness of the sin they have committed, but live as if it were nothing. These, of course, cannot say, ‘My sin is always before me.’ On the other hand, when a person is consumed and afflicted by his sin after sinning, and is tormented by remorse, he is ceaselessly torn to pieces and endures attacks in his most inner being that confute him, so that he has good reason to exclaim, ‘There is no peace for my bones given the nature of my sins… ‘Therefore, when we see before the eyes of our heart the sins that we have committed, we look at them one by one, acknowledge them, feel ashamed and repent of all that we have done, then, justly upset and frightened, we say that ’There is no peace in our bones given the nature of our sins’” (Omelie sui Salmi, Florence, 1991, pp. 277-279). Acknowledgment and awareness of sin is, therefore, the fruit of sensitivity we acquire thanks to the light of God's Word.
Within the confession of the Miserere there is one particularly marked emphasis: sin is not only considered in its personal and“psychological” dimension, but above all it is considered in its theological quality.“Against you alone have I sinned” (Psalm 51:6), exclaims the sinner. According to tradition, this sinner is David, who is fully conscious of his adultery with Bathsheba and the prophet Nathan's denunciation of this crime and of the murder of her husband, Uriah (see verse 2; 2 Samuel 11-12).
Sin Betrays God
Hence, sin is not merely a psychological or social question, but is something that damages our relationship with God by breaking his law, rejecting his plan for history, upsetting his hierarchy of values, changing“darkness into light, and light into darkness,” and calling“evil good, and good evil” (see Isaiah 5:20). Although it is eventually an offense against man, sin is first and foremost a betrayal of God. The words that the Prodigal Son, who was so reckless with his inheritance, uttered to his father, who was so lavish with his love, are symbolic:“Father, I have sinned against heaven (that is against God) and against you!” (Luke 15:21).
Sin and Man's Nature
At this point the psalmist introduces yet another aspect that is more directly connected with human reality. It is a phrase that has given rise to many interpretations and that has also been linked to the doctrine of original sin:“True, I was born guilty, a sinner, even as my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:7). The psalmist wishes to indicate the presence of evil in the whole of our being, as is evident from his mention of conception and birth, a way to express the whole of existence beginning with its origin. The psalmist, however, does not formally associate this situation with Adam and Eve's sin, and does not speak explicitly of original sin.
Nevertheless, it remains clear from the text of the psalm that evil makes its home in man's innermost being; it is inherent to his historical reality and, because of this, his request for God to intervene with his grace is decisive. The power of God's love overcomes the power of sin, and the disruptive river of evil is less forceful than the fruitful water of forgiveness:“Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more” (Romans 5:20).
The Hope of Salvation
In this way, the psalmist indirectly recalls the theology of original sin and the whole biblical view of sinful man with words that enable us at the same time to perceive the light of grace and of salvation.
We will have an opportunity to discover in the future when we return to this psalm and its subsequent verses that confession of guilt and awareness of one's own misery do not result in terror or an obsession with judgment, but rather in the hope of purification, of deliverance, of new creation.
In fact, God saves us“not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy, he saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the holy Spirit, whom he richly poured out on us through Jesus Christ our savior” (Titus 3:5-6).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Banned Bishop Says Mass by Phone
ASSOCIATED PRESS, May 6—Bishop Jerzy Mazur, a Latin-Rite Catholic bishop from Poland who has been refused re-entry to Russia by that country's government, is saying Mass by telephone for his congregation in Irkutsk, the news service reported.
The bishop's voice is broadcast through the church over loudspeakers, to a congregation, which has been without its pastor since April. Mazur is the second Catholic priest who has been banned from Russia, following the recent ejection of Father Stefano Caprio.
Associated Press traced the heightened tensions between Roman Catholics and the Russian Orthodox Church to native resentment at“the Vatican's decision this year to upgrade four apostolic administrations in Russia to full dioceses.”
Christians Emerge from Hiding in Indonesia
REUTERS, May 6—The pressure has eased for the moment on the Christians of Indonesia, the British news service reported.
In the Christian regions of the Molucca Islands, a weekend of sectarian violence left the city of Ambon a virtual ghost town. Riots on Saturday, May 4, were sparked by the arrest of Islamist leader Jafar Umar Thalib, who may have ties to Osama bin Laden. Two people died and 12 were injured during those protests.
Despite the pause in violence following the weekend's clashes, authorities fear more violence from Thalib's followers, who wish to impose Islamic law on all Indonesians—including the 15% who are Christian, Hindu or animist.
Thalib's arrest was supported by Christian and Muslim clergy alike. A. Polpoke, a leader of Ambon's Muslim clerics visiting Jakarta, said,“Jafar Umar Thalib is clearly against the … peace truce and therefore it is fair enough for him to be arrested.” The Rev. I.W.J. Hendrinks, speaking for local Protestant churchmen, said,“We thank the police.” A spokesman for Laskar Jihad blamed its leader's arrest on U.S. pressure to clamp down on terrorism.
A team of clerics from Ambon visiting Jakarta asked the government not to impose martial law in the Moluccas. Warned Catholic Bishop P.C. Mandagi,“There will be an ethnic cleansing if martial law is imposed.”
Islamist Terror Strikes St. Joseph Festival
CWN NEWS, May 1—Catholics celebrating the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker May 1 were attacked in the village of Notre Dame, near Cotabato City in the southern Philippines, the news service reported. Islamist militants threw grenades into the crowd, killing three and injuring almost 100.
That region of the Philippines has seen sustained terrorist activity by Muslims seeking independence, including several bomb attacks two weeks ago in General Santos City that claimed 15 lives. A man claimed responsibility for those attacks on behalf of the Abu Sayyaf Muslim guerrillas, which according to CWNews is“a group which has been linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Allies in Wonderland DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:At the United Nations, it was an unlikely alliance: The United States, the Holy See and Muslim countries like Sudan, Iran and Pakistan stood together to defend the family at a special session of the General Assembly on Children in mid-May. It was also an effective one.
As is eerily the case with so many of the things that the United Nations does, abortion and the proper definition of the family took center stage at the special session.
It was gratifying to see America on the right side of those questions for a change. In the past, the Holy See and Catholic and Muslim countries were united against a pro-abortion coalition led by the United States.
The pro-abortion side also gathered a strange coalition. Delegates from the European Union and Canada have been reliably pro-abortion for years. But this year, they had the Latin American delegates more solidly in their pockets than ever before—the representatives of the very countries whose residents are most pro-life.
Together, they were pushing U.N. member countries to commit to a far-reaching agenda that attacks the family in the most fundamental ways. On the table were policies that would call homosexual relationships“families,” policies that would promote abortion to children as young as 10, policies that would encourage countries' abortion laws to be disregarded. At one point, a UNICEF book for children that suggested kids try various sexual practices was touted. When it got media attention, it was hastily withdrawn.
In the strange culture that reigns at the United Nations, delegates promote horrific ideas as if they were they were commonplace. In order to do so, they have created their own special vocabulary, and policies rise or fall based on its use or misuse.
For instance,“reproductive health services” has been universally regarded for years to be code language for abortion. But it was never publicly acknowledged to have any reference to abortion. When European delegates wanted to promote abortion but didn't want to have to debate abortion, they pushed for“reproductive health services,” confident that abortion would follow in due course.
But in U.N. meetings last June, a Canadian delegate slipped and admitted that the phrase included abortion. So the European delegates had to abandon the phrase at this month's U.N. summit—thanks to the persistence of the Bush administration.
In another example of doublespeak gone awry, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston, Texas, committed a pro-abortion faux pas when she criticized the White House.“There needs to be flexibility on life,” she said of the Bush anti-abortion stance. Oops. Does that mean the congresswoman believes that unborn children are“lives”? A person close to Jackson Lee, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Washington Times that the remarks were intended to urge“more flexibility on family planning.”
Thus, the United Nations can be like an Alice in Wonderland place, a place where delegates from anti-Catholic Sudan join forces with the Vatican, where Americans make friends with the Axis of Evil's friends, where it is impolite to acknowledge the plain meanings of words.
But the reason for the strangeness is simple. The United Nations has attempted to promote policies that are so shameful that unlikely coalitions oppose them, so heinous that clear explanations will only hurt their chances.
Catholics in America can be doubly thankful for our representation at the summit. The Holy See, as always, argued valiantly for life. And it didn't have to fight America in doing so, for a change.
Before the children's summit, there was some question as to whether the Bush administration would do the right thing by the family at the United Nations. For now, the question is closed. Thank you, President Bush.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Scalia is No Kissling
Archbishop Chaput's comments about “Cafeteria Catholicism” were disturbing (“Denver's Archbishop Chaput: Cafeteria Catholicism Found in All Flavors,” April 21-27).
His analogy comparing the actions of Justice Antonin Scalia to Frances Kissling, infamous abortion promoter, borders on calumny toward Justice Scalia. Ms. Kissling promotes the killing of innocent children, whereas Justice Scalia merely commented on a recent papal proclamation that the death penalty is nearly always wrong. The archbishop did indicate that abortion and the death penalty “don't have equivalent moral gravity.” However, the impression remains that the actions of Scalia and Kissling were equivalent and Justice Scalia should be quiet, as a “good Catholic” would.
Archbishop Chaput further states that “nothing can wound the Church more deeply than the sins and indifference of her own people, especially people in the ministry.” Very true, but had we “good Catholics” been more encouraged to speak out, much of this current pain now taking place in Boston could possibly have been avoided.
The pro and con discussion in the Register is a wonderful thing. Please publish more of it, including the otherwise inspiring words of the good archbishop.
CLETUS TAUER
Luck, Wisconsin
Editor's note: We would only note that, when the alternative is to dissent publicly from the teaching of a papal encyclical, it probably is best for a good Catholic to remain quiet.
Mother Church Needs You
As much as I am saddened by the recent struggles that our Holy Church and priests are having, I am just as deeply disturbed by the people and organizations who are denying their Catholic faith and joining the media-driven “pile-on” that is occurring.
I was especially shocked to read in the papers the comments of Maureen March, a representative of Catholic Charities in the Boston area. While lamenting the drop-off in donations, she stated that people need to understand that the organization had little “official” connection with the Church, and most of the people it serves are not Catholic.
Huh? Is this not the same organization that solicits funds from the loyal Catholic population? That inserts donation envelopes in with our weekly parish [budget envelopes]? That usually places a picture of a member of the clergy on their advertising? Although Ms. March maybe technically correct, the fact that she stated this shows that the organization is not willing to embrace the Catholic moniker it so deftly has utilized to its benefit in the past. This episode brings to my mind Peter's denial of Jesus during his time of need.
Of course, none of this began just with the recent events. Some of our Catholic colleges and universities, one of which I am a graduate of, have routinely engaged in acts counter to what faithful Catholics stand for.
The presentation of filthy plays, facilitation of pro-abortion speakers on campus and secular coursework have been defended by these institutes as providing “culture” and “open discourse” on the campuses. Leading Catholic politicians bend their knee to the U.S. Constitution instead of the Gospels through their support of abortionists and activities that are against the teachings of our faith. All of these groups and peoples through their actions have turned their back on the very Church that has nurtured their growth and provided them the support that they needed. Furthermore, they have begun to join the circus concerning the “scandal,” wringing their hands in public over the troubles involving “their” Church and actively looking for scapegoats.
What our Church does not need are people and organizations with clay feet who turn away and deny the Church at the slightest difficulty.
Did the Church ever turn from you? When you were experiencing difficulties, was not the Church there for you, providing comfort? When you celebrated your marriage, was not the Church there for you to share in the sacrament? When you baptized your children, did not the Church open its arms with joy? When a loved one died, did not the Church provide solace?
I could go on. The point is that the Church has always been (and will be) there for us. Now we need to be there for her. We need to provide understanding and patience, comfort and support; we need to pray for her. She is hurting, and needs a shoulder to help her get through this period of difficulty. We need to stand together now, more that ever, to defend our faith and our Church, and not hide with embarrassment or search for someone to blame.
NEIL BROWN
Fairview, Texas
Father Fessio's Legacy
I'm writing to add my voice to that of David L. Schindler in praise and admiration for a good priest—Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio (“Father Fessio's Obedience,” Letters, May 5-11).
In 1978, he lured my son from Philadelphia to the new St. Ignatius Institute at the University of San Francisco. My son enjoyed only one and a half years of study there, but it was probably the most important 18 months of his life. He formed true, Catholic values based on sound, authentic Catholic teaching. The institute was a jewel of the Catholic faith, sparkling with sound doctrine and the classic writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. The friendships he formed there have endured until today, including that of Father Fessio. He witnessed the early birth pains of the Ignatius Press, founded by Father Fessio. Today, you can be sure of solid Catholic teaching and values in all their publications.
I think it's a sad day for our Church when the Jesuits, who were founded to defend the pope and the magisterium of the Church, sink to the low of silencing those who, like Father Fessio, would speak out for the truth. His obedience to his superiors speaks volumes. I pray Campion College will flourish like the Ignatius Institute without the interference of “the Jesuits.”
LINDA IRELAND
Philadelphia
Vatican II and You
I'm responding to your excellent editorial “Vatican II Calling” (April 21-27).
I have lived in the aftermath of Vatican II my entire adult life and could never understand until I became a member of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps why so many priests and religious left their ministries. The answer is this: Many people who go into a very strong institution (such as the Church or the Army) and are told on a daily basis what to do, are unable to succeed in civilian life. In other words, they are not self-disciplined. They did not internalize the values taught when they were children. Therefore, when Vatican II came along, it was interpreted to mean there were no more rules to follow. Hence the exodus.
That, of course was never the intent of Vatican II and, as your editor correctly points out, many of the dissenters in the Church never actually read the documents of Vatican II. Nor did most of the faithful. They are beautifully written and meant to make the Church an institution able to cope with the modern world we live in. It also doesn't help when certain conservative Catholic booksellers publish books whose authors oppose Vatican II. I encourage all Catholics and non-Catholics to read the documents of Vatican II in their entirety.
SISTER GERALDINE MARIE WAGNER, O.P., R.N.
Lompoc, California
Santorum Fan
When I first heard about the “Santorum language” in Benjamin Wiker's commentary (“Will ‘Santorum Language’ Save Us From Scientific Fundamentalism?”) in the issue of April 21-27, hope leaped up like a fire.
For won't U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum's legislative language also require that every student of elementary biology be taught the scientifically incontrovertible fact that the occupant of a mother's womb is a genetically unique and complete individual?
Genetically complete in that it has the same scientific identification (DNA) as it will have when born and throughout life; genetically unique in that no one, not even the mother, has identical DNA. This has been known for years, but not taught because of secular fundamentalism, which labeled such simple scientific fact “too controversial.”
Once this becomes known, every high school sophomore will be able to see through the abortion industry's “blob of tissue” argument, because there is no such thing as tissue without DNA.
Thank You, God; thank you, Sen. Santorum!
ROSALIE DANCAUSE
Dumfries, Virginia
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Public Libraries as Mission Fields DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Last night I read your article about the town that donated books to the public library in order to make them more accessible to Catholics in the area (“Finding Faith at the Library” April 21-28). What a brilliant idea!
I would like to do the same thing in my town. Could you provide me the list of materials that they bought and/or put me in touch with the person who organized this effort? I bet there are others who read the Register and would like to copy this great idea—maybe you could make the list public somehow.
KERRY HENNESSEY
Wakefield, Massachusetts
Editor's note: See the following letter …
I enjoyed your April 21-28 article on adding Catholic books to public library collections. Adding books to public library collections is important because I have found that the books I suggested for the public library were circulating 100 times as fast as those in the parish library.
As a result of my suggestions, about 40 Catholic and Christian books have been added to several libraries in my area.
Readers can learn how to suggest Catholic books, and which books to suggest, at my Web site—geocities.com/richleebruce.
I like to suggest spiritual classics like The Story of a Soul and The Imitation of Christ. These works have the three c's . They will be added to the collection, they circulate, they convert. One woman in the parish said the library copies of these books were responsible for her conversion.
RICHARD BRUCE
Portland, Oregon
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Racial Profiling: Good, Bad Or Morally Neutral? DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Since Sept. 11, many Arab-Americans have stated their belief that racial profiling has taken center stage in the war against terrorism.
Groups such as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab-American Institute and the Council on American Islamic Relations have charged that immigration and law officials have been detaining Arab immigrants more readily, often secretly and without solid evidence. Information released so far by the Justice Department confirms that most of the detainees in the war are from Middle Eastern or Central Asian countries.
Racial profiling is an extremely contentious issue. For many people in our country, the idea of singling out individuals because of their race stirs up painful memories of injustices from the past. And, whether or not the allegations of racial profiling prove true, every accusation raises serious moral questions for anyone who takes the Gospel seriously. Among these: Is profiling in itself unjust and morally unacceptable? May the state resort to racial profiling in times of national crisis such as war?
To answer these questions, we need to clarify what may be considered profiling.
The concept of profiling entails collecting information regarding a person's race—or sex, age, nationality, appearance, culture, education or some other distinguishing personal characteristic—to gauge the likelihood of a certain type of behavior.
Therefore, the term racial profiling is somewhat misleading because it suggests that race is the only factor taken into account.
What the term should indicate is that race is one factor among many when compiling information concerning a subset of the population. Profiling, properly understood, considers many aspects of a particular group of people.
Now we can answer the first question: Is profiling in itself unjust and morally unacceptable?
The action of gathering data on a given group of people is, in itself, neither good nor bad. The use of this information could be used, however, with a good or bad intentions. For example, a person of a certain age, race, habits and medical history may be much more susceptible to a given illness than others. Profiling in this situation could help doctors watch for early symptoms of a particular disease. This is a moral good.
On the other hand, if information on a given group of people is used by an organization with the intention to harass or abuse those people, this is unjust and morally unacceptable. Therefore, from a moral viewpoint, profiling is not bad in itself. It's more accurate to say that it can be bad, depending on how it is used.
Is it unjust for our government to‘profile’ Arab Muslims who live in the United States?
Now comes the most controversial question: Is it unjust and, therefore, morally unacceptable for our government, as a strategic part of the war on terrorism, to profile Arab Muslims who live in the United States (and those who want to come here)? To answer this question, we need to consider the action of the government, the intention of the government and the circumstances surrounding the action of the government.
Many Arab Muslims contend that the govern-ment's action to focus on their community is unjust and upholds the erroneous principle of guilt by association.
The government's decision to pay special attention to Arab Muslims seems to stem from the reasoned supposition that Arab Muslims educated in certain places with particular ideas are far more likely to engage in terrorist activities than other individuals.
This action, in itself, does not appear to be unjust or unreasonable.
Why? Because the government's intention is not to harass or humiliate Arab Muslims—but to protect its citizens from a future terrorist attack. This intention is consistent with any state's right to protect the common good of its own people. The Catechism of the Catholic Church appears to support this principle:
“The common good requires peace, that is, the stability and security of a just order. It presupposes that authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defense” (No. 1909).
If some Arab Muslims have had to undergo serious inconveniences, such as questioning or temporal detention, it would be due to the gravity of the circumstances. Consequently, any negative experience suffered by Arab Muslims is not deliberately willed, but permitted as an indirect effect.
Given these considerations, the government's recent actions in the name of homeland security do not seem unjust or immoral. Nonetheless, particular cases and practical aspects of profiling will always need to be closely considered to avoid any possible abuses.
Profiling is a double-edged sword. It can be used for good or evil. It should be held in hands that are virtuous.
Legionary Father Andrew McNair teaches at
Mater Ecclesiae International Center of Studies in Greenville, Rhode Island.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew McNair Lc ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Anthropology Afoul of the Facts DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:In 1928, Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa. An immediate success, this slender volume established Mead as the most famous and most influential anthropologist of the 20th century. For nearly half a century, whether writing scholarly articles from her desk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York or pontificating as contributing editor of the popular magazine Redbook, Mead helped to refashion attitudes on nearly every social issue. In 1979, a year after her death, Mead was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Few women have been more adored, more honored and more influential than she.
If Mead's influence were for the good, then she would deserve the profuse praise she received. The truth about Mead, however, points elsewhere. Coming of Age in Samoa, perhaps more than any other work, helped to convince the intelligentsia of the West that the only natural expression of sexuality was casual sexuality. Even more distressing, Mead's work in Samoa, which allegedly established the naturalness of casual sex, was a work of fraud and fiction, merely a projection of Mead's own sexual beliefs.
Science—or Shenanigans?
Mead portrayed Samoa, a small island in the South Pacific, as a sexual paradise, free from all the oppressive restrictions of sexuality burdening the west. According to Mead, “Romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealously and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa.”
Perhaps Mead's most famous picture of this sexual paradise was that of the casual lovers rendezvousing “under the palm trees.” In her famous description of “A Day in Samoa,” she painted the following tantalizing scene: “As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place.”
As one might have guessed, according to Mead, Samoans took marriage lightly. “If … a wife really tires of her husband, or a husband of his wife,” she wrote, “divorce is a simple and informal matter, the non-resident simply going home to his or her family, and the relationship is said to have ‘passed away.’” Mead's Samoans had quick and easy no-fault divorce in place long before the backward West caught on.
The “only dissenters,” according to Mead, “are the [Christian] missionaries.” But Mead's Samoans happily ignore them, so that the missionaries' “protests are considered unimportant.” Even though missionaries had “introduced a moral premium on chastity,” the “Samoans regard this attitude with reverent but complete skepticism and the concept of celibacy is absolutely meaningless to them.”
Indeed, Mead claimed that although Samoans had been Christians since the 1840s, the Christianity they actually accepted was “gently remoulded” by being filtered through the carefree and casual attitude of Samoan life, so that “its sterner tenets” were blunted, resulting in a liberalized form of Christianity “without the doctrine of original sin.”
Mead ended her study of the Samoans by stating the underlying goal which had animated the entire work, a call for release from the moral strictures of a society still formed by Christianity. “At the present time,” she claimed, “we live in a period of transition,” still, unfortunately, believing “that only one standard can be the right one.” The sexual revolution must begin in the home. “The children must be taught how to think, not what to think. And because old errors die slowly, they must be taught tolerance, just as today they are taught intolerance. They must be taught that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative.”
Contrary to Mead's assertions, the Samoans, once converted by missionaries, became almost fanatical in their practice and observance of Christianity.
Research as Romantic Fiction
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this chapter of popular scholarship, looking back on it, is that, despite its aura of scientific authority, Mead's influential account of Samoa as a sexual “paradise” was almost completely false. Yet it was not until 1983 that the myth of Mead was exploded.
The blow was delivered by Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Freeman, an anthropologist and professor at the Australian National University for 40 years, showed step by step that nearly every assertion made by Mead in Coming of Age was either completely false or severely distorted. “The main conclusions of Coming of Age in Samoa are, in reality, the figments of an anthropological myth which is deeply at variance with the facts of Samoan ethnography and history,” Freeman wrote.
As it turns out, Mead completely mis-represented Samoan sexual attitudes and practices both before and after Christianity. Rather than being a society built on promiscuity, the entire civilization was actually built on the veneration of virginity, a devotion that Christianity only intensified.
For Samoans, there were no women more esteemed than the ceremonial virgins (called taupous), whose virginity at the time of marriage was so important that Samoans had an elaborate pre-marital, public ritual to determine virginity.
Furthermore, as Freeman shows, this regard for virginity was not confined to the upper classes from which the taupous came, but permeated the entire society, down to the lower levels—the levels Mead claimed were sexually the freest.
Casual sexual liaisons under the palm tree, rather than being smiled upon, were (when they actually did occur) “recognized by all concerned as shameful departures from the well-defined ideal of chastity.” Finally, contrary to Mead, marital exclusivity was taken with the utmost seriousness by the Samoans. Adultery was punished by beating, mutilation or even death.
As for Mead's assertions that the Samoans paid only “the slightest attention to religion,” this claim contradicted the actual, fervently religious nature of the Samoans both before and after Christianization. According to Freeman, pre-Christian Samoans were devoted polytheists, with very intricate and elaborate religious beliefs and rites. After being converted by missionaries in the mid-19th century, they became “almost fanatical in their practice and observance of Christianity.”
Also, in complete contradiction to Mead's claim that the Samoans were guilt-free, and that they quickly dispatched with Christian notions of original sin, Samoans themselves informed Freeman that “sinfulness, or agasala (literally, behavior in contravention of some divine or chiefly ruling and so deserving of punishment), is a basic Samoan concept antedating the arrival of Christianity, and, further, that the doctrine of original sin contained in Scripture is something with which, as converts to Christianity, they have long been familiar.”
In regard to Mead's fantasy-images of casual sex, Christianity only elevated the Samoan regard for sexual purity, the result being that “fornication is strictly forbidden to all church members and any suspicion of indulgence in this is in’ results in expulsion from the church.” In short, as Freeman concludes, it should “be apparent that Samoa, where the cult of female virginity is probably carried to a greater extreme than in any other culture known to anthropology, was scarcely the place to situate a paradise of adolescent free love.”
How could Mead get it so wrong? Simply put, it appears her desire to eliminate restrictions upon her own sexuality determined her conclusions about that of the Samoans. For Mead, science was a form of autobiography, as is clear from her own life. She was married and divorced three times, apparently with the ease which she falsely claimed was characteristic of the Samoans; she engaged in numerous affairs with the same casualness of the fictional youth slipping off to the palm trees at dusk; and she was also bisexual as were the Samoans in her fantasy work Coming of Age.
How ironic that Margaret Mead's anthropological myth, masquerading as science, could help to bring about a real sexual revolution, leading the west not only to casual sex and casual divorce, but the scourge of abortion. Such are the ways of the culture of death.
Ben Wiker teaches philosophy of science
at Franciscan University of
Steubenville (Ohio).
----- EXCERPT: Margaret Mead's Flights of Fancy in Samoa ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ben Wiker ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Canadian Catholics Share Americans' Pain;and Hope DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Canadian Catholics are watching the unfolding of the clergy-abuse story south of the border and in Rome with a mixed sense of unease and déjà vu.
One decade ago, the Church in Canada occupied the quagmire in which the
Church in America is currently mired, after a nationally publicized sex-abuse scandal forced Canadian bishops to confront issues whose ramifications are still being felt today.
This fall, the Canadian bishops will revisit the report they produced ten years ago—and they'll try to ensure 1990s guidelines hold up in light of 21st-century realities. It's a cautionary tale for the American Church that, even with recommendations in place, keeping them relevant and effective is a never-ending task.
Canada's clergy-abuse scandal began in the 1980s at Newfoundland's Mount Cashel orphanage. Several priests and brothers at the orphanage were convicted of sexually abusing youths, which led to revelations of child sexual abuse across the country.
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops at the time described the reactions of Canadians in words that will seem familiar to Americans today. People are “angry, ashamed, hurt and disillusioned,” says Archbishop Roger Ebacher, who chaired the bishops' ad hoc committee on child sexual abuse. “The offenders have done great damage to the victims and their families, to the Christian communities where the abuse occurred, to their fellow priests and brothers and to the whole Church.”
The commission published two reports, the main one TITLEd “From Pain to Hope,” which resolved to “break through the wall of silence” protecting abusers. Its 50 recommendations ranged from requiring immediate investigation and reporting of abuse claims, to mandating basic sex abuse protocols in every diocese.
For Msgr. Peter Schonenbach, general secretary of the CCCB, the decision to review the decade-old guidelines recognizes that “a lot of things have changed over 10 years.” High on the list is one the American Church is grappling with—especially now that the U.S. cardinals have met with the Pope on the matter: What to do with priests who have taken advantage of their flock through sexual abuse. It's one thing to establish protocols requiring transparency and reporting to authorities. It's another to determine what becomes of the offender after punishment and treatment.
“We really didn't discuss too much just what to do with priests or religious who have been accused, who perhaps have had some type of punishment,” says Msgr. Schonenbach.
That became apparent in January in the western Canadian diocese of Calgary. Parishioners at a suburban church were stunned to learn their newly assigned priest had a sexual-abuse background involving a 16-year-old altar boy in the 1980s. Although the priest was treated, he later re-established contact with the former altar boy and was found guilty of sexual assault. He was eventually given a fresh start in Calgary. Unfortunately, nobody informed parishioners about his past and, when someone in the congregation recognized the priest from Ontario, parishioners exploded. Calgary Bishop Frederick Henry removed the priest and publicly apologized for not advising parishioners about his background, explaining that he felt the priest no longer posed a risk.
The Calgary incident suggests that, good as guidelines are, there may remain gaps. No one keeps statistics on how many of Canada's 72 dioceses have implemented recommendations from the 1992 report, but “the vast majority” have protocols in place to handle sexual abuse allegations quickly and visibly, says Msgr. Schonenbach. “Every diocese has something in place,” he adds. “Every diocese, every bishop, subscribes to the idea that things have to be transparent, that we have to act quickly on things, and there should never be cover-up.”
Vancouver Archbishop Adam Exner, a member of the ad-hoc committee 10 years ago, said recently that the guidelines have been “very, very helpful in aiding dioceses to cope with reported cases more openly and more expeditiously.” He urged the American Church to develop protocols “suited to their own condition, so that we get away from this idea of simply moving one problem from one place to another without really handling it.”
On a practical level, the Canadian Church is up against demographic and geographic realities that could also prove challenging for American bishops.
There are immense differences between the Archdiocese of Toronto and tiny Whitehorse in the Yukon. “We have maybe 15 or so large, urban dioceses,” says Msgr. Schonenbach. “But the rest are kind of spread all over the place,” requiring different policy models.
One possibility is that the Canadian bishops could issue a decree instructing dioceses on how to respond to abuse allegations.
Once approved by Rome, it would have the force of law. It's probably high time for such a move, says Msgr. Schonenbach, to give people “a real sense that this is being taken seriously.”
Considering the amount of effort and time that has been expended on the task of drafting and implementing a national policy, there is bewilderment that the issue remains a long way from being vanquished, on either side of the border. “I think we can say quite frankly that we thought the whole thing was pretty well in shape,” Msgr. Schonenbach says. “I was really astounded to hear how so many dioceses in the U.S. were still operating more or less in a case-by-case vacuum.”
There's a general sense in Canada that there has been more time to heal and implement solutions here. “I do feel that the Canadian bishops really tried to put their house in order about 10 years ago,” says Msgr. Schonenbach.
Still, the Canadian Church also remains painfully aware that it is not immune from potential scandal. As Calgary Catholics recently discovered, a diocese is only as safe as its current policies are effective.
Paul Schratz, editor of the B.C.
Catholic, writes from Vancouver.
The reports “Breach of Trust, Breach of Faith” and “From Pain to Hope” can be ordered from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Call (613) 241-7538 or e-mail publi@cccb.ca.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Paul Schratz ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Priestly Celibacy and Its Roots in Christ DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Father Thomas McGovern, a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei in Dublin, is the author of “Priestly Celibacy Today.” He was interviewed recently by Register staff writer John Burger on issues about celibacy raised by the current sex abuse crisis.
Why is it that among the general population celibacy is in some way seen to be at the root of the sex abuse problem?
For some time there have been insistent calls for the abolition of “compulsory” celibacy in editorials and feature articles in the print media, and in TV and chat show commentary. Underlying much of this crusade is the assumption of a direct causal link between celibacy and sexual deviance. Yet at no time has any solid scientific or statistical evidence been offered to substantiate this claim.
Nevertheless, as a result of saturation coverage of some clerical sexual scandals in the media, many people seem to have been persuaded into thinking that there must be some intrinsic connection between celibacy and sexual immorality, and that it is widespread among the clergy. Indeed Pope John Paul II has referred to “a systematic propaganda which is hostile to celibacy” and “which finds support and complicity in some of the mass media.”
In our contemporary sex-saturated culture, the very notion of a celibate lifestyle is incomprehensible to many people. For them celibacy is seen as a form of repression, a stunting of the natural growth of personality, leading to frustration and deep sense of psychological and emotional isolation. When this caricature of celibacy is fostered, then it is not difficult to see why people would begin to associate it with the current problems.
Consequently, as John Paul II affirms his 1992 document, Pastores Dabo Vobis, on the formation of priests, there is a great need today to present and explain the charism of celibacy “in the fullness of its biblical, theological and spiritual richness.”
How in fact does the Church understand celibacy? What is the connection between celibacy and priesthood?
To understand celibacy we have first to look to Jesus Christ. The link between priesthood and celibacy was first established in him. By remaining celibate, Jesus went against the socio-cultural and religious climate of his time, since in the Jewish environment no condition was so much deprecated as that of a man who had no descendants. By freeing himself from the claims of family, Christ was totally available to do his Father's will, to establish the new family of the children of God.
The priestly vocation is a personal grace by which a young man is called to share in the priesthood of Christ. Implicit in this call is the grace to imitate Jesus in his celibacy, drawn by the example and the mystery of Christ. Celibacy is a wellspring of spiritual energy that enables the priest to live a very fruitful and fulfilled life.
By sacramental ordination every priest is configured to Jesus and shares his priesthood in such an intimate way that he acts in the person of Christ. The sacrament of orders gives the priest a share in the mystery of Christ as spouse of the Church—as in Ephesians 5:23-31. The priest, as icon of Christ, has then to love the Church with the same spousal love, loving her with an exclusive, sacrificial love which results in all the fruitfulness of spiritual paternity, generating new children of God through his sacramental and pastoral ministry. This, according to John Paul II in Pastores Dabo Vobis, is the basic theological reason for celibacy.
Does celibacy involve a sacrifice?
Responding to a celibate vocation is a decision based on faith. At the ceremony of the diaconate, when he makes his solemn promise to remain celibate and consecrate his whole life to God, the candidate for holy orders knows that Christ is asking a lot of him. However, he accepts the consequences of his promise secure in the knowledge that he will never lack the graces he needs to overcome any difficulties he may encounter in his priestly life.
The calling does not eliminate the sacrifice involved in giving up the attraction to conjugal love in this life and the joyful prospect of setting up a family. Nevertheless, implicit in the response to God's call is the readiness to share in the sacrifice involved in building up the kingdom of heaven on earth. By living out his vocation fully, the priest manifests that Christ is sufficiently rich and great to fill the heart of man.
By his celibacy he lets it be known that henceforth he expects everything from God, the Creator of all love, in whose hands he places his human completion and his human fruitfulness. As a result, celibacy makes a constant appeal to the priest to live in intimacy with Christ.
A commitment to celibacy is in no way a rejection of the value of human sexuality. Indeed, as John Paul II has strikingly affirmed, it is precisely the person who understands the full potential for self-giving which marriage offers, who can best make a mature offering of himself in celibacy.
The priest who lives for Christ, and from Christ, usually has no insurmountable difficulties with celibacy. He is not immune to the normal temptations of the flesh but, as a result of the daily cultivation of his spiritual life, and the prudent distancing of himself from anything which could constitute a danger to his chastity, he will encounter great joy in his vocation and experience a deep spiritual paternity in bringing spiritual life to souls. As a consequence of celibacy, his heart is free to love others in an inclusive way.
Would a married clergy solve the vocations problem which many dioceses are experiencing today?
It is often suggested that if the Church had a discipline of optional celibacy many more young men would be attracted to the priest-hood. This claim is not supported either by experience or objective data. While it is true that there has been a serious decline in priestly vocations in the developed countries of the West, this is not the case in other parts of the world. In Africa the number of seminarians, diocesan and religious, increased fivefold between 1970 and 1997. There was a three-fold increase in Central and South America in the same period, while candidates for the priesthood in South East Asia more than doubled.
Yet, there are good reasons for hope in the West as we can see from the healthy developments in some dioceses in the U.S. and elsewhere. Peoria [Ill.], Arlington [Va.], Denver and Lincoln [Neb.] have been singularly successful in attracting young men to the priest-hood. Atlanta, which in 1985 had nine seminarians, now boasts 61. Another diocese with a healthy seminary situation is Omaha, Neb.—56 men ordained between 1991-98 for a diocese of 215,000 Catholics. Mount St. Mary's seminary in Emmitsburg, and seminaries like those in Denver and Lincoln are thriving with the increased influx of vocations.
What all this says is that there are plenty of young men ready and willing to give their lives to Christ if they are challenged in the right way. John Paul II himself has been a great promoter of priestly vocations because of his compelling witness to a priesthood which reflects the person of Christ so clearly.
He generates a deep conviction about priestly identity—this is why he attracts many young men to the priesthood. It was in this context that Cardinal Baum said the present Holy Father is “the best vocation director the Church has ever had.” It is not without significance that in Europe as a whole vocations have increased significantly since John Paul II's accession to the papacy in 1978.
Pope Paul VI said it simply was not possible to demonstrate that the abolition of ecclesiastical celibacy would considerably increase the number of priestly vocations. The contrary seems to be proven by those churches and ecclesial communities which allow ministers to marry.
The cause of the decrease in vocations is, he tells us, to be found elsewhere, especially in the fact that individuals and families have lost their sense of God, and their esteem for the Church as the institution willed by Christ for the salvation of men.
This phenomenon is a particular expression of a much more widespread condition of lack of faith and lack of vibrant Christian families. Indeed, in this post-Vatican II era, it is only when evangelization promotes Christian commitment as a vocation for all that the ground will be adequately prepared for the fostering of the particular vocation to the priesthood.
What sorts of challenges does celibacy present to the individual priest, and do these challenges change over time?
Priestly celibacy is a call to a special friendship with Christ, a call to holiness. John Paul II, when he recently ordained 20 priests for the diocese of Rome told them very directly, “the Lord wants you to be saints.”
A vocation to holiness requires daily effort and, for the priest, the commitment to celibacy is an integral part of that quest for sanctity. It is interesting to note that the U.S. cardinals, in their final statement about the Rome meeting April 23-24, made their own the challenge of the Holy Father that the present crisis had to “lead to a holier priest-hood.”
The chastity which goes with priestly celibacy is not something which is acquired once and for all. It is, as for all Christians, the result of daily effort. Because he is a normally constituted person, the priest is going to experience at times the brittleness of his virtue, the tug of his passions or the renewed attraction of married life.
Yet the wisdom and experience of the Church offer him all the necessary resources to achieve holiness. Daily prayer, love for the Eucharist, a spirit of self-denial, frequent confession and devotion to Our Lady are some of the tried and tested means which will give the priest joy and fulfilment in his vocation. In addition, if a priest has regular spiritual counselling, he will find it a powerful help to overcome any difficulties in the area of celibacy.
Personal spiritual guidance is an opportunity for communicating at the deepest and most intimate level of our being. It provides an awareness of being understood, supported and appreciated. This relationship is a powerful defense against the dangers of pessimism and frustration which can undermine the commitment of the priest.
In today's environment the enticements to sensuality which are purveyed by TV and advertising, by immodesty and bad example, are an opportunity for the priest, as well as for others, to make constant decisions in favour of purity of mind and heart, especially through guard of sight. As Christ reminds us, “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.”
What influence does our contemporary culture have on the idea of celibacy?
Celibacy, which calls into question the reductionist philosophy of man spread abroad by our culture of scientism, is a challenge to that incapacity to make a permanent commitment which seems to be a characteristic of contemporary culture.
This inability to commit oneself irrevocably is demonstrated, particularly in the Western world, by the increasing rate of marriage breakdown and divorce, as well as by the rise in the number of couples living together without any binding commitment, civil or ecclesiastical. This is the result of a breakdown in basic social relationships where values such as loyalty, friendship and a spirit of service have less and less significance.
Love as self-giving is replaced by love as possession, where the other is regarded as an object of sexual fulfilment rather than a person to be cherished for themselves. In addition, the process whereby the sense of human fatherhood has been diminished or obscured in contemporary culture, has contributed to an impoverished understanding of the spiritual fatherhood of the priest.
Clearly, education has a decisive role in determining the type of people our society produces. If children learn little about self-denial or a spirit of service through self-giving to others, they will have limited capacity to understand and accept the sacrificial love which is required to live celibacy, or, indeed, to respond generously to the full implications of marriage as a Christian vocation and a way to holiness.
Many of the arguments against celibacy derive from the secular and Freudian idea that unless a person enjoys sexual fulfilment he is somehow diminished or is likely to be emotionally or psychologically unbalanced, a sort of freak in the modern hedonistic culture. In a world where the definition of man is strongly influenced by such presup positions, and where more importance is given to psychological and sociological models of the human person than to those drawn from biblical revelation, there is a real need for seminarians to be deeply formed in Christian anthropology. It is only in the light of divine revelation, culminating in the Incarnation of the Word, that we can fully appreciate the unique value of the call to celibacy, and have the audacity to proclaim it as a great good.
It is often argued that, since celibacy is not a datum of divine revelation but merely a matter of ecclesiastical discipline and canon law, it can be abrogated at any time? How valid is this attitude?
Recent scholarship on the history of celibacy in both the Eastern and Western Church has shown that there is a considerable body of evidence in favor of the argument that priestly celibacy is of apostolic origin, based on Christ's invitation to the Twelve to leave all things and follow him. Indeed, John Paul II points out in his 1979 Holy Thursday Letter to Priests that celibacy is so closely linked to the language of the Gospel that it refers back to the teaching of Christ and to apostolic tradition.
What is clear from Scripture, from the early history of the Church, the writings of the Fathers, and the witness of many clerics, is that there has always been a tradition of priestly celibacy in the Church. This tradition was approved and spread by various provincial councils and popes.
It was promoted, defended and restored in successive eras of the first millennium of the history of the Church, although it frequently encountered opposition from the clergy themselves and the worldly values of a decadent society. Apart from the historical argument, the theological justification for celibacy has gained considerable ground since Vatican II, not least in the writings of John Paul II.
Consequently the idea that clerical celibacy is merely an ecclesiastical discipline is an argument that becomes progressively less convincing. As if anticipating the current questioning of celibacy, John Paul II, in Pastores Dabo Vobis, said that he did “not wish to leave any doubts in the mind of anyone regarding the Church's firm will to maintain the law that demands perpetual and freely chosen celibacy for present and future candidates for priestly ordination in the Latin rite.”
Can it not be argued that by imposing celibacy, the Church infringes the rights of the individual?
The objection that the Church, by “imposing” celibacy, offends the rights of individuals has no real basis. In the first place no candidate for the priesthood has a subjective right to be ordained.
The priestly vocation is a gift God can bestow on whom he pleases, irrespective of the merits of the individual. Secondly, those who are called to the priesthood accept with full freedom the discipline of celibacy laid down by the Church. This they do after several years of preparation and prayerful reflection, at an age when they are fully capable of making a mature decision.
Can the Church “impose” celibacy? The Church responds to the guidance of the Holy Spirit who is active within it and leads it into all truth. In this sense it is perfectly enTITLEd—drawing on its experience, its tradition and the witness of celibacy lived to the full down through the centuries—to require its priests to be celibate. Certainly, in doing so, it is asking more than is humanly justifiable.
However, the Church is not a human organization. It has a divine origin and has been given powerful supernatural means of grace and charisms of the Holy Spirit, which justify it making the audacious claim that in the Latin rite it is God's will that its ministers should be celibate, and that in giving a vocation to the priesthood the Holy Spirit also endows it with the charism of celibacy.
At the same time the point has to be made that the Church obliges nobody to celibacy. The seminary years are an opportunity for the candidate for orders to reach a mature decision concerning his vocation to celibacy as a result of the specific formation he receives there. The seminary authorities have a complementary role to play in helping the student come to a conclusion about the authenticity of his vocation to the celibate priesthood. There is no pressure on the candidate to go ahead. On the contrary, he will be discouraged from doing so if there is any reasonable doubt about his aptitudes or suitability.
How valid is the argument that celibacy was imposed in the Middle Ages in order to prevent married clergy handing down Church property to their sons?
This argument is invalid because it results from a confusion of several distinct but related elements in Church history which need to be clarified. In the first millennium of the Church, apart from single men who came forward for ordination, many candidates for the priesthood were already married.
Nevertheless, a precondition for these men to be ordained was a commitment to perpetual continence in their subsequent married life. Church legislation on this requirement for married higher clergy—bishops, priests and deacons—goes back to the Council of Elvira, in the year 305 or thereabouts.
On the other hand, a single man, once he was ordained a priest, could not marry subsequently if he wished to continue in the ministry—this was a law which applied to the Church in both East and West from time immemorial and was never subsequently abrogated.
Down through the history of the Church many such priests failed in their commitment to celibacy and took to living with concubines, an abuse which became widespread during the Middle Ages. Pope Gregory VII [1073-85] reaffirmed the ancient norms concerning the prohibition of marriage for clerics in major orders but met with stiff opposition from priests in irregular situations who campaigned vigorously for the right to marry.
At the Second Lateran Council [1139], it was decreed that a marriage attempted by a bishop, priest or deacon was not only gravely illicit but also invalid. This led to the misunderstanding, still widespread today, that celibacy for higher clergy was introduced as late as Lateran II. In reality that Council declared invalid something that had always been prohibited.
During this same period the benefice system dominated the life of the Church. Ecclesiastical property, which was often very valuable, was linked to certain Church offices and could thus make the holder economically independent. The confer-ral of the benefice-office, frequently carried out by the secular power independent of Church authority, usually referred to as lay investiture, meant that these ecclesiastical offices were often filled by candidates—bishops, abbots, priests—who were anything but worthy.
This resulted in two fundamental abuses in the Church—simony [the sale of ecclesiastical offices] and the widespread infraction of the discipline of priestly celibacy whether due to the incontinence of married priests or the concubinage of single men. It was precisely against these abuses that the Gregorian reform was primarily directed. As a consequence, a serious effort was made to find more worthy candidates for the priesthood and to give them a better formation.
Also, as part of the drive to recover the obligation to celibacy, the number of married men accepted for ordination was gradually limited. From the time of Pope Alexander III [1159-81] married priests, as a rule, were not allowed to have ecclesiastical benefices, and the ordained son of a priest was prohibited from succeeding to his father's benefice. The accession of unworthy priests to ecclesiastical benefices did create the risk of alienating Church property, but the laws introduced by the Gregorian reform were focussed essentially on the eradication of the abuses of simony and lay investiture, as well as bringing about a return to a chaste way of life for the clergy.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Thieves Lurk in the Shadows Online DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:“Calvary greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am former Mrs. Fatima Egunbe Otu, now Mrs. Mary Egunbe Otu, a widow to the late Sheik Egunbe Otu.”
That's how an e-mail I recently received started out.
“I am 72 years old,” the message continued. “I am a new Christian convert, suffering from long time cancer of the breast. From all indications, my condition is really deteriorating and is quite obvious that I may not live more than six months, because the cancer stage has gotten to a very severe stage.
“My late husband was killed during the Gulf War, and during the period of our marriage we had a son who was also killed in cold blood during the Gulf War. My late husband was very wealthy and, after his death, I inherited all his business and wealth. My personal physician told me that I may not live for more than six months and I am so scared about this. So, I now decided to divide part of this wealth by contributing to the development of evangelism in Africa, America, Europe and Asian countries. This mission, which will no doubt be tasking, has made me recently relocate to Nigeria, Africa, where I live presently. I selected your church after visiting the Web site for this purpose and prayed over it. I am willing to donate the sum of $10 million to your Church/Ministry for the development of evangelism and also as aids for the less privileged around you.
“Please note that this fund is lying in a Security Company in Switzerland and the company has branches. Therefore my lawyer will file an immediate application for the transfer of the money in the name of your ministry. Please, do not reply to me if you have the intention of using this fund for personal use other than the enhancement of evangelism.
“Lastly, I want you/your ministry to be praying for me as regards my entire life and my health because I have come to find out since my spiritual birth lately that wealth acquisition without Jesus Christ in one's life is vanity upon vanity.
“May the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you. I await your urgent reply.”
The e-mail was signed “Yours in Christ” from a Mrs. Mary Egunbe Out of Bodija, Ibadan, Nigeria.
We responded to Mrs. Otu, writing that we would use the money as intended and that we would keep her in our prayers. She responded to our reply by giving us the e-mail address of her lawyer, whom she said would give us further instructions on what to do to receive the donation.
At this point, I decided to do some checking. The lawyer's e-mail ends with lawyer.com. I looked for that Web site, but came up with nothing. Next, I used network solutions “whois” directory to see who owned that domain name. Easylink Services Corporation in New Jersey owned it. Their Web site told me they were involved in the transaction-delivery segment of the electronic commerce industry, providing solutions to more than 20,000 companies worldwide. I figured the lawyer, one Barrister Ade Omolomo, must work for them.
So I called them up. It turns out that they supply free e-mail addresses—so the lawyer.com ending doesn't necessarily mean he is a lawyer. Next, I decided to look up his company in Nigeria on nigeria.com. I couldn't find the company listing. Then I saw a link called NigerianFraudWatch.org under their business links. That site is dedicated to the tracking of advance-fee fraud perpetrated by Nigerian organized-crime syndicates. There I found a U.S. group called The 419 Coalition dedicated to fighting Nigerian scams; their Web site is at http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal.
The 419 Coalition had examples of scams, one being a will scam. I looked at it and—lo and behold—the name “Ade Chambers” appeared. Now where did I see that name before? Oh, yes. Supposed lawyer Barrister Ade Omolomo, who was going to send us $10 million, works for them. I was being targeted for scamming.
Sure enough, Barrister Ade Omolomo's next e-mail to me asked for an upfront fee of $850 “for the processing of your documents and file.”
“As soon as your payment is received,” the message concluded, “the processing of your donation will commence. Best regard, Barrister Ade Omolomo.”
Last year, according to Gavin McCormick from the Associated Press, at least 16 people fell victim to this elaborate plot, which pinged millions of e-mail inboxes. Those 16 people reported losses of $345,000, including two unidentified people who lost $78,000 and $74,000. Of 17,000 fraud complaints to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, on the Internet at www1.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp, 2,600 concerned solicitations from Nigeria. That put the country at the top of those outside the United States generating complaints.
The moral of this story is a quote from Brother Frederick here at the monastery: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't .”
By the way, if you have a spare $10 million, we could use it. Then again, perhaps I should stick to buying lottery tickets.
Brother John Raymond, co-founder
of the Monks of Adoration, writes
from Venice, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: If it sounds too good to be true ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Monthly Web Picks DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:This month's Web picks focus on the Holy Spirit.
Pope John Paul II's Encyclical On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World is a good place to start. vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_ jp-ii_enc_18051986_dominum-etvivificantem_en.html.
Then you will want to see the Catechism of the Catholic Church's section enTITLEd “I Believe in the Holy Spirit.”scborromeo. org/ccc/p1s2c3a8.htm.
Next, how about taking a quiz on the “Holy Trinity” and “The Holy Spirit and the Church” presented by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops? nccbuscc.org/catechism /quizzes/index.htm.
Were those quizzes too easy? If so, how about taking a dive into the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas? Questions 36 through 38 deal with the Holy Spirit. newadvent.org/summa/1.htm.
Interested in the charismatic-renewal movement, which gives special emphasis to the Holy Spirit? nscchariscenter.org.
For more links on the Holy Spirit, see our online Catholic directory on that category at monksofadoration.org /holyspir.html.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Roommates (1995)
Few films examine the relationship between a child and a grandparent. Roommates, directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt) and written by Max Apple and Stephen Metcalfe, is a feel-good comedy-drama about the lifelong bonds between the crusty Rocky (Peter Falk) and his orphaned grandson, Michael. The rest of the family wants to send the 5-year-old boy away to an orphanage. But the 75-year-old man, who “has the personality of a clenched fist,” insists on raising him. “The child stays! Conversation over,” he declares.
Michael grows up to be a medical student and, when Rocky is evicted from his apartment, the young man talks his grandparent into moving into the place he shares with six other students. The conflicts that follow are both funny and touching. The roommates have little in common except a love of poker. But when Michael marries, he does-n't abandon Rocky. In an understated way, the movie deals intelligently with the issues of aging in our society and the meaning of family ties.
Himalaya (2001)
It's easy for Westerners to sentimentalize the picturesque way of life of primitive peoples. Himalaya, nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, dramatizes the generational conflict for the leadership of a Nepalese mountain tribe with a point of view that treats its age-old customs with respect yet also suggests some of its shortcomings. Tinle (Thinlen Lhondup) is the elderly chief of a yak-herding, farming village who rigidly adheres to the astrological traditions of their Buddhist beliefs. When his oldest son dies, he insists on leading a caravan to trade salt for grain across the mountains with his younger son, Norbou (Karma Tenzing Nyima Lama), who's a monk and a painter. But neither is really up to it.
Tinle's fatalistic and tradition-bound decisions are challenged by his dead son's charismatic best friend, Karma (Gurgyon Kyap), who's more forward-looking. Their trek is full of dangers and surprises. Veteran French documentary filmmaker Eric Valli captures the lonely grandeur of the Nepalese landscape and the colorful textures of his characters' daily lives.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Middle East is usually depicted as a place of mystery and intrigue. So when a French spy (Daniel Gelin), who's disguised as an Arab, is chased through a Moroccan bazaar and dies in the arms of an unsuspecting American tourist (James Stewart), we know that the tourist and his wife (Doris Day) are going to be sucked into a vortex of danger and death not of their own making. After the dying French spy whispers some incomprehensible words into the Americans' ears, their young son is kidnapped. In order to save the child, the tourist couple must travel to London, where they find themselves entangled in a diplomatic assassination plot.
The Man Who Knew Too Much is Alfred Hitchcock's only remake. (The original dates from 1934.) The emphasis is on the thrills and suspense, not the politics. The climax includes two of Hitchcock's most famous set pieces: a 12-minute assassination attempt during a concert at Albert Hall and the embassy rescue of the tourists' missing son.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts & Culture -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, MAY 19
American Writers II: The 20th Century C-SPAN, 3 p.m. live
This live program profiles famed writers by visiting their homes and by answering viewers' phone and e-mail questions about their works. This week's subject is war correspondent Ernie Pyle (1900-1945). World War II GIs loved him because he risked his life in the front lines with them, dug his own foxholes, ate K-rations with them and gave the folks back home a true picture of what combat soldiers endure. At his death from hostile fire on Ie Shima in the Pacific on Apr. 18, 1945, all America mourned. To be rebroadcast Friday at 8 p.m.
MONDAY, MAY 20
Nicklaus Museum Opening Ceremony Golf, 6:30 p.m.
Join in this tribute to Jack Nicklaus, who burst upon the golfing scene four decades ago.
TUESDAY, MAY 21
Science Times: The Third Option National Geographic Channel, 9 p.m.
This hour-long show charts advances in surgically treating spina bifida in babies before they are born. The two other “options” implied in the show's TITLE are surgery after birth — and killing babies by abortion, which is morally evil and so is no option at all.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 22
SportsCentury: Lou Gehrig ESPN, 4 p.m.
They called him “The Iron Horse” for defying injuries and playing in 2,130 straight baseball games. With the New York Yankees in the 1920s and 1930s, strapping first baseman Lou Gehrig (1903-1941) set many batting records for teams often rated among the best clubs ever. But Americans loved him even more for his strength of character, which eventually helped him face a wasting disease and an early death.
THURSDAY, MAY 23
Airport Travel Channel, 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.
These two hour-long shows, Mission Control and All Systems Go, depict daily operations at the bustling Houston Bush Intercontinental Airport.
FRIDAY, MAY 24
Navy SEALS Training Discovery Channel, 9 p.m.
Viewers might get tuckered out just watching the exhausting training of these crack military professionals.
SATURDAY, MAY 25
The Crufts Dog Show Animal Planet, 8 p.m. & 11 p.m.
The Kennel Club in Birmingham, England, hosts this event every March. This year, 18,000 enthusiastic canines competed in a raft of categories such as gamekeeper, gun dog, pastoral, working, police, rescue, guide and, of course, best of breed.
SATURDAY, MAY 25
A Salute to America's Military CBS, 9 p.m.
In this patriotic tribute, Clint Black and Lonestar perform on the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Art & Culture -------- TITLE: Mary and Mosquitos DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Hooray! May is here. If you're an outdoor enthusiast, that means it's time to pack up the tent, load the backpack and hit the trail. Along with some powerful insect repellent, you don't want to forget to bring friends who will help—not hinder—the ultimate goal: fun and relaxation.
Other camping experiences have not been so pleasant. I once went camping with a group of friends from college. We weren't far into the trip when I discovered that I was the only practicing Catholic in the group.
That was fine, at first. Then we began to have a “religious discussion.” A simple discussion on the Ten Commandments took an unfortunate turn when one of the members of our group, an evangelical Protestant (we'll call him “Ed”), asserted that the Catholic Church's “worship” of Mary violated the First Commandment. He said it was a perfect example of modern-day idolatry.
I was stunned and speechless. My heart began to race and my blood began to boil. I knew I had to say something—but what? After what seemed like years, I finally managed the standard Catholic response: “Catholics don't worship Mary. We ask her to pray for us.” At that, Ed picked up his imaginary bullhorn and shouted in my ear: “But she's dead!” Flustered to the point of speechlessness, I shrugged my shoulders and changed the subject.
If Ed's objective had been to ruin my camping trip, he had succeeded. Yet his aggressive offensive also brought an unintended benefit to my spiritual life: It motivated me to seek some deeper answers after the trip ended. Here's what I found.
The source of confusion over Marian devotion is, first of all, a difference in understanding of what various words mean. Protestants like Ed tend to equate prayer with worship. Only God is worthy of worship; therefore, we should only pray to God. Catholics make a distinction between several different kinds of prayer.
In prayer, we all agree, we should give God the praise and adoration that is due him alone as our infinite, merciful creator—our savior, our lord and master of everything that exists (Catechism, No. 2096). The Catechism defines prayer, in part, as “the raising of one's mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God” (No. 2559).
Ed said it wasn't OK to pray to Mary because “she's dead.” What should I have said? Simply this: “She's not dead; she's alive in Christ.” How do I know she this? Well, for starters, she lived a life of faith in Christ. Scripture says she is blessed among women, she totally surrendered her will to God and she said Yes when he asked her if she would bear his Son. She was filled with Christ, she is full of grace, and her soul magnifies the Lord.
I also might have mentioned that, in their prayers, the earliest Christians invoked the names of the Christians who had died. They asked the saints and martyrs—those who had “gone to sleep” in Christ—to pray for them just as they, the living, prayed for the salvation and sanctification of one another. Death does not cause separation between Christ and the members of his body. We Christians on earth now, along with those who preceded us here, are united in his love. There are many parts of Christ's body, but there is no division among them; all parts share concern for one another (see Romans 8:38-39 and 1 Corinthians 12:25-26).
There was a time in my life that my worst camping fears were bears, snakes and mosquitoes. Since my camping trip with Ed, all that has changed. Now I fear being caught off guard by a distortion of my faith. No matter how many times I mentally replay what I should have said, I can't bring the conversation with Ed back. All I can do now is offer up a prayer on his behalf and make sure I'm ready the next time.
Christina Mills writes from
Eugene, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christina Mills ----- KEYWORDS: Traveler -------- TITLE: The Saint of the Impossible in America DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Maybe it's her prominent place in the recent hit movie The Rookie. Maybe it's the sense, shared by many right now, that the Church is in dire straights.
Whatever the reason, St. Rita of Cascia is, suddenly, in.
And why not? Saint of the impossible and advocate of difficult cases. Wife and mother, widow and Augustinian nun. Reconciler and promoter of family harmony. Such are some of the TITLEs by which the Italian stigmatist is known and venerated by people throughout the world.
Last week the Register reported on the basilica dedicated to St. Rita in her homeland of Umbria, Italy. This week we visit a St. Rita site closer to home for most Register readers.
The white-stone face of the National Shrine of Saint Rita rises over the frenetic streets of Philadelphia. As soon as you walk off the curb through the tall, curved, wrought-iron gate—passing under a sign reading “Remain in Peace and Charity”—you're aware that you're not in the city any more. Spiritually speaking, anyway. The upper church, with its 80-foot high painted ceilings and towering pipe organ, all constructed in the style of 14th-century Renaissance architecture, transports you to a better place, a place of supernatural tranquility.
I learned during my visit that the edifice was constructed in 1915 and completely renovated in 1994. I could see that the latter project was carried out with great respect and reverence. As I walked along the side aisles, my eyes were attracted to beautiful paintings along the walls depicting scenes from the lives of St. Augustine, St. Rita and other Augustinians. At the front of the church, massive marble columns framing the main altar drew my glance toward a domed ceiling. Here St. Rita ascends to heavenly glory amid a throng of saints and cherubs. Turning down the opposite side aisle, I paused to reflect on scenes of St. Rita's life, detailed in stained-glass windows. From there I continued down an alcove in which her shrine altar is set. A first-class relic of the saint, preserved in a glorious reliquary, inspires many visitors to write out their petitions for St. Rita's intercession.
Opposite this exceptional altar is one in honor of Blessed Stephen Bellesini (1774-1840), an Augustinian and an advocate of education who was a dedicated pastor to the sick and poor. His statue depicts him kneeling, surrounded by children, while his first-class relic sits behind in an alcove magnificently augmented by a 15th-century image of Our Lady of Good Counsel.
Graced With a Thorn
Moving on to the lower shrine, newly renovated within the last two years, I discovered even more rich treasures to meditate on. The first thing to catch my eye was a bronze figure of Jesus in his Passion—standing, crowned with thorns and enduring tremendous agony. He holds his hand outward toward another figure, also cast in bronze far across the room. Who else? St. Rita, crowned with roses, kneels and reaches toward Jesus. She is holding a thorn in her hand.
Centered in the second room of the lower level, a depiction of St. Rita in ecstasy is heart-wrenching. As I gazed at the lines in her face, her eyes tightly shut, I could see St. Rita actively participating in a “stream of grace” that flows from her statue to Jesus' image. These awe-inspiring structures are the handiwork of a Philadelphia artist, Anthony Visco.
Here I stopped to reflect on the story of St. Rita and the thorn. Once, as she knelt in prayer, the nun's forehead was violently pierced by a single thorn—the exact same kind of thorn as the ones used to “crown” Jesus on his way to the Crucifixion. This injury brought Rita 15 years of physical pain (she bore it, unhealed, for the rest of her life). Worse still, it led to her being shunned by her religious community, whose members were nauseated by the odor that emanated from the wound.
Tradition has it that the sacred thorn from Jesus' crown, reverently preserved through the centuries, was given by Philip, King of France, son of the saintly King Louis, to the prior-general of the Augustinians, Clement of Osimo, in 1272.
A century later, this precious relic was placed in the Augustinian Church of Sant'Elpidio a Mare and was transferred to the Church of Saint Augustine in Fermo, Italy, where it is still preserved and venerated.
Reflective Reliquary
Moving on to the other parts of the lower shrine, I entered a circle-shaped room in which are housed a number of well-preserved artifacts from St. Rita's life. The Sisters of Cascia have recently donated a small pillow, dubbed the “Pillow of Tranquility,” taken from the glass sarcophagus in which St. Rita's incorrupt body rested from 1935 to 1947. I leaned over the glass case to see the gold-trimmed pillow, which once supported the saint's hands, to notice a large relic of the flesh of St. Rita, preserved in a vessel for continuous veneration. Among such precious relics, I couldn't help but feel a palpable sense of St. Rita's strong, intercessory presence.
The circular room, which is still unfinished, holds five niches that will soon exalt other Augustinians; additional plans call for a mosaic, spanning the entire room, that will depict all the major events of St. Rita's life.
During my visit, the best was saved for last. The crowning glory of this shrine is its eucharistic-adoration chapel, where anyone can adore the Most Blessed Sacrament, exposed from 8:45 a.m. to 9 p.m., at which time follows Benediction. The monstrance, posed on a marble altar, is surrounded by statues of Our Lady of Fatima, St. Joseph and a stunning, suspended cross. This sanctified space is about as far as you could get from the bustling city just outside the front doors of the shrine.
As you leave the National Shrine of St. Rita of Cascia, passing back through the iron gate, check and see if you don't have a powerful sense of the saint's message of harmony, peace and forgiveness written on your heart. I'll bet you won't be able to miss it.
Regina Marshall writes from
Hamden, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: National Shrine of Saint Rita of Cascia, Philadelphia ----- EXTENDED BODY: Regina Marshall ----- KEYWORDS: Traveler -------- TITLE: The Neocatechumenal Way to Toronto DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:More than 1,000 members of parish-based communities called the Neocatechumenal Way gathered at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., for a day of prayer and catechesis in preparation for World Youth Day 2002.
The gathering, presided over by Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark, included members of the Neocatechumenate from 20 dioceses across the eastern United States, including Boston, Newark, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Conn.
Giuseppe Gennarini, head of the movement's catechist team in the United States, began the meeting by telling the young people that “faith is not just to learn things. Faith is a concrete meeting with a person and that person is Jesus Christ. And he is here today. And he is waiting for you in Toronto.”
Archbishop Myers urged the youths to cling to their faith and not lose hope in the time of crisis in the church. “You can be the generation of reform. We need holiness. We need saints. And you can do this,” he said.
The gathering coincided with the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, April 21, and culminated with a call for vocations that invited anyone in the crowd who felt called to the priesthood or religious life to come forward and receive a blessing from the archbishop.
A similar vocational call will be held this summer when members of the Neocatechumenal Way from all over the world gather as part of World Youth Day celebrations.
“Please pray about it and think about it,” Archbishop Myers said. “We need you and we need your gifts.”
To thunderous applause, 28 young men and 34 young women proceeded to the front of the assembly. They knelt in rows as the archbishop laid his hands on the head of each person and asked that God bless and confirm their vocational call.
After they all had received a blessing, Gennarini explained that these young people would begin a time of spiritual counseling to discern their vocation.
For 16 parishioners from St. Michael Parish in Gainesville, Ga., the day was more than just preparation for World Youth Day.
“It was like a mini-pilgrimage. It was a preparation for the pilgrimage, of course, but also this really was a chance to give the kids the awareness that Christian life is a pilgrimage,” said Peter Heidkamp.
Heidkamp, who is from Boston but is currently working as an itinerant catechist in Gainesville together with his wife, Lisa, and their five children, led the delegation from the Archdiocese of Atlanta to the meeting.
Armed with sleeping bags, they set out in three minivans on the 850-mile journey. Along the way, they stopped in Washington where they visited the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and were offered hospitality in a local parish for the night.
“We went with very little,” Heidkamp told a reporter from The Pilot, Boston's archdiocesan newspaper. “And we saw how God provided—with food, with hospitality, with everything.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gregory L.Tracy ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Trinitarian Theology for the Family Fun of It DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:FIRST COMES LOVE:
FINDING YOUR FAMILY IN THE CHURCH AND THE TRINITY
by Scott Hahn
Doubleday, 2002
192 pages, $19.95
Available in retail and online bookstores.
This is arguably Scott Hahn's best and most important work in print to date. In previous books, the popular speaker and theologian has traced the theme and reality of covenant in Scripture (A Father Who Keeps His Promises) and examined the covenantal nature of the Church's liturgy and worship (The Lamb's Supper). Now, in First Comes Love, Hahn plunges even more deeply into the supernatural foundation of the New Covenant—the Trinity—and shows how the triune God is the source and sustainer of both human families and the Church, the family of God:
“For at the core of human experience is the family,” he writes, “which is familiar to all of us, and which most of us think we understand, while somewhere far beyond the limits of our minds is God the Blessed Trinity, whom many people find remote, abstract, and inaccessible. Yet I propose that we don't understand what we think we understand—that is, the family—and we do possess a key to understanding what we find inscrutable: the Trinity.”
The Trinity, described in the Catechismof the Catholic Church as “the central mystery of Christian faith and life,” is inexhaustible but not unknowable. In becoming man, Hahn explains, the Son reveals the inner life of the Trinity and invites mankind to enter into that eternal, perfect Communion. Drawing upon the Catechism, the Church Fathers and the writings of Pope John Paul II, Hahn reflects upon the profound truth of deification, the process by which man is filled and animated by God's own supernatural life: “Christian life, then, is a participation in the life of the Trinity,” he writes.
Beginning with courtship and marriage, and building on the theme of family and love, First Comes Love moves on to the Incarnation and then ascends to an extended consideration of the God who is family, covenant and love. Covenant—the complete gift of self to another—is illuminated by the light of the Trinity, in which the three divine persons eternally give themselves to one another in total love: “Covenant is what God does, because covenant is who God is.” Hahn then masterfully shows how the Incarnation, the Church, and the family logically flow from the reality of the triune life of self-gift and love.
Written in a popular and personal style, the book clearly seeks in places to communicate the brilliant, but often dense, writings of Pope John Paul II pertaining to family, love and sexuality.
This is evident in Hahn's depiction of the Fall, when Adam and Eve refused to sacrifice their natural desires for the greater, supernatural good. This failure, of course, was cause for the Incarnation. “Jesus' life, death and resurrection were a revelation in time of the eternal inner life of the Blessed Trinity,” writes Hahn.
Sacrifice is the way to God; it “is the only way that humans can imitate the interior life of the Trinity. For God is love, and the essence of love is life-giving. … Sacrifice, then, became the essential mark of all subsequent covenants between God and humankind.”
Insightful, engaging and spiritually challenging, First Comes Love demonstrates that Hahn has few equals when it comes to explaining the complex riches of the Catholic Faith without watering them down or dulling their potency.
There is no greater vocation than to be a true child of God, and First Comes Love is a fine articulation and explanation of that precious truth.
Carl E. Olson is editor
of Envoy magazine
(www.envoymagazine.com)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl E. Olson ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Good Entrepreneurs
THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS, April 25—The U.S. Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship has awarded its 2002 innovative entrepreneurship course award to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.
The winning course, “Christian Faith and the Management Professions: An Entrepreneurial Perspective,” has been team-taught by professors in theology and entrepreneurship, for the past two fall semesters.
Same-Sex Schooling
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, May 2—Elementary and secondary students who learn in same-sex classrooms score higher on tests, stay out of trouble and are more willing to explore a broader range of subjects, said researchers at a single-sex instruction seminar hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington daily reported.
Single-sex instruction especially benefits poor students. “For at least some students, a more effective way to achieve an ideal end is to offer them an education separate from the other sex for at least a portion of their schooling,” said Rosemary Salomone, a St. John's University law professor in New York.
Unrestricted Gift
THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY, May 3—Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., has received an unrestricted gift of $5 million from Robert and Miriam Smith, according to the trade publication that specializes in philanthropy. Some $2.7 million of the gift will be dedicated to the Benedictine college's $50 million capital campaign.
Rising Costs
THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 2 -The cost of public higher education for poor and middle class students is rising, according to a study outlined by the Times. The reason: a decades-long trend of steep rises in tuition as states are less inclined to subsidize public institutions.
The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education found that, on average, poor families spent 25% of their annual income for their children to attend public four-year colleges in 2000, compared with 13% in 1980.
For middle-class families, the percentage of annual income required to attend public colleges nearly doubled as well, to about 7% from 4%.
Graphic Sex Ed
THE ARIZONA REPBULIC, May 2—A sex-education bill before the Arizona State Senate was roundly defeated earlier this month after opponents quoted directly from federal sex-education materials that could be used in Arizona schools if House Bill 2249 passed. The bill would have eliminated a portion of state law that bars teachers from promoting homosexuality. The federal sex-education materials included “graphic descriptions of sex devices and sex acts,” that caused many in the Senate gallery to gasp, said the Republic.
School for China
ST. CLOUD VISITOR, April 30—Catholic and other youths in central Minnesota are working to raise $15,000 to build a school in Hai Cheng, China, for up to 35 students who otherwise would be working in one of that city's factories, reported the newspaper of the St. Cloud Diocese.
Laura Hann, project coordinator for the local chapter of Free the Children, an international organization of “children helping children,” said the school would employ a single teacher and open in 2007. A high-school student, Hahn is a Sunday-school teacher at St. Augustine Parish in St. Cloud.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Job Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Is Perfection Worth It?
A lot of mission statements and company pep talks say that perfection is the goal of their service and business. But a lot of the “perfectionists” at work are burning out.
Nearly everyone I've interviewed for jobs in the past few years describes himself as a perfectionist. I think that this is what prospective employees think that hiring employers want to hear. Just like “My biggest weakness is that I work too hard.”
The truth is that employers do want hard workers and they want employees who strive for quality in their work. But self-confessed perfectionists should raise some concerns.
For one thing, how much can a person really do if he only submits things that are perfect? Perfect takes an awfully long time, and those who head for it can get stuck on the little details to such an extent that deadlines and milestones are missed.
Perfectionists often try to do everything themselves, yet most projects require collaborating teamwork and multiple consultations and revisions. The perfectionist tends to hold onto things and doesn't want a “draft” to be disclosed because, well, it isn't perfect. Perfectionists are awfully hard on themselves, and can be even worse on others who don't measure up. So it can invite a climate of criticism and complaints.
Perfectionism is rooted in pride and perhaps vanity. What I do looks good because of me (pride), and the quality of my work brings others to admire me (vanity).
Some perfectionists have a hard time saying “no” to things. They let a lot of projects pile up and they work extra long hours to get them all done just right. Well as the projects keep piling up, and as they refuse to say no to things they can eventually get to the point where they just can't keep up and they start to break down. They sleep less to meet their goals and that impairs their judgment and health, and sometimes very debilitating dysfunctions occur, such as anxiety, depression or mania.
But doesn't the Gospel (Matthew 5:48) say that we should be perfect? Shouldn't we as Christians bring excellence into the workplace? Indeed.
Arching towards perfection as a Christian means that we try to prayerfully live our lives according to the principles of the Gospel. As Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes about Matthew 5:48: “Far from implying a head-breaking striving for the unattainable, we should rise from our immersion in the business of self-survival and focus our outlook from the divine point of view.” We want to participate in the perfection of God.
It is for this that we should strive.
Christian perfection is not a fruit of our own abilities and skills and desires. It is a fruit of the intimacy with Christ. It is closer to holiness (i.e. nearness to Christ) and not to pride and vanity. It is Christ working in us that enables us to do things that please him.
Art Bennett is
the director of the Alpha Omega Clinic
and Consutation Services
and a radio host.
Reach Family Matters
at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: The Ring and the Cross DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas—Catholic widows in recent history have had just three choices for a meaningful second vocation. Some remarry, a few choose religious life, and most live as unmarried lay persons devoted to prayer and good works in the parish or community.
Now another way of life is budding forth in the Church: consecrated widow-hood.
“Canonically this is neither lay nor religious. It's a whole category in itself,” said Catholic author and professor Ronda Chervin, a consecrated widow of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity in Corpus Christi, Texas.
“It's along the lines of consecrated virgins,” she said. “You could live with others, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is to be a bride of Christ, consecrated to Christ and the Church and to live very much as the widows in the early Church.”
Like a religious sister, the consecrated widow takes public vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. She lives simply, spends her life in prayer and service, and in some cases may don a habit, said Chervin, who wears a gray dress and a large cross. As in religious life, there are particular graces of consecration, she said.
But like a lay woman, a consecrated widow manages her own money and lives alone, with her family or with an apostolic community of priests and lay people—not in a community of other women, Chervin said. In her order, the vows of consecration are renewed annually, so that the widow is free to attend to her family if they should need her, she said.
Consecrated widows are mentioned specifically in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 922: “From apostolic times Christian virgins and widows, called by the Lord to cling only to him with greater freedom of heart, body and spirit, have decided with the Church's approval to live in the respective states of virginity or perpetual chastity ‘for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.’”
The Holy Father also refers to the unique state in life in his 1996 apostolic letter Vita Consecrata: “Again being practiced today is the consecration of widows, known since apostolic times, as well as the consecration of widowers. These women and men, through a vow of perpetual chastity as a sign of the Kingdom of God, consecrate their state of life in order to devote themselves to prayer and the service of the Church.”
It could be said that the first consecrated widow was Mary, whose many TITLEs include Exalted Widow, according to Chervin. Other holy widows who lived a consecrated or religious life include St. Monica, St. Brigid, St. Louise de Marillac, St. Jane de Chantal, St. Rita and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.
Consecrated widowhood in the first few centuries of the Church gave way to religious communities, but in recent years the vocational state is being explored in small but meaningful ways. The Society of Our Lady (SOLT) has two consecrated widows and four in formation, said SOLT founder Father Jim Flanagan.
Holy Family
The Holy Family Institute, part of the religious family that includes the Daughters of St. Paul, has about 1,000 widows in its international membership that also includes individual married people and married couples. A consecrated widow of institute does not live in a community or wear a habit but maintains her secular life, through which she is made holy and in which she can influence society, according to Father Tom Fogarty of the Holy Family Institute in Canfield, Ohio.
Various dioceses, such as the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, have had expressions of interest, but no vows as such, according to several vocations directors. Some, including the Archdiocese of New York, have moved forward in another revived form of consecrated life—that of consecrated virgins.
A few religious institutes in France include consecrated widows and widowers, and a lay association in Wisconsin, Widows of Prayer, offers a program of spiritual formation and prayer discipline for widows. While not actual consecration, membership includes a period of discernment and a spiritual rule beyond what is typical for laity.
“Now that lifespans are so much greater, with men and particularly women living into their 80s and even 90s, we are seeing in consecrated widowhood and similar calls a whole new challenge for both service and spiritual development for mature, older women,” said Ruth Lasseter, assistant editor for the Catholic women's magazine Canticle.
“Some women who have lived fully as wives and mothers and grandmothers in their younger days and in middle age are finding that they may have to face many years alone as widows; this would also apply to single mothers who have raised their children,” Lasseter said. “There is a vast number of older women who live alone. When such women become consecrated widows, they can find a very rich spiritual life of prayer and opportunities for service in companionship and in example.”
Following the practice of the Society of Our Lady, Chervin prays three hours a day, including the Mass, Liturgy of the Hours, adoration and the rosary. But she said the rule could be adjusted for a widow who is too old, tired or sick to maintain the schedule.
“This lifestyle is ideal, because very devout women who are older and have raised families don't need to be formed in the same way that young women do,” Chervin said. “They are already very formed, to the point of calcification! What you want is to grow in holiness, but you don't want thousands of rules.”
A Widow's World
As she relates in her book on the widow saints, A Widow's Wa lk (Our Sunday Visitor, 1998), Chervin herself was widowed in 1993 at the age of 56. She was open to remarriage, then later investigated joining a religious order that accepts late vocations.
Her search eventually brought her to the Society, and she became its first consecrated widow, in 1999.
A year later another widow, Billie Ann Steward, became consecrated, and after serving in the SOLT novitiate in New Mexico, she is now in semi-retirement in her former hometown of Jefferson City, Mo.
Steward, 83, was widowed at age 51, and after her youngest child graduated from high school she experienced a religious “awakening,” she said. She joined the Society of Our Lady as a lay member of one of its ecclesial teams, which include laity, priests and religious.
“Father Jim Flanagan had mentioned [consecration] to me once before. He didn't sound like he was pushing it too hard, and I didn't either,” she said. “But then Ronda came. I had read about that woman and I was so impressed. I thought, ‘Maybe I could give more than I think I can in that area.’ “
Steward said even now she keeps the Society's prayer practice, and she opened her home to a parish Lenten study group. But she said she does miss the SOLT community, and she would like to be more active.
“If I look at my age, I just think I don't have enough sense to quit. I'm just grateful to God for going this long.” She said she still wears her gray habit, although she jokes, “I'm going to have to start getting another wardrobe; it's getting kind of threadbare.”
Father Flanagan, currently teaching SOLT seminarians in Rome, said the Holy Father's document on consecration and the witness of holy widows in Church history inspired him to promote consecrated widowhood in his order.
“It's a question of a relationship with Christ. Every consecrated person has a personal relationship with Jesus himself, so I feel [consecrated widowhood] will bring forth a fullness, a fruitfulness of that relationship,” he said. “Even in their families it creates tremendous blessing and gifts to their own children.”
Chervin said her own grown children are sometimes embarrassed to be seen with her in what they call her “monkess outfit.” At the same time they see that her consecration makes her happy, she said, and “they're happy because I'm happier.”
The chief advantage of consecration to a widow is hidden but profound, said Father Fogarty.
“Each of your good thoughts, words and actions has a special spiritual value that it did not have in the baptized state,” Father Fogarty said.
Ellen Rossini writes from
Richardson, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: Consecrated widows find a new's pouse' ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: -------- TITLE: Abandoned Babies Get a Safer Place DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:ST. PAUL, Minn.—A study released by the Centers for Disease Control in March found that Americans are 10 times more likely to be murdered on the day of their birth than at any other point of their lives. It also found that between 1989 and 1998, 3,312 infant homicides were recorded in America; 7.3% of those occurred on the day of birth.
Such reports are “startling” to Laure Krupp, but it makes her feel even more energized about the work she has been called to do. Krupp serves as executive director of the Minnesota-based Safe Place for Newborns (the program), whose mission is to save the lives of newborns in danger of abandonment and to help preserve the health and future of their mothers.
The program, which was launched in January 2000 and signed into Minnesota law that April, offers anonymity and immunity from prosecution to any mother that decides to leave her baby, up to three days old, at any hospital in the state. Since then, more than 35 states have implemented laws modeled on the Minnesota law, and Safe Place for Newborns has opened two additional chapters in Wisconsin and Washington and started a national crisis hot-line.
The idea for Safe Place for Newborns sprung from a program that was started in Mobile, Ala., after 12 infants were abandoned in one county in the course of a year. Lilly Riordan, president of A Community Caring for Life at the Cathedral of St. Paul, shared the idea with the Cathedral's then-parochial vicar, Father Andrew Cozzens. The two presented it to the Minnesota County Attorneys Association and the Minnesota Hospital and Healthcare Partnership, who gave it unanimous approval. On January 6, 2000, the program was launched at three hospitals in Dakota County.
What followed was in God's plan, said Father Cozzens. The night before the program launched, NBC News ran a lead story about the growing number of abandoned babies in the country. Providentially the program offered a solution and received national news coverage. One week later, a baby was found in a dumpster in Minneapolis and soon other county attorneys got involved with the program. Eventually the legislature took action and worked with Father Cozzens to write the law. the program retained control of the publicity and crisis line and pushed to ensure the women were guaranteed anonymity.
“Our goal is to make it as easy for a woman to bring her baby to a hospital as it is for her to put it in a trash can,” said Father Cozzens. “If we can point out to society the dignity of newborn life, they will also begin to see the dignity of unborn life,” said Father Cozzens.
When a baby is brought into a hospital, the mother is offered medical care and asked to fill out a form with some biological information, but it is not required. The baby is placed in foster care and put up for adoption after the time allowed for parental rights has terminated. Helen Healy, president of Safe Place for Newborns in Wisconsin, said this is a winning solution for everyone involved. “The baby lives, the mother does not have guilt and prosecution, and a family who wants to adopt a baby, gets a baby,” said Healy.
After Minnesota's law passed, Krupp was inundated with calls from legislators around the country who sought advice. Her office worked with Healy to start the Wisconsin chapter. Each state has different stipulations, so the program has included a section on its Web site, www.safeplacefornewborns.com, that any woman can click on to find out about the legal parameters for relinquishing a child within her state.
The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that there are 300 to 400 reported cases of infants found dead or killed by their parents every year. Coined, neonatacide, concern has been mounting in recent years that it is becoming a national crisis. Krupp believes the sex education programs are partly to blame. “We have taught children that getting pregnant is the worst thing that could ever happen to them—worse than AIDS or cancer,” said Krupp. “We have really drilled this well into women,” she said. “The more that we as a culture are forced to look at the baby like a thing, the less we care about what happens to it.”
Healy said the average age of women who abandon their babies is 19, and the most common element among them is fear of being found out. “They either are in denial about their pregnancy, they do not know they are pregnant, or they conceal their pregnancy the third scenario is most dangerous,” added Healy.
Healy was particularly disturbed about a recent case in Eau Claire, Wis., when a college freshman who had concealed her pregnancy bled to death while giving birth in a dorm bathroom even as her friends knocked on the door and pleaded to let them help her. The baby died the next day.
“This is the woman that we concentrate on finding and serving with the program,” said Healy. “They don't even tell themselves they are pregnant, and end up having the baby and don't know what to do and they panic. If we can get the message out very clearly that if you have a baby, take the baby to a hospital. And if we can offer them anonymity and immunity then we can save the baby and save them from a lifetime of grief.”
The program is not able to track how many babies are saved through the program because of the confidentiality element. But they often get calls from a nurse or a social worker telling them a Safe Place for Newborns baby was brought in. Krupp also knows from the crisis line operators that many people are hearing about them. She was touched by a letter she received from a woman who thanked the program for what they were doing and told how desperately she wished they had been around 18 years ago instead of the Planned Parenthood that she turned to for help.
“To think our culture would say, ‘it's just a glob of cells; you lost nothing.’ But 18 years later, this girl was still tortured. And this is what we've done,” said Krupp. She is working to start more chapters in the country, and to that end, the program has created brochures, posters, billboards, public service announcements, TV ads and other materials that can be easily customized to each state.
Barb Ernster writes from
Fridley, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barb Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of life -------- TITLE: LIFE NOTE DATE: 05/19/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: May 19-25, 2002 ----- BODY:Virginia Apologizes
WASHINGTON POST, May 3—Virginia Gov. Mark Warner formally apologized for the state's embrace of eugenics, denouncing a practice under which some 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized from 1927 until as recently as 1979.
“The eugenics movement was a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved,” Warner said.
The governor's statement marked the first time that a U.S. governor has formally apologized for eugenics, a practice that was adopted by 30 states and resulted in the involuntary sterilization of an estimated 65,000 Americans.
Pro-Life Picketer Vindicated
THOMAS MORE LAW CENTER, May 2—When Ann Norton's pro-life sign showing a color photo of a bloody, aborted baby's head was torn from its backing by a passerby, a Kalamazoo police officer was dispatched to the scene.
To Norton's surprise, she was threatened with arrest for violating section 750.38 of the Michigan Penal Code, a criminal law that prohibits the public display of pictures of murder.
Earlier this April, a federal judge signed a Consent Judgment permanently enjoining the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety and several of its officers from arresting Norton under this arcane Michigan law.
As part of a settlement with the City of Kalamazoo, Norton agreed to dismiss her claims for damages against the individual police officers.
In turn, the City agreed to pay Norton $650 as part of this settlement.
According to Norton, a portion of the money from the City will be used to purchase several new pro-life signs to aid her in the future.
Abortion Clinic Loses Lease
OPERATION RESCUE WEST, May 1—The Abbey Company, landlord to the San Diego abortion facility Family Planning Associates (FPA), has notified pro-lifers they will not renew the clinics lease. FPA controls 6700 square feet of office space.
The news came as a stunning victory for pro-lifers who have faithfully maintained a presence at the abortion facility, since it first moved to La Mesa in 1987.
The Abbey Company decided not to renew FPA's lease after police in riot gear, SWAT officers, and bomb-sniffing dogs were called out for the annual observance of the Roe v. Wade anniversary in January of 2001. Pro-life activists' midweek presence and years of pressure at FPA was also mentioned as a factor.
“My company has come to the conclusion that having Family Planning as a tenant is a detriment to the project,” stated an Abbey Company representative in a letter to pro-lifers.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Bishops Fine-Tune Dallas; Root Causes Come Next DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — U.S. bishops voted overwhelmingly Nov. 13 in favor of revised norms for addressing clergy sexual abuse, norms meant to protect victims and treat accused priests fairly.
In October, the Vatican objected to several key elements of the policy and convened a mixed Vatican/U.S. commission to revise it.
Now, with the revised policy on its way back to Rome for final approval, attention is turning to other avenues for addressing the abuse scandals: the upcoming apostolic visitation of U.S. seminaries and the proposal to convene a plenary council to address the root causes of the abuse crisis.
The high-profile and controversial sex-abuse policy was originally approved hastily — and under unprecedented media scrutiny — at the June meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Dallas. The policy and its accompanying norms were sharply criticized by laity, priests and members of the Canon Law Society of America for denying due process to accused priests.
Critics and the Vatican also objected, saying the policy ignored the statute of limitations in canon law, defined sexual abuse too broadly and imposed the same harsh punishment — permanent removal from public ministry — on every offender regardless of circumstances or the severity of the crime.
At the Dallas meeting, several bishops expressed concern about the proposal despite voting for it. At the Washington meeting, fewer bishops expressed objection, and the final vote was 246-7.
“The spirit among the bishops at the conference was very good,” said Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver. “It was a very different atmosphere from Dallas in June … I think we have a good and a fair common approach to these matters now, and the Holy See's guidance was very important in making that happen.”
Also approved at the meeting were slight changes in the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People to conform with the norms; a deliberative process that may lead the bishops to call for a plenary council of the Church in the United States; and a statement committing the bishops to “fraternal support, fraternal challenge and fraternal correction” of one another regarding their decisions on clergy sex abuse, an aspect that was missing from the Dallas documents.
The norms and the charter call for removal from ministry of any priest or deacon who has sexually abused a minor. They also contain provisions for victim assistance, review boards at the diocesan and national levels, and cooperation with civil authorities.
“The bishops are very concerned about the protection of minors,” said Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, the senior U.S. member of the joint commission, at a news conference the day before the vote. “They are also concerned about protecting their relationship with their priests.”
Critics of the Dallas policy had warned that the elimination of the statute of limitations and the mandatory reporting to civil authorities of all allegations, without regard to credibility, served as a wedge between bishops and priests — threatening a relationship that is foundational to the health of the Church.
Plenary Council
Although bishops expressed confidence the revised norms will pass muster with the Vatican, some believe an extraordinary measure — in the form of a plenary council — is in order if true and sustainable reform is to occur. In July, eight bishops issued a letter asking their fellow bishops to consider holding a plenary council to promote holiness, priestly celibacy and sound sexual morality in the Church in the United States.
The proposal bishops approved, which calls for bishops to consider a plenary council, outlines a process in which the bishops’ conference would take at least 18 months to decide whether a plenary council is needed.
The last plenary council in the United States, the Plenary Council of Baltimore, was convened in 1884. The monthlong session resulted in identifying the ideal of a Catholic school in every parish and the mandate of the Baltimore Catechism.
“I think the opportunity to meet, pray about and discuss the root issues of our faith in a spirit of fidelity, and then see how we can better evangelize American culture, would be very valuable,” Archbishop Chaput said after the Washington meeting, explaining his support of a plenary council. “I also believe that the council should be completely separate from the [bishops’ conference] — not because of any deficiency in the conference but to ensure a really fresh look at our realities.”
Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute in New York and a member of the lay group Catholics for Authentic Reform, said he hopes bishops don't wait around for the convention of a plenary council before changing the direction of pastoral culture in the Church in the United States.
“Priests, theologians and nuns in this country have been espousing views directly opposed to Catholic teachings for decades,” Ruse said. “Until they deal with that issue there will be a crisis into the future, whether or not we have a plenary council or meetings of the bishops’ conference.”
Ruse said the best hope of avoiding future Church morality scandals lies in the willingness of “young, smart, orthodox bishops to lead us.”
Ruse described an unhealthy culture that has resulted from priests and bishops tolerating and accommodating North American sexual morality, such as widespread contraception, abortion and premarital sex.
“The unhealthy priest culture flows out of an unhealthy laity,” Ruse said. “If the leaders who can take us out of this are to be successful, it will require changes in the laity as well. True reform will occur organically as a result of priests, laity and bishops obeying the true teachings of the Church.”
Homosexuality
Ruse said the unhealthy culture has led to an acceptance of homosexual men into seminaries for decades. Some of those homosexual priests, he noted, have engaged in sexual relationships with young Catholic men.
Although the mainstream press frequently refers to “pedophile priests,” facts indicate most of the sexual-abuse cases have involved homosexual priests who have had relationships with boys in their midto late teens.
According to a comprehensive study of known cases of abuse commissioned by USA Today and published in the paper's Nov. 11 edition, 91% of 539 victims of priest sexual abuse whose gender had been identified publicly were males. Of those boys, the large majority were age 12 or older.
And while the two most egregious recent allegations of priest sex abuse involved priests of the Archdiocese of Boston who are believed to have abused numbers of young boys, the USA Today study stressed that such cases are clearly the exception.
“Most abusive priests are not serial predators, despite the publicity about a few accused of abusing many children,” the newspaper stated. “One in 10 accused priests account for more than half the known allegations, while 40% have been accused of abuse by only one person.”
The study also noted that only a tiny minority of priests has faced abuse accusations.
“Of the 25,616 priests who have served in the 10 dioceses since 1965, slightly fewer than 1% have been named publicly in allegations,” USA Today reported.
“It's pretty clear that there's a problem [of homosexuality] in the Church that's debilitating to priests and the laity,” Ruse said. “I hope bishops will decide now to go after this subculture of homosexuality and doctrinal dissent.”
Like Ruse, Archbishop Chaput believes the future health of the Church in the United States relies on all Catholics choosing their faith over the culture they live in — a culture that is often hostile to that faith.
“The fact that we're Americans is important, but we need to be Catholics first; we need to be faithful to Jesus Christ and his Church first,” the archbishop said. “Too many Catholics are too comfortable, too well accepted, too willing to compromise on important moral issues. And this isn't some revolutionary insight. It's straight out of St. Paul.”
“If we really believe, we need to act like it,” he continued. “If we really believe, we need to be agents of God's love — and in living that love, a little more fire in the heart and iron in the spine would help.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: U.N. Action Changes Ethics of U.S. vs. Iraq DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Is a U.S. war on Iraq justified?
This summer, when the White House proposed a unilateral attack on the country, Paul Schroeder said No. In an article in The American Conservative magazine, “Iraq: The Case Against Pre-Emptive War,” he argued that a U.S. invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein would be unjust, aggressive and imperialist.
But this fall the United Nations approved a resolution calling for weapons inspections in Iraq, focusing the international community of nations on the question of Iraq's threat.
In light of the new reality, the Register asked Schroeder, professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to revisit his argument.
The article argued that “to justify a resort to pre-emptive war, a state needs to give reasonable evidence that the step was necessary, forced upon the initiator by its opponents and that it represented a lesser evil.”
The threat to be pre-empted, he says, must be shown to be “(a) clear and imminent, such that prompt action is required to meet it; (b) direct, that is, threatening the party initiating the conflict in specific concrete ways, thus entitling that party to act pre-emptively; (c) critical, in the sense that the vital interests of the initiating party face unacceptable harm and danger; and (d) unmanageable, that is, not capable of being deterred or dealt with by other peaceful means.”
If the proposal of a pre-emptive war against Iraq failed this test on all four points, as Schroeder, a Lutheran, argued last summer, how does it fare now?
He discussed his answer with Register staff writer John Burger.
The arguments you use sound much like the just-war theory. The U.S. bishops have said they find it difficult to justify a resort to war, based on the evidence now available. Do you think the Bush administration has been giving such arguments the consideration they deserve?
My view is that it's very much an ethics of responsibility and consequences. The reason I call it unjust is that I believe it would lead to bad consequences, especially for the international system. That's different than applying the just-war theory.
The biggest reason it would be aggressive and imperialist is the consequences of undermining the international system.
No, the Bush administration doesn't give it the consideration it deserves, but I believe there is — at least on the part of the president and some others — a different kind of ethics. It seems to me that President Bush gives every indication of being a true believer in the notion that America is the embodiment of everything good. He would believe that America never conquers, that when we invade and overthrow a government it's liberation. The national security doctrine Bush delivered to Congress on Sept. 20 is riddled with this kind of language. I suppose his ethical basis is very different from what I'm basing my views on.
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have a utopian realpolitik, which says that with enough power you can do things they believe are good for America and the world.
What do you mean exactly by the “international system”?
The rules, norms, understandings and practices that are adopted by a community or society in order to govern their relationships in a common practice, not in pursuing a common goal. It is what regulates the relationships between them to enable each to pursue its own individual interests. The world has made, in the past half-century, tremendous progress along these lines. Innumerable things that were once in the realm of war are now in the realm of peace.
What do you think of the way the United States worked through the United Nations to effect the resolution? Do you sense imperialism at play there?
Not exactly. What has happened is that we have changed the basic character of what we intended to do, which was a unilateral action to take Saddam Hussein out. Now it's become a multilateral action whose ostensible, and maybe real, intention is to disarm him. What we are ostensibly trying to do is within … the international system. Whether Bush intended this or not we now have a real chance to avoid war and exercise leadership rather than to create an empire. The international community, represented by the United Nations, is compelling a member to disarm on the grounds of the belief that possession of weapons of mass destruction is a danger to everybody.
France and Syria, which have been opposed to an earlier draft of the resolution, now have signed on. And the Arab League approved of it. Do you too feel differently about it?
I think they are afraid of the United States running amok. I'm thankful that Colin Powell helped mediate this and brought it about. I think there are still claims we are making that are dangerous, such as the right to resort to unilateral action if we decide there's been a breach in the resolution. That would set a dangerous precedent. The administration was saying to Iraq, “You have a choice. Comply or die.” We too have a choice: “Hegemony or empire.” Hegemony is a fact, and it's necessary, not necessarily a bad thing. We should exercise it prudently.
Iraq has accepted the terms of the resolution, though it claims the document is full of lies. Does it look to you as if their acceptance has defused the potential for preemptive war?
Their acceptance does at least offer the possibility of defusing war. In fact, if we went to war now it wouldn't be pre-emptive. If Iraq does comply, and we go ahead with war, it would be a plain, unprovoked war.
If Iraq violates any terms of the resolution, do you still think military action against her would be unjust?
That's very hard to answer. It depends on what you mean by “violate.” Do you mean violate materially, in the sense of punishing Saddam for concealing some small aspect of his weapons program? In that sense, one might consider it to be using means disproportionate to their end. What I see this resolution doing is establishing a regime; that is, a system for dealing with a very grave problem: the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the danger that comes from their use by a dangerous regime or terrorist groups. We don't have a method for dealing with that through the international system. This seems to me a good method.
Aren't you worried about Saddam becoming nuclear-capable? He reportedly has said his big mistake in Kuwait was invading before he possessed a nuclear weapon. Wouldn't that indicate that he wants to gain control of the gulf's oil and use nuclear blackmail to hold us at bay?
Yes, I'm worried. If guarding against that can be achieved by this multilateral method, which preserves what we've achieved with great difficulty — the international society, structure or system that has the rudiments of law about it and advances that system — I'm all in favor of disarming Iraq, or a ruler who is very dangerous, though I think that danger is somewhat overestimated — and advancing the rules that have to be followed by everybody, big states as well as small. The one thing that is morally offensive about Bush's national security document is the constant claim that because America is good and its purposes are noble, anything America does is all right and we are not bound by the rules that other nations are bound by.
Saddam wants nuclear weapons for something of the same reason others want them: to increase his power and make sure such weapons cannot be used against him without impunity. That he would like to be the dominant force in the region I have no doubt.
Couldn't we make an analogy to Adolf Hitler? If we don't stop Saddam now, as we could have stopped Hitler in the late 1930s, we might have a bigger problem to deal with later.
I know this is always said. I'm reminded of something the American historian Carl Becker said, that the purpose of history is to free us from misleading historical analogies. I think this is one. For one thing, it was not a failure to use preemptive war against Hitler. It was a failure to deter, to use the means available to deter him. The year 1936 and the remilitarization of the Rhineland is the date usually given as the time when we should have stepped in. But that was simply not an option. It was never remotely considered.
Asking French and British statesmen in 1936 to launch a pre-emptive war against Germany on the basis of what Germany had done up to that point would amount to demanding that they play God. Nobody could possibly have known at that time the true, horrible extent of future Nazi crimes. The real criticism of British and French policy is not their failure to launch pre-emptive war but their failure or refusal to take either the Rhineland occupation or the 1938 annexation of Austria seriously and to undertake a resolute course of deterrence and collective security. So this makes a case for deterrence and containment.
One of the big suppositions made in advocating preventive war is that if we do this and succeed this will prevent future violence. I can go through history and show how that has always been falsified by events. Most of the time it has failed, events have turned out badly and it's ruined the person who supported it. Even when it succeeds, it does not end the quarrel and produce peace. It produces resentment. It escalates the cycle of violence. Therefore I don't see any reason to argue for pre-emptive war.
You write that we should rely on the international system to develop new, effective means to check new dangers. How can the international system guarantee that we will be able to respond to nuclear blackmail?
What's happening now is a step in that direction. One of the most fundamental insights is that you can't have absolute security. There are dangers against which there are no surefire insurance policies. This is one of them. There are at least eight nuclear powers in the world today, and we will continue to have the possibility for nuclear blackmail. We should try to limit it, prevent its spread. But this is the world we live in. We have found pretty good ways of dealing with it over the long run. Nobody's used nuclear weapons since 1945. There have been some very risky and dangerous moments.
We've handled them through the application of the international system. Take the recent crisis between India and Pakistan. Pakistan is a pretty unstable state, and the two countries had a significant issue between them — Kashmir. But with the pressure from the international community, plus fear on both sides of having nuclear weapons used against them, the crisis was defused. That's what we have to rely on. The alternative is the belief that power politics can make the world more peaceful and law abiding. We cannot expect it to make us perfectly secure against nuclear blackmail in a world that is nuclear.
And it's nonsense to argue that we are in more danger than ever before. America is at peace. The terrorist threat is worse for some other countries than it is for us.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Election 2002: Catholic Voters Trend Republican DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — The 2002 elections were certainly historic. Only three other times in the past century have a president's party gained seats in the House in an off-year election, and the president's party has never before gained back a Senate majority during a midterm election.
With 60 million Catholic votes up for grabs, Catholics account for the nation's largest voting bloc. Many analysts wonder: Did the Catholic vote make a difference in this year's election?
Historically, the majority of Catholics have tended to vote Democrat. That trend, however, seems to be changing.
Since 1994, when Catholics supported Republican candidates over Democrats by a margin of 53-47%, increasing numbers of Catholics appear to be favoring Republican candidates over Democrats. In fact, exit-poll data show the Catholic vote might very well have played a role in key Senate races such as those in Missouri, New Hampshire and Minnesota.
Sen.-elect Norm Coleman captured 53% of the Catholic vote in Minnesota, John Sununu captured 49% of the Catholic vote in New Hampshire and Gov. Jeb Bush captured 58% of the Catholic vote in Florida, according to Michael Hernon, director of Catholic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, quoting both Zogby and Fox News exit-poll data. Catholics, he noted, made up the highest single denomination voting in Florida at 26%.
Hernon also noted that nine times out of 10, Catholics tend to outvote their percentage of the population. Not only that, but since 1994 practicing Catholics have tended to vote more Republican than the general population.
“While Catholics make up only 4% of the general population in Georgia, for example, they made up 12% of the voting population,” Hernon said, “contributing to Saxby Chambliss’ Senate victory there.”
The Washington Times reported that 74% of religious conservatives voted for the pro-life Chambliss for U.S. Senate.
Key to such victories was the Republican strategy of building grass-roots alliances with Catholics at the local level. Active in 18 states, such coalitions were most active in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, California, Missouri, Michigan, Florida and Minnesota.
Their efforts varied. They included telephone canvassing, direct mail, lawn signs, literature drops and even inviting Catholic leaders to Washington for briefings by Republican Party Deputy Chair Jack Oliver, presidential adviser Karl Rove and President Bush himself.
In Pennsylvania, outreach volunteers distributed the state's Catholic Conference's voter-education guides to show where candidates stood on the issues.
“I expect we are going to see the Church taking more of a role in educating Catholic citizens in future elections,” Hernon predicted.
Perhaps no efforts gained quite as much attention as those in Minnesota for Senate candidate Coleman. Headed by Kristin Flom, Minnesota state director of United in Faith, the coalition between the Republican National Committee and individual Catholics produced bumper stickers, buttons, lapel stickers and 2-foot-by-4-foot blue-and-white lawn signs that read “Catholics for Coleman.”
Eager voters put up the 500 Minnesota signs within two weeks. “There was a thrill and excitement with regard to our materials,” Flom said. “People seemed hungry for something like this.”
The signs created much controversy. Some erroneously suggested they could be perceived as antiSemitic. Both candidates, the late Paul Wellstone and Coleman, were Jewish. Angry and confused Catholic voters called their dioceses to complain.
“I think the signs were too broad in their language,” said Janet Haarman of Emily, Minn. “They do not speak for all Catholics. ‘Some Catholics for Norm Coleman’ would have been more accurate,” she said.
Others disagreed. “Something is definitely out of order when the ‘Catholics for Coleman’ signs could arouse so much fury among the public and the media while the organization of ‘Catholics for Choice’ continues to be tolerated as freedom of speech by the very same public,” wrote Tom and Patricia Strang in a letter to the St. Cloud diocesan newspaper.
The signs prompted the dioceses of Duluth and St. Cloud to publicly state that the Catholic Church does not endorse or promote particular candidates. Internal Revenue Service rules, of course, prohibit Church endorsements.
“Some felt that the signs were confusing,” Flom said, “but all we had to do was set people straight on the fact that it was a coalition, not an endorsement from the Catholic Church.”
As impressive as the numbers might appear, in other areas of the country Republicans were not as successful. Pro-abortion Catholic Jennifer Granholm was elected governor in Michigan.
And, despite a letter encouraging pro-life voting written by Bishop Blaise Cupich and read in all Rapid City Catholic churches, pro-life Republican candidate John Thune lost to pro-abortion incumbent Tim Johnson in South Dakota by a little more than 500 votes.
Efforts by Catholics in California also met with defeat, as gubernatorial pro-life candidate Bill Simon lost to pro-abortion Gov. Gray Davis, a Catholic.
“We did some polling and identified some issues and particular groups that we felt we should focus on and distributed about 500,000 pieces of literature,” said John Klink, chairman of the Catholics for Simon effort and a former Vatican diplomat. In addition to literature drops, the coalition also held a fundraiser for Simon and did telephoning to get out the Catholic vote.
While Simon didn't win, Klink said he thinks the coalition was able to create an infrastructure for future pro-family efforts.
“It's unusual for an incumbent governor to win by only 4 points,” Klink said.
Many reasons have been cited for Republican victories. Among them are the party's unified message, Republican grass-roots mobilization and the president's popularity and travels. Additionally, many see the pro-life issue as partly responsible for the outcome.
Deal Hudson, Crisis magazine publisher and chairman of Catholic outreach for the Republican Party, admitted he was surprised by how large a role the issue of abortion played in deciding several key elections.
“According to Pro-Life Infornet,” Hudson noted, “eight of the top 10 Senate races in the country went to pro-life candidates.”
Indeed, among voters in both Missouri and Minnesota, abortion ranked as a top concern. In Missouri, 17% of voters said abortion was their No. 1 concern, second only to the economy (21%), in voting for a senator. Of those 17%, 80% voted for pro-life candidate Jim Talent over incumbent Sen. Jean Carnahan.
Additionally, in Minnesota, 14% of voters said abortion was their top concern, the third-highest issue named. Likewise, 9% of voters in Georgia felt the same way.
That issue might have given Republicans the upper hand.
As evidenced by individual voters such as Kathleen Virnig of St. Cloud, Minn., more and more former Democrats find themselves switching parties.
“I used to vote Democrat,” Virnig said, “but I switched parties in part because of the typically pro-abortion stance taken by many Democrats. I decided they weren't my party any more. They left me.”
Tim Drake is executive editor of Catholic.net.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Deaf FBI Agent Inspires DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Sue Thomas went deaf at age 18 months.
After years of extensive therapy, she learned to speak and mastered the skill of lip reading. Through a series of providential events, she ended up working at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she became involved in undercover surveillance using her ability to read lips.
Thomas’ life is the subject of the new TV series “FB.Eye,” which airs at 9 p.m. Sundays on the PAX television network.
A deeply committed Christian with roots in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, Thomas is in great demand as an inspirational speaker all around the world. She spoke with Register correspondent Barbara Nicolosi about her life.
How did you become deaf at such a young age?
No specialist in this country has been able to figure out how or why I lost my hearing or, for that matter, how to restore it. My mother noticed one day that I was turning the television up higher and higher. The next day, when I didn't respond to my parents’ voices, they knew something was wrong. They took me to specialists all over but eventually all the doctors agreed that nothing could be done to restore my hearing. And so my parents made me a lifetime vow: “We will do whatever we can, absolutely everything in our power and within our means, to enable you to become as much a part of the hearing world as possible.”
I ended up at the Youngstown [Ohio] Hearing and Speech Center, where I learned to speak by imitating the vibrations I felt when I put my hands on the therapist's throat and by looking in the mirror to shape my mouth the way she formed hers. In an effort to fit in more in the hearing world, I also made it my goal to master the art of lip reading.
How did you end up working undercover at the FBI?
After graduating from college I found myself in pretty desperate straits. I couldn't find a job for a very long time. This was back in the days before there were a lot of accommodations for people with disabilities. Word had gotten out that the FBI was looking for deaf people to do fingerprint comparison. It was very precise work and they thought deaf people might have a better ability to concentrate. It was incredibly boring work. Basically, I was talking all the time to God, saying, “Please, get me out of here.” He answered that prayer powerfully.
One day some of the agents whom I had befriended were working on a case in which the sound mechanism failed on the surveillance camera. They asked me to come in and watch the tape and interpret it for them using my lip-reading skills. I wrote down what I saw, and I never went back to fingerprinting. Soon I was going on cases, in restaurants, in airports — wherever a deal was going down — and taking verbatim notes of what the suspects were saying. I was there for three and a half years — just long enough to get a TV series out of it!
Early on you were also successful as a competitive ice skater.
When I was little, my mother had a painting of Jesus hanging in my bedroom. She used to tell me that with his help, there was absolutely nothing in my life I couldn't do.
Being in a public school as a small child, some of the other kids would tease me a lot for being different. I used to get away from it by spending more and more time at a nearby skating rink. I hooked up with a wonderful coach who would help me feel the vibrations of the music by beating on the sides of the rink. With a lot of hard work, at the age of 7, I became the Ohio state champion.
When you were first approached about having a TV show done about your experiences, were you worried about how you would be portrayed?
This has been in the making for 12 years. Right after my book Lip Service came out, Columbia Motion Pictures bought the movie rights for it. They didn't know which way to take it. They thought it was too inspirational and spiritual. Some wanted to make it more of a thriller. It was all over the place. Eventually it fell apart.
The vice president of the motion picture group came to me very disappointed and said, “Sue, you have a great story here and it will eventually be told.” Eight years went by. Then Dave and Gary Johnson got involved. They are currently producing Doc for the PAX network. They first met me eight years ago when they were working on various other network TV projects. They never forgot me. So when PAX approached them last year to do another show, they said, “We want to do a show about a deaf woman and her dog who worked for the FBI.”
I knew the Johnsons well enough — that they were men of God with integrity. I knew they would be able to take my struggles but see the whole thing in the context of my journey of faith. I have given to them with a totally open hand to let them mold and shape this series.
The actress, Deanne Bray, who plays you on “FB.Eye,” is also deaf. Have you met her?
I've not only met her, I've taken her home! I've grown to love her. She's like a little sister to me. We e-mail each other constantly. This is another reason the project took so long, I think. God was waiting for the very best person to play my part. And we have found this in Deanne. Deanne is a Catholic and both she and her husband are people of strong faith.
You were born and raised in the Protestant tradition. How is it that you spent several years living with Carmelite nuns?
After leaving the FBI, I knew there was something missing in my life. The nuns kindly took me in and let me spend a couple years finding my way. Eventually, I received the desire to have a better understanding of the word of God. So I ended up going to a nondenominational seminary down in South Carolina. But I will always thank God for that time among the sisters. It was there that God gave me the foundation and root of my prayer life.
But in leaving the cloister I didn't leave the wonderful goods I had found in the Catholic tradition. During Lent, for example, I am in the Catholic Church every morning. I haven't left. I've embraced both. I don't shout it out because I don't want to lose anyone, and I am currently welcomed among Christians of both traditions.
People ask me, do you miss the cloister? I really do. I think that once this whirlwind is over, there is a convent in Connecticut where I will end up. I have no doubt.
What do you think Catholics and Protestants have to learn from each other?
Catholics still have a reverence before God: the awe, the humility, the sacredness of the sanctuary, the ability to sit in silence before God. I stress all the time to my friends in the Protestant faith to remember that God is holy. We've lost the sense of that in much of the culture of Protestantism. We've tried to make God just like us. Yes, he is our best friend, but how dare we put him on the same level with us! I do believe there is a mystery of God that only the silence can lead us to. And I pray that in the Catholic faith each and every person will yearn to have a deep understanding of the word of God. When that happens we'll be together again, right where we started.
I do a lot of speaking for women and youth retreats. When I do my retreats with Protestants, I use a lot of the Catholic liturgy. People always come to me afterward and say, “Where did you get that? It was beautiful!”
Barbara Nicolosi writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sue Thomas ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Church-State Separation Has Its Roots in Anti-Catholicism, Authors Say DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — When groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation fight for “separation of church and state,” they're siding with historical bigotry against Catholics that was bestowed on American culture by the Ku Klux Klan.
So argue two new academic books about the First Amendment that come to nearly identical conclusions: The First Amendment set out to protect religion from government, not government and society from religion.
“One of the real dangers that arises from the metaphorical use of the ‘wall of separation’ is that a wall, by its nature, imposes restrictions on either side of the wall,” said Daniel Dreisbach, professor of justice, law and society at American University in Washington, D.C. Dreisbach is the author of Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York University Press, 2002).
“The Constitution places no restrictions on religion — or religious expression — on private or public property,” Dreisbach said. “The Constitution expressly imposes restrictions on government and on government only.”
Dreisbach's conclusions mirror those of University of Chicago law professor Philip Hamburger, who wrote Separation of Church and State(Harvard University Press, 2002).
Both scholars argue the phrase “wall of separation” was gleaned from Jefferson's Jan. 1, 1802, letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. They write that Jefferson used the metaphor in hopes of winning support of rival Federalists in New England, not as a definitive interpretation of the First Amendment.
“In a 1947 Supreme Court case, justices picked up this metaphor and elevated it to a virtual rule of constitutional law,” Dreisbach explained. “This misinterpretation has become the central metaphor that's used to restrict the role that people in communities of faith can play in the public marketplace of ideas.”
Dreisbach and Hamburger, who worked separately, blame the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black for erecting the wall and promoting the myth that the First Amendment regulates and restricts religious expression. They argue that Black was motivated mostly by a hatred of Catholics, cultivated while he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and his overt fear of Catholic schools becoming too dominant in American culture.
“Black, like John Dewey, saw public schools as the temple of democracy, the great equalizer in society, so he looked at Catholic parochial schools with great fear and disdain,” Dreisbach said.
Dreisbach, a Presbyterian, said Black's KKK-inspired intolerance was popular because America has a history of Protestant bigotry against Catholics.
“The rhetoric 'separation of church and state’ came into vogue in the 1820s and 1840s when we saw the first great waves of Irish Catholic immigrants,” he said. “We see the same thing at the end of the 19th century when the second wave of Catholic immigrants came from Ireland, Italy, Poland and other central and southern European countries. … It was a separation of Catholics from the dominant Protestant society.”
Yearly Debate
Arguments about separation of church and state come to the fore-front every year, when local governments begin planning Christmas and Hanukkah displays that usually go up the day after Thanksgiving.
Some of the displays, found in every state in the union, are sponsored and funded by cities, counties or school districts. Others are privately sponsored displays that draw controversy when erected on public property, such as a courthouse lawn or in a civic center park. Both routinely result in protests and lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
The Supreme Court has ruled such displays do not violate the First Amendment as long as they consist of secular symbolism, such as Santa and reindeer, and symbolism from various religions. Most displays, therefore, have Christian symbolism, secular commercial symbolism and Jewish symbolism.
The fuss over the religious content of public religious displays, Dreisbach said, represents an ironic affront to what the founding fathers intended when they wrote the First Amendment. He said they intended to protect religious expression from being singled out for special treatment or exclusion from the public square.
“The courts have consistently said that certain kinds of speech are not protected, and there are legitimate limitations to free speech,” Dreisbach said. “We are not protected in using speech that promotes violence, for example. But if an expression does not directly result in violence, deemed lewd or pornographic, government must remain neutral regarding the content.”
Laurie Gaylor, spokeswoman for the Freedom From Religion Foundation based in Madison, Wis., said Americans love the “wall of separation.” They will continue to cherish the wall, she said, regardless of what scholars write about its questionable origins.
“The fact is, hordes of Catholics support this wall precisely because they have been a minority to Protestants in this country,” she said. “Very typically, the earliest court cases arguing in favor of a wall of separation were brought by Catholics who didn't like the fact that their children were hearing readings from Protestant versions of the Bible in the public schools. Catholics, outnumbered by Protestants, wanted their children to learn from a Catholic version of the Bible at home and at church.”
Even recently, Gaylor said, Catholics have fought for separation of church and state in court. In a federal case in Texas, Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, a Catholic and Mormon family sued the school district because Baptist students were leading prayers over the school's public address system at sporting events.
Dreisbach said he understands that some people benefit from separation of church and state, and that it is popular among many Americans — secular, religious and atheist alike. That doesn't mean, however, that constitutional law should be twisted in such a way that religious expressions are sifted from the marketplace of free ideas.
“The strictest notions of separation — the idea that religion is an inappropriate thing for public schools — has really declined,” said Tom Berg, law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, Minneapolis, who specializes in constitutional law. “There has been a big movement away from this idea that secularism is neutral ground that serves the interests of separation of church and state.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Supreme Court Judges Internet Porn in Libraries
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Nov. 12 — The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that will determine whether or not public libraries should be legally required to protect minors against pornographic Web sites using filtering technology, according to the Associated Press.
Congress has attempted to mandate such filters through several laws — each one struck down by lower courts — in lawsuits filed by the American Library Association and other civil libertarian groups.
Former President Bill Clinton signed the latest bill in 2000. It requires all libraries that receive federal aid to install such filters. A three-judge panel had previously thrown out the Children's Internet Protection Act, claiming that filtering technology is too crude to avoid filtering out important medical and political information.
The Bush administration has taken up the appeal, noting that libraries need not stock pornographic films and therefore need not offer an open window into the vast world of indecent sites online.
Texas Attorney General (and now Senator-elect) John Cornyn wrote in defense of the law, “Parents should not be afraid to send their children to the library, either because they might be exposed to such materials or because the library's free, filterless computers might attract people with a propensity to victimize children.”
The case will be heard sometime in the spring.
Catholic Charities Is Fourth-Largest Nonprofit
U.S. NEWSWIRE, Nov. 11 — The Catholic Charities network is composed of some 1,640 local agencies and institutions across the United States. It has just been ranked as the fourth-largest nonprofit organization in the country by The NonProfit Times, which publishes the oldest annual ranking of charities in the country.
Local Catholic Charities agencies provide a myriad of vital services in their communities, ranging from day care and counseling to food and housing. The 2000 combined revenue of the Catholic Charities network was $2.69 billion. Nearly 90% of these funds were spent on programs and services, making Catholic Charities one of the nation's most efficient charities, reported U.S. Newswire.
Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Still Pending
AGAPE PRESS, Nov. 12 — Judie Brown, founder and president of the hard-hitting American Life League, is happy about the recent pro-life victories in Congress, but she's not about to do an end-zone dance.
Agape Press reported she is adopting a “wait-and-see” attitude, hoping these victories will really result in protection for the unborn. The soon-to-be appointed Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has made the promise to push a ban on partial-birth abortion, a fact she finds encouraging.
But Brown warned that “the partial-birth abortion bill that Sen. Lott has now promised to introduce does contain an exception; [and it] will not ban the procedure, but regulate it.”
She also noted the bill will not forbid “the three other forms of abortion that kill those same babies at that same age.” However, she remains “cautiously optimistic” that some progress will be made in the new Republican Congress.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'Step Back From Brink of War' With Iraq, U.S. Bishops Tell Government DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — The U.S. bishops Nov. 13 urged the United States to “step back from the brink of war,” saying they “find it difficult to justify the resort to war against Iraq.”
The bishops said they agree with the Holy See and bishops from the Middle East that resorting to war under current circumstances “would not meet the strict conditions in Catholic teaching for overriding the strong presumption against the use of military force.”
The statement was approved after an hour-long debate by a vote of 228 to 14, with three abstentions. It prefaced its conclusions by explaining that the “grave choices about war and peace, about pursuing justice and security,” are not only military and political choices but also moral ones involving matters of life and death.
“Traditional Christian teaching offers ethical principles and moral criteria that should guide these critical choices,” it said. Instead of primarily pursuing a course to war in Iraq, the bishops said, “it is vital that our nation persist in the very frustrating and difficult challenges of maintaining broad international support for constructive, effective and legitimate ways to contain and deter aggressive Iraqi actions and threats.”
At the urging of several bishops, the statement was careful to note that “there are no easy answers” and acknowledge that “ultimately, our elected leaders are responsible for decisions about national security.” However, they “hope that our moral concerns and questions will be considered seriously by our leaders and all citizens.”
They said, “We have no illusions about the behavior and intentions of the Iraqi government. The Iraqi leadership must cease its internal repression, end its threats to its neighbors, stop any support for terrorism, abandon its efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction and destroy all such existing weapons.”
Toward that end, they said, they support “effective enforcement of the military embargo and maintenance of political sanctions.” They called for more carefully focused economic sanctions “which do not threaten the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians.”
The bishops said they welcome the fact that the United States has worked to win the U.N. Security Council's support for calls to Iraq to disarm or face military intervention.
“We join others in urging Iraq to comply fully with this latest Security Council resolution,” the statement said. “We fervently pray that all involved will act to ensure that this U.N. action will not simply be a prelude to war but a way to avoid it.”
They acknowledged that “people of good will may differ on how to apply just-war norms in particular cases, especially when events are moving rapidly and the facts are not altogether clear.”
However, they said, “based on the facts known to us, we continue to find it difficult to justify the resort to war against Iraq, lacking clear and adequate evidence of an imminent attack of a grave nature.”
The bishops said they are especially concerned about recent efforts to expand the traditional definition of a just cause for war “to include preventative use of military force to overthrow threatening regimes or to deal with weapons of mass destruction.”
It noted that the Catechism of the Catholic Church limits the choice to go to war to cases where “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations [is] lasting, grave and certain.”
“A distinction should be made between efforts to change unacceptable behavior of a government and efforts to end that government's existence,” the statement said.
Decisions to wage war with Iraq should “require compliance with U.S. constitutional imperatives, broad consensus within our nation and some form of international sanction,” the bishops said. Recent actions by the U.S. Congress and the U.N. Security Council are important toward that end, they said.
“As the Holy See has indicated, if recourse to force were deemed necessary, this should take place within the framework of the United Nations after considering the consequences for Iraqi civilians and regional and global stability,” they said.
Also to be considered are the probability of success and proportionality, the statement said.
“We recognize that not taking military action could have its own negative consequences,” the bishops said. “We are concerned, however, that war against Iraq could have unpredictable consequences not only for Iraq but for peace and stability elsewhere in the Middle East.
“The use of force might provoke the very kind of attacks that it is intended to prevent, could impose terrible new burdens on an already long-suffering civilian population and could lead to wider conflict and instability in the region.”
The statement also suggested that “in assessing whether ‘collateral damage’ is proportionate, the lives of Iraqi men, women and children should be valued as we would the lives of members of our own family and citizens of our own country.”
The agenda for the bishops’ annual meeting did not originally include any international policy issues. On the first day of their conference, however, several bishops proposed they quickly draft and approve a new statement about Iraq, taking into consideration the recent actions by the Security Council and Congress.
----- EXCERPT: Bishops' Fall 2002 Meeting Roundup ----- EXTENDED BODY: Patricia Zapor ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: St. Edith Stein Was a Saintly Thinker Waiting to Be Discovered DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:ROME — The thought and current importance of Edith Stein, a copatroness of Europe, is yet to be discovered, a dean of philosophy says.
Angela Ales-Bello, the dean of the School of Philosophy of the Lateran University, is a specialist in Edmund Husserl and St. Edith Stein (1891–1942).
Sixty years after her death in Auschwitz, St. Stein — or Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, as she was known in religious life — continues to be one of the most important figures in the field of phenomenology and philosophical anthropology, Ales-Bello said in this Zenit (a Rome-based news agency) interview.
Will St. Edith Stein be proclaimed soon a doctor of the Church?
Perhaps our Pope might think of this possibility in a relatively short period of time. In any event, she is already a patroness of Europe and for the time being no mention has been made of her proclamation [as doctor].
Why does St. Edith Stein's philosophy continue to be of importance?
St. Edith Stein is not removed from the world. Her complex personality did not allow her to forget any element, either human or religious. She knew how to combine human, worldly and political interests with spirituality. Herein lies her great current importance.
Moreover, she knew how to synthesize medieval and contemporary thought.
What was St. Stein's contribution to phenomenology?
St. Edith Stein followed her teacher, Edmund Husserl, succeeding in explaining the analysis of the human person in a rigorous and clear manner. St. Stein was able to communicate and be a mediator between Husserl's fine and lofty analysis and the anxieties of the young students of philosophy.
She herself, out of modesty, said that she did not know to what degree the intuitions she referred to were her own or her teacher's.
How did you discover St. Edith Stein's thought?
While studying Husserl in the ,60s, I realized that it was very important to keep in mind the phenomenological school he created. I found out that there were very interesting women in the group: St. Edith Stein,
H. Conrad-Martius and others. It was then that I began to be interested in St. Edith.
I think one cannot understand this woman if one does not know Edmund Husserl: to isolate St. Edith from her philosophical milieu would result in a partial, superficial study of her thought.
Much emphasis is placed on St. Stein's spiritual dimension and less on the philosophical. Is the latter less important or is it, rather, because it is not known?
There is no discussion of her philosophy because of ignorance. We must keep in mind that the first writings made available came from the Carmelite world, which gave preference to her spiritual texts.
This does not mean that her philosophy was not appreciated at Car mel. Let's not forget that she wrote Fin ite Being and Eter nal Being in her cell. Ob viously, how ever, her less philosophical writings are preferred.
Her philosophy is complex. It is good that works on St. Edith Stein and her spirituality are being published, but her philosophical facet must not be forgotten. There must be further study of this aspect, which clearly distinguishes her from other saints.
Her theoretical research is not abstract; it is linked to important social, political, juridical and ethical questions. Her spiritual life cannot be separated from her philosophy. Philosophical research structured her life radically, which was enlightened by her spiritual journey.
What is St. Edith Stein's concept of the person?
For St. Edith Stein, as well as for Husserl, the person is divided in three parts: body, psyche and spirit. When St. Edith transcribed the second volume of Ideas for a Pure Phenomology, a text of Husserl, her teacher, she was impressed by this tripartite approach.
She went deeper into this aspect and through the method of phenomenology showed how the actions of a person demonstrate that these divisions exist.
The tripartite division of the person was useful in her approach to mysticism and in explaining that God dwells in the soul.
Potentially, we have all three aspects. However, it can happen that one or another is developed according to one's education. This explains St. Edith Stein's commitment to the educational realm and to formation.
“Whoever seeks truth seeks God, whether he knows it or not,” this German philosopher said. Is St. Stein's philosophical research a constant quest for God?
She said the phrase about Husserl, her teacher. St. Stein felt that Husserl had not demonstrated his religiosity sufficiently, because he did not want to mix the academic aspect with religious questions. She recriminates him for this diffidence, this lack of commitment.
In fact, for St. Edith, whoever seeks truth through philosophy seeks God, because God is truth. So, for her, it is clear that whoever seeks truth is, in fact, seeking God.
What model of life has this copatroness of Europe left us?
A possible model that is not easily attained. St. Edith Stein succeeded in combining many different aspects; she was interested in different topics and had great intellectual capacity.
Her proposal of the three-dimensional person — body, psyche and spirit — is a call. Today it is difficult to speak about the spiritual; there is a great tendency toward immanentism.
St. Edith Stein arouses great interest among those who know her. It is interesting to see how in civil universities doctoral theses on her philosophy are proliferating.
The clarity of her intuitions and the multifaceted character of her interests urge us to go deeper into existential situations that we meet in daily life. In this sense, we can speak of a thinker for our time.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Vatican Envoy to Mexico Urges Priest Training
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Nov. 10 — Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Vatican Congregation for Bishops, told Indian Catholics in Mexico's southern Chiapas there are too many lay workers in the area and not enough priests.
Cardinal Re said Pope John Paul II would not reverse his decision to suspend the training of lay Indian deacons for five years, the Associated Press reported.
“In all of the other 85 dioceses in Mexico combined there are less deacons than in Chiapas,” he said. What is missing, the cardinal said, is an effort to encourage the sons of deacons to study for the priest-hood.
Continuing the work of his predecessor, Bishop Samuel Ruiz, San Cristobal Bishop Felipe Arizmendi had aggressively pursued the training of Indian deacons.
But on Feb. 1, the Vatican asked Bishop Arizmendi to suspend the program amid concern the deacons were not supervised closely enough by priests and married deacons were close to taking on the functions of priests.
Did Bin Laden Plot to Kill Pope?
MSNBC, Nov. 10 — One of the top officials in the terrorist organization al Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is now suspected of having planned to murder Pope John Paul II in 1999 in the Philippines, according to MSNBC and The London Sunday Times.
That country's intelligence sources revealed that a pipe bomb was supposed to be planted in a park where the Pope was scheduled to speak and snipers were to be stationed nearby with high-powered rifles in case the bomb failed to kill the Pope. However, Church officials questioned this account.
Msgr. Gilbert Garcera of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines noted there were never plans for the Pope to visit the Philippines in 1999. His 2002 visit was cancelled due to poor health.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is on the list of 22 most wanted terrorists put out by the U.S. government.
Vatican Fears a Bethlehem Without Christians
Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes visited the Church of the Nativity and brought with him approximately 250,000 British pounds donated by the Vatican charity Cor Unum to help the Palestinian Christian minority in a town that had been mostly Christian since the second century.
The intifada launched by Yassir Arafat after the failure of peace talks with the Israeli government in September 2000 has driven away most of the tourists who were the town's economic mainstay. Gift shops and inns have closed, according to the Times.
Father Amjad Sabbara, the Franciscan pastor of Bethlehem, told the paper that dozens of Christian families have moved out in just the past two years.
“It is the middle classes, the intelligentsia, who are leaving because those are the families who have money and can afford visas,” he said. “They won't come back. Those who left in 1967 did not come back.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: John Paul Makes Historic First Address Before Italian Parliament DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:ROME — It might have been the most symbolically rich day of Pope John Paul II's ministry as primate of Italy — that is, as an Italian bishop. On Nov. 14, he became the first pope ever to address the Italian parliament.
Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi also attended, as did Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, accompanied by the entire Italian cabinet.
Addressing the elected representatives of the Italian people in one of the longest speeches he has delivered in years, the Holy Father outlined the broad principles of Catholic social doctrine. He called for a concerted effort to reverse Italy's declining birthrate, the possibility of a clemency to relieve the suffering in overcrowded prisons and the rights of parents in the education of children.
Yet what he said was secondary to where he was saying it. In 1870, the forces of Italian reunification seized Rome from the temporal control of the pope, defeating the papal states. For 59 years, the popes chose to remain as “prisoners of the Vatican” rather than recognize the sovereignty of the Italian Republic.
In 1929, the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and Italy created the Vatican City State, which guarantees the Pope's independence from any civil power. Yet throughout the postwar period tensions between the Holy See and Italian politicians were high, as the Church favored the Christian Democrats against the anti-clericalism of the Italian communists and their allies. The Christian Democrats splintered in the early 1990s, and with the contemporaneous collapse of communism, Italian politics has been reconfigured.
Noting the “vicissitudes and contradictions” of history, the Holy Father proclaimed in the seat of the Italian government that “the bond that exists between the Holy See and Italy … has had highly positive results, both for the Church of Rome, and therefore for the Catholic Church, and of the beloved Italian nation.”
In 1984, John Paul — the first non-Italian Pope in 450 years — signed a new concordat with the Italian government that removed Catholicism's status as the country's official religion. The visit to the parliament is a continuation of that new approach: John Paul does not see the Church's role as one of imposition upon the civil authorities but rather as a role of proposing. And he came with a proposition about what it meant to be an Italian and Italy's historic vocation in Europe.
“Italy's social and cultural identity, and the civilizing mission it has exercised and continues to exercise in Europe and in the world, would be most difficult to understand without reference to Christianity, its lifeblood,” John Paul said.
Pier Ferdinando Casini, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, echoed the Pope's words in an extraordinary speech of welcome.
“You have contributed in a determined way to the heavy but exalted work of building Europe,” Casini said to John Paul. “Today, on the vigil of its reunification, which finally embraces the peoples of Eastern Europe and puts the definitive end to the any division of our continent, we consider with great respect what you have often said about preserving the spiritual background of Europe and of the European peoples, a soul which is essentially Christian, even for those who are not Christian.”
Sen. Marcello Pera, president of the Senate, who quoted the 1993 papal encyclical Veritatis Splendor(The Splendor of Truth) on the danger of ethical relativism in his welcoming address, began at the heart of the Christian vision of the political order.
“If, as Christianity teaches, the Word was made flesh, then man is the image of God and has value in himself, regardless of his condition,” Pera said. “From this revolutionary message — the 'scandal and folly’ as St. Paul says — it follows that man is a brother to the other, is in agreement with the other, has compassion for the other, has respect for the other.”
American theologian Michael Novak, who was in Rome during the address, said the visit was a flowering of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, which he covered as a correspondent in the 1960s.
“There was such hostility then, such a visit was unimaginable,” Novak said. “And now, it has happened — it is very moving for me to see this. Very noteworthy were the addresses by the Italian politicians, laymen who understand the teaching of the council about the vocation of lay people to undertake the political vocation in the light of the Gospel. It was very impressive — it would be hard to think of more than a few American politicians who could have spoken so.”
The historic character of the visit was apparent everywhere.
The Vatican City State flag flew alongside the Italian tricolore outside the Montecitorio, as the parliament is called. The papal address was carried live on television, and newspapers devoted dozens of pages to coverage, noting the length of the address (46 minutes), the amount of applause (23 times) and the duration of the final ovation (3 minutes). One national columnist wrote simply: “Montecitorio? No. Mount of the Beatitudes.”
A full two hours before the Pope arrived, Italian senators and deputies (analogous to members of Congress) were crowding into the chamber in order to claim a good seat — a real sacrifice, as it meant two hours without mobile phones.
Just in case anyone forgot, and to ensure the proper solemnity, a public announcement was made before the Pope arrived to turn off all mobile phones — the first time such an announcement had been made.
The tail-coated ushers of the parliament were fussing over the papal chair with great excitement; at one point, no less than a dozen of them found some reason to adjust, check or otherwise touch the Holy Father's chair and reading stand.
The address demonstrated that Catholic social doctrine is very broad indeed and cannot be reduced to any one political party. Different groups in the chamber applauded at different times as John Paul spoke about family issues, reducing poverty and unemployment, and issues of peace.
Yet above all, it was plea for Italy and Europe to turn away from a “democracy with values [that] easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”
“In this noble assembly I would like to renew the appeal which I have made to the various peoples of the continent,” the Holy Father said toward the end of his speech. “Europe, at the beginning of the new millennium, open once again your doors to Christ!”
Father Raymond J. de Souza writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Jerusalem, the Mother of All Nations DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II met with more than 7,000 pilgrims in Paul VI Hall during his general audience on Nov. 13. He offered his reflections on Psalm 87, which presents Jerusalem as “a city of peace and the mother of all nations.” He was continuing his catechesis on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours.
The Holy Father expressed his sadness that the psalmist's description of Jerusalem as a city of peace does not correspond to the situation the city is currently experiencing. “However, a purpose of prayer is to sow trust and generate hope,” he noted. “The psalm sings of Zion as the mother of all mankind and not just of Israel.” He pointed out that in the psalm, even nations that were considered to be hostile to Israel are going up to Jerusalem where they are welcomed not as foreigners but as relatives.
The Pope also emphasized the Christian interpretation of the psalm. God's promise of salvation, he said, is symbolized in the Church, which is the “Jerusalem from above,” of which St. Paul speaks. He pointed out that the Church Fathers read this psalm in light of Mary, who gave birth to the Incarnate Word and is the mother of all the redeemed.
Unfortunately, this song about Jerusalem, a city of peace and the mother of all nations, is in contrast with the historical situation the city is currently experiencing. However, a purpose of prayer is to sow trust and generate hope.
The universal perspective of Psalm 87 seems reminiscent of the hymn in the Book of Isaiah, where all the [non-Jewish] nations are converging toward Zion to hear the word of the Lord and rediscover the beauty of peace, beating “their swords into plowshares” and “their spears into pruning hooks” (see Isaiah 2:2-5). In reality, though, the perspective in this psalm is very different. Instead of converging on Zion, it radiates out from it; the psalmist sees Zion as the point of origin for all nations. After declaring the primacy of the holy city, not because of its historical or cultural benefits but only because of the love that God has poured upon it (see Psalm 87:1-3), the psalm widens its perspective to an outright celebration of this uni versalism that makes all peoples brothers and sisters.
Mother of All Nations
The psalm sings of Zion as the mother of all mankind and not just of Israel. Such an affirmation is extraordinarily audacious. The psalmist is aware of this and points out: “Glorious things are said of you, O city of God” (verse 3). How could the modest capital of a small nation ever be presented as the point of origin of nations that are far more powerful? How could Zion make such an outlandish claim? The answer is given in the same sentence: Zion is mother of all mankind because it is the “city of God” and is therefore at the foundation of God's plan.
All the earth's cardinal points are viewed in relation with this mother: Rahab, or Egypt, the great western state; Babylon, the well-known eastern power; Tyre, which personifies the business nation to the north; Ethiopia, which represents the deep south; and Philistia, which represents the central area that is also a daughter of Zion.
All peoples of the earth are recorded in the spiritual birth register of Jerusalem: the formula “was born here/was born there” is repeated three times (see verses 4, 5, 6). This is an official juridical expression that, at the time, stated that a person was a native of a specific city and, as such, enjoyed the full civil rights of that nation.
Finally, it is rather noteworthy that the nations that are considered to be hostile to Israel are going up to Jerusalem where they are welcomed not as foreigners but as “relatives.” Moreover, the psalmist transforms this procession of these peoples toward Zion into a choral song and a joyful dance: They rediscover their “true home” (see verse 7) in the city of God, from which a spring of living water flows that makes the whole world fruitful, as the prophets so often proclaimed (see Ezekiel 47:1-12; Zechariah 13:1; 14:8; Revelation 22:1-2).
In Jerusalem, all people must discover their spiritual roots, feel like they are in their homeland, be at ease with each other as members of the same family and embrace like brothers and sisters who have returned home.
The Heavenly Jerusalem
Truly a page from interreligious dialogue, Psalm 87 is a compendium of the universalist legacy [salvation is also for non-Jews] of the prophets (see Isaiah 56:6-7; 60:6-7; 66:21; Job 4:10-11; Malachi 1:11, etc.) and foreshadows our own Christian tradition, which applies this psalm to “the Jerusalem from above,” which St. Paul proclaims “is freeborn, and she is our mother” and has more children than the earthly Jerusalem (see Galatians 4:26-27). Likewise, the Book of Revelation sings of “a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (21:2, 10).
In line with Psalm 87, the Second Vatican Council also sees the universal Church as the place where “all the just from the time of Adam, ‘from Abel, the just one, to the last of the elect‘” are gathered. It will have its “glorious completion at the end of time” (Lumen Gentium, No. 2).
Mary, the Living Zion
In the Christian tradition, this ecclesial understanding of the psalm opens the door to reading this psalm in a Mariological light. For the psalmist, Jerusalem was truly a “metropolis” or “mother-city” within which the Lord himself was present (see Zephaniah 3:14-18). In light of this, Christianity sings of Mary as the living Zion, whose womb gave birth to the Incarnate Word, and consequently the children of God are reborn. The voices of the Church Fathers — from Ambrose of Milan to Athanasius of Alexandria, from Maximus the Confessor to John Damascene, from Cromazio of Aquileia to Germanus of Constantinople — accord with this Christian understanding of Psalm 87.
Now let us listen to a teacher from the Armenian tradition, Gregory of Narek (circa 950-1010), who, in his Panegyric to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, addresses the Virgin with these words: “Taking refuge under your most worthy and powerful intercession, we are protected, O Holy Mother of God, and find refreshment and rest under the shadow of your protection as if we were protected by a well-fortified wall: an ornate wall, studded gracefully with purest diamonds; a wall enveloped by fire and therefore impregnable to the assault of robbers; a sparkling and flaming wall, out of reach and inaccessible to cruel traitors; a wall surrounded on all sides, according to David, whose foundations were laid by the Most High (see Psalm 87:1, 5); a powerful wall of the heavenly city, according to Paul (see Galatians 4:26; Hebrews 12:22), where you welcome all as inhabitants, because through the bodily birth of God you made the children of the earthly Jerusalem children of the Jerusalem above. Therefore, their lips bless your virgin womb and all confess you as the dwelling place and temple of him who is of the same essence as the Father. Justly, then, the prophet's words apply to you: ‘You were for us a house of refuge and help against the torrents in the days of anguish’ (see Psalm 46:2)” (Testi Mariani del Primo Millennio, IV, Rome, 1991, p. 589).
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Turkey Thanksgiving: Syriac Christians are Pilgrims in Their Own Land DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:MIDYAT, Turkey — Spread out among a network of villages between the Tigris River and the Syrian border lies one of Turkey's last remaining original Christian communities.
The Syriac Orthodox Christians of Tur Abdin have endured 1,600 years of oppressive rulers, forced conversions and wars — but it was the 20th century that almost saw their extinction. What was once a thriving populace is today a sparse 2,500 members.
But as Turkey bids for admission to the European Union, many Christians are returning to the land they left behind with hopes of renewal and renaissance.
The Syriac Christians, the region's only indigenous people, date their conversion back to the fourth century, although Christianity had reached the area in the early first century with the Apostle Thomas. In their daily life and liturgy the Syriac Christians still speak the ancient Aramaic language used by Jesus Christ and the Apostles.
Since a 1999 cease-fire in the Turkish government's war against Kurdish separatists and the lifting of martial law there have been gradual improvements to the area and its inhabitants. New government spending has led to much-needed road repairs and improved bus service to the isolated villages. With security back in place, the vital tourist industry has been revived and new hotels and businesses have begun popping up.
Other significant improvements have come courtesy of the European Union, which has requested that Turkey — a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim but is officially secular under the terms of its Constitution — reform many of its restrictions on minority groups in order to qualify for EU membership.
“New laws have recently passed through parliament now allowing the Church to buy and sell property and organize humanitarian programs — things we couldn't do before,” said Melfono Gulten of Mor Gabriel Monastery, located near Midyat. “[We are allowed to] teach our very own language — Jesus’ language. These are all new laws insisted on by the EU.”
“We have a big hope for the future because the political government has changed,” Father Gabriel Akyuz said. “If we get into the EU our future will be more secure and then many more people will return to their homeland.”
Hope for Christians
The exodus began 30 years ago when many left to escape economic hardships, government oppression and finally a Kurdish conflict that put the Christian community in the middle of a 16-year guerrilla war. More than 30,000 people were killed, many of them innocent Christians.
The central city of Midyat, once home to a majority Christian population, today comprises a mere 100 families living around the city's eight churches. But it is as vibrant a city as it was 500 years ago as an episcopal see, with a multicultural community made up of Christians, Arabs and Kurdish Muslims.
There is still much interaction between the three communities — they speak the same languages, shop at the same stores, go to the same schools and play together — and as a result there is substantial understanding of one another. As one 12-year-old Kurdish girl put it: “The only difference is that we go to mosque and they go to church.”
And today, the same government that in the past threatened criminal charges for unauthorized church renovations — renovations nearly impossible to obtain — is today assisting Christians with building materials.
“We want the Christian people to return,” said Murat Erdem, public relations official for the city of Midyat. “The government here will do anything for them. We will give them whatever materials they need for their home and churches. We have about 10 families that have returned, but this is only the beginning.”
While the Tur Abdin Christians are pleased with the changes taking place, they remain mindful of the troubled times in their recent past and remain a bit uneasy about their future.
“I feel neither optimistic nor pessimistic about tomorrow,” one Church official said. “I want to be optimistic, but it seems unreasonable. If Turkey fails to enter the EU it will again be very difficult for us.”
This anxiety is most intensely felt in the villages where Christians live a more isolated existence and experienced the brunt of the 16-year war. After three years of peace they still feel a need to conceal their gold crosses when venturing outside Tur Abdin.
Whether these fears are reasonable or not is uncertain, but according to Gulten, it is a fear of the past that should be forgotten. “They need to lose this old fear,” he said. “I think the teachers are better trained now and this new generation is a more understanding one. But it needs time.”
The area's children seem to agree. “Everyone in my school is more friendly to me and wants to get to know me because I am Christian,” said 17-year-old Serro from Mardin, who is just one of three Christians students in a school of 700. “I think it is the opposite now and is better to be Christian.”
The Christian minority is all too aware its future lies in the hands of others, just as it always has. They are also well aware that a single event could set them back to the terrifying war years. Therefore they are extremely careful about what they do and say and to whom. As one Church official said, “We have to always be on our guard thinking about what we do and its consequences.”
Iraq
One of their concerns is war with Iraq, whose border is just 30 miles east of Tur Abdin. During the Gulf War a million refugees poured into Turkey, not only upsetting the area's fragile economy but also setting off the greatest escalation in the Kurdish uprising.
“We don't know what will happen if war starts up in Iraq — and this worries us,” Gulten said. “We don't like Saddam's regime either, but I am not sure how much a war will help anyone. We are Christians and we don't want war for any reason. We pray for a better solution.”
Chuck Todaro filed this report from Midyat, Turkey.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Chuck Todaro ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Queen Marks Anniversary of Intra-Faith Charity
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Nov. 8 — British Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Consort Philip attended a reception of more than 700 guests at St. James Palace to mark the 60th anniversary of a World War II-era charity designed to bridge gaps between Jews and Christians.
The group, the Council of Christians and Jews, sees fighting antiSemitism as one of its key goals, according to director Margaret Shepherd. She told the Associated Press that in a “fragile world of many anxieties … there has been a rise in anti-Semitism again. There has never been a greater need for people to be speaking to each other.”
Other attendees included Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and the Catholic archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.
First Public Recitation of New Rosary Mysteries
FIDES, Nov. 11 — On Oct. 31 some 2,000 Philippine Catholics gathered in Quezon City, near Manila, at a national Marian shrine, Mary Queen of Peace, to recite the new Luminous Mysteries of the rosary proposed by Pope John Paul II in his Oct. 16 apostolic letter “Rosarium Viginis Mariae” (“The Rosary of the Virgin Mary”).
Fides, the Vatican's missionary news service, reported this was the first public recitation of the new mysteries in the world. They cover Christ's public ministry between his baptism and his passion.
At the rosary rally Cardinal Jaime Sin predicted the year ahead would bring “many blessings to the country. Mary will heal our land through millions of people praying the rosary and more living the rosary in their lives.”
Writer Marked for Death for Criticizing Misogynists
WORLDNETDAILY.COM, Nov. 9 — Sudan is the site of extensive persecution of Christians and animists by Islamic militants. Now a Muslim woman who dissents from her nation's cultural practices is being targeted as well, according to Art Moore, columnist for WorldNetDaily.com.
Author Kola Boof has been marked for death by Sudanese diplomat Gamal Ibrahim in a fatwa, like that put out by Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran on British leftist author Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses more than a decade ago.
An Islamic Shariah court in London passed sentence on Boof in 1997 for her collection of protest poetry. In February 1998 she received a call from the fugitive Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden in which he said, “If I had the time, I would come there and slit your throat myself.”
She responded to the fatwa with this statement: “As a black African woman, I cannot and will not be silent as black men in Arab nations are chained up like dogs to the back doors of Muslim households and fed, literally, from doggie bowls. I will not be silent as African women are raped, mutilated and mentally demeaned by sadistic human beings calling themselves children of Allah. I will not be silent as the number of little black boys who are sodomized by their Arab masters continues to soar, while even worse atrocities attend the lives of little black girls.”
Boof is now under protection of U.S. government agents. Her latest book is TITLEd Long Train to the Redeeming Sin: Stories About African Women.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: ... Now For Step Two DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:When bishops first met in Dallas, the pressing question was how to deal with wayward priests. It was being asked in the highest profile way, under the white-hot glare of a media feeding frenzy. With CNN and the New York Posthanging on bishops’ every word, it was not the right time to ask how the Church got into this mess in the first place.
However, just before the end of the meeting, several bishops made clear that, later, the bishops would have to do just that.
It's later now. The Dallas norms have been vetted by the Vatican, they've been rewritten by a mixed commission of Vatican and American Church leaders, and approved again by the bishops in Washington this month. It's time to start focusing our energies on phase two.
Bishops have begun planning for the possibility of an American plenary council. Catholics should give the council attention now and throughout the process leading up to it, to help make it an honest and thorough accounting of the state of the Church in America.
A plenary council is a sort of synod that addresses specific problems and is capable of providing serious, permanent solutions. In the 1880s, deficiencies in Catholic education were the Church's No. 1 problem. A plenary council's solution literally changed the character of the Church in America: It produced the parish school system, the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and the Baltimore Catechism.
What's the crisis for today's Church? Not sex abuse per se but the underlying problem: the crisis in fidelity, as George Weigel has put it, or, more broadly, a crisis in the universal call to holiness.
Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Allen Vigneron, who first proposed the council, said he was not thinking of establishing new norms for priests in the country.
The Church would simply reaffirm in a solemn council those things priests should be doing anyway: daily Mass, frequent confession, eucharistic devotion, meditation, regular retreats, the Liturgy of the Hours and ascetic practices such as fast and abstinence.
An excellent idea. We think the council should also look at a couple of issues very carefully.
Homosexuality and the priesthood. It is time to move past equivocations and half-truths as regards homosexuality and clergy abuse. The claim is often made that notorious pedophile priests came from “a pre-Vatican II seminary culture” and that this culture is now changed. It's true that pedophilia is unrelated to homosexuality, but that's beside the point. The priest sex abuse making most headlines around the country isn't pedophilia, it's homosexual activity between adults and post-adolescent minors.
Homosexual literature frankly acknowledges the desirability of such activity to homosexuals. In The Gay Report, by homosexual researchers Karla Jay and Allen Young, the authors report data showing that 73% of homosexuals surveyed had at some time had sex with boys 16 to 19 years of age or younger.
Pope John Paul II in September called for greater care in selecting candidates who have the capacity to live celibate lives and the exclusion of anyone with observable “deviations in their affections.” He added, “It would be lamentable if, out of a misunderstood tolerance, they ordained young men who are immature or have obvious signs of affective deviations that, as is sadly known, could cause serious anomalies in the consciences of the faithful, with evident damage for the whole Church.”
Culture of dissent. At the same time, the Church in the United States can't simply scapegoat homosexuality as if that were the cause of all our woes. As Archbishop Charles Chaput pf Denver told us, “We've seen a permissiveness regarding contraception and premarital sex, and the same priests who allow that can easily slip into giving themselves permission regarding other issues of sexual moralities.” He added, “It's a spirit that says each person and priest can decide individually what to accept in terms of Church teachings.”
The bishops have been bold in dealing with priests after they have become abusive. The next logical step is to act just as boldly to solve the problems that lead to abusive clergy in the first place.
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Semi-Catholic Governor?
Regarding “Pro-Abortion and Catholic?” (Nov. 3-9):
Michigan Gov.-elect Jennifer Granholm states that the question of when human life begins is a matter of faith. This notion is simply ludicrous.
Science, not religion, defines the beginning of the existence of any living organism. I am a pathologist and have examined many stillborn embryos and fetuses over the years, and it is very clear that they are human beings. My freshman medical-school embryology textbook (post-Roe v. Wade) says on page 1 that the zygote (the cell that results from fertilization) is the beginning of the human being.
The philosophical question pro-abortion-ists are really asking is: When does a human being become a person endowed with rights and privileges? I think Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer, Ph.D., has offered the only clear way to answer this question. Every being of human origin must be considered a person. This is the only objective criterion available. Once exceptions and limits are made, objectivity is lost. The question becomes a subjective judgment, with the strong and powerful judging the weak and defenseless on their fitness for life. Enslavement and holocausts begin with the concept that the victims are nonpersons.
As for the dissenting priests who defended Ms. Granholm: How can priests who willfully and publicly dissent from the truths taught by the Church guide others (and themselves) to the Kingdom of God? With all due respect, the bishops do need to exercise their legitimate authority to govern, teach and sanctify, and rein in the destructive culture of dissent.
Finally, as Franciscan Father Benedict J. Groeschel has often pointed out, reform begins with each and every individual in the deepest recesses of his or her being and continues throughout one's life. May God grant us all the grace to reform.
JAMES E. BROWN JR., MD
Metairie, Louisiana
Anglican Angst
I just had a little something to add to “Figuring Out the New Archbishop of Canterbury” (Nov 3-9). Mr. Longenecker forgot to mention one thing about this man. Something quite important.
In a recent issue the monthly magazine Catholic World Report, there was some information about the Anglican bishop. Here is an excerpt: “Soon after his candidacy won approval in Parliament, the Times of London raised eyebrows with the news that Archbishop Williams would soon be inducted into the White Druidic Order, the highest of three orders of the Gorsedd of Bards. Members insist it is not a pagan organization, although the rites of the group refer back to primitive Celtic religions. Many prominent Welsh men — including the retired Catholic Bishop Daniel Mullins of South Wales — are also members. Archdruid Robyn Lewis, a retired judge, told the Times:‘We are not like the English Druids. The Stonehenge druids are a pot-smoking crowd. Ours is a very respectable society.’”
There is another little bit of information that Carey is “an acknowledged liberal who supports the ordination of women and gays.”
I have been wondering if, had Mr. Longenecker known the above facts, he might not have expressed the opinion that “from a Catholic point of view, Williams will be better than Carey.”
ELVIRA FLYNN
Rio Rancho, New Mexico
‘Neo-Catholic’ Nonsense?
George Sim Johnston's account of Vatican II (“40 Years Ago: Six Reasons for Vatican II,” Nov. 10-16) seems very similar in letter and spirit to a review he wrote in the May 1996 issue of Crisis magazine.
The earlier piece has received new attention of late as a target of criticism in Christopher Ferrara and Thomas Woods’ recently published traditionalist polemic, The Great FaÁade: Vatican II and the Regime of Novelty in the Roman Catholic Church. Ferrara and Woods portray Johnston's 1996 piece as epitomizing what they denounce as “neo-Catholicism” — that is, support of the postconciliar Church's substitution of a sub-dogmatic “regime of novelty” for the Church's traditional doctrine and practice. They assert that the preconciliar Church is “casually denigrated” by Johnston, and criticize his “semi-gnostic” appeal to the “ineffable” doctrines of Vatican II, whose obscurity (they say) does not prevent him from deeming them sufficient grounds for abandoning the Old Church.
Johnston surely knows of The Great FaÁade, but his Register column neither mentions it nor addresses its criticisms directly. Rather, he repeats his 1996 criticisms of the pre-1962 Church with a determination that is hardly casual, and [in a way that] looks very much like his implicit answer to Ferrara and Woods. All the ‘60s liberal slogans about the supposed shortcomings of the Old Church are on prominent display: gloom and pessimism, obsolete institutional model, negative moral theology, non-participatory liturgy, rejection of democracy, insufficient attention to the subjectivity of the truth.
What is not on display is the fact that those slogans are rather tendentious references to the carefully, repeatedly and authoritatively articulated teaching — rooted in their account in Scripture, tradition and prior magisterial and human reason — of at least the last half-dozen preconciliar popes, one of them the first papal saint in three centuries. It is not clear whether Johnston does not know, or does not care, about the gap that yawns between what the Church thought, taught and did before 1962 and what it has thought, taught and done since.
Nor do we hear much from Johnston about the state of the Church 40 years after the council commenced to reform the Church. This is hardly surprising: Since Johnston has no cure for the Church's manifest decadence, he would prefer not to talk about the disease. Instead, he concentrates on the old slogans and their implication that, because the traditionalists pine for the allegedly bad old days of gloom and pessimism, obsolete institutional model, etc., they have no cure, either. But I myself would have thought that, given the current mess, it might be worth a try to give those slogans a bit more scrutiny and even open a dialogue with those Catholics who believe what almost all Catholics believed 40 years ago, and who also believe that the way of the Church in the third millennium is the way it left 40 years ago.
At the very least, it would be interesting to see whether the sons of Vatican II can mount quite as vigorous a campaign against the supposed “gloom and pessimism” of, say, St. Pius X as their spiritual fathers did.
JOHN A. MCFARLAND
Ellicott City, Maryland
George Sim Johnston replies: I've never heard of The Great Facade, but its arguments sound familiar.
They are based on the specious notion that an ecumenical council of all bishops in union with the Chair of Peter rebelled against the Holy Spirit. The mischief that followed the council was not the work of the council; rather it was mainly the work of clergy (and some laity) who received their Catholic formation prior to Vatican II. The council documents were never properly implemented in this country, and I am looking forward to the day when they are.
Keating Matters Too Much
Regarding “Bishops’ Abuse Point Man Says Rome Doesn't Matter” (Oct. 20-26):
The appointment of Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating to the National Review Board on Clergy Sexual Abuse was a very poor choice, in more than one way. The appointment to the board of any person with political agendas and aspirations is inappropriate, given the conflict of interest inherent in representing a special interest group and representing oneself, in order to maintain political viability.
The role of the Lay Advisory Board is to do just that — advise the U.S. Bishops’ Con ference. It was not created to generate independent procedural decisions for the conference. Nor was it created to serve as a publicity tool for Catholic dissidents such as Keating.
I am sure that the U.S. bishops acted in good faith when they appointed Keating. However, since he has proved himself to be both indifferent to the issues facing the bishops and a liability to collaborative endeavors, isn't it now more prudent to remove him rather than keep explaining and apologizing for him?
GAIL MCNAUGHTON
Fresno, California
MOMS Harms
I was shocked to see an article promoting MOMS — Ministry of Mothers Sharing — in your Oct.13-19 issue. The article states: “MOMS is not a parenting class. It is a superb spiritual renewal program for women…” My experience with the program was quite different.
Soon after my family moved to Mesa, Ariz., in the late 1980s, we joined a parish with a MOMS program. I attended the program and considered it a major waste of time. One of the women in my group actually left the Catholic Church within a year of completing the classes.
Since then, I have learned much about my Catholic faith. I question whether the MOMS program is more New Age than Catholic. For example, one section in the MOMS journal I received reads as follows: “Our way of being in the world, our way of doing whatever we do in the light of being touched, held, delighted by, and rooted in the Mystery of Divinity — whether that Divinity is called God, Goddess, Holy Wisdom, the Unnameable, or simply 'thou.’ Which definition best describes your experiences?”
Please take a serious look at the MOMS program and, if necessary, print a retraction of the Register's endorsement of this program.
JANICE BRIGHT
Mesa, Arizona
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Happy Anniversary, Register DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Congratulations on the 75th anniversary of the National Catholic Register and on your excellent anniversary issue, highlighted by John Burgerís fine reporting of the paperís history (Nov. 10-16). The Register has survived some very difficult times through the years but has always remained an important and faithful voice in the American Church. Iím grateful to the Legionaries of Christ for their commitment to keeping that voice alive and, indeed, strengthening it. I am proud to be a former correspondent for the Register, and prouder still to have married one (Mary DeTurris Poust). God bless the staff in your important ministry.
DENNIS POUST
Albany, New York
The writer is director of communications for the New York State Catholic Conference
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Thinking Outside The 'Jesus Box' DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:I was ecstatic.
Last week, while sitting in an airport, I was drawn to a CNN story about a “box” that was touted as being the oldest archeological link to Jesus Christ. The burial box, or ossuary, reportedly bears the inscription, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” Scientific studies suggest that the inscription was written about 62 A.D., the year that James, the first bishop of Jerusalem and known to be the “brother” of Jesus, was martyred.
Here seemingly was independent, physical evidence of Jesus’ existence, which, unlike the Shroud of Turin or relics of the true Cross, could have widespread credibility with a skeptical scientific community. I also knew that some restraint was in order, as James, Joseph and Jesus were all common names at that time.
At the end of the day, we're probably going to have to conclude that we don't know whether these are the James, Joseph and Jesus of Christ ianity. Even so, the archeological community is seriously debating the authenticity of this find, and most agree that the mention of a brother on an ossuary is unusual and significant. This truly is an intriguing discovery.
As news of all this has hit the mainstream American media, we hear questions concerning Mary's perpetual virginity. Doesn't this inscription, if authentic, definitively prove that Joseph and Mary had other children, that Jesus had a brother named James?
I think the new discovery provides us with an opportunity to review what we know and what we don't know about Jesus’ human family.
We do know as a matter of faith that our Blessed Mother was a virgin before, during and after giving birth to Jesus. Nowhere in Scripture is she identified as being the mother of anyone other than Jesus.
Even though Scripture refers to the general perception that Joseph was Jesus’ father (e.g., Luke 2:48; John 6:42), we know that Joseph was Jesus’ foster father or guardian, but not his biological father. James and other individuals are identified in Scripture as “brothers” of Jesus, yet in both Aramaic (Jesus’ native tongue) and Greek (the language of the Bible) the word for “brother” can have a range of meanings, including “cousin” or “kinsman.” Further, Scripture mentions three Jameses in Jesus’ company who are not identified as sons of Joseph — the sons of Zebedee (cf. Matthew 10:2), Alphaeus (cf. Matthew 10:3) and possibly Clopas (cf. Matthew 27:56; John 19:25).
Interestingly, the heresy that the Blessed Mother had other children did not arise until the fourth century, at which time St. Jerome wrote persuasively against the error and the Church formally proposed the teaching on Mary's perpetual virginity. An interpretation of the “brothers” of Jesus that would reject Mary's perpetual virginity has seen a resurgence in our time among Bible Christians, but even the early Protestant leaders (Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli) maintained Mary's perpetual virginity.
A ‘brother’ of Jesus?
On the other hand, the recent discovery raises the issue of the exact sense in which James is a “brother” of Jesus. Theories have been advanced throughout the Church's history, but we must serenely admit that we don't know the answer to that question with certainty.
The most ancient tradition is that Joseph was considerably older than Mary, and in any event was widowed with children at the time he married Our Lady. This tradition would help explain why Joseph is out of the picture when Jesus begins his public ministry. Under this view, James and the other “brothers” of Our Lord are actually his stepbrothers. This view dates back to a document known as the Protoevangelium of James (c. 120 A.D.) and has been advanced by many reputable sources throughout Church history, perhaps most notably St. Epiphanius, a fourth-century bishop.
Of course, this theory would be entirely consistent with the inscription on the ossuary as initially reported.
Other views are equally legitimate and consistent with what we do know. For example, the more prevalent view today is that James was a “cousin” or “kinsman” of Our Lord who was part of Joseph and Mary's extended family. Perhaps Joseph and Mary were actively involved with James’ upbringing because of death or some other circumstance that has been lost to history.
And there's one other point to consider. Even if the “James” on the ossuary is the martyred “brother” of Jesus and the “Jesus” is none other than Our Lord and Savior, this still doesn't prove that the “Joseph” identified on the ossuary is the foster father of Jesus. It would certainly be well within the realm of possibility that another Joseph could be the father of James. This scenario wouldn't prevent Jesus from still being mentioned, as James’ relationship with the King of Kings would still be a point of legitimate pride and such mention would also distinguish this James from other Jameses who have fathers with the name Joseph.
Obviously, all this entails a certain amount of speculation, which is fine so long as we build on what is known to be true.
It's doubtful that the riddle of the ossuary will be definitively solved. I have to say, though, that I found a discussion on cable news networks about historical evidence for Jesus Christ a welcome change of pace from reports on Martha Stewart, Iraq and sniper shootings.
Even more, we must recall that truth is one. Authentic scientific discoveries help us in our pursuit of truth, so we need not be disturbed by the latest archeological report, though we should at the same time bring what we know by faith to bear on the subject. And if a particular scientific discovery proves to be false or a hoax, we can just as serenely walk away. After all, ultimately our faith is not in a box of dead man's bones but in an empty tomb.
Leon J. Suprenant Jr. (leon@cuf.org) is president of Catholics United for the Faith (CUF) and Emmaus Road Publishing.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: 'Abortion Movies' Through a Pro-Life Lens DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:There is no arena of American society that has been more consistently and squarely pro-abortion than the entertainment industry. In politics, law, medicine and religion, pro-life heroes have risen up and have managed to keep the sanctity of life flame flickering.
This is not the case in the world of mainstream entertainment.
Everybody with any real power in movies and television is either hysterically pro-abortion, or else indignantly pro-abortion, or else so completely engulfed in the abortion mentality that questioning it strikes them as annoyingly bizarre, like questioning the morality of dental floss or Belgian waffles.
But strangely, there has not been the full-scale onslaught on this issue that we have seen addressed to other areas of social policy like racism.
Truly, never have so many powerful people done so little to make an impact on an issue about which they feel so desperately. Why?
Making Abortion Movies
The most recent films to tackle the abortion question have been painstakingly well-produced in an effort to make what is ultimately political propaganda more entertaining and palatable to the viewing audience.
The 1996 HBO movie If These Walls Could Talk boasts a cast that includes a dozen of Hollywood's top actresses including Sissy Spacek, Demi Moore, Cher, Anne Heche, Rita Wilson, Jada Pinkett Smith and many others. The Cider House Rules was nominated for a slew of Academy Awards and ultimately won for John Irving's screenplay and Best Supporting Actor Michael Caine. The Contender, also well-produced and Oscar-nominated, is more of a defense of Bill Clinton's sexual antics than a case for abortion, but it still clearly draws the line between good guys and bad guys based on who defends “a woman's right to choose.” Citizen Ruth is a biting and effective satire of both sides in the abortion fight, with the tie, of course, going to those who support abortion.
The abortion films claim to be mirrors, revealing truths about the women who choose abortion, the supporters of abortion rights and most particularly, the pro-life movement to itself and to the broader audience. Watching these films is a school of what the pro-abortion movement, and probably about half of America, hears us saying (as opposed to what we think we are saying), which of our arguments have landed (and should be developed), and which fall on completely deaf ears (and should be abandoned).
To their credit, contemporary abortion stories in both feature films and TV shows generally avoid presenting the extreme pregnancy situations — abortion, rape, incest or life of the mother — that we have heard trumpeted ad nauseam by so many cowering “personally against abortion, but” politicians. These movies are all about abortion as a civil right, as basic self-determination and autonomy for women.
The screaming of the pro-lifers in the background about the life of the fetus doesn't even register as a real argument. If anything comes through in screening all the abortion films it's that we can't keep shouting “baby!” while the other side shouts back “woman!”
They don't see it any more than I would see it if a bunch of hysterical Hindus accosted me at McDonald's and pointing at my hamburger, shouted, “Murderer!” All I could say to them would be, “I'm sorry that you think so. I don't.”
They know we think it's a baby. We can stop shouting that now. We should try to make a case based on their own main argument, namely that abortion is a civil right. Can we make the case that civil rights don't exist in a vacuum? What is it that qualifies even basic civil rights?
A New Kind of Hero
One of the weirdest aspects of the abortion movies is their attempt to recast the role of the movie hero into the radical providers and protectors of abortion. It's a hard sell because traditionally in movies, heroes are those who do the right thing, not those who do a regrettable thing.
Universally, the pro-abortion hero characters are presented as ambivalent about the difficult choice involved in having an abortion, and their very heroism is couched in their ability to swallow their ambivalence to help women in need.
In The Cider House Rules, Dr. Larch cannot do what he does without a daily dose of mind-numbing ether. We catch Cher's abortionist in Walls in a private tearful moment, before she rolls up her sleeves and exchanges her bulletproof vest for a white coat and suction hose. In The Cider House Rules, the climactic moment for the main character, gentle young Homer, comes when he sets aside his own pro-life instincts to perform an abortion. He is a hero, the film suggests, because he doesn't let his conscience stop him from doing the right thing. How weird is that?
Also presented as heroic are the pregnant women who push ahead trying to make their best choice, even if it causes them anguish. Interestingly, the only ones who don't show any ambivalence about abortion are the post-abortive women. The pro-abortion dogma here is that all of a woman's angst comes before the procedure. Once the fetus is terminated, however, so are the doubts and struggles. As one post-abortive woman claims in Walls, “People told me I would feel guilt. But, honestly, all I felt was relief.”
We know the filmmakers are being dishonest here because everywhere in America churches and counselors, family and friends are finding themselves called on to help women pick up the pieces after their abortions. This is a strong case for us because it is all about the women. The argument is ours to make that abortion haunts women much more because of their own nature than because of social stigma.
Overall the movies reveal that pro-abortion America cannot evade its own ambivalence.
They know that championing abortion feels, well, icky. They are trying to convince themselves that history's abolitionists and suffragettes and social reformers must have felt icky too, but deep down inside, they sense that the opposite is true. At their best, movies skillfully create and develop characters. Let's face it: There aren't a lot of pro-life people who live and work in Hollywood. We are largely absent from the creative community. This al lows our movement to be defined from the outside, by those who don't get us, or worse, by those who see us as part of what's wrong with the world. The entertainment industry depicts us as loud-mouthed, intrusive, unintelligent, poorly dressed religious fanatics. And guess what? Most Americans don't want to be that.
Ours is a visual culture that moves and responds to perceptions. It doesn't matter whether that is right or wrong, it's just the way it is. If we are going to win people to our ranks, we have to create the appearance of a cool momentum. We have to present ourselves as funny, confident, stylish and yes, even detached about whether people accept our arguments or not. The frantic urgency and rejection of popular culture that marks so much of our public identity has to be replaced by calm conviction and an “at-homeness” in the world. This is our culture too, and we should be masters of it, not outsiders who are cowering in fear of it.
The sad fact is that in 30 years, there hasn't been a single mainstream feature film that has articulated what we believe about abortion.
The pro-life movement has not responded in the popular culture to the powerful popularization of the abortion mentality that comes weekly on Law and Order, ER or just about any prime time drama except Touched By an Angel.
Our whole focus in this issue has been legal and political, and like Aesop's fox staring at the grapes, popular culture has proved too difficult a battlefield for us, so we have branded it as beneath our efforts. In so doing, we have surrendered the most pervasive and powerful pulpit from which to make our case.
Pro-Life Propaganda?
We need to reverse this defeatist trend, but we have to know what we are doing before we launch into the business of crafting visual parables to support our point of view. I read a script not long ago from a group of Christians who told me it was a “pro-life Cider House Rules.” I winced at this moniker, not because of the pro-life part but because The Cider House Rules was basically a tedious, unentertaining propaganda film.
Sure enough, this new script rivaled that of The Cider House Rulesand was basically tedious, unentertaining propaganda. Why would we want to do that? One of the writers challenged me: “It isn't propaganda if it's true.” He was wrong. Propaganda is anything that seeks to manipulate human beings using distortions and fear. By definition, propaganda is a violation of human freedom because it seeks to force a choice.
We don't get to do that.
Movies are a bad forum for making precise legal or moral arguments the way the parables would be bad as a source from which to derive principles of canon law. The Holocaust and racism films work in so far as they are hero accounts, not treatises on public policy. My sense of pro-abortion films is that they principally serve to delight and affirm pro-abortion America. It might be nice to be able to reward some of our pro-life heroes up there on the big screen, but chances are, if we had that power, we would also succumb to the sinful urge to vilify and caricature our opponents. And we would be twice as culpable because we have been on the other side.
This doesn't mean that we can abandon popular entertainment. To say that we should not produce propaganda films is not to discourage us from making art that reflects the truth about abortion. Parables are a powerful means of helping people grow. It's just a matter of knowing how and when to use parables and then maximizing their potential.
The absence of pro-life people — indeed, the absence of many people who love God and virtue — from the entertainment arena for the last 50 years has been devastating to society. We need a new generation of deeply committed, skilled artists who can offer a richer and truer view of human life than what is now on the screen.
But we have more reason to hope for success in our projects than does pro-abortion America in theirs. Ultimately, pro-abortion movies do not fail as entertainment because of bad production, flawed writing, incompetent directing or uneven performances.
They fail because you can't sell a lie.
There will never be a pro-abortion To Kill a Mocking Bird, because Mocking birdspeaks the truth about racism. Abortion is not a good choice for women and no beautifully crafted artistic statement is going to refute that. Pro-life filmmakers have the truth on their side. They just need to come up with parables that bring that truth to light.
Barbara R. Nicolosi is a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
This column is adapted from the forthcoming book,Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement (St. Augustine's Press, 2003).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara R. Nicolosi ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: 'Ex-Gays': Is This the Church's Answer? DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:The engaging young man on the subway poster doesn't look like a tempting target for vandals.
He's smiling, with a direct and open gaze. The young woman on a matching poster has a pierced eyebrow and a sweet, school-of-hard-knocks smile. So why have vandals defaced two of the 10 ad posters currently on display in the Washington, D.C., subway system?
The first hint is in the ads’ headlines: “I Chose to Change” and “It's My Choice to Change.” The man and woman represent PFOX, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays; the ad copy tells of their decision to become “ex-gays.”
I would never vandalize these posters. That's a property crime, and, more importantly, it's a slap in the face to everyone who has made the admirable and countercultural choice to seek to leave homosexuality behind. I admire PFOX and similar groups. Nonetheless, the posters exemplify some of the problems with the “ex-gay” movement.
Let me be clear: Not all self-identified ex-homosexuals, and not all ex-homosexual groups, share these problems. And it's absolutely true that some men and women have had a significant reduction of same-sex attractions by the grace of God — in that sense, “ex-gays” aren't a myth. But Courage, the Catholic group for people with same-sex attractions, does not follow an “ex-gay” model. In my view, the Courage model shows a much more accurate view of the Christian life — and the differences between “straights” and “gays.”
One D.C. subway poster reads, “I make choices every day … Where to eat. What to wear. Who to see. But as a gay man I never thought I could change who I was. Until I realized change was a choice … and I chose to change from gay to straight. It may not be a decision you want to make, but you should know thousands of us already have. Please respect our choice.”
The other ad says, “If someone changes their address, maybe changes an attitude, or even changes their job, you'd still respect them, right? So why not respect me when I decide to leave homosexuality? I chose to change from gay to straight. If that choice isn't for you, at least change your mind about me.”
The ads sugarcoat the moral aspect of homosexual acts; the posters compare homosexual acts to where one eats and which job one takes. They employ a rhetoric of “choice” that gives up on persuading others that chastity is the right choice, not just one neutral choice among others. But that's not too important, since, in the larger cultural context, pretty much everyone who sees the posters will understand that people generally “change from gay to straight” for moral and religious reasons.
The important problem with the ads, and with the “ex-gay” movement more generally, is in the way the struggle with homosexual temptation is presented. Living a chaste life is presented as a matter of switching teams, becoming an “ex-” something, an ex-sinner. It's supposed to be a moment of decision, not a lasting struggle. The goal is not chastity but heterosexuality.
I don't want to speak for Courage, since I'm neither a spokeswoman nor a member, but one thing I love about the group is that it acknowledges that for many people the struggle with same-sex attraction doesn't go away. So Courage urges people with same-sex attractions to form strong friendships, to embed ourselves in networks of people who can counsel and support us when temptation strikes. And Courage knows that one of the best supports for a profoundly countercultural stance against homosexual temptation is a love of Christ in the Eucharist. (One of the most inspiring reflections on eucharistic devotion I've ever heard was spoken by a Courage member explaining how he maintained his chastity.) Courage presents people with homosexual attractions with a realistic picture: The struggle is difficult, it may or may not end in this life, but in Christ all things are possible.
Wait a second! That sounds exactly like what the Church says to people who struggle with heterosexual temptations!
That's another thing I like about Courage. Their very name is taken from a virtue that all Christians must exemplify. In promoting a chaste way of life, rather than a switch from the Bad Team (homosexuals) to the Good Team (heterosexuals), Courage emphasizes the aspects of spiritual struggle that all Christians share in common. People who are tempted to heterosexual lust pray that the temptation may end, but if it doesn't, no one thinks they have failed; they just keep trying to live chastely in the teeth of temptation.
I once heard a panel discussion on homosexuality and Christianity at which one of the panelists described a group of her friends as Dos Equis (double X) — exex-gays. The Dos Equis are the practical consequences of a movement that, despite its admirable desire to help people struggling with homosexual temptations, ultimately does not provide a realistic model of Christian life.
Eve Tushnet writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Eve Tushnet ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: What Changed DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:The following is a summary of the key revisions to the proposed sex-abuse norms set forth in June in Dallas by the U.S. bishops:
E Instead of no statute of limitations, the standard under Church law was inserted: 10 years after the alleged victim reaches his or her 18th birthday. However, waivers of that limit are not only possible, but they also must be sought from the Vatican by bishops, according to the bishops’ interpretation of the language.
E Dioceses must follow local civil law in regards to what allegations of abuse it reports to the civil authorities.
E Lay-led diocesan review boards that were to be created under the policy now would be “confidential.” Also, bishops would not have to use the boards to help assess the credibility of allegations and fitness for ministry in every case. Requirements that assessments be communicated to the alleged victim and the accused, and that the boards review their diocese's policy and procedures every two years, were dropped.
E Under the norms proposed in Dallas, the Vatican was not directly involved. Under the changes, the Vatican would have to be notified of cases in which a preliminary investigation indicates the allegations might be credible. The Vatican could direct the diocesan bishop to proceed or, in special circumstances, handle the case itself.
— Wayne Laugesen
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: My New Pastor DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:My parish got a new pastor this fall. From what I gather about him by reputation, I have reason to believe he'll be a good priest. God knows we need him in these days, and 10,000 others like him.
Of course, good priests don't just “happen.” They don't materialize out of thin air. They're not merely the product of good character, supportive families and sound training, either — though these things are indispensable. Parish priests need to hear from their flock. They need our encouragement and our gratitude. And they need to hear our needs.
In that spirit, here are six unsolicited, unauthorized, but hopefully not unreasonable words of counsel to my new pastor: E Don't obsess about the scandals. It seems like the theme of “inappropriate sexual conduct” has for months dominated parish life to the detriment of Scripture, the sacraments and the Church's universal call to holiness. Yes, we need disclosure. Yes, we need healing. We need restoration of our shaken confidence in the Church. But we need to get on with the business of Christian living as well.
E Support devotions and pious practices. Most Catholics are not triumphalistic, superstitious, scrupulous, letter-of-the-law types more interested in lighting candles and praying novenas than in practicing charity and promoting justice. Don't make people feel uncomfortable receiving communion on the tongue or staying after Mass to pray. Let them have their societies and their adorations. Far from creating division or encouraging phony piety, opening such avenues will enrich and sanctify the parish family.
E Demand high quality from ministers. Participation in liturgy is not an end in itself, meant simply to get people involved or make them feel wanted. Musicians and lectors, altar servers and extraordinary ministers all have the solemn task of serving the function of and augmenting the beauty of the Mass. Readers and singers and servers who are properly trained for their roles and execute them proficiently do more than further the cause of active participation: They make the liturgy more perfect, more reflective of its heavenly analogue.
E Preach from Scripture. The Catholic Church is the true “Bible Church.” Not only because is it the Church consistent with the one whose founding and early life we read about in the New Testament, but because Catholic life and worship are soaked with Scripture. The catechism summarizes our doctrines with continual appeals to the written Word. Our liturgies and prayers take their words from the Bible and follow biblical models. And throughout the liturgical year, of course, we hear an ordered progression of scriptural stories and passages at Mass.
E Give us an intellectual connection with Scripture. Teach us the meaning of the verses you and your lectors read to us. Use your homily time to help us penetrate those passages; show us how they apply to our daily lives and to God's great plan of salvation history as well. Jesus made the scriptures come alive for his audiences. In his name, follow his example.
E Be demanding of your people. Take a cue from the religious orders and diocesan vocations offices that have stressed orthodoxy and a rigorous prayer life: They're flush with new priests and religious. Lay movements offering a clear choice between the way of Christ and the way of the world are rewarded with enthusiastic members. The same dynamic can work in our parish.
Have faith in your people, Father. We get out of bed on a Sunday morning because we're looking for challenge and guidance — not to be affirmed on the path we're already on, but to be led along a higher, tougher, more rewarding path. Push us. Test us. With charity and patience and love, demand no less of us than Christ did: to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.
Todd Aglialoro is editor of Sophia Institute Press in Manchester, New Hampshire.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Todd M. Aglialoro ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Humble Woodland Home of the 'Weisse Dame' DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:The rolling hills of Missouri's wine country — yes, the Show-Me State has a wine region — make a fitting home for the Shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows.
The shrine is tucked into 40 lovely acres behind St. Martin's Parish in Starkenburg, Mo., a tiny German municipality. And I mean tucked: I had to negotiate several sharp curves and steep hills before finally spotting the church.
It was late Sunday morning and the site was deserted. So were the spacious woods behind it, except for the shrine itself. This, I soon found out, comprises a mammoth stone chapel, small log chapel, 13-foot-high Stations of the Cross, replicated Grotto of Lourdes, underground sepulcher topped by a Mount Calvary grouping and various other attractions and aids to prayer. As I stood alone in the hot, still air this past summer, it was hard to believe that several thousand pilgrims visit this place every year.
So rich in devotional stops were the woods that I wasn't sure where to start. So I started at the beginning, entering the tiny log structure that was once the primary shrine. Erected in 1888, the chapel was built to house the “Weisse Dame,” or White Lady, the name the area's German settlers gave to their statue of Mary. This they carried in special processions whenever missionaries came to visit. (The German settlers had actually first built a chapel for the Weisse Dame in 1852; this was the second version.)
Although the German settlers’ public devotion to Mary impressed the locals, relatively few people visited the woodland shrine until the arrival of Father George Hoehn from Heppenheim, Germany, in 1887. Hoehn became pastor of St. Martin's; his nephew, August Mitsch, arrived a few months later to serve as sacristan. When Mitsch built the log chapel I was in, the number of pilgrims rapidly increased. The chapel was soon enlarged and adorned with stained-glass windows from Germany and a bell in its small tower.
With pilgrims trekking to the chapel in greater numbers, a Way of the Cross was erected in the surrounding woods in 1889. The wooden stations were elegant in their simplicity, although weather took its toll. Today's stations are instead made of reinforced concrete. The 13-foot white stations, arranged in a circle just downhill from the log cabin, reminded me of tombstones bearing silent witness to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
In 1890, the parish purchased a “Sorrowful Mother” statue to replace the faded and worn Weisse Dame. Even more visitors flocked to the site and miraculous events began to occur. When an addition to St. Martin's was in progress the next year, for example, rain delayed the work for weeks, threatening the settlers’ crops. Father Hoehn vowed a solemn annual pilgrimage to the Blessed Virgin in the chapel if the rains would cease. They did.
Another extraordinary event occurred in 1894, when a terrible drought had people burning candles continually before the Sorrowful Mother statue. One night the altar in the log chapel caught fire; soon the altar linens, flowers and everything on top of it was ablaze. Everything, that is, except the statue of the Blessed Virgin — even though it was topped by a flammable veil anchored by a waxen wreath.
Around the turn of the century, a grotto was built in the woods just past the Stations of the Cross. Crafted to resemble the grotto at Lourdes, it contains a statue of the Immaculate Conception and another of Bernadette Soubirous, the French girl to whom Our Lady appeared in 1858. Unfortunately, there was no water at the grotto. But Father Hoehn didn't worry — he prayed to the Blessed Mother and began digging. On the third day, which happened to be the feast of Mary, Comfortress of the Afflicted, he struck water. Father Hoehn later traveled to France and brought back water from the Shrine of Lourdes, pouring it into the Starkenburg well. This only increased the devotion of the people. (Water from Lourdes has been added to the well numerous times over the years, most recently in 2000. Small vials of the mixed waters are available in the chapel for visitors.)
In 1906, parishioners began quarrying stone for a massive chapel dedicated to Mary. The imposing Rhenish-Romanesque-styled building measures 69 feet long by 43 feet wide, and features a 12-paned rosette window above the main entrance and a pulpit of stone.
Deep Gratitude
As I entered the shrine, my eyes immediately went to the side altar of Our Sorrowful Mother. Old crutches and braces — the leather worn, the metal rusted — rest quietly in front, silent testimony to the healing power of the Blessed Mother. In addition, numerous plaques adorn walls and pillars, thanking Mary in German and English for blessings granted. I was moved, upon touching one plaque, which read, “Dank der Schmerzhaften Mutter (Thank you Sorrowful Mother), 1904,” to reflect on the deep gratitude so many have felt in this place.
One of the plaques, I learned, was placed here by a young student who noticed a growth on his hand. The young man had prayed to Mary, using the holy water from the Lourdes well, and the growth disappeared. The student later became one Msgr. Martin Hellriegel, considered a giant of the 20th-century liturgical movement. Father Hellriegel said his first Mass in this chapel.
Back outside, I made my way through the woods to see the three remaining holy sites: a grotto called Mount Olivet; a grotto to the Holy Family, dedicated in 2000; and the sepulcher and Mount Calvary, one of the shrine's most impressive sites. The dimly lit underground sepulcher features a statue of the body of Christ lying in death. Pilgrims often kneel in meditation here and read the illuminated prayers installed at the railing.
Outside, the Mount Calvary grouping sits atop the sepulcher. The dead Savior's body hangs on a large, wooden crucifix, while Mary and St. John keep watch beneath.
Just as I started back toward the parking lot, a car door slammed, startling me. More pilgrims had arrived. As I headed out and they headed in, we nodded to each other in silence. I pulled away from the serene woods, pausing to notice a ray of sunshine that had alit on one of the stations. I was flooded with peace. Starkenburg had hooked another pilgrim.
Melanie Radzicki McManus writes from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
----- EXCERPT: Shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows, Starkenburg, Mo. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Melanie Radzicki ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Online Voting for the Rest of Us DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Our community recently bought a new car.
Okay, for us, “new” means “pre-owned.” (We found out no one says “used” anymore when it comes to second-hand cars.) Anyway, it's a 1995 Ford Escort. The digital dashboard clock was wrong, so I set out to reset it.
You might think that, given my experience with technology, I could figure out how to set a clock. You'd be wrong! Looking at the car manual revealed all I had to do was follow these simple but certainly not obvious steps: 1. Turn the radio on. 2. Press and hold in the “Clock” button. 3. Press the “Seek” button left to advance the hours and right to advance the minutes.
I hope my difficulties were not a harbinger of things to come vis-‡vis computerized voting.
I recently voted here in Florida, home of the dimpled chads of 2000, this time using an automated voting machine. It certainly was not as complex as setting the Ford Escort clock, but still at least one thing was not obvious to me — how do you write in a candidate's name instead of selecting from among the ones listed? It could be done, but I had to ask somebody working at the polls how.
The voting machines used touch-screen technology. You touch a box graphic next to a candidate's name on the monitor and an “X” appears there. Since all the things to vote on did not fit on one screen, I had to touch the next-page button on the screen to move on. There was also a previous-screen option in case you needed to go back and make a change. Finally, after going through everything, I watched as a summary screen appeared displaying all my selections. Touching any of these would take me back to the page of selections for that candidate or issue, where I could change my vote if I wanted to. Once everything appeared in the summary like I wanted it, I only had to go to the next screen and touch the option to cast my vote.
Except for not knowing how to write in a candidate's name, the experience for me was fairly simple. That wasn't the case for others.
One of the brothers from the monastery went along with me to vote.
To put this in a politically correct way, I consider this brother “technologically challenged.” After I finished voting, I gave him the sample ballot we had received in the mail with the choices we had agreed upon before going to vote. For some reason, his touch screen did not follow the order of the sample ballot as mine had; nor did it list all the voting categories. He eventually called over one of the assistants working there and they managed to work it out.
Although there were some technical glitches, like our brother experienced, with the new touch-screen voting machines in Florida, it still was a far cry from the massive polling-place problems of the 2000 election.
European governments are taking voting machines a step further by experimenting with Internet elections. The European pilot programs are trying to solve the problems inherent in Internet voting — things like voter privacy, voter identity checks and the risk of hackers affecting results. In Geneva, officials sent each voter a card with a 16-digit code and six alphanumeric characters under a scratch-off seal. To vote online, residents had to enter these codes along with their birth dates and voting municipality. This identified the voter so that he or she could not cast multiple votes, while at the same time protecting the voter's anonymity. For each election, a new code would be mailed to voters.
Italy is planning on using “smart cards” to identify voters. Italian national identity cards will be replaced by cards with silicon chips storing personal-identification data. A Milan-based partnership is building an online voting system that will allow Italians to swipe their smart cards, enter their password and then vote.
Geneva and Italy's system identifies the voter — but what about protecting the votes in transit online from hackers? Both of these systems encrypt votes and voter identities as data travels over the Internet. The United Kingdom has a different approach. Each voter in a test district would receive a unique code for each candidate. Even if hackers intercepted voting data, they would not know how to interpret the codes or adjust them to alter election results.
Once the votes arrive and are finally recorded in a central database, protection is still required: Hackers might steal information on who voted for whom or tamper with the results. In Geneva, voters’ identities would be separated from their votes and scrambled, making it impossible to trace how people voted.
Of course, online voting has its detractors. For instance, the very techniques that safeguard privacy and anonymity can make it difficult to review election results in the case of irregularities. Unlike conventional voting, electronic votes can be altered without leaving any sign of tampering. Also, voters have no way to check whether their vote was recorded correctly.
In the United States, two startup companies, VoteHere in Bellevue, Wash., and Election.com in Garden City, N.Y., are offering to help U.S. state and county governments conduct elections online. The U.S. armed forces already have online voting — service members stationed around the world were able to vote over the Internet in the 2000 presidential election. If the U.S. Congress approves a pending bill giving state and local election agencies billions of dollars for new voting technologies, the momentum for online voting for public elections could increase rapidly.
I don't believe nationwide online voting is a question of “if” It's a matter of “when?” Certainly the convenience alone would promote more robust participation among voters. Then again, there are still enough of those technologically challenged people out there to make mandatory online voting prohibitive. I'm sure it will be employed initially as some type of hybrid situation where people can do either — vote online or vote using touch-screen systems set up at voting locations.
Here's hoping that, once it gets here, widespread online voting will be easier then adjusting the clock on a 1995 Ford Escort!
Brother John Raymond, co-founder of the Monks of Adoration,writes from Venice, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: Internet-based 'virtual booths' are on the way ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, NOV. 24
The Search for Kennedy's PT 109 MSNBC, 8 p.m.
On Aug. 2, 1943, in the Solomon Islands’ Blackett Strait, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed and sank Navy Lt. John F. Kennedy's PT boat. This new “National Geographic Explorer” documentary interviews the two islanders who rescued the future president and his crew. It also watches Robert Ballard locate the probable wreck.
MONDAY, NOV. 25
Ronald Reagan: A Legacy Remembered
History Channel, 9 p.m.
In this new two-hour special, President Reagan's family, friends and associates offer fresh insights into the character and beliefs of the bold chief executive who restored America's confidence and set in motion the collapse of the vaunted Soviet “evil empire.”
TUESDAY, NOV. 26
The History of Thanksgiving
History Channel, 8 p.m.
Spanish expeditions in the present-day United States held thanksgiving observances in 1541, 1565 and 1598. But here is a re-enactment of the three-day harvest festival in autumn 1621 that Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians celebrated at Plymouth Colony, Mass. History relates that venison and “wild fowl” were on the menu, but not cranberries, mashed potatoes or pumpkin pie. Also, Pilgrims wore several colors, not the black portrayed by illustrators — and they wore no buckles, either.
WEDNESDAY, NOV. 27
The Great Fire of Rome
PBS, 8 p.m.
In this “Secrets of the Dead” episode, modern investigators speculate about what caused the blaze that began on July 19, 64 A.D., and consumed most of Nero's Rome.
THURSDAY, NOV. 28
Thanksgiving Day
Thanksgiving wouldn't be quite the same without all the TV standbys. NBC has the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade at 9 a.m. and, at noon, the National Dog Show, a Purina Pet Care two-hour special taped Nov. 15-17 at the Kennel Club of Philadelphia. At 2 p.m., NBC presents Frank Capra's 1946 Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life. This year's Thanksgiving pro football doubleheader features the New England Patriots at the Detroit Lions, 12:30 p.m. on CBS, and the Washington Redskins at the Dallas Cowboys, 4 p.m. on Fox. Rounding out the holiday, at 8 p.m. on TBS, is The Wizard of Oz, the beloved 1939 film based on the 1900 children's novel by L. Frank Baum.
FRIDAY, NOV. 29
Emeril Kicks Up Leftovers
Food Network, 8 p.m.
Gobble (pun intended) your leftovers after enhancing them a la Chef Emeril.
SATURDAY, NOV. 30
My Daughter and the Madonna
EWTN, 8 p.m.
This hour-long special shows the people of Monopoli, in the province of Bari in Italy's Puglia region, as they reverently and joyfully create a living Nativity in their picturesque city in 1999.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:The Grass Harp(1995)
Growing up is always hard to do. But it can be especially difficult when a child loses both his parents. The Grass Harp, based on Truman Capote's semi-autobiographical novella, is the coming-of-age story of Collin Fenwick (Edward Furlong), who's raised in a small Southern town in the 1930s. After his mother's death, Collin must move in with two maiden aunts from his father's side, who have very different personalities. Verena Talbo (Sissy Spacek) is a narrow-minded businesswoman always on the lookout for a quick buck. She doesn't hesitate to exploit her eccentric sister, Dolly (Piper Laurie), with whom Collin has bonded.
The young boy is also thrown in with a colorful band of unpredictable characters. Among them are a retired local judge, Charlie Cool (Walter Matthau); a hustling, big-city businessman, Morris Ritz (Jack Lemmon); an itinerant Protestant evangelist (Mary Steenburgen); and a black house-maid (Nell Carter). Rather than construct a tightly plotted narrative, director Charles Matthau and screenwriters Stirling Silliphant and Kirk Ellis choose to create a series of poignant vignettes.
Dark Victory(1939)
One of the glories of Hollywood's golden age were the “women's pictures” — sentimental, heart-grabbing melodramas whose primary purpose was to make viewers cry.
Nowadays we have “chick flicks” (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, etc.) that are targeted at the same audience but with a narrower focus. Their emphasis is on female relationships and “sharing” (a kind of soft-core feminism) rather than on grand, sweeping, emotional moments.
The Oscar-nominated Dark Victoryis an old-fashioned “weepie” whose sole aim is to showcase a bravura performance. Judith Traherne (Bette Davis) is a snotty, old-money heiress who gets her kicks from high-society parties and thoroughbred horses. When diagnosed with incurable brain cancer, she's forced to rethink her life and priorities. She falls in love with her surgeon, Dr. Frederick Steele (George Brent). A cold scientist, he's transformed by her affection into a man of deep feeling. Director Edmund Goulding and screenwriter Casey Robinson pull out all the stops in a way present-day film-makers seem afraid to do.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Holy Cross 'Crusaders' Fight for Catholic Identity DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:WORCESTER, Mass. — College of the Holy Cross alumnus Victor Melfa has spent most of his time since January fighting for the Catholic identity of his alma mater.
He protested the Ash Wednesday campus presentation of the play “The Vagina Mono logues”, organized a successful Catholic Identity Seminar during reunion weekend, condemned the college's decision to award an honorary degree to former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland, and sent thousands of letters and e-mails to fellow alumni enlisting their support.
Because of all his work, the Cardinal Newman Society selected Melfa to receive its Ex Corde Ecclesiae Award for significant contributions to the renewal of Catholic higher education. The award was presented at the society's annual meeting Nov. 9-10 in Washington, D.C.
“Vic is a model for other alumni of Catholic colleges who are concerned that changes during the past 40 years have produced dissenting faculties, declining academic standards and student behavior that is far removed from Christian living,” said Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society.
The college itself supplied the initial facts that led to Melfa's crusade. At a recent alumni weekend it distributed a profile of students with the following information: Holy Cross students do not attend Mass regularly, do not go to confession, see very little relationship between sex and religion, do not have any devotion to the saints and do not know much of what the Church teaches.
At the reunion, Edward (Ned) Kirby (‘49) happened to ask a seminar facilitator, “Are you still teaching St. Thomas Aquinas?”
He didn't like the answer.
Kirby and three other alumni took action. He and William Cousins (‘45), Edgar Kelley (‘49) and Guy Bosetti (‘49) sent a letter to 10,000 alums who graduated before 1972 alerting them to the state of the college.
Areas of Concern
In the letter they identified more areas of concern: At least half of the faculty at Holy Cross is non-Catholic. Homosexual and bisexual groups are funded by the college, but the Knights of Columbus is not.
The letter included a reply card that alumni were asked to sign and return stating their support for the reestablishment of a core curriculum of studies in philosophy and religion and “appropriate measures” to correct the secularization of Holy Cross.
Of the 10,000 sent, more than 1,500 were returned. All but 30 were positive.
Melfa, who graduated in 1957, didn't receive the original letter because his address on file was not current. But after reading in the local paper about the alumni's efforts, he called Kirby and soon sent his own letter to pre-1972 alums. In May, Melfa formed the Holy Cross Cardinal Newman Society to address concerns among alumni that the college has “drifted from its strong Catholic moorings.”
The men selected only pre-1972 graduates for reasons fiscal and practical. That was when the Jesuits ceded control of the school to a board of trustees and when, according to Melfa, Holy Cross began to lose its Catholic identity.
That was also the last year of required Catholic studies.
During Melfa's time, students were required to take 16 courses in Catholic theology and philosophy courses. Today, students must fulfill just one requirement in each, and classes in Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism satisfy the religion requirement.
“You can be a double major in religion and philosophy and get out of there without taking a single ‘Catholic’ class,” said 2002 graduate Matt Smith, a philosophy major.
Extracurricular activities also mirror the trend away from Catholicism. Although AbiGale (the Association of Bisexuals, Gays and Lesbians) enjoyed school support, for several years the Catholic group Compass, which inspires and equips students to take the initiative in evangelizing college life, did not. Holy Cross would not allow them to use classrooms for meeting purposes.
“We had to stuff 15 kids in a dorm room just to study the catechism,” Smith recalled.
He does point out the positives of his alma mater: There is a strong campus ministry group, and “being pro-life is still fine,” he said.
No Holy Cross faculty members would agree to speak to the media about Melfa's work or about the college in general.
However, the current president of Holy Cross did.
“Mr. Melfa has not done anything positive for Holy Cross and never has been particularly involved as an alumnus in the life of the college,” said Jesuit Father Michael McFarland in a prepared statement.
Melfa says his goal is not to alienate Holy Cross . “Our goal is to reCatholicize it,” he said. “We really feel it's a secular school with a Catholic presence.”
The first step is communication, which is enhanced by the group's Web site at www.holycrosscardinalnewmansoci ety.org. “We have to get the word out, get the truth out,” Melfa said. The alumni have also put together a database of 2,000 supporters and plan to add post-1971 graduates later this year.
On campus the group is working with the Knights of Columbus and Compass to reach students and effect change, but it's an uphill battle with the administration and faculty.
‘I am doing this because I love my faith and loved my Catholic Jesuit education at the Cross.’
No Faculty Support
In response to Melfa receiving the Ex Corde Ecclesiae Award, Holy Cross President Father McFarland wrote: “The Cardinal Newman Society is a fringe group and they don't represent the mainstream of Catholic education. That said, it's an entirely appropriate award for Vic Melfa to receive because the group, like Mr. Melfa, works to cynically manipulate the truth and to impose a narrow, right-wing agenda on Catholic higher education.”
But 2002 graduate Smith, who is familiar with Melfa's work but not involved with the Cardinal Newman Society, sees it differently. “All these alumni are doing this because they care about Holy Cross and want to change things in the future for the better.”
The group's presence is being felt.
The women's studies department recently invited Frances Kissling, president of the dissenting pro-abortion group Catholics for a Free Choice, to speak on campus and expressed surprise when Father McFarland wrote them a strongly worded letter denouncing the decision.
An anonymous professor who spoke to the Boston Globe blamed Father McFarland's decision on the influence of “a small group of extraordinarily conservative Catholic alums … that challenge anything and everything that is contemporary.”
But Melfa doesn't take the bait.
“I am doing this because I love my faith and loved my Catholic Jesuit education at the Cross, and because I have been upset over the years with the changes I noticed,” he said. “I believe that if we, as Holy Cross alumni, let this continue without exposing and attempting to correct it, we are just as guilty as the college is.”
Dana Wind writes from Raleigh, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Wind ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Whither Blaine?
The law forbids Harrison from performing a required internship at the school where she works, Bellarmine Prep aratory, a Jesuit school. Enacted in the wake of massive Catholic immigration from Europe, the law, Will said, forbids any public money for the “support of any religious establishment.”
It is ironic, Will continued, that in the legal battles over issues like school vouchers liberal groups such as the teachers union have resorted to the harsh laws — “products of Protestant chauvinism,” and “not the idea of separation of church and state” — to effectively limit the life prospects of inner-city children.
Oops!
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Nov. 11 — St. Xavier University is contemplating disciplinary action against a professor who called a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy a “disgrace to this country” in an e-mail message that also derided the military's “aggressive baby-killing tactics,” the wire service reported.
After a barrage of complaints, administrators at St. Xavier forced the professor, Peter Kirstein, to apologize. The institution, Chicago's oldest Catholic university, also issued an apology.
Kirstein's screed was a response to an e-mail message from first-year cadet Robert Krupiel that was sent to numerous academics around the country seeking advice about a student political debate that will examine America's role in the post-Sept. 11 world.
Teams Dropped
College officials said the move was designed to save money and make the remaining teams more competitive. The cuts will affect 90 student-athletes.
Cyber Theology
Begun in 1999, the Satellite Theological Education Program does not offer college credit for the courses but gives a certificate to people who successfully complete them. The courses last for five weeks and cost $75 each.
Gay and Gone
CHRONICLE.COM, Nov. 6 — InterVarsity, a Christian group affiliated with the Reformed Church, at Iowa's Central College has forced one of its student leaders, Brad Clark, to give up his position because of his homosexual lifestyle, reported the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
After “heated debate” about whether or not the group could continue to be recognized “in light of its policies,” the news service said, Central's student senate voted 22 to 12 last month to continue recognizing InterVarsity.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: How Not to Waste Our Present Sufferings DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:SUFFERING : THE CATHOLIC ANSWER : THE CROSS OF CHRIST AND ITS MEANING FOR YOU
Dom Hubert van Zeller Sophia Institute Press, 2002 144 pages, $12.95 To order: (800) 888-9344 or www.sophiainstitute.com
The late Benedictine monk Hubert van Zeller (1905-1984), a gifted spiritual director and writer, authored several popular books on prayer and spirituality. He was also a talented sculptor whose spare, clean works of religious art mirrored his deceptively simple style of writing. His penetrating insights into the spiritual life are evident on every page of this challenging book, a series of reflections on suffering based on the Stations of the Cross. While the reflections are written as aids to Lenten devotions, they're just as well suited to the current, protracted season of suffering for the Church and her people.
For van Zeller, the answer to suffering is not found in procedures and committees but in active participation in the cross of Christ. The book begins in bracing fashion and never lets up: “God does not condemn man to suffering; man condemns himself to suffering. God tells man what is needed for happiness, and, in refusing God's terms, man condemns himself to unhappiness. … If man thinks he can make better rules for happiness than those laid down by God, he must bear the consequences of his arrogance: He must bear the weight of suffering.” The basis for a right relationship with God depends on a combination of moral humility and clarity of vision, both gifts of God's grace. Only by participating in Christ's life, death and resurrection — not merely viewing or contemplating those realities — does the Christian obtain true, lasting happiness.
The book's main themes are masterfully intertwined: the communion of saints, the centrality of the cross, the primacy of love. “It was love that made the atonement adequate,” van Zeller explains, “the obedience pleasing, the example inviting, and the actual agony bearable.” This love has little to do with emotion, but is a willing choice to die to self. Christ's death on the cross is the ultimate example of this selfless love; he is also the only means by which we can obtain it ourselves. Central to the Christian's growth in this love is an active participation in the Mass. Van Zeller matter-of-factly states, “If we do not learn from the Mass how to approach Calvary, we are not likely to learn it from this book.”
Each of the stations helps us see the cross from a different perspective: through the eyes of Mary, Simon, Veronica, the women of Jerusalem, and especially of Jesus Christ. Each of the stations, van Zeller explains, indicates a deepening response to God's call to sacrifice. The cross is a sign that cannot be ignored. “The cross not only resembles a signpost, but in a sense is a signpost,” he writes, “It points two ways. In one direction it sanctifies; in another it condemns. It leads either to beatitude or to bitterness; it cannot leave us unaffected.”
Written at the height of the Cold War, the book's references to the struggle with communism carry a special poignancy, highlighting the fact that the greatest enemy of the Church is not the state. It is difficult to deny van Zeller's chilling words of warning: “A more serious menace to the Church's life than even atheistic Communism is apathetic Catholicism. The real enemy is not the persecutor from without, but the spineless Catholic within.” Communism has fallen, but apathy continues. We face it every day, in ourselves and in our fellow Catholics.
This powerful work is a potent call to holiness and true sacrifice. Reading it will surely aid us to appreciate the author's insight that “the cross is something we see by, rather than something we see.”
Carl Olson, editor of Envoy magazine, writes from Heath, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl E. Olson ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Happy Holy Days DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:An Advent Feast-Day Calendar of the Saints of the Season Happy holidays.
It's the politically correct way to greet people as Christmas approaches. But holidays are holy days — and there are quite a few holy days coming up in the weeks before Christmas.
Here's a feast-day roundup for the month ahead so you can mark your Advent calendar, know your Advent saints — and plan your Advent prayers:
Dec. 3 - St. Francis Xavier.Born to noble parents in Spain in 1506, Francis went to the University of Paris when he was 18. There he met St. Ignatius Loyola, who was about to start the Society of Jesus. Ignatius eventually convinced Francis to forsake his worldly ambitions and join the Jesuits; the young protégé went on to become arguably the greatest single missionary since St. Paul. During the course of his amazing career in India, Ceylon, Japan and other lands of the east, St. Francis made thousands of converts. In fact, it's said that he baptized so many people that he became too weak to raise his arms. St. Francis longed to evangelize China, which barred foreigners. When he was 46, he succeeded in getting the arrangements made, but he fell ill and died on an island off the Chinese coast. He's the patron saint of foreign missions and of all works for the spreading of Christianity.
Dec. 4—St. John Damascene. He was born in Damascus about 690, son of a Christian official at the court of the khalif. After a good education, he succeeded his father's post. John filled this for some years and then became a monk in the monastery of St. Sabas near Jerusalem. He defended the veneration of images against the emperor, wrote a classical work called On the True Faith and was the greatest hymn-writer of the Eastern Church. The last of the Greek fathers and the first of the Christian Aristotelians, he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1890.
Dec. 6—St. Nicholas. Though the man who would be “Santa Claus” is certainly one of the most popular saints in the Greek as well as the Latin Church, there is hardly anything historically certain about him except that he was bishop of Myra (in Asia Minor) in the fourth century. Some of the main points in his legend are as follows: He was born at Parara, a city of Lycia in Asia Minor; in his youth he made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine; shortly after his return he became bishop of Myra; cast into prison during the persecution of Diocletian, he was released after the accession of Constantine and was present at the Council of Nicaea. In 1087 Italian merchants stole his body at Myra, bringing it to Bari in Italy.
The numerous miracles St. Nicholas is said to have wrought, both before and after his death, are outgrowths of a long tradition. His representations in art are as various as his alleged miracles. His relics are still preserved in the church of San Nicola in Bari; up to the present day an oily substance, known as Manna di S. Nicola, which is highly valued for its medicinal powers, is said to flow from them.
Dec. 8—Immaculate Conception. To become the mother of the Savior, Mary “was enriched by God with gifts appropriate to such a role.” The angel Gabriel at the moment of the annunciation salutes her as “full of grace.” In fact, in order for Mary to be able to give the free assent of her faith to the announcement of her vocation, it was necessary that she be wholly born by God's grace. Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, “full of grace” through God, was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Blessed Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854: “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin” (Catechism, No. 490-491).
Dec. 11—St. Damasus I. Elected pope in 366, Damasus vigorously defended the Catholic faith in a time of dire and varied perils. He condemned heresies in two Roman synods and shored up the moral authority of the Roman see. He's probably best known for his extraordinary devotion to the Roman martyrs — many of the beautiful hymns he wrote to them survive on their tombs.
Dec. 12—Our Lady of Guadalupe. “I have the joy now of announcing that I have declared that on Dec. 12 Our Lady of Guadalupe will be celebrated throughout America with the liturgical rank of feast. O Mother! You know the paths followed by the first evangelizers of the New World, from Guanahani Island and Hispaniola to the Amazon forests and the Andean peaks, reaching to Tierra del Fuego in the south and to the Great Lakes and mountains of the north. Accompany the Church which is working in the nations of America, so that she may always preach the Gospel and renew her missionary spirit. Encourage all who devote their lives to the cause of Jesus and the spread of his kingdom. … Holy Virgin of Guadalupe, Queen of Peace! Save the nations and peoples of this continent. Teach everyone, political leaders and citizens, to live in true freedom and to act according to the requirements of justice and respect for human rights, so that peace may thus be established once and for all. To you, O Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of Jesus and our Mother, belong all the love, honor, glory and endless praise of your American sons and daughters!” (From Pope John Paul II's homily at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, Jan. 23, 1999).
Dec. 13—St. Lucy. Tradition has it that she refused marriage to a suitor during Emperor Diocletian's persecution of the faithful. The man turned her in as a Christian and she was sentenced to a brothel, but the guards assigned to take her there were unable to move her. They then tried to burn her; failing at that as well, they stabbed her through the throat. Whether or not she met her end this way, she certainly died a martyr's death in 304.
Dec. 14—St. John of the Cross. One of the Church's greatest mystics, John de Yepes was born in Spain in 1542. He became a Carmelite friar and wrote some of the most enduring and beautiful expressions of contemplative prayer — The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul among them. Along with St. Teresa of Avila, his mentor, he worked to reform the Carmelite order; for this he was treated harshly by his superiors. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.
Dec. 21—St. Peter Canisius. The first “literary” Jesuit, Peter spent much of his life rebuilding the Church in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Bohemia in the time of the Protestant Reformation. It was a violent age, but he was known as a temperate, scholarly man who preached, wrote, instructed, arbitrated and otherwise spent himself restoring the credibility and vitality of the Catholic Church. He was declared a Doctor of the Church at his canonization in 1925.
Dec. 23—St. John Cantius. This priest, who spent most of his adult life as a theology professor at the University of Krakow, lived an austere, penitential life and gave virtually all he owned to the poor. He slept on the floor, ate very sparingly and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem hoping to die a martyr. He died in 1473.
Biographical information on the saints condensed from entries in The Catholic Encyclopedia.
----- EXCERPT: An Advent Feast-Day Calendar of the Saints of the Season Happy holidays. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Natural Family Preparedness
My fiancé and I are getting married soon. Since we want a large family right away, is there any reason to take a natural family planning course before the wedding?
Congratulations! Your attitude indicates generosity in the service of life, so already you're beginning on the right foot.
There is a widespread misconception (no pun intended) among Catholics concerning the role of natural family planning (NFP) in their marriages. Often, couples view NFP as a means to avoid or postpone pregnancy and nothing more. Therefore, if they plan to have children early and often, they see no need to learn the discipline. However, knowledge of NFP is beneficial in ways that may not be immediately obvious.
Think of NFP as you would insurance. You're young, in good health, in strong financial shape and looking forward to children. You may not need NFP right now, but it can be reassuring having the know-how: You never know when your circumstances might change unexpectedly. Just as it is prudent to have a savings account in case of a financial emergency, so it is prudent to be familiar with NFP. It's not easy or ideal to try to “pick it up” at the last second. Like the insurance company refusing to sell you a hurricane rider while a tropical storm is bearing down, so it is with NFP — you need a little time to become familiar with your body for NFP to be useful.
What unforeseen circumstances might arise? A health issue could come up suddenly. For instance, early in our marriage, our doctor determined that Caroline had contracted an unusual virus. While it was no big deal for her, it could cause birth defects if we conceived. So, we used NFP until given the “all-clear” by the doctor. We then had our second child, bright-eyed and healthy, and never were more grateful to the priest who required us to take the class before we were married!
Another unforeseen circumstance may be financial. We've learned from recent events that jobs and income can come and go overnight. If you lost your primary source of income, prior knowledge of NFP is helpful until a new way to provide for the family is found.
Even if you desire many children, you may wish to use NFP to space out the births. Recent research indicates that children spaced roughly two years apart is beneficial physically and emotionally (for both you and them!). And, of course, knowledge of NFP helps couples conceive — many couples enroll solely for that purpose.
Learning NFP can enhance your marital relationship. If you both take the class, you'll be grateful for the in-depth understanding of how the female body works and the role of hormones (especially good for men!). You'll also be more keenly aware if something goes awry. We've known women whose doctors were able to detect and treat serious problems early simply because the woman noticed a change in her normal signs of fertility. Besides, what's the harm in learning more about God's gift of fertility, even if you never need to use NFP?
The McDonalds are family-life directors for the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom and Caroline Mcdonald ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Picking Up the Pieces of 9/11 DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Standing 6 foot 4 inches, weighing in at a linebacker-like 250 pounds, Msgr. Marc Filacchione cuts an imposing figure. Joseph Zwilling, director of communications for the Archdiocese of New York, calls him “a great big bear of a man.”
At the same time, Zwilling adds, “Msgr. Filacchione is as gentle as anyone you would ever meet. He is a nonstop worker and he is always willing to do more.”
Not only is he dedicated, but he's also gifted, sliding from one responsibility to another with unusual ease and grace. Some might even say he is indefatigable. As a diocesan priest, he wears three hats — pastor, senior chaplain of the New York City Fire Department and the coordinator of chaplains for 100 hospitals and 200 nursing-care facilities.
Msgr. Filacchione is pastor of St. Michael's parish, which is located in the heart of Manhattan at 34th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The parish is only a block from Madison Square Garden and not far from the Senator Jacob Javits Convention Center.
During the work week, scores of Big Apple commuters — high-level executives, blue-collar workers and everyone in between — make their way to weekday Mass here. There are two daily Masses at St. Michael's and both are well-attended. “It's amazing,” says Msgr. Filacchione. “Even with a long commute, many people are in church a half-hour before Mass. And many stay after Mass to pray another half an hour.”
It's not hard to see why. St. Michael's is an oasis of deep peace on a literal island of barely controlled chaos.
Recently, two postal workers approached Msgr. Filiacchione and proudly showed him condensed versions of the daily office that they have made part of their prayer lives. “For me it was just one more example,” he points out, “of the deep desire so many have to grow in their spiritual lives and grow closer to God.”
It's that kind of faith in action among the rank and file, adds the priest, that keeps his sprits high even in sad and turbulent times like the present. “Just looking out from behind the altar and seeing them, day after day, sustains and strengthens my own faith,” he explains. “What they have in their lives, you want in your own life.”
As for his personal prayer life, Msgr. Filacchione says the time he spends before the Blessed Sacrament is “as important to me as the air I breathe.” He says he was taught to cherish prayer before the Blessed Sacrament by Bishop Patrick Ahern, retired auxiliary of New York, his first pastor at Blessed Sacrament parish on Staten Island.
Eucharistic Heart
Bishop Ahern, who resides at St. Thomas More parish in Manhattan, recalls his friend and fellow priest as a joy to live with and be around. “He masterminded much of what we were able to accomplish at Blessed Sacrament,” says Bishop Ahern. “Marc is a remarkable fellow. Nothing is too great a challenge for him. He is interested in everybody, he has a photographic memory for names and events, and he is just a wonderfully warm human being.”
Speaking of heat, as senior chaplain for the heroic NYC Fire Department, a chaplain corps that includes two Catholic priests, a Protestant minister, a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim Imam, Msgr. Filiacchione helps minister to the spiritual needs of 11,000 firefighters — most of whom are Catholic. In that position, he is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“I constantly have to tell people that, if my beeper goes off, I have to run,” he says. A steady stream of firefighters have sought out his counsel in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, from which the force is still recovering. Many consider him a member of their family. He baptizes and marries their children and grandchildren, offers funeral Masses and officiates at the burials of their loved ones.
Since 1995, when Msgr. Filiacchione joined the fire department, he says he has been struck many times not only by the firefighters’ dedication to duty but also by their filial love for each other. “They care deeply about each other and they depend on each other so much,” he says. “They develop the same kinds of bonds you see among soldiers in the trenches during war. When they call on another ‘brother,’ they truly mean it.”
Msgr. Filiacchione says that he and his fellow chaplains receive tremendous support and affection from the entire department. Recently, at the end of a Holy Name meeting, a retired fireman thanked him for all the good he does for the department. “We are with you all the way,” the firefighter said to the priest.
Blessed Upbringing
In addition to being one large, extended family on the job, Msgr. Filiacchione reports, the Catholic firemen are also loyal and active supporters of their particular parishes.
As for his own roots, Msgr. Filiacchione was born and grew up in the Bronx. His father, Frank, was a barber. His mother, Betty, who came from Britain, is a convert from the Church of England. He also has an older sister.
He recalls how his family was immersed in the daily life of Our Lady of Grace parish in the Bronx. He credits his vocation to the example set by his parents — and a long list of holy, dedicated priests he met during his formative years. “There was great stability among the priests who served at Our Lady of Grace when I was growing up,” he says. “You would go away to college, come home and they would still be there serving the people when you returned.”
Msgr. Filiacchione attended Our Lady of Grace Grammar School and Cardinal Hayes High School. Following high school, he enrolled at Cathedral College, the seminary college, then studied for the priest-hood at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie, N.Y. He was ordained a priest by the late Cardinal Terence Cooke on Nov. 15, 1981, at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
As pastor of St. Michael's, he is particularly proud of St. Michael's Academy, a girls high school with an enrollment of 400. There are 40 priests on the faculty as well as Franciscan, Xaverian, Marist and Christian Brothers. Currently, there are 11 sisters living in a convent at St. Michael's. For 127 years, the Presentation Sisters of New Windsor have helped retain the school's distinctive Catholic identity.
Since the heinous events of Sept. 11, 2001, Msgr. Filiacchione says he has witnessed people drawing closer to God and closer to each other. “Many have been wounded,” he says. “But in the midst of so much suffering, people have been able to carry on with hope because of the strength they have found in God and the strength they get from one another.”
He considers his duties as a fire-department chaplain a “special blessing” because, he says, “the NYC Fire Department is one giant parish without boundaries.”
Wally Carew, author of Men of Spirit, Men of Sports, writes from Medford, Massachusetts.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wally Carew ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 11/24/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: November 24-30, 2002 ----- BODY:Pro-Life Nurse Keeps Her Job
WASHINGTON TIMES , Nov. 4 — Louisiana health officials have decided to accommodate a public-health nurse whom they earlier threatened to fire for refusing to dispense the “morning-after” pill.
The nurse, Cynthia Day, filed formal complaints on Oct. 23, charging employment discrimination on the basis of her religious beliefs. The assistant secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals wrote a letter dated Oct. 25 to Day, rescinding the health department's threat to fire her.
The health department will allow Day to select a new job from a listing of reassignment opportunities, reported the Washington daily.
Praying Pro-Life Technician Sues
M INNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE , Nov. 5 — A pro-life medical technician who was fired for encouraging a patient not to have an abortion is suing his employer.
Donald Grant, an ultrasound technician, saw on a pregnant patient's chart last April that she was considering abortion. He asked the woman if she would pray with him and, after their prayer, he encouraged her to carry her baby to term. The patient was not offended, according to the lawsuit.
Grant was fired days later for “going outside the scope of his position.” Now he's filed suit against Fairview Health Services, where he has worked for two years, for religious discrimination.
According to the Minnesota daily, Grant argued in the suit that Fairview could have accommodated his religious beliefs by not including information about abortion on forms sent to him or by transferring him to another position that doesn't involve abortion.
Abortion Clinic Pays Damages
THOMAS MORE LAW CENTER , Nov. 6 — The Madison Abortion Clinic in Madison, Wis., has been ordered to pay damages in a civil case brought by a pro-lifer who was attacked by a staff member of the abortion facility.
In December 2001, Will Goodman delivered a letter affirming the dignity of all human life to Dennis Christensen, the abortionist, and his staff.
Soon after, as Goodman was quietly handing out information on crisis-pregnancy resources to women in the clinic's waiting room, he was tackled by a member of the clinic staff and held in a headlock. A security officer then pulled Goodman to the ground and forcefully put him in handcuffs.
Goodman was awarded an undisclosed amount. He pledged to donate the money to pregnant mothers in need.
Women Can Sue
NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE , Nov. 5 — The Louisiana Supreme Court has refused to consider a case attacking a 1997 pro-life law that gives women up to 10 years to sue over injuries they or their unborn children suffer as a result of unsuccessful abortions.
The law puts no limit on the amount of money a woman can win in a lawsuit against an abortion practitioner for a botched abortion.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: HMO Recruits Doctors to Help Kill Patients DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:PORTLAND, Ore. — Kaiser Permanente Northwest (KPNW) is actively looking for doctors who are willing to participate in physician-assisted suicide — even if the victim is not the doctor's patient.
The Register obtained an electronic memorandum detailing the request, sent out to 829 Oregon physicians.
The Aug. 6 memorandum reads, in part: “KPNW has complied with implementation of the Oregon Death With Dignity Act (for Oregon residents ONLY) since it became law. The use of this law by KPNW patients and physicians has been administered by our Regional Ethics Service. Recently our Ethics Service had a situation where no attending M.D. could be found to assist an eligible member in implementing the law for three weeks, during which time this person was suffering and actively dying.”
The memorandum adds that this situation “can be very distressing to critically ill patients and their families.”
The e-mail memorandum includes the four guidelines doctors must perform in order to comply with Oregon law. In addition, it asks doctors if they will act as an attending physician for their patients or for members who are not their patients.
Oregon became the only state to legalize assisted suicide in 1994, when Oregon voters approved Measure 16, but a federal judge in 1995 placed an injunction on the law before it took effect.
The practice of physician-assisted suicide became legal on Oct. 27, 1997, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals removed the injunction. A few weeks later on Nov. 4, Oregon voters rejected an attempt to repeal physician-assisted suicide.
Voters in four other states have rejected attempts to legalize the practice: Washington in 1991, California in 1992, Michigan in 1998 and Maine in 2000. In addition, 14 of the 38 states that have bans on the practice have decided to strengthen those laws within the past eight years.
This latest development is “frightening,” according to Dr. Gregory Hamilton. A Catholic physician based in Portland, Hamilton co-founded Physicians for Compassionate Care in 1994 to oppose physician-assisted suicide.
“This e-mail indicates that Kaiser HMO not only allows assisted suicide, but they are lending administrative support to assisted suicide to make sure it can happen,” Hamilton said.
That Kaiser Permanente found so few doctors willing to participate in physician-assisted suicide comes to no surprise to Hamilton.
“Kaiser HMO cannot find enough doctors for two reasons,” he said. “No. 1: Doctors do not want to OD [overdose] patients. No. 2: They don't have to kill their patients. They can manage pain.”
The real impetus behind the HMO's tors for two reasons,” he said. “No. 1: Doctors do not want to OD [overdose] patients. No. 2: They don't have to kill their patients. They can manage pain.”
The real impetus behind the HMO's recruitment e-mail is not simply concern for suffering patients.
“If Kaiser succeeds in recruiting doctors to perform assisted suicide, the profit is potentially huge,” he said.
Hamilton noted the cost of drugs for assisted suicide amounts to about $60 as opposed to approximately $40,000 to aggressively treat a terminal patient's pain.
“If you get 10 patients, that's $400,000 in savings. It's not huge in a medical budget, but it's a chunk of change,” he said. With active recruitment, that profit could swell and seniors would be left in the cross hairs, Hamilton said.
“Assisted suicide is not some kind of individual right. It gives power to the HMO, the insurance companies and the whole medical bureaucracy,” he said.
Kaiser Permanente Northwest denied it had any financial incentive to encourage patients to choose physician-assisted suicide.
“That is outrageous and unfounded,” said Dr. Al Weiland, medical director of Kaiser Permanente's northwest region. “Such speculation is offensive because physicians are so deeply committed to the well-being of our patients.”
He added: “I don't want to leave any doubt — in regard to this law we have no financial incentives that can influence the individual discussions between one of our physicians and his or her patient.”
Weiland claimed Hamilton's charges were “unfounded” for several reasons. He noted that under Oregon law, a patient is only eligible for physician-assisted suicide if a doctor determines a patient would otherwise live for only six more months.
“By then, the more costly diagnostic and treatment phase of an illness is usually passed and most patients are already on hospice and being cared for at home,” Weiland said. “Second, very few patients make a request. Even fewer follow through with filling a prescription and fewer yet ever take the medication. Those who take it generally only do so shortly before they would have died from their illness.”
Weiland insisted his HMO is neutral on the issue of physician-assisted suicide.
“Kaiser Permanente hasn't taken a position either for or against Oregon's Death With Dignity Act. But we do respect the decision that Oregon voters have twice made to give the terminally ill the right to request from a physician a prescription with which they could end their life,” he said.
Hamilton said Kaiser Permanente cannot claim neutrality on the issue. With Oregon's law, HMOs have to decide whether they will permit their doctors to assist in a patient's suicide, he said. The only HMOs to refuse physician-assisted suicide are Catholic, such Portland-based Providence Health System, Hamilton said.
“To find doctors to perform physician-assisted suicide is certainly not neutral. It is taking a position,” Hamilton said.
He also denied the HMO had no financial incentives.
“Anybody knows that any HMO will save money if they OD a patient rather than give him medical care. It's not speculation,” he said.
Hopeful Sign?
Robert Castagna, executive director of the Oregon Catholic Conference, said the HMO's actions were “chilling.”
“There were no safeguards — that's what our campaign said,” Castagna said, referring to the unsuccessful campaign to prevent passage of the law by voters in 1994. “This was one of the potential abuses we pointed out. Here, eight years later, we have a health care company encouraging doctors to end the lives of people who aren't even their patients.”
He said the memo is “an extremely negative development that concerns the Oregon Catholic Conference greatly.”
But Castagna did, however, find something good about the memo: “It's a good sign that physicians don't want to engage in physician-assisted suicide,” he said.
For now, Castagna hopes a court decision will put an end to physician-assisted suicide. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft issued an opinion last November stating that Oregon doctors cannot prescribe federally controlled drugs such as barbiturates to assist a patient's suicide.
A federal court in April sided with the Oregon government, and the case will likely go to the Supreme Court.
“I'm hoping the federal courts will find Measure 16 is in violation of the Federal Controlled Substances Act,” Castagna said.
Such an action would not overturn Oregon's law but would render it almost unworkable, as physicians would have few if any remaining drugs to legally prescribe for assisted suicide.
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II criticized attempts to call euthanasia merciful.
“True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another's pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear,” the Holy Father wrote in section 66 of the encyclical. “Moreover, the act of euthanasia appears all the more perverse if it is carried out by those, like relatives, who are supposed to treat a family member with patience and love, or by those, such as doctors, who by virtue of their specific profession are supposed to care for the sick person even in the most painful terminal stages.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Minneapolis.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Back to History DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:CAMARILLO, Calif. — When students return to school this year, many will have a new resource that has not been available for more than 35 years — a modern, full-color, authentically Catholic history textbook.
For the past three decades, secular publishers such as Harcourt Brace and Silver, Burdett and Ginn have largely dominated the textbook market. The new book, All Ye Lands: World Cultures and Geography, published by Ignatius Press, hopes to fill the void.
Written for sixth-grade students, All Ye Lands is the first in a series of five textbooks to be published as part of the Catholic Schools Textbook Project. Seven U.S. bishops served on the project's episcopal advisory board, along with a team of history scholars, researchers and writers under the direction of Dr. Rollin Lasseter of the University of Dallas.
“This project is long overdue,” said Douglas Alexander, executive director of the Catholic Schools Textbook Project. “For the past 35 years Catholic schools have been forced to use secular history textbooks because the older Catholic history textbooks have become increasingly out-of-date.
“Books from the 1930s and 1950s were written to help Catholic students face a certain set of challenges,” he continued. “Students today face a different set of challenges. They need freshly written books to help them.”
As an example, Alexander cited the canonization of hundreds of new saints by Pope John Paul II. The textbook project's books will include vignettes about saints.
Alexander also cited the powerful impact of a few of the many events of the past 35 years: moon landings, the ending of the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Internet, the launching of World Youth Days, the saintly examples of Padre Pio and Mother Teresa, and the devastating effects of 30 years of legalized abortion.
“We have a whole generation of Catholic children who are simply unaware of their own reality,” Alexander said.
James Hitchcock, professor of history at St. Louis University, agreed.
“The books usually studied by Catholic students teach them the Church was backward and tyrannical until the Second Vatican Council came along,” Hitchcock said. “As a result, Catholic students do not cherish those who have gone before them or identify with the sacrifices made by previous generations to evangelize and build up the Church.”
“Even worse,” Alexander added, “many of today's popular secular history textbooks contain blatant factual errors, some of which directly involve the Church.”
He provided as an example the world history textbook Continuity and Change, published by Holt in 1999. “On Page 404, it reads, ‘Copernicus … accepted the idea that the planets moved in perfect circles around the earth.’ The truth is that Copernicus, a Polish university professor and Catholic priest, argued that planets moved around the sun, not around the earth.”
Catholic schools across the country have expressed interest in the project. “They are hungry for good, Catholic, up-to-date history textbooks,” Alexander said.
Unfortunately, printed only weeks ago, the textbooks are too late for most schools to use this year. However, schools in California, Michigan, Alaska and Nebraska have already ordered them for use this year. The Lincoln Diocese in Nebraska plans to order books for all its sixth-graders.
Because of the book's late arrival, Anthony Ryan, marketing director for Ignatius Press, said he expects to launch a full marketing campaign prior to next school year.
Birth of a Textbook
The idea for the textbook came from Michael Van Hecke's teaching experience. When Van Hecke started teaching history 13 years ago, he was given a copy of Prentice Hall's Pageant of World History and a black-and-white photocopy of a Catholic textbook.
The secular textbook, though colorful and glossy, had no religious coverage. The old Catholic history textbook, while it contained some good stories, wasn't graphically inspiring. Van Hecke found it overly parochial. “Why can't we marry the two?” he thought.
That idea grew and grew until 1996 when he received a $17,000 bequest to kick off the Catholic Schools Textbook Project. The project gathered a group of people to work on the project, received support from Ave Maria University and hired writers Carl and (Register correspondent) Ellen Rossini of Dallas, to write the manuscript. About three years ago, they struck a deal with Ignatius Press to print the book. The result was printed and shipped to the warehouse four weeks ago. It retails for $55.
“The textbook meets the grade-level standards of most public school systems,” Van Hecke said, “but it's decidedly Catholic.” Van Hecke, currently headmaster of St. Augustine Academy in Ventura, Calif., plans to use the textbooks in his school.
Tina Sabga, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at Spiritus Sanctus Academy in Ann Arbor, Mich., had the opportunity to use a test version of the book last year with her 22 students.
While Sabga gave the textbook high marks, she said some students struggled with the book's language and thought it was a bit advanced for their grade level. “In some sections I had to break it down word-by-word. It's probably more appropriate for a seventh- and eighth-grade level,” Sabga said.
Still, the majority of her students received As and Bs — and that while using a test version without maps or pictures.
In particular, Sabga noted students enjoyed the textbook's section on the Church's history and heresies. “I have a degree in theology and thought that the way the book covered the different aspects of the Church was beautifully done,” she said.
One example comes in Chapter 6, “Christianity: A Gift from God.”
Says the book: “St. Augustine was widely known for his defense of Christianity against two major heretical groups, the Donatists and the Pelagians. In doing so, he developed several major teachings of the Church. The Donatists had long ago separated over the issue of bishops who weakened during persecution. To them, St. Augustine argued that sacraments are valid even if the minister is a sinner, and that the Church is holy even though it consists of saints and sinners.”
An early review from the Love to Learn Catholic home school Web site has also been positive. The site described the textbook as both helpful and enlightening.
“There is a distinct effort to be fair to our Catholic legacy without whitewashing faults,” it noted. “It recognizes the role of Christianity in shaping Western culture without ignoring the contributions of the Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.”
The review noted the textbook's fun features as well. For example, a “Let's Eat” segment for each culture, toward the end of the chapter, provides information on what people ate and some simple recipes.
The text has also received praise from bishops. “I am a strong believer,” says a promotional text by Bishop Raymond Burke of La Crosse, Wis., “in the importance of the knowledge of Church history for the understanding of our Catholic faith and its practice. Therefore, I am happy to give my endorsement to the Catholic Schools Textbook Project.”
Mark Brumley, president of Ignatius Press, said the book was a natural for the nonprofit company.
“Fifteen years ago, when I was teaching junior high and was on the St. Louis archdiocesan textbook evaluation committee,” he said, “I would have loved to have a book like this. The content is solid, the graphics are superb, and it reflects a Catholic worldview that is neither pietistic nor biased in favor of Catholicism.”
No stranger to textbooks, Ignatius is also the publisher of the popular Faith & Life religion series, which is currently being revised. In addition to All Ye Lands, the project is writing a high school American history textbook. Next fall the group hopes to have its fifth-, seventh- and eighth-grade textbooks completed.
Tim Drake is the Culture of Life editor.
----- EXCERPT: Returning Students Have New Textbook ------- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Abortion Politics: Tale of Two Parishes DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:PLYMOUTH, Mich. — When protesters picketed Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Plymouth, Mich., to challenge the pro-abortion views of Jennifer Granholm, a parishioner who is the Democratic candidate for governor, Joanne McKay kept hoping one of the priests would seize the opportunity to affirm Church teaching on human life.
Associate pastor Father Doc Ortman finally broke the silence with a column in the parish bulletin on Aug. 4, but he didn't say what McKay had hoped. Instead, Father Ortman penned a paean on Granholm's “pro-choice” position, saying it was not the same as being “pro-abortion.”
“To say that one is pro-choice,” he wrote, “is, for the Christian community, an admission that we are created in freedom. … Make no mistake, Christians are pro-choice in the purest understanding of the term. We are free to choose between the Lord and the evil one. … The freedom to choose is a gift in which to revel.” He later had to aplogize for the statement.
Meanwhile, across the country at Holy Trinity Parish in Westminster, Colo., another priest, Father John Hilton, was telling parishioners not to leave their Catholic conscience at the door of the voting booth in the Aug. 13 primary election. He provided voter guides with the positions of several candidates — including parishioner Ann Ragsdale — on abortion, partial-birth abortion, physician-assisted suicide and human cloning.
Ragsdale supporters responded by accusing Father Hilton of a politically motivated personal attack on the pro-abortion state representative, saying he had violated the tax code prohibiting endorsements of candidates by churches. They threatened to mount an attack on the church's tax-exempt status and put a sign outside the house facing the parish's adoration chapel that said, “Leave the church out of politics.”
Earlier, Ragsdale had complained about fetal-development posters posted at the parish's Fun Fest.
This “tale of two parishes” illustrates the difficulties faithful Catholics have when they support Church teaching on human life even as some priests and lay people — especially those in the political arena — openly dissent or remain silent.
Despite the clarity of such documents as the U.S. bishops' 1998 statement “Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics,” some Catholics insist their religious beliefs should not inform their political views.
However, the 1998 statement says the Gospel of Life is not to be practiced only as “a private piety.” It states: “American Catholics must live it vigorously and publicly, as a matter of national leadership and witness, or we will not live it at all.”
Lay Voices
Teresa Klatka, chairman of the Respect Life Committee at Holy Trinity and one of many parishioners who rallied around Father Hilton after he was criticized by Ragsdale's supporters, said the idea of Catholics bringing Christ to their decision making has nothing to do with partisan politics.
“It has to do with faith, and it's unfortunate that a lot don't see that,” she said.
Joanne McKay, a nurse consultant and mother of four, agreed. For her, being pro-life is simply part of being Catholic.
“Period. End of story. It's an oxy-moron to say you're Catholic and pro-choice,” she said.
Klatka said she thinks Catholics need to be better informed about what their Church teaches.
“It's why we're trying to focus on education in our parish,” she said. “So many people don't know. They haven't read the documents.” She said she would like to invite Ragsdale to learn more about Church teaching.
Ragsdale, who defeated her opponent in the Democratic primary and will run unopposed for a third term in November, could not be reached by the Register. The Rocky Mountain News has reported that she supports second- and third-trimester abortions, the use of aborted fetal tissue and has voted against legislation that would limit access to abortions.
Asked whether Granholm, who emerged from the Aug. 13 primary as Michigan's Democratic candidate for governor, had read the U.S. bishops' 1998 “Living the Gospel of Life” statement, spokesman Chris DeWitt said he did not know.
Granholm, who is a lector at Our Lady of Good Counsel in Plymouth, has been endorsed by Emily's List, which supports pro-abortion Democratic women candidates. Right to Life of Michigan's “granholmgarble” Web site quotes her as telling Gongwer News Service: “There are a number of folks in the Catholic Church who believe life begins at conception, but it is a matter of faith and we should not impose faith on others. Government has no role, and I'm pro-choice.”
Mistaken Views
The bishops' 1998 statement says Catholic elected officials are seriously mistaken when they claim that, though they personally oppose such evils as abortion, they cannot force their religious views on others.
“Most Americans would recognize the contradiction in the statement, ‘While I am personally opposed to slavery or racism or sexism, I cannot force my personal view on the rest of society,’” the statement notes.
It continues: “We urge those Catholic officials who choose to depart from Church teaching on the inviolability of human life in their public life to consider the consequences for their own spiritual well-being as well as the scandal they risk by leading others into serious sin. We call on them to reflect on the grave contradiction of assuming public roles and presenting themselves as credible Catholics when their actions on fundamental issues of human life are not in agreement with Church teaching.”
When Granholm's spokesman was asked to respond to the bishops' statement, he said, “Obviously, there are some disagreements, but she holds to what she believes.” DeWitt said the candidate's schedule would not permit her to talk to the Register.
The Archdiocese of Detroit issued a statement Aug. 14 regarding Father Ortman's comments. “The opinions expressed in Father Ortman's column on the Michigan gubernatorial candidates are solely his own,” the statement said. “To those who have reacted to the column, Cardinal [Adam] Maida's office has informed them that this matter will be addressed directly with Father Ortman. Throughout his tenure as Detroit's archbishop, Cardinal Maida has consistently promoted the Gospel of Life. Both in public and private, he has called all Catholics and people of good will to affirm the value of life. These efforts will continue in the future.”
At the request of Cardinal Maida, Father Ortman issued a formal statement of apology in the Aug. 25 parish bulletin, asking “forgiveness and reconciliation” for the hurt caused by his earlier comments.
“My column of Aug. 3–4 was ambiguous and led some to believe that I am not dedicated to life. I am sorry for that misunderstanding,” he wrote. “I reverence God's gift of life from its beginning, at conception, until its natural end. … This means I am necessarily against the sin of taking life by acts of abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment.”
Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of the U.S. Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, said he couldn't imagine any context in which it would be appropriate for a priest to defend the pro-abortion position.
“That is simply not the Church's position,” Doerflinger said. “What excerpts I've seen [from Father Ortman's letter] seem to contain a very elementary fallacy, confusing a pro-choice position on abortion with the simple affirmation of freedom of the will. Yes, we are all free to choose, we are capable of choosing both good and evil. That doesn't mean evil is just as good as good is. God gave us free will in order to have us choose the good freely.
“So to say ‘yes we have to celebrate choice’ is quite irrelevant to the abortion controversy. We don't celebrate choices to violate other people's rights; that's what abortion is.”
Become Informed
Doerflinger said priests should feel free to urge people to vote and to become informed on the moral implications of their choices in the voting booth. The Pro-Life Secretariat provides guidelines for doing so on the bishops' Web site.
“Certainly, the priest can inform parishioners of Church teaching on life,” he said. “If he informs them on one particular issue in an election year where candidates differ on that issue, he is at risk of having his comments taken as an endorsement of that candidate. That's why the guidelines urge giving positions on a range of issues of interest to the Church.”
Added Doerflinger: “Obviously the Church should be informing people of the Church's view on issues all the time. If they only begin to do so in an election year, it looks like an effort to influence an election, which underscores the importance of educating parishioners in season and out of season, not starting when it's election time.”
Charles Rice, professor emeritus of law at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Winning Side: Questions on Living the Culture of Life, said there is no legal restriction to parishes informing people about voting records and telling them they should vote pro-life.
“Diocesan attorneys freak out over this,” he said. “It's always safe for a lawyer to advise a bishop to do nothing. … There is no legal impediment to giving objective information and telling people you should not vote for a candidate who favors abortion.”
Rice said Holy Trinity's Father Hilton was absolutely correct in his approach.
“We should have been doing this for the past 30 years,” he said. “The priest up in Plymouth should sit down and read some papal documents and pray.”
The failure to discuss life issues is widespread in American parishes, Wall Street Journal chief editorial writer William McGurn commented last year.
“My non-Catholic friends seem to labor under the impression that Catholics spend their Sundays enduring thundering homilies on abortion and the pill,” McGurn said. “But in four decades of fairly regular church attendance … I can count on one hand the sermons I've heard on abortion. About contraception, in-vitro fertilization and stem-cell research, barely a peep, much less anything suggesting the linkage they all have to a culture of life.”
For his part, Father Hilton, who has been a priest for 20 years, said he plans to continue preaching the pro-life message.
“It's absolutely critical that I do — every priest needs to do this,” he said. “The reality is when we do it, we receive tremendous support from our people.”
Judy Roberts writes from Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Five Years Later, Mother's Cause on Fast Track DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:ROME — Sister Blandina, an Indian nun working in central Italy, has never had much doubt the founder of her order would one day receive the Church's official recognition of her holiness.
“I've always felt she would be made a saint because her example has inspired so many people,” Sister Blandina said from the bleak mountain town of L'Aquila, where the Missionaries of Charity have one of their communities.
The Indian-born sister, who came to Italy nine years ago, was one of the thousands Mother Teresa inspired by her devotion to the poor and needy. She makes no secret of her joy that the “Mother,” who died five years ago this week, is to be beatified soon.
“I'm longing for the day when we can travel to Rome to see the Pope declare her blessed,” she said.
Mother Teresa's cause for beatification, the penultimate stage on the ladder to canonization, is indeed moving ahead quickly. According to a senior official at the Vatican congregation dealing with beatification processes, the solemn ceremony in St. Peter's could come this fall or next spring.
One Italian daily even reported recently that an Oct. 13 date has already been scheduled. But neither the Congregation for Sainthood Causes nor the priest coordinating Mother Teresa's cause could confirm the report.
“I'm very happy with the way things are “I'm very happy with the way things are going,” said Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, promoter of the cause. “But it's premature to talk about dates because the process isn't finished yet.”
However, he said, of the two options being considered he thought spring the more realistic one.
The Process
The first phase of Mother Teresa's beatification process began in July 1999 and ended last August. During the two years the Indian Archdiocese of Calcutta collected a huge quantity of material on the Albanian-born nun, including writings by and about her and personal testimony from people who knew her.
All this material was entrusted to Father Kolodiejchuk, a Missionaries of Charity priest in Canada whose job it is to steer Mother Teresa's cause through the second phase of the process in the Vatican. Father Kolodiejchuk, officially termed the “postulator” of the cause, has been working since August 2001 to prepare all the documentation required for examination by the Congregation for Sainthood Causes.
In late April he submitted a four-volume, 5,000-page biography of Mother Teresa recounting her “life, virtue and reputation for holiness.”
The report, known as a positio, must be studied by nine theologians. If they judge Mother Teresa lived a life of “heroic virtue,” the position will be passed on to 12 cardinals and bishops who are members of the congregation. If their decision is also positive, then a decree recognizing her heroic virtue will be published and signed by the Pope.
Father Kolodiejchuk and his collaborators have also recently finished another report, detailing the unexplained healing of a non-Christian woman in India. This could be the miracle required by canon law for beatification.
The possible miracle happened on Sept. 5, 1998, exactly a year after Mother Teresa's death. Monica Besra, 30, was in the care of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta and suffered from what appeared to be a huge abdominal tumor.
“The doctors said she was too weak to be operated on, but meanwhile the situation was worsening,” Father Kolodiejchuk recounted. “Some of the Missionaries of Charity who were assisting her started to pray, and they laid on her a ‘miraculous medal,’ which had been in contact with Mother Teresa's body before her burial. During the night the woman, who had gone to sleep, woke up and realized that the mass had disappeared.
“Now the doctors have to check that it's all true and see if there is sufficient evidence to define it a miracle,” he said.
So, before “Madre” Teresa, as some call her, can be declared blessed, three separate panels within the congregation — composed of theologians, doctors and cardinals — have to give their go-ahead. It might seem a lot, but this particular cause is on a fast track, which could mean everything will be approved within a few months.
“Madre Teresa's cause has had absolute top priority all the way,” said Father Peter Gumpel, a senior official in the Congregation for Sainthood Causes.
Normally, a cause of beatification cannot start until the candidate has been dead for at least five years, he explained. But in Mother Teresa's case an exception was made and the Pope waived the rule.
“It is understandable that Mother Teresa should be given this sort of treatment because of the universal devotion she enjoys,” he said. “The pastoral importance of the cause is greater than others. It's not just local or even national. It extends to the whole world.”
Jumping Ahead
When a cause such as Mother Teresa's is given top priority, it also jumps ahead in the line. Instead of waiting its turn for examination by the congregation, the Pope commanded it be looked at as soon as possible. Processes that can normally take decades need only a few years. Given that there are several hundred causes on the congregation's books waiting to be vetted, Mother Teresa's is no mean advantage.
What this all means is that Mother Teresa looks set to break all records. If she is beatified in the next year, it will have been only five years after her death.
Until now the fastest beatification in memory is that of Josémaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, who was declared blessed 17 years after his death.
Moving from the status of blessed to full sainthood could also happen quickly. The key requirement is that another miracle be attributed to her divine intervention after she has been beatified.
In the recent case of St. Padre Pio, a Franciscan friar with a wide following in Italy and elsewhere who was canonized in June, the final step to canonization took three years. Mother Teresa certainly commands no less devotion and can be expected to complete the process in a similar time or less.
‘Only Moved House’
In the meantime, the Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa goes from strength to strength. Now under the guidance of Mother Nirmala, it has 679 centers helping the poor in 125 countries. The new mother superior said in a recent interview that the death of her world-famous predecessor had done nothing to clip the congregation's wings.
“Mother Teresa has only moved house, you see, from the earth to heaven,” she said. “But she's still here, right beside us, and the grace of God continues to spread out. Since Mother Teresa died we have set up 85 new homes.”
Asked what people could do to help the Missionaries in their work, Mother Nirmala replied promptly: “Oh, we never ask anybody for help. Whoever wants to just gives spontaneously because God touches their heart.”
After a moment's thought, she came up with the following recipe: “Pray more, love more and learn to respect the rights of others.”
Martin Penner is based in Rome.
Life of Service
E Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje, Albania, in 1910.
E She feels called to be a nun. She joins the Sisters of Loretto in Dublin, Ireland, in 1928 and takes the name of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who was canonized in 1927.
E Arrives in Calcutta, India, in 1929 to teach at St. Mary's high school.
E In 1946, as a result of words of Jesus she received during a train ride, she founded the Missionaries of Charity order, which immediately set about helping and sheltering the poorest of the poor.
E In 1965, Pope Paul VI places the Missionaries of Charity directly under papal control. He authorizes Mother Teresa to expand the order outside of India.
E In 1979 she is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
E She persuades Israelis and Palestinians in 1982 to stop shooting long enough to allow her to rescue 37 retarded children from a hospital in besieged Beirut.
E In 1985, President Ronald Reagan awards her the medal of freedom.
E Today her order comprises about 4,000 nuns and almost 400 priests. It runs some 679 aid shelters in 125 countries.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Martin Penner -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Believer Generation DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Colleen Carroll, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy.
Register correspondent Kathryn Jean Lopez recently talked to her about young Christians and their increasing numbers and orthodoxy.
Who are the “new faithful”?
The “new faithful” is a name I gave to the young Americans who are gravitating back to the organized religion and traditional values that their parents' generation largely rejected. For my book, I concentrated on the growing trend toward Christian orthodoxy among young adults ages 18 to 35. Their religious affiliations span the Christian spectrum, but my focus — on orthodox young adults who are in positions of cultural influence and on churches where this trend is most vibrant — tended to lead me to Roman Catholics and evangelicals as well as some mainline Protestants and Orthodox Christians.
When did you become aware of the enthusiasm among youth for orthodoxy?
I am 27 years old, and I remember puzzling over descriptions of my generation for many years. As a student at Marquette University in the mid-1990s, I noticed a disparity between the “cynical, slacker” image of my peers and what I actually saw among my fellow students. Many of them did not fit the orthodox Christian mold, but they had an almost visceral attraction to God, the Church and the ideals of service and community.
After college, as a journalist, I consistently saw media reports about apparently unrelated trends — the popularity of the Latin Mass among young Catholics, for instance, or of virginity pledges among teen-agers. But I never saw anyone connect the dots and explain how those trends were related or what was driving them. Thanks to a generous fellowship from the Phillips Foundation that I won in 2000, I had the opportunity to spend a year traveling the country, meeting and talking with hundreds of young adults who helped me answer those questions and write The New Faithful for Loyola Press.
It's Catholics, evangelicals, Jews, Muslims? Who's growing the most in terms of young, active members? Any idea how many people this involves?
I focused on the movement toward Christian orthodoxy, which largely entails Catholics and evangelicals. There is a strong parallel trend toward orthodoxy among the young in Judaism, and I have seen evidence of this attraction to tradition among American-born Muslims as well. The trends — and the young adults behind them — have many of the same characteristics, but I saw the most energy and the largest numbers among these young Christians.
Religious devotion and moral convictions are difficult to quantify, and there is no overarching number that gives a definitive count of the new faithful. In my book, I tried to break down this question into manageable pieces by using statistics in each chapter that related to a particular realm of life affected by orthodox faith commitments. So in the sexuality and family chapter, for instance, I included statistics that showed declining approval rates for casual sex and legalized abortion, among many others. I did the same in chapters on church and worship, the campus, politics, etc.
As for big-picture statistics, a few that I mentioned in my first chapter might be of interest:
— A 1997 Gallup poll that found nearly 80% of teens age 13 to 17 considered religion a significant influence in their lives.
— Gallup polls of teen-agers in the 1990s found that 70% rejected the notion that religion is “not an important part of the modern world” and they identified themselves as “religious” by an almost identical margin. Nearly nine in 10 polled by Gallup said they believed in the divinity of Jesus.
— The federally financed National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health has recently found that two-thirds of teen-agers describe themselves as “religious” or “very religious.”
In a more anecdotal vein, I encountered well more than 500 young adults in my year of research who fit this mold, and I was constantly turning down opportunities to visit other churches, campuses and cities where throngs of these new faithful were gathered.
Is this a counterrevolution? Most of the new faithful are more conservative than their parents on matters like dating, divorce and theology, aren't they?
Yes, in many ways, this is a counterrevolution. The new faithful are more conservative than many of their elders on a host of issues, including the necessity of saving sex for marriage, for instance, and the importance of putting family unity before personal fulfillment. But “conservative” is a tricky term for these believers, because many of them also embrace political stands that could be deemed “liberal.” For instance, young Catholics might pray a rosary outside a clinic to protest abortion, then pray another rosary outside a prison to protest capital punishment. If you ask them whether they are liberal or conservative, often they will reject both labels and tell you, “I'm just Catholic — like the Pope.” Pope John Paul II is a great hero to many of these new faithful, both Catholic and Protestant, because they see him as an authentic Christian leader who follows the Gospel, not a political party line.
You caution “conservative” Catholics against rigidity. Tell me more.
There are two main dangers that confront the new faithful. One is the tendency, particularly pronounced among evangelicals, to capitulate to culture in an effort to make Christianity “relevant” to the post-modern world. For orthodox Catholics, the danger is exactly the opposite: They tend toward a rejection of culture, and of outsiders, that can leave them too isolated to effectively witness to Christ. Many gravitate toward orthodox enclaves where everyone they meet thinks as they do, where ecumenism no longer seems necessary, and where condemning liberal Catholicism becomes an all-consuming diversion. It is important for these young Catholics to stand up for truth in their parishes, schools and on the job, and for them to find fellowship where they can. But they need to guard against this tendency to seal themselves off from the world and from less-orthodox Catholics, lest they become judgmental and lose their capacity to be “salt and light” to the world.
How are your new faithful Catholics handling the seemingly relentless scandal news?
Very well. Most of these young Catholics I have talked to have a realistic view of the Church and the frailty of some of her members. Some want to put all of the blame on the media or on those who would criticize the bishops and priests. But most recognize that sexual abuse is a very real problem among Catholic clergy, and they tend to blame the laxity of some bishops, the homosexual subculture in some seminaries, the culture of dissent among some Church leaders and, in some cases, clericalism. They want the Church to be purged of these problems.
But they also know their theology, so they are not scandalized to the point that they would walk away from the Church because of the sins of particular priests. They tend to see this as a purification period that the Church needs to go through in order to wind up healthier, holier and more faithful to Jesus.
You mention that some couples have actually converted to Catholicism because of sexual-morality teachings, specifically natural family planning.
Contrary to conventional wisdom about one of the Church's most controversial teachings, I found the Catholic stand against contraception has actually attracted a fair number of converts. The popularity of natural family planning is growing among young Catholics, and a growing number of evangelicals are practicing it as well. Some see the Church's staunch resistance to contraception and its promotion of a natural way to plan pregnancies as evidence of its fidelity to the “hard Gospel” — the timeless teachings of Christianity that are often unpopular. Many of these young NFP-users have told me it simply makes sense to them that if God is in control of every other part of their lives, he also ought to have a say over their fertility. They see children as a blessing from God and NFP as a way of remaining always open to God's will for their lives. Many young Catholics are particularly taken with Pope John Paul II's “theology of the body,” which offers an intellectually rigorous and almost mystical rationale for the birth-control ban.
What got you interested in all this?
As I said earlier, I was bothered by the great disparity between the image of my generation and the reality I saw all around me. I was also bothered by the fact that when religious leaders try to figure out how to reach the youth, they always take their cues from the kids who have rejected religion and try to tailor their message to the ones who have rejected it. Then, in an attempt to make Christianity “relevant,” many of these leaders wind up watering down the faith and chasing away young adults who sense they are being pandered to — and resent it.
I thought, why not look at those young people who are embracing faith with fervor and find out what works, what has attracted them? The hunger that drove these new faithful to orthodoxy also exists in their peers. If orthodoxy was the answer for the new faithful — who are some of the most inquisitive and serious thinkers in this generation — maybe it could appeal to others, too. But first, religious leaders need to understand what attracts young adults and what repels them.
You're one of the new faithful too, of the homegrown variety, aren't you?
I am a cradle Catholic who was given a strong faith formation. I never lost the faith. But I have had conversion experiences that deepened my faith and led me to integrate it more fully into my life. Like the new faithful, I have had to confront the intellectual, social and spiritual challenges of living as a committed Christian in a culture that often spurns and even ridicules those commitments.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Colleen Carroll -------- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Family Groups Denounce Big Brothers-Big Sisters' Homosexual Policy DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — A Virginia-based family group has asked Congress to withhold federal funds to schools that participate in Big Brothers-Big Sisters of America Inc. programs.
The group, called Public Advocates, says the action is necessary to prevent homosexual men from preying on young boys.
The group's announcement came just weeks after Big Brothers Big Sisters announced July 1 that all 490 of its affiliates had been instructed to implement an antidiscrimination policy that included “sexual orientation.”
“No agency of a government-sponsored public school should knowingly hand over minor children under 18 to adult homosexuals as a matter of policy,” said Eugene Delgaudio, president of Public Advocates. “It is a tragedy that a group that has provided worthy programs for children is recklessly abandoning the well-being of children to satisfy the radical homosexual lobby.”
The proposed legislative action has caused some interest, but “right now, not everybody's ready to jump on Big Brothers-Big Sisters of America,” said Public Advocates spokesman Jesse Binnall.
Big Brothers-Big Sisters of America matches at-risk children and teen-agers with adult role models. The program currently has 220,000 youngsters placed with mentors. More than 70,000 of those matches are made through school programs in which the mentors make lunchtime visits.
Most Big Brothers-Big Sisters affiliates ask about the sexual orientation of the mentors. In the home-based program, the child's parent has to approve any mentor.
But that freedom is not enjoyed in the school-based program, which is what is causing concern among family groups.
“This policy is a brazen affront to parents with deeply held religious beliefs, not to mention a potential hazard to the well-being of children everywhere,” said Dr. Bill Maier, a psychologist working for Colorado-based Focus on the Family.
Maier noted that the charity's timing couldn't be worse.
“Big Brothers-Big Sisters of America should learn from the recent Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal and realize that matching fatherless boys, starving for attention, with homosexual men is reckless and irresponsible, not to mention a recipe for disaster,” he said.
Big Brothers-Big Sisters President Judy Vredenburgh said her organization has had this nondiscriminatory policy for 25 years. Only in July, however, did local affiliates have to implement the policy.
She also stated that the 98-year-old organization would keep its recent policy change.
“We're getting incredible, positive support for the action we took,” Vredenburgh said.
Reaction
But officials at the Big Brothers-Big Sisters in Phoenix received more than 20,000 complaints in 24 hours. Many have pledged to withdraw financial support.
The loss of funds might influence the policy, admitted Big Brothers-Big Sisters spokeswoman Noreen Shanfelter.
“We're looking at a variety of issues and possible impacts and, of course, one of those has to be donations,” she said.
One affiliate won't wait for the national headquarters to change its mind. The Big Brothers-Big Sisters affiliate in Owensboro, Ky., is now called Quest for Kids.
“Our board voted to disaffiliate with the national organization, change our name and refine the organization in an effort to help more children realize their highest potential,” Chairman Brad Rhoads said.
He said the disaffiliation was necessary to keep the focus on helping children.
“We're trying to stay focused on what our mission is: to find good Christian people to mentor young children in need,” Rhoads said.
A month after the disaffiliation, donations and volunteers at Quest for Kids are up. It has 90 potential volunteers in the process of becoming mentors or on a waiting list to be matched, Rhoads said, and it continues to receive volunteer inquiries.
“We have received wonderful support from the community,” he said.
Well-Founded Concerns
Tim Dailey, a senior fellow for culture studies at the Family Research Council, said research suggests that the concerns expressed by the Owensboro affiliate are well-founded.
“Although heterosexuals outnumber homosexuals by a ratio of at least 20 to 1, homosexual pedophiles commit about one-third of the total number of child sex offenses,” he said.
Dailey released a report in May detailing the link between homosexuality and child abuse. He noted that even homosexuals acknowledge the link.
“In The Gay Report, by homosexual researchers Karla Jay and Allen Young, the authors report data showing that 73% of homosexuals surveyed had at some time had sex with boys 16 to 19 years of age or younger,” Dailey said.
Dailey also noted a quote from the New York City's left-wing publication, The Village Voice: “Gay fiction is rich with idyllic accounts of ‘intergenerational relationships,’ as such affairs are respectfully called these days.”
Young boys will be targets of abuse, Dailey said, unless Big Brothers-Big Sisters changes its policy.
“Would you put an adult male with an adolescent female? I don't think they'd allow that. Not that every male would abuse. But it's the same dynamic,” Dailey said.
For now, the new policy is causing tensions among those affiliated with Big Brothers-Big Sisters.
“In my community, I think there's a lot of resistance,” said a local director from the Midwest who wished to remain anonymous. “We really don't want to belittle anyone who is homosexual. At the same time I don't want to be a party to anything that could endanger a child. I think we're sacrificing the integrity of the organization.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Minneapolis.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Same-Sex Unions and the City
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, Aug. 16 — Same-sex unions have not been faring all that well in America's courthouses and legislatures, but New York City may prove to be an exception. After a raucous debate that nearly led to a city councilman being hauled out of the council's chambers, the city's elected representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill recognizing homosexual “marriages” and “civil unions” from other jurisdictions, the New York daily reported.
Democratic Councilman Simcha Felder was almost ejected when he wouldn't stop arguing against the bill, declaring, “They'll have to carry me out!” after being ruled out of order. He finally stopped objecting after being surrounded by sergeants at arms.
The New York City bill extends legal benefits of domestic partnership laws to visitors to the city and newcomers whose homosexual relationships are legally recognized elsewhere. Currently, Vermont is the only U.S. state to recognize homosexual “civil unions.”
Christine Quinn, one of the bill's sponsors, declared before the debate, “The use of the word ‘marriage’ is done deliberately to make it clear that New York City is going as far as it can possibly go legislatively to recognize lesbian and gay relationships.”
It's unclear whether polygamous unions, slave contracts and other unconventional relationships will also be covered by the new bill.
‘Mother Angelica Live’ — On Tape
EWTN, Aug. 20 — The voice of Mother Angelica has been stilled by a major stroke on Christmas Eve that left her with speech impairment, and for seven months her place has been filled by Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa. But now the Eternal Word Television Network she founded has decided to fill her spot with old episodes from the archives.
“Mother Angelica Live Classic” will begin in September. Doug Keck, vice president of programming and production for the network, said, “EWTN wanted to bring Mother's programs back to her traditional 8 to 9 p.m. (EDT) prime time slot, so the idea of airing ‘classic’ Mother Angelica Live ‘Family Night’ programs in the Tuesday slot is a natural.”
Florida's Scarlet Letter Law Criticized
FLORIDA TODAY, Aug. 18 — Another well-intended piece of government regulation has created unintended consequences, according to Florida Today. A Florida state law designed to protect the rights of fathers of children put up for adoption may well be encouraging abortions because of the severe invasion of privacy it entails in the life of the mother.
The 2001 law requires birth mothers “to publish their names and sexual histories before their babies can be adopted,” Florida Today reported. The mothers must publish ads in local newspapers once a week for four weeks, listing recent sexual partners, in order to notify possible fathers of their children about the adoption.
“I personally think it's a real violation of confidentiality,” commented Betty Gibbens, an adoptions worker for Catholic Charities. “Some of that information is not really appropriate.”
The bill's author, 72-year-old Republican Rep. Evelyn Lynn, has said that she will seek certain modifications of the bill when the next legislative session opens.
One of the eight state senators who opposed the bill, Bill Posey, said, “I don't think a function of government is to issue scarlet letters to its citizens. That's lunacy.”
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: After Catholic Protests, New York Radio Station Fires Shock Jocks DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Gidget Lohrer is happy The Opie and Anthony Show is off New York airwaves after the “shock jocks” broadcast a live account of a couple having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
“I believe in the Catholic Church. I don't want this to happen in my temple,” the New York area resident said.
But Lohrer said it wasn't only Catholics who were offended.
“I have non-Catholic friends that told me, ‘My gosh, if that happened in my church I'd be upset, too.’”
And the timing of the stunt, which occurred Aug. 15 on the Feast of the Assumption, upset Lohrer even more.
“It's not only that it was in the cathedral, but it was a holy day of obligation. They did it on a busy, busy day for the Church,” she said.
WNEW-FM, which had syndicated The Opie and Anthony Show to 10 million listeners in 19 markets, announced Aug. 23 that it had fired the shock jocks.
“Based on recent events, The Opie and Anthony Show has been canceled and will be replaced by other programming beginning [Aug. 24],” said Dana McClintock, a spokesman for Infinity Broadcasting, which owns the station.
McClintock wouldn't be specific about the number of complaints, however.
“I don't know how to characterize it; certainly there was some,” he said.
In response to the initial wave of outrage over the St. Patrick's incident, WNEW-FM suspended Greg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony Cumia on Aug. 19 along with general manager Ken Stevens and program director Jeremy Coleman. However, the station continued to air reruns of the shock jocks' show.
The couple involved in the incident, Brian Florence and Loretta Lynn Harper, both from Virginia, appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court on Aug. 21 to face criminal charges of obscenity and public lewdness. If convicted, they face up to a year in jail.
Charges are also pending against comedian Paul Mercurio, who described the couple's actions by cell phone for the radio show's listeners.
The FCC
WNEW-FM announced its decision to axe the show permanently only hours after FCC Chairman Michael Powell announced an investigation.
“I am deeply disturbed about the reports of an incident involving WNEW-FM and a radio contest involving sex in public places, and I have directed the FCC's Enforcement Bureau to proceed immediately with a thorough investigation of the matter,” Powell said.
Infinity and WNEW could still face penalties and have the station's license revoked, but the New York-based Catholic League is satisfied the corporation has made amends.
“This is a refreshing example of corporate responsibility,” said Bill Donohue, who leads the 350,000-member organization.
He added that the Catholic League would drop its petition with the FCC for revocation of WNEW's license.
“The Catholic League is satisfied with the results of this decision,” he said. “There is no reason now to revoke the license of WNEW.”
While Martha Kleder of Concerned Women for America is also relieved that Infinity fired the shock jocks, she wants the FCC to continue its investigation.
“I'm slightly placated,” said Kleder, who in January wrote an exposé of regulatory inaction against broadcasting excesses TITLEd, “The FCC: A Failure of Enforcement.”
“But the FCC needs to look at this,” she said. “This kind of thing has happened before.”
She noted that the incident at St. Patrick's Cathedral was the third time the radio program had broadcast reports of couples having sex in public, which is against the law.
Radio hosts Opie and Anthony encouraged listeners to have sex in public places under a promotion known as “Sex on Sam.” Participants were awarded tickets to a concert series sponsored by Samuel Adams, a beer manufactured by the Boston Brewing Company.
“One couple performed sex in an elevator,” Kleder said. “When the door opened a family with kids saw the whole thing.”
Before the incident at St. Patrick's Cathedral, “The CEO [James Koch] of Samuel Adams came into the studio and joked about the promotion,” Kleder pointed out. “If you sponsor something like that, don't be surprised when you get some heat from it.”
The Boston Brewing Company did not return calls for comment, but press reports said the company had been deluged by protests from customers who intend to boycott its products over its involvement with the WNEW program.
This is not the first time Opie and Anthony have lost their jobs for controversial on-air actions. In 1998, they were fired by a Massachusetts station for falsely reporting on April Fool's Day that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had been killed in a car crash.
Continuing Investigation
The FCC investigation will continue despite the cancellation of The Opie and Anthony Show, a spokesman said Aug. 23. “We get a complaint, we decide to follow up, and continue with that,” spokesman David Fiske told the New York daily Newsday. “The licensee is responsible for the conduct of the station.”
Kleder, who spent 20 years in the broadcasting industry, is confident that real reform will only occur when the FCC moves beyond stern words and small fines.
Said Kleder: “It's only when we look at the licensure issue that we're going to get anywhere.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Minneapolis.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Gray Davis Will Sign Bill To Enshrine Roe v. Wade DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:SACRAMENTO — California Gov. Gray Davis has promised to sign legislation specifically designed to protect the “reproductive rights” of California women regardless of changes in federal law, the conservative news service CNSNews.com reported Aug. 22.
On a party-line vote, the Democrat-controlled California State Assembly passed the Reproductive Privacy Act on Aug. 19 by a 44–23 margin, sending the pro-abortion legislation to Davis, who is Catholic.
Included in the legislation is a provision granting women greater access to the chemical abortion pill RU-486.
“Yes, he's going to sign it,” Davis' spokesman Russ Lopez told CNSNews.com.
Davis' 2002 campaign Web site says the incumbent governor “helped make California the most pro-choice state in the nation, signing into law seven pieces of legislation to strengthen a woman's right to choose.” Davis is running for re-election against Republican nominee Bill Simon, a pro-life Catholic.
Lopez said Davis has been working closely with the Reproductive Privacy Act bill's author, Democratic Sen. Sheila Kuehl.
Kuehl, California's first lesbian state senator, said the pro-abortion bill will protect Californians from an “anti-choice president, an anti-choice Congress and the Supreme Court,” which she fears is a single vote away from overturning Roe v. Wade.
California Catholic Conference spokesman David Pollard told CNSNews the new state law would aggravate the social injuries caused by abortion. “[Abortion] is just one of those elements of our society that we believe is causing damage to society,” Pollard said. “The more irreversible it becomes, the more difficult it will be to control the damage that is happening.”
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Changing the World: the Church, the Media and the Christian Vocation DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Convinced that nothing is coincidence and everything is Providence, Archbishop John Foley set out at an early age to influence society with the Gospel through his interest in communications and eventually his call to priesthood.
Now the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, he spoke with Legion of Christ Father Raymond Cleaveland about the media, the Church's approach to communications and his own vocation in this second of a two-part interview.
What led to your vocation? Tell me a bit about your family life.
I am an only child. My parents were both wonderful people of great moral integrity. When I was young, we would always have interesting discussions at the dinner table about politics, history or whatever I was studying at the moment. It would take us an hour and a half to eat dinner every night. Then, my mother would wash the dishes and my father and I would dry the dishes, and we would all sing — almost every night; and whenever we were in the car, we would sing as well.
I can remember the very moment of my vocation. I had gone back to our parish church after our family Christmas dinner in 1952, my senior year in high school. I knelt in front of the crib and I said, “Lord, you have given me everything I have: my life, my family, my faith; you have given us your Son to save us; and I would like to give it all back to you.” I thought I was giving God something, and he was really giving me something: my vocation.
Have you always had an interest in communications? Was there a specific experience that piqued your interest in communications? Tell me about it.
I am convinced that nothing is coincidence and everything is providence. My parents gave me a book when I was in seventh grade called You Can Change the World. The book said that we should choose activities that will make a difference in the world, mentioning politics, education and communications. Communications sounded interesting so I started to write radio plays on the lives of the saints because I thought people needed role models. I was in eighth grade when I was writing those plays.
When I got into high school, I was put in contact with a woman at the local CBS station who helped me with the plays. And she put me in touch with the owner of a local radio station, WJMJ in Philadelphia, who put them on the air. Later I became an announcer on that station.
Sunday mornings I would do that during high school. When I got to college, I became active in television as well. RCA owned a local TV station and we had a weekly program called “Debate,” and I had some programs on other stations from time to time, in addition to continuing the radio hour. And I was active in student publications as well.
All of this before you were a seminarian?
Yes. But when I entered the seminary I thought to myself, “well, I guess this communications thing is over, except for the Sunday homily.” One summer I got a call from the editor of the Catholic newspaper who knew me from my radio work. “Are you the same John Foley?” he asked.
“I am,” I replied.
“Well, how would you like to work here during the summer?” he offered.
So I started working at the newspaper as a seminarian, mainly doing the Catholic directory for the 10-county archdiocese. Then I did feature articles. Later, the editor of the paper got me involved in more radio work for the Philadelphia Catholic Hour.
What did you do for the Philadelphia Catholic Hour?
Well, I was on it as a guest. Then I became the director and the producer for seven years. I had to write the scripts, get the guest speakers — it's amazing thinking about it in retrospect. We had zero budget, so I would buy my own records, time all of the background music myself — I did everything. And the time was donated by the radio station, so we had very little overhead. Nowadays they have entire departments that do what I did. And I had to do it all during the only free time I had, which was on Sunday afternoons.
Obviously all of this pastoral experience prepared you to meet this challenge as president of the communications council; did you have any other experiences that honed your communications skills?
Later on, I was appointed editor of the local Catholic newspaper, and then I became one of the two news secretaries for the bishops' meetings. I did that for 15 years. Then in 1979 I was the English-language press secretary for the papal voyage of Pope John Paul II to Ireland and the United States.
Can you relate an example or two from your own experience about the Holy Father's personal interest in the media or his ability to use the media as a pulpit for proclaiming the Gospel?
Well, of course, he was active in theater, and when he invites us to lunch once or twice a year to talk about the work of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, he always asks what we are doing about theater. Theater is very local. We are in contact with the archdiocese of the cities that are the centers of theater: traditionally London and New York.
The Holy Father is certainly aware of the importance of the media, and he has opened his life as much as possible to the media. And I said to him on one occasion, “Holy Father, sometimes your symbolic gestures — kissing the ground or taking a baby with AIDS in your arms — are more effective than discourses.”
He replied, “Yes, I don't plan to do those things; they are spontaneous for the most part, but I do realize the importance of symbols. The word symbol comes the Greek word ‘symbolein,’ meaning to bring together, which is the opposite of the Greek word ‘diabolein,’ meaning to divide or separate — that is where our world ‘diabolic’ comes from — so symbols,” he concluded, “should always be a source of unity.” And that's what the media does: It is an expression of unity.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Cinema Looks at the early Life of Karol Wojyla
VARIETY, Aug. 15 — A TV drama depicting the early life of Pope John Paul II has earned the blessing of the Holy See, according to Variety magazine.
Covering young Karol Wojtyla's life in Poland during World War II, his involvement in drama and his fight against communism, the film will culminate with “his election in 1978 as the first non-Italian pope in 450 years. Shooting is expected to start in September 2003,” according to the report.
The producer, Pietro Valsecchi, is considering Luca Zingaretti to play the young priest in an adaptation of the Story of Karol by veteran Vatican journalist Gianfranco Svidercoschi.
Less likely to win Church plaudits is a project by the racy actress Heather Graham (Boogie Nights, The Spy Who Shagged Me), a vocal former Catholic.
Graham told the Aug. 19 Daily Record in Britain she aspires to play the legendary figure of “Pope Joan” — a woman who some medieval folktales claim was elected pope.
The blonde actress said, “I would love to play the part. It is one of a number of films I'm developing myself. … There's this great script about this woman who, to get an education, posed as a man and joined the priesthood. Then, in a sort of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington sort of way, she becomes pope.”
Pope Asks ‘Lord's Army’ to Disarm
THE NEW VISION (Kampala, Uganda), Aug. 19 — After 16 years of war between the government of Uganda — where Idi Amin once urged Muslims to slaughter Christians — and a self-styled “Lord's Resistance Army,” Pope John Paul II sent a written message calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities.
The note was read at an emotional interfaith prayer service, held by the Uganda Joint Christian Council at the Lugogo Indoor Stadium in Kampala. The Holy Father offered special prayers for “the victims of the recent massacres in which over 60 people were killed at Mucwini, Kitgum district.”
Officials of the Catholic Church, the (Anglican) Church of Uganda, the Orthodox Church, Bahai, Hindus and the Sikh religion also condemned the massacres.
Has the Pope Let Us Down?
WALL STREET JOURNAL, Aug. 20 — Conservative columnist Rod Dreher thinks that “The Pope Has Let Us Down.” So said the TITLE to his essay in the business daily.
“Why does such a great and good man seem to care so little about the plight of faithful Catholics …?” he wrote, taking the Pope to task for not being tougher on bishops who covered up sex abuse as well as a host of matters such as “abuses in the liturgy, corruption in seminary life, and the rejection of church teaching by Catholic universities and hospitals.”
Saying it pained him to say it, Dreher wrote: “[T]he pope has largely failed to use the disciplinary authority of his office.”
The essay sparked debate on Catholic Web sites, which pointed out the many ways the Pope has addressed each of these problems, and the lack of precedence of popes who “fix” problems by firing bishops.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: God Is Rich in Mercy DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II recalled several highlights from his Aug. 16–19 trip to Poland during his general audience on Aug. 21 at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. They included the consecration of the Shrine of Divine Mercy, the beatification of four of his countrymen and the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the shrine at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska.
More than 3,500 pilgrims attended the general audience amid singing and applause of some 300 Poles. “The main purpose of my visit was to proclaim once again that God is ‘rich in mercy,’ especially through the consecration of the new Shrine of Divine Mercy in Lagiewniki,” the Holy Father said. He told the pilgrims that Sister Faustina's simple prayer, “Jesus, I trust in you,” has sustained him throughout life. “As a laborer and a student, and later as a priest and a bishop in the difficult periods of Poland's history, I, too, repeated this simple and profound invocation many times and experienced its effectiveness and its force,” he said.
John Paul also recalled the Mass he celebrated for more than 3 million people in Krakow, during which he beatified four of his countrymen. “These blessed people, together with the other saints, are shining examples of how ‘creativity in charity,’ of which I spoke in my apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, draws us into closer solidarity with all those who are suffering and makes us architects of a world that is renewed by love,” he said.
The Holy Father told the pilgrims the shrine at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska also has special meaning for him. “I have had a connection to that holy place since my childhood,” he said. “Many times I have experienced how the Mother of God, Our Lady of Graces, turns her merciful eyes to those who are afflicted and need her wisdom and help.”
Today, I would like to reflect on my eighth trip to the land of my birth, which divine Providence enabled me to carry out safely a few days ago.
I would like to express once again my gratitude to the president of the Republic of Poland, its prime minister and its civil and military authorities of every order and rank, as well as to the authorities of the city of Krakow, for ensuring that my visit would be peaceful. I also wish to extend my cordial thanks to its primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, to the archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, and to the entire episcopate, as well as the priests, religious and all those who prepared this important ecclesial event and took part in it with faith and devotion.
Above all, I wish to extend my warmest gratitude to the beloved people of my country, who welcomed me in such great numbers with an overwhelming display of affection and intense participation. My visit was to only one diocese, but in spirit I embraced all of Poland, which, I hope, will continue in its effort to create genuine social progress while never failing to faithfully safeguard its own Christian identity.
God Is Merciful
“God, who is rich in mercy” (Ephesians 2:4). These words were often heard during my apostolic pilgrimage. Indeed, the main purpose of my visit was to proclaim once again that God is “rich in mercy,” especially through the consecration of the new Shrine of Divine Mercy in Lagiewniki. The new church will be a center for spreading the fire of God's mercy throughout the world, based on what the Lord showed St. Faustina Kowalska, the Apostle of Divine Mercy.
“Jesus, I trust in you!” This is the simple prayer that Sister Faustina has taught us, which we can utter at any moment in life. As a laborer and a student, and later as a priest and a bishop in the difficult periods of Poland's history, I, too, repeated this simple and profound invocation many times and experienced its effectiveness and its force.
Mercy is one of the most beautiful attributes of our Creator and Redeemer, and the Church exists to bring men to this inexhaustible source, of which she is the guardian and steward. This is why I wished to entrust my homeland, the Church and all of mankind to Divine Mercy.
Example of Mercy
The merciful love of God opens our hearts to concrete acts of charity toward our neighbor. This was true for Archbishop Zygmunt Szczesny Feliñski, Father Jan Beyzym, Sister Sancja Szymkowiak and Father Jan Balicki, whom I had the joy of beatifying during the Mass that was celebrated in Krakow's Blonie Park last Sunday.
I wanted to hold up these newly beatified individuals as an example to the Christian people, so their words and example would serve as a stimulus and as an encouragement for them to witness through their deeds to the Lord's merciful love, which conquers evil with good (see Romans 12:21). This is the only way in which it is possible to build the civilization of love that we longingly desire, whose gentle strength is a strong contrast to the mysterium iniquitatis that is present throughout the world. We, Christ's disciples, have been given the task of proclaiming and living out the lofty mystery of Divine Mercy that regenerates the world and impels us to love our brothers and sisters and even our enemies. These blessed people, together with the other saints, are shining examples of how “creativity in charity,” of which I spoke in my apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, draws us into closer solidarity with all those who are suffering (see No. 50) and makes us architects of a world that is renewed by love.
The Power of Love
My pilgrimage then led me to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska to commemorate the 400th anniversary of that shrine, which is dedicated to the Passion of Jesus and to Our Lady of Sorrows. I have had a connection to that holy place since my childhood. Many times I have experienced how the Mother of God, Our Lady of Graces, turns her merciful eyes to those who are afflicted and need her wisdom and help.
After Czestochowa, this is one of the most well-known and frequently visited shrines in all of Poland, to which the faithful of neighboring countries also flock. After having completed the Way of the Cross and the Way of the Compassion of the Mother of God, pilgrims stand before the ancient and miraculous image of Mary our Advocate, who welcomes them with eyes full of love. Standing before her, one can perceive and penetrate the mysterious bond between our Redeemer, who “suffered” on Calvary, and his Mother, who “suffered with him” at the foot of the cross. In this communion of love in suffering, it is easy to see the source of the power of intercession that the Virgin Mary's prayer has for us, her children.
Let us ask Our Lady to kindle the spark of God's grace in our hearts, helping us to transmit to the world the fire of Divine Mercy. May Mary obtain for everyone the gift of unity and peace: unity of faith, unity of spirit and thought, and unity within families; peace of hearts and peace among nations and throughout the world, while awaiting Christ's glorious return.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer -------- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Islamic Law Means a Rocky Future
BBC, Aug. 19 — Nigeria's northern regions, which impose Islamic law on Muslim citizens, are headed for a conflict with the country's constitution, according to the BBC.
The British broadcast network reported that an appeals court has upheld a sentence of death by stoning for adultery ordered for a 30-year-old Nigerian woman, Amina Lawal. The nation's Supreme Court has held such sentences unconstitutional, but the Sharia, or Koranic law, is extremely popular among the country's Muslim plurality.
BBC reported that “the largely male crowd in the courtroom reacted to the judgment of judge Aliyu Abdullahi with shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is great].”
The judge said, “We uphold your conviction of death by stoning as prescribed by the Sharia. This judgment will be carried out as soon as your baby is weaned.”
The court's ruling will heighten tensions between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, BBC predicted.
Girl Scouts Honor Population Controller
C-FAM.ORG, Aug. 16 — At its international summer conference in the Philippines, the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts honored Nafis Sadik, former executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, the agency recently defunded by the U.S. government for supporting forced abortion in China.
The association invited Sadik to deliver the keynote address and presented her with its World Citizenship Award, noted the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, a Catholic lobby at the United Nations.
In her speech, Sadik expressed her belief that “traditional” morality disguises a male power structure and must be transformed. She decried “the narrow traditional moral boundaries which some people would draw around sexual behavior,” asserting that “restrictive morality is being used falsely as a means of asserting power over women in particular.”
“We must make male and female condoms far more widely available, and we must demand that men use them,” Sadik said. She also condemned those who are “squeamish” about distributing the morning-after abortion pill.
Sadik has also been honored by Communist China, which presented Sadik with a Population Prize Award. Accepting that prize, Sadik praised China's coercive one-child policy, according to C-FAM, saying, “China has made an indelible mark in the global population community. It is to be congratulated on its successful programs.”
Pakistan: Christian Escapes Death Sentence
INDEPENDENT CATHOLIC NEWS, Aug. 16 — A Christian Pakistani narrowly escaped execution this week as his death sentence for “allegedly blaspheming the Islamic prophet Mohammed” was overturned by that country's Supreme Court.
Independent Catholic News reported that 26-year-old Ayub Masih was arrested in 1996 and sentenced to death two years later. He strongly denied his guilt, saying his accuser was simply trying to grab the Masih family's land.
Supporters still fear for his safety, which has been threatened by Islamic extremists. According to ICN, “there have already been at least two attempts on Masih's life.”
The human rights group Jubilee, which defended Masih, praised the decision but noted that “there are still many Pakistani Christians imprisoned for blasphemy and two of them, Kingri Masih and Anwar Kenneth, are currently facing the death penalty.”
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Blaming the Pope DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Acrescendo of voices of concern from faithful, devout Catholics says Pope John Paul II, despite all his good points, has a style of governance that is deeply flawed. The argument most recently is being made about the scandal of sex-abuse cover-up by bishops. Why hasn't the Pope used his authority more forcefully against those who caused — or enabled — the scandals?
For one thing, the argument is based on a false premise. John Paul greatly toughed canon law's treatment of child abuse by priests, for example, and other strong measures have taken place behind the scenes.
But the argument could be put just as forcefully on any number of topics. Why hasn't the Pope moved more decisively against pro-abortion Catholics, for instance? Are his encyclicals and public statements enough? Why not excommunicate pro-abortion politicians?
What about the crisis of the sacrament of confession that he has mentioned so often? He's promulgated several documents (a motu proprio, recently), but why hasn't he disciplined dioceses that haven't backed these up?
What about catechesis? Certainly, again, he can boast of documents and, significantly, the Catechism, but there's no penalty to those dioceses who ignore them.
Before too long, these questions are no longer about how John Paul has handled this or that issue — they are a challenge to his papacy. Then, if you look at history, they become something more — a challenge to the very structure of the Church.
The truth is, the Church has never functioned in a pope-as-police-chief model — or even pope-as-CEO. Not in the times of the Christological heresies, when large sectors of the Church went to Mass and received the sacraments from bishops who didn't hold to the divinity of Christ. Not before the Reformation. Not after the Council of Trent, which corrected abuses from before the Reformation. Not in the days of Cardinal John Henry Newman, who described a Church rife with heresy and negligent bishops.
If John Paul has let us down, every pope has let us down. And that just means Christ's model of the Church has let us down.
But it isn't clear that the Church could have functioned on this disciplinarian model. Can the pope know best how to handle the situations of every diocese? And with whom would he replace negligent bishops? Saints? They are always in short supply. More to the point: Today, many people assume that the Pope ought to boot this or that bishop out, when they have a very limited knowledge of the facts of the matter. There are cases where the Pope asks for bishops' resignations — perhaps he knows something we don't about others.
It's instructive to consider another example of what was often called a great “failure” of John Paul: his interaction with communists in his native Poland. Why did he never denounce them? Why didn't he discipline Poles who were sympathetic to them?
The answer, of course, is that he was too smart. Denunciations and a heavy hand would only have drawn their ire — and slowed the progress of the Church. What he did instead was create “facts.” He made “parishes” in neighborhoods where no Churches were allowed, by gathering people for Mass in meadows. Once the parish was a “fact,” the people's demand for a Church had to be respected. Once he was Pope he created the “fact” of a Catholic Poland hungry for freedom by going to Poland and encouraging it.
It's the same in the instances listed above. In addition to disciplinary measures he has created and encouraged many “facts.” He has written a beautiful and thorough magisterium, he has encouraged the apostolic movements, he created the World Youth Day gatherings with their many fruits.
Pope John Paul is not a man incapable of error. One could point to several errors of his. But his leadership of the Church in our day is not one of them. If bishops — and lay Catholics — had done half of the things he asked us to, the world would be radically different, radically better.
As thinker Gerard Serafin put it, we shouldn't worry so much about whether the Pope has let us down. We should worry that we have let him down.
----- EXCERPT: Editorial ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Gov. Keating's Dissent DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding “Keating Rebuked for Counseling Catholics to Avoid Church and Not Donate” (Aug. 25–31):
Just what kind of Catholic is Mr. Keating? Judging from his statements in this article, he is not a Catholic. Mr. Keating's statements as a public official lead Catholics away from the Church, its teaching and away from Christ himself. This type of dissent, brought on by our own bishops' failure to deal with the root causes of the scandal — i.e., dissent among the clergy and homosexuality among the clergy and in seminaries — is the very reason Catholics in America either leave the Church or live their faith cafeteria-style.
Our Church is not a democracy, thanks be to God, but God's instrument on earth to be obeyed. Or would you lead us down that broad road called disobedience, Mr. Keating?
SCOTT AND KATHERINE TRAUBITZ St. Louis
Grace-Filled Grotto
Many thanks for your continuing “Travel: History and Saints” section published weekly in the Register. Many years ago, I purchased a copy of Catholic Shrines and Places of Pilgrimage in the United States, which goes into detail on many such shrines and churches. Since that time, my family and I try to attend Mass — or at the very least, visit — one or more such sacred places of Catholic worship during our travels.
You can imagine my family's surprise then, after returning from a road trip that took my family (husband Andy, and children Kate, Danny and Jacqueline) from Seattle to San Francisco, when we returned home to find two copies of the Register, one of which highlighted the National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother in Portland, Ore. (“Marian Magnificence in the Pacific Northwest,” Aug. 11–17). It's affectionately known by the locals as simply “the Grotto,” and we were fortunate enough to attend Mass at this sacred sanctuary on the previous Sunday, Aug. 4.
Your readers may be interested in knowing a little of the history of the Grotto that was not included in your article. To quote from Catholic Shrines and Places of Pilgrimage: “Servite Fr. Ambrose Mayer, OSM, founded the shrine as an act of gratitude to God for an answer to a prayer for his mother. She was close to death as a result of childbirth. Fr. Mayer, a boy at the time, promised to do something great for God, if his mother survived.”
The actual building of the National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother was truly built, then, as the way of a Servite friar fulfilling a promise that he had made many years ago as a young child. The result is a truly awe-inspiring Catholic worship site in which all can find peace and comfort.
LINDA A. GRIBLE Akron, Ohio
The Biggest Scandal
Much has been written and said about the clerical sex-abuse scandal, but there is a much larger scandal in our country that is aided and abetted by Catholic lay people in positions of political power doing the bidding of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.
Planned Parenthood has for decades opposed all forms of parental involvement in their daughters' sexuality. They have promoted immoral sex education, contraception and abortion to youngsters. They want to divide parents and children, and the reason became obvious through the Life Dynamics Inc. survey you featured (“Campaign Targets Alleged Planned Parenthood Abuses,” Aug. 18–24).
Life Dynamics Inc. has documented evidence that abortion providers are profiting from the sexual abuse of young girls by adult men. Life Dynamics called abortuaries around the country and found out that more than 90% of them cover up the crime of statutory rape and provide abortions to minors impregnated by adults. Among girls 15 and younger who become pregnant, as many as 80% of them are impregnated by adult men. To protect their profits, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers are covering up the sexual abuse of minors on a much broader scale than that found in the clergy. Very conservatively, abortion providers are themselves committing the crime of failing to report statutory rape as many as 20,000 times a year. Planned Parenthood receives hundreds of millions in tax dollars to ply their trade and commit thousands of crimes, while the Church is reviled with negative publicity.
Planned Parenthood is currently working through the Democrat majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), to defeat the nomination of the extremely well-qualified Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, President Bush's nominee as judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals (“Senate Democrats Dragging Feet on Bush's Judicial Appointments,” Aug. 4–11).
The reason Planned Parenthood wants to defeat Judge Owen is that she upheld the Texas State Parental Notification Law, which requires that a minor's parents must be notified before she can obtain an abortion. An almost identical law has been declared constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, so Ms. Owen upheld what the Texas State Legislature enacted and what the Supreme Court declared constitutional.
Yet many Catholic Democrats, such as Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote against Judge Owen, as they voted against and defeated the nomination of another judge who dared to sponsor a pro-life measure when he was a legislator.
The Catholic clergy sex-abuse scandal, as bad as it is, is dwarfed by the cover-up of sexual abuse by abortion providers and the detestable actions by Catholic politicians, such as Leahy, who vote to continue the large-scale sexual abuse of girls, some as young as 10 years old.
CAROLYN NAUGHTON Silver Spring, Maryland
Reading the Koran
Should the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill use government funds to require incoming students to study a santitized, abridged version of the Koran (“Campus Watch,” Aug. 25–31)?
We should learn about other people. But the book might be misleading.
For one thing, there is no one “authentic” version of Islam. The Koran states that “whatever communications We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring one better than it or like it.” (Surah II:106) Some Muslims believe that the parts of the Koran about doing good abrogate the parts about killing the Infidel, some believe the opposite, and there are shades of opinion in between.
And if it's important to have an understanding of bin Laden's religion, shouldn't students also study our own? More than four-fifths of the United States is Christian, and worldwide there are twice as many Christians as Muslims and 55% of those Christians are Catholic. The Church is the soul of Western civilization. You can't understand our own art, literature or history without an understanding of Christianity and the Church.
Yet the same people who want students to have a sympathetic understanding of Islam think that it's unconstitutional to expose them to Catholicism. Why is that?
DON SCHENK Allentown, Pennsylvania
Correction
Our story “Zero Tolerance Turmoil: Dioceses' Mixed Results” (Aug. 25–31) uses the TITLE “Msgr.” when quoting Michael Higgins, founder and current chairman of Justice for Priests and Deacons.
Though he has been widely quoted with that TITLE in the press, the Diocese of San Diego has informed us that Higgins was dismissed from the clerical state in March 1999 in a decision by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that was confirmed by Pope John Paul II. The Register regrets the error. Our online version of the story, at www.ncregister.com, does not include the quotes by Higgins.
----- EXCERPT: Letters ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Plenary Premature? DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Regarding the proposal of a plenary council of American bishops to address the root causes of the priest-ly sexual abuse scandal (“Eight Bishops Call for a Council on Scandal's Causes,” Aug. 18–24):
The intentions of the eight bishops are clearly praiseworthy, but I think such a council is very premature. At this point, a council could only be an organizational approach to the problems. The roots of the problems, however, are not organizational but a lack of supernatural faith and a way of life more of the world than of the Kingdom. Moreover, this lack of faith and worldly way of life has infected all the members of the American Church, whether clergy, religious or laity. We are impressed, rightly so, with the productivity of our economic and political institutions. We are gravely tempted to ape their methods.
Jesus used no such methods. His “method” today is still to call us to “repent and believe the Good News.” The Apostles founded the Church but they did not “organize” it. Rather, they proclaimed Jesus Christ, brought people out of paganism to him, nourished them with the sacraments and made of them a community in Christ. Yes, they held a council, but the problem which it addressed [whether gentile converts had to keep Jewish ceremonial law] had really already been solved by the Lord's call of St. Paul and by his astounding labors in the spirit. The apostolic council of Jerusalem came at the right time, to codify what had already been worked out. The early Church worked out their problems and carried on their “programs” by living the life of Christ. The “handing on” of the faith is accomplished by living it as an encounter with Christ, not by “blueprints and programs.” We are over-burdened by programs. We have all the teaching documents we need at this point.
The solution is saints. And we need to look to the saints for solutions. One of these in the modern world is surely Pope John Paul II. He has already given us the agenda for The Church in America, a lamentably neglected document. This post-synodal apostolic exhortation is subTITLEd On the Encounter with the Living Lord Jesus Christ: The Way to Conversion, Communion and Solidarity in America. Short of a plenary council, some sort of assembly might be helpful, but one of people who are working to implement the Holy Father's interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.
We face a situation in modern secular culture that is even more daunting than the Church faced in the ancient Hellenic Roman world. What is needed above all are a few bishops, priests, religious and lay leaders to show the rest of us how to encounter the living Lord Jesus Christ, to live that life in the Church and to sort out the good in the modern world, just as the Church sorted it out in the ancient world, that we, in solidarity with all Americans, might save our nation from the culture of death.
FATHER JOHN D. DREHER Pawtucket, Rhode Island
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: John D. Dreher Pawtucket -------- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Better Reasons For Garry Wills To Be a Catholic DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:A friend of mine wanted answers to the big questions and found them all in one place: The Catholic faith.
After his conversion, he broke the news to an aunt, who exclaimed: “Why would you do that? I'm a Protestant and I can do anything I like.”
Not a few Catholics share her attitude. Particularly in the area of sexuality, they would prefer a church that issued only permission slips and a pope obligingly silent about norms of behavior. Garry Wills, who in recent years has tirelessly informed us about the shortcomings of Pope John Paul II, has a new best seller that caters to such attitudes. Why I am a Catholic, No. 7 on the New York Times list for hard-cover nonfiction as of press time, is a self-esteem manual for Catholics who want to tune out the magisterium and buy into a sexual revolution which long ago failed on its own terms.
This is a very annoying book. It has a veneer of scholarship that, on closer examination, proves bogus. Its centerpiece is a highly tendentious history of the papacy meant to discredit as many popes as possible. You can get the same skewed versions of these historical episodes — Pope Zosimus endorses Pelagianism! Popes Liberius and Honorius turn heretic! — by visiting Protestant fundamentalist Web sites.
When making highly debatable claims, such as that there was no bishop of Rome until well into the second century or that the papal primacy was not recognized until centuries later, Wills never mentions the literary evidence to the contrary. Instead, he takes at face value the claims of “progressive” historians who, like himself, want to cut the magisterium down to size.
It is not difficult to find even liberal Catholic scholars who disagree with Wills about the early primacy of Rome. In his recent history of the papacy, Saints and Sinners, Eamon Duffy writes that the apostolic succession of the chair of Peter “rests on traditions which stretch back to the very beginning of the written records of Christianity.” Duffy quotes St. Irenaeus, who, around 180, invoked the Church of Rome as the “great and illustrious Church” to which, “on account of its commanding position, every church, that is faithful everywhere, must resort.” St. Irenaeus also supplies us with the earliest list of popes after Peter (Linus, Cletus, Clement and so on) about which Wills is silent.
So much for an early phantom papacy. When it comes to subsequent popes, Wills is shocked — shocked — to find not a few careerists, sycophants, politicians and bad administrators. But Christ did not exclude the papacy when he said that the Church would be a mixture of wheat and tares until the end of time. He did, however, establish the Church as a teaching authority and handed the keys to Peter and his successors.
Christ established the Church as a teaching authority. This is where Garry Wills begs to differ.
This is where Wills begs to differ. He wants a church that endorses contraception, homosexual sex, serial marriage and other items on the menu of political correctness. The magisterium, as defined by the Second Vatican Council, will not do this, so Wills has to manufacture his own authority that he can adhere to and still call himself Catholic. And what is this authority? It boils down to his own conscience and the thwarted intentions, as Wills reads them, of the most liberal bishops at the Second Vatican Council.
Wills rightly emphasizes Vatican II's endorsement of “freedom of conscience.” But he does not mention the council's insistence on an antecedent duty to form our conscience according to “objective standards of moral conduct.” For a Catholic, the teachings of the magisterium are a definitive, although not exhaustive, guide to such standards.
Without directly saying so, Wills flatly rejects what Lumen Gentium, a council document he is happy to quote in other contexts, teaches about the authority of the pope and bishops in this regard. Instead, he turns to that convenient fogging agent, the “spirit of Vatican II,” defined in this case as what the most radical theologians had hoped to accomplish at the council. This invisible authority, needless to say, urges the conscience of all Catholics to follow the path of least resistance when it comes to difficult moral issues.
An irony that escapes Wills is that among the more liberal bishops at Vatican II was the future Pope John Paul II, who had a large influence on its most “radical” documents. John Paul's pontificate has been a rich unfolding of the Council's teachings. But dissidents like Wills are so focused on a handful of sexual issues that they cannot see this. Nor do they seem to notice that those Protestant denominations that have caved in on these issues are the ones whose numbers have declined most drastically.
The teachings of the Church are not always easy. After all, Christ came as a sign of contradiction. But these teachings exist for a good reason, and it would be a good thing if Catholics like Wills would stop regarding them as arbitrary rules imposed from the outside. They are, rather, signposts — and based not simply on Revelation, but also on a profound reading of the human person.
George Sim Johnston, author of Did Darwin Get it Right?, writes from New York City.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: George Sim Johnston -------- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Little Brothers Are Watching DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:It's been an amazing six and a half years, watching this kid grow up. Zeferino was just nine when our local Big Brothers chapter made him my little brother — and made a mentor out of me.
When we look back now, we still talk about the times that seemed like milestones along the road from kite-flying to car-shopping.
Oh, all right. I'm the only one who does the looking back. I launch into another “Remember the time when you …” — and he does one of two things. Laughs and changes the subject or asks when I'm going to “let it go.”
With 16 in his sights, “Z-man” is inclined to face just one direction: forward. He can get his driver's license in a few months. He just started dating his first girlfriend. And high-school graduation is only two school years away. With the world opening up all kinds of possibilities before him he's not the least bit interested in what happened five minutes ago, let alone five years back.
But one day soon, I'm sure, he'll stop and reflect not only on the memories we've shared, the bond we've forged, but also on the major turning points of his entire young life. He'll think about how he lost both his parents to a car crash when he was just 5 years old. How his grandmother adopted him, loved him as her own, became “Ma” to him. How he came to start spending Sunday afternoons with a guy named Dave who, thanks to Ma, knocked on the front door and walked into his life one sunny day. He'll look back and, I hope, he'll see fit to become a mentor to a fatherless boy himself. He'd be good at it.
When that day comes, I hope he finds that Big Brothers-Big Sisters of America has been restored to greatness.
Yes, I said restored.
In case you missed the news, here it is. In February, the national office of Big Brothers-Big Sisters notified its nearly 500 chapters that, beginning July 1, they could not exclude homosexual volunteers as potential mentors to children.
What kind of madness is this? you ask. Haven't they seen the headlines coming out of Boston, Palm Beach and Dallas this year? Haven't they heard what happens when boys and young men are sent off with homosexual men?
Of course they've heard. But money talks louder than good sense. You see, this decision isn't about improving the organization's ability to do what's best for kids in need. It's about economics.
Big Brothers-Big Sisters primarily serves the poor. For funding, it relies on United Way donations, foundation grants and corporate sponsorships, along with grassroots fund-raising efforts like raffles and walkathons. The United Way, with its expansive donor base, is weak as a dry reed against the cultural currents of the day. And we know all too well from the headlines that many of today's corporate and foundation leaders have no compelling reason to stand up for what the culture considers “traditional ideals” of virtue. Especially at a time when companies are scrambling (or being sued) to do things like extend health insurance to their employees' live-in lovers, including the same-sex variety.
That Big Brothers-Big Sisters is being swept along on this rising tide of moral compromise is especially troubling to me because I know some of the organization's administrators and social workers at the local level. The folks who staff my Big Brothers chapter are some of the finest and most dedicated human-services workers I know. They put in long hours screening potential mentors, corresponding with hopeful mothers and monitoring existing matches. They're concerned with just one thing: helping fatherless boys find a rewarding and responsible place in the world.
Local-chapter people can't say so out loud, but you can bet that few, if any, have a special place in their hearts for politically correct bylaws mandated by “National” to appease potentially vociferous donor segments.
Solid Citizens
And then there are the communities the local chapters help. A 1992 study of youth-mentoring programs confirmed what anyone knows if they have a little bit of what my grandfather would have called “horse sense”: Young people who have a caring grown-up in their lives are a lot less likely to get into serious trouble. Drugs, alcohol, crime, dropping out of school and having babies out of wedlock — the social pathologies soar among teen-agers who have no adult mentors or role models to relate to. And Lord knows that, today, too many young people, especially the ones in high-risk, low-income homes, are growing up with not a responsible adult in sight.
The difference a mentor makes is especially conspicuous among young males. Because Big Brothers is there, lots of boys tempted to commit serious crimes are instead learning how to do the right thing. As a result, the mean streets of our cities are at least a little less mean. What's not to love about an initiative making a contribution like that?
Now, suddenly, as of this summer, there's a big “and yet” hanging over the entire organization: They do a lot of good for a lot of people, and yet …
Unless the powers that be at Big Brothers-Big Sisters see what a terrible mistake they're making, one sure to have tragic consequences at some point in the future, I'll have no choice but to walk away from Big Brothers once Zef turns 18 (at which time we'll begin a new phase of our relationship: friends for life, but no longer monitored by a social worker).
In the meantime, I'm going to write the group's national office in Philadelphia to voice my deep disappointment over this sad development. And, yes, I'll urge them to learn from the mistakes we, the Catholic Church, made when we inadvertently sent boys and young men off with homosexuals. I'll ask: Why would anyone — no, why would you of all people — do so deliberately? Why not focus instead on doing the right thing and trusting the funds to follow, albeit from different sources than you've courted in the past? (To join your voice with mine, go to www.bbbsa.org and click on the “Contact Us” link.)
I don't relish taking this step. I have as much to thank my local chapter's administrators and social workers for as Zef does. Watching him develop — in ways he might not otherwise have grown without my being there, such as in regular attendance at Sunday Mass — has enriched my life immeasurably, in more ways than I could ever count or pay back. See my Big Brothers testimony under the “Stories & News” link at bbbsa.org and I think you'll see what I mean.
No Room for Compromise
I think so highly of my local chap-ter's staff that, when I heard the news, my initial response was to mull the idea of “working within the system” to right things. I'm a member of my chapter's advisory board. Couldn't I stay and push for change from within? I asked myself.
After all, I know firsthand how rigorously mentors are screened, and that no match is made without the consent of the mother or legal guardian.
But it eventually sank in that, once my present match is officially complete, nothing less than a zero-sum stand will do. Why? Because this is one situation in which a “non-discrimination” clause protecting homosexuals is so clearly wrong at such a fundamental level. Big Brothers-Big Sisters is one organization that should make no apologies for screening out adults who may become sexually attracted to their own charges. Indeed, such a lockout seems essential to the very mission of the organization. Isn't this obvious?
If you don't think so, consider this. How hard is it to picture, for example, a lesbian couple who want “our son” to have an adult male in his life — and have no compunction about sending the boy off, week after week, with a homosexual man? Now picture a Big Brothers administrator having no choice but to say to the boy: “Well, if it's okay with your moms, it's okay with us.”
It will pain me to part company with Big Brothers, if this policy is still standing two and a half years from now, because I know that, except for this one devastating new wrinkle, Big Brothers-Big Sisters of America remains — “on the street,” if no longer on paper — a worthy and good secular charity.
Can it be saved by a letter-writing and mentor-resignation campaign? For the sake of all of us, I can't tell you how much I hope so.
David Pearson edits the Register's opinion, travel, arts and books sections.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: David Pearson -------- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Who's Afraid of an Authoritative Pope? DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:On July 31, the day Pope John Paul II traveled from Toronto to Guatemala, the newspaper published a seven-paragraph editorial TITLEd “The Words of the Pope.” The first two paragraphs were about the Holy Father's health, his frailty, a physical and spiritual “resolve so towering that it casts an image greater than the man himself.” The editorial speaks of his “moral authority.”
The next five paragraphs are devoted to the sex-abuse questions. One reads carefully when the Chronicle talks about “sex abuse.” The Holy Father is complimented for speaking out “against the sexual abuse that has been jarring to many of the faithful.” The Pope talks of “shame” and “sadness,” of the “indiscretions by as many as 300 priests” that have “harmed the Church.”
Since the Pope was speaking before devout and younger folks in Canada, the Chronicle editorial grants that the Pope did not want to employ stronger terms, even though “the disillusioned victims … longed for stronger condemnations and deeper assurances.”
What did the Chronicle think the Pope “should” have done? “The Pope could have apologized. Or chided his bishops for using legal tactics and callous denial to cover up abhorrent behavior.” There is a sense that the Pope waffled, that he “missed an opportunity.”
The editorial finally mentions a controversy in Mexico about a painting of Juan Diego that does not make him appear as an Indian. All of this background leads to the following conclusion: The Pope alone can “deliver the level of rectitude and calm that only he can offer to an increasingly restless flock.” Wilfred Ward, the great English advocate of papal infallibility in the 19th century, could not have put it better.
This editorial reminded me of the coverage of the Toronto papal visit in the Washington Post. Sex-abuse stories have been regular features in the press, of course. They should be, granted their truth. But it is interesting to see the context in which they have been appearing. On July 29, the Post had two long, front-page articles devoted to this issue. What the Pope actually said in Toronto was again overshadowed by what he “should” have said.
The first article was TITLEd: “In Address Pope Turns to Scandals.” This essay was about 24 column inches; it stretched out over two pages. Just below the papal headline on the same front page was a second, much longer essay (51 column inches on two pages), TITLEd, “How Deep the Scars of Abuse? Some Victims Crippled; Others Stay Resilient.” There are graphic photos in the latter essay, one of a priest who is said to have abused “at least 330 people.” The implication seems to be that this abuse is the main issue, not what the Pope had to say to hundreds of thousands of youth in Toronto.
The Post essay ended with the following passage about one of the 330 victims: “Bachmann said he remains a prisoner of the past. ‘I feel all this anger that he (the priest) was allowed to get away with it, that the church was allowed to get away with it,’ he said. ‘I can't forgive and I can't forget. The thing is, I still feel like I'm responsible for what happened.’” Lots of things to sort out there, no doubt.
Now, I cite these two accounts or views, one from San Francisco and one from Washington, because of what they imply. By this time, only a blind man cannot see the dimensions of the problem. I agree with the view that this particular issue is not somehow an unjust outside attack on the Church or a product of the culture. Rather it is an internal problem that was wholly in the hands of Church officials to do or not to do something about. It has to do with what the Church expects of its own about its own teachings and practices. The fact is, it took the press and the law to bring it to our attention in a way in which it is a common topic in the press.
Obviously, something is wrong at a deep level.
What the Chronicle editorial reveals, however, and this is my point here, is that the Church is expected, and not just by itself, to have authority — and to wield it. And if bishops won't use theirs, the Pope is expected to use his.
We can, of course, just hear the cries of “authoritarianism” and “anti-Romanism” if the Pope had in fact immediately sacked a good number of cardinals and bishops for a negligence that seems common knowledge. What we are hearing is the opposite. We are hearing that the Pope, frail though he be, ought to be tougher. No one impugns his own integrity, but many wonder why he is so reluctant to discipline these men, many of whom he himself appointed.
The unspoken agenda in all of this controversy has to do with what is the abuse “about”? It is in fact mainly about homosexual activities, which, as such, are considered “private rights” in the culture. It would be surprising, even edifying, if the San Francisco Chronicle were criticizing the Pope for failing to state that all homosexual activities, not just those against minors, not just those performed by aberrant clergy, are wrong. If we say that this turmoil is only about pedophilia, the abuse of small children, we focus attention away from the vast majority of the cases.
In any event, what is important about these editorials and columns is that they implicitly recognize that the Church does have authority and ought to use it. The Church is not criticized for claiming authority she does not have, but for having it and not using it. Authority must always be exercised in a prudent way, of course, and it is possible to make things worse. Almost everyone thinks that the bishops are so cautious or so implicated as to be paralyzed in this matter.
What is unexpectedly interesting, however, and why I think it worthy of attention, is that those who are often vocal critics of the Church and its authority are precisely those who are suddenly most astonished that the Church does not act as if it had authority in an obvious case where authority is needed.
The secular world seems to want not the “words of the Pope” — but more aggressive use of his own authority.
With no little amusement, we cannot help but see here a graphic, if indirect, acknowledgment of the rightness of the structure of the Church even in the secular order.
Jesuit Father James Schall teaches political science at Georgetown University.
----- EXCERPT: Does the San Francisco Chronicle wish for a papacy with more authority? ------- EXTENDED BODY: James Schall, Sj -------- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Take the Pledge DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Dear Adrienne and Lance,
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This is the Pledge of Allegiance, which a federal appeals court recently ruled unconstitutional because of two words: “under God.”
I'm pleased that students at both of your schools recite the pledge each morning. They also pray. They can do that because you attend private schools where religion is a vital part of the curriculum. And contrary to what a particular group of California jurists may think, it would have been fine to the folks who wrote our Constitution.
There has been much revision of history in order to determine what should not be constitutional. A strange collection of judges, activists, atheists and general troublemakers has worked long and hard to try to establish the concept that anything that hints of God or religion has no place in a public institution. Our Founding Fathers would be appalled.
The brave souls who gave us the Declaration of Independence and later wrote the Constitution were overwhelmingly God-fearing men of religious faith. The declaration mentions God, creator, divine providence and sacred honor. And the oft-cited First Amendment to the Constitution isn't about prohibiting religion but enabling religious practice: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
Letters to My Children
In other words, the framers of the Bill of Rights weren't trying to stifle religion; they were trying to nurture it.
We Americans fought for our freedom. We determined to be a democratic republic, not government by a king. That didn't mean there should be no law.
We determined there would be no state-mandated religion. That didn't mean our people should reject their faith in God.
Some tortured legal arguments and judicial decisions that ignore the clear direction of our Founding Fathers have combined to make the public practice of religion an endangered species. You've read the bizarre stories of teachers in public schools getting in trouble for wearing a crucifix, students giving graduation speeches being silenced when giving thanks to God or a public official bearing a reprimand for putting a Christmas wreath on his office door.
Gen. George Washington didn't lead his ragged band through the frigid winters at Valley Forge and Morristown so that God would be kept out of our lives. On the contrary: Many men died so we would be free to welcome the Lord into our hearts.
It is amazing that two little words — “under God” — could cause so much trouble. Of course, despite the brevity of the pledge, there are other words that some folks probably find controversial: allegiance … united … republic … one nation… indivisible … liberty … justice … for all. Yep, there probably is something here to offend everyone.
But I hope we have the courage and common sense to pledge that our nation is “under God” as opposed to whatever option someone could come up with, including the nation being under nothing whatsoever. As the Holy Father said during his recent trip to Poland, “Frequently man lives as if God did not exist, and even puts himself in God's place.” I expect there are lots of folks who would like the pledge to read “one nation under me.”
Jim Fair writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ------- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Fair -------- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Hills Are Alive With the Love of Mary DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Prominent on the skyline just beyond Salzburg, Austria, two cream-and-white bell towers hint at great beauty hidden below.
Indeed, the entire baroque façade of the Basilica of Maria Plain is an invitation to admire the handiwork of man — and to step inside to revere the glory of God.
You need to do some climbing to reach the shrine, but you'll be in the good company of millions of pilgrims who have ascended this hill over the centuries. Among them: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was so moved by the ambience of holiness here that he composed his Coronation Mass for the Blessed Virgin Mary on this spot in 1779.
The story of this much-loved Austrian shrine begins in the 17th century. One night in 1633, a fire destroyed a Bavarian family's bakery. The only material thing to survive the blaze was a long-cherished picture of the Virgin and Jesus by an unknown artist. In fact, the holy image, TITLEd “Maria Trost” and depicting the Mother of God lifting a veil from the reclining Infant Jesus, escaped entirely unscathed. This celebrated beginning is illustrated on a paneled door that leads to the church's choir loft.
Word of the image's miraculous staying power soon spread throughout Austria and Lower Bavaria. In 1652, a Baron Rudolf of Grimming brought the image from Regen to Salzburg, building a chapel to house it on a hill above the growing city. This chapel is known as the Ursprungskapelle and can be visited today, although the beloved picture is ornately framed above the altar of the baroque basilica. The gift of the image to the people of Salzburg (and the subsequent building of a chapel for the honoring of the miraculous painting) is depicted on another of the choir-loft doors.
Benedictine Beginnings
By the 1670s, the picture's fame had made the site an immensely popular pilgrimage destination, making necessary the erection of a larger church. Giovanni Antonio Dario took three years, 1671 through 1673, to build the Church of Maria Plain, the façade of which resembles the Salzburg Cathedral in the city below. Three years later, the bishop of Salzburg consecrated the sanctuary. At the time of the solemn consecration, care of the estate was entrusted to the Benedictine monks. The Benedictines remained in charge until 1824, when the duties were turned over to the Convent of St. Peter.
Pilgrims continued to visit the shrine and grounds, walking the 20-minute path to the church and stopping to pray at the five small chapels erected along the uphill slope. Construction of these chapels, or Kalvarienberg (Calvary mountain), began in 1686; they are presently being restored. The final chapel, the Schmerzenskapelle depicting the crucifixion of Jesus, is the largest of the five and stands at the head of hill. From the top of Calvary, the view of Salzburg, with its multitude of Catholic Church steeples, is striking.
Inlaid on the basilica's façade are marble statues depicting the four Gospel writers. Over the main door is a marble relief of the Virgin and Child, both crowned in gold.
The interior of the church, cool in the heat of a Salzburg summer afternoon, is cream-colored marble with painted accents of dark blue and gold on the chancel, statuary and side altars, all in deference to the glory of Our Lady. The altar, housing the miraculous image above the tabernacle, is separated from the congregation by large, wrought-iron gates, separating earth from the heavenly presence.
Helps and Healings
Through the past 300 years, numerous healings and helps have been credited to this shrine. In 1751, through the donations of pilgrims and patrons of Maria Plain, the original painting was enhanced with gold and jewels, molded into crowns for the Virgin and Child. Pilgrims and believers have left tokens of their love and reverence for this shrine, enabling the picture to be framed in gold and silver and helping to fund the exquisite altar housing the image, as well as the rest of the awe-inspiring interior.
In 1952, on the 300th anniversary of the fire, the Church of Maria Plain was declared a “Basilica Minor” by Pope Pius XII. Six new bells were installed in the right tower in 1959; they ring daily at 11 a.m. and can be heard throughout the valley below. The basilica was completely renovated in 1974. In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited Maria Plain and prayed before the miraculous image.
The Wallfahrtsbasilika (Pilgrimage Basilica) supports an active parish in the Bergheim suburb of Salzburg. Daily Mass is celebrated twice per day; on Sundays and feast days there are four Masses. In addition, on Saturdays, Sundays and feast days, there is recitation of the rosary. The 10 a.m. Sunday and feast-day Masses are celebrated specifically for pilgrims.
German is the main language spoken at the basilica (though sometimes there's an English-speaking priest available for confession) — but here holiness has a way of transcending verbal limitations. Just say Ave Maria!
Mary C. Gildersleeve writes
----- EXCERPT: Basilica-Shrine of Maria Plain, Salzburg, Austria ------- EXTENDED BODY: Mary C. Gildersleeve -------- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Spirit Moves Him DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Singer-songwriter Sean Forrest left the secular music world after a 1998 pilgrimage led to his conversion to the Catholic faith.
His Movin' with the Spirit Ministry concentrates on reaching teens — but plenty of adults show up for his retreats and concerts, too.
Forrest was named Best New Artist at the 2000 Unity Awards (given out annually by the United Catholic Music and Video Association). Now 35, he has recorded four CDs and told his story in a book, From Happy Hour to Holy Hour and Freedom. He spoke about his music-based ministries with Register correspondent Joseph Pronechen shortly after performing at World Youth Day in Toronto.
What is it about your original songs that young people are responding to?
My CD Can't Look Back, for example, is all about real-life issues. All my songs are about actual events and God's mercy in our lives. It's like listening to your own life. People will say, “That's what I'm going through.” The songs don't end in gloom and doom, but they end by bringing you to Christ.
What's your overall impression of today's Catholic youth? Do they know the faith?
Too many of these kids just really don't know Jesus. Sad, but true. They ask questions like, “Wasn't he just a man or a prophet?” I'm also scared because 95% of the kids I talk to believe the Eucharist is just a piece of bread. They were taught it was Jesus, but they're just getting it in their head and not in their heart. They can say the Hail Mary and the Our Father, but they don't seem to know what it all means. Real faith is not being shared in households.
My philosophy is, until they have a powerful heart-to-heart moment with Jesus Christ and understand his sacrifice, they will not care about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Mass or any of the sacraments.
Did you even find this lack of understanding among the young people at World Youth Day?
The kids were all fired up. But I interviewed kids from around the country and around the world and found that there's a wide disparity in terms of formation. On abortion, for example, youth from Honduras were horrified by it. They wanted to know how anyone could do that to a baby. Meanwhile, a lot of kids from around the United States were pro-choice and felt homosexuality was okay. They thought that lifestyle was fine and the Church was wrong. So, at World Youth Day, I loved how the kids were cheering, but I wasn't sure if they knew what they were cheering for.
What about your music do you think appeals to teens?
I won't compromise the truth. When you speak the truth, you have the truth of Christ behind you and the truth of the Church behind you, and the Holy Spirit just penetrates their hearts and they listen.
Right away the kids know I'm approachable. They can speak. If you can't talk openly and discuss what the Church teaches about abortion, premarital sex and homosexuality, you don't have a prayer with these kids.
And these kids eat up the truth. Unfortunately, people are afraid to tell them the truth because they don't want to get the kids upset. But the kids are leaving the Church for churches unafraid to tackle the hard issues.
These kids will bare their souls to God and to me on retreat after hearing the hard truths of our faith. They realize it's an honor to be Catholic and need to start living it.
Are they open to avenues other than high-energy music?
Oh, yes. The priests and directors of religious education have to share their lives and struggles so kids can see they're real people and say, okay, let's talk. Your own personal story is important.
One of the most powerful things I do is talk about the real sufferings of Christ on the cross, and kids connect with the suffering. We've got to get back to that “heart moment” with Jesus and what he did for us on the cross.
Are they always receptive to this message or do some give you flack?
If I don't get any flack, I must not really be preaching the Gospel.
Has the sex-abuse scandal crisis made it harder to get the Gospel through to young people?
The current crisis is devastating. I'm sick of heretics, people in authority opposing the magisterium on homosexuality, birth control, abortion. That's evil and messes up the minds of the kids. Our bishops and priests need to preach the truth and not worry about popularity.
What kind of feedback do you get on your work from young people?
About 98% of the kids are transformed on a retreat; they say their life has completely changed. Nothing is impossible with God. I'm just preaching the Gospel and letting the Holy Spirit do his work. And this transformation is not just a one-night yahoo. It's a conversion. A month later I'll still get letters or e-mails. I'll get thank-you letters from parents saying their son or daughter is a different person.
It's very generous of you to distribute your CDs and books by donation, accepting whatever people can afford to give, rather than a set charge. Why do you do it?
Because of a letter I received from a girl who was on the brink of suicide but decided to listen to my CD first. She changed her mind and asked her parents to get her help. She didn't have any money, so I had given her that CD.
After that experience, I never charged for another. Because I'm a nonprofit organization, people know I'm not just saying these things to sell CDs.
What's your book about?
It's my journey to Christ and the Catholic faith. I encourage families with members who aren't practicing their faith to get the book or a CD as a gift and even just put it on some-one's car seat with a note, “You might like to read this, or listen to song No. 4.”
We need to love people enough to tell them God's truth, even if it hurts, so they can experience God in a deeper and more meaningful way. My goal is to get people on fire for Christ and the Catholic faith.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen -------- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:The Rookie (2002)
Sports movies can be an effective metaphor for the American Dream. At their best, they highlight competition, achievement and excellence. The Rookie is based on the uplifting, real-life story of pitcher Jim Morris, a 35-year-old West Texas high school teacher and baseball coach who'd been forced to quit the minors because of injuries. The movie chronicles his against-all-odds comeback to become one of the oldest relief pitchers in major-league history.
Director John Lee Hancock focuses mainly on Jimmy (Dennis Quaid) as a happily married, middle-aged man with three kids. The high school baseball team he's coaching is on a losing streak. The kids cut a deal: If they win the district championship, he must try out again for a professional team. When the impossible happens, Jimmy decides to go for it. At first his wife (Rachel Griffiths) is opposed. But she realizes his example could be an inspiration to their children. Family unity is a priority for her and Jimmy, and they're willing to make the effort to have it work.
Young Sherlock Holmes(1985)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic detective stories have been brought to the screen many times. Young Sherlock Holmes, adapted by Chris Columbus (Home Alone), directed by Barry Levinson (Rain Man) and produced by Steven Spielberg, is one of the more imaginative versions. In the original, Watson first meets Holmes when they're adults. But what if they'd also worked together as schoolboys?
John Watson (Alan Cox) is impressed by the deductive skills of his older classmate, Sherlock Holmes (Nicholas Rowe), and the duo soon find themselves plunged into a bizarre mystery.
Men who have no apparent connection with each other are being struck dead after experiencing terrifying hallucinations. The adventurous schoolboys encounter a sinister fencing master (Anthony Higgins), the eccentric inventor of flying machines (Nigel Stock), and a cult dedicated to Egyptian rites of mummification. The movie's tone is closer to Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom than the usual stiff-upper-lip Victorian detective yarn. There are cliff-hanging chases with clever special effects as well as the sifting of clues.
Sabotage(1936)
Islamic terrorists aren't the first group to use terrorism to advance their cause. Western society has been plagued by this threat for more than a century. Its perpetrators have ranged from anarchists and communists to great-power rivals. Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage, which should not be confused with his similarly TITLEd Saboteur, is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's classic novel about terrorism, Secret Agent. Sylvia (Sylvia Sidney) is unaware of the terrorist activities of her husband, Verloc (Oscar Homolka), who uses a London movie theater as a front. Her primary interest is the care of her little brother (Desmond Tester). Scotland Yard harbors suspicions about Verloc's operations and assigns a detective, Ted (John Loder), to watch them.
Verloc plans to detonate a bomb on a bus crowded with innocent civilians. (Sound familiar?) The inability of the authorities to prevent this outrage provokes some challenging moral questions.
The action unfolds in the brooding atmosphere of evil, intrigue and suspense that Hitchcock knows how to create so well.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer -------- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, SEPT. 1
Barns Reborn Home & Garden TV, 9 p.m.
This show follows people as they transform their barns into residences. Those who restore the barns and redecorate them usually try to recreate their early American flavor. Often, they even use some the construction techniques of the original builders.
MON.-THURS., SEPT. 2–5
The 9–11 Year History Channel, 9 p.m.-11 p.m.
Six specials (one each on Monday and Wednesday, and two each on Tuesday and Thursday) recount the history of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, recall the 9–11 attacks and recovery efforts, assess the war on terror and supply historical perspective on the overall situation. Relics from the Rubble, at 10 p.m. Tuesday, is especially interesting, because it looks at the intricate process of finding, preserving and archiving objects from the attacks. Some items constitute crime-scene evidence; others will become parts of memorials, such as an entire fire truck. The architectural firm Voorsanger and Associates is handling the job. All six shows will re-air on Sept. 11.
TUESDAY, SEPT. 3
Out There: Ice Riders National Geographic Channel, 11 a.m.
Two modern-day explorers, Paul Schurke and his daughter Bria, traverse the North Pole regions that Robert Peary and Matthew Henson crossed in 1909.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 4
Attack on the Pentagon A & E, 10 p.m.
This “Minute by Minute” installment recounts the 9–11 strike against the Pentagon.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 5
Mother Teresa: Seeing the Face of Jesus EWTN, 4 p.m.
On the fifth anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, this 30-minute animated video tells children her life story. This holy Catholic sister recognized “Jesus in distressing disguise” in each and every one of the helpless, ignored and destitute people whom she and her sisters rescued, nursed and, above all, loved.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 6
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly PBS, 5 p.m.
Mary Alice Williams follows a Christian family and a Jewish one as they each grieve for a loved one lost on 9–11. Deryl Davis surveys how people of various faiths conceive of “sacred space” at the WTC site. Program content is subject to change without notice.
SATURDAYS
Rough ‘n’ Ready Saturday Hallmark Channel, noon-5 p.m.
At noon is High Chaparral (1967–1971), with Leif Erickson and Linda Cristal. At 1 p.m. is The Rifleman (1958–1963), with Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford. At 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. is Rawhide (1959–1966), with Eric Fleming, Sheb Wooley and a young Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates. Advisory: at 4 p.m., The Young Riders (1989–1992), with Anthony Zerbe, is another example of this programming.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler -------- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Making the Case for a Classical Education DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Is it still possible to get a classical education in today's learning culture?
Indeed it is, according to Tracy Lee Simmons, director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. He holds a master's degree from Oxford University in the classics and is a frequent contributor to Crisis and other periodicals.
He spoke to Register correspondent Kathryn Jean Lopez about the value of a classical education.
When you write about classical education you mean more than learning enough Latin to help with the SATs. What is a classical education?
This was the humanist's education, in the sense in which Erasmus and Thomas More were humanists. A classical education used to mean simply a curriculum based upon Greek and Latin. Of course, that curriculum also included math, history and literature, but they were secondary; the two ancient languages were primary. Greek and Latin were what made the curriculum classical, nothing else.
Unfortunately, as I say in the book, a classical education can mean lots of things these days, practically everything from Shakespeare to phonics. But, on the upper end, most definitions seem to have in common a fairly demanding curriculum and a serious reconnection to the history of the Western world — but often without the languages themselves. I think this is deadly, because it excludes the rigor. Over time it gives us the illusion of knowing things we don't. So I've tried to re-emphasize Greek and Latin as being vital, in fact central, to a classical education.
It's not really my definition, mind you. It's what everyone from T.S. Eliot on back for hundreds of years would have recognized. A classical education forms the mind by classical models of thought and language and gives us a past.
Should everyone be getting a classical education, to some degree? Where do you start in terms of grade/age level?
Well, after admitting, as we should, that no time is too late to start — high school, college or later — we must also acknowledge a few humbling facts. If the classical languages are to serve their formative function, a training in them should begin as early as possible. It's still common in European countries, for instance, to begin Latin around the age of 10, and that's usually after the child has already begun a second modern language. Let's not kid ourselves: That kind of schooling is not merely different from ours, it's superior. Children end up maturing sooner and knowing more.
Who should get a classical education? In a perfect world, everyone would have a shot at it, at least at the beginning. But the real answer is, whoever can. That is, whoever is blessed with a good mind, as well as with the advantages of good schools with traditional values and practices — remember, we need both. Where Latin is still available in America, students still start somewhere near the ninth grade. That's okay, but it's later than it needs to be. Under the older system, which some American schools followed, a Latin student could be reading Virgil — or a Greek student, Homer — by that stage. I see no reason to waste time the way we do in this country, though we can see where we have gone wrong. If we are not worried about the i mmediate and obvious utility of a subject, we're worried that our children will feel bad about themselves if they don't get straight As. Both motives are low and unbecoming, and they don't, as we say now, send a very good message to young people about the life of the mind.
What are the current trends? Who is getting classical educations? Who is studying Greek and Latin?
Again, whoever can. It's a parched world out there, but there are signs of hope. The Catholic schools could once be counted on at least for teaching Latin, if not Greek, and many still do. But you find a disturbing number of Catholic schools getting rid of Latin, and failing to stress it where it survives, which means of course that it probably won't survive very long. Many home schoolers are trying to provide Latin, and mostly for all the right reasons. But if the parents haven't had Latin, or not much of it, they can't take their children very far without expert tutoring. The best places remain good private schools where, for whatever reasons, the good and rigorous subjects remain and are well taught by extraordinary, if underpaid, teachers. Those schools are out there. You even see Latin returning here and there to public schools, and that should put the Catholic schools to shame.
Among the advantages of Greek and Latin is the discipline that comes with memorization. Rote learning is out these days. Is a comeback possible?
Yes, I think a comeback of rote is probable. The Gross National Stupidity might force the issue. To say that Latin helps your English is to say the least, but it still doesn't say much. More disturbingly, people are beginning to see that their intelligent children don't know very much. Here they are, with minds as strong as any the world has seen, and those minds simply don't contain very much, nor are they very well-molded. And they've frittered away their childhoods on public-school silliness like multiculturalism and time-wasting projects instead of reading books. They know things, but they haven't learned much systematically. If they had taken, say, French and Latin by the age of 12 — along with Algebra I — they'd not only know all that comes with them; they'd have gained the ability to teach themselves whatever comes along.
You say this is all a lost cause, don't you? Is it really? Then what are your goals?
It's mostly a lost cause, but not completely. It's certainly a lost cause as far as the educational establishment — the NEA and AFT and so forth — is concerned. Talking to them is like talking to a mud fence. I guess my goal is to encourage the creation of a remnant of those who know what's good and what will promote a healthy society, which is of course healthy, intelligent individuals, not big schemes for social improvement. We need to start small. And since I've pretty much given up on the education establishment to reinstate some decency, I suppose we must form a disestablishment of civilized people. It's possible.
Maybe we'll need to return to monastic schools, where the mind and soul are formed together. That would be best. The Benedictines have had it right for 1,500 years. They brought salvation, sanity and civilization — not a bad deal, all things considered.
Where would you send parents who want to ensure their kids get a classical education or some sort?
Start from home. Some public and parochial schools continue to retain their classics, and they might be just around the corner. You may not need to go to an expensive private boarding school.
Here's one sign to watch: Generally, the earlier the students start their languages, the better and more serious the program is likely to be. Be wary of those who prefer smiling children to intelligent children; same with adolescents, only more so. Be careful with those schools offering Latin because it's a current fad; they must be committed to it, regardless of what the latest studies are saying. Incidentally, make sure that the parents aren't running the school, because that's a recipe for an oozing demise of anything like real education.
Sad to say, the average baby boomer parent these days is as ignorant of the goals of a humane education as children are, and good things and good people always get hurt when ignorant busybodies prevail. If your local private school isn't offering Latin, be bold and ask the headmaster or principal why, and watch him squirm. Often the reasons are not very good, and usually schools that provide more computer training than intellectual formation are ensuring a lifetime of mediocrity for those children. If that's what you want, go for it. Otherwise, politely walk away.
How can knowing Greek and Latin enrich your religious life — particularly if you are Catholic?
Namely, by direct access to high ideals and beauty. Latin is to Catholics what Hebrew is to the Jews. It's that simple, and that profound. To lose Latin now would be a calamity, doctrinal and aesthetic, of the first order. It formed the Catholic mind and sensibility. For many centuries, the Latin Mass alone gave us that access to a peculiar kind of richness and beauty, which no other tradition, excepting the Eastern Orthodox, has.
But, unlike the Eastern Orthodoxy, that sensibility was spread very far, to the corners of the known world and changed it. As much as I love Italian, I'm glad Aquinas wrote the Summa in Latin. And while St. Augustine is fine in English, he's better, and more beautiful, in Latin.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez -------- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Koran Is Okay
THE NEWS & OBSERVER, Aug. 16 — A federal judge has refused to grant a temporary restraining order to block a requirement that incoming freshmen and transfer students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill read and discuss a book about the Koran, reported the Raleigh, N.C., daily.
Federal Judge Carlton Tilley ruled against plaintiffs who had argued that assigning the book — Approaching the Qur'án: The Early Revelations, by Michael Sells — violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
Two members of the Family Policy Network, a Protestant group, were listed among those who filed the suit along with three anonymous freshmen, one of whom is Catholic.
Ave Maria Law Accredited
CHRONICLE.COM, Aug. 16 — Ave Maria, the two-year Catholic law school in Ann Arbor, Mich., has won provisional accreditation from the American Bar Association, allowing graduates to sit for the bar exam in any state.
Ave Maria was founded by philanthropist Thomas Mona-ghan in 2000 in order to produce lawyers guided by both faith and reason.
“Some legal scholars questioned whether the school's religious focus might make it difficult for professors and students to openly debate issues,” the Chronicle said. But school officials said the bar association “was convinced that the school was not forcing its views on anyone.”
In Memoriam
ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY, July 29 — The Vincentians' New York university has broken ground on the $12 million DaSilva Hall, a technology lab, classroom and office building, according to a St. John's announcement. The building was named for John DaSilva, a St. John's alumnus who died in a car accident shortly after his graduation in 1980.
The building was dedicated on the Staten Island campus and received financial support from the DaSilva family and several local financial institutions.
No Church-State Conflict
LIPSCOMB UNIVERSITY, Aug. 15 — The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a district court decision and affirmed that Industrial Development Bonds awarded to Lipscomb in the early 1990s are constitutional, announced the Churches of Christ university.
In a 2–1 decision, the court held that the bonds were issued through a religiously neutral program of metro Nashville, Tenn., and provided only indirect aid to Lipscomb, according to the majority opinion written by U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus Jr.
John XXIII Medal
THE COLLEGE OF NEW ROCHELLE, July 29 — Capuchin Father Jack Rath-schmidt, the longtime campus chaplain, was awarded the college's Pope John XXIII Medal in recognition of his commitment to the school, which is administered by the Ursuline Sisters. In its announcement, the college said Father Rath-schmidt will become director of students in the Capuchin formation program.
Affiliation
CATHOLIC NEW YORK, August — Dominican College has entered into agreements that will enable students graduating with associate's degrees from Rockland Community College and the Helene Fuld College of Nursing to transfer credits to Dominican in order to pursue a bachelor's degree in certain fields. Dominican, located north of New York City in Orangeburg, N.Y., is administered by the Dominican Sisters of Blauvelt.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen -------- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Keeping the Faith One Century at a Time DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:FOUR WITNESSES: THE EARLY CHURCH IN HER OWN WORDS
by Rod Bennett Ignatius Press, 2002 343 pages, $16.95 To order: (800) 651-1531 or www.ignatius.com
While in Europe for the first time as an exchange student, I regularly attended a little parish church in Heidelberg that is older than the United States. The experience broadened my horizons and strengthened my sense of being a Catholic.
I can imagine, then, the effect that reading Christian writings from the first two centuries A.D. would have on a sola Scriptura evangelical Protestant who was brought up thinking that Church history starts with Martin Luther. In the introduction to Four Witnesses, Rod Bennett tells how he discovered the “Old World.”
“We have (contrary to popular belief) a very vivid picture of primitive Christianity,” he writes. “Poking around in a local Christian bookshop one rainy afternoon, I stumbled upon a set of books enTITLEd The Ante-Nicene Fathers [i.e. pre-Council of Nicea, A.D. 325]. … Within five minutes I knew that I had just dropped down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. … Right off the bat I encountered four eloquent witnesses squarely straddling this alleged gap between apostolic [33–68 A.D.] and post-apostolic Christianity.”
By immersing himself for a year in the works of Clement of Rome (pope at the turn of the second century), Ignatius of Antioch (bishop and martyr), Justin Martyr (the first Christian philosopher) and Irenaeus of Lyons (a French bishop from the Middle East), Bennett learned the full implications of his baptism. “And I suddenly realized, with a little trepidation, that I was actually going to have to start dealing with the early Church from now on … rather than just identifying myself with her.”
Bennett's intensive study of Scripture and patristics led him into the Catholic Church in 1996. He is convinced that more Protestants would jump at the chance, if only the post-New Testament Church were better-known. So he has made the works of four early Fathers of the Church accessible to the average American reader.
He is a terrific tour guide. He brings the writings of the four witnesses to life by presenting them together with detailed biographical and historical information. He gives the reader a ringside seat at the Coliseum on the day when Ignatius was thrown to the lions. We root for Justin when he writes to the “philosopher king,” the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, to explain the tenets of Christianity, even though we know that his Apology failed to end the fierce persecutions.
Against this background, Bennett sympathetically portrays the plight of the “first crop of cradle Christians” toward the end of the first century A.D.: “Their parents had accepted the Christian life for themselves, with eyes wide open. They, on the other hand, had been carried off into this wilderness without their consent. … They just wanted to belong a bit better.”
How on earth did the true faith survive such pressures? Clement's Epistle to the Corinthians demonstrates the authority of the pope of Rome to settle disputes, even in other churches. The letters that Ignatius wrote while traveling from his diocese to his execution testify clearly to a hierarchy composed of bishops, priests and deacons. Justin describes a liturgy that any Catholic today would recognize as the Mass.
By asking the essential questions and allowing the early Church to answer “in her own words,” Rod Bennett has compiled a tremendous work of Catholic apologetics. The book also happens to be as gripping and enjoyable as a good historical novel. I highly recommend this inexpensive, one-volume introduction to the Church's wealth of post-Scriptural Tradition.
Michael J. Miller writes from Glenside, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Books Pick ------- EXTENDED BODY: Michael J. Miller -------- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Marriage: Call to Holiness? DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:Q.
When we were first married, I hoped that we'd spur each other on to holiness — to help each other become better people. But my husband views my attempts as mere nagging, and I'm disappointed that we're not progressing.
A.
Caroline: Never give up on anything having to do with your marriage, but perhaps you do need to redirect your focus. It's true that marriage is a path to sanctification and salvation, but we're called to lead — not drag — each other to heaven.
Think of some of our greatest saints, like Thérèse of Lisieux or Francis of Assisi, who may not have been eloquent preachers or writers. They inspired holiness in those around them simply through their examples of prayer, service, joy and self-sacrifice. That's the method we need to adopt in our marriages: to inspire holiness in our spouses by becoming holier ourselves. Goodness is contagious. When I try to be more patient, generous or loving toward my husband and children, it unfailingly encourages the same in them. And of course the opposite is true: When I am self-centered, grouchy or nagging — even if, like you, I think I'm pointing out legitimate faults — I bring the entire family down.
Another truth that has taken me years of marriage to learn is that my efforts in noting Tom's flaws are much better spent praying for and affirming him. Let's face it: We all know our own failings and weaknesses. I know that I need to shed excess baby weight and be more faithful to a daily prayer time.
I've confessed these shortcomings — more than once. If Tom continually pointed them out, even in a loving way, it would serve only to make me resentful (and depressed about the weight!). What helps is when Tom affirms the feeble attempts I do make to improve. A few simple words of praise about my good weigh-in at a prenatal checkup, for example, can keep me smiling and motivated to stay disciplined. And I have definitely seen the results when I devote myself to praying for Tom's needs and struggles.
Tom:
Another pitfall to avoid in dealing with each other's failings is what a favorite Catholic author of ours, Gregory Popcak, terms “marital chicken.” (For a great book on marriage, see his For Better … Forever! A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage.)
It's easy to be trapped in a marital pity party, where we whine about our spouse's flaws and make excuses for our own: “Why should I bother to keep my clothes off the floor when everything else is on the floor when I come home from work?” or “If only he weren't so grouchy, then maybe I could be more affectionate.” And on and on. Don't fall into this rut! Remember that on our wedding day we promised to be true to each other in good times and bad, for better or worse, whether thin or fat, cheerful or cranky … until death. I persist in doing good for Caroline because I'm called to love her as Christ loves, unconditionally, without reserve, holding nothing back. What she is doing or not doing isn't the issue. Let's love each other into heaven.
The McDonalds are the Family Life directors for the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ------- EXTENDED BODY: Tom and Caroline Mcdonald -------- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: MOM AT HOME, HIGHER SCORES DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:The largest government child-care study has found that maternal employment was associated with lower scores on school readiness tests at age 3.
Braken School Readiness Test Scores
Children whose mothers return to work by the time they are 9 months
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Forgive Us Our (College) Debts DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:She is 24 years old, a college graduate, youthful yet mature, strong-minded, emotionally healthy and in love with Christ and his Church. She could be the ideal candidate for religious life, except for one thing: several thousand dollars in school loans, a debt that by canon law must be resolved before entrance into a community.
It turns out that helping more men and women to hear and heed God's call is not the only challenge in increasing vocations. College debt has become a stubborn problem for many potential candidates for religious life, according to several vocations directors.
“We do run into it I guess more frequently now than before,” says Sister Megan Marie Thibodeau, vocations director for the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity. “We're getting more women who have graduate degree, or even debt from undergraduate programs.”
Educational debts can range from a couple thousand dollars to tens of thousands, for those with advanced degrees or from private universities. While some kinds of debt can carry a stigma of irresponsibility, school debt — unlike consumer debt — is difficult to avoid.
“It's really hard today for people to graduate from college without some kind of debt,” says Sister Catherine Marie, vocations director of the Nashville Dominicans. “It used to be the case, but not any more.”
Candidates are generally quite willing to work to pay their debts, which they took on in good faith, vocations directors agree. But others have pointed out that a number of things can happen before a woman has paid her own debt that might prevent her from being able to enter at all.
She may meet a wonderful man and decide on marriage. She may become too acclimated to the go-go pace and aggressive leadership required in her workplace to adapt easily to a community or to find the time to develop her interior life.
Or, during the years — maybe eight to 10 years — it takes to pay off her debt, she may simply get too old to be accepted. While a man can become a priest at even a late age, most religious communities of men and women have an age cap of 30 to 35, after which it can be difficult for a person to be formed into a community member, docile under the authority of a superior.
What's a would-be sister saddled with debt to do?
An informal survey done for Horizon, the quarterly journal for the National Religious Vocations Conference, found a variety of policies by religious communities. Some are able to help pay educational debts with the understanding that the candidate would repay the congregation if she leaves. Some can offer a postulant an interest-free loan to take care of her school debts, also repayable if she leaves.
Other communities lack the means to assist the candidate in any way and instead encourage her to make personal requests of friends and family. Individuals are often happy to help a candidate enter, seeing in their contribution a direct support of religious vocations, like the old saying about the missions: They give who go, they go who give.
Sister Megan Marie says her community, the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, encourages candidates to let friends and family members know there is a risk that the candidate may not stay.
“Our Lord is not outdone in generosity, and he's provided for the women,” she says. “People have been very generous in their response. The women's desire and motivation is pure; they're not trying to get their loans paid off.”
She herself had $5,000 in college loans when she first inquired with her community. “My college loan was kind of my trump card with the Lord,” she explains. “After sending a letter of inquiry, she spoke with the sisters and was told she would have to pay the debt before entering. The next day the phone rang, and a good friend of mine offered to pay my loan without my even asking.”
Some help is available through the two largest lay organizations that support vocations, the Knights of Columbus and Serra International. Through its program of giving funds back to local councils that sponsor a seminarian or postulant, the Knights have given “more than $22.9 million to thousands of seminarians and postulants,” according to the national organization's Web site. Another fund provides scholarships specifically for seminarians, some 60% of whom are said to receive some funding from the Knights. Serra does not have a national fund that could be used for student loans, but individual clubs may sponsor candidates.
While the Iron Is Hot
Other avenues for support are emerging as well. Cy Laurent, a Minnesota businessman, has established the Laboure Foundation, an organization which aims to lift the impediment of debt from those called to the priest-hood or religious life. And Alfred Leopold, a business executive and a former administrator with Franciscan University of Steubenville, has established Veritas Foundation, an umbrella foundation to support giving to multiple causes that support Gospel values. Its first project, funded by one major donor and several smaller contributors, helped a young Franciscan University graduate enter the Carmelite order two years ago by taking over her payments on her student loans.
“I talked to the mother superior of the order and assured her we would stand in the place of this lady and make her loan payments, and when she makes final vows we would take it over,” Leopold says. “If she were to decide after two to three years of postulancy to come out of the Carmelites, she would be responsible for resuming the payments on her loans.”
The pay-down strategy appeals to benefactors, who would not want to plunk down a large sum — say, $20,000 — only to see the candidate leave right after entering, Leopold says. But even if the candidate does end up leaving after a period, the money contributed is still a good investment, he adds.
“Typically they're going to come out well-formed, able to serve the Church,” Leopold says. He tells of a friend who spent some time in a religious community then, after leaving, headed up a chastity program and eventually became director of youth ministry for a diocese.
At least a dozen candidates for priesthood and religious life have come to Veritas with a need for student loans to be resolved, Leopold says, and he is planning a fund-raising campaign to help them.
During his eight and a half years with the university's Austrian program, Leopold says, he saw many students develop their interest in religious life. At the same time, they were accumulating up to $40,000 in student loans.
“So many of them came to their decision to enter religious life at graduation. They have no choice but to go out into the secular world and to spend four, five, six years paying off their student loans just for the chance to enter religious life and seminary,” he says. “They have a very good chance of losing their vocation.
“Whereas right now if thousands of Catholic families would rise up and contribute $10, $20 or $50 a month to help support these men and women, we could have hundreds of candidates to enter religious life today, and we'd have five, six, seven years of service in the Church rather than working in the world,” he says. “If they have already fostered the vocation and are ready to go, why not strike when the iron is hot and immerse themselves in the priesthood and religious life?”
Running for Nuns
Catholics can also support vocations by giving to the orders themselves, rather than to individual aspirants. One such fund-raising project is the “Nun Run,” a five-kilometer race for all ages — including a cheering squad of sisters from the local orders — going on its second year in the Diocese of Dallas. The event was inspired by the concern of a local laywoman who learned that 20 women could not get into the communities they wanted because of college debt.
“The intent of the Nun Run is to raise awareness of vocations and to help aspirants,” says race organizer Mark Vahala, a financial planner and member of a local Serra chapter. “If we could get some money to the orders, that would help them recruit the women and pay for such things as travel expenses.”
He says the preference of the organizers is to support orders that are active and innovative in recruiting. “It seemed to me that some of them are pretty strict and others are a little bit more willing to work with [candidates] even if they are 38 and not 22,” he explains.
Vahala said he hopes this year to raise $25,000 and to bring out 1,000 participants, including Catholic school students — the religious of the future. He also plans to develop a “cookbook” for the Nun Run this year so the event could be imitated in dioceses all over the country.
Ellen Rossini writes from Richardson, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini -------- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 09/01/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 1-7, 2002 ----- BODY:New Seat Belt for Moms
SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE UNBORN, Aug. 13 — Researchers at Loughborough University in England have been awarded £145,000 by the U.K.'s Engineering and Physical Science Research Council to design a car seat belt which is both comfortable and safe for use by pregnant women.
Many unborn children have died in car crashes, either because their mother was not wearing a seat belt or because pressure exerted by the seat belt itself caused internal injuries.
Warning: Pill Danger
MANCHESTER NEWS, Aug. 16 — Mary Stanley and her husband, Nigel, have decided to tell their story so other parents are aware of the potentially fatal effects of the birth-control pill.
Their 15-year-old daughter, Claire Stanley, fell ill and died seven days after she was prescribed the pill for painful periods. She suffered a fatal blood clot after three doctors failed to diagnose her symptoms.
Claire was taking Cilest, a second-generation, “safer” pill. Every day, up to 450,000 women take Cilest. Of those, some 120 will develop deep-vein thrombosis, which proves fatal in around one case per year.
Chinese Girl Seeks Asylum
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 14 — A 12-year-old Chinese girl who disappeared after arriving in San Francisco with a tour group and reappeared with relatives in Amherst, Calif., will seek asylum in the United States, her lawyer says.
Yukun Jia joined her father, who has been in this country since 2000.
Yukun's mother was unable to leave China as planned and is in hiding, lawyer Shen-Shin Lu said.
Yukun's mother, Hong Jia, and her husband hoped to seek asylum together on the grounds that Hong was forced to have two abortions under China's “one-child” population control policy, Lu said.
Zimbabwe Abortion Warning
THE DAILY NEWS, Aug. 9 — Gualupe Association of Zimbabwe, a nongovernmental organization involved in human rights awareness, has started a countrywide tour to educate people on the dangers of abortion.
The director of the association, Ela Chihambakwe, said abortion was harmful to women both mentally and physically.
The association offers post-abortion counseling. Chihambakwe said her organization was visiting women's centers and schools encouraging women to resist the temptation to abort.
The organization has started community projects such as knitting, sewing and training on housekeeping. The projects are aimed at alleviating depression and a sense of helplessness on the part of women who have undergone abortions.
Endorsing Candidates
AMERICAN LIFE LEAGUE, Aug. 14 — Georgia Right to Life is refusing to endorse political candidates who insist that abortion be allowed in cases of rape and incest.
According to news accounts, a number of candidates have embraced Georgia Right to Life's position, but others are accusing the state organization of making a “strategic mistake.”
“Taking a tough stand on behalf of the pre-born is never a mistake,” said Judie Brown, president of the American Life League.
Disciplined for Abortion Advice
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Aug.13 — The D.C. inspector general is recommending “appropriate disciplinary action” against an emergency medical services supervisor whose advice prompted three rookies to get abortions last year.
The incident occurred during a two-week orientation class in March 2001 for emergency-medical techni.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: It's Been a Tough Year for Some of 9/11's Heroes DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — The firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers of Sept. 11 weren't the day's only heroes.
Priests were, too.
World Trade Center command centers put out an urgent call for priests that day. Priests gave general absolution to rescue workers rushing into the buildings. Priests gave the last rites to people falling out of the buildings. Priests were listening to confessions in the streets before the ash blacked everything out. And then, for months afterward, they buried the dead, comforted the troubled and ministered to a profoundly shaken flock.
Then, after the World Trade Center towers fell, the tower of the priesthood came under attack as a result of the sexual-abuse scandals. But if the sins of a tiny percentage of priests have made headlines this year, Sept. 11 tells a different story, a story of how we count on priests in times of trouble and how they don't let us down.
Each Sept. 11 priest the Register spoke with has particular images seared into his memory.
For Father George Baker, it was seeing the second plane hit the World Trade Center and later helping those that had taken refuge in his Manhattan church.
For Father John Delendick, at the site just minutes after the second plane hit, it was seeing people jump from the towers.
And for Father Geno Sylva, it was blessing recovered body parts at the site later that day.
Each will be commemorating the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks in a far different way.
At Ground Zero
The images are as clear today for Father George Baker as they were on Sept. 11.
His parish, Our Lady of Victory, sits just three blocks southeast of the World Trade Center complex. Following the 8:20 a.m. Mass that day, Father Baker stepped outside to greet parishioners. That's when he noticed everyone staring toward the World Trade Center. In walking over to get a better look, he saw a gaping hole in the tower with dark smoke pouring out. He returned to the church, removed his vestments, put on his suit jacket and made his way to the Millennium Hilton across from the World Trade Center complex, where a triage center had been set up.
“It was while I was there comforting people that I witnessed the second plane go into the second tower,” Father Baker recalled. “Shock waves went through my body and time seemed to go blank. Suddenly, all of the police and fire personnel started screaming, telling everyone to run in an eastward direction.”
Father Baker ran back to his parish.
There he found approximately 100 people gathered in the church basement — coughing, wheezing, praying and crying. They would remain until they were given clearance to leave by the National Guard later that day.
In the days following Sept. 11, the most difficult thing for Father Baker was observing among parishioners “a belief that God, for a moment in time, had turned his back or stepped away from us. When I began to celebrate public Mass with the congregation again, I looked out on all these people that used to be so attentive and they suddenly looked blank, as if they had been drained of every possible emotion and feeling, as if there was nothing left in them. They were performing the ritual of their faith, but not feeling their belief. They were like sheep without a shepherd.”
It was then that Father Baker realized his parishioners needed something more.
As a result, his parish set up post-traumatic stress disorder discussion groups over the lunch hour.
“Friends or family that lived even 20 blocks away would tell them, ‘It's over. You made it through. You need to move forward,’” he said. “These people needed a way to articulate their pain and hurt. They needed to shout and stomp and cry to express their emotions.”
Since then Father Baker has noticed a more significant increase in the depth of soul-searching with which people come to the sacrament of reconciliation.
“It's an increase in quality, not quantity,” he said. “We've always been blessed with vast numbers of people coming to the sacrament, but now they are coming with very deep reflection on their lives and examining areas where they have strayed and where they can improve their relationship with God or with others.”
Father Baker plans to celebrate a 12:15 Mass on Sept. 11 to commemorate the victims of last year's attacks. He invited Cardinal Edward Egan to be the celebrant and homilist.
“After our Church reopened, we placed a Book of Remembrance in the sanctuary where parishioners could enroll names of those that had perished,” he explained.
“The book has maintained a place of deep respect in our church. During the liturgy, we will place that book and a wreath in front of the altar.”
Working With Youth
Ever since he responded to an emergency call on Sept. 11 to leave his chaplaincy post at a nearby high school to minister at Ground Zero, Father Geno Sylva has been trying to comfort youth, especially those who lost family members.
“Many teens’ presuppositions that life is fair or that everything happens for a reason came tumbling down on Sept. 11,” said Father Sylva, director of DePaul High Catholic High School in Paterson, N.J. “We're trying to try to rebuild teen-agers’ faith in the goodness of people.”
Father Sylva plans to start the new school year with a theme based on Isaiah 43, “I have called you by name.”
This Sept. 11 he plans to gather students and faculty at 8:30 a.m. to remember what they saw a year ago. He wants teachers to discuss with students what is different about what they pictured a year ago to what they remember now.
Then he will play a video in all of the classrooms of children suffering from cystic fibrosis. He hopes to encourage students to rebuild the world and make it a better place.
As part of the school's effort, DePaul High School is partnering with the Passaic County Elks Cerebral Palsy Treatment Center to allow students to minister to children there.
“My hope is that we can change the presuppositions that were lost last September — the things that evil tried to destroy in us last year — and reverse the idea that the world is no good,” Father Sylva said.
He also plans to give each student a medal bearing both the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Blessed Mother — medals he received while in Turin, Italy, this summer.
“I want to let our students know that these children need to be treated the way that Mary treated Jesus,” he said.
Serving Families
Father John Delendick estimated he has served at hundreds of funeral Masses and memorial services for fallen firefighters during the past year, and the memorials still aren't finished.
“I have three more scheduled in September. Another family is waiting until they get something back,” said Father Delendick, pastor of St. Michael's Catholic Church in Brooklyn and currently one of six chaplains serving the New York City Fire Department.
“We're busy, but it's a different kind of busy,” Father Delendick said. “A year ago, most of our time was spent with families and family-support groups. Now, the time is spent planning for things like memorials and handling problems in the firehouses themselves. What has us worried is that other still-unforeseen problems may crop up.”
While the disaster has drawn some firehouses closer together, Father Delendick said, in others the large number of deaths has contributed to mental-health issues, disagreements and hostilities.
As a result, Father Delendick helped set up counseling units to sponsor weekend getaways for firefighters and their wives. The weekends involve spending a morning and afternoon with a counselor, followed by a date consisting of dinner, a Broadway show and an evening at a New York City hotel.
“Many firefighters spent a lot of time away from home, taking care of other families while they ignored their own,” Father Delendick explained.
He said he will take part in an ecumenical prayer service at fire department headquarters on Sept. 11.
The department will unveil a bronze plaque bearing the names, company and date of death of all 343 men that were lost in the attacks. Families have been invited to attend.
“I'll spend a good part of my day there,” Father Delendick said. In the evening, his parish will host a Mass followed by a candlelight procession to Engine Company 201, a company that lost four men.
Still, the ceremonies are bittersweet.
“Most families are tired and want to get on with their lives,” Father Delendick said. “They're sick of ceremonies. They need time for themselves. During September there will be a lot of different things happening. A lot of fresh wounds will be opened up again.”
Tim Drake is the Culture of Life editor.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Plans Threaten Right to Choose What's Right DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:OLYMPIA, Wash. — Washington state's attorney general has stated that prescription contraceptives cannot be withheld from health-insurance plans because of an employer's religious or moral objections.
Christine Gregoire announced the ruling Aug. 12 after an inquiry from the insurer of Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, a Catholic hospital.
The Washington Catholic Conference is “working with” the state's insurance commissioner to make sure Catholic institutions will be able to exercise their right to opt out of mandates that violate Catholic teaching, said Kevin Glackin-Coley, the conference's associate director. “It's unclear when a final determination will be made,” he said.
The impending dispute highlights an upward trend in coverage of birth-control drugs and devices (and an erosion of the ability to opt out on moral and religious grounds) and the inevitable clash with those who follow Catholic teaching. Because of new laws, rulings and employee lobbying, more and more employers are paying for the coverage.
The Wall Street Journal reported that 78% of insured workers nationwide are now covered for oral contraceptives, up from 64% the year before. Over the last few years, some 20 states have passed laws requiring insurance policies with prescription drug plans to cover contraceptives.
Washington estimates its new mandate, which was not enacted by legislature but by an administrative rule issued by the state's insurance commissioner, extends birth-control coverage to at least 200,000 more women.
Most of the 20 states allow exemptions based on religious or moral objections, but some are so narrow that Catholic hospitals and universities would have to pay for contraceptive coverage.
Both California's law and New York's “pill bill,” which Gov. George Pataki is poised to sign, permit an optout only to institutions whose mission is primarily one of spreading the faith and where a majority of employees and people it serves share that religion. Catholic Charities of Sacramento, Calif., is challenging the mandate in court. And in New York, where the original Assembly version of the bill permitted no conscientious exemption, the Catholic Conference is keeping an eye on the California case and is considering a similar suit.
Most conscience clauses in contraceptive mandates do not protect individual employees working for a secular employer, said Ed Szymkowiak, executive director of Stop Planned Parenthood International (STOPP), a division of American Life League. An employee would have to pay “into a plan that provides contraceptive coverage for his fellow workers.”
But Catholics should not shrug their shoulders and allow pill bills, court decisions and pro-contraception business decisions to go unchallenged, Szymkowiak said. The state laws and a possible federal law will “solidify contraception as a norm,” and the changes now taking place will add up to make society more supportive of the culture of death, he said.
The Church is being “forced into a corner,” having to provide the coverage for its employees in a Catholic hospital or university or eliminate prescription coverage altogether, Szymkowiak said. In time, he speculates, those same institutions could be forced to pay for — or even provide, in the case of hospitals — abortions.
A bill is pending in Congress to require prescription drug benefits in all health plans to cover the pill, IUD, diaphragm, Norplant, Depo-Provera and so-called emergency contraception. The Equity in Prescription Insurance and Contraceptive Coverage Act (EPICC) is sponsored by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, (S. 104), and Rep. James Greenwood, R-Pa. (H.R. 1111).
In a letter to Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee members, Gail Quinn, executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, said EPICC would “force Church entities to end all prescription drug benefits if they are to avoid violating their fundamental moral and religious teaching on the dignity of human procreation.”
“Moreover, Catholics who serve as employers and employees outside of Church institutions will be similarly affected,” Quinn wrote in June.
She worried that the bill would override any state conscience provisions.
In addition to legislation, companies are agreeing to include contraceptives in their plans as a result of employee lobbying, lawsuits or complaints to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Pro-contraceptive organizations are encouraging workers to pressure their bosses to add coverage. On a special Web site, Planned Parenthood outlines steps female employees can take, while the National Women's Law Center's site opens with a banner reading, “Does your health plan cover prescription contraceptives? If not, your employer may be breaking the law.”
The center advises women to go to their employer claiming that the company is “discriminating against women … when its insurance policy covers preventive drugs, devices and services but excludes prescription contraceptives.” It has threatened legal action against employers who refuse to add coverage.
One of the center's founders and co-presidents, Marcia Greenberger, sits on the board of the Georgetown University Law Center Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program in Washington, D.C., according to the Web site.
A Necessity for Health?
While many health-insurance plans have covered abortion for years, especially in HMOs, contraceptive coverage has been largely limited to medical procedures such as tubal ligations.
“It's been a discretionary item, not considered a medical need,” said Richard Meyers, a professor at Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Procreation “is a perfectly healthy and natural process,” Szymkowiak said. “It boggles the mind to hear people say [contraception] is basic health care.”
But the National Women's Legal Center trumpets on its Web site that “enabling women to time and space their pregnancies and reduce unintended pregnancies … lead(s) to healthier mothers and children, and fewer abortions.”
“Preventing unintended pregnancy through the use of safe and effective contraception is essential to women's health and well-being,” the center said.
The Pro-Life Activities Secretariat countered that many pills and contraceptive devices are abortificient — and abortion rates rise when they are in wide use. Also, contraceptives have numerous side effects and risks of serious complications.
“The side effects of the pill include headaches, depression, decreased libido and weight gain,” the pro-life office wrote on its Web site. “Documented serious complications include heart attacks, cervical cancer and blood clots.”
The office mentioned a recent class-action lawsuit, brought by 123 English women against three pharmaceutical companies, alleging that a form of the pill — the “third generation pill” — has caused death, strokes and life-threatening blood clots.
Who's ‘Discriminating’
But is it discriminatory for a business that provides other prescription drugs not to cover contraceptives?
The EEOC in 2000 agreed with two female employees that companies’ failure to pay for coverage violated the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which requires equal treatment of women “affected by pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions” in all aspects of employment, including the reception of benefits.
Although spokeswoman Jennifer Kaplan said each decision rendered by the commission applies only to the charges at hand, the EEOC's decision has been cited as proof that employers must provide the coverage.
Pro-contraception forces have an even stronger backing in the June 2001 decision of a federal district court that Bartell Drug Co. acted discriminatorily when it failed to pay for the birth-control pills of a female employee. Bartell is appealing the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
But health plans don't cover everything, said Francis Manion, senior regional counsel with the American Center for Law and Justice. “Many plans don't cover plastic surgery. They don't all cover alcohol rehabilitation treatment and some forms of psychological treatment. … My plan doesn't cover everything, but it never occurs to me that it's discriminatory.”
Manion believes pro-life forces can fight the mandates on several grounds. For one, there have been several court rulings upholding union members’ right to withhold part of their dues because they disagree with some of the causes to which their union contributes. And the principle behind the Hyde Amendment might apply: “We might not be able to outlaw abortion right now, but don't make me pay for it.”
Nevertheless, contraception is making strides. Although some firms such as Wal-Mart continue to fight lawsuits seeking to force contraceptive coverage, automaker DaimlerChrysler began offering coverage for all forms of prescription contraceptives a month after a lawsuit was filed in May.
Also in June, drug store chain CVS began offering coverage for oral contraceptives. An employee, Amanda Mewborn, brought a suit against the company in January. Mewborn, a 23-year-old single mother, was earning $8 an hour as a cashier and said she struggled to pay the $32.59 a month for her birth-control pills.
Both lawsuits claimed sex discrimination.
“It's easier [for companies] to take the path of least resistance,” said Michael O'Dea, executive director of the Christus Medicus Foundation, citing the fear and intimidation created by advocates as well as attorneys referring to the EEOC ruling.
Passage of a federal mandate, he said, would end freedom of choice in health plans for those who do not want to subsidize contraception, he warned.
“Catholic executives have to start standing up and saying, ‘We're going to lose our freedom if we let them tell us what to do,’” he said.
The Diocese of Baker, Ore., did take a stand, switching from a major health insurance company to a self-insurance plan for the diocese's employees.
Bishop Robert Vasa “felt strongly about it,” said Father James Logan, diocesan chancellor, and decided that even if the diocese opted for a plan that excluded abortion and contraception coverage, the premiums paid to Blue Cross would help pay for immoral practices through contracts the insurer has with other businesses and individuals.
But the federal bill, EPICC, would require even self-insured plans, such as the Diocese of Baker's, to cover contraceptives.
Manion of American Center for Law and Justice is ready to go to court on the matter. TITLE VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the basis for the sex-discrimination argument, also provides for religious accommodations grounds on which pro-life advocates can say they don't want to be forced to pay, he pointed out.
Organizations such as Planned Parenthood “claim to be for choice,” Manion stated. “But it turns out they're for their choice. If they truly are for choice, they shouldn't compel people to pay for something that goes against their beliefs.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Rejecting Apology, Boston Pubs Boycott Sam DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:BOSTON — After the British responded to the Boston Tea Party by closing the harbor, Samuel Adams the patriot urged a general boycott of British trade by the American colonies.
Now, led by an angry Catholic father, 50 Boston pubs are boycotting the beer that bears Adams’ name. They say they're hoping to help “turn around” major media's slide into filth.
Boston Beer Co., maker of Sam Adams, was a sponsor of the syndicated Opie & Anthony Show until Gregg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony Cumia got kicked off New York's WNEWFM. The shock jocks broadcast a sex stunt inside St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan on the feast of the Assumption, part of the third annual Sex for Sam contest in which players competed for points for having sex in the riskiest public places. The winner was given a free trip to Boston for a Sam Adams-sponsored concert.
Boston Beer chairman Jim Koch, who was in the studio during the live broadcast on Aug. 26, called his presence on the show a “lapse in judgment, a serious mistake.”
“We are re-evaluating our policy on radio station appearances,” Koch wrote.
The Catholic League in New York said it was satisfied with the apology, which Koch also expressed in a phone call to the group Aug. 26.
But Boston pub owner Jerry Foley found the apology “mealy-mouthed.”
“It didn't do the trick,” the Catholic father said.
He and restaurateur Michael Sheehan still wanted to express their outrage at what Foley, owner of J.J. Foley's in downtown Boston, called a “very disgraceful display” and a “very anti-Catholic stunt.” So the two organized a boycott of the brew. Foley said Aug. 29 that 30 to 50 city establishments have since signed on and are refusing to serve up any more Sams.
In addition, he said, “a lot of people are quietly boycotting” the product and he expected the action to spread to places like New York and Chicago.
Foley's patrons are “very happy” that he's refusing to stock Sam Adams and are switching to Guinness Stout and Bass Ale, he reported. Sam Adams is “a good local brew, and everyone was happy with it, but there are other local brews.”
The Apology
Koch said in the formal apology that the company was “not in control of the program, and it was never our intention to be part of a radio station promotion that crossed the line.” He also responded to an e-mailed protest, “I had no warning that a place of worship would be part of the show. I should have walked off the show and I didn't.”
But C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, responded: “It was a contest encouraging people to engage in sex in public places, and his company supplied the prize. And he was in the studio as it was being reported over a cell phone. What happened in St. Patrick's Cathedral was an outrage, a sacrilege and a crime.”
Opie and Anthony have crossed the line in the past. They were fired from a Boston radio station after an April Fool's broadcast stating that that city's mayor had been killed in a car crash.
Just a couple of months before this incident, the Federal Communications Commission fined Infinity Broadcasting, which owns New York's WNEW-FM, $21,000 for airing three indecent Opie & Anthony shows.
Lewd and crude, with plenty of talk about sex, the show encouraged women to bare their breasts to anyone displaying a WOW bumper sticker on a car. Opie and Anthony also offered $1,000 to the first woman who exposed her chest on a live airing of NBC's “Today Show.” Someone took them up on the offer.
They boasted in a Penthouse interview about the sex on their show getting around FCC rules, and how many listeners viewed it on a Web cam accessible through the WNEW Web site. “You have to be smart about how you word things and present situations to the listener,” Cumia said. “You want to give them every detail of what is going on, but still adhere to the FCC rules. And I think we do a good job of that.”
Third Contest
The cathedral incident took place during the third annual Sex for Sam contest, and this year, “a church” was added to the list of risky places where contestants could win points for engaging in public fornication.
As Brian Florence and Loretta Lynn Harper, both of Virginia, did so in a cathedral vestibule, comedian Paul Mercurio reported on it over his cell phone.
He and the show's hosts also managed to get in a few digs at the priest-hood in light of the recent sex scandals with references to pedophilia, according to a digital recording of the segment.
As he was being confronted by a St. Patrick's security guard, Mercurio made another reference to pedophilia and added, “I guess when the doors are closed it happens on the altar, right?”
The trio also took up a significant portion of policemen's time in a city that is still on edge after last September's terrorist attacks. The three were arrested, but as they were being questioned, Mercurio and Florence told them that Florence went into the cathedral because he desperately needed to use a restroom. Mercurio told them the couple were his friends and he was showing them around the city.
The incident was an “out and out disregard for someone's worship,” pub owner Foley complained. But more important than an apology from Boston Beer is the need for the Federal Communications Commission, which is looking into penalties for the broadcast, to “turn this media around,” he said. “It's such garbage.”
A father of seven children and a grandfather, Foley said, “You can't listen to this with kids around.”
The Catholic Action League asked Koch to guarantee that he won't subsidize Catholic bashers in the future. “He said he had to think about it,” said Doyle, who also received a telephoned apology from the beer executive. “If it was racism or anti-Semitism, I don't think you would have to ‘think about it.’”
Koch could not be reached for comment, but Boston Beer spokesman Skip Perham said, “We're working to address [Doyle's] needs.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Why Church Construction Costs More For Catholics Than Protestants DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:VANCOUVER, Wash. — When the Assemblies of God's Glad Tidings Church completed its new 52,000-square-foot church here in 1998, the congregation paid slightly less than $5 million.
Less than a mile away, when it is finally completed, the parishioners of Holy Redeemer Parish in suburban Vancouver, Wash., will have spent more than $16 million for their 70,000-square-foot new church.
Across the river in suburban Portland, Ore., the 60,000-square-foot nondenominational Protestant Church of the Good Shepherd is priced at $8-10 million — under $170 per square foot. Across town, the 70,000-square-foot Sunset Presbyterian Church, with a rotating stage, padded pews and an elaborate audiovisual system, is budgeted at $11-12 million — $170 per square foot.
The numbers are starkly revealing.
But a few miles to the north, the Catholic Church of St. John the Evangelist is preparing to replace its aging and small church building with a larger one capable of seating the 1,200-family parish and expanding its parish hall. The cost for this project, encompassing less than 19,000 feet, is $4.3 million, or about $239 per square foot.
In practically every case, when church construction costs are examined, the Catholic church will cost more — usually 50% more per square foot — than the comparable Protestant church.
“It's very frustrating,” said Father Joseph Mitchell, pastor of Holy Redeemer Parish. “You want to build a nice church, something with character that will be an enduring symbol, but then you're talking more money. It's overwhelming.”
Why does it cost so much to build a Catholic church?
Conflicting responsibility, procedural errors, poor cost containment and more than a little monumentalism by parishioners, pastors and architects combine to escalate costs, often beyond the parish's ability to pay.
Meanwhile, the number of inadequately housed parishes continues to increase, as congregations celebrate Mass in school gymnasiums and auditoriums, parish halls, aged and overcrowded church buildings or, in a few cases, suburban strip malls. The Archdiocese of Portland in 1962 had a population of approximately 500,000, with 115 parishes. In 2002, those numbers jumped to 1.8 million Catholics with 125 parishes.
Overlapping responsibility for master plans, design, budgeting and fund-raising goals are where difficulties begin. Parish committees interact with archdiocese design and finance committees, who interact with architects and a variety of fund-raising, design and special-purpose consultants.
“Personally, I find that the levels, the layers [of project administration] make for a cumbersome process, and it indirectly affects costs,” said architect Kenneth Paulson. “Meeting codes, parish building committees and the committees at the archdiocese level can be more complex than can be anticipated.”
Paulson described ongoing negotiations with the Archdiocese of Seattle over the placement of the tabernacle at the new St. John the Evangelist Church.
“The parish has a desire that the tabernacle be placed in a prominent location, but the archdiocese doesn't want it in competition with the altar,” he said. “These are subjective elements, and a matter of a few feet can make a major difference, since if you change one thing, you need to change six other things.”
This complexity contributes to the procedural errors. These can make a major difference in the expense of the project, said Stephen Schommer, president of Schommer & Sons Construction, a major builder of churches in the Archdiocese of Portland.
“Rather than waiting until the end, the builder should be part of the design process from the beginning,” he said.
Builders traditionally perform ongoing cost estimates, Schommer said.
“Without these estimates, there is tendency for costs to creep,” he said. “By the time it gets to the construction phase, the design is done and you're over budget.”
Uncontained Costs
Cost containment also fails due to the sequence of events, from conception to completion. Financial analysis of the parish and its fund-raising capabilities follows, rather than precedes, design of the project master plan. This, Schommer noted, leads to overdesign, which leads to massive cost overruns and compromises that leave parishes celebrating Mass in halls and gymnasiums for decades.
“The real issue is not the structure but the furnishings and materials used,” said Joe Gehlen, president of Kramer, Gehlen & Associates, a structural engineering firm, which has handled several Protestant and Catholic church projects in the Pacific Northwest. Gehlen said commercial construction, whether it involves a church or an office building, is fairly standard at approximately $70 per square foot for wood frame and $110 per square foot for steel and concrete, including basic plumbing, wiring, fixtures and finishes.
Long spans, high and unsupported exterior walls, and extensive use of glass can inflate construction costs, as can exotic wood and stone work, elaborate audiovisual systems, and custom artwork and installations.
“In standard commercial construction, [architectural design features] account for 25% of the build-ing's cost,” Gehlen said. “In churches, it tends to be higher.”
Ed Foster, director of Property and Construction Services for the Archdiocese of Seattle, agreed, but he cautioned that direct cost-per-square-foot comparisons are risky.
“You have to compare site preparation, special circumstances and utility costs, too,” he said.
Foster also said comparing the cost of Catholic and Protestant church construction is meaningless. “We're not talking the same language,” he said.
Foster said he would expect the cost of a parish church to be higher since there is more concern about permanence.
This is where monumentalism enters the construction equation. The Catholic church, whether a cathedral or a parish church, is an icon.
“If you want to compare with our Protestant brethren, probably Catholic churches are, on average, more expensive,” said architect Duncan Stroik, a member of the faculty at University of Notre Dame and a leading expert on Catholic architecture. “They should be, since we believe they are sacramental architecture and houses of God. Buildings are catechism in bricks, mortar and glass.”
“If you want to make a contemporary comparison which is apt,” he said, “we could compare the cost of parish churches to other public buildings, such as museums, concert halls, stadiums, courthouses, some university buildings and public libraries in big cities.”
The recently completed $430 million Seahawks Stadium and the $517 million Safeco Field in Seattle cost between $6,000 and $10,000 per seat. By comparison, St. John the Evangelist comes in at $4,700 per seat, while Holy Redeemer Church will cost approximately $8,000 per seat, not including the parish hall or school building.
Meanwhile, the 250,000-square-foot Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, built in 1993 at a cost of $89 million, was $356 per square foot. American Institute of Architects gold medal-winning architect Frank Gehry's other recent project, the 145,000-square-foot Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, was completed this spring for $61.7 million, or $426 per square foot.
Both projects cost more per square foot than the $228-$239 per square foot price of Catholic churches planned for the Portland area.
Although this is not necessarily a practical comparison, since height and square footage inflate construction costs as structural burdens increase and stadiums and museum spread the cost over several hundred thousand — rather than several hundred — families, Stroik said the real problem is Catholic parishioners.
“We have to ask why it is that Catholics are the wealthiest they have ever been and yet tithing has gone down, as a percentage, which leads one to ask why we do not ask people to sacrifice. Whether it is the Widows’ Mite or the middle-class family's SUV, where your treasure is, so is your heart.”
Philip S. Moore writes from Portland, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Philip S. Moore ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Courage in the Scandal DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Author of the best-selling papal biography Witness to Hope, his most recent book is about hope in the face of scandal.
The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church is a new release from Basic Books. The 51-year-old theologian, a senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, spoke with Zenit news service at his home in North Bethesda, Md.
Does it take courage to be a Catholic today?
I chose the TITLE The Courage to Be Catholic because that's the way genuine reform always works in the Church — through men and women with the conviction and the courage to be countercultural, to be genuinely, fully, joyfully Catholic.
The Church has never been reformed by “Catholic lite.” Reform always means a deeper, more thorough appropriation of the truths that Christ bequeathed the Church — the truths that are its “constitution,” if you will.
And to do that requires courage?
Sure. But it's also exhilarating. One of the things Catholics need to recover is a sense of the great adventure of orthodoxy. Christian orthodoxy is the most exciting proposal on offer in the world today. It's far, far more exciting than “Catholic lite.”
“Catholic lite” is an image that recurs throughout
We can't understand the crisis of clergy sexual abuse and episcopal leadership failure outside the context of the past three and a half decades.
During that time, a culture of dissent took root in the Church in the United States. And by “culture of dissent,” I don't mean simply men and women who were confused or who thought the Church should express its teaching more clearly.
By “culture of dissent” I mean men and women — including priests, women religious, bishops, theologians, catechists, Church bureaucrats and activists — who believed that what the Church proposed as true was actually false. If you really think that — if you really believe that the highest teaching authority of the Church is teaching falsehoods and is leading the Church into error — you're not in full communion with the Church. And that has consequences, including behavioral consequences.
Are you suggesting that the “culture of dissent” is primarily responsible for the current crisis in the United States?
The “culture of dissent” doesn't explain everything about the Catholic crisis of 2002. It's a very important part of the puzzle, though, because what people think has a lot to do with how they behave.
Is it surprising that some men who learned to live lives of intellectual deception and deceit in the seminary — men who were told that they could take a pass on authoritative teaching — eventually led lives of behavioral deceit, becoming sexually abusive? It shouldn't have been surprising, given our sex-saturated culture.
Is it a surprise that bishops who were unwilling to fix what was manifestly broken in seminaries and Catholic universities in the 1970s and 1980s — in part, because they were unwilling to confront the culture of dissent, often for fear of fracturing the unity of a local Church — also failed to come to grips with the scandal of clergy sexual abuse? It shouldn't have been.
That's one thing I try to demonstrate in The Courage to Be Catholic: The Church in the United States has to learn to connect the dots, historically, if it's going to come to grips effectively with this crisis — and if the crisis is to become an opportunity for genuinely Catholic reform.
How would you describe the crisis itself?
There are three parts of the crisis. There is the crisis of clergy sexual abuse, of which the most prevalent form is the homosexual abuse of teen-age boys and young men. There is the crisis of failed episcopal leadership. And, at the bottom of the bottom line, there is the crisis of discipleship. Sexually abusive priests and timid or malfeasant bishops are, first and foremost, inadequately converted Christian disciples.
That's why the crisis is a call to everyone in the Church to live lives of more radical discipleship. As Father Richard Neuhaus and others have pointed out for months, the primary answer to a crisis of infidelity is fidelity. Period.
Because confusions about what the crisis is and isn't get in the way of genuinely Catholic reform. This is not a crisis of celibacy; it's a crisis of men failing to live the celibate vows they pledged to Christ and the Church.
It's not a crisis caused by the Church's sexual ethic, which flatly condemns all forms of sexual abuse. It's not a crisis caused by “authoritarianism,” because the Church isn't an authoritarian institution — it's a community formed by an authoritative tradition, which is something very different. And it's not a media-created crisis. Yes, the media have distorted things on occasion, and yes, there's been something of a feeding frenzy atmosphere; but a feeding frenzy needs something to feed on. It's a very serous mistake not to realize this is a crisis Catholics created and only Catholics can fix.
How?
The first step toward fixing what's broken is to recognize the spiritual roots of the crisis. Like every other crisis in 2,000 years of Catholic history, the current crisis is caused by an insufficiency of saints. That's a call to everyone to lead holier, more thoroughly Catholic lives. Whenever the Church is bottoming out, the response adequate to the crisis of the moment is always the same — everyone in the Church has to live the call to holiness more radically. Everyone.
The Courage to be Catholic includes three chapters of recommendations on specific reforms: in vocation recruitment, in seminaries, in the priesthood, in the way bishops are chosen, in the exercise of the episcopal office and in the way the Vatican gathers its information and relates to local Churches in crisis. Those recommendations are based on my own experience, on extensive discussions with some of the most effective reformers in the Church today and on intense conversations I had in Rome last February and April.
The fact that so many people are asking that question itself testifies to the central place that bishops have in the life of the Church.
Contrary to the claims made by the advocates of “Catholic lite,” most Catholics aren't interested in bishops who mortgage even more of their authority to various committees and boards. Most Catholics want bishops who will effectively exercise the authority that is theirs, and do so in a way that challenges everyone in the Church to a holier way of life.
I think the episcopal failures of recent decades have been similar to the failures of priests: It's fundamentally a failure in self-understanding. If a priest thinks of himself as simply another “minister,” facilitating the “ministry” of others, he isn't going to think of himself as what the Church teaches he is — an icon, a living representation of the eternal priesthood of Jesus Christ. And if he doesn't think of himself as an icon of Christ, he's going to be tempted to act in ways that contradict the commitment he's made to Christ and the Church.
The same dynamic applies with bishops. Bishops who think of themselves primarily as managers — or worse, bishops who think of themselves as discussion-group moderators whose primary responsibility is to keep everyone “in play” — are going to be unlikely to act like apostles when the crunch comes.
That means part of genuinely Catholic reform today means asking a very tough question: Has the internal culture of the U.S. bishops’ conference made it more difficult for the bishops, as individuals, to be the apostles they've been ordained to be? And has the conference culture made it even more difficult for the bishops to think and act apostolically as a group?
Yours is, finally, a hopeful book. Why?
I can think of three reasons. First, because “crisis,” in the Bible, has two meanings: catastrophe and opportunity — and the opportunity the current catastrophe offers us is the opportunity to complete the reforms of Vatican II as they've been authentically interpreted by the pontificate of John Paul II.
The second reason I'm hopeful is because this crisis marks the last hurrah of the aging, intellectually sterile champions of “Catholic lite,” who can't even describe accurately the crisis they helped create.
And finally, I'm hopeful because that's what Christians are: men and women of hope, who know that God's purposes are being worked out in history, in what often strike us as strange ways. That's why I believe, with Dorothy Day, the truth of what Pope Pius XI meant when he said, “Let us thank God that he makes us live among the present problems; it is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: George Weigel ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: One Year After 9-11, Americans Hold Confused Feelings About Islam DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — Since terrorists attacked this country in the name of Islam nearly a year ago, America's association with the world's secondlargest religion has become a cauldron of seemingly contrary trends.
Consider:
E President Bush says “Islam is peace,” a great religion of more than a billion people worldwide, which al Qaeda tried to hijack on Sept. 11. Yet the Rev. Franklin Graham, who gave the invocation at Bush's inauguration, criticizes Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion.”
E The image of American Muslims is actually better than it was before Sept. 11, according to one survey. Yet many Muslim leaders say it feels as if Bush's war on terrorism targets their faith, making them suspects in non-Muslim eyes.
E Books on Islam are hot. But American Muslims complain they often sensationalize theological concepts such as “jihad,” which many popular authors define as “holy war” when it could also be used in reference to a Muslim's lifelong spiritual “struggle.”
E The U.S. State Department has launched a public diplomacy campaign to “win the hearts and minds” of the “Islamic world” through Web sites, videos and Arabic radio programs targeting Muslim twentysomethings scrutinized in focus groups. But the strategy hasn't overcome the anti-American resentment found on the “Arab street.”
In short, America's relationship with Islam, never easy, has become more jumbled since Sept. 11. And with a U.S. military attack on the Islamic country of Iraq under serious consideration, it might get even messier.
“What I'm seeing now is not so much a love-hate as hate-hate and that's what worries me the most,” said Akbar Ahmed, professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington and a columnist for Religion News Service. “By hate-hate I mean there are few people in the Muslim world who see anything good about America anymore.”
In February, the Gallup Organization released polls from nine Islamic countries. Respondents in all nine — including those considered American allies — viewed the United States more unfavorably than favorably. American soldiers freed Kuwait from Iraqi invaders in the 1991 Gulf War, yet only 28% of Kuwaitis polled held favorable views. In Saudi Arabia, a major trading partner, only 16% perceived the United States favorably.
Why Do They Hate Us?
This raises the often-asked post-Sept. 11 question: “Why do they hate us?” The answers are many and complex.
One, advanced by Princeton University's Bernard Lewis, argues that Islamic antagonism is rooted in centuries of history, hostility and feelings of inferiority toward the “infidels” of Western civilization, whom Muslims once ruled.
Lewis concludes in his new book, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, that if Muslims can abandon victimhood and join in a common creative endeavor, they can reclaim the stature that Islamic civilization enjoyed in the Middle Ages.
“The choice is their own,” he writes.
But Lewis’ critics, led by Columbia University's Edward Said, accuse the historian of relying on abstractions such as “the West” and “Islam” as if there were a cartoonlike battle between the virtuous and the villainous. A more helpful approach, Said writes, would think in terms of “powerful and powerless communities.”
Other Muslim scholars argue that a primary source of contemporary antipathy is an inconsistent and unjust U.S. foreign policy, punctuated by the superpower's support of Israel in the escalating Middle East conflict.
Reactions to Sept. 11 have been particularly challenging for American Muslims, whose estimated numbers range from a low of 3 million to a high of 7 million.
In the days following the attacks, some feared public opinion would scapegoat Muslims as it did Japanese-Americans after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.
There were early incidents of violence, and there have been ongoing reports of harassment. But the majority of Americans seem to have distinguished between the Islamic beliefs of fellow U.S. citizens and those of al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, who, speaking to Muslims worldwide by videotape, said, “God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America.”
A March survey found that Americans’ image of their Muslim countrymen had actually improved.
Conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the national poll showed that 54% viewed Muslim Americans favorably. In spring 2001, the favorability rating was 45%.
In the wake of Sept. 11, relations between the Catholic Church and Muslim leaders have solidified and grown, Catholic News Service reported Aug. 28. Catholics and Muslims for years have engaged in dialogue about issues of common concern, noted John Borelli, associate director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Center of Orange County, Calif., said “from the first day” the Catholic Church has been supportive of the mainstream majority of Muslims who do not interpret the Prophet Mohammed's teachings as encouraging terrorism. In fact, the course for interreligious relations followed by the Catholic-Muslim dialogue should be a model for other faiths, Siddiqi said.
The improvement in the public perception of Muslims heartens Saif Abdul-Rahman, a spokesman for Dar Al Hijrah mosque of Falls Church, Va. He also applauds the president's praise of Islam and his plea to separate bin Laden from the peaceful approach of most Muslim Americans.
But he decries Bush's signing of the U.S. Patriot Act last October, giving sweeping new powers to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. As Abdul-Rahman sees it, the government now has a dangerous license that it has already used to harass mosques and Islamic charities and deny Muslims their civil liberties.
“The American Muslim community is in a situation right now in which it feels like it has to prove its innocence because of the immediate presumption of guilt,” Abdul-Rahman said. “This is scary.”
Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Washingtonbased Islamic Supreme Council of America, expresses a different view.
“I have to say that Muslims in America, especially the immigrants, complain too much when back in many of their homelands they are not allowed to even open their mouths in criticism [of the government],” Kabbani said.
“We have been discriminated against, of course,” he said. “But that's to be expected after a situation like Sept. 11.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mark O'Keefe ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Priest Found Innocent and Forgives Accuser
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 23 — Father Miguel Flores, 34, of the California Diocese of Fresno, has been acquitted of all charges connected with a rape alleged by a 16-year-old girl who once worked at his church.
Had he been convicted, Flores could have faced 26 years in prison. Prosecutors said they were satisfied the facts in the case had been aired.
Associated Press reported that “after the jury left the courtroom, the priest said he thanked God and the jury. He said he planned to celebrate and pray,” and offered forgiveness to his accuser.
Church officials said that Flores “could return to active ministry next year.”
Hoover's FBI Sent Innocent Men to Face Death Penalty
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Aug. 24 — Media have made much of the abuses alleged against J. Edgar Hoover, and a new report in the Aug. 24 New York Times seems particularly damning — and offers fodder to opponents of the death penalty.
It seems the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation — stung by criticism that he fumbled the fight against organized crime — embarked during the 1960s on an elaborate scheme to attack northeastern crime “families” by bribing some of their members to become government informants.
So far, so good; police still use such tactics. But Hoover went much further, the report alleged, to the point where the FBI learned about and failed to prevent a mob-related murder in 1965, a crime for which Hoover allowed four innocent men to be framed.
“Four other men were tried, convicted and sentenced to death or life in prison for the murder, though they had had nothing to do with it,” the Times wrote. “One, Joseph Salvati, who spent 30 years in prison, filed notice with the Justice Department last week that he planned to sue the FBI for $300 million for false imprisonment. … Two of the other wrongly convicted men died in prison. Their survivors have joined the fourth man, Peter Limone, in a $375 million lawsuit against the Justice Department. Mr. Limone was sentenced to die in the electric chair. His life was spared only when Massachusetts outlawed the death penalty in 1974.”
Dannon Yogurt Says God Is a Woman
ONEMILLIONDADS.COM, Aug. 26 — Dannon Yogurt appears to be a little mixed up.
In a newly released print ad appearing in the Sept. 1 issue of Woman's Day magazine, Dannon offers this boast: “100 Calories. 0% fat. Proof that there is a God and she is a woman watching her figure.”
OneMillionDads.com, an activist group associated with the American Family Association, is protesting the ad and asking Dannon Yogurt to show more respect for biblical representations of God.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Home Educators Face Legal Challenges in State Legislatures DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:PURCELLVILLE, Va. — The growing U.S. home school movement involves an estimated 2 million students and growing. And it's parents concerned about public education who are driving the movement, much to the chagrin of the education establishment.
A trend around the country lately is to try to get home-schooled children back into public schools — a trend driven in part, many believe, by the fact federal funding is based on a school district's enrollment. As a result, home schoolers say, they have had to deal with intimidation tactics, misinterpretation of the laws, demands for private records and sometimes quirky requests from their districts.
Robert Ziegler, media director of the Home School Legal Defense Association, an advocacy group in Purcellville, Va., that monitors state laws and offers legal assistance to home-school families, said the group used to hear the argument that home schooling does not work. However, test scores and college entrance exams have repeatedly debunked that idea.
Ziegler said despite the documented successes of home schoolers, they still must battle for recognition in many jurisdictions. “There are some wins and losses, and the home-school community is realizing that they should not be complacent about their freedoms,” he said.
Problems in Pa.
A key legislative effort, House Bill 2560, is under way in Pennsylvania to revise a 14-year-old law to ease restrictions and requirements placed on home educators.
Most states have a minimum requirement that parents file an affidavit at the beginning of the school year stating their intent to home school. Some states require parents to follow the same statutes as private schools and keep records at home of immunizations, attendance and academic work.
But in Pennsylvania, home-school children are required to take standardized tests administered by the school district. Parents are accountable to a certified teacher at the end of the year, who must review the child's work and approve it. It is then reviewed by the school district.
The problem, said one home school activist, is parents have been subjected to increasing demands for documentation such as proof of a high school diploma, immunizations and other information that is already provided in their affidavits.
School districts are asking for academic records, attendance records, test scores, workbook pages and mounting paperwork that goes beyond what the law requires. Sometimes families are asked for medical records, income tax returns, social security cards, birth certificates and other records that affect their privacy. Each school district differs in its requests.
“We should be able to maintain that privately at home, even if it is required, just like a nonpublic school, Catholic school or any other school in the district,” said Ellen Kramer, who, with her husband, Larry, founded Catholic Home-schoolers of Pennsylvania.
The couple home schools three children and one has just graduated. Ellen Kramer said the state education department keeps changing how it wants home educators to comply with the law, so parents are uncertain year to year what to do.
Kramer said she believes there is a system-wide agenda against home schoolers that started to mount several years ago when home-schooled children won several national competitions and attracted national media attention.
“That's when things absolutely intensified in Pennsylvania,” she said. “They have good reason to harass us back into the district because as we leave, they lose money,” she said. Pennsylvania had 24,019 home-schooled students for the 2000-2001 school year, which translates into millions of federal dollars lost to school districts.
Kramer is confident they have the votes needed in the House Education Committee to pass the bill. The challenge will be getting it through the full House and Senate and ready for the governor to sign by Nov. 27.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, a state considered favorable to home school education, a loophole was discovered recently in a law that protects student privacy. As a result, home-schooled children's records are public information.
Republican Rep. Dave Knutson has introduced a bill in the state House to close the loophole, but he warned that legislation concerning home schoolers can be problematic. Said Knutson: “There's a lot of reasons why we don't want home school students to be commonly defined as students under our laws, because those students are then subject to our laws concerning the Profile of Learning, the graduation requirements and other kinds of public school requirements.”
California Memo
Some California home schoolers were alarmed this year by a memo the California Department of Education sent to all school districts. It stated in part that “home schooling … is not an authorized exemption from mandatory public-school attendance,” and “a parent filing an affidavit required by a private school does not transform that parent into a private school.”
Home-schooling parents would be operating outside the law and their children considered truant, it further implied. California is one of 12 states where home schooling falls under the private-school statutes.
The Home School Legal Defense Association has been following the situation and posted a notice on its Web site stating, “This is the same inaccurate opinion that has been routinely propagated by an attorney in the CDE [California Department of Education] Legal Office for the past 10-12 years. The CDE does not have any authority to enforce truancy.”
The California Department of Education subsequently issued a statement noting that no laws had changed. What has changed is that home schoolers can no longer get affidavits from their local school districts but must file online through the department's Web site.
Many parents brushed the memo off as a scare tactic.
Timmerie Morton is a consultant with Mother of Divine Grace, a California-based network that provides independent study programs to 2,000 home-school children.
Morton has home schooled six children in both Florida and California. She said Florida was very open and friendly to the movement, and she's comfortable with California's laws.
But problems can arise because people in charge of different school districts interpret the law the way they wish, she said.
“There's always that attitude that ‘home school just isn't right’ coming from those in the education department,” Morton said. “I don't become intimidated easily and I feel very secure in what we're doing.”
Barb Ernster writes from Fridley, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barb Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Polish Man Held for Threatening to Kill Pope
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 22 — Police in Warsaw said they had captured a man who posted a death threat against Pope John Paul II on the Internet before the Pope's recent visit to Poland.
The suspect, known as “Ryszard M.,” sent the e-mail threat to Gazeta Wyborcza, the nation's biggest paper. The message was laced with insults and called for the murder of the Pope.
According to Associated Press, “A Warsaw court charged the suspect with making illegal threats, calling for murder and slander, and ordered him detained for three months.”
More than 18,000 policemen and several hundred officers from the Government Protection Office, an elite security unit, were on hand in Krakow to provide security during the papal visit, Associated Press reported.
Pope and Protesters Prod Earth Summit
REUTERS, Aug. 25 — The Earth Summit that met last week in Johannesburg, South Africa, was mobbed with protesters, like other meetings that deal with globalization. But local authorities warned them that they would tolerate none of the chaos that surrounded previous “globalization” summits in Milan and Seattle.
According to Reuters news service, South African President Thabo Mbeki called for an end of what he called a “‘global apartheid’ between the planet's powerful rich minority and multitudes of poor.”
In a message from Rome, Pope John Paul led appeals for the conference to safeguard the planet. “Men have been assigned by God as administrators of the earth — to cultivate it and look after it,” the 82-year-old Pope said.
Russian Orthodox May Reopen Dialogue
ITAR-TASS, Aug. 26 — TASS News Agency reports that Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II, who cut off ecumenical talks with Rome this year, might resume such talks in the near future.
“The Russian Orthodox Church has once again stated to the Vatican its view on various aspects of bilateral relations. The time has come to make each other's positions clear,” Alexy told the Macedonian newspaper Utrinski Vesnik.
However, Alexy continues to hold that the establishment of four Latin-rite, Catholic dioceses in Russia “has practically eliminated the results of recent contacts with the Vatican.” He accused the Vatican of “showing hypocrisy when on the one hand it calls for dialogue, while on the other hand it makes important decisions that affect our interests without any dialogue … Catholics are conducting missionary activities across the entire CIS [former Soviet Union], secretly from Orthodox believers, usually disguised as charitable actions.”
According to Alexy, “If the dialogue is resumed, it should lead not to an exchange of ceremonial smiles against the background of remaining problems but to their real resolution for the benefit of both churches and Christianity in Europe.”
Rome denies that it proselytizes Eastern Orthodox in Russia.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: God Is Close to Those Who Seek Him DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:We continue our journey in the morning prayer psalms of the Liturgy of the Hours. We have just heard Psalm 84, which Jewish tradition attributes to the “Korahites,” a priestly family that looked after the liturgical services and guarded the threshold to the tent of the Ark of the Covenant (see 1 Chronicles 9:19).
This is a very charming psalm permeated with a mystical longing for the God of life, who is repeatedly exalted (see Psalm 84: 2-4, 9, 13) with the TITLE of “Lord of hosts” — the Lord of the heavenly hosts and therefore the Lord of the universe. Moreover, this TITLE was specially connected with the ark that was kept in the Temple, which was called “the ark of the Lord of hosts, who is enthroned upon the cherubim” (1 Samuel 4:4; see Psalm 80:2). In fact, it was considered to be a sign of God's protection during times of danger and war (see 1 Samuel 4:3-5; 2 Samuel 11:11).
The background for the entire psalm is the Temple to which the faithful are making a pilgrimage. It seems to be autumn because the psalm speaks about the “early rain” that soothes the scorching heat of summer (see Psalm 84:7). For this reason, it might be referring to a pilgrimage to Zion for the third main feast of the Jewish year — the Feast of Tabernacles — that commemorates Israel's wanderings in the desert.
Our Spiritual Happiness
Let us walk, therefore, even when we are in the ‘valley of tears,’ keeping our eyes fixed on that shining goal of peace and communion.
The Temple, which is the special attraction, is present at the beginning and at the end of the psalm. In the opening verses (verses 2-4), we find the wonderful yet delicate image of some birds that have had the enviable privilege of building their nests in the sanctuary. This image portrays the happiness of all those — like the priests at the Temple — who permanently reside in the house of God, enjoying its intimacy and peace. In fact, the believer's entire being stretches out toward the Lord, driven by an almost physical and instinctive desire: “My soul yearns and pines for the courts of the Lord, my heart and flesh cry out for the living God” (verse 3). The Temple appears again at the end of the psalm (see verses 11-13). The pilgrim expresses his great happiness at spending some time in the courts of the house of his God and contrasts this spiritual happiness with the delusion of idols that drives people to the “tents of the wicked,” namely those infamous temples of injustice and perversion.
There is light, life and joy only in the sanctuary of the living God, and “happy are those who trust” in the Lord and choose the path of righteousness (see verses 12-13). The image of a journey brings us to the heart of the psalm (see verses 5-9), where another more significant pilgrimage is taking place. If those who reside permanently in the Temple are happy, those who decide to make a journey of faith to Jerusalem are even happier.
A Mystical Ascent
In their commentaries on Psalm 84, the Fathers of the Church also attached particular importance to verse 6: “Happy are those who find refuge in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrim roads.” Ancient translations of the Psalms speak about this decision to make the “ascent” to the Holy City. Therefore, the pilgrimage to Zion was for the Fathers of the Church a symbol of the just man's continuous progress toward the “eternal dwelling,” where God welcomes his friends full of joy (see Luke 16:9). Let us reflect for a moment on this mystical “ascent,” for which earthly pilgrimages are an image and a sign. We will do so through the words of a Christian writer from the seventh century who was an abbot at the monastery in Sinai.
He is John Climacus, who wrote an entire treatise — The Ladder of Divine Ascent — in order to illustrate the many steps in the spiritual life. At the end of his work, he lets love itself speak, which is placed at the top of the ladder of spiritual progress. It is love that invites and exhorts us by expounding on the feelings and attitudes of which we have already found hints in our psalm:
“Climb up, brothers, ascend. Cultivate, brothers, in your hearts a burning desire to always climb upward (see Psalm 84:6). Heed Scripture's invitation: ‘Come, let us climb the Lord's mountain, to the house of our God’ (see Isaiah 2:3), who made our feet swift as a deer's and set the heights as our goal, so that by following his ways we will be victorious (see Psalm 18:33). Let us hasten, therefore, as it is written, until we all find the face of God in the unity of faith, and recognizing him, we attain the perfect manhood to the extent of the full stature of Christ (see Ephesians 4:13)” (La Scala del Paradiso, Rome 1989, p. 355).
Trust in the Lord
The psalmist is thinking first of all of the concrete pilgrimage that leads to Zion from various towns in the Holy Land. The rain that is falling seems to be a foretaste of the joyful blessing that will envelop him like a mantle (see Psalm 84:7) when he is before the Lord in the Temple (see verse 8). The exhausting trip through the “Baca valley,” also known as the “valley of tears” (see verse 7), is transfigured by the certainty that the goal is God, the one who gives life (see verse 8), who listens to the cry of the believer (see verse 9) and who is his protective “shield” (see verse 10).
It is in this light that the pilgrimage is concretely transformed — as the Fathers of the Church had understood — into a parable on life itself, which is torn between separation from God and intimacy with God, between mystery and revelation. Even in the desert of daily life, the six days of the working week are made fruitful, enlightened and sanctified by our meeting with God during the seventh day through the liturgy and through prayer.
Let us walk, therefore, even when we are in the “valley of tears,” keeping our eyes fixed on that shining goal of peace and communion. Let us also repeat in our hearts the last beatitude, which is so similar to the antiphon that closes this psalm: “O Lord of hosts, happy are those who trust in you!” (verse 13).
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Register Summary DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:During his general audience held in the courtyard of his summer residence south of Rome on Aug. 28, Pope John Paul II resumed his series of teachings on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours. He offered his reflections on Psalm 84, which he called “a very charming psalm that is permeated with a mystical longing for the God of life.”
The background for the psalm is a pilgrimage of the faithful to the temple in Jerusalem, the Holy Father said, which was an object of fascination for the Jewish people: “The pilgrim expresses his great happiness of spending some time in the courts of the house of his God and contrasts this spiritual happiness with the delusion of idols that drives people to the ‘tents of the wicked,’ namely those infamous temples of injustice and perversion.”
The Pope noted that the early Church Fathers, especially St. John Climacus, considered this pilgrimage to Zion as “a symbol of the just man's continuous progress toward the ‘eternal dwelling,’ where God welcomes his friends full of joy.” He urged pilgrims at the audience to keep their “eyes fixed on the shining goal of peace and communion” with God and ended his talk with a quote from the psalm: “O Lord of hosts, happy are those who trust in you!”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Iraqi Nun Martyred in Baghdad
CHALDEAN NEWS AGENCY, Aug. 25 — Pointing to the many Christian martyrs of the ancient Chaldean Church in Iraq — which in union with Rome — the Chaldean News Agency (www.chaldeansonline.net) announced the death of Sister Cecilia Hanna, 82.
The news agency said Sister Cecilia “was killed savagely in a disgusting crime where her head was severed from the rest of her body, not because this old and kind human being did something wrong, but because being a Christian in a land roaming with Muslim fanatics is becoming a dangerous venture and a provocative act to those who have twisted the teachings of their religion.”
A member of the Order of the Heart of Jesus, Sister Cecilia joined the order in her early teens. She worked in Baghdad until her death on Aug. 15, the 98th anniversary of the establishment of her order.
The Chaldean News Agency called “once again upon the Iraqi government to follow through its investigation with the Arab Muslim suspect that has been arrested to find his accomplices and to make public the results of that investigation” and “upon the Iraqi authorities to take the necessary measures to control the rising tide of Muslim fanaticism in Iraq.”
Own a Bible, Pay a Fine
KESTON NEWS SERVICE, Aug. 22 — Leaders of a Protestant ministry in the Central Asian state Uzbekistan were raided by police on Aug. 9, according to Keston News Service, and informed that Bibles are illegal.
Some 13 members of that evangelical group were saddled with fines and saw their pamphlets and at least one Bible seized. Later, government spokesmen backtracked, saying the Bibles are legal, but that the church group was not, since it had not complied with the country's rigorous policy of registering and monitoring religious sects.
According to the news service, which monitors religious freedom in communist and post-communist countries: “It is all but impossible for communities to register, and many Protestant leaders have been subjected to fines.”
Uzbekistan is a majority Muslim country and former Soviet republic that is still ruled autocratically by former communist officials. However, it is cooperating with the U.S. war on terror.
Australians Speak Up for ‘the Force’
BBC, Aug. 27 — Despite the dwindling quality of the films that preach its gospel, some 70,000 Australians have declared themselves worship-pers of “the Force,” the Jedi creed laid out in the Star Wars movies.
The most recent census in that country shows that one in 270 respondents — or 0.37% of Australians — “believe in ‘the Force,’ an energy field that gives Jedi Knights like Luke Skywalker their power in the films,” according to the British Broadcasting Corp.
Some observers have noted that an e-mail campaign conducted by Star Wars fans encouraged movie buffs to choose this option on the census, which might account for many of the responses.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics declined to add “the Force” to the list of officially acknowledged faiths, categorizing its followers’ beliefs simply as “not defined.” In the United Kingdom, “Jedi Knight” is now listed among other religions by census officials.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What They Saw DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:“As people escaped from the buildings, some of them were making confessions. ‘Give me a blessing, Father,’ they'd ask. I heard one or two confessions. They were all hurrying away. But they'd say, ‘Just give me absolution, Father,’ as they hurried to get out of the place.”
— Father Peter Philominraj, Our Lady of Victory parish.
“While ministering to the wounded in front of the Millennium Hotel, I heard what sounded like gunshots coming from the towers. It was not gunfire. It was the distinct sound of bodies falling to the earth.”
— Father Jim Hayes, St. Andrew's Catholic Church, Manhattan
“After the buildings came down, I saw an officer running out of the debris cloud covered with dust. I ran into a nearby deli and grabbed eight to nine bottles of water to pour on his head. He later joked that he thought I was one of New York's first looters.”
— Father Chris Hynes, Port Authority chaplain
“As I approached the place where one of our fellow citizens lay, every activity would stop. Soldiers would halt, digging would cease, police officers and firemen sifting through the rubble would lay aside their duties, and together we would kneel in the dust and bow our heads to pray for the dead and to afford them the reverence, respect and love that they so richly deserve.’”
— Father Robert Marciano, military chaplain, Pentagon
“I was appointed as chaplain of the Port Authority just 10 days before Sept. 11. When I got down to Ground Zero on the evening of the 11th, I could not believe the devastation. It was like World War II. It was beyond my imagination. The dust was ankle-deep. There was so much smoke and the smell was unforgettable. There were three air-cooled tractor-trailers serving as morgues. As body parts were discovered they were placed in plastic bags, wrapped in an American flag and saluted and carried away. I spent the evening praying over and blessing them.
“For the first five months I spent Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. working at Ground Zero and working with the 74 Port Authority families that have lost a loved one.”
— Father Mark Giordani, Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Paterson, N.J.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Lessons Learned From Victims' Families DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:On the roof of Firehouse 10, on Liberty Street, Nancy, a woman in her late 40s, overlooked the remains of the World Trade Center. Nearby, her daughter and her son, a 15-year-old girl and her 22-year-old brother, peered glazy-eyed into “the pit.”
We — six Manhattan moms, Brother Michael Steele and I — had come to pray at the tragic site. Each time I bring visitors to Ground Zero, they immediately get absorbed in the impressions.
The intent is not to come to “gawk” but to reflect and pray. We will get to that, too, but while they first of all fill their eyes, I make contact with those already present: rescue workers, the hospitable firemen and visitors who are often relatives or friends of victims. I invite them to join our group in a prayer, which we usually offer concretely for the victims known to those present, as well as for peace, conversion, reconciliation and forgiveness in our world.
Nancy was easy to approach. She came from Baltimore. I commented that she looked especially moved. She said her husband had died here. “He traveled from Baltimore on Sept. 11 to the Twin Towers for a meeting on the 102nd floor.”
My spontaneous reaction was full of pity –– “How awful!”
She corrected me immediately.
“No, it was God's will,” she said. “This was foreseen by him, and since that day he has never ceased to pour his love into our hearts. At night, frequently, I found my daughter crying,” she pointed to the girl staring down into the site.
“When I went to her she would say how she would not have her dad to accompany her down the aisle,” she said. “Somehow, I always find the right words to console her at once. God is so good to us. My husband was making plans for the two of us to go to Paradise Island in November to celebrate our 25th anniversary. Now, the only thing that makes me mad is that he has gone to Paradise before me.”
Deeply impressed by this stout-hearted Christian woman, I asked her not only to join us in prayer but if she would kindly give her testimony to the women who had come to pray.
Not one of the moms had a dry eye.
In Toronto, one month ago, the Holy Father addressed 800,000 young people:
“You are young, and the Pope is old and a bit tired. But he still fully identifies with your hopes and aspirations. Although I have lived through much darkness, under harsh totalitarian regimes, I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young. Do not let that hope die! Stake your lives on it! We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.”
For me, Nancy is living testimony of this hope. So are many other victim families.
I have yet to meet a victim family who seethes with anger and seeks revenge. The patience and will to forgiveness of so many Sept. 11 victim families speaks volumes about the greatness of American Christians.
Recently, in Ireland and also in Mexico, when I shared stories like this, educated young people could hardly believe what I was saying. From their media information, they imagined the American anti-terrorist measures and war-talk as filled with vengeance, explainable only in terms of hate and revenge. The true story has to be told.
Revenge is far from Christ's heart. It is not his image. How grateful I am to God that I could witness how his American children are growing ever more Christ-like in this regard.
You, who mourn, thank you for strengthening us all.
Legionary of Christ priest Father Eamon Kelly writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Eamon Kelly ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: EDITORIAL DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Don't Bomb Iraq
War is never a good thing. But sometimes it is necessary. Those who make the argument that war must always be avoided have to ignore the many circumstances in which — as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it — war is “the right and duty” of the state.
That said, Christians uniquely understand just how horrible war is — and it is our duty to remind the world that the dignity of man, made in God's image and redeemed by the Incarnation, can never be taken lightly. War's destruction is sick and revolting, intolerable to those who love God and know the worth of the men and women he created in his image.
Yes, war is sometimes necessary, but, as the Catechism also says, “all citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war” (for the whole section on war, read Nos. 2307-2317).
A year ago this Sept. 11, an attack was launched against the United States and an enemy forced us to respond to a very real, very present, threat.
It was possible then to look at the preconditions for a just war and see how U.S. action fit them. They are, according to the Catechism:
E ” The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain.” After the leveling of the Twin Towers and the directive to kill Americans, this was the case.
E “All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.” The Taliban were not going to relinquish the killers.
E “There must be serious prospects of success.”
E “The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.”
These last two can now be evaluated by looking at Afghanistan itself — reformed, recovering and rebuilding.
But what about Iraq?
Is the “damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations … lasting, grave and certain”? If it is, Vice President Dick Cheney, in his recent speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, didn't say so. That speech, considered one of the most thorough treatments of the case for invasion yet, is vague on the main question: Is Iraq a threat to our national security?
“We now know,” said Cheney, “that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.” He cites recent defectors and says “many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” Cheney said Iraq is “enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents.”
Iraq has “resumed efforts to acquire” nuclear weapons. “Many of” the administration's members are “convinced” that he will some day. He is also “enhancing capabilities” in chemical and biological weapons. Are the threats scary? You bet. Do they constitute “lasting, grave, certain damage?” They do not. Why aren't we considering attacking nations where the weapons threat is more certain? North Korea? China?
In light of that, the rest of Cheney's case fails to convince us that a violent invasion of Iraq is the unavoidable response of the United States at this juncture.
To make matters worse, the United States hasn't been very just to Iraq in the years since the Gulf War. The sanctions that have been in place against the country — sanctions that the Vatican has repeatedly condemned — have greatly worsened the suffering of the Iraqi people while not easing Saddam's hold on the country at all.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said as much shortly after President Bush's inauguration. “The message I've consistently heard is that overdoing it with the sanctions gives [Saddam] a tool that he is using against us, and really is not weakening him,” said Powell.
In justice, we ought to end sanctions against Iraq on a quicker timetable. In prudence, we should continue to aggressively police the country's war preparations. But we should not invade Iraq.
Let's take to heart the words of the Catechism: “Because of the evils and injustices that accompany all war, the Church insistently urges everyone to prayer and to action so that the divine Goodness may free us from the ancient bondage of war.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: LETTERS DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Pray for Mental Health
Regarding “Coping with Depression and Mental Illness, the Catholic Way” (Aug. 25-31):
Thank you for your thoughtful coverage of the problem of mental illness. I have to disagree with some of Dr. Mango's comments on Catholics. He seems to believe that Catholics think if they just pray, then “everything would be fine.” In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Today Catholics, along with the rest of society, are too dependent on the medical model for psychiatric care. And often it doesn't work!
I am a registered nurse and the mother of an 18-year-old son who suffers from schizophrenia. Medications definitely can be a part of God's plan for us, but we must remember that God is the only true source of healing. I also believe that we are just beginning to learn how spirituality plays a major role in many illnesses. But illness can be our greatest gift from God if it leads us into his arms, and sometimes that's the only way he can get our attention!
So let us have faith and pray more, knowing that Jesus offers his healing graces through prayer, and especially holy Mass and the sacraments.
BARB JOHNSON Carmel, Indiana
The Pope and I
I am greatly heartened by your editorial concerning the Pope's leadership (“Blaming the Pope,” Sept. 1-7). I wish you had mentioned more specifically, however, that his primacy of jurisdiction must necessarily be in tension with the jurisdiction of the local ordinary. Bishops do not receive their authority to preach, teach and sanctify from the Holy Father, but through the episcopal ordination, which, among other things, makes each a vicar of Christ in their local church.
Great will be the number of retrospectives written about this particular Pope. He will be hailed as “the champion of Vatican II” and as “the wrecker of Vatican II” — depending on the writer's perspective. In the meantime, all of us can ask not what the Pope can do for us but what we can do to further the mission of the Church.
FATHER JACK FEEHILY Moore, Oklahoma
Jews Need Jesus, Too
The recent media attention given to the U.S. bishops’ document on evangelization of the Jews is a further tragedy for the American bishops and for the Church.
The tragedy is not only this recent statement about evangelizing Jews, but, more fundamentally, the failure of most American bishops to take responsibility for the priests in their dioceses — especially regarding sexual morality, practice and teaching. We must pray for all the bishops: for the holy, faithful bishops who work courageously for the Church and for the other bishops also.
The duty of bishops is to teach. The media are reporting that the bishops are now teaching that Jews can be saved without Christ. This is a grave scandal. Most faithful Catholics and almost all non-Catholics believe the erroneous media reports.
The document is not a statement from the bishops. Most bishops did not see the document before it was released. The document has no doctrinal authority; it is merely the opinion of a small panel of Jews and Catholics. It does not say that Jews can be saved without Christ. On the contrary, it affirms the Catholic teaching that no one can be saved without Christ. Jesus’ command to proclaim the Gospel to all people most certainly includes the Jewish people.
However, the document was released by the bishops’ office. It is time for the bishops to take responsibility for what happens in their dioceses and for documents released from their office. Jesus warned us that scandals will come. He also said, “Woe to those through whom the scandals come.”
While we must continue to pray for all bishops, to encourage and support our faithful bishops, the bishops must teach. And we all share this responsibility to proclaim the truth.
MARK DROGIN New Hope, Kentucky
The writer, a Jewish convert, is executive director of Remnant of Israel.
Luther's Loss
For the first time I have read the Register. I did not know of its existence until yesterday, when I came across a front-page article on Gov. Frank Keating (“‘Luther was Right,’ Says Bishops’ Point Man,” June 30-July 6).
Keating, if he really understands his comments, should just become a Protestant. At least his problem would be solved and the laity, or what I suspect, politicians can now control religious thought. That too was part of Luther's teaching and look where it landed the civilized world — chaos, crime, hate, world wars. Keating ought to know, as a Catholic, that taking control of the Church and her decisions has been an ongoing aim of Protestants, atheists and others who despise the Roman Catholic Church because it cannot be controlled for the gain of politicians or others with personal agendas. It has withstood these attacks for 2,000 years and will continue to do so.
BILL FORREST Mount Laurel, New Jersey
World Youth Day Memories
Regarding “When an Assignment Becomes a Pilgrimage” (Aug. 11-17):
Tim Drake, I was at that fence at Morrow Park with my daughter. How long was it — three or four minutes with the Pope so near? I was also at Downsview and discovered those confessionals, which you write of, about midnight on the Saturday, as bongos and tambourines filled the warm night air. Unforgettable moments, both of them. Thanks for sharing them with many readers.
BRUCE MULLOCK Toronto
Marriage Mobilization
There is a Web site (petitiononline.com) that allows for a simple way to create a petition and get the word out to people to have them sign it.
With regard to your recent article about the marriage amendment (“Proponents Fight for Marriage Amendment — Before It's Too Late,” Aug. 18-24), there is a petition to stop the amendment with 440,000 signatures. Could [one of your readers] get a legal-minded person to create a counter-petition and get the word out for people to sign it? Here is a link to the anti-marriage petition: www.petitiononline.com/0712t001/petition.html. God Bless!
SANDOR GYETVAI Oceanside, California
Voice of Fidelity
I totally agree with Father Andrew McNair in his column TITLEd “Voice of the Unfaithful? New Group's True Colors” (Aug. 18-24).
This is what I say to the Voice of the Faithful: Instead of trying to take over the Church, buy each of your members a four-volume set of the Liturgy of the Hours and read it daily like all the shepherds of God's Church do every day of the year.
This intercession, for Aug. 21, is very appropriate for my response to your group. Under morning prayers on the feast of Pope St. Pius X, there is this: “Christ is the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep. Let us praise and thank him as we pray. Nourish your people, Lord. Christ, you decided to show your merciful love through your holy shepherds, let your mercy always reach us through them. Through your vicars you continue to perform the ministry of shepherd of souls, direct us always through our leaders. Through your holy ones the leaders of your people you served as physician of our bodies and our spirits, continue to fulfill your ministry of life and holiness in us.
“You taught your flock through the prudence and love of your saints, grant us continual growth in holiness under the direction of our pastor. Followed by the Our Father…”
In conclusion, may I suggest that instead of spending your money to usurp the authority of the Pope you should make a contribution regularly to one of the faithful groups in the Church that are doing so much?
JOSEPH R. J. BIRT Ashland, Massachusetts
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Foundations Finder DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:I was frustrated in reading the article about Foundations, the marriage-improvement newsletter, because no information was given about how or where to order it (“The Foundations of Many a Great Marriage,” Aug. 25-31). I would like to have the information because I think that this might make a fine wedding or engagement present in this time when a lot of my children's friends are getting married. So, how do I contact them?
BARBARA LEVICH Seattle
Editor's note: Write to Foundations, P.O. Box 1632, Portland, ME 04104-1632; call (800) 775-4757; or visit www.foundation-snewsletter.com on the Internet.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Don't Give Up On Ireland's Catholicity DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Just when you think the faith is on its way out of Ireland, something unexpected happens that reminds you it is still alive and well.
Two events this summer had this effect on me. The first occurred in a tough inner-city neighborhood of Dublin, the other in a picturesque rural town in County Cork. Oddly, or perhaps providentially, depending on your point of view, both events involved images of the Sacred Heart.
For a long time Dublin's Monto neighborhood was the biggest and most notorious red-light district in Ireland.
Its “working girls” catered to the sailors from the nearby port, British army soldiers from the nearby barracks (Monto dates back to the days before Irish independence in 1922) and, no doubt, a few locals as well. No one approved of Monto, but most people thought nothing could be done about it. Wasn't prostitution inevitable? they reasoned.
Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary, thought otherwise. He decided to clean up Monto. In 1925, armed with his faith, he set about doing so. He drove a spike into a wall in a prominent place in Monto and hung on it an image of the Sacred Heart, announcing that he was dedicating Monto to the Sacred Heart. He quickly won the support of the locals, who were thoroughly sick of the brothel owners luring their girls into “the trade.” In no time at all, the doomsayers were proved wrong. Duff had succeeded in his task; Monto had been cleansed and, as if to prove the point, an image of the Sacred Heart was placed in every former brothel in the area.
Shortly after this dramatic reclamation, the Legion of Mary decided to mark it by placing a 4-foot statue of the Sacred Heart on the tallest building in Monto as if to overlook and protect it, and to ensure that it would never fall back into its old ways. Monto never did, but it is still a very poor area, plagued by a terrible drug problem, with very few people attending Mass anymore. But an incident last month involving the Sacred Heart statue of Monto showed that the embers of faith still burn — even if, sometimes, only faintly.
The area is being redeveloped with many of the old buildings in the process of being torn down. One of these is the building on which stands Duff's statue. In the process of removing it from the building, some workmen dropped it and watched in horror as it smashed to pieces on the street below. The workmen knew the significance of the statue. A local craftsman intervened and decided to repair it. As he did so, he and others involved in the repair of the statue detected from it the smell of roses.
The Catholic faith lives on. Even in modern-day Ireland.
The statue was restored and locals flocked to see it. Some of them, too, detected the smell of roses. The parish priest was skeptical of such reports, but he was in no doubt that the renewed interest in the statue showed that, deep down, the people of his poor inner-city parish were still seeking something deeper in their lives than mere consumerism. What it actually showed, although the priest didn't say so, was that the traditional devotions, and much of the traditional imagery of the Catholic faith, still has a grip on the hearts and minds of many people. Deprive them of this route to sanctity, and you might deprive them of the faith itself.
The second incident revolved around the police station in Cobh, County Cork. The Cobh police moved to a new station a few weeks ago. Their old station was more than 80 years old and in all that time an image of the Sacred Heart had hung in the station's reception area. The Office of Public Works, which was in charge of the move to the new station, suggested that in newly multicultural Ireland some people might be offended by a picture of a Catholic image like the Sacred Heart positioned in a prominent place in a police station. They suggested that the Cobh police hide it somewhere.
Now, one does not have to be a member of the American Civil Liberties Union to see that maybe there was something to the Office of Public Works’ concern, but what is interesting is that the police objected strenuously to the Office of Public Work request.
Media coverage of Irish affairs gives the impression that Ireland has become radically secularized, but then we find the police fighting to keep their beloved image of the Sacred Heart and the town mayor, along with the townsfolk, supporting them. (In the end the image was placed not in the reception area of the new police station, but in the office where the police officers work).
Small but telling incidents like these show that Christ still has prominence of place in the hearts of many Irish people. Many Irish still look to the Catholic Church to feed their faith, hope and love. The Catholic faith lives on. Even in modern-day Ireland.
David Quinn is editor of The Irish Catholic in Dublin.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Quinn ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Choice, Pro- and Otherwise DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:A sophisticated lady went on television recently explaining that she was for “choice.” This was one right that she upheld. She did not seem aware that simply to affirm some right “to choose” did not by itself settle what she did with this power when she used it.
To say that I have a “power of choice” tells me nothing about what I do with this choice. What makes all the difference is what I choose to do with my power. That I have the power “to choose” says no more about my moral status than if I said that I have the power to walk with two legs. Both the will and the legs are given. I do not give them to myself, but receive them. What matters concerning my character is where I choose to walk or what it is I choose to do with my power “to choose.”
All human beings have the power of free will or free choice given to them as part of their constitutive being. This power follows upon the capacity to know or understand. Free will means that we can choose means to an end, in this case, the end for which we will all that we choose, namely, happiness. We cannot not will to be happy, though we can give different definitions to what we mean by it.
Rights and Reason
These different definitions, however, can and must be examined by our faculty for reason. With reason, we can examine the means that might be freely employed to achieve this end or purpose. The power of choice comes into play only as a consequence of our having some definition of happiness established within our understanding. This end is that to which we tend in all we do. If we make a mistake at this level, all our actions will follow that initial mistake in so far as they are logical.
If I say that I have the power to choose, I have not yet said anything about the exercise of this power. All I have done is point to its existence within me, something I can recognize in self-reflection. The fact that I possess this power is not itself a product of choice. It is a given of my being or nature. I am not a being who makes myself to be the kind of being (human) that I am.
What counts is not having power, but using it: What is it that I choose to do?
When the will is in act, that is, when I put it into operation, I can perform two functions with it: I can choose to act or not act, or I can choose to do this thing rather than that thing. To choose to act or not to act is itself a choice. “It is better to suffer evil than to do it,” as Socrates said.
To choose this thing rather than that thing depends upon what it is that my mind or senses present to me as alternatives. The will does not present “what” it is I might do. The mind or intellect does this. I am responsible when I choose or do not choose; I am responsible when I choose this thing or that thing. The kind of being I make myself to be — good or bad — depends on the quality of these choices, themselves related to the end for which I do all that I do. I am praised or blamed for what I choose to do. If I choose badly, I can be punished. I can also ask for forgiveness. To choose to be punished is a sign that I understand that what I did was wrong. I want to restore order, the order that I violated when I chose wrongly.
What I cannot do, in spite of all modern rhetoric to the contrary, is simply “to choose.” I must choose this or that, to act or not to act. Thus, in the case of abortion, where this “to choose” is proposed as a justification, my choice is never just a “choice.” It is a choice to do this or that, to kill the child or not to kill it.
There is no middle ground.
This is what “to choose” means and must mean in this context. It is never neutral. In other words, the choice is always of something, to do or not to do; to do this, not that. It is simply contradictory to say that the power “to choose” is itself what decides the goodness or badness of the choice.
Pro-What?
What decides this goodness or badness is what we decide to do, what happens when the choice is made and carried out. Some deny that what is killed is a human being. The question then becomes: “Is this true? Is it sustainable?” Whatever is destroyed by the choice is in every case the product of human begetting, something that is always human and another being separate from the parents from its beginning. No choice or theory of choice can change this fact, this reality.
“Pro-choice” can only mean that I have the power of choice. It cannot mean that whatever I chose to do with this power is all right because I have the power. Once I have the power to choose, given to me by whatever it is that causes me to be the sort of being I am, what counts is not the power but how I use it. In other words, what do I choose to do?
I must choose this or that, or I must choose to act or not to act. What I do follows from what I choose in the light of what I am. If I “choose” to kill a human being, that is my own act. It does not become “good” because I choose it. It becomes good or bad because of what I choose. My active choice is dependent on the reality that is affected or changed by my choice. To be “pro-choice” does not and cannot mean that whatever it is I choose to do is all right because I do whatever I want. What it is I choose to do with my power of choice is what makes the difference.
If I am given a choice to do evil or suffer it, I should choose to suffer it. If I am to choose to do this or that, I should choose to do what is objectively good. I do not make the good to be good, but I do choose the good or reject it. In this sense, I become what I choose. To refuse to know what it is that happens when I choose is but another way of saying that I choose to make myself a god, to make my own good and evil.
To be “pro-choice” in this sense is simply another way of imitating Lucifer in my own life — a power that I can exercise, again, if I so choose.
Jesuit Father James Schall teaches political science at Georgetown University.
To read more of Father Schall's writings, visit www.moreC.com/schall on the Internet.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J. ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: An Almost Patron Saint for Christian-Muslim Relations DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:His ruling passion was to convert all Islam to Christianity.
Yet, in a fit of rage, he slaughtered his Muslim ally who taught him Arabic.
He was a tireless peregrinator, traveling to many distant Islamic outposts. But his efforts were often met with stern opposition. The people he sought to convert responded with varying degrees of violence. He was detained, incarcerated, exiled, stoned and perhaps, as many believe, martyred by Saracens. He published the works of prominent Islamic thinkers and fought to include Islamic studies in Christian schools.
If passion and dedication were sufficient to justify ascension to the position of “patron saint of Christian-Muslim relations,” Ramón Llull would easily qualify.
Ramón Llull was born in the year 1232 (or thereabouts) in the Mediterranean island of Majorca. His father, a wealthy merchant from Barcelona, settled in Majorca with James I of Aragon the year after the king had conquered the island from the Moors. In effect, Llull was a child of Muslim-Christian inheritance. He was raised and educated at court and was eventually appointed a seneschal (a steward in charge of the royal palace) to the young James II. Traditional accounts tell colorful stories of Llull, especially in his role as a troubadour.
Llull was once smitten by a young woman. True to his romantic and flamboyant nature, he rode his horse into the center of the church where she was praying during a worship service in order to impress her with his love. She had her chaperon arrange an appointment and, when alone with Llull, confessed her own affection for him. In a most dramatic gesture, she then exposed that portion of her body that was already ravaged by cancer. She had only a few weeks to live. The impact on Llull was staggering and left him, for some time, in a state of emotional shock.
Sometime thereafter, after having been inspired by a Franciscan sermon, Llull renounced his life at court and dispossessed himself of all his worldly goods. He made pilgrimages to Rocamadour, Santiago de Compostela and other shrines, and subsequently joined the Franciscan order. In 1263 or 1264, Llull had repeated visions of Christ crucified. It was as a consequence of these mystical experiences that he conceived the idea that he had been chosen to convert Islam to Christianity.
In order to take the first step in achieving this grandiose project, he needed to learn Arabic. To this end, he secured the services of an Arab slave to teach him the language. When this task was accomplished and Llull had some command of the slave's mother tongue, he attempted to convert his teacher to Christianity.
Llull failed miserably. In his extreme frustration, whatever the particulars of the circumstance may have been, he flew into a rage and killed his slave. His remorse over such an impetuous and violent act caused so profound a remorse in him that he vowed that, from that moment on, he would live by only one rule: “He who loves not lives not.” Forevermore, he abandoned the sword to live by love and to persuade by logic.
From this point on, Llull's life is an icon of exuberance and indefatigability. His love for the Church and his enthusiasm for converting Muslims never diminished. On the academic side, his accomplishments were astonishing. He wrote 228 books on almost every important topic of his age. He wrote on philosophy, geometry, astronomy, physics, chemistry, anthropology, law, statecraft, navigation, horsemanship and warfare. He perfected the astrolabe, anticipated problems in thermodynamics and held strong to the position that there was a great continent on the other side of the world. He was also, apart from being a prolific logician, a very good poet and a novelist of considerable acclaim.
In addition to all this, Llull initiated the cult of the Virgin and provided the philosophical underpinning for the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. There is a stained-glass window in one of the churches in Palma, the capital of Majorca. It shows St. Francis and St. Dominic watching with approval as Ramón Llull in purple robes and Duns Scotus in blue announce their doctrine of the Virgin.
“I revere Llull,” James Michener once wrote, “because in his day he saw the interlocking nature of the world and was willing to sacrifice his life to help achieve unity. To him the Mediterranean was infinitely larger than the Atlantic and the Pacific are to me, yet he went forth to all the shores, preaching one message, ‘He who loves not, lives not.’”
Llull lived well into his 80s. He died in the year 1316, perhaps, as many believe (particularly Franciscans) as a martyr. Some of the local gentry venerate him as a saint. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that irate Muslims stoned him to death outside the city walls of Bougie in Africa. The Catholic Encyclopedia claims that he was stoned to death by Saracens during his visit to Tunisia.
This great figure, Doctor Illuminatus, as he is called, is entombed on the Island of Majorca, his birthplace, in the convent dedicated to another troubadour and exuberant Christian, St. Francis of Assisi. In his life following his one grievous act of sin, he is a role model for our post-9-11 times.
Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus of philosophy at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Donald DeMarco ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Straying From the Norm DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:STEVENSON, Wash. — There are exceptions to every rule, and in the small Columbia Gorge town of Stevenson at the farthest corner of the Archdiocese of Seattle, there is the exception to the rule on the high cost of Catholic churches.
Completed in 1995, the new home for the 110 families of Mary, Star of the Sea Parish contains a spacious church, offices, classrooms and a hall. The 8,000-square-foot wood and stone structure is nearly four times the size of the simple 1915 wood frame church it replaced.
It also cost the parish $585,000 to build, or approximately $73 per square foot.
Completed in the middle of a decade-long economic downturn that shut down the town's main employer, a plywood mill, and pushed the community's unemployment rate to more than twice the state average, the new church is a symbol of the determination and support of the parishioners and the frugal creativity of Father Ronald Belisle, the former pastor, and the late Thomas Nathe, a former deacon who died in 2000.
“My dad always had the dream of building a new church,” said Tom Nathe, son of the former deacon. “It was more of a pipe dream until one of the parishioners came forward and said he had $100,000 worth of timber on his property and would donate the money from the sale to build a new church.”
Aware of the fact that their financial resources were extremely limited, the pastor and deacon dispensed with the approved practice of hiring an architect, establishing a master plan and developing a fund-raising analysis. Instead, they conceived a plan for a nave twice as large as their existing one, surrounded it with essential offices and meeting space and sought a nearby builder's advice on design and costs.
“RSV Construction of Vancouver said it could be built for less than $600,000,” Nathe said.
The proposal was then submitted to the archdiocese, which notified the parish of the obvious: Their plans were well below the expected costs associated with construction of a Catholic church and there was absolutely no chance they could raise the $1.5 to $2 million necessary to build a church campus at the normal rate.
“The archdiocese looked at the local economy and the contribution numbers,” Nathe said. “Based on that, they said we couldn't afford a new church.”
Convinced their construction budget was correct, Father Belisle, Deacon Nathe and the parish received the reluctant approval of the archdiocese, who warned the parishioners they could expect no loan assistance from the revolving construction fund. They didn't need it.
The parish found a buyer for the old church property and other major donors. “One woman who had been a cook in a logging camp wrote a check $10,000,” said Kay Wright, a member of the parish since 1951 and one of the coordinators of the construction project. “We had other big donors and the pledges were paid off in a year.”
“Money was donated,” Nathe said in agreement, but in a scene reminiscent of the 1963 movie Lilies of the Field, parishioners and community members came forward with materials and labor. “Whenever anything was needed, somebody always came forward.”
Slightly more than three years since the June 13, 1992, campaign kickoff, the new church was dedicated in October 1995.
— Philip S. Moore
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Philip S. Moore ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Spirit & Life DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:The Repture Rupture
Rumors of the great apocalyptic event known as “the Rapture” seem to be popping up everywhere. The talk is both confusing and scary. Just the other day, I heard a woman remark to her coworker, “It seems like the world is getting worse and worse. I think we're very close to the Rapture.” What, if anything, is the Rapture?
The word “rapture” comes from the Latin rapiemur. It was translated by St. Jerome from the original Greek word harpazo, meaning “caught up.” The idea of being “caught up” appears in Paul's letter to the Thessalonians. “The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17).
The idea of “the Rapture” began in the 1830s with an ex-Anglican priest named John Nelson Darby. Today the Rapture is taught as a doctrine primarily in fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant churches. Although there is still some debate over the timing of the Rapture, the basic idea goes like this: True believers will be taken up to Christ in the clouds (raptured), leaving behind all unbelievers to endure a time of great tribulation. After “the Tribulation,” Jesus will physically return to conquer the Antichrist in the battle of Armageddon and rule from the temple in Jerusalem for 1,000 years in the millennial kingdom (Revelation 20).
The Catholic view is a little different. While Catholics do not typically use the word rapture, we do believe that Christ will come again in glory to gather his Church and that, at that time, he will judge the living and the dead and usher in his eternal kingdom (see the Catechism, Nos. 673-682).
To Catholics, the 1,000-year reign described in Revelation 20 has long been understood, like the rest of Revelation, as symbolic language. It means a long period of time, an “age.” This age is not to be literally 1,000 years long; rather, it is the present period of Christ's rule of both heaven and earth at the right hand of the Father. As St. Peter says: “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day” (2 Peter 3:8).
The main rupture in the theology of the Rapture is the idea that the Rapture (Jesus gathering his Church) and the second coming (Jesus’ triumphant return in glory) are two events separated by a span of several years. This is a problem — first, because Jesus never said he would return twice and second, because Scripture teaches that there will be no separation of good and evil until Christ returns. In the parable of the “weeds of the field,” the good seeds represent believers and the weeds represent unbelievers. Jesus said, “Let them both grow together until the harvest.” At the close of the age, the weeds will be gathered and burned with fire and the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father (Matthew 13:24-43).
Don't let rumors about “the Rapture” get you down. Take St. Francis as an example: While weeding his garden, he was asked, “What would you do if you knew that the world would end right now?” St. Francis replied, “Continue weeding my garden.”
Christina Mills writes from Eugene, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christina Mills ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Capital Contemplation DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:It was my third trip to Washington, D.C., but my first as a Catholic.
With several high-level meetings scheduled for later in the day, I was nervous. What better way to calm my nerves than to begin the day with Mass? I figured. Boarding the Metro early in the morning, I made my way for my first visit to St. Matthew the Apostle Cathedral.
Appropriately named after the patron saint of civil servants, the cathedral is located just a few blocks from the White House. It's a quiet place for meditation and prayer amid the frenetic cityscape of our nation's capital.
St. Matthew's plain brick-and-sandstone exterior is deceiving: It gives no hint of the rich adornments found within. The interior is decorated in unique rose and green marble, but what make this sanctuary truly special are the mosaics adorning its walls.
The cathedral has been undergoing an extension restoration since 2000; about half the $6.9 million needed for the work has been raised so far. During my visit, netting was visible above the pews to catch falling plaster, and scaffolding filled the entire sanctuary. The mosaics behind the altar were being cleaned of a century's worth of incense and candle residue. As I prayed, three workers stood 20 feet up, cleaning and restoring the mosaics and marble.
Established in 1840, the church was originally located at 15th and H streets. Construction of the present church began in 1893 under the direction of Msgr. Thomas Sim Lee. The first Mass was celebrated on June 2, 1895. The church was dedicated in 1913 and designated a cathedral in 1939 when the Archdiocese of Washington was established.
Designed by noted New York architect C. Grant La Farge, the cathedral bears the form of a Latin cross and is a hybrid of Romanesque and Byzantine styles.
Unfortunately, the prominent mosaics in the front of the church — St. Matthew and the Angel and the Angels of the Crucifixion — were entirely obscured by scaffolding. However, I was able to enjoy the remaining mosaics. I tried to put myself in the place of a parishioner 100 years ago — one who was unable to read but capable of understanding the stories from the mosaics.
History Happened Here
Prior to his retirement, Washington Cardinal James Hickey said of the cathedral in 2000: “My hope is to leave the cathedral in splendid shape so it can stand as a silent witness of faith to future events we can scarcely imagine from our vantage in history.”
He was prescient. During my own time spent in prayer inside St. Matthew's, I could not help but contemplate events I could scarcely imagine — the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the nearby Pentagon, the first anniversary of which we remember this week. With all of its inspirational artwork, I found St. Matthew's a very appropriate place to pray for our president, our Congress and our entire country — not knowing whether some of them might be in attendance at Mass along with me.
As you enter the church, to the right sits the small Chapel of St. Francis of Assisi. It contains a large crucifix, similar to the famous image at San Damiano that spoke to St. Francis, and frescoes depicting scenes from the life of St. Francis. It also serves as the burial chamber for Washington's archbishops.
Continuing further into the church along the right side, you come to the large, bright and colorful Chapel of St. Anthony of Padua. Vivid mosaics depicting the lives of St. Francis and his disciples in the Umbrian hill towns of Italy rim the chapel. The quiet interior space also contains a notable bust of Pope John Paul II commemorating the Holy Father's visit here to celebrate Mass on Oct. 6, 1979.
The east transept features a mural of the martyrdom of St. Matthew above a 5,045-pipe organ. The west transept features a mural of the calling of St. Matthew.
During my visit, the Wedding Chapel to the right of the sanctuary and the Blessed Sacrament Chapel to the left were concealed under plastic sheeting to protect the artwork during the restoration.
The high altar is dazzling. Made of white marble, it is encircled with semi-precious stones. Created by artists from India, the altar does not sit under the dome but rather sits at the head of the cross formed by the church's layout.
I was surprised when, during Mass, I went forward to receive the Eucharist here. In front of the sanctuary, beneath my feet, a marble marker read: “Here rested the remains of President Kennedy at the Requiem Mass, November 25, 1963, before their removal to Arlington where they lie in expectation of a Heavenly Resurrection.” As a lover of American history, I was moved by this unexpected discovery. I also learned that every president since Grover Cleveland has attended services at St. Matthew's, many during the cathedral's annual “Red Mass.”
The penditives, or pillars supporting the church's dome, are decorated with mosaics by Edwin Howland Blashfield. They feature the Four Evangelists.
Along the church's western edge, Our Lady's Chapel features six mosaics representing biblical passages referring to the Blessed Mother, her genealogy and the genealogy of Jesus. The chapel is also marked by a distinct Gordon S. Kray statue in which Mary is portrayed as a caring mother reaching down to fallen humanity while also pointing to her ascended son.
American Icons
My favorite mosaics were found in the baptistry. The brilliant mosaics, not nearly as old as those found in the church, feature an angel stirring the water and another of Matthew baptizing an Ethiopian woman. Here is also a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by sculptor Thomas Hudson Jones, the artist who sculpted Arlington National Cemetery's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Finally, upon leaving the church, visitors will note a unique mural above the inside main entrance. Created by Blashfield and his assistant Vincent Aderente, it depicts “Saintly and Eminent Personages of the Americas,” including St. John Neumann, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, St. Katherine Drexel, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Rose of Lima, St. Isaac Jogues and other figures important to Catholic life in the nation's capital. It is a fitting mural for the seat of the Archbishop of Washington.
I look forward to returning once the restorations are complete, when the cathedral will undoubtedly shine with the brilliance of its newly restored mosaics. No matter what happens in or with our nation by then, America will always need our prayers.
The first Sunday in October, St. Matthew's celebrates the “Red Mass,” where U.S. leaders ask for
----- EXCERPT: St. Matthew the Apostle Cathedral, Washington, D.C. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Blessed Is He Who Sings for the Poor DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Having recorded seven albums of spiritual and inspirational songs, Al Barbarino now sings almost weekly in parishes and concerts throughout the United States — and beyond.
His repertoire combines original compositions with traditional hymns and modern inspirational songs such as “Let There Be Peace on Earth.”
A lay-apostolate Franciscan of the Padre Pio Shelter in the South Bronx and a member of the Knights of Columbus, Barbarino also works part time as a counselor in a high-security prison in the Bronx for youths 11-18. He spoke with Register correspondent Joseph Pronechen about his musical-evangelization mission, which next year will take him to Alaska, Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
How did you get started as a professional religious singer?
My whole family always sang. I was in the church choir since I was 9 years old. Singing was just natural for me. I never had any formal training.
What is it that you want people to get out of your music?
During a Mass, I usually speak after Communion on the purpose of my recordings: to evangelize, to bring the message of God — his love, his peace — to others through song. I also hope I inspire people to help the poor. It's a double-headed mission. I remind the people that God uses all of us. I try to stress to the people that it doesn't have to be big things. It can be something as simple as being kind, wearing a smile on your face, calling someone you haven't spoken to in a while.
I try to focus people on giving everything they have and do for God. I try to let people know the greatest thing we have as Catholics is that we receive the Eucharist, and that we receive the power of the Holy Spirit through eucharistic adoration.
What do you think it is about music that reaches people who might not otherwise listen to a religious message?
Music is universal. There's something that happens spiritually within us when we hear music. Music has a way of reaching us within.
Many times it's difficult to verbalize the feeling, how it affects you within, just as it's difficult describing the concept of love.
Your music, from what I've heard, is very soothing and calming.
In the present state of affairs with terror and terrorists, even with all the technical security and troops, people are still filled with anxiety. In my music I tell people that we must listen to the Scriptures. They tell us not to fear. Jesus said, “My peace I give you, and it's a peace not of this world.” If we offer everything we do as a prayer, we will then receive his peace, which this world cannot give.
How do you use music to help the poor?
I take no collections for my performances. I don't charge for concerts. At the end of each one, people can buy the CDs if they want to. The money I raise selling the CDs goes to three places: Croatian Relief Services, the Padre Pio Shelter (run by the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal) and the poor of the parish where I'm singing.
Every parish has its own problems, especially in the inner cities. The entire mission, in essence, is for the poor.
I notice that you play several songs in which Jesus speaks in the first person. Is this a theme you consciously set out to capture?
I select songs of that kind to reassure people how simple his message is to each and every one of us. That he is with us and we should never fear, and that we must love him and love one another. That's the overriding message and concept: He's always with us saying, “Worry for nothing, I am always with you.”
Music is universal. There's something that happens spiritually within us when we hear music.
In the original “Did You Call My Name,” Jesus says, “I will take your pain. Let your burdens be lightened…” When we listen with an open heart, God tells us that we will have crosses to bear, but we should never think we are carrying them alone. He will help us carry our cross.
You also record and perform a fair number of secular songs. How do you select those?
I pray on that a lot. If the song can't convey an obvious message of God's love, I won't record it. When people hear a contemporary song like “You Needed Me” and see that you're interpreting it with Christ as the beloved one, it takes on a whole new dimension. I could easily kneel before the Blessed Sacrament and sing that as a prayer. Or “Let It Be” by the Beatles. Listen to the words — they refer to total surrender: Let go, let God.
I understand your brother Santo writes the music and lyrics for some of your originals.
That's right. One of his compositions is called “St. Joseph.” People were telling him to give St. Joseph some attention. Proportionately to Our Lady, the Lord's foster father does-n't get as much attention. Before my brother composes a song, he prays quite a bit and he refers to Scripture. He writes powerful words. In “St. Joseph,” for example, “Patient Joseph, working father, faithful guardian of our mother/Did the angels tell you it was he who held you?” Santo works these songs with care. It takes him over a month to compose one. When I sing one, people say that song is so anointed.
What advice would you give to aspiring Catholic musicians?
Pray! Bring everything before God and he will provide direction.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Persuasion (1995)
Artful adaptation of Jane Austen's 1818 novel about an upper-class English-woman (Amanda Root) who secretly regrets having rejected an impoverished seaman (Ciaran Hinds) years earlier, just as he is too proud to admit his feelings for her now that he is prosperous and ready to settle down. Director Roger Michell captures the look of the era and its rigid class distinctions while delicately exploring the repressed yearnings of the would-be lovers. Romantic complications and a few accident-related injuries.
Where the Lilies Bloom (1975)
Four sturdy Appalachian children keep the death of their widowed father a secret so the state won't take them away to an orphan's home and provide for themselves out of the profits of “wildcrafting” (collecting and preparing certain herbs and wild flowers prized for their medicinal qualities). The Robert B. Radnitz production directed by William A. G raham tells its story of youngsters learning to care for themselves in the adult world with warm humor and genuine sensitivity for the conditions of life for the rural poor.
Shot on-location in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the film is an uplifting account of survival and unity in the face of a hostile environment. A rare and satisfying entertainment for the entire family.
Sink the Bismarck! (1960)
Stirring dramatization of the 1941 British naval victory over the TITLE German battleship after it slips into the North Atlantic, easily defeats the first British warships encountered, then becomes a sitting duck when its rudder is disabled by a carrier plane's torpedo. Directed by Lewis Gilbert, the sea action is intercut with the personal drama involving the Admiralty's director of operations (Kenneth More) his assistant (Dana Wynter), the officers of the ships following his orders and the Nazi admiral (Karel Stepanek) commanding the “Bismarck.” Wartime violence.
Video reviews from the Office of Film and Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. John Prizer will return next week.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Costly Government Aid?
Q I am a stay-at-home mother. Our family participates in a government-assistance program called WIC (Women, Infants and Children). I am troubled that three different Catholic friends say it's just one more step in the government having control over us. Is it? Also, is it ethically correct because we are not in financial trouble and are getting by?
A This is a great question about a very common concern. There are two overt issues. Will this invite increased government intrusiveness? And are you stealing? There are also two covert issues of possible vanity and pride, which I'll mention later.
Given that we have to pay our taxes (“render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's”), we always hope that there are some legitimate “benefits” that the government should provide for its citizenry: military defense, roads, street lights, police forces, fire departments, schools, social security. We may choose not to avail ourselves of, say, the public schools, in favor of private schools. However, even home schoolers in several states take advantage of the facilities and educational opportunities offered by the public schools.
Regarding any hidden agendas by the government, it seems to me that you are probably not revealing any more “personal business” than you or your frowning friends reveal, with all the details on your income tax returns.
“The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race” (No. 2402). The universal destination of goods is a more fundamental right than even the ownership of private property. So the legitimate use of tax dollars by the government to help those in need is actually an ethical one, giving primordial value to the universal destination of goods (No. 2403).
Are you being asked to compromise your own family's values in return for this government aid? If not, and you receive this legally legitimate aid, then it seems as ethical to accept it as it is for a wealthy person to accept a tax refund.
This is a case of distributive justice which the Catechism says “regulates what the community owes its citizens in proportion to their contributions and needs” (No. 2411). If you can use this legally attained benefit and it helps your family, it is a good thing to accept it.
It already sounds like you have your friends on your back and I don't want to add to the chorus, but an aspect to consider when trying to do the right thing is to be sure that vanity and pride don't misdirect our intentions.
You might possibly be worrying too much about what others think as human respect or vanity will make us prone to do. Or pride might be tempting you not to accept from others because you have to make it on your own, alone. Pride and vanity are always something to watch out for.
Bring issues like this to prayer and spiritual direction and don't hesitate to reach to the top of your bookshelf and blow the dust off of that handbook for life, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, when issues like this pop up.
Art Bennett is the director of Alpha Omega Clinic and Consultation Service.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Costly Government Aid? ----- EXTENDED BODY: Art Bennett ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:A new study shows that Catholic and evangelical-Protestant men may make better fathers than their secular counterparts, if judged by the time they spend with their children in activities or at the dinner table.
Catholic and evangelical men spend:
An average of 27 more family dinners a year than fathers of no religion.
On average spent about 8 hours more a month with their children than fathers of no religion.
Source: Journal of Marriage and Family, August 6, 2002
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Christian Fathers ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Teens and the Keys of the Kingdom DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:After a week of wild cheering, joyful prayer and ardent confession, hundreds of thousands of teens have returned home with a personal challenge from their hero, the Holy Father.
Nevertheless, he who holds the keys of Peter has issued a greater challenge to parents, pastors and youth leaders back home. He inspired faith and hope in the hearts of many thousands of teens. We must now take that spark and help it mature into a holy blaze that will endure. The Holy Father has much to teach us about bridging a generation gap that's wider than differences of fashion, music or hairstyles.
Despite his heavy travel schedule, the international stature of his post and the many heavy personal demands he still meets, John Paul II faithfully portrays the personal charism of evangelization. His prison visit to a would-be assassin, a private dinner with a small number of World Youth day attendants, his visits to the smallest of Catholic dioceses — these efforts are examples of discipleship that inspire the whole Church.
Evangelization requires a personal investment on the part of leaders. This is even more important in work with teens, who seem to have a special gift for recognizing anything less than pure intention. In order to reach out to kids with the fullness of faith and challenge them to live the Christian life, we must first know them — and know them well. We must meet them within the parameters of their own culture, as the Pope has done through World Youth Day. They love him because they know that, like Christ, the Pope has loved them first.
In his message to Rome at the close of the Jubilee year, the Holy Father encouraged the world to understand the individual investment required in order to form authentic Christians. He wrote, “This cannot happen without the deep personal involvement of teachers and those who are taught. But it also means giving this whole process a strongly missionary character that will make Christians willing and able to bear clear witness to their faith in all the circumstances of their lives.”
Karen Cook is the director of religious education and full-time youth minister at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Grove City, Ohio. She knows from personal experience that kids will only see the real love of Christ when youth leaders are willing to work in the kids’ setting. “Initially,” she says, “they just need to experience that love of Christ through the actions of a mature Christian. It may sound controversial, but the only way you can do it is to love them. I call this a ‘ministry of presence.’ How can I lead teens into a relationship with Christ if I'm not in a relationship with them first?”
Once the kids have a personal encounter with Christ through relationships in the Church, they will develop a thirst to know everything. That, according to Cook, is when to begin catechesis. She observes that the usual approach is to put Christ in their heads before putting him in their hearts. “That's why confirmation is ‘graduation,’” she says. “The kids leave and then we don't see them again.”
Where the Teens Are
Traditional youth ministry is sometimes referred to as an “in-reach” program: setting up programs and events at the Church, then ministering to those who show up. The ideals of the New Evangelization demand that we find new ways of reaching those who aren't in contact with the classical means of finding the faith. Like Christ, we have to leave the temple and actively go after souls. Like the Pope, we must initiate “outreach” and go wherever the kids are — the school cafeteria, football games, the mall. “Christ was just there, wherever the people were,” says Cook. “Eventually, they came to seek him out and ask him questions. We really need to stress outreach.”
The personal investment of individuals, however, isn't enough. The Holy Father stresses the need for teens to be part of the Church community in order for youth ministry to bear fruit. “In today's social and cultural context,” he writes, “and given that so many families are unable to provide their children with primary Christian formation, it is our ecclesial communities, beginning with the parishes, that must take up the task of their entire formation, starting with their childhood years and continuing without interruption to their youth, adulthood and old age.”
Jeff Cavins, host of EWTN's youth-outreach show “Life on the Rock,” believes that the Church family is exactly what teens are hungering for. “Teens want to discover who they are in the context of family — family, which is the Church,” says Cavins. Parishes, he adds, need to “put their money where their mouth is.” In other words, we need to invest in full-time youth ministries.
“Youth ministry that incorporates kids into the fabric of parish life must become a normal five-night-per-week deal, incorporating Bible study, recreation and eucharistic devotion,” says Cavins.
Cook agrees that full-time youth ministry is imperative. “There is no such thing as part-time ministry,” she says. “Could you ask Mother Teresa to work on a part-time basis?”
Tradition Transmitted
Finally, youth ministry in the third millennium needs to tap into existing, Church-approved methods of passing on the radical Christian life. Consider some of the most dramatic snapshots of World Youth Day: the Eucharist being celebrated with fervor, the cross carried with joyful enthusiasm, confession lines swelling with penitents. These could have come straight from a history book of the Church's first centuries.
A more recent testimony to living tradition is the success of the Dead Theologians Society at St. Frances de Sales parish in Newark, Ohio. Inspired by the hit 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, the Dead Theologians Society has capitalized on the club mentality that youth find so attractive.
This fast-growing program is teaching parishes all over the world about a “teen-only” environment that fosters a fervent prayer life and a peer-to-peer evangelism born of a faithful witness to Christ. The specific charism of the Dead Theologians Society is to plug into the graces of the Church triumphant, pray for the Church suffering and reap the power of the Church militant. The approach must be working: The society boasts of more than 50 chapters around the world and has been featured twice on “Life on the Rock.”
Co-founders Michael Barone and Eddy Cotter said their success is by virtue of “tapping into a vein that has already existed — something of which the Church approves,” says Barone. “Imagine, these [saints] are all sitting there around God with favors to give us. The Dead Theologians Society is bringing those individual graces to the aid of these kids through the intercession of each saint we study.”
By presenting the truths of the faith in a traditional, uncompromising way, they are bringing the Gospel to a wide spectrum of teens. “They all come, the churched and the unchurched,” says Barone. “We are reaching the black sheep, the drug-gie, the golfer, the goody-two-shoes, the jocks. It's a very interesting family that God is building here.”
One member of that family is high school junior Jenny Lennon, 17. She has participated in St. Francis de Sales’ youth program since she was a freshman. She claims that the combination of Sunday-night Catechism classes after Mass, weekly Bible study and Dead Theologian's Society meetings have given her the impetus to take ownership of her faith. “Teens need someone to push us, to get us out of our cradle Catholic comfort zone,” she says. “Just hanging out with [youth ministers] who are living their faith gives you that push. It gave me a desire to know about God and to draw closer to him. When we're given that kind of challenge, we change our hearts.”
Caroline Schermerhorn writes from Newark, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Caroline Schermerhorn ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: From Park Avenue to Prayer Place DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Was his saying Yes to priesthood the culmination of a late vocation?
It would seem that way, since he graduated from Columbia University with a degree in economics in 1975 and worked several years on Park Avenue and Wall Street with Citibank and Merrill Lynch.
But such an assumption, says Father C. John McCloskey of his own priesthood, would be a mistaken one.
“I assure anyone who asks,” adds Father McCloskey, “that I had already completely dedicated myself to God many years before when I was a teen-ager. My vocation to the priesthood developed out of that commitment.”
Father McCloskey is a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei and he is director of the Catholic Information Center of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. He joined Opus Dei while still in high school; the teaching of its founder, soon-to-be St. Josemaria Escriva, immediately impacted his own formation and subsequent journey of faith.
The Opus Dei Way teaches that sanctification is indeed the work of a lifetime, begun at baptism; that the call to holiness is universal; that no one is exempt; and that, most important, it is not only possible, but imperative that all seek holiness in everyday life, regardless of professional or familial circumstances.
Father McCloskey studied for the priesthood in Rome and Spain, where he received a doctorate in theology with a specialty in Church history. He was ordained a priest in Spain in 1981 by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray.
Over the years, he has done extensive work in radio and television. He has appeared on the major networks and cable-news programs. His articles and reviews have been published in major Catholic and secular newspapers and magazines.
As a priest, he has served within an influential triangular corridor that includes New York City, the nation's capital and Princeton University, home base for a center of Opus Dei.
He also has worked closely with converts, including numerous celebrities. Among those he has welcomed into the Church are former abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson, commentator Lawrence Kudlow, syndicated columnist Robert Novak and Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas.
In that role, he sees himself as a bridge, a conduit, a facilitator. “The Holy Spirit uses me,” he says.
As for the converts — luminaries and little people alike — he experiences the privilege of being present and journeying with them. “It is about a hunger to save their souls,” he says. “It takes a tremendous amount of grace and courage to recognize the truth and then to commit to it.”
A gifted Catholic apologist, Father McCloskey regularly corrects misconceptions, many held by society and some even circulated within the Church. For instance, falsehoods related to Vatican II. “There is a mistaken notion that is fairly widespread in our society that the Second Vatican Council was about the role of the lay Catholic in the Church,” he says. “It was not. It was about the role of the lay Catholic in the world. It was about shaping the secular world according to the will of God in family, professional, social, cultural and political settings.”
He sees Vatican II as a work in progress, a beautiful piece of art that is yet to be completed. “Some theologians distorted the real thing,” he says. “What resulted was a hijacking of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.”
Nevertheless, he points out, a papal artist has been perfecting the Vatican II masterpiece during the 24 years of his pontificate. “It is the mind and vision of Pope John Paul II that will bring to completion the interpretation and implementation of the Second Vatican Council,” he says.
As for dissidents, whose voices continue to clang ever-so-loudly, Father McCloskey predicts that they soon will no longer consider themselves Catholics. “The children of pick-and-choose, cafeteria-style Catholics will no long be members of the Church,” he says. “Either they will become completely faithful, returning to a faithful Catholicism their parents rejected, or they will fade away and disappear.”
As for the current crisis in the Church, Father McCloskey takes comfort in the wisdom of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who once remarked that in the history of the Church “there have been 1,000 Calvarys and 1,000 Easters.”
Conversion, renewal and reform are facts of daily life for the Church and her followers. Father McCloskey is the first to admit that errors have been made in the selection of some men for the priest-hood. He pinpoints the underlying answer and remedy to the problem in a sweeping response to the universal call to holiness. “There has not been enough emphasis on the holiness of the life of a priest,” he says. “Priests are men of prayer, men of sacrifice and men of self-denial. For a priest, seeking holiness is the best means of service to the people entrusted to him.” He points to great priests and saints such as John Vianney and Padre Pio as models for modern-day priests to follow.
Ours is an evolving Church. Such has been the case since the time of the Apostles. Father McCloskey says it took 20 years following the Council of Trent to launch the Catholic Counter Reformation. “Now it has taken us 35 years to get over the crisis after the Second Vatican Council.”
He labels the American Church “the new kid on the block” — “but we are going to get it right here in the United States.” How we will do that, he says, is “by becoming holy, happy people who by the total commitment of our lives give glory to God.”
Winning Hearts
It's clear that his priestly witness is drawing hearts deep into life in Christ.
Donna Bethell of Washington, D.C., an attorney, co-owner of a small business and the chairman of the board of directors of Christendom College, has known Father McCloskey for eight years, since his days at Princeton. She says she continues to be inspired by the priest's no-holds-barred commitment to the Lord. “His single-mindedness is remarkable,” she says. “It is contagious. His joy comes from his love for the Church and his love for God.”
Bethell adds that Father McCloskey seems totally attendant to God's will for him. “I have learned from him how to pay attention to God,” she explains. “The Catholic faith provides the tools. It is important to begin now, this very moment, no matter where we are or what we are doing.”
Christine Creech is completing work on a master's degree in sacred theology with a special emphasis on communications at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. She first met Father McCloskey in June 1998 while walking the streets of the nation's capital with friends.
“He recognized one of my friends,” Creech recalls. “We all started talking and he invited us to an evening of recollection.”
Since that day, Christine says, Father McCloskey has had “a huge” impact on her life. “He's so warm,” she says. “He's like another dad, a spiritual coach. He's also bold when it comes to your spiritual life. He tells you what you need to hear in black and white. If you take his advice, you know what you need to do to deepen your spiritual life.”
A former editor and writer for the Holy Childhood Association, which produces books for children, Creech currently works for the Nurturing Network, which offers multiple services to women experiencing crisis pregnancies.
Father McCloskey is a native of Washington, D.C. He is the oldest of C. John Jr. and Joan McCloskey's eight children. His late father was an economist and a decorated naval officer who served in World War II and the Korean War. He says his parents were “very normal.” Yet, just by faithfully fulfilling their marriage vows and being open to the teaching of the Church, they set a heroic example for their children. “They provided me with my first example,” he says. “I was schooled well. The importance of the sacraments and a solid prayer life were instilled at an early age.”
Father McCloskey lives a balanced life based on spiritual, mental and physical fitness. He is an avid squash player at the University Club in Washington and a member of the U.S. Squash Racquets Association.
As a priest, Father McCloskey champions the virtues of family life, where vocations take seed and where contemplatives — priests, religious and laity — are bred: leaders who are in the world, but not of the world; mature, committed Catholics who joyfully allow God to use them in the transformation of society into a culture conformed to the teaching of the Church.
Wally Carew writes from Medford, Massachusetts. He is the author of Men of Spirit, Men of Sports (Ambassador, 1999).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wally Carew ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Profile Victories DATE: 09/08/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 8-14, 2002 ----- BODY:Healthy Despite Mother's Tumor
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 19 — A Dominican woman has given birth to a normal baby despite having a 16-pound tumor in her uterus, doctors said.
Isabel Santana, gave birth to a 6.8-pound baby boy. Doctors performed a Caesarean section during the birth and also extracted the benign tumor from her uterus, said Dr. Alcibiades Cruz, director of the Soto Gonzalez Clinic in Santo Domingo.
Doctors detected Santana's tumor three years ago and she had been undergoing treatment since then. Six months ago, doctors confirmed her pregnancy.
“We advised the patient to undergo a therapeutic abortion for her own health, but she refused when confronted with the possibility of never being able to have children,” Cruz said.
“The important thing is that I trusted God and my family because without them I would not have been able to do this,” said Santana.
R.I. Pro-Life Center Opens
PROVIDENCE JOURNAL, Aug. 16 — Prolifers have broken ground for a new crisis-pregnancy center that will sit next to an abortion facility in Providence, R.I.
After celebrating a noon Mass at the Holy Ghost Church, pro-lifers marched a few blocks to the vacant lot where the Mother of Life Center will be built. The ceremony drew about 100 church members and pro-life advocates. In addition to offering free counseling and emotional support, the center will have sonogram equipment, a library of pro-life literature and audio-visual sets and meetings to organize pro-life activities.
The fact that the center is being built within feet of an abortion business called Women's Surgical Services is intentional, said Joanne McOsker, head of Catholics for Life and the project chairperson.
Aussie Stay-at-Home Moms
THE AGE, Aug. 17 — Australian Archbishop George Pell has given his support to a government-funded maternity-leave plan and urged that any payments be extended to stay-at-home parents.
Archbishop Pell said the job of parenting was grossly undervalued, adding that the preference of some parents to give up work while their children were young should be supported, not derided. He cited studies showing that 70% of mothers prefer to provide full-time care to their children at home until they go to school.
Australian Embryo Research
AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 21 — Embryos used for stem-cell research would be treated no better than laboratory rats, Cabinet minister Tony Abbott told the Australian Parliament. Abbott spoke during debate on a bill that would allow research on surplus in-vitro fertilization embryos and outlaw human cloning. Urging parliament to either split the bill — to allow a ban on human cloning — or defeat it, Abbot said embryonic stem-cell research would target entities which could not answer back.
He likened the issue to euthanasia, saying deliberately destroying an embryo was akin to giving it a lethal injection.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Pope to Church: Risky Seminarians Must Go DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:ROME — Last spring, in a summit with U.S. cardinals, Pope John Paul II ordered Vatican “apostolic visitations” of U.S. seminaries. Through them, the Holy See would take a look at a key source of clergy sex-abuse problems: the seminaries that train priests.
Now, in a Sept. 5 address to another group of bishops — this time from Brazil — the Holy Father has delivered a powerful signal that one principle in particular should be high on the agenda of any seminary investigation: Sexually disordered men aren't appropriate candidates for priests.
In his Sept. 5 speech at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, John Paul called for greater care in selecting candidates who have the capacity to live celibate lives and the exclusion of anyone with observable “deviations in their affections.”
“It would be lamentable if, out of a misunderstood tolerance, they ordained young men who are immature or have obvious signs of affective deviations that, as is sadly known, could cause serious anomalies in the consciences of the faithful, with evident damage for the whole Church,” the Holy Father said.
The term “affective deviations” is used by priestly formators to describe individuals with disordered sexual orientations — such as homosexuality or ongoing heterosexual activity — that are incompatible with priestly celibacy.
John Paul's comments are directly applicable to the situation in America. While the U.S. bishops have been unanimous in specifying what they want in future priests — healthy, holy men called to and capable of lifelong celibacy — they are clearly divided on the question of whether priestly candidates can possess a homosexual orientation.
The question is central to the sex-abuse cover-up scandal, as the large majority of known incidents are cases not of pedophilia — the sexual abuse of prepubescent children — but molestations of teen-age boys by homosexual priests who have already been active with adults.
“This whole topic is going to be addressed, especially as we go through our efforts to look at priest-ly formation,” said Father Edward Burns, executive director for the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Priestly Formation. “There are some bishops who have identified that they would not accept candidates who possess a homosexual orientation. There are some who take it on a case-by-case basis.”
Bishops are in agreement that no one should be ordained who cannot demonstrate a commitment to celibacy, Father Burns said.
“It is important that any semblance of a gay element of the priesthood would have to be eradicated,” he said.
But previous Vatican statements, like the Holy Father's Castel Gandolfo comments, have indicated that homosexuality as such — not only active homosexual behavior — is incompatible with the priesthood.
A 1961 instruction to the superiors of religious communities on “Careful Selection and Training of Candidates for the States of Perfection and Sacred Orders” states: “Advancement to religious vows and ordination should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and the priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers.”
What Kind of Men?
Bishop John Nienstedt of New Ulm, Minn., who is the newly elected chairman of the priestly formation committee, confirmed that warning, saying that he personally would have “serious reservations” in accepting a seminary candidate who is homosexual.
“I would say in the main that a person with a homosexual orientation would not be a good candidate for seminary life,” he said. “The temptations are too great: You're living in an all-male environment, your closest friends are men. You're putting a person in harm's way.”
Committee member Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Wichita, Kan., said that even without directly asking candidates about homosexuality, seminary rectors and bishops can discern through personal references, psychological testing and observation of moral character whether a sexual problem would present an obstacle to the ordained ministry.
“If they're sexually active we would not accept them. I think a person could be so caught up in the homosexual lifestyle where it would just overcome them, in which case they would not be a good candidate,” he said. “Because I would consider homosexuality to be a disorder, if there is a serious homosexual problem, it would show itself in various ways. I would see it as not being fully mature.”
However, outgoing formation committee chairman Bishop George Niederauer of Salt Lake City cautioned that the issue of selection of candidates relative to avoiding future child sexual abuse is more complicated than simply excluding homosexuals.
“What I don't want is some kind of link between being homosexual and being a molester of minors,” he said. “Eighty to 90% of child sexual abuse is committed by married men or young men who will be married, so child abuse is not a heterosexual or homosexual problem; it is an illness and a disorder.”
Committee member Bishop Daniel Walsh of Santa Rosa, Calif., also questioned any “causal connection” between homosexuality and the abuse cases.
“If these things happened — and most of them happened 20, 30, 40 years ago — these priests were trained under the old system,” he said. “I think we are seeing the effects of the sexual revolution of the ‘60s. Some of them were not prepared for the sexual licentiousness of our society.”
Homosexual Abusers
However, the known data on priestly sex abusers — and on abuse by homosexuals in general — does, in fact, point to a causal connection.
Philip Jenkins, author of Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis, has intensively researched the subject of clergy sex abuse. Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, based much of Pedophiles and Priests, which was written in 1996, on data released by the Archdiocese of Chicago following abuse scandals there in the early 1990s.
Commenting last spring after the current scandal erupted, Jenkins noted that most clergy-abuse cases have involved minor boys who have sexually matured. “The proper word for a man who has sex with a boy of 16 or 17 is homosexuality,” Jenkins said.
Sociological data also indicate that homosexuals as a group are far more prone than heterosexuals to engage in sex with minors.
“Although heterosexuals outnumber homosexuals by a ratio of at least 20 to 1, homosexual pedophiles commit about one-third of the total number of child sex offenses,” said Tim Dailey, a senior fellow for culture studies at the Family Research Council.
Dailey released a report in May detailing the link between homosexuality and abuse of minors and noted that even homosexuals acknowledge the link.
“In The Gay Report, by homosexual researchers Karla Jay and Allen Young, the authors report data showing that 73% of homosexuals surveyed had at some time had sex with boys 16 to 19 years of age or younger,” Dailey said.
The Visitation
Apostolic visitations to all 48 U.S. seminaries were ordered by the Holy Father in April in the specific context of the abuse scandal and confirmed in Article 17 in the bishops’ June charter for the prevention of child sexual abuse by clergy.
The last apostolic visitation, headed by then Bishop John Marshall of Springfield, Mass., began in 1984 and was completed in 1989-90, according to Father Burns of the bishops’ priestly formation committee. As well, voluntary visitations occur each year at the request of individual seminaries.
No information is yet available on when the apostolic visitations will begin or who will compose the teams. Father Burns said Sept. 6 that the bishops are still awaiting a “conversation” to take place between the three bodies that will organize the visitation: the bishops’ conference, the U.S. apostolic nunciature and the Congregation for Catholic Education.
“The bishops are ready for a sense of direction on how to proceed with the apostolic seminary visitations,” Father Burns said.
John Paul's comments Sept. 5 provide them with direction in several key areas. Along with his strong signal not to ordain homosexually oriented candidates “out of a misunderstood sense of tolerance,” he called also for a general renewal of seminaries, including a more careful selection of professors who are holy, well trained theologically and faithful to Church teaching.
He said in some parts of the world seminaries and theology institutes are promoting a “mutilated vision of the Church” and were forgetting “the essential: that the Church is participation in the mystery of Christ incarnate.”
In some cases, the Pope said, legitimate theological efforts to make the Christian message more accessible to modern men and women had not been “duly controlled,” resulting in “compromising the nature of theology and even the content of faith.”
The Holy Father said bishops had a responsibility to watch over their seminarians’ theological studies to ensure quality and sound doctrinal content.
Said John Paul, “The existence in some theological schools and seminaries of poorly prepared professors, [some of whom] are even in disagreement with the Church, causes profound sadness and concern.”
He explained that it is not acceptable to let “those who are formed, to be exposed to the disorders of formators and professors who lack explicit ecclesial communion and clear evidence of seeking holiness.”
Dissent
Some U.S. bishops and many laymen have also expressed concern about the connection between homosexuality and dissent from Church teaching on sexual issues.
“The crucial thing, from my point of view, is they reject the teaching of the Church,” said Dale O'Leary, a Catholic writer who for the past seven years has studied what she and others refer to as same-sex attraction disorder.
“You see so clearly that [men who have sex with men] do not understand what sexuality is. They really do use people as objects,” said O'Leary.
As well, individuals who have identified themselves as “gay” and who believe that they cannot give up homosexual behavior and/or urges may feel a psychological imperative to dispute Church teachings on sexuality, noted the Catholic Medical Association's 2000 statement, “Homosexuality and Hope.”
Said the CMA statement, “Such persons may feel it is futile and hopeless to resist same-sex desires and embrace a ‘gay identity.’ These same persons may then feel oppressed by the fact that society and religion, in particular the Catholic Church, do not accept the expression of these desires in homosexual acts.”
Bishop Nienstedt said someone who identifies himself as “gay” would not be called forward to ordination because his agenda — that a homosexual lifestyle and a heterosexual lifestyle are morally equivalent — would directly contradict what he would be called to proclaim as a Catholic priest.
“In order to be a priest, they're going to have to have a sense of their own person, they're going to have to be happy with the Church's teachings on sexual issues, they will need to enter into a sense of spiritual fatherhood,” said Bishop Olmsted in agreement.
Bishop Nienstedt noted that upcoming apostolic visitations will not be the first occasion for U.S. seminaries to look closely at these concerns.
He said he hopes the visits will also reveal the great progress made in the last 20 years to form and ordain the best and most dedicated priestly candidates.
“I believe that the programs we have in place — the formation programs, seminars, workshops that are being done on chaste celibate living — have been very substantial, and the young men I see being ordained today reflect very well the tradition of the Church,” he said. “They're dedicated, they're disciplined and they're highly motivated to give themselves completely to Christ, their whole being, their sexuality being a part of that.”
A survey released last month by Catholic University of America sociologists Dean Hoge and Jacqueline Wenger gives support to that perspective. TITLEd “Catholic Priests’ Attitudes Toward Celibacy and Homosexuality,” it was based on a sampling of 858 randomly chosen priests from 44 dioceses and 45 religious institutes.
The survey recorded a sharp spike in orthodox views among younger priests. Whereas 73% of priests between ages 56 and 65 supported the statement, “Celibacy should be a matter of personal choice for diocesan priests,” only 33% of those between ages 25 and 35 agreed.
Said Bishop Nienstedt: “If anything, the present seminarians are really the disciples of Pope John Paul II. They're not afraid. They've been inspired by this pontificate. They've been called to a kind of dedication and solid intellectual, spiritual and apostolic formation that he reflects.”
Ellen Rossini writes from Dallas. (Register staff, CNS and Zenit contributed to this report)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: The Family, According to Hollywood DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:AURORA, Colo. — Ann Warner trusted the ratings system used by the Motion Picture Association of America — until this summer.
After seeing four movies in which the main characters had dead parents, Warner said she began to sense a fear among her children whenever leaving them with a sitter that mom and dad would die or fail to come home.
“When it says rated ‘G’ or ‘PG’ it's usually very good about language and sexual content,” says Warner, a Catholic in Aurora, Colo., who has children ages 5, 7 and 9. “What I found this summer, however, is that movies made for children tend to cast parents in a bad light. More often, however, one or both parents are dead, or they are divorced. It started to bother me.”
Tom Delapa, a movie critic and films curator for the Denver Art Museum, says children's movies have long centered on orphans or children from one-parent homes. However, he says only one well-known movie in the past year — Spy Kids II — involves characters who are part of a two-parent, functional, traditional home. Movies about orphaned kids or children of divorce, he says, have become predictable.
“The days of ‘Leave It to Beaver’ and ‘Father Knows Best’ are pretty much over,” says Delapa, a Catholic. “Stories based on those solid families worked at a time when people aspired to that and felt a functional, two-parent family with a thoughtful and kind mother and father was obtainable. Today, mothers work and there is just a lot more stress and strain in society and particularly on families. The culture today is fierce and dangerous, and today's movies reflect that.”
Some of the recent kids movies that feature young characters who have lost parents include Lilo &Stitch; Like Mike; Hey Arnold! The Movie; and Stuart Little II. Delapa says the characters, mostly heroes of some sort, seem to thrive precisely because their parents are out of the way. Calvin, in Like Mike, leads a professional basketball team to victory. Arnold, in Hey Arnold! The Movie, saves his neighborhood from wicked developers. The hero in 2002's biggest hit, Spider-Man, saves the world from all sorts of evil. Last year's blockbuster kids flick, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, featured an orphaned wizard who was proficient at magic.
Delapa says death is an old vehicle for setting up parentless characters in movies. What's more recent, he says, is divorce. Delapa says it's almost assumed that the parents in children's movies, if alive, are divorced.
“This became an almost irresistible movie cliché when E.T. became an enormous hit,” Delapa says. “The kid in E.T. was in the custody of his mother, who was recently divorced. E.T., an alien, became the father figure, friend and Jesus to this child all at once. The Jesus symbolism came at the end, when E.T. died and then came back to life. Using the vehicle of divorce, Spielberg was able to make this alien all things to this kid. It was very appealing to audiences.”
Michael Medved, a nationally syndicated movie and cultural critic who is broadcast on Christian radio stations, says it is true the 2002 summer movies for kids mostly involve characters without normal homes. However, he doesn't think it reflects any sort of sinister intent by Hollywood producers to undermine traditional families. Rather, he says, it's simply good, conflict-oriented story telling.
“No one is more critical of Hollywood for its anti-family movies than I am, but orphaned kids have been a staple of fairy tales and children's stories throughout time,” Medved says. “Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz was raised by Auntie Em; Huck Finn had no mother and his father was a murderous drunk ... Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Pinocchio. This list goes on. Story telling relies on children going through life with no parents, or at best one troubled, over-burdened parent.”
That's true, Delapa says, but the divorced-parent trend of the past 25 years often fails to cast the tragedy of broken families in all its glory. Delapa says divorce is so painful and tragic that it could be used to make good movies better, if the truth were told.
“Look at Mrs. Doubtfire,” Delapa says. “That's just one example of how Hollywood makes light of divorce. It's very painful to children, but in these movies it's all fun and games. Erin Brockovich comes immediately to mind, also. It was just accepted, without explanation, that the mother is divorced and this is a perfectly natural state of being that causes little pain to the children involved.”
“The movies tell kids that divorce isn't so bad, and that if I have an intact family with two parents who love each other my life is probably boring. It is nice to see people meet the challenge of writing fully functional families into plots, such as in Spy Kids II, where you not only have a good family with two loving parents, but the parents and kids are all involved in the same endeavor — spying. It's refreshing.”
Medved says it's true that children might get the idea that coming from a family with two loving parents is boring, based on the movies. Which is precisely why, he says, Hollywood typically avoids making movies about functional families.
“As good parents — and I have three children — we want what are essentially boring, safe and predictable lives for our kids,” Medved says. “It is the job of two protective parents to protect children from danger and thrills. Therefore, an accurate movie about children with two loving parents would feature children who are protected from that which is dangerous and thrilling, and that doesn't make a very good story. Obviously there are exceptions, and Spy Kids II is one of them.”
David Walsh, founder and executive director of the National Institute on Media and the Family, in Minneapolis, says Hollywood may want to re-examine the clichéd theme of bold child characters without parents. In the wake of Sept. 11, Walsh told the Dallas Morning News, children are less secure than they've been in the past about fears of losing their parents.
“One of the functions of fairy tales and children's stories is that they provide opportunities for kids to explore feelings within relative security,” Walsh said. “Now we have a situation where kids are not as secure as they were prior to 9-11. There's a difference between a story that is going to help a kid vicariously deal with the feelings to one that will open up a wound. I hear about kids who don't want their parents to travel because they hear all the stories about the children in New York who lost their parents.”
Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wayne Laugesen ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Catholics Find Hope After 9-11 DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — A fire chief. A firefighter's widow. A concrete and excavation specialist. Tourists.
These are the people who pass unnoticed on New York's streets — and they are the ones whose moving words perhaps best describe how the Catholic faith brought hope out of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
They were among the 500 people gathered at Old St. Peter's Church at a Sept. 8 service that kicked off a week of memorials in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The church is located one block from the site known as Ground Zero, where hijacked planes leveled the Twin Towers on a day when terrorists killed thousands of Americans.
Father Richard Veras summed up what could be called the Catholic meaning of Sept. 11.
“In this place of death, we find a proclamation of life,” said the New York chaplain of Communion and Liberation, the ecclesial movement that sponsored the event. “There is no terror so terrible that it is greater than the love and the mercy of Christ.”
With Scripture reflection, song and testimony, that proclamation was shared with those who gathered together — not just parishioners and out-of-town Catholics, but also non-Catholics and nonbelievers who were attracted by the music as well as tourists who sauntered in and out.
They heard the words of Jean Palombo, who thanked God for the 19 years of married life she had with her husband, Frank, and for the 10 children Frank left behind.
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Frank, a New York firefighter, had helped her get their 10 children into the van and off to school. Jean told him how much easier the morning went with his help. He said he would always help her.
“God allowed him to speak the truth that day,” Jean Palombo says. Frank, she says, is “stronger now than he ever was.”
God's House
Those gathered also heard the words of Frank Silecchia. A burly concrete and excavation specialist, he was working last September with the fire department in the rescue and recovery effort. They had found three bodies on the night of Sept. 12 and as dawn broke the next day, Silecchia looked up and saw the steel beams standing amid the rubble and remains, forming perfect crosses.
It is believed the crosses were steel beams that came from the north tower and collapsed into Building 6 of the World Financial Center, destroying much of the center of it.
At the Sept. 8 memorial service, Silecchia said the crosses told the faith meaning of the tragedy.
“The message is that our faith will overcome this terrorism,” he said. “Terrorism won't win this. Faith is stronger. Terrorism started a war; our faith is going to beat it.”
Last year, Silecchia says, he dropped to his knees, fell silent and wept for about 20 minutes on the morning of Sept. 13 when he discovered the crosses. He marked the site by spray-painting on a nearby wall the words “God's House.”
On his Web site, www.wtcgodshouse.com, Silecchia says: “It was as if — in that given moment — God had spoken to my heart and showed me that everything somehow was going to be all right.”
Even a year after his discovery, the man whom one columnist called a “gentle giant” left the lectern in tears after talking about the cross.
The biggest of several crosses found in the ruins remains at the Ground Zero site — the most prominent sign of the disaster in a site where most evidence of the destroyed buildings has been covered over.
Another of the crosses has been moved to Graymoor — run by the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement — a 10-foot steel cross. As the Register goes to press, a Sept. 11 service by the cross is planned at the Garrison, N.Y., retreat and rehabilitation center.
Jesus in New York
Annie Ross, a parishioner of St. Peter's, says the Communion and Liberation service was just what her neighborhood needed. In the midst of all the 9-11 anniversary events, “it gives it all more meaning.” Of the cross, she says, “I see that Ground Zero over there as a cemetery. With that cross, Christ was giving the victims their last rites.”
One out-of-towner from California, Susan Jane Kent, said hearing of Silecchia's discovery made her realize where the World Trade Center once stood “is sacred ground. Before coming here I just thought about how sad it all is, which it is. But now I realize that Jesus is with us — and here in New York.”
Marie Francine, another Californian, says the whole city has been transformed by the attack and its aftermath. “It's a slower pace. People have the time to think about being nice. And they are,” she says. “I even want to move here if I can.”
It was fitting that Pope John Paul II's address from Rome last Sept. 12 was read during the Communion and Liberation memorial service. In his address, the Holy Father said, “Faith comes to our aid at these times when words seem to fail. Christ's word is the only one that can give a response to the questions which trouble our spirit.”
“Even if the forces of darkness appear to prevail,” he said, “those who believe in God know that evil and death do not have the final say. Christian hope is based on this truth; at this time our prayerful trust draws strength from it.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online and an associate editor of National Review magazine.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Priest Cancels Wedding Over Bride's Abortion Ties DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:MEDICINE HAT, Alberta — “My wedding is ruined,” says Celina Ling, a Canadian Planned Parenthood employee in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
In fact, Ling has been complaining to newspapers, radio and television shows across Canada since her parish priest, Father John Maes, canceled her Church wedding on three weeks’ notice after he learned she was working for a Canadian affiliate of Planned Parenthood, the world's largest abortion provider.
But pro-life Catholics across North America are applauding Father Maes and Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary, who has offered unequivocal support for his priest's decision.
Father Maes had agreed to preside at the marriage of Ling and fiancé Robert Symmonds on Sept. 21, but that was before he read an Aug. 21 Medicine Hat News story. It quoted Ling, identified as a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman, complaining that local “anti-choicers” were spreading misinformation about Planned Parenthood. He immediately told her that he could not perform the wedding since her beliefs were in conflict with the Church.
Ling will now be married by a civil official at the wedding reception hall. She said she told Father Maes last fall that she worked for Planned Parenthood and he “didn't react at all. He didn't say a word.”
Ling said the Church is hypocritical, because if she had just kept her mouth shut, she could have had a Church wedding. “This is about equality,” she insisted.
In support of her position, Ling also cited a poll by the anti-Catholic, U.S.-based pro-abortion lobby Catholics for a Free Choice that 76% of Catholics are pro-choice and “about 95% of Catholics use birth control. Are we going to kick all of them out, too?” Ling said.
Catholics for a Free Choice has accepted funding from pornographer Hugh Hefner's Playboy Foundation and several other private foundations that attack Church teachings on sexual issues. It has been repeatedly condemned by the U.S. bishops for misrepresenting itself as an authentically Catholic group.
In a statement released in late August, Father Maes said, “I have no recollection that during the interview, Celina Ling stated that she was employed by Planned Parenthood.” When he did learn of her employment with the abortion group, he had to “discharge my duty to the Church,” quoting the Vatican's Declaration on Abortion: “One can never claim freedom of opinion as a pretext for attacking the rights of others, most especially the right to life.”
Bishop Henry
Father Maes’ superior, Bishop Henry of the Calgary Diocese, put it more strongly. “I believe she has incurred automatic excommunication under Canon 1398 of the Code of Canon Law for direct and formal cooperation in abortion,” he said.
While Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the world, its Canadian affiliates do not perform abortions. However, they routinely refer women for abortions and provide counseling on contraception.
Would referring for abortion incur excommunication? “I think it would,” said Bishop Henry. “You become an accomplice in abortion if you refer women to abortion clinics.” He added that he needs to investigate more deeply before giving a definitive ruling, but noted that at the very least Ling is unrepentant about her involvement with abortion and is causing scandal by publicly witnessing to her support for abortion.
Bishop Henry stressed that one cannot pick and choose what to believe in the Catholic Church. “People have this idea that nobody is supposed to judge them, that they can do whatever they think is right,” he said. “Nobody is supposed to throw stones according to the parable of the woman found in adultery. What they ignore is that Jesus said [to the woman], ‘Go and sin no more.’”
Bishop Henry does not shy away from controversy or media criticism when it comes to pro-life issues. Last year he publicly criticized national Progressive Conservative leader and former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark for campaigning as a “pro-choice Catholic.” He cautioned the politician, who represents an area within the Calgary Diocese, that he may not receive the sacraments and if he died would probably not be buried from the cathedral unless he recanted his support for abortion.
Ed Szymkowiak, national director of Stop Planned Parenthood (STOPP), a division of American Life League, said he is thrilled with Father Maes’ and Bishop Henry's stand. In fact, he wrote to the priest thanking him for upholding the truth.
Szymkowiak said it is the bishop's role to teach and discipline and suggested more bishops should follow Bishop Henry's lead in instructing pro-abortion Catholics. “This young woman should realize that they are concerned for her eternal salvation,” he said.
Bishop Bruskewitz
One American bishop who did take a similar stand is Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb. In 1996, Bishop Bruskewitz issued a canonical warning to Catholics belonging to Planned Parenthood, Call to Action and several other groups that advocate policies in direct contradiction to Church teachings. Father Matthew Eickhoff, director of the Family Life Office for the Diocese of Lincoln, said the bishop gave people two months to leave the groups or be excommunicated.
Father Eickhoff said some people did return to the Church and received confession and Communion. He does not believe any individual was formally excommunicated, although some may have incurred the latae sententiae, or automatic excommunication Canon 1398 specifies for those directly involved in abortion.
As well as its effect on individuals involved with the groups that promote dissent, Bishop Bruskewitz's warning had the effect of telling all Catholics in the diocese that the Church takes its teachings seriously and that one cannot flout them without penalty. STOPP's Szymkowiak said the Lincoln Diocese has been rewarded with many candidates for vocations as a result of the strong public support for Church teachings.
Celina Ling admits that she disagrees with many Church teachings, but says she was born and raised a Catholic and has always dreamed of a Church wedding. “Everything I do in my everyday life makes me a Catholic,” she said.
However, she lives with her boyfriend, who is not Catholic, and supports abortion and contraception. She does not attend Mass every Sunday — another grave sin — but said she goes “frequently,” even though members of the parish say they do not know her or her family.
And during the required marriage preparation course, which includes Church teaching on sexuality, she never raised an objection or expressed her own opinions on abortion, contraception or premarital sex.
Priest Applauded
Ling said many Catholics have told her they agree with her and will leave the Church over her treatment on this issue.
That hasn't been the message that everyday Catholics are delivering to Father Maes or Bishop Henry. The bishop said calls are running 20 to 1 in his favor from Catholics and non-Catholics across North America.
As for Father Maes, at a Sunday Mass after the media frenzy about Ling's complaints over the cancellation of her wedding, he preached that Church teaching cannot be fudged or compromised. The parishioners, who had packed St. Patrick's Church, gave him a standing ovation.
Joanne Byfield writes from Edmonton, Alberta.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joanne Byfield ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Souls Who Fight and Die DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:When the planes hit the World Trade Center last year, the U.S. aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy was dispatched from training exercises to protect the Eastern seaboard of the United States.
Now back in port after participating in Operation Enduring Freedom, her crew would be ready if called into action in the event of a war with Iraq, said Father David Mudd, who has been its Catholic chaplain for the past two and a half years.
Father Mudd, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, spoke to Register staff writer John Burger about life at sea and how he became a military chaplain.
How long have you been on the JFK?
I'm finishing a two-and-a-half-year stint. Sea duty is considered arduous duty, so it's shorter, usually two years, but since we were deployed [in Operation Enduring Freedom], it was an extra six months. Living conditions are difficult. It's a harsh environment with not many creature comforts. The work of keeping an aircraft carrier going is so consuming. There's a crew of about 3,000, just to keep it afloat and operating. Then there are another 2,200 in the air wing — the pilots who fly the fighter jets and the maintenance crew. So you're trying to minister to all that many people on a nonstop schedule.
The chaplain spends a lot of time listening to the crew. They are very young; most of the population is under 21. Some are married; some are in relationships. Some have family problems that have never been resolved. On board, we receive messages in our office from the American Red Cross and the Navy ombudsman about deaths in the family, accidents, illnesses, children who are sick, money problems, which is often the case. We get 10 to 15 a day. Very often we work together with their chief, the people they work for in their department, to break bad news. It involves a lot of time counseling, helping them deal with a situation, putting them in contact with other agencies that can help them. Then they have to get back to work. You're stuck on a ship, although in an emergency, like the death of a very close family member, they can get permission to go home.
What has it been like on board the JFK since Sept. 11, 2001?
We were sitting in port in Mayport, Fla., early that morning, getting under way. We were going out, doing some of our workups for deployment. We were supposed to go down to the Caribbean for training. A half hour out, we heard about the first attack. We all watched it on television with a sense of disbelief and horror to see what was happening. Immediately, we were put on mission to guard the East Coast. For the first two or three days we were on high alert. We were also preparing to go into battle, maybe even right off our own coast. It was a very tense time.
Chaplains rotate offering an evening prayer from the captain's bridge every night. There were very sincere, heartfelt prayers for the victims of the attacks, especially those in the Pentagon, but also New York was very dear to us because we had visited there during the International Naval Review in July 2000 and Fleet Week in May 2001. We remembered the firemen and police officers who'd come on board. So it was a very emotional time. The captain got on [the P.A. system] and helped us focus on our mission: to protect and defend our nation, to go into war and into harm's way if need be. He called us to an intense preparedness for war.
We were deployed to Operation Enduring Freedom for six and a half months, which included three to four months [in the North Arabian Sea] near Afghanistan.
In counseling people, the events of Sept. 11 have made it very clear that military service is greatly needed. Among the crew, there's not a lot of hesitancy. It's clear we need to meet the mission and do it completely. For our six-and-a-half-month deployment we didn't lose anyone in combat. The pilots were always at risk. From the sea to Afghanistan, it's a long distance. But they knew the risks and performed superbly.
We had a lot of personal exchange with the pilots — how they felt. They didn't always drop ordnance. But to take out al Qaeda was very meaningful to them: That's their job, to fly a fighter jet and be able to knock out an enemy who is a threat to us. We saw what they're capable of on Sept. 11. Hopefully, we're preventing another similar event. Pilots aren't out to kill. This is what they do. They were not targeting highly populated areas; it was going to the caves where [al Qaeda forces] were hiding.
How do you and some of the sailors feel about prospects of war with Iraq and of possibly being deployed to that region now?
We just came back so we need down time. There's not much talk about Iraq. We'll be in port for a year. There's a lot of work that needs to be done on a ship that's been on a difficult and dangerous deployment. We'll help the air wing stay qualified, flying off the Atlantic coast. But if this other thing develops, we'll be ready, no doubt.
And yourself?
I'll be transferred to Naval Station Charleston [South Carolina], which is a weapons station. It also houses the Nuclear Power School for the Navy. I thought of trying to get an assignment in Europe or something, but they gave me a choice: “You can go to Charleston, Charleston or Charleston.”
It's probably a much quieter assignment, working at the base. I'll be the only Catholic chaplain there. There was a gap for a year; they couldn't fill the position. It's a lovely area. I'll say my first Mass in the chapel there Oct. 6. I have to build a CCD program and RCIA. They haven't had Mass for a year. It's very satisfying [knowing you are filling a need]. You certainly feel needed by the military people, and they make you feel very wanted as well.
What was it like growing up?
I was born in Washington, D.C., right in the city and grew up with a family with five boys and one girl. There was a lot of family on my mother's side. My father was an orphan and was never adopted, so there was no family on that side. We moved to Silver Spring, Md., and I went to Catholic grade school and later Gonzaga High School in the city. It was a fairly important school.
I attended Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Md., for a year, and then continued studies at local colleges. Eventually I applied to the seminary and was sent to the Pontifical College Josephinum in Worthington, Ohio, where I did philosophy.
They I went back to Mount St. Mary, where I studied theology. I was ordained in 1980.
My father was not Catholic, though he was supportive of us. When we were young he often attended Mass. He was very supportive of us going to Catholic grade school and high school. It was a very good Catholic family. My mother's side was Italian background, which was obviously Catholic, and a very large extended family.
What led you into the service as a chaplain?
After 11 years of ministry, I took sabbatical studies at Catholic University. It was during the Gulf War, and I got involved with dozens of people who worked in private industry and were reservists who were called to active duty and sent to the gulf area. I could see the tremendous sacrifices they had to make.
I was watching the news on CNN one day and a priest was on, saying, “We have all these Catholics and don't have sufficient Catholic chaplains.” I didn't even know it was a problem. So I met first with Msgr. Jack Benson, a retired Army chaplain with whom I served at Our Lady of Victory Church in Washington, D.C. Jack was a great priest and friend, and I said to him, “It may sound strange, but I am willing to help and serve as a military chaplain.” Jack said, “I think you would do well as a chaplain, and the need is great.”
I met with Cardinal [James] Hickey [then archbishop of Washington], and said to him, “I would like to serve as a chaplain in the Gulf War.” He said, “Okay, let's try it.” I went on active duty in 1991 and got a three-year extension in 1994. I had to ask the cardinal for another extension, and when that ended I came back, supposedly to work in the archdiocese forever, but again I drifted toward helping the military in the D.C. area.
When Cardinal Hickey was retiring, he asked if I'd like to return to the military. I said Yes and that the need is greater now than it was before, that we're really short on priests on active duty. So he gave me permission, and Cardinal [Theodore] McCarrick just gave me another three years.
How has it been?
All my assignments have been very demanding positions. But it's an extraordinary experience to serve with and for our great service people. I've had the good fortune of working with the Army, the Navy and the Coast Guard.
Tell me about some of your most interesting experiences.
When I was with the Army, I served in the 2nd Infantry Division, 3rd Brigade, in South Korea. I was the only chaplain in a rather large area, the Western Corridor, just south of the demilitarized zone. I got great support from the Army; I had a driver and a Humvee. We went every Sunday to six — sometimes eight — field sites for Mass and confessions, sometimes during the week, too. These were in some of most remote places in South Korea — it was really beautiful.
I celebrated a Christmas Eve Mass at the Joint Security area near the DMZ. You had to drive through with no headlamps at night so as not to alert the enemy on the other side.
It was called the demilitarized zone, but it was highly militarized. Five or six soldiers attended the Mass. They didn't have any Christmas decorations. You could just feel the spirituality, the presence of God, the appreciation of the soldiers — they had nothing for Christmas but this. It was their way to connect to Christmas; it was important for them that a priest came. They realized I had to make a special trip. I could have scheduled it for a weekday; in the military, every day is Christmas, every day is Sunday. If we say it's Sunday it's Sunday. It's when the chaplain gets there.
We worked with hundreds of Korean orphans who were handicapped, physically and mentally. The command made it a priority to visit them, to hold parties and social events.
I also had a two-month assignment with the U.N. Protective Force in Croatia at a MASH [mobile army surgical hospital] in the winter of 1993. It was one of the last they had before changing the MASH name. So it was neat to do the Father Mulcahy thing in Zagreb. We would provide medical service to 25,000 U.N. forces: French, British, African, Polish.
A Russian soldier was brought in one day. We still weren't on great terms with Russians at that point. He'd been shot in the abdomen and was unconscious. I attended the daily medical briefs with the nurses and doctors. For two or three days it sounded like he was really failing. I assumed that since he was Russian he might be a Christian, an Orthodox, so I asked the commanding officer if it was okay to offer him the last rites. He said, “By all means.” The soldier was scheduled for a blood transfusion the next day, but eventually he got out of the hospital and returned home. I felt at the time, “Here is a Russian soldier in a U.S. hospital, with no family; none of his people are with him.” I assumed he was a Christian and that the grace of the sacrament would help him and heal him in mind, body and soul, and it did.
How did you discover your vocation to the priesthood?
I guess it was over many years. They did vocation talks [in grade school], and we went on retreats in seventh and eighth grades. The idea was planted. I was working and going to school but always involved in parish and community service. It seemed that's where I was drawn. Several good priests influenced me in a positive way, so I thought maybe I should just try the seminary.
The priests in our parish, St. Camillus in Silver Spring, were almost all very fine priests — dedicated and personable. They came to social events and family gatherings, and they were approachable. They were men of good character who were focused on that assignment, not seeing it as a stepping-stone to another assignment. You could tell the difference. You could really depend on them to be there when there was a death in the family or some other tragedy. They were there to assist everyone. They did what they could to involve everybody in the life of the parish.
Once I got to Josephinum everything just felt right. The spiritual direction and the academics were good, as was the pastoral education. At that time the seminary had a very good focus on being a complete person. We were there to serve the Lord as priests.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Mud ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson ----- TITLE: Catholic League Fights to Purge 'Anti-Catholic' Link From DNC Web Site DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Committee (DNC) categorically lists organizations of interest to its supporters on its Web site. But until recently, the sole group listed under the “Catholic” category was one that Catholic League President William Donohue calls “patently anti-Catholic.”
The link is to the Web site of Catholics for a Free Choice , a pro-abortion lobby that has been condemned by the U.S. bishops as a “rejection and distortion of Catholic teaching.”
Despite protests over the summer from Donohue to the DNC, the link is still there, and the Catholic League — which launched a formal campaign against the DNC on Aug. 26 calling for an end to the committee's association with Catholics for a Free Choice — is receiving support from several Democratic Congressmen to do something about it.
A letter from Donohue to DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe on July 31 asking him to “act quickly and decisively by removing Catholics for a Free Choice from the DNC's links of interest organizations” went unanswered.
Neither party, Donohue said, should associate itself with an organization that discriminates or shows prejudice against a particular religion. He compared the listing of Catholics for a Free Choice under the Catholic section to listing the group Jews for Jesus under the Jewish-American section.
He found support for his position within the Democratic Party after sending a letter on Aug. 6 to every Democrat in the Senate and the House urging their assistance.
A staff member of Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., contacted the Catholic League at the end of August and pledged to make its complaint a priority.
Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., informed Donohue on Sept. 4 that he also had written to McAuliffe asking him to respond to the league's concerns.
“It's an outrage that the DNC would associate itself with someone like Frances Kissling,” Donohue said. Kissling, a former abortion clinic director, is the president of Catholics for a Free Choice. By including Catholics for a Free Choice, Donohue said, the DNC is giving its “tacit endorsement” to an anti-Catholic organization.
But Bill Buck, spokesman for the DNC, said Catholics for a Free Choice was chosen strictly for its pro-abortion stance. “The Democratic Party platform is pro-choice and this is a group that, from what I saw on its Web site, is very focused on a number of women's issues,” he said. Catholics for a Free Choice is also listed under the “Pro-Choice” category on the DNC site.
Buck said that in his perusal of the Catholics for a Free Choice site he saw no indication that the group was anti-Catholic. “That is not their stated policy,” he said.
According to Donohue, the issue is not whether Catholics for a Free Choice is pro-life or pro-abortion. “I'm not opposed to the DNC listing pro-choice organizations,” he said. “But Frances Kissling has said, quite explicitly ... that it is her goal to overthrow the Catholic Church.”
Kissling has also lobbied to revoke the Holy See's Permanent Observer status at the United Nations, Donohue noted. “To forge an alliance with such a group is a slap in the face of all Catholics,” Donohue said.
Buck called the complaint from Donohue, and from various Republicans, “typical politics.”
Pro-Life Dems?
In recent years, the Democratic Party has become ever more synonymous with pro-abortion. Robert Casey Jr., one of the few prominent pro-life Democrats and an experienced political veteran — his late father was the popular, pro-life governor of Pennsylvania from 1987-1994 — was soundly defeated in the Pennsylvania Democratic gubernatorial primary in May, following a strong campaign against him by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.
Commenting on Casey's defeat, pro-life Washington journalist Robert Novak remarked, “Henceforth, no practical Democratic politician will seek statewide office in urbanized states as a true foe of abortion.”
After Donohue's initial complaint, the DNC added another link in the Catholic category to Catholic-USA.com, a compilation of official and/or endorsed Catholic sites. Kissling's pro-abortion lobby is not one of them, which Donohue cites as evidence that it is not a Catholic group.
Buck said the addition of the link is not related to the complaint. “We're always looking for more groups to add,” he said.
Donohue plans to continue his fight on the issue. The Catholic League has reserved quarter-page advertisements in major newspapers for four consecutive weeks beginning Sept. 15 that will detail the DNC's association with Kissling and urge Catholics to contact the DNC.
“I have to convince people that this is not an abortion issue; this speaks more to the heart and mission of the Catholic League,” Donohue said. “This has an odor to it. This is bigotry.”
Dana Wind writes from Raleigh, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Wind ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Crisis vs. Goodbye, Good Men
CRISIS, September 2002 — Another Catholic publication has reported on research flaws in Michael Rose's book, Goodbye, Good Men. The book reports on abuses in American seminaries that have allegedly made them homosexual friendly, while driving away many heterosexual candidates.
The monthly journal cites earlier articles in Culture Wars, Our Sunday Visitor, and the Register which found flaws in Rose's book, noting that all three publications shared the book's concern about the harm caused by tolerating active homosexuals in seminaries.
In “A Question of Integrity: Michael Rose and the American College of Louvain,” Crisis senior editor Brian Saint-Paul examines Goodbye, Good Men's claims about the American-run seminary in Belgium. Largely on the basis of the uncorroborated testimony of a single disgruntled ex-seminarian, Rose reported that a homosexual subculture dominated the American College, said the article, and that seminary officials had persecuted the seminarian for complaining about a classmate's homosexual advances.
Wrote Saint-Paul: “In the case of Louvain, Rose made very serious accusations against the seminary and its former rector. He based all his charges on the claims of one person. He never called the seminary, the rector, or any of the other principals involved.
“In short, Rose failed to do his research, and that failure has cast suspicion on his entire book. Undoubtedly, many of the stories in Goodbye, Good Men are true. But which ones? How can we trust and promote a book so grievously flawed in some sections, even if the central thesis is one we believe to be true?”
The Love That Dare Not Shut Its Mouth
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sept. 1 — The New York Times made a sort of history last weekend by printing its first announcement of a “same-sex civil commitment ceremony” between two men.
Daniel Gross, 32, a Fulbright scholar, “joined” Steven Goldstein, 40, the founder of a public relations company, in a Jewish ceremony at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Montreal.
The announcement of the ceremony ran with a photo of the two gentlemen in the newly renamed “Weddings/Celebrations” feature last Sunday. “Ten years ago, none of this would have been possible,” Goldstein said. “Dreams do come true.”
Pro-Abortion Pol Gets Picketed at Mass
DETROIT FREE PRESS, Sept. 2 — Michigan attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jennifer Granholm is vocally in favor of legal abortion — and a parishioner at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Plymouth, Mich.
Pro-lifers who heard about this piece of ecclesiastical irony began to picket the parish months ago, with graphic signs presenting the results of legal abortion. Protestor Suzanne Housey, 24, of Ann Arbor, Mich., told the Detroit Free Press: “Jennifer Granholm running as a pro-choice Catholic is inconsistent with the teachings of the Church.”
Some 20 protestors appeared this past Sunday, as they have every week throughout the campaign. “The Church has never said anything regarding Granholm, and they should condemn her position,” said Robert Klucik, 35, also of Ann Arbor.
Other protestors made this point outside the home and cathedral of Cardinal Adam Maida, the Detroit prelate.
By way of precedent, picketers pointed to the California case of former state Sen. Lucy Killea, who was denied the sacraments by order of her bishop for her pro-abortion activities.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Air Force Captain Sues Military to Clear His Record DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — U.S. Air Force Capt. Ryan Berry filed suit against the Air Force on Aug. 29 to end reprisals he received for seeking an accommodation for his Catholic religious beliefs, allowing him to avoid extended duty in close quarters with a woman soldier.
The suit asks the U.S. District Court to order the Air Force to expunge its records, including its official Web sites, of allegedly false and negative statements entered there in retaliation for his “constitutionally-protected requests for accommodation of his religious exercise.”
Berry is not requesting that he be returned to his former missile alert duties but rather is seeking to clear his record. His previous efforts were rejected by various review boards, leading no remaining alternative but to file suit in federal court.
“This suit is not about whether Ryan Berry is enTITLEd to an accommodation. It is about whether he should be punished just for asking,” said his attorney, Christine Lockhart of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is handling the case.
The Defense Department did not return calls for comment.
The Case
After graduating with honors from West Point in 1996, Berry was trained in operation of Minuteman II missiles and assigned to duty at the 740th Missile Squadron at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.
During a missile alert, two officers typically spend 24 to 48 hours together in a small underground bunker where the launch system instrumentation is separated from a bunk and toilet by a small curtain.
When informed that he might be assigned with female officers, Berry consulted with the Catholic chaplain at the base about religious concerns.
Berry, who is married with several children, believes he is required by his Catholic faith to avoid situations in which he might “develop inappropriate intimacy — even platonic — with a woman who is not his wife.”
The request was based on Department of Defense policy as set forth in Department of Defense Directive 1300.17, which states:
“It is DOD policy that requests for accommodation of religious practices should be approved by commanders when accommodation will not have an adverse impact on military readiness, unit cohesion or standards of discipline.”
Three successive squadron commanders granted Berry such an accommodation. However, after being transferred to a new unit in April 1998, his new commander, Lt. Col. Leslie Brockman, granted the accommodation with an exception disallowing it where “militarily necessary.”
Berry agreed, clarifying with his commander that “military necessity” would be a circumstance where a missile officer was called to replace a crew member who became ill during the course of an alert and asked to finish the alert with a female crew member.
A few months later, Lt. Col. David Blalock became Berry's commander and agreed to the accommodation with the same exception.
But on Dec. 8, 1998, Col. Stephen Cullen, Blalock's superior officer, notified Berry in writing that he had discontinued the accommodation. Cullen stated:
“Previous accommodation of your religious practice, or not serving with a female missile crew member, has had an adverse impact on good order, discipline and morale of the group. I have determined that there will not be any future accommodation of this religious practice.”
The next day, Berry notified Blalock of this PDI, or “potentially disqualifying information,” which was his duty as a serviceman, thereby giving notice that he might not be able to comply with orders that conflicted with his religious beliefs.
Blalock immediately suspended Berry from his missile alert duties. On Jan. 8, 1999, Blalock permanently decertified Berry from the program.
'Talented Officer'
The following month, Berry received his Officer Performance Report from Dec. 30, 1997, to Jan. 31, 1999. In the report, 1st Lt. Peter Bonetti said Berry “flawlessly handles programs that are key to wing's nuclear surety program — keeps our mission on track. Heap it on him — he can handle it. Talented officer, boundless potential; will succeed in whatever he does.”
Capt. Dewitt Morgan concurred: “One of my best ... Logical thinker, poised performer. ... Loaded with potential.”
Col. Ronald Haeckel, however, disagreed with Berry's exemplary review and included the a statement is his Referral of Officer Performance Report:
“I find your unwillingness to perform prescribed ICBM alert duties with fully qualified female officers as unprofessional,” Haeckel stated. “You have failed to accept personal responsibilities of an ICBM missile combat crew member and that of an officer in the United States Air Force.”
But Becket Fund attorney Lockhart said that allegation is false. “There has never been a time when Capt. Berry has refused service with a woman,” Lockhart said.
Catholic military leaders have come to Berry's defense.
The Air Force had claimed the chaplain community believed that “Berry's position was based on his personal understanding of the biblical directives and not based on Catholic doctrine.”
But Archbishop Edwin O'Brien, archbishop of military services, disagreed.
In a June 23, 1999, letter to Berry's commanding general, Archbishop O'Brien wrote: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
The late Cardinal John O'Connor also defended Berry.
“I can't believe this typifies the armed forces in which I spent 27 years of my life as a priest; 27 wonderfully fruitful years with the United States Navy and Marine Corps. There's something awry,” Cardinal O'Connor wrote. “But because of Lt. Berry's moral integrity and fidelity to Catholic teaching, his career is now at risk?”
In contrast, feminist groups are defending the military's position.
“Historically, opponents of women's equality have justified excluding women from areas traditionally reserved for men with an appeal to men's inability to control their sexual impulses. Women have been portrayed as ‘too tempting to have around,’” said Galen Sherwin, president of the National Organization for Women's New York City chapter.
“The attitude of ‘woman as temptress’ has strong roots in Catholic teaching, so in that respect, it is not surprising to hear a Catholic leader voice these views,” she said.
But Elaine Donnelly, president of the Michigan-based Center for Military Readiness, said the military would have to prove why Berry was punished if, as it seems, he didn't disobey any orders.
Donnelly also noted that the restricted size of the underground bunker's conditions closely resembles that of a submarine. Last year, the Navy had considered allowing women to serve on submarines, but rejected the idea because of the potential difficulties.
Said Donnelly: “The Navy fortunately made the right decision on that one by not permitting women in submarines.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Minneapolis.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Liturgical Music After Vatican II: A View of the State of Affairs DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:ASSISI, Italy — Post-Vatican II reform opened great possibilities for composers “so long as they enter into the spirit of the rite,” says the director of the Sistine Chapel Choir.
For the past 10 years Msgr. Giuseppe Liberto has been the official composer of the national Liturgical Week, which was held in Assisi at the end of August. In the following Zenit interview, he evaluates the liturgical evolution since the Second Vatican Council.
Next year the liturgical reform will be 40 years old. How do you evaluate it, from the musical point of view?
Not everything has been valid, and not everything should be despised. Perhaps we should follow the advice of the parable of the wheat and the darnel. Let them grow together, because the time of the harvest has not yet come. But in the meantime, let's discern.
What are the distinctions to be made?
Above all, there is confusion between liturgical music and sacred music. This is already a first distinction. The term sacred music is quite ambiguous, whereas the object of liturgical music is the celebration.
And the one who composes for the celebration must be conscious of the fact that in the liturgy we celebrate Jesus Christ, the word made flesh. Instead, many times it is thought that the music during the rite must only celebrate itself, in a sort of narcissistic self-complacency which serves itself only instrumentally of the celebration. In this way, the liturgy is turned into pure performance and sterile ritualism — precisely what the council eliminated forever.
It should certainly not be a performance, but your musical colleagues lament the fact that, in favoring the participation of the assembly, the liturgical reform has reduced their own bounds.
There must be understanding of this issue, also. The assembly is all the people of God, who gather to celebrate Christ.
Now, this assembly is articulated in its different forms of ministry. Therefore, the president of the assembly sings as president of it, the deacon as deacon, the psalmist as psalmist and so [also] the choir. The response comes from the people of God, who acclaim, etc.
Not all should sing everything, but each one according to his ministry. And one must write differently for each one, which is precisely the challenge. Often there are those who approach liturgical music without being clear about these differences.
Is it, then, just a question of formation?
I think so. There are areas for composers and musicians, and these are very great, on the condition that they enter into the spirit required by the reform, also as regards to musical forms. Today, many old musical forms are no longer workable in the liturgy of Vatican Council II. And we must be conscious of this.
Instead, many reason the opposite way: “Since my music does not fit the liturgy, the liturgical reform has failed.” Or, on the contrary, as they are incapable of writing music in more elaborate and complex ways, they reduce everything to a kind of musical minimalism, which often is nothing other than bad taste. Instead, the right way is formation. The musician who wishes to compose for the liturgy must have a specific liturgical education.
What is the advice of the director of the Sistine Choir for someone who wishes to be faithful to Vatican II?
Given that the work is only just beginning and that we are all searching, my advice is to avoid three very dangerous attitudes: idealism — music as the expression of subjectivism; romanticism — music in which everything is the resonance of a sort of unknown God; and functionalism — music reduced to a pure ornament centered on oneself.
However, if sacred music does not become holy music, namely, at the service of the celebration, we will never have true liturgical music.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope to Greece: Let My People Go!
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 2 — Last week, Pope John Paul II formally asked the government of Greece to grant full civil and religious rights to Catholics and grant the Church the same legal rights as the majority Orthodox communion.
Speaking to Greece's new ambassador to the Holy See, Christos Botzios, John Paul asked the Athens government to emulate other European Union countries’ policy of mutual religious respect.
“They continue to suffer a difficult situation concerning the recognition of their rights in the bosom of the nation and various echelons of society,” the Holy Father, who made a controversial pilgrimage to Greece, said of the 50,000 Catholic Greeks.
Until recently, religious affiliation was listed on national identity cards. The information is still mandatory when Greeks move to a new municipality or enter the army as required by law.
Currently the Church “is not recognized as a legal entity in Greece and doesn't have the right to buy and sell property or be represented in the court system,” according to Associated Press, which reported that “the European Court of Human Rights in December 1997 found Greece at fault for not according legal status to the Roman Catholic Church in Greece.”
Want to Sue God? Ask the Holy See
AUSTRALIA DAILY TELEGRAPH, Aug. 31 — Director Mark Joffe is about to release a new comedy film called The Man Who Sued God, and he decided to run the film by the Vatican for its opinion.
The film, which stars Billy Connolly and Judy Davis, appeared in Australia in the Focus Film Festival in Rome last week. Joffe invited prominent cardinals to attend.
“They actually contacted the Australian Embassy afterwards to say how much they liked the film,” said Joffe, who said he regretted Pope John Paul II's absence.
Italy Freezes ‘Terror’ Funds
CNN, Aug. 29 — Bank officials in Italy have frozen the accounts of a variety of groups and persons believed to have some connection to the al Qaeda terror network, according to CNN.
The Italian Finance Ministry released the names of 11 individuals and 14 groups listed in a U.N. “international terrorism blacklist.”
“The 14 entities were owned or controlled by two men, Youssuf Nada, a Tunisian national born in Egypt, and Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, an Ethiopian,” said CNN, which noted Italy's government is working alongside those of the United States, the Bahamas and Luxembourg.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Padre Pio Still Answering Prayers 34 Years After His Death DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Italy — Memorial celebrations are planned around the world this month to mark the 34th anniversary of the death of Italian miracle worker and stigmatist St. Padre Pio. According to pilgrims such as Marie Rudy of Arlington, Va., as he did in life this saint is still answering prayers and confounding science from heaven.
When Pope John Paul II canonized Padre Pio on June 16 in one of the largest canonization ceremonies ever held in St. Peter's Square in Rome, Rudy was there with her son and daughter. She said it was the least she could do.
Her 8-year-old son, Jonathan, was diagnosed by prenatal testing as having Down syndrome. When a second test confirmed that diagnosis conclusively, the doctor suggested abortion as a possible alternative.
“I told him that even if my child had only one eye, I would keep him because he is my son,” Rudy said.
But Rudy was still worried about the prospect of having a child who would have such a condition. Then she heard about Padre Pio on the television show “Unsolved Mysteries.” The episode she watched chronicled the cure of a girl born without a bladder, a cure attributed to Padre Pio.
“So I prayed to Padre Pio and said, ‘If he's born okay, I will take him to San Giovanni Rotondo,’” Rudy said.
Despite the tests, Jonathan was born completely healthy and without a trace of Down syndrome, Rudy said.
She fulfilled her promise, traveling to San Giovanni Rotondo also to pray for the conversion of her husband, a Baptist.
Rudy and her family are not the only ones who come to San Giovanni. For the past several years, more than 7 million pilgrims have visited the town where Padre Pio quietly lived out his life as a Capuchin friar, making it the second-most visited shrine in the world after that of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Other pilgrims tell similar stories.
Carlos Humphrey came from Mexico City to thank Padre Pio for saving his son from a permanent, degenerative liver ailment.
Dr. Robinson Barron, a surgeon from southern California, said he found Padre Pio more powerful than science. Because of kidney dys-function and a cancerous tumor, Barron had difficulty eating. Against the advice of his doctors, he left the hospital and traveled to San Giovanni Rotondo to ask for a miracle from Padre Pio in November 2001.
After praying, Barron said, all of his pain disappeared, and he could eat normally for the first time in months.
A short time later his tumor burst, but miraculously, he said, the cancer did not spread, although medically it should have. “[My doctor said] it was like someone held the cancer in place,” Barron said.
“It was very unusual.”
Prayer Groups Growing
Of the many legacies Padre Pio has left, Mandina said he believes Padre Pio's example and network of prayer groups he began are the most important.
Mandina himself helped begin one of the first American prayer groups in Los Angeles in 1968. Under the direction of a priest, the groups meet once a month for Mass, benediction, the rosary and confession. Mandina said the groups provide a means of spiritual growth for countless people.
There are now more than 2,700 recognized Padre Pio prayer groups worldwide, which follow the eucharistic and Marian emphasis of Padre Pio. These groups are headquartered in San Giovanni at the hospital Padre Pio built and are under the direction of Bishop Riccardo Ruotolo.
Speaking at Padre Pio's canonization, the Holy Father praised the prayer groups: “[Padre Pio] loved to repeat, ‘I am a poor Franciscan who prays,’ convinced that ‘prayer is the best weapon we have, a key that opens the heart of God.’ This fundamental characteristic of his spirituality continues in the prayer groups he founded, which offer to the Church and to society the wonderful contribution of incessant and confident prayer.”
Physician-pilgrim Barron said he intends to take the Pope's message to heart.
“I will come to San Giovanni every November to thank Padre Pio,” he said, “and I will start prayer groups.”
More Powerful Now
Charles Mandina, who worked as Padre Pio's translator and correspondence secretary for several months during the 1960s, isn't surprised the good padre continues to shower the faithful with graces.
“Padre Pio used to say, ‘I can do more for all of you in heaven than on earth,’” Mandina said.
He has known people who attributed cures to Padre Pio both when the saint was alive and after he died, he said.
Mandina cited the case of Rocky Falatico, a close friend who was cured of a brain tumor while Padre Pio was alive.
“Rocky was only given a month to live by the doctors, but after he visited Padre Pio, he began to get better and is still alive today,” Mandina said. “Padre Pio is very powerful.”
Even more important than Padre Pio's physical cures are his spiritual ones, Mandina said, adding that not everyone who seeks a physical cure from Padre Pio receives one.
“Padre Pio once told a man who was suffering with a leg ailment, ‘It's more important for your soul to be cured than your body,’” Mandina said. The saint then went on to read the man's soul and enumerate the ways in which the man needed to reform his life.
Mandina said Catholics should learn from Padre Pio's simple message. “He insisted on charity,” he said. “The Mass, confession and the rosary: Those are the basics.”
In addition to saying a two-hour Mass each morning — Padre Pio suffered from the stigmata more at Mass than at any other time — he also spent hours each day in the confessional and constantly prayed the rosary.
“He lived the Mass, he lived the crucifixion and the long hours in the confessional — these were even more important than the miracles,” Mandina said. “Curiosity might bring people to him, but once you had seen Padre Pio, you couldn't explain it, but you were changed.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: God's Holy City DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II traveled by helicopter from his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo to the Vatican's Paul VI Hall for his weekly audience with more than 7,000 pilgrims on Sept. 4. He continued his series of teachings on the psalms and canticles from the Liturgy of the Hours.
The Holy Father commented on Isaiah 2:2-5, one of the many canticles from the Bible that are included every day in the Liturgy of the Hours. Isaiah's canticle speaks about the establishment of God's dwelling place on Mount Zion. “Mount Zion rises at the heart of Isaiah's vision, towering in a figurative way above all the other mountains since it is there that God dwells, making it a contact point with heaven,” he said.
The Holy Father recalled Isaiah's prophecy: “When nations reach the top of Zion, where God's temple rises, then the miracle for which mankind has been longing and to which it aspires will take place. Nations will throw down their weapons, which will then be gathered up and forged into peaceful tools of labor...” Consequently, an era of peace will begin, bringing an end to war and hatred.
The Holy Father told pilgrims that Isaiah's canticle is a challenge for Christians today. “Because of this, we, Christians, heed the prophet's cry in a special way and seek to establish the foundation for a civilization of love and peace in which there will be no more war, ‘no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away,’” he noted.
After the audience, John Paul returned to Castel Gandolfo by helicopter.
Besides the p salms, the daily liturgy of morning prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours always includes a canticle from the Old Testament. In fact, it is worth noting that next to the Book of Psalms, which is truly Israel's prayer book as well as the Church's prayer book, there is another kind of “Psalter” that is spread throughout the various historical, prophetic and wisdom books of the Bible. It, too, consists of hymns, supplications, praises and petitions that are often of great beauty and spiritual strength.
During our journey through the prayers that make up the morning prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours, we have already encountered many of these songs that are scattered throughout the pages of the Bible. Now we will meditate on one that is truly wonderful, the work of one of Israel's greatest prophets, Isaiah, who lived in the eighth century B.C. He was witness to one of the most difficult periods that the Kingdom of Judah experienced, but he was also a composer who proclaimed messianic hope in highly poetic language.
God Is at Work
This is the case with the canticle that we have just heard that is found almost at the beginning of his book in the first verses of Chapter 2, preceded by a subsequent editorial note that says: “This is what Isaiah, son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:1). Thus, the hymn was conceived as a prophetic vision that describes a goal to which Israel's history aspires in faith. It is no accident that the opening words are, “In the days to come” (verse 2), or in the fullness of time. This is, therefore, an invitation not to focus on the misery of the present time, but to learn how to perceive God's mysterious presence at work in daily events as he directs the course of history to a very different perspective — a perspective of light and peace.
This “vision” has a messianic flavor and is later repeated on a much larger scale in Chapter 60 of the same book as a sort of further meditation on the prophet's important and incisive words in the canticle that we have just heard. The prophet Micah (see Micah 4:1-3) repeats this same hymn, although with a different ending (see Micah 4:4-5) from the one in Isaiah's prophecy (see Isaiah 2:5).
God's Dwelling Place
Mount Zion rises at the heart of Isaiah's vision, towering in a figurative way above all the other mountains since it is there that God dwells, making it a contact point with heaven (see 1 Kings 8:22-53). According to the prophecy in Isaiah 60:1-6, this mountain, toward which people from all corners of the earth will walk in procession, will emit a light that will penetrate and dissipate the darkness.
Zion's power of attraction is based on two realities that emanate from Jerusalem's holy mountain: the law of the Lord and the word of the Lord. These two things constitute a single reality that is the source for life, light and peace and an expression of the Lord's mystery and desire. When nations reach the top of Zion, where God's temple rises, then the miracle for which mankind has been longing and to which it aspires will take place. Nations will throw down their weapons, which will then be gathered up and forged into peaceful tools of labor: Swords will be transformed into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. An era of peace will begin — of shalom (see Isaiah 60:17) as they say in Hebrew — a favorite word in messianic theology. Finally the curtain will fall forever on war and hatred.
Isaiah's prophecy concludes with an appeal that recalls the spirituality found in the songs of pilgrimage to Jerusalem: “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord” (Isaiah 2:5). Israel must not remain a spectator to this radical historical transformation; it cannot disassociate itself from the invitation that resounded on the lips of the people at the beginning: “Come, let us climb the Lord's mountain” (verse 3).
A Civilization of Love
We, Christians, are also challenged by Isaiah's canticle. In their commentaries on it, the Fathers of the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries (Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Theodoretus of Cyrus, Cyril of Alexandria) saw it fulfilled by Christ's coming. Consequently, they identified the Church as the “mountain of the Lord's house ... established on the highest mountain” from which the word of the Lord flowed and to which the pagan peoples flocked in the new era of peace that was inaugurated by the Gospel.
In his First Apology that was written around the year 153, the martyr St. Justin already was proclaiming the fulfillment of the verse from the canticle that says, “from Jerusalem shall go forth the word of the Lord” (verse 3). He wrote: “Men went forth from Jerusalem throughout the world — 12 in number. They were ignorant; they did not know how to speak. But thanks to God's power, they revealed to all mankind that Christ sent them to teach God's word to all. We, who used to kill one another before, not only do we no longer fight against our enemies, but in order not to deceive or lie to those who question us, we willingly die confessing Christ” (Prima Apologia, 39, 3; Gli apologeti greci, Rome, 1986, p. 118).
Because of this, we, Christians, heed the prophet's cry in a special way and seek to establish the foundation for a civilization of love and peace in which there will be no more war, “no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Collapse in Jerusalem?
REUTERS, Aug. 27 — One of the holiest sites on earth stands on shaky ground, according to Reuters news service.
Jerusalem's Israeli mayor, Ehud Olmert, agreed with archaeologists last week that there is a new and alarming bulge in the wall holding up the Al Aqsa Mosque on the former site of the Jewish Temple destroyed in A.D. 70.
“There are serious grounds for the apprehension that it could collapse,” the mayor said. “In my view we have reached the moment of truth.”
Muslim authorities denied the claim, seeing in it an attempt by Israeli authorities to meddle with the third-holiest site in Islam, from which the prophet Mohammed supposedly ascended to heaven. (At the time, the site featured a Christian church.)
Some radical orthodox Jews want to demolish the mosque to make way for a rebuilt temple — something some Christians have seen as a sign of the “end times.”
Russia to Liquidate Baptist Parish?
KESTON NEWS AGENCY, Aug. 30 — In the latest episode of religious restriction on religious groups other than the quasi-official Orthodox Church, a local government in Vanino, Russia, is seeking to shut down an independent Baptist parish, according to Keston News Service.
Supposedly the congregation violated Russia's draconian “religious-activities regulations.” The case has gone to court; if found guilty the parish “would then be prohibited from all religious activities and able to apply for legal status again only after a 15-year wait,” according to the service that monitors religious freedom in communist and post-communist countries.
Orthodox Force Compromise in World Church Council
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 2 — The World Council of Churches derives much of its perceived legitimacy — and almost one-third of its church membership — from the participation of Eastern Orthodox Christians. (The Catholic Church has always refused to take part in the liberal, ecumenical organization.)
That leads to tensions between the traditionalist leadership of those Eastern churches — which condemn abortion and homosexual behavior and only ordain men — and the “mainline” Protestant denominations that founded and still largely fund the council.
Those tensions almost drove the Orthodox out of the organization this year as various hierarchs refused to take part in the ecumenical prayer services sponsored by the council since they seemed to confuse the differences between churches in faith and were frequently led by women clergy.
Now a deal has been patched up, according to Associated Press. After a three-year study by a special commission, the World Council of Churches offered a plan for less formal “common prayer” and decisions by consensus — rather than by majority — that respects the orthodoxy of the Orthodox.
Said Dr. Peter Bouteneff of the Orthodox Church in America: “I am extremely pleased.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Forming Priests With the Theology of the Body DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Prior to the outbreak of the clergy sex-abuse scandal, the U.S. bishops’ priestly formation committee had begun to prepare the fifth edition of the formation program to be used in U.S. seminaries. The document providing a framework for the new program is Pope John Paul II's 1992 apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis (I Will Give You Shepherds), a follow-up to the 1990 Synod of Bishops on priestly formation.
In the document, the Holy Father outlines criteria for a priest's intellectual, spiritual, pastoral and human formation. It is the section on human formation that will be the focus of the apostolic visitations of U.S. seminaries, according to the bishops’ June charter.
Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Wichita, Kan., a former seminary rector in Rome, said any references to Pope John Paul II's theology of the body can be particularly beneficial for seminary formation.
“I think the Holy Father's teaching on the nuptial meaning of the body is crucial to our whole understanding about who we are, crucial to marriage, crucial to celibacy and even crucial to single life in the Church,” he said. “When he talks about Christ, he talks about him not only as head of the Church but as spouse of the Church.”
The Pope's exhortation does not specifically mention homosexuality. However, it describes the character of the priest as one with a sound masculine identity: He is called to be, like Jesus, the bridegroom of the Church; a sharer in the fatherhood of God; and one “capable of opening himself to clear and brotherly relationships.”
The free choice of a life of celibacy, explains the exhortation, “is built on esteem for priestly friendship and self-discipline as well as on the acceptance of solitude and on a physically and psychologically sound personal state.”
—Ellen Rossini
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: What Have We Changed? DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:What has changed since Sept. 11, 2001? Some say everything has changed, fundamentally and irrevocably. Some say nothing has changed but the length of airport lines. Catholics already know the truth: If any one day changed everything, that day happened 2,000 years ago.
After that, cataclysms come and shake us up and then fade from memory, but they aren't what change people. The only lasting change in our world comes when people are brought to Christ.
So, the question isn't what has changed since Sept. 11 but what have we changed in the world?
It's a less comfortable question, and it demands that we take a hard look at things we didn't want to face last year.
What is the purpose of extending American freedom?
Soon after Operation Enduring Freedom was over, some American political leaders began to act like it was Operation Enduring Freedom to Choose. Some American leaders began pushing to legalize abortion in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, back at home, other American leaders have been pushing other false freedoms: Homosexuals are closer than ever to having their (usually temporary) sexual arrangements treated like marriages, scientists are expanding their opportunities to experiment on human beings and pornography's popularity rises unabated aided by an approving pop culture that is itself sliding further into the muck.
This isn't American freedom at all. America was founded on the “law of Nature and of Nature's God,” says the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If America rejects its unique, moral vision of freedom in favor of one uprooted from its original religious vision, then extending American freedom will do no good at all. In fact, it will do much harm.
This changing understanding of America is related to another uncomfortable question Catholics can ask themselves after Sept. 11.
Have we spread the religion of love as effectively as others have spread religious hatred?
The Islamic religions of the Mideast are sweeping up large numbers of adherents (sometimes by force). At the same time, American culture is still very much in the grip of secularist attitudes that consider it impolite to mention God.
The more our country flees faith, the more the practices and attitudes that Pope John Paul II calls the culture of death will gain ground in America. The more secular we become, the more odious we will seem to people overseas.
In his 2001 World Day of Peace message, the Pope criticized the cultural exports of the West. The most powerful such exporter, of course, is America.
“Western cultural models are enticing and alluring because of their remarkable scientific and technical cast, but regrettably there is growing evidence of their deepening human, spiritual and moral impoverishment,” he said. “The culture which produces such models is marked by the fatal attempt to secure the good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”
The allure of the cultural products of America can be a great threat or a great opportunity. They can export secularism — or they can export America's moral vision of freedom. They can hasten the culture of death or they can prepare the ground for a flowering of the culture of life.
The vision America brings to the world can be transformed by Catholics. We have a full understanding of what human happiness requires. We have the incomparable tools of the Gospel and the sacraments. We have the wisdom of centuries. We have the mandate given us by Christ, and we constitute 25% of the population.
A year after Sept. 11 is a perfect time to renew our commitment to bring the Gospel to all sectors of society, to all people, but in a special way to those people capable of setting the tone in our parishes, neighborhoods, localities, states and eventually our nation. Bettering our communities can better America — and bettering America can better the world.
What have we changed since Sept. 11?
----- EXCERPT: EDITOR ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Tough-Loving Church DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Thank you for Father Andrew McNair's column “Voice of the Unfaithful? New Group's True Colors” (Aug 18-24).
The reason I'm writing is very simple. Father McNair exposes a group that will do harm to the Church, but he fails to address the underlying reason for the existence of these groups. The fact still remains that, until Church officials stop allowing sexual abuse by priests and others, groups like this will easily find a following.
I suggest you stay a little more focused and in line with the reason for the reaction of the “laymen.” Groups like Voice of the Faithful will come and go, but will always be there when the Church does not solve its own problems. The current problem with homosexual priests is not a tough problem to solve — it simply requires a “tough Church.”
ALAN MERWIN Fatima, Portugal
Viva EWTN!
I was perplexed that Archbishop John Foley never mentioned the wonderful coverage of EWTN, the global Catholic TV network (“The Church &the News,” Aug. 25-31).
We saw EWTN's coverage of Pope John Paul II's trip to Poland while we were in Albany, N.Y., visiting my daughter. It was beautiful! In addition, we viewed many of their other excellent programs, featuring people like Father Benedict Groeschel, Msgr. Eugene Clark and Father George Rutler — all wonderful!
Here in Manhattan we are hoping to have EWTN added to our cable network soon. It is seen in most all the country and the world. It is made available free to cable systems like Time Warner and RCN. There are no commercials. They depend on donations. Their Web site is www.ewtn.com.
ANNE MCLAUGHLIN New York City
Meetings Don't Mend
I read recently that, when Pope John Paul II called the bishops together when the priest scandals first broke, he said dissent from the Church's teachings on sexuality was the root of the problem. We are still not hearing clear teachings on sexuality and, as far as I can tell, that issue was not addressed at the U.S. bishops’ meeting.
In your editorial “Blaming the Pope” (Sept. 1-7), I still do not hear that addressed. It seems to me that more meetings will not solve the problem of lack of constant, clear teaching on the Church's stand on sexuality.
SUSAN CARFAGNO Atkins, Arkansas
Intolerable Patience?
The Holy Father's style of leadership is superior to many of his predecessors and has been more than successful in the most important areas (“Blaming the Pope,” Sept. 1-7).
What disappoints many is the almost unbelievable patience with which he has tolerated those with positions of responsibility — bishops — who clearly have not defended the faith and actually seek to undermine Catholic teaching.
MARK E. MEDVETZ Henniker, New Hampshire
Mission: Michigan
Thank you for the article about Jennifer Granholm's pro-abortion position and her priest's irresponsible defense of her position (“Abortion Politics: Tale of Two Parishes,” Sept. 1-7). In Michigan we have been blessed to have John Engler, a very pro-life governor, for the past 12 years. His current lieutenant governor, Dick Posthumus, is running against Granholm. Posthumus is solidly pro-life and voters have a clear and distinct choice this November.
Priests in Michigan should not miss this opportunity and should follow the excellent example of Colorado's Father John Hilton by informing their parishioners of the voting records of pro-life and pro-abortion candidates and reinforcing the official position of the Church. Charles Rice said in your article: “There is no legal restriction to parishes informing people about voting records and telling them they should vote pro-life.” Sadly, so many Catholics are ignorant about these issues.
AGGIE LANGSCHIED Lambertville, Michigan
The Education Project
I was gratified by your “Making the Case for a Classical Education” (Sept. 1-7) because it highlights the need for the study of classical languages in any truly humane education. But I was mortified by the following offhand statement by Mr. Simmons: “Incidentally, make sure that the parents aren't running the school, because that's a recipe for an oozing demise of anything like real education.”
This statement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the project of education and of what a school really ought to be. This misunderstanding, so common in our contemporary culture, is responsible for much that is wrong in education today. We Americans seem to have the attitude that we ought to stand back and let the “experts” educate our children (usually that means those “experts” hired by the state). But God has entrusted the primary responsibility for the education of a child with his parents. They should not abdicate that responsibility, even to such finely educated men as Mr. Simmons.
A school is really a moral institution of families who have come together to educate their children. They do this because they judge that they can do a better job educating their children in common than they could individually. But the creation of this institution never absolves parents from their responsibility as the primary educators of their children. So of course parents should oversee the school, no matter how fine the experts are whom they've hired to help them educate their children.
With that said, I hope Mr. Simmons’ book does lead to a revival of the study of Latin and Greek in our schools. Classical languages are the foundation of a classical education, because they teach an elegance and precision of grammar that cannot be learned from modern languages. Grammar is the way that we understand and express the nature of reality, and so without it we can learn nothing else. That is why grammar is the first of the liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy.
We need scholars like Mr. Simmons to help us educate our children. We just need to remember that we parents are in charge.
STEPHEN HOLLINGSHEAD San Antonio, Texas
The writer is principal of Our Lady of the Atonement Academy.
‘I Believe in Miracles’ — But ...
Ted Hickel's letter to the editor is false and offensive for insinuating that I disbelieve in miracles (“Miesel and the Miracle,” Letters, Aug. 11-17). What I'm skeptical about are the allegedly miraculous images in the Guadalupana's eyes. I've read both the description of the phenomenon in The Handbook of Guadalupe and seen the pictures themselves in The Image of Guadalupe. What the unenhanced photo shows — before considerable computer amplification — are random white blobs of fiber arbitrarily outlined to form heads and bodies.
How arbitrary? One half of a double blob is taken as a knee, but the rest of the leg is made out of nothing at all. And so on. I remain underwhelmed.
Why must we drown this lovely image of Mary in pious tosh about “God's miraculous Polaroid”?
How do the faces of Juan Diego and the bishop wind up facing the same direction in the Virgin's eyes when they were facing each other when the cloak was opened (as the “primitive account” describes)?
And if the reflections are taken from those in the eyes of an invisible apparition, as Mr. Hickel claims, how do those invisible eyes reflect light?
If they're the reflection in the eyes of the actual image, how much could the small Virgin held by a short man “see” with bent head and lowered eyelids? A whole crowd of people? Really? And where's the vanishing point of her field of view? (Try this yourself and see what I mean.)
I believe in many miracles, but I don't believe that we're dealing with a miracle here.
SANDRA MIESEL Indianapolis, Indiana
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ----- TITLE: Radio-Ready Catholics DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:The increase of Catholic radio stations in the United States is indeed a welcome development (“Catholic Radio Takes to the Air,” Aug. 25-31). Although this growth appears to be spontaneous and a recent development, it is noteworthy that the Vatican II fathers, writing in 1963, gave particular attention to the need for Catholic radio stations and other media of mass communication.
As noted in the Decree on the Means of Social Communication, Inter mirifica, Catholics have a duty to support Catholic radio (as well as television and the press). The council “advises them of the obligation they have to maintain and assist Catholic newspapers, periodicals and film projects, radio and television programs and stations, whose principal objective is to spread and defend the truth and foster Christian influence in human society.”
As a member of the Advisory Board of WHFA, a Starboard Broadcasting Catholic radio station serving southern Wisconsin, in addition to the welcome support of our bishop and diocesan officials, I have had the opportunity to see the gratifying out-pouring of support from numerous parishes, some by no means wealthy, when they are presented with the rich apostolic opportunities offered by Catholic radio.
As pointed out in Inter mirifica, “It is quite unbecoming for the Church's children idly to permit the message of salvation to be thwarted or impeded by the technical delays or expenses, however vast, which are encountered by the very nature of these media. At the same time, the synod earnestly invites those organizations and individuals who possess financial and technical ability to support these media freely and generously with their resources and their skills, inasmuch as they contribute to genuine culture and the apostolate.”
Happily, a response to the council's call for Catholic radio is now manifesting itself.
DAVID R. J. STIENNON Madison, Wisconsin
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: The 'Hour Of the Laity' Is Upon Us DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul II has logged nearly 700,000 miles — almost three times the distance between the earth and the moon — bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.
All along the way these past 24 years, a major component of his evangelical message has been directed at Catholic lay people: Now is the hour of the laity, he has said, in so many words. In his 1988 apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici (Christ's Faithful Lay People), the Holy Father challenges every Catholic to seriously rethink his or her mission in the Church.
What is your mission in the Church? Or, phrased another way, what does it take to be a faithful Catholic layperson today?
Understanding the laity's mission, John Paul has repeatedly stressed, begins with a correct understanding of the Church. The Church is much more than a place where we go on Sunday to do our weekly worship duty. Christifideles Laici lays out a comprehensive vision of the Church as a communio — a communion of believers. Within this communion of believers, there are three states of life: the laity, the priesthood and consecrated religious life. Together, the members of this communion form the body of Christ in the world.
Through baptism, the Pope maintains, all Christians within the communion of the Church are called, in a way appropriate to their station in life, to a radical life of holiness. How should the laity live this call? By imbuing every aspect of secular life, whether it be political, social or economic, with the light of Christ. The laity have not just the right to witness Christ to the world, but also the responsibility. In a very real, practical sense, the laity is the Church engaged in the world.
Here's how the Catechism puts it: “Lay believers are in the front line of Church life; for them the Church is the animating principle of human society. Therefore, they in particular ought to have an ever-clearer consciousness not only of belonging to the Church, but of being the Church, that is to say, the community of the faithful on earth under the leadership of the Pope, the common head, and of the bishops in communion with him. They are the Church” (No. 899).
Mindful of the many moral dilemmas facing the world at the opening of the third millennium, the Holy Father reminds us in Christifideles Laici: “It is not permissible for anyone to remain idle.” The Pope urges the laity to take a leading role in the new evangelization he has been calling for since the early part of his pontificate. To evangelize, to sanctify and to serve: This is the profile of the lay apostle of the new evangelization. Being a lay evangelizer, for John Paul, means taking the initiative to bring Christ to others. At the fourth World Youth Day, held in Spain in 1989, he explained the mission of lay evangelizer.
Few think they are able to meet the demands of being a lay apostle. Why?
“To be Christians means to be missionaries, to be apostles,” he said. “It is not enough to discover Christ — you must bring him to others! ... You must have the courage to speak about Christ, to bear witness to your faith through a lifestyle inspired by the Gospel. The harvest is great indeed for evangelization and so many workers are needed. Christ trusts you and counts on your collaboration.”
To successfully bring Christ to others as lay apostles requires a sincere striving for personal holiness. Holiness attracts. It sparks the light of truth in others. The universal call to holiness entails a personal relationship with Christ through prayer and the sacraments. It permits the laity to be, in the words of Christ, “salt of the earth and light of the world.”
Many of us acknowledge, in theory at least, that the Pope is right when he speaks about the laity's mission in the Church. Yet, in practice, few think they are able to meet the demands of being a lay apostle. Why? In the past, maybe we have tried to bring others to Christ and failed. Could it be that we are disillusioned by the current scandals within the Church? Possibly we have convinced ourselves that we simply don't have time to be a lay apostle. To give in to such obstacles, the Holy Father says, would amount to missing a decisive moment in history that the new evangelization offers at the start of a new millennium. In his impressive 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio (On the Permanent Validity of the Church's Missionary Mandate), John Paul makes this prophetic statement:
“Today, as never before, the Church has the opportunity of bringing the Gospel, by witness and word, to all people and nations. I see the dawning of a new missionary age, which will become radiant day bearing an abundant harvest, if all Christians ... respond with generosity ... to the calls and challenges of our times.”
The Holy Father summons every Christian who loves the Church to confront with faith, courage and tenacity the demanding task of offering to humanity the great treasure of the Catholic Church: the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Legionary Father Andrew McNair teaches at Mater Ecclesiae International Center of Studies in Greenville, Rhode Island.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew McNair, LC ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: 'I'll be Back, if God Permits' DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul II's Aug. 16-19 pilgrimage to Poland, his ninth visit to his homeland, focused on the theme “God, rich in mercy.” The theme was in part dictated by the Pope's consecration of the Divine Mercy Shrine in Krakow, but it also focused on how mercy should be incarnated in social life. Geographically, the pilgrimage was the smallest in Poland, confined to Krakow and its environs. Estimates suggest, however, that it may have been the largest gathering of pilgrims ever to see the Pope in one place, with the possible exception of his 1995 pilgrimage to the Philippines.
The current pilgrimage, like the ones preceding it, evoked different emotions long before the Pope arrived on Polish soil. Soil was indeed on many peoples’ minds, and not just because of the Pope's tradition of kissing the ground when he arrives in a new country. (This time a colorful basket of Polish earth was presented to the Pope, most likely in view of his limited mobility.) During a previous electoral campaign, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski was caught off-camera with a current Polish government official, the latter parodying the papal custom of kissing the earth. In that light, some found Kwasniewski's greeting of the Pope inappropriate, although the head of state could hardly not be there. There may be a double entendre in Krakow Cardinal Franciszek Macharski's statement: “What seemed almost impossible to imagine has now taken place.”
Greeting the Pope in the name of all Poles, believers and unbelievers alike (the president could hardly leave out his own government of ex-communists), Kwasniewski painted a pessimistic picture of Poland without naming the causes of Poland's current malaise. The Pope in reply expressed solidarity with all his countrymen living in poverty, with families with multiple children, with the unemployed and those lacking both the means and hope for a better tomorrow. The Pope focused on those who are paying the highest price for the socioeconomic transformation of Poland.
Kwasniewski stressed the benefits to Poland from joining the European Union. The Pope never mentioned the EU by name. He spoke in general terms of Poland's rightful place in the community of nations as a conveyor of Christian values. One can thus interpret the Pope as giving tacit approval to Poland's EU accession. Two questions remain: Will Poland be adequate to that evangelical task the Pope envisions? And will a paganized West be interested in listening?
Holy Father, Favorite Son
The Pope's remedy for the social problems he previously catalogued, however, lay not in the EU but in mercy practiced by human hands and confidence in the risen Christ who conquers death. The Pope cautioned against attempts at building one's happiness and prosperity upon impoverishment and injustice suffered by others.
During his open-air Mass in Krakow's Blonie Park, the Pope reminded his listeners not to regard others with contempt, urging his hearers to defend the right to life. The Pope observed that contemporary man acts as if God did not exist, wanting to decide about life and death itself, manipulating those values by his own self-will. These attitudes give birth in the world to the mystery of evil (misterium iniquitatis), from which also arise fear in the face of emptiness, suffering and destruction.
St. Faustina Kowalska, the apostle of mercy associated with the newly consecrated Shrine of Divine Mercy in Lagiewniki, showed the path to the mystery of mercy (misterium misericordiae) that challenges the mystery of evil.
One word comes to mind: Farewell. Yet the Pope ended his visit home on a hopeful note.
Mercy, which everyone needs, is offered by God to everyone. The four persons the Pope beatified in Poland are living examples of the mystery of mercy, each in their own spheres of life. Archbishop Zygmunt Felinski worked for social welfare in Russian-partitioned Poland.
Father Jan Beyzym laborered among the lepers of Madagascar. Father Jan Balicki, a dogmatic theologian, was a devoted confessor. Sister Sancja Szymkowiak performed works of charity during World War II.
Be Not Afraid
The Pope returned to social justice during his visit to the shrine at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. There the Pope took poetic liberties with the old Polish Marian hymn, Pod Twoj1 obronê (“Beneath Your Protection”), praying for a genuine interior unity between Poles and the Blessed Mother and asking that people in every state of life — parents, children, young people, union workers — all carry out their vocation in life. In the end he asked for prayers for himself, so that he might carry out his own vocation in service to the risen Christ until the end. The pilgrimage even had an eschatological note, words that provide food for thought: Christ had promised Sister Faustina that here, in Lagiewniki, from the sanctuary of divine mercy, would arise a spark preparing the world for the second and final advent of the Merciful One.
The accent of this pilgrimage was on the world's need for rescue through human and divine mercy. The goal is clear. We can ask ourselves, however, about the reality, and there it might not be too difficult to exaggerate. I was on my way to celebrate Sunday Mass at a parish while the Pope was preaching on Krakow's Blonie field. Petty bazaars were in full swing, even as the Pope reminded his listeners to “remember to keep holy the Lord's Day.” During the Pope's departure ceremonies, President Kwasniewski observed that it is not enough to hear the Pope. We should also listen to him. The acid test of his sincerity will arise when bills reach the floor of the Polish Parliament to legalize abortion, decriminalize euthanasia and to sanction concubinage and homosexual unions to the detriment of genuine marriage. We'll see then whether anybody was really listening to the helmsman as the common ship that is Poland heads out into the turbulent waters of today's world.
What will prevail: egoism and selfishness or a healthy sense of self-preservation that respects authentic values? Once the emotions subside and the papal visit recedes in peoples’ memories, the days and months ahead will be a chance for a sober test of where the heart and soul of contemporary Poland really lies.
On a concluding note, there was a certain sadness, a certain sentimentality surrounding this visit, as if the Pope was saying goodbye. The Pope limited this pilgrimage to those places that have been closest to him throughout his life. He confined himself to Krakow. Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, where the Pope spent many days as a young student, a priest, a bishop and a cardinal, is part of the spiritual heritage of Krakow (as are the Benedictine abbey at Tyniec and the Camaldolese of Bielany). He visited St. Florian's, where he was a vicar. He ended the trip with a flight over his hometown, Wadowice. It was all so spontaneous: the sadness, the burdened face of the Pope as he stood atop the stairs of his airplane. And the constant plea: Pray for me, now and always.
One word comes to mind: Farewell. Yet the Pope ended on a hopeful note, in the local dialect: a smile and przyjdzie zas (I'll be back), if God permits.
There are so many parallels to the Pope's first pilgrimage in 1979, as if a circle were closing. On both occasions the Pope appealed for us not to fear. There were reasons to be afraid back then; there are reasons now. This time, however, the appeal was part of a crusade of hope founded on entrusting the world to a God rich in mercy. The Pope's main purpose in this pilgrimage was to proclaim that God — not just to Poland, but the entire world.
Father Zygmunt Zielinski is a professor of Church history at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Zygmunt Zielinski ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: Will Catholic Voters Pray Now and Swing Later? DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Frustrated Catholic voters, take heart.
In the approaching election season, we may have more clout than we think.
After 2000, where do we stand politically? Abortion and other moral issues have caused a major shift in the Catholic vote. In the last presidential election, most church-going Catholics voted Republican. Quite a change from the days, within living memory, when Catholics, including a number of quite orthodox priests, led the American labor movement.
In the process of switching party allegiance, many Catholics accepted Republican ideas of minimalist government, lower taxes and economic deregulation. But voters who read Pope John Paul II's frequent statements on political topics must be aware that the Holy Father is hardly a Reagan Republican. On issues such as third world debt, corporate globalism and the Palestinian problem, most Republican politicians are out of step with the Vatican.
Based on Church teaching, Roman Catholics should feel alienated from both major parties. Here's why.
All major Catholic thinkers have agreed that the object of politics is the common good. The mind of the Church considers individual rights, including life, liberty and property, important inasmuch as they derive from the just ordering of society. Individual rights have no meaning outside the context of the common good, which is threatened by too much emphasis on individualism.
Thus it is that St. Thomas, in De Regimine Principium, says that a king “must first establish the welfare of the community he rules.” But tyranny begins when “the community is directed in the particular interest of the ruler and not for the common good.” Thomas makes it clear that “the good of the community is greater and more divine than the good of the individual. Thus the hurt of some individual is sometimes to be tolerated, if it makes for the good of the community.”
Think about it. A person forfeits his right to liberty when he commits a crime. When society is endangered, it also demands a forfeiture of liberty through the military draft. The right to property, of course, is vitiated by taxation. Even the right to life is not absolutely “unalienable.” Catholic teaching permits the death penalty when necessary to defend the community.
It's not easy for American Catholics to accept the priority of the common good, although it is embodied in the preamble to our Constitution: “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare...” The “general welfare” is a hard concept for us because politicians tend to ignore the Constitution, except for the Bill of Rights, and emphasize the Declaration of Independence, with its rights to “life, liberty,” and, instead of property, “the pursuit of happiness.”
We do not have a common-good party in this country. There is an individual-rights party of the left, promoting privacy (abortion) rights, women's rights, homosexual rights and various other civil rights. There is also a right-wing individual-rights party, proclaiming the right to bear arms, the right to unfettered enjoyment of one's property, the right to life (for the unborn) and the right of churches to express their religion publicly.
We often hear the complaint that special interests have taken over the government. These special interests remind us of the “particular interest” of the ruler that, according to St. Thomas, leads to tyranny. In reality, both parties are based on the ultimate special interest, the individual, and neither exists to promote the general welfare.
To arbitrate between competing rights, a concept of the common good — the truly just society — is needed. Should Catholics form a third, Common Good Party?
Third parties in the past, true to the American pattern, have generally asserted some right of individuals. Their causes have frequently been just while lacking a coherent vision of the general good.
Thus the Liberty Party competed in three presidential elections from 1840 to 1848 on a platform of restricting slavery (the right to liberty). The Free Soil party campaigned on the same right in 1848 and 1852. Conversely, the Southern Democrats of 1860 defended slavery, citing the right to property as well as the right to liberty from federal interference.
The politics of rights also gave rise to parties that crusaded against some natural right. The American (“Know-Nothing”) Party of the 1850s fought against immigrants’ rights and the religious liberty of Catholics. After the Civil War, the National Party (the “Greenbacks”) and its successor the People's Party, or Populists, struck at property rights by promoting a silver or paper currency.
Then there is the Prohibition Party, which has been around since 1872. Its platform is obviously an attack on the “pursuit of happiness.”
In the 20th century, third parties took an even more individualistic direction, forming around the agenda of a single man: Theodore Roosevelt, Huey Long, George Wallace and, most recently, Ross Perot. In a bizarre twist, the Perot Party (a.k.a. the Reform Party) suffered a schism during the 2000 election when Pat Buchanan captured its nomination. Buchanan, a Catholic, then reformed the Reform Party in the image of the anti-immigration Know-Nothing Party.
The Constitution poses a challenge for our hypothetical Common Good Party. The electoral college encourages a two-party system, since any election in which no presidential candidate receives a majority of electoral votes is decided by the U.S. House of Representatives. Getting rid of the electoral college, however, would promote the growth of new special-interest parties, creating individualistic chaos.
Instead of forming a third party, Catholics should organize to support candidates in both major parties who have a clear vision of the common good. Our status as “swing voters,” with social concerns that transcend party lines, gives us power. If we avoid tying ourselves to either party, we will be courted by both and will have the opportunity to influence politicians toward the truly just society.
By doing this, we would follow the example of the first American Catholic politician. Asked whom he supported in the 1828 presidential election, Charles Carroll refused to offer a name. The signer declared that he favored “him whose measures will be solely directed to the public good.” It is hoped Catholic voters will be able to say as much when we go to the polls in November.
Scott McDermott is the author of Charles Carroll of Carrollton: Faithful Revolutionary, published this summer by Scepter Press. He writes from Nashville, Tennessee.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Scott McDermott ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary ----- TITLE: The Words of God DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Tertullian called it the summary of the whole Gospel. St. Augustine said that it expresses every petition contained in the Book of Psalms. St. Thomas Aquinas said it was the perfect model for prayer. These towering Christian figures refer not to some tome composed for scholars, but to a basic prayer taught to children: the Lord's Prayer.
The “Our Father” is the perfect prayer, a balanced meal for the soul, because it was composed by Jesus himself. In few words it expresses our relationship to God (a child before our heavenly Father) and sums up exactly what we need and how we should ask for it. Knowing our weakness, Jesus left little to chance. When his disciples asked him how to pray, he gave them more than suggestions. He gave them, and us, the words themselves, deep as the mystery of God yet accessible to “little ones.”
St. Thomas Aquinas said that in the Lord's Prayer we ask “not only for all the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence that they should be desired.” In that sequence is the key to the spiritual life of every Christian. In subsequent columns we will look at that pattern of praise and petition and what it means for our prayer life. For now, let us take a more personal overview of this prayer of prayers.
At the beginning of each session in his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius Loyola directs the aspirant to place himself in the presence of God for the space of an Our Father. Rather than setting a time limit for meditation, the spiritual master leaves a time open for the voice of God to reach the soul. Anyone who has taken the exercises will tell you that, as you go along in the program, the time for the Our Father becomes longer as the thoughts on God become deeper. You are learning to pray. You are building a relationship with God and discovering that God is the one who initiates communication and brings it to fulfillment in a communion of persons. The Our Father is the perfect meditation prayer because it offers a grasp of God from the beginning: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” We have a name and an address. But when do take the time to write or visit?
The Spritual Life
We pray the Our Father at every Mass, yet how often do we miss the fullness of the words because we are anticipating the sign of peace, seeing who's around us and wondering if he or she will want to shake hands or simply wave? If we were instead to choose a phrase of the prayer to concentrate on each Sunday, how much closer we would come to God at the end of a few weeks. We would wonder what we really ask for when we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” Are we ready at that moment, standing before the Lord's altar, for Jesus to come in all his glory to judge the living and the dead? To judge us in our sin and imperfection? Such thoughts would be a remedy for those who say the Mass is boring or they get nothing out of it.
Likewise, those who don't frequent the confessional because they complain of getting a string of Our Fathers for a penance should think again. If they would live fully even one phrase of the prayer, their lives would be changed forever. How about “fiat voluntas tua,” thy will be done?
Brian Caulfield writes from West Haven, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brian Caulfield ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: There's No Place Like Naples DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:A New York friend born in Naples was the inspiration for my first visit.
He described a magic land where enormous church doors led to mystic, shadowy realms — reverential sanctuaries where saints illuminated only by flickering candles smiled and waved, and where angels seemed to nestle in every nook. Step back outside and you're enfolded into a chaotic old-world cityscape, one in which the joy of living is palpable despite abundant evidence of economic want. If you have a weakness for cheap toys and candies, you'll be tempted at countless small street stands.
You might say that his memories drove me to Naples — where I found that his descriptions were not exaggerated in the least.
On his advice, the neighborhood known as Spaccanapoli was my first stop. Its name derives from spaccare, which means “to split violently, as a log.” Here the city could be “split in two.” In this ever-buoyant section, wash lines still hang from old palaces, billowing sheets and nightgowns replacing the royal standards of former owners. Recently it has achieved a gentrifying caché, brightening some things, draining character from others. Best of all, the narrow streets are often closed to traffic, making it possible to walk without feeling like a target in a game of high-stakes dodgeball.
Dating back to Greek days of the sixth century B.C., Spaccanapoli has seen wars, earthquakes and volcanic upheavals (Mount Vesuvius is just across the bay). A brief tour could start at the piazza del Gesù Nuovo, where the Gesù church stands behind a guglia (steeple-like tower) graced by the Madonna at the top.
Touch of Thomas
From here, first make an essential detour left to piazza Oliveto and Sant'Anna dei Lombardi. I wandered by accident into this church whose Pietà has lingered in my memory. The life-size terra cotta figures in this work, crafted by Guido Mazzoni in 1492, are so real, their pain over the death of Jesus so tangible, that you want to reach out and touch them to offer consolation.
To the right of the Gesù stand the Church and Convent of Santa Chiara (St. Clare), one of the most impressive sights in Naples. This medieval structure was bombed nearly to oblivion during World War II, but enough was left to restore Santa Chiara to its regal Gothic form.
The tomb of the 13th-century French King of Naples, Robert the Wise, shows him both on his throne and laid out in the habit of a third-order Franciscan, which he embraced at the end of his life. His wife, Sancia of Mallorca, was determined to endow this convent, having wished to spend her life as a nun but forced to marry Robert (nothing personal; he was a good man).
The cloisters are unusually charming: Columns and benches, richly decorated in faience, depict a lyric world beyond. Thick vines create shady arbors around the green and yellow ceramics.
Farther down via Benedetto Croce, another guglia stands in front of the castle-like Basilica of San Domenico, erected between 1283 and 1324, also in Angevin days. Much of the original structure was destroyed during the earthquake of 1456; in 1850 gold and polished stucco was added to the interior. The Chapel of the Crucifisso contains the crucifix icon said to have spoken to Thomas Aquinas when he lectured here. While Thomas was praying, the Lord said from the crucifix: “You've written well of me, Thomas” and asked what Thomas would like in return: “Only Thee,” Thomas replied, “Only thee.” Look for these words: Non aliam nisis te.
The nearby Cappella Sansevero (1590) is strangely compelling. Originally a family crypt, it's now a private chapel with an entrance fee. Inside, a member of the family seems to leap from his grave over the door in greeting. Its treasure is the Veiled Christ, a delicate marble rendering of the Savior lying dead, covered by a delicate veil of marble.
Another in the maze of churches in this area not to miss is 16th-century San Gregorio Armeno, on the street of that name where Christmas ornaments are sold all year, especially in November. The church has delightful cloisters and a vial of Santa Patrizia's dried blood that liquefies every Tuesday, as well as on her Aug. 25 feast day. Patrizia, a seventh-century saint from Constantinople, was a noble who fled the East to avoid marriage; she became consecrated to God as a virgin in Rome. Patrizia gave away her goods to the poor and became a patron of Naples.
The church of San Lorenzo Maggiore is a glorious sight. A Gothic triumph, it recalls medieval France, where its Anjou founders originated. Among many unusual features are the excavations. Below the church an entire ancient Roman road, complete with shops, can be visited. Perhaps the Emperor Nero followed it when he came here for singing competitions, which we're sure he won. The soaring majesty of this space inspires reflections on the amazing variety of the world God has given us.
Gennaro's Juice
San Gennaro (Januarius) is one of the most vivid symbols of Naples, despite his passing from this world in about the year 305. His legend varies, but it seems that, while serving as bishop of Benevento, he visited three Christians imprisoned for their faith at Pozzuoli, which angered the Roman governor. Bishop Gennaro was condemned to death by being pulled apart by wild beasts, but when he arrived at the arena, the animals stood back and would not touch him. This was attributed to magic and he was condemned to beheading at Pozzuoli. My favorite legend is that he then carried his own head to Naples, thus taking the founding relic to the cathedral.
Amazingly, Gennaro's fame was just beginning. A vial containing his dried blood liquefied frequently, even three times a year, and this miracle told Neapolitans whether their future would be rosy or troubled. Each year on his feast day, Sept. 19, his relic vial is held up to a crowd. If the blood liquefies quickly, that is a good sign for the year to come. Slowly, not so good. Not at all means gloom. Additional blood bubblings were observed on Dec. 16, anniversary of deliverance from destruction by Vesuvius, and in May. No amount of remonstrance from post-Vatican II clergy can stop this very cultural, very Neapolitan ceremony. (They've tried.)
A visit to the saint's relics in the Duomo, (just outside Spaccanapoli), is a popular venture. The chapel where his head and blood are kept is quite a beauty in itself, especially its gates and fresco. A strong Counter-Reformation statement is made in the fresco by Domenichino (ca. 1630), which shows Luther and Calvin trampled by a youth holding a banner, indicating the Catholic triumph over Protestant heresy. (Imagine what Protestants thought of the Gennaro mysteries.)
The magnificent Renaissance tomb of Cardinal Carafa shows a life-size Carafa kneeling. Included within the Duomo is the fourth-century Santa Restituta, Naples’ oldest remaining basilica. This might be an appropriate place to end your tour of Naples — it's a marvelous site to ask for the departing blessings of greater faith, hope and love in the Lord whose praises everything here sings.
Barbara Coeyman Hults is based in New York City.
----- EXCERPT: Italy's magical mystery tour for pilgrims ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman ----- KEYWORDS: Travel ----- TITLE: Spy Movies Come in from the Cold (War) DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Long one of the most popular genres in Hollywood, the spy thriller took on a new appeal after Sept. 11, 2001.
The shocking events of that day awakened America to the importance of national security. The newly vigilant nation has turned to espionage films not only for exciting entertainment but also as a way to process the concerns raised by ever-immanent terrorism.
Seven of this summer's big-budget productions fell into this category, and all but one were profitable. Because they were produced before the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, they didn't attempt serious examinations of al Qaeda, Islam or the Middle East. For this reason, the standards against which they probably should be measured are the escapist James Bond films — the longest-running franchise in Hollywood history (almost 40 years) — rather than more serious fare.
The early-summer releases (The Bourne Identity, The Sum of All Fears and Bad Company) strived to create a new kind of “cool” spy hero whose style would be more appealing to the contemporary-youth market than the suave, tuxedoed 007. They also tried to be slightly more realistic than the Bond movies, sketching out some of the larger issues raised by their characters and story lines.
The next entrants in this summer's espionage sweepstakes, Austin Powers in Goldmember and Men in Black 2, had no such lofty aspirations. Sequel entries in established franchises, they were broadly drawn parodies of the genre itself. The emphasis was deflected from suspense and international intrigue to gags and one-liners.
Now come XXX and Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams to complete the summer's spy-film offerings. Both are variations on the Bond model: All their characters are larger than life, good and evil are clearly defined, and action scenes and gadgets are more important than character development. Their heroes’ predicaments are taken seriously, but the tone is tongue-in-cheek. The intent is pure entertainment rather than social or political commentary.
Despite these similarities, XXX and Spy Kids 2 achieve very different results. XXX is an expensively made, ultra-violent, live-action video game whose story has no surprises. Spy Kids 2 imaginatively reworks the genre's conventions to fashion a pleasant, uplifting family film (though Catholics might consider it appropriate for older kids than its marketers envisioned).
Like the summer's early releases, XXX gives its hero edgy qualities calibrated to register as “cool” with youthful audiences. Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) is an outlaw extreme-sports champion who's recruited by an American intelligence agency for an especially dangerous mission. This is a workable idea.
Unfortunately, director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) and screenwriter Rich Wilkes make an all-too-common Hollywood mistake. They assume that spectacular stunts and special effects can take the place of narrative invention. Halfway through, the adrenalin rush wears off. From that point on, viewers are left with a by-the-numbers plot resolution whose every twist is utterly predictable.
Xander, a muscular hulk with his nickname tattooed on the back of his neck, is skilled in hand-to-hand fighting, motorcycle riding and parachute jumping. Nothing scares him. “I like anything fast enough to do something stupid,” he quips. Xander would be cast as a villain in a Bond film, but here he's the good guy.
Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson), a veteran intelligence operative, believes Xander's specialized talents are exactly what's needed to infiltrate a terrorist gang called Anarchy 99 based in Prague. Once inside, he must also outwit the group's leader, the renegade Russian officer Yorgi (Marton Csokas) and his mysterious female assistant, Yelena (Asia Argento).
Xander remains the same cartoon-like figure throughout. But, by the end of his adventures, a vague notion of patriotism has replaced his live-for-the-moment nihilism.
Spy Kids 2 has many of the same virtues as the first entry in the franchise. Writer-director Robert Rodriguez combines unhurried, offbeat humor with a playful visual imagination. The story is a continuation of the fantasy adventures of the Cortez family. The teen-age Carmen (Alexa Vega) and her preadolescent brother Juni (Daryl Sabara) have now become secret agents in the spy organization to OSS, the spy organization to which their parents Gregorio (Antonio Banderas) and Ingrid (Carla Gugino) belong.
The Cortez kids are rivals within OSS with the young Giggles siblings, who don't play fair like the Cortezes do. Gerti Giggles (Emily Osment) brags about their trendier clothes and more up-to-date gadgets because her father, Donnagon (Mike Judge), has just been made head of OSS. Complicating matters is Carmen's crush on the teen-age Gary Giggles (Matt O'Leary).
The Cortez and Giggles kids compete to rescue the U.S. president's daughter, Alexandra (Taylor Momsen), who's gotten into trouble at Dinky Winks Amusement Park. During this mission, the supersecret Transmoker device, which belongs in the White House, is stolen by mysterious villains who threaten to deto-nate it to destroy the world. The quest to retrieve the machine leads both the Cortez and Giggles families to the Island of Lost Dreams, where the gentle mad scientist Romero (Steve Buscemi) has created a menagerie of dangerous, mutant animals.
The sequences are sometimes longer and more complicated than they need to be, and it never quite equals the original film's surprising charm. Parents of young children will find that it has too many tense and frightening scenes — and too many bad attitudes. Still, Spy Kids 2 is on the whole good-natured fun for both teens and adults. Best of all, Rodriguez subtly reminds viewers about the importance of family relationships and why it's worth it to sustain them despite the occasional difficulties.
Hollywood will eventually come to grips with the more serious issues raised by Sept. 11 and the subsequent war against terrorism. In addition to the Bond films, there's also a tradition of more inquisitive and insightful spy drama to build on (The Third Man, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold). Here's hoping one of today's talented filmmakers will add an entry to this sub-genre soon. In the meantime, we can enjoy small pleasures like Spy Kids 2.
John Prizer has relocated from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: XXX and Spy Kids 2 — two very different ways to update a genre ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Changing Lanes (2002)
Most great drama is about moral choices. The central characters must decide between good and evil and suffer the consequences if they choose unwisely. Changing Lanes is hardly great. But every twist and turn of the plot does depend on the moral choices of its main characters. The story is triggered by a two-car collision in Manhattan involving a high-priced attorney (played by Ben Affleck) and a black insurance agent who has family problems and is barely making ends meet (Samuel L. Jackson).
The insurance agent wants to handle things according to the rules, but the attorney refuses. A string of bad luck follows for both, and each sets out to destroy the other. The action takes place on a single day, Good Friday, and the filmmakers explore issues of sin, sacrifice and redemption. Even though they pull their punches at times, the film is redeemed by sharp social commentary and the suspense of a well-made thriller.
Air Bud (1997)
The Disney imprimatur hasn't been a guarantee of family values for almost 20 years now. But if you search carefully, you can still find movies of which old Walt would have been proud. Air Bud successfully uses elements of fantasy to explore a classic story about a misfit boy whose best friend is his dog. Josh Framm (Kevin Zegers) is a lonely junior high-schooler whose dad has died. His life changes for the better when he takes in a golden retriever named Buddy who's escaped from his mean owner.
The canine can play basketball like a pro and almost never misses a shot. After he joins Josh's school team, the boy finds he's become accepted by his peers. But Buddy's original owner threatens to spoil things when he tries to take the dog back.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAYS
Seek First the Kingdom EWTN, 9 p.m.
“Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides,” Jesus tells us (Matthew 6:33). In this new program, Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel illustrates this divine counsel with his usual directness, wisdom and kindness.
MONDAY, SEPT. 16
Super Road: Interstate 95 Travel Channel, 8 p.m.
It stretches from Maine to Florida and carries hundreds of thousands of people, as well as untold loads of cargo, every day. This new documentary reveals lots of surprising facts about the East Coast's great commercial and commuter artery.
TUESDAY, SEPT. 17
Does It Work?
EWTN, 6 p.m.
Echoing their founder, the soon- to-be-canonized Blessed Josemaria Escriva (1902-1975), members of Opus Dei explain how they unite their labor and their spiritual lives so as to seek sanctification in the performance of their everyday duties.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 18
Chuck Jones: Extremes and In Betweens, A Life in Animation PBS, 10 p.m.
This 90-minute show is a repeat, but the peals of laughter it evokes can never go stale. The late comedy genius Chuck Jones perfected Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and the other Looney Tunes characters we cherish for their all-too-human foibles.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 18
Modern Masters: Hispanic American Artisans Home &Garden TV, 10 p.m.
This one-hour program takes us to the studios and workshops of experts who achieve one-of-a-kind creations in furniture, floors and other crafts.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 19
King Herod's Lost City History Channel, 8 p.m.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” boasted the poet Shelley's “Ozymandias, king of kings” about his proud empire that later crumbled. King Herod the Great must have bragged similarly about Caesarea, the Mediterranean port he built in Palestine between 25 and 13 B.C. Today it lies largely submerged, its pagan grandiosity forgotten. Its lasting legacy is the preaching of the Gospel there by Sts. Peter, Paul and Philip.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 20
This Week in History: The Civil War History Channel, 8 p.m.
Re-enactors head for the firing line to gauge the firepower and accuracy of every weapon from the War Between the States they can find: pistols, rifles and cannon.
SATURDAY, SEPT. 21
College Football: Boston College at Miami ESPN, 7:45 p.m.
The Boston College Eagles, a Catholic college football Eastern powerhouse, take on the formidable Miami Hurricanes in Florida.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts ----- TITLE: Keeping the Faith on Catholic Campuses DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:SOUTH BEND, Ind. — When Christina Dehan, a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame, began her college career at the Catholic school, she hoped to find other like-minded students who also practiced their faith consistently and adhered to the teachings of the Church.
But even at a college rich in its Catholic heritage, she had trouble finding such fellowship.
“I really didn't know where to look at first,” she said.
“For me, it was once I started going to daily Mass — it just happened,” Dehan said. “All of a sudden I knew all these people who were really on fire for the Lord. Then you have the most important thing in common, which is Christ.”
“Finding that community of strong believers is really key,” she added.
As is the case every year, as students pack up the car and move into dorms at Catholic campuses around the country this fall, many hope to make new friends and be encouraged in their Catholicity by other strong believers.
What they often encounter, however, are fellow students who, although Catholic, either are indifferent, ambivalent or outright hostile toward Church teachings. On many campuses, encouragement to retain their strong Catholic identity is lacking.
“Many Catholic colleges today are not as Catholic as they ought to be,” said Dr. Larry Chapp, associate professor of theology at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pa.
It's no secret that Catholic colleges and universities largely lack an institutional commitment to the Church, even after the release of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Holy Father's Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Higher Education, Chapp added.
Good Catholic fellowship is still out there, however. As many students say, one just needs to know where to find it.
“Be involved with Catholic life. Go to Mass,” said Christine Dumais, a senior at the University of San Francisco. “It's a temptation to say, ‘I don't have the time.’ You need to make time. There will be time if you make it, if you put the effort into it.”
“There's such a yearning [to find like-minded Catholics] that it is not difficult to find others,” said Sabine Calle, a senior at Georgetown University. “Just talk about the faith.”
Ron Floyd, a senior at the Catholic University of America and Grand Knight of the CUA Knights of Columbus College Council, said joining clubs was how he was able to find solid Catholic fellowship. He is a member of the College Republicans and the pro-life club in addition to his involvement in the Knights.
If they do have trouble finding fellowship, students should be more proactive, said Jesuit Father Matthew Gamber, the university ministry chaplain at Gonzaga.
“I would start by getting a group together and praying the rosary,” he said. “Mary is the way to create friendships and family. Turning to Mary is always your best bet. From that, you'll get eucharistic adoration, Mass and service.”
Father C. John McCloskey, director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., who served many years as a campus minister at secular colleges, advised students to find a spiritual director.
“Find a priest who's faithful and prayerful himself,” Father McCloskey said. “Look for priests who are involved in institutions or ecclesial movements that are faithful to the Church.”
Faculty members who are loyal Catholics can also provide fellowship to students.
“To have a good faculty mentor who is an authentic Catholic is very important for a young Catholic today,” said Dr. Joseph Hagan, president emeritus of Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. To find such a mentor, Hagan suggested consulting organizations such as the Cardinal Newman Society or the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
“Even at nominally Catholic colleges you will find a significant proportion of faithful Catholics,” DeSales University's Chapp said.
How would a student find those professors who have maintained a strong Catholic identity?
Dr. Curtis Hancock, chairman of the philosophy department at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo., said students should look at the faculty and ask themselves, “Who is interested in cultivating a genuine Christian wisdom in their students?”
“A student wants someone who can demonstrate the view that knowledge can strengthen and deepen faith and that Athens and Jerusalem are friendly,” Hancock said.
Father Gamber reminded students to take advantage of the resources of a Catholic university. They are unique places in which a student should strive to integrate the life of faith with the life of reason, he said.
“[In a Catholic university], many disciplines can come together to give the student a Christian wisdom,” Hancock said. “Even the sciences can have some bearing on deepening and making sense of the faith. Any knowledge you acquire gets you closer to God. It's such a lie that students are told that knowledge undermines faith. All learning is kind of an answer to a prayer.”
Defending the Faith
Occasionally, students find themselves in a situation where they need to defend the Church or its teachings.
“Be vigilant with the administration,” Hagan said. “If they are trying to take down crucifixes [in classrooms], you have to fight that.”
In such situations, Georgetown student Calle suggested first going to the chaplain. “If the chaplain isn't useful, keep a cool head no matter what,” she said.
Hancock agreed. “Walk a thin line between being prudent and on the other hand keeping your integrity,” he advised. “Most get away with this sort of thing because they are never held accountable. We have to be wise as serpents because there's such an assumption of atheism and relativism. You have to keep your wits about you, which is easier said than done.”
If a student perceives a professor to have misrepresented the faith, Chapp said, “It's incumbent on the student to first confront the faculty member in a very polite and respectful way. State, ‘My understanding of the faith is this, and what you taught us is that.’”
If the student's perception was right and the professor refuses to correct himself, Chapp recommended going through the proper chain of command. If that also fails, he said, then students should write a letter to the newspaper or to the local bishop.
Catholic Schools?
Many agree students should not have any difficulty at all when trying on campus to build up their faith according to the Church. After all, they are at Catholic schools. But the problem still persists.
“I think the scandal of the problems of Catholic higher education are seriously underappreciated by the bishops and those in the Church,” said Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society. “The damage being done is more severe than they are willing to accept.”
Despite the struggles, Reilly said, he sees some signs worthy of hope.
“In the past decade there's been a turnaround in attitude,” he said. “At the minimum, [Catholic colleges and universities] are willing to concede that these are Catholic institutions, and shaping Catholic identity will be a major project in the coming years. The problem is, some will try to define Catholic identity as something other than how the Church defines it.”
In the meantime, though, Hagan advised students to remain consistent in their faith, grow with what the Church offers and partake in what is available on campus.
Ultimately, he said, “The very best ways to grow in faith are prayer and the sacraments.”
“If we just do the basics,” Father Gamber said, “then everything else will follow.”
Tom Harmon writes from Spokane, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom Harmon ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Weekly Book Pick DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:THREE APPROACHES TO ABORTION: A THOUGHTFUL AND
COMPASSIONATE GUIDE TO TODAY's
MOST CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE
by Peter Kreeft Ignatius Press, 2002 134 pages, $9.95 To order: (800) 651-1531 or www.Ignatius.com
If common sense and clear thinking are like splashes of cold water, reading Peter Kreeft is the equivalent of diving into a deep mountain stream. Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, has addressed abortion many times, including in the form of a fictional debate between Socrates and an abortionist (The Unaborted Socrates). In Three Approaches to Abortion, a slender book that hits like a stiff punch, Kreeft comes at abortion from “three angles”: the impersonal, the personal and the interpersonal.
The first approach is an objective, 15-step argument logically showing that abortion is murderous and must be outlawed. It begins with the simple premise that we know what an apple is. From there it establishes the true nature of human beings, that morality is based on metaphysics, that rights do not come from society and that abortion is wrong because the Golden Rule is right. Although the arguments are rigorous, the language is not. Kreeft deftly demonstrates that the acceptance of abortion comes from an abandonment of morality and the implicit (sometimes explicit) rejection of reality.
While “pro-choice” advocates like to talk about how “complex” and “involved” the abortion issue is, Kreeft strips away these self-serving semantics. Abortion, he writes, “is not a complex issue. If it is not wrong for big, strong people to kill little, weak people just because they do not want them to live, then what could possibly be wrong?” There are only two possible ways of approaching ethics, he points out — “either might makes right or right makes might.” If the former is true, mankind has no objective basis for condemning murder, slavery or genocide. If the latter is true, abortion is evil. In the end, the most important concern is the foundation of moral thought and behavior: “The issue that most critically and crucially divides Western civilization today,” he writes, “the issue whose resolution will decide the life or death of that civilization, is the origin and basis of morality.”
Between the impersonal and personal sections, Kreeft interjects a short but powerful historical postscript. Especially striking are comparisons between recent American legal decisions and the philosophy and propaganda spread by the Nazis. Kreeft compares abortion to the ancient Canaanite worship of the child-destroying Moloch, the human sacrifices of the Aztecs and “Hitler's death machine.” Abortion, he notes, is today the “primary sacrament” of American society and of the sexual revolution. It is the centerpiece of an anti-religion that is consuming the moral fiber of our nation.
In “Why We Fight: A Pro-Life Motivational Map,” the approach becomes more personal. Kreeft lists and remarks on 15 subjective motives that fuel the pro-life movement. These include honesty, patriotism, civilization, families, sex, women, love of life and the image of God. While the tone is occasionally caustic and emotional, pro-abortion supporters (if they can be convinced to read the book) should be struck by the clarity and moral authority of Kreeft's statements. He poignantly summarizes his pleas for an end to abortion by saying, “It is time to be both pro-choice and pro-life by choosing life.”
The final and longest section is a fictional interpersonal dialogue between Libby, a pro-abortion feminist, and Isa, a pro-life Muslim. The imaginary conversation effectively conveys the moral and logical weakness of the pro-abortion stance. This is done without any explicit appeal to Christianity but by using logic, philosophy, science and natural law.
Kreeft hopes this book will be read by pro-choicers as well as prolifers. Abortion supporters who do read it with an open mind will be challenged — and shaken. Unfortunately, Kreeft hurts his cause, at times, with touches of biting sarcasm.
While his outrage is understandable, it occasionally clouds the clarity and strength of his arguments. However, his logic and reasoning are impeccable, making this book a valuable contribution to the ongoing battle against the American genocide.
Carl Olson, editor of Envoy magazine, writes from Heath, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: Airtight Arguments Against Abortion ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl Olson ----- KEYWORDS: Books ----- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Oath of Fidelity
FRANCISCAN UNIVERSITY OF STEUBENVILLE, Aug. 27 — In what might be a first for any U.S. prelate teaching at a Catholic university, the recently retired Bishop Gilbert Sheldon of Steubenville, Ohio, joined new theology faculty in pledging his loyalty to the Pope and promising to adhere to Catholic Church teaching.
Bishop Sheldon gave his oath of fidelity and profession of faith before Bishop Daniel Conlon, his successor for less than three weeks as the Steubenville ordinary. Bishop Sheldon will serve as a guest lecturer in bioethics and theology.
The oath of fidelity is in keeping with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education.
Right Teaching
THE NATIONAL COALITION OF CLERGY AND LAITY, Aug. 16 — The coalition said it will present its annual Pope Pius XI award this year to Mary Schrader and Franciscan Father Paul Guthrie, according to a press release.
The award, which commemorates Divini Illius Magistri, Pius XI's 1929 encyclical on Christian education, is given each year to a layperson and a religious or priest for “selfless efforts to build up authentic Catholic education among youth.”
A longtime catechist, Schrader has also served as secretary for the publication of the 10-volume Official Catholic Teaching, published by Catholics Committed to Support the Pope. Father Guthrie, a friar of the Byzantine Holy Dormition Monastery in Sybertsville, Pa., has served in a number of Ukrainian Catholic parishes where he has specialized in the catechesis of children and teen-agers.
Interim Rector
PONTIFICAL COLLEGE JOSE-PHINUM, Aug. 26 — Father James Garneau, a Church historian, has been named interim rector/president of the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, said a college announcement. He replaced Bishop-design ate Earl Boyea, who was named an auxiliary bishop of Detroit.
In a separate announcement, the seminary said Scott Hahn has been named adjunct professor of Scripture in the school of theology. He also teaches at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Father Garneau, a priest of the Diocese of Raleigh, N.C., was academic dean of the Josephinum's School of Theology and College of Liberal Arts.
Sept. 11 Labyrinth
CHRONICLE.COM, Aug. 26 — A roundup of activities planned for the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks included this item on the Edmundite fathers’ college in Colchester, Vt.:
“St. Michael's College is having a labyrinth painted on its campus green, and visitors will be invited to navigate it in contemplative thought.”
Webster's Dictionary defines labyrinth as “a place constructed of or full of intricate passageways and blind alleys.”
Final Four
BLOOMBERG NEWS SERVICE, Aug. 26 — If college sporting events were decided in the classroom and on who crosses the finish line on graduation day, three Catholic colleges would be among the “final four,” according to the wire service.
Based on the graduation rates of scholarship athletes in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the top four would include St. John's University of New York (with an 80% graduation rate), University of Notre Dame (77%) and Xavier University of Cincinnati (70%).
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education ----- TITLE: Pope: It Moves God, 'for Whom Nothing Is Impossible' DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy — Pope John Paul II encourages families to include the saints — and prayer — in the heart of home life. In a recent talk, he urged families to reject the skepticism of modern man and to embrace their faith as a way of life.
He made his remarks on Sept. 8 — the birthday of Mary — and said she was the pre-eminent model of a prayerful spirit.
Here is a translation of the address John Paul II delivered Sept. 8 before reciting the Angelus with thousand of pilgrims gathered at the papal summer residence.
In today's Gospel passage, Jesus says to his disciples: “Again, ... I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father” (Matthew 18:19). These words, received with faith, fill the heart with hope. God is a merciful Father who listens to the prayers of his children.
When believers pray, they move God's heart, for whom nothing is impossible. As I wrote in the apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, it is necessary for them to be distinguished “in the art of prayer” (No. 32), so that all Christian communities will become “authentic schools of prayer” (No. 33).
Unfortunately, we are often exposed to vicissitudes and tragic events, which sow disconcert and anxiety in public opinion. Modern man seems to be sure of himself and yet, especially on critical occasions, he must come to terms with his powerlessness: He feels his incapacity to act and, consequently, lives in uncertainty and fear. The secret to face not only emergencies but exhaustion and personal and social problems day after day is in prayer, made in faith. Whoever prays does not get discouraged, not even in the face of the most serious difficulties, because he feels God by his side and finds refuge, serenity and peace in his open arms. Then, in opening the heart to the love of God, it also opens to love of brothers and makes it capable of constructing history according to the divine plan.
Dear brothers and sisters, may education in prayer become a decisive point of all pastoral programs (Novo Millennio Ineunte, No. 34). It is very important to pray every day, personally and as a family. May prayer, and prayer together, be the daily breath of families, parishes and the whole community.
I am pleased to greet the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors present for this Angelus prayer. Upon you and your families I cordially invoke the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
May Mary help us to understand the great value of prayer, the intimate union of the soul with God. Today we celebrate the mystery of her Nativity, for which Christian people have always felt a lively devotion. Let us ask the Holy Virgin to open our hearts to greater confidence in the Lord, who worked great wonders in her, the humble and docile handmaid.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Lost During the Storm DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Q When my 6-year-old loses his temper, I can't settle him down. Do you have any ideas to calm him?
A If I did, I'd be nominated by parents everywhere for a Nobel Peace Prize. Alas, to paraphrase Dr. McCoy from the old television series “Star Trek,” “I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker.” In truth, getting your son to quit his fit is not as unlikely as you might think. It's just that it's not as much of a snap as you might like.
The primary purpose of discipline is to teach a lesson. To oversimplify a bit, we say to the child, “If you do x, I'll do y.” Discipline is a promise of predictability. It shows a child that he will be held responsible for his conduct.
A secondary purpose of discipline is control. Initially the grown-up attempts to control the child's behavior so that eventually the child will come to control himself. In other words, external controls and consequences teach internal restraint.
Teaching a lesson happens immediately.
Teaching self-control takes years; in some cases, it takes a lifetime. As soon as you tell your son, “Flare, for this fit you're in the corner; keep going, and you're in bed,” you've conveyed the primary purpose of discipline. You've taught the lesson.
But that doesn't mean he'll abruptly change his emotional direction and confess, “I'm so sorry, Mother. Thank you for talking sense into me. The threat of an early bedtime was just the impetus I needed to get hold of myself.”
Forty-three outbursts from the present one, Flare may ever so slowly begin to realize, Gee, every time I have a blowout, things happen to me that I don't like. I'd better get a quicker grip. Thus begin the seeds of self-control, of the ability to short-circuit an outburst in progress — sometimes even before it starts.
Part of your son's seeming imperviousness to discipline is due to a quality he shares with all humans of any age. Once we're on an emotional roll, we more often come to a skidding halt rather than a dead stop. So when a child is in a let-it-all-out frustration episode, not too much is going to instantly, successfully penetrate his thinking. By its very essence, an emotional tirade is long on feelings and short on reason. It is during those in-between periods of calm — hopefully far longer than the storms — when the learning has time to sink in, and thus slowly to eradicate the fits.
Also, never underestimate the power of temperament. Some kids by nature are more fiery than others. That is just a fact of their wiring. For them to bring their outbursts under control is a longer, more involved process. When Serena can quiet herself at the mere mention of discipline, Blaise practically feeds on punishment as a necessary fuel for his fire. Rest assured, even the most intense of kids can mature at the hands of a strong parent.
In the end, remember, no matter how good the lesson, or how many repetitions, all humans retain the proclivity to throw a fit. The form may change, but not the motive: I'm mad about what's happening here. And don't try to stop me just yet.
Dr. Ray Guarendi is the father of 10, a psychologist and an author. He can be reached via www.kidbrat.com.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Married Parents DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:A new study released by the Urban Institute found that children with married parents do much better economically and behaviorally than do children with cohabiting parents. According to the study, children in cohabiting households were more than twice as likely to live in poverty, be without sufficient food and to have behavior problems.
Source: Family Research Council
----- EXCERPT: Facts of Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Making Saints a Part of the Family DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:There's strength in numbers. This old maxim applies to armies heading to battle, citizens rallying for an important cause — and families facing the day-to-day challenges posed by life in these United States.
A wife can draw on the strength of her husband when she finds work particularly burdensome. The loving care of siblings and parents can lift up children and teenagers when they feel weighed down by peer pressure. And, through common prayer and mutual devotion, each family member can be a source of grace for the others.
The strength of prayer and devotion can also be added to the family by making saints a part of their number. Sometimes this happens through the deliberate choice or tradition of the family. At other times it might seem that God, in his providence, sends saints into the life of a family in surprising and mysterious ways.
This is what happened recently in the lives of Torie Winter and Craig Smythe. When the lives of their respective daughters were both threatened by grave illness, two American saints, recently beatified, became ordinary parts of their families in ways that they could have never expected. Torie and Craig may have been mystified about how these saints became parts of their families, but they will be forever grateful for the strength that they have added to them.
After a difficult pregnancy, Torie Winter gave birth in a New Orleans hospital to her daughter Brynn. In ordinary circumstances this would be an occasion of awe-filled joy. But on May 22, 2000, confusion and anxiety filled the delivery room.
Two families transformed by American saints Father Seelos and Mother Theodore.
Ordinarily, a mother has her newborn baby in her arms within seconds after the child is born. But Brynn was born blue and motionless. “They rushed away with her,” Torie remembers. “The doctor was yelling for a specialist.”
Torie soon learned from the doctors that Brynn had clipophile syndrome. They told her that her baby would probably be blind, deaf and mentally retarded. Vertebrae in her neck and spine were fused, as were her ribs. And then, when just over a week old, Brynn experienced seven seizures over two days. She was in a neonatal intensive care unit. Her parents were expecting the worst.
One night, Torie came to Brynn's bed and saw a card lying on it. The card had a prayer on it and a picture of a priest. The man was Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, a Redemptorist priest who ministered in various parts of the United States in the 19th century and who eventually died and was buried in New Orleans. The prayer on the card asked for his intercession. So she and her husband, Larry, started praying.
The seizures stopped when the prayers to Blessed Seelos started. As the couple continued to pray to him over the following months, the vertebrae and ribs started to separate. “I've never seen spinal fusions become un-fused,” says Brynn's doctor. “Whatever you all are doing, keep it up.” He wrote to Torie and Larry a year later and told them that what had happened to Brynn was not scientifically explainable.
As Torie and Larry have continued to pray to Blessed Seelos over the past two years, Brynn's scoliosis (curvature) of her spine has also continued to improve, confounding doctors. But Blessed Seelos has also become an integral part of the Winter family. “I carry his relic in a locket with me everywhere I go,” Torie says. “I have a couple of pictures of him up around the house, almost like he is family.”
I Second That Devotion
Meanwhile Blessed Mother Theodore Guerin has been welcomed into the family of Craig and Julia Smythe of Pendleton, Ind. Devotion to the saints was not a part of their family life before their 9-year-old daughter, Sarah, was diagnosed with a rare and life-threatening cancer-like disease in July 1999.
In the days leading up to a surgery scheduled for her in November of that year, Craig contacted Tony Barrett, the principal of St. Ambrose School in Anderson, Ind., where Sarah was a student. When Craig told Tony of Sarah's condition, he immediately told him, “You must have a relic from Mother Theodore Guerin.” As Craig knew nothing of her and had no devotion to any saint, all he could say in response was, “Who is that?”
He learned more about the blessed from Sister of Providence Mary Kevin Tighe, the promoter of Blessed Mother Theodore's cause. As the surgery approached, everyone in the family had many concerns and misgivings. But they also started praying to Blessed Mother Theodore, in Craig's words, “all the time.” He felt that Mother Theodore was somehow calling to them, “Appeal to me! Put this in my hands.”
When the day of the surgery arrived, Sarah went into the operating room with a framed prayer card containing a relic of Blessed Mother Theodore. The surgery was successful, but Sarah has had additional operations since then. The family has had to travel to St. Louis for treatments and surgeries. On their way there, they have stopped at Blessed Mother Theodore's tomb to pray. Still, they acknowledge that Sarah's condition is likely to always be a part of her life.
But so will Blessed Mother Theodore. Sarah composed a prayer that she prays to her every night at bedtime: “Dear Mother Theodore Guerin: Thank you for loving us the way you do. Make us completely well. And keep us completely well.”
And she has become like an important, honorary member of the Smythe family. “She is part of our lives,” Craig says, “sometimes on an hourly basis.” Craig's two stepsons, both of whom suffer from muscular dystrophy, have been “bowled over” by how praying to Blessed Mother Theodore has helped smooth out the challenges in their lives.
Some might say that the devotion to the saints seen in the Winter and the Smythe families would detract from their trust in Christ. Just the opposite. “Our devotion to Mother Theodore Guerin in no way obscures our faith in Christ,” says Craig. “It absolutely enhances it because time and time again, when I speak to her, her answer is always the same — ‘I have taken your petition to God and put everything in his hands.’”
Torie Winter echoes that. “When I pray to Blessed Seelos,” she says, “I'm asking him to pray for me to Jesus.”
So it is that Catholics like the Winters and the Smythes have found strength in numbers by making saints a part of their families. This can be true for any of us, whether our families are burdened by disease or not. That's why it's important to recognize that the examples of the Winters and the Smythes are not all that extraordinary. Although some diseases are described as “rare,” it is the family that never experiences the challenges of life-threatening illness or injury that is truly uncommon.
Such struggles might be the occasion for some families to come to know a saint. But, as the stories of the Winters and the Smythes show us, once we welcome a saint into our homes, they can become very much a part of the family. They add strength to our numbers.
Sean Gallagher writes from Columbus, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sean Gallagher ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Staring Post-Abortion Grief Straight in the Eye DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Psychotherapist Theresa Burke of King of Prussia, Pa., was a young graduate student leading a support group for women with eating disorders when she stumbled upon a startling revelation: Six of the eight women in the group had had abortions. Although her supervisor sternly advised her not to inquire further into their abortions, Burke knew she had to explore the apparent connection. Her work led her to start Rachel's Vineyard retreats in 1995 for those suffering from post-abortion trauma.
Now, with David Reardon, an expert on the aftereffects of abortion on women, she has co-authored Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion. Burke talked with Register correspondent Judy Roberts about her efforts to expose the truth that abortion harms women.
How did you first learn that most of the women in your eating-disorders group had had abortions?
A woman named Debbie started sharing about flashbacks to her abortion. Then she shared that her ex-husband would call and leave messages on her answering machine, calling her a murderer. When she said that, everybody in the group went crazy. One woman said, “Your ex-husband is a horrible man. I had an abortion, too, and I would feel terrible if someone said that to me.” Another said, “We have a right to control our bodies.”
Another got up and left the room and slammed the door. It was this big dramatic reaction from everybody. I went to my supervisor, who was a psychiatrist, and shared what happened with him. I knew I wanted to know more about their abortions because I thought their flashbacks and nightmares could be symptomatic of post-traumatic stress syndrome. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “You have no right to pry into people's abortions.”
How did you react?
With eating disorders, people stuff their feelings with food, and so the therapy for it has always been seen as “the talking cure.” In the group, we had run the gamut of every subject. Nothing was off limits. So to have permission to discuss anything and everything except abortion, it was clear that abortion was “forbidden grief.” I eventually left that place, but had a couple other head-on collisions with my own colleagues because no one wanted to acknowledge post-abortion grief. There's scientific proof that this is real, yet there is still resistance to acknowledge it.
Abortion providers claim that not all women react to abortion the same way. Some even say that women who are especially “religious” should not have an abortion. Do women who suffer trauma after an abortion have certain characteristics, such as a strong religious background, or have you found that women across the board suffer?
Abortion providers like to blame it on religion — “If you're Catholic, you will have a problem afterward.” But this pain transcends religion. It's part of our humanity. When you look at medical records, you find higher rates of suicide, depression and the seeking of psychiatric care among women who have had abortions. Because this problem is so unrecognized, they're likely to be diagnosed with other problems, such as anxiety disorders, and are not able to deal with the root of what caused the symptoms.
Did you have difficulty finding a publisher for
I tried two years to find a publisher. I was told the book was well-written and moving. I even got personal notes at the bottom of form letters. But nobody wanted to [publish it]. Then I sent it to David Reardon. We met in Chicago and he said he would like to publish it, but he suggested I add [some material]. Then I got pregnant with my son, Stanley, who is now 3. So I said, “Why don't you write it with me?” What David added made this book so much more credible. Otherwise, it was all anecdotes. In the book, I give the woman's story and the psychoanalysis. He gives the research and cites studies.
Have you always been pro-life?
Yes. But even though this was a very important issue to me, I didn't feel that everything I was seeing in the pro-life movement was a fit for me. I actually did a “rescue” once after my first child was born — he's 16 now — and got arrested. They threatened to separate me from my son in jail and it was so frightening. I thought, “There's got to be a better way.” Then, when this incident happened in the eating-disorders group, I started my first therapeutic support group for post-abortion trauma. I just did it as a little ministry on the side. The curriculum for Rachel's Vineyard came out of those early days.
What other pro-life work have you done apart from Rachel's Vineyard?
My husband, Kevin, a clinical social worker, and I own and operate Covenant Family Resources to help couples with adoption. Kevin guides and manages the growth of the ministry — under the direction of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
How did radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger happen to write the foreword to
Three years ago, I wrote her a letter asking if she would like to take a look at the book and write an endorsement for it. She wrote back and said yes almost right away. Just before the book was published, I wrote her again and explained, “I'm my kids’ mom, I had a baby and things were delayed. Would you still be interested in endorsing the book?” I never heard anything back, so David printed all the galley proofs with “Foreword by Dr. Laura.” When she got the proofs, she read it, got excited about it and wrote the foreword almost immediately.
Do you think pro-abortion advocates are ever likely to accept the fact that women are harmed by abortion? Might this be key to changing their attitudes?
I think that's the only hope we have. There's going to be more and more research coming out showing that it's irrefutable. At some point, they're going to have to acknowledge that abortion is hurting women. One of the great gifts Forbidden Grief reveals is the depth of their suffering. We pull back the curtain on the human heart. Every other injury is paraded on TV talk shows, but not this one.
Judy Roberts writes from Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life ----- TITLE: Profile Victories DATE: 09/15/2002 12.00.00 P.M. CATEGORY: September 15-21, 2002 ----- BODY:Australian Cloning Ban
CYBERCAST NEWS SERVICE, Aug. 30 — Australia's parliament has voted unanimously to ban all human cloning. The vote followed an agreement by lawmakers to split the cloning ban component from broader legislation they are considering, which would legalize controversial research on human embryos.
The ban covers cloning of a human embryo for whatever purpose, including so-called “therapeutic cloning” that would allow cloning of an embryo solely to provide stem cells.
With the cloning matter out of the way, lawmakers have more time to debate the more contentious embryonic stem-cell research provision, which if passed will allow scientists to harvest stem cells from “spare” embryos created during in-vitro fertilization treatment.
Pravda Criticizes U.S. Press
RFMNEWS.COM, Aug. 26 — The former Soviet state-controlled newspaper Pravda has called the American mainstream media establishment “liberal” and asserted that “dozens of studies” associating abortion with breast cancer are not being discussed in the American public forum.
According to Pravda, this occurs because the women's health issue is a “taboo subject” as a result of “intense pressure from the billion-dollar abortion industry.”
Pravda reported on a controversy which has erupted between U.S. Rep. John Hostettler (RInd.) and a handful of women associated with the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). The congressman was publicly chastised and called an “embarrassment.”
Hostettler raised the subject of the abortion-breast cancer link in a meeting with the activists who are breast cancer survivors and the women felt he had implied they once had abortions.
Iran Keeps Abortion Illegal
SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE UNBORN CHILD, Aug. 29 — A group of legislators in Iran have tabled a bill which would legalize abortion in cases of fetal handicap.
The legislation would permit so-called preventative abortions in the first four months of pregnancy if three doctors certified that an unborn child was “malformed.”
Abortion is currently illegal in Iran except to save the mother's life.
Abortion/Breast Cancer Link
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COALITION FOR LIFE, Aug. 30 — Participants in the Avon Breast Cancer Walk and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Colorado will see a mobile billboard which reads, “Breast Cancer's Most Avoidable Risk: Abortion.”
Last year, Colorado Right to Life joined forces with Survivors, a group of American-teens who carry the message that one third of their generation has been destroyed by “choice,” to launch the mobile billboard campaign.
The billboard was driven past hundreds of women in the Komen Foundation race.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: For Mass in English, New Era Begins at ICEL DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — When a long-awaited new English version of the Mass arrives, what will it sound like? Chicago's Cardinal Francis George says it might be an amended version of a translation the Vatican recently rejected.
Cardinal George, who serves in a key position with the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, the body entrusted with translation of the liturgy into English, speculated that the rejected work could be salvaged and that a translation of the new, third edition of the Roman Missal will depend on “how fast we can get translators to work on it.”
The third edition of the missal was promulgated in 2000. The bishops who oversee the translating body — which is known as ICEL — met in Ottawa July 29-Aug. 1 and announced several major changes.
First, they said that a new translation might be ready in early 2005. But it could be 2007 or later before it is introduced into daily use in dioceses of the United States.
Second, they named Coadjutor Bishop Arthur Roche of Leeds as chairman and Father Bruce Harbert, a priest of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, England, as new executive secretary.
In an interview Sept. 10, as he took up his duties at ICEL's Washington office, Father Harbert said the commission will decide soon on whether to use the rejected translation of the second edition of the missal as a basis for the new one.
“In a few weeks, or perhaps a couple of months, we have to decide what role the text already prepared will play,” he said. “It doesn't have to be trashed.”
The Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the sacraments rejected ICEL's translation March 16. The translation had been in the works for years. In a letter explaining the rejection, Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez, prefect of the congregation, suggested incorporating “the best elements” of the work in a revision.
The Problems
Cardinal Medina's letter, written to presidents of English-speaking bishops conferences, was “very helpful,” said Cardinal George, treasurer of ICEL's Episcopal Board and the new chairman of the U.S. Bishops Committee on the Liturgy. “It wasn't an exhaustive list,” he told the Register, “but it gave indications where the translation suffers.”
The letter, which was published by Adoremus Bulletin (www.adore-mus.org), cited problems in the ordering of the texts of the Mass; grammar, syntax and sentence structure; “inclusive language” and the distinction of liturgical roles.
On inclusive language, for example, Cardinal Medina wrote that the omission of the word “men” in the Creed, particularly in a line reading, “For us and our salvation,” has “theologically grave” effects. The revised text “no longer clearly refers to the salvation of all, but apparently only that of those who are present,” he said. “The ‘us’ thereby becomes potentially exclusive rather than inclusive.”
Use of the term “humankind,” further, is “too abstract to convey the notion of the Latin homo. “The latter, just as the English ‘man,’ which some appear to have made the object of a taboo, [is] able to express in a collective but also concrete and personal manner the notion of a partner with God in a covenant who gratefully receives from him the gifts of forgiveness and Redemption,” Cardinal Medina wrote.
ICEL said this summer that a new revision would be based on the principles of Liturgiam Authenticam — the 2001 Vatican document that calls for translations to be faithful to the Latin — as well as Cardinal Medina's letter.
The letter, then, provides good clues of what the Mass will sound like. Catholics will be praying, “I believe in God” at the beginning of the Creed, rather than “We believe,” and responding, “And with your spirit,” when the celebrant says, “The Lord be with you.”
Also, a version of what Cardinal Medina calls “the rich language of supplication,” with phrases such as “we beseech” or more contemporary equivalents such as “we beg” or “we implore,” likely will be reflected in prayers offered by the priest.
Cardinal Medina also complained to ICEL about the lack of relative clauses in its translation of the second edition of the missal.
“This loss is detrimental … to the manner of conveying the proper sense of the posture before God of the Christian people or of the individual Christian,” the cardinal wrote regarding the relative-clause issue. “The relative clause acknowledges God's greatness, while the independent clause strongly conveys the impression that one is explaining something about God to God. … The quality of supplication is also adversely affected so that many of the texts now appear to say to God rather abruptly: ‘You did a; now do b.’”
Cardinal George said an English translation that is faithful to the original will necessarily have a different tone because sentence structures are different in Latin.
Father Harbert
Father Harbert, who taught last year at the Liturgical Institute in Chicago, also has been critical of ICEL's work, saying it has gone beyond its mandate to convey the meaning of the original Latin in ways that speak to contemporary man. In 2000, he wrote in the journal Antiphon that in ICEL's translation of the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I), “God has been demoted; man promoted.”
“In the prayer over the bread and wine (‘Father, accept this offering’), God is commanded rather than asked or entreated: ‘Be pleased (placatus), we pray (quaesumus) to accept’ would be closer to the tone of the Latin,” he wrote.
Father Harbert said an artificial sacral character cannot be imposed on the translation but that the translation must reflect the sacral character of the original.
“Thirty or 40 years ago, people thought you could not address God without using ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’” he noted. “The key point is faithfulness” to the Latin. The English language is “very rich, [with] an enormous abundance of resources. It's a very subtle instrument in our hands for making the missal of the Church available to the people of today.”
“It's a challenge with each text to find the middle way” between excessively ornate language and flat, ordinary language, he said. “It demands creativity.”
ICEL has already begun translating according to Liturgiam Authenticam. This has involved using different translators in some cases, Cardinal George said.
The commission is working on the Rite of Ordination, the Rite of Exorcism and the Rite of Dedication of a Church, said Father Harbert, who sees his role as including “always looking for new people” to translate texts.
While translations have taken a long time in the past because of the consultative nature of ICEL's approach, Cardinal George said, it is conceivable the commission could now have a few people to do the translations, then have many others review the work before it is sent to the English-speaking bishops' conferences for approval and to Rome for the necessary recognitio.
“The work is done by committees and task forces,” Father Harbert said. “The executive secretary is a coordinator. He does what the bishops ask him to do. The work goes through so many bodies, but ultimately the responsibility for the liturgy is each bishop in his own diocese.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: On School E-mail, Can you Say The Word 'God'? DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:DALLAS — Earlier this year in Dallas, when public school receptionist LaDonna DeVore sent an e-mail to fellow co-workers about this year's National Day of Prayer, she wasn't expecting to have her hands slapped. After all, the text of the e-mail was a proclamation issued by the president of the United States.
But the e-mail policy of her employer, the Highland Park Independent School District, prohibited “religious worship” and “proselytizing.” She was warned that if she sent such a group message again she would lose e-mail privileges at work.
DeVore sued the district for violating her constitutional right to free speech. The district maintains the problem was not that she sent an e-mail with religious content but that she sent a group e-mail for personal reasons — even though DeVore's lawyers say other personal group e-mails resulted in no such reprimand.
Whatever the reason for the reprimand, the wording of the e-mail policy has been changed, and the lawsuit is now being settled, lawyers said.
The policy approved by the school board at its last meeting no longer singles out religious speech, said Bill Banowsky, attorney for the school district.
“We changed the policy because it is of questionable constitutionality,” Banowsky said. “DeVore is correct and her lawyers are correct in that we can't select out religious speech.”
DeVore's attorney, Stuart Roth of the American Center for Law and Justice — a religious and civil liberties advocacy organization in Virginia Beach, Va. — said that revision was exactly what they were looking for. “They changed the policy. They did the right thing,” he said.
The fact that such policies remain on the books in some schools or other public institutions reflects the confusion in many people's minds about the acceptable place of religion in the public arena. Employees and employers may not know the rights they have and other times assume rights they don't have, according to legal experts.
“I think people have been pressed into thinking that they can't engage in continuing font page story religious expression in the public arena. They are incorrect. Religious speech is fully protected speech, even if it occurs in a public arena,” American Center for Law and Justice's Roth said.
The mistake the Dallas school board made with its original policy was confusing an employee's free-speech rights, which are guaranteed by the First Amendment, with a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from the establishment of religion, agreed Roth and school district attorney Banowsky.
“Most people who have worked in the public sector become so used to hearing the establishment clause that they begin to think it applies to them as well,” Banowsky said.
The government as an employer cannot prohibit protected speech, such as religious or political expression, if that speech is not disruptive of the workplace, said Eugene Volokh, UCLA law professor who teaches on free speech and law of government and religion.
“The government has considerable power, but not unlimited power, over speech,” he said. “The establishment clause doesn't give the government any extra power or responsibility here, because we're talking about private speech. It may not then discriminatorily exclude religious speech.”
What could be punished would include speech that insults other employees or interferes with work-place morale, he said.
“If there is no real disruption but there is just some theory that it may be disruptive … then in that case the employees continue to have the right to [that speech],” he said.
Government not only has First Amendment restrictions as an employer but also as a proprietor, Volokh said, and it must remain “content-blind.” For example, once the government declares a work facility — such as a bulletin board, lunchroom or e-mail — to be open-speech territory, then it cannot restrict religious or political speech there, he said.
The school could say, for example, that employees may talk about politics or other non-work matters in the lunchroom, but they can't use e-mail for such discussions, he said. Or it could say a certain bulletin board is to be used for work projects only, not for personal notices.
“But if the institution says employees may use the e-mail for personal stuff, either political causes or social causes, then in that case the government may not then exclude religious speech,” he said.
One reason DeVore was corrected by her superiors, Banowsky said, is that she sent the e-mail to some 30 or 40 fellow employees and did so as the receptionist.
“DeVore is the receptionist and sort of the public face of the district,” he said. “We were concerned about people misinterpreting her personal e-mail representing the policy of the district. We can't allow employees to do anything that would seem to endorse religion.”
Even though the message was about the National Day of Prayer and consisted of President Bush's own proclamation, the fact that it included some New Testament verses would have put it at risk of violating the establishment clause had it come from the schools, he said.
Indeed, if DeVore had sent a religious message out to public at large and signed the school district's name, that would have been punishable, Volokh said.
But it is easy to distinguish between personal e-mails to fellow employees and a message from the school to the public at large, he indicated. “I can tell when I get an e-mail from my colleagues that it's from them and not from the school,” he said.
Roth said the burden is on the school district to properly administrate employees’ use of e-mail to avoid confusion. “Once the school creates this forum for expression, it's their duty to inform everybody that the school does not endorse uses by the staff,” he said.
In 1997 the White House under President Bill Clinton issued guidelines on religious rights of employees, Banowsky said. The guidelines, which are posted on the Web site of the Christian Legal Society, represent a balanced view of the law that is applicable to other public institutions, he said.
Private Workplaces
The law is quite different when it comes to private workplaces, where employees could be prohibited from sending out religious e-mails, Volokh said.
The rules regarding freedom of religious expression in a nonpublic workplace come under TITLE VII, which requires both private and public employers to provide reasonable accommodation for employees’ religious practice, he said.
For example, he said, if a work-place has a no-jewelry policy, the employer would have to give an exemption for religious jewelry that is worn as part of someone's religious practice. But unlike with a public employer, there is no specific constitutional prohibition against a private employer placing restrictions exclusively on religious expression.
Said Volokh, “Some people think they have all kinds of rights they don't possess. The First Amendment only protects them against the government.”
Ellen Rossini writes from Dallas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: After U.N. Speech, Catholics Assess the Case for War DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:NEW YORK — President Bush traveled to the United Nations on Sept. 12 to lay out his case for a possible U.S.-led military campaign to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
But prominent U.S. Catholic commentators remain sharply divided about such a campaign and about whether a war would be more or less moral than the current U.N.-ordered trade embargo against the Arab country. That embargo has been condemned repeatedly as unjust by Pope John Paul II and by Catholic bishops in the United States, Iraq and other countries.
In a speech that largely repeated known facts about Iraq's support for terrorism, Saddam's efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and his failure to comply with U.N. resolutions, Bush declared, “By breaking every pledge — by his deceptions and by his cruelties — Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.”
“[O]ur greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale,”
Bush said. “In one place — in one regime — we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.”
But has Bush in fact made a persuasive case for waging war against Iraq if Saddam refuses American demands to allow the return of U.N. weapons inspectors?
The Register talked to several Catholic leaders who thought the war could be justified. Making the case for a just war were Princeton professor Robert George and scholar George Weigel. Making the opposite case were commentators Pat Buchanan and Lew Rockwell.
Meanwhile, Pax Christi USA spokesman Johnny Zokovich said his organization is “against violence in all its forms,” and said that neither “killing people with a long-term economic embargo” nor “killing people by military action” is justified.
“The rest of the world recognizes Iraq for what it is, a defeated country,” Zokovich said. “If there is an imminent threat of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction, that must be addressed by other means — through negotiations, diplomatic channels and international pressure.”
And while Saddam is certainly a “nefarious figure,” the primary American motivation in tackling him seems to be the sense of “unfinished business” coming out of the 1991 Gulf War, Zokovich added.
Other Catholic commentators offer assessments with more nuances. Christendom College historian Warren Carroll said he believes the Iraqi embargo is justified but is concerned about a preemptive military attack.
“We have the right not to trade with that sort of government,” Carroll said. And even if the impact of the embargo falls on the population at large, rather than against its dictatorial leader and his supporters, that is no more than the natural consequence of “a people paying the price for the kind of government they have.”
But when it comes to war, Carroll said, “I'd be more comfortable if [Iraq] had committed some clear act of aggression. The absence of a casus belli is something we should think seriously about.”
And even if Saddam did possess nuclear weapons — which he does not, according to intelligence estimates of his military capabilities — the morality of a pre-emptive attack would depend on Saddam's intentions to use them, Carroll said, adding that “nobody really knows” what those intentions are.
The Hawks
For Princeton University professor of jurisprudence Robert George, an all-out war against the Iraqi regime might be morally preferable to the long-standing embargo.
“There has to be some sort of presumption against an embargo, because you run such a great risk of harming the very people you're trying to help,” George said. “For that reason, you have to consult with credible representatives of the people,” to ensure that any damage to them is outweighed by the good of weakening an oppressive regime.
“But embargoes have a poor record of doing any good,” he added, “so the presumption has to be in favor of free trade, for the common good of our community and the rest of mankind.”
When it comes to war, however, George stressed the moral principles that would justify a war must be distinguished from the prudential question of their application in the case of an attack on Iraq. He believes “as a matter of moral principle” that a just war can be a pre-emptive war against a regime that has not first attacked the United States.
If there is “a very substantial likelihood that aggression is imminent, and if the consequences of that aggression would be massive destruction, proportionately much worse than the destruction of a preemptive attack, then a pre-emptive attack is morally justified,” George said.
As for the question of “imminent aggression,” George said Saddam has already committed acts of aggression: “He invaded Kuwait and has since grossly violated the terms of surrender; he attempted to assassinate our 41st president [Bush's father George H.W. Bush]; and he has brutally suppressed his own population.”
Given that history, Saddam's acquisition of nuclear weapons would itself be an act of aggression, George said, and “the potential magnitude of the threat matters.”
If a war against Iraq is in principle a just one, George continued, the issue then rests on the factual question of whether Saddam is preparing to use nuclear weapons. Bishops and other Church leaders can contribute to that prudential decision only if they have superior sources of intelligence, he said.
“As a private citizen, I don't have any privileged access to the intelligence I'd need to make that decision, but I trust President Bush and his team,” George said. “I'm happy that the administration isn't united on this question, that there's scrutiny and broad debate about just how imminent and serious the threat is.”
Scholar and papal biographer George Weigel of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center also thinks a solid case can be made for attacking Iraq.
“In my judgment, the possession of weapons of mass destruction by an aggressive, indeed murderous, regime — a regime that has demonstrated its willingness to use such weapons on its own citizens as well as in war — itself constitutes an ‘aggression under way,’ one of the ‘just causes’ in classic just-war theory,” Weigel said.
“It makes little moral sense to argue that the U.S. must wait until Saddam Hussein fires a missile with a nuclear, chemical or biological warhead before we can attempt to stop him,” he added.
Weigel acknowledged that meeting the test for a morally principled war “doesn't settle the prudential question, of course,” but he is convinced that military action is both necessary and “doable.” Doing it, however, will lay a further obligation on the United States “to see to it that positive regime change actually follows — that Iraq is given every chance to become a peaceful and prosperous country,” Weigel said.
The Doves
In contrast, conservative political activist and author Pat Buchanan questions the imminence of the threat Saddam poses to the United States.
“A regime change would be preferable, but only the Iraqi people have a complete right to remove their regime. The U.S. has a right to do that, only were the use of nuclear weapons imminent,” Buchanan said.
To a limited extent, Buchanan conceded, weapons of mass destruction do change the standard of what constitutes a justified pre-emptive attack — but probably only to the extent of justifying an attack against the threatening facilities.
“I'm no unconditional defender of Israel, but I think the Israelis were right to attack the [Iraqi] Osirik reactor” in 1981, he said.
While conceding that an Iraqi war could be morally justified in theory, Buchanan nevertheless does not think the factual reality is there to justify it.
“I don't believe Saddam has nukes, and I don't believe he has the means to deliver them. And if he did, though he is undoubtedly a wicked tyrant, he is not insane. He doesn't have the kidneys of Osama bin Laden,” Buchanan judged. “Now, if Osama had nuclear weapons, you'd be justified in doing whatever it took to stop him.”
Catholic libertarian Lew Rockwell, editor of LewRockwell.com, doubts whether the United States has any right to do anything to Iraq.
“Sure, Saddam is a bad guy, but there are lots of bad guys in the world,” Rockwell said. “What government has the right to change any other government, just because they're bad?”
Rockwell likens the decade-long embargo against Iraq to a police force torturing the wife of a suspected murderer to get him to confess. “The Holy Father is right; the United States is the aggressor here,” Rockwell said. “Our policy has been to crush the Iraqi people, to get them to do something about their own regime.”
As for nuclear weapons, Rockwell said Saddam's efforts to acquire them are driven precisely by the threat the United States might seek a regime change. He said the only scenario where Saddam would use them was in the event of an American attack, since the Iraqi leader knows he would face annihilation from the vastly larger U.S. arsenal if he initiated a nuclear conflict without provocation.
Rockwell also challenges Bush for singling out Iraq as one of three members of the “axis of evil” that allegedly sponsors international terror. “What does the so-called axis of evil — North Korea, Iraq and Iran — have to do with al Qaeda?” he asked, alluding to the lack of hard evidence so far that Saddam has been a primary backer of bin Laden's terror network.
And while Saddam might be a bloodthirsty tyrant, he actually runs one of the Middle East's most liberal regimes. “You can get a drink in Baghdad, and there are Catholics in his government — neither of which can be said about our good ally Saudi Arabia,” Rockwell said.
Rockwell argues that Saddam was previously regarded as “the U.S.’ tool” when he warred with Iran in the 1980s, “but at some point, he ceased being the U.S.’ boy, and now we want to replace him with someone who will take our orders.”
Said Rockwell: “This is our way of saying to the world, ‘Cross us and we'll destroy you.’ We're like Genghis Khan, building a mountain of skulls in Baghdad.”
Joe Woodard is based in Calgary, Alberta.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Woodard ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Apologetics Blunders DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Mark Brumley knows all the wrong things. And he wants to tell Catholics who evangelize how to avoid them.
Formerly the editor of The Catholic Faith and Catholic Dossier, Brumley currently serves as president of Ignatius Press, vice president of Campion College in San Francisco and is editing the Ignatius Catholic Encyclopedia of Apologetics. His new book is How Not to Share Your Faith(Catholic Answers). He spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake about his conversion and the apologetics movement.
Where did you grow up and what was your religious background?
I grew up in St. Louis. My parents were both factory workers and I have one younger brother. I was a nondenominational nothing. I describe myself as a south St. Louis theist. We believed in God, but my family didn't go to church. We tried to live moral lives, but there was no specific faith content. We didn't see that as especially important.
What led you to become a Christian?
I first became a Christian while I was in high school. This came about through a combination of things — talking with friends and reading the New Testament some elderly ladies down the street had given to me. My acceptance of Christ is hard to describe. On one hand, I had not formally been schooled in any religion. On the other hand, once I accepted Christ a whole range of things that I was only semiconscious of — like prayer and my place in the universe — made sense.
Unfortunately, the kind of Christianity I was initially exposed to was an independent, militant anti-Catholic fundamentalism. I saw the Church as the “whore of Babylon” and thought the Pope was probably the precursor to the Antichrist. I interview saw the Church as the worst of the corrupt religious systems of Christendom.
So what led you into the Catholic Church?
I came into the Catholic Church through the back door of evangelical Christianity. Gradually, through a period of study, reading folks like C.S. Lewis and talking to different people, my Christianity expanded. I came to see that genuine Christians could be found in most Christian bodies, and there were even some Catholics who could be Christians. Interestingly, although I regarded myself as a radical Christian, I had not been baptized. I was very suspicious of organized religion and human authority.
I was troubled that I could not find a New Testament church in evangelicalism. I wanted to find a church that was one in faith, one in ritual and one in its church government but was unable to.
I eventually was baptized in the Methodist church. Reading C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and Frank Sheed, as well as talking with some charismatic Catholic friends, helped me get over some of my problems with the Catholic Church. The book The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism by Louis Bouyer helped me to understand the Reformation and the Church. An intellectual conversion then led to a conversion of heart. I converted in 1980.
It seems there is resurgence in the Catholic apologetics movement. What do you think accounts for this?
I don't know. There has been a boom in Catholic apologetics since the late 1980s. I would say it's probably due to a bunch of little old ladies saying their rosaries back in the 1970s. There were a lot of people praying for their children who had been taken out of the Church. The modern apologetics movement is, in part, a response to the prayers of those people.
There are too many people involved to pinpoint any individual, but if we were, Karl Keating is perhaps the principal human agent there. He really spearheaded the modern renaissance of Catholic apologetics.
There are some drawbacks to this resurgence as well, which you address in your book.
Like any movement of the Holy Spirit there is always the risk that human beings will distort the good and allow themselves to get derailed, so there are some dangers of that in the modern apologetics movement.
My general observation is that we should expect that. Nefarious forces trying to undercut the good should not surprise us. If we didn't see it, we should wonder if we weren't doing something that we should be doing.
Do you have any personal examples of evangelizing efforts that backfired?
I know that on many occasions I have used a strategy of dismissing others' arguments with the line, “I used to believe that too, but now I know the truth.” While it might be true, it's condescending and insulting to dismiss others as if you don't have to grapple with their arguments.
Because I came from an evangelical background, on many occasions I have been too inclined to argue with evangelicals when it is not appropriate.
I recall showing up to protest the film The Last Temptation of Christ. While there, some evangelicals started witnessing and evangelizing us Catholics instead of trying to evangelize the crowd there. I knew in my heart that we should ignore them, but instead we got into a big, long theological argument in front of the theater. It did a disservice to the cause of Christ, so much so that a Jewish man yelled at us and told us we should stop. He said we could argue these points somewhere else, but here we should be united. I was utterly embarrassed and realized it was something we need to examine our conscience about.
What are the key mistakes apologists make?
One mistake can be apologetical gluttony or trying to do too much. This means trying to prove what is not provable or to compel a person to say Yes to the fullness of the faith. An example I use is a friend of mine who insisted he could prove the doctrine of the Trinity from reason alone. I warned him that if he were successful he would cause me to question what the Catholic Church teaches because the Church teaches the Trinity is a supernatural mystery, beyond the power of reason alone. If he could produce an argument showing the Church was wrong about supernatural mysteries it would have made me worry the Church was wrong about faith.
Some apologists think faith is simply about presenting strong arguments. They confuse our arguments for the faith with the faith we argue for so we come to think if our arguments falter, there is something wrong with the faith. There is also the danger of trying to come up with novel argumentation. The danger is that people can come to confuse these ideas with the faith itself. Sometimes the ideas don't hold up.
You compare such mistakes to the seven deadly sins. In what ways can we prevent ourselves from making such mistakes?
I present seven habits of effective apologists that can be developed to overcome these vices. They include prayer, study and dialogue. We need to respect the people with whom we are speaking. We need to talk to them in a way that will help the truth that is living in our minds and hearts to live in their minds and hearts.
The three final habits are faith, hope and charity. It takes great faith to be an effective apologist. We need to admit when we are wrong, and when we have charity we will love the truth more than we will love ourselves. The love of God needs to be the primary motive of everything we do as Catholic apologists. This will oblige us to present the best arguments we can muster.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mark Brumley ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Theologian Urges ‘Voice of the Faithful’ to Dissent
THE HARTFORD COURANT, Sept. 10 — Pro-abortion priest Father Daniel McGuire of Marquette University is encouraging the lay activist group Voice of the Faithful to go further and faster in its criticisms of Church hierarchy and doctrine.
“From what I've seen so far, they're much too timid and fearful to do the job they've set out for themselves,” Father McGuire said in The Hartford Courant. “We keep hearing they're ‘not dissidents.’ Well, that's the whole point — dissident means you're disagreeing; you have to be a dissident to the hierarchy that promoted sexual abuse of children.”
Father McGuire criticized Voice of the Faithful for distancing itself after its recent convention from invited speaker Debra Haffner, a sex educator; author; co-director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing in Norwalk, Conn.; and a Unitarian seminarian.
Archbishop Dolan Uses Radio to Promote Vocations
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL, Sept. 4 — New Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan has gone on the offensive to promote vocations in the archdiocese.
Archbishop Dolan, former rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, has drawn large crowds at parish visits, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and has launched a radio ad campaign for a top priority: priestly vocations. His voice could be heard on more than 140 broadcasts of a one-minute spot played on five local radio stations.
“He's moving like a tornado, and I'm just hanging on,” said Father Bob Stiefvater, archdiocesan vocations director. “I wanted to use the good news he is creating to further a positive image for the priesthood and religious life.”
In the ads, Archbishop Dolan called on listeners to intensify “your love and service to your husband, wife, children, family, friends, classmates, community, parish, co-workers, neighbors. And yes, maybe, just maybe, by considering the possibility the Lord might be calling you to serve him and his Church as a priest, deacon, religious sister or brother, or professional lay minister.”
Retired Bishop Suspends Ministry After Allegations
SUBURBANCHICAGONEWS.COM, Sept. 5 — Bishop Daniel Ryan, 72, one-time prelate of the Joliet and Springfield, Ill., dioceses, “has suspended his public ministry amid new allegations that he sexually abused a minor,” according to the Web site.
A lawsuit accuses Bishop Ryan of sexual involvement with Frank Sigretto, then 15 years old, at the bishop's Springfield home in 1984. Bishop Ryan protests his innocence.
However, three other men have come forward to claim the bishop had sexual encounters with them when they were young in a suit that dates back three years.
According to the news site, “The suit alleges that a Springfield Diocese priest abused a boy in the 1980s, and that Ryan's multiple homosexual relationships created an atmosphere of tolerance for the sexual abuse of minors. Ryan stepped down as bishop when the suit was filed in 1999.”
The site also points out that “diocesan documents recently unsealed by a Will County judge indicate that in the 1970s, Ryan advocated ordination of a seminarian who would later be accused of molesting several adolescent boys.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Michigan Candidate for Governor Targeted Over Pro-Abortion Stance DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:DETROIT — Pro-life Catholics in Michigan are applauding a new statement from the Michigan Catholic Conference that emphasizes that opposition to abortion should be the “pre-eminent” issue when the state's Catholic voters cast their ballots this fall.
The Sept. 9 document updates an earlier conference statement that was less forceful in emphasizing the importance of abortion, and it comes in the context of continuing controversy over the stridently pro-abortion views of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jennifer Granholm, who is Catholic.
“This is a great first step,” said Matt Bowman, a student at Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor. “The statement is quite a bit better than anything they have put out before.”
Granholm, the state's attorney general, has stated that while she is “personally opposed to abortion,” she is “100% pro-choice.” Her campaign for governor is being backed by Emily's List, the Washington-based pro-abortion political action committee.
In protest against Granholm's views, pro-lifers have picketed for several weeks outside Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Plymouth, where she is a parishioner and lector.
In early August, in response to the protests, associate pastor Father Doc Ortman wrote a column in the parish bulletin defending Granholm's “pro-choice” stance. “To say that one is pro-choice,” Father Ortman wrote, “is, for the Christian community, an admission that we are created in freedom. … Make no mistake, Christians are pro-choice in the purest understanding of the term.”
At the direction of Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit, Father Ortman issued a formal statement of apology in the Aug. 25 parish bulletin, asking “forgiveness and reconciliation” for the hurt caused by his earlier comments.
“My column of Aug. 3-4 was ambiguous and led some to believe that I am not dedicated to life,” the priest wrote. “I am sorry for that misunderstanding. I reverence God's gift of life from its beginning, at conception, until its natural end. … This means I am necessarily against the sin of taking life by acts of abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment.”
Pancake Breakfast
Granholm, in contrast, has remained unrepentant and continues to argue that a Catholic politician can be “pro-choice.” To confront her publicly over that position, a group of Ave Maria law students attended a pancake breakfast Sept. 7, where Granholm and her Republican opponent, Dick Posthumus, were meeting with voters. Posthumus opposes abortion except in cases where the life of the mother is in danger.
One of the Ave Maria students’ shirts bore the message, “Gran-holm: Catholic? Pro-abortion murderer? Which is she?” Another shirt asked, “If Granholm lies about her religion, how can we trust her as governor?”
Student Suzanne Housey told the pro-life Internet news service Lifesite that she went to the breakfast to ask “Granholm to either stop masquerading as a Catholic or stop advocating this unspeakable crime as good public policy.”
Housey noted that in challenging the candidate she was only repeating the official teaching of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding abortion in the bishops' 1998 document Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics: “No public official, especially one claiming to be a faithful and serious Catholic, can responsibly advocate for or actively support direct attacks on innocent human life” (No. 32).
After being confronted by the protestors, Granholm cut short her appearance at the pancake breakfast and left without taking part in the question-and-answer session candidates usually engage in with voters.
Conference Statement
The Michigan Catholic Conference statement, released two days after the pancake breakfast, was cause for further discomfort for Granholm.
TITLEd “A Catholic View to Election 2002,” the statement was sent to all of the state's 804 parishes. While again listing seven major social issues for Catholics to consider this fall, as in the previous election statement issued by the conference earlier this year, opposition to abortion was singled out this time as the “pre-eminent” concern.
“Respect for the dignity of the human person demands a commitment to human rights across a broad spectrum,” the statement said. “Abortion is the pre-eminent threat to human dignity because it directly attacks life itself, the most fundamental human good and the condition for all others.”
Sister Monica Kostielney, president of the Michigan Catholic Conference, stated in a press release, “There's no ambiguity in this statement … Catholic voters — and candidates — are called upon to be consistent in their defense of life, from the first moment of conception to the last natural breath.”
Granholm told The Detroit News on Sept. 9 the “seven basic principles” the conference has listed “are all part of my agenda.” However, she said, “the abortion issue has been settled by the U.S. Supreme Court and its legality cannot be a subject of this election. I believe what Catholics believe on abortion. But not every faith agrees with that. So is it right for government to force Catholic beliefs on every other faith?”
Pro-lifer Bowman said Granholm's comments demonstrate her continuing refusal to acknowledge clear Church teachings that specify Catholic politicians must always fight against abortion. “She has actually stepped up her ‘pro-choice’ rhetoric,” Bowman said.
Some Michigan Catholics have asked Cardinal Maida to go further and publicly chastise Granholm by name or even excommunicate her. But archdiocesan spokesman Ned McGrath told the Detroit Free Press in late August that excommunication wasn't under consideration.
“It's not something the Church just throws around,” McGrath said.
Bowman said he thinks the new Michigan Catholic Conference statement to voters should be sufficient — so long as it is presented forcefully to Catholic voters.
“This new statement is definitely more direct and applicable to Granholm,” he said. “It should be promulgated in the parishes leading up to the election, and it should be applied to what she says.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope Issues Plea for Truce During Olympics
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 2 — While addressing Greece's new ambassador to the Holy See, Christos Botzios, Pope John Paul II called upon the ancient tradition of an “Olympic truce” to ask nations of the world to suspend armed conflict during the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
The Holy Father said such a truce would “offer the possibility of a new experience of fraternity to vanquish hatred, to bring individuals and peoples closer … I make an appeal for a lasting truce from all violence so that the peaceful spirit and healthy stimulus, proper to the founders of the Olympic Games, may spread in all areas of society and in all continents.”
The Olympics are scheduled for Aug. 13-29, 2004. Ambassador Botzios, 63, noted the wish for peace had already been expressed jointly by the Pope and Orthodox Archbishop Christodoulos during John Paul's visit to Athens in May 2001.
Vatican Agrees to Plan for ‘Sustainable Development’
VATICAN INFORMATION SERVICE, Sept. 7 — Archbishop Renato Martino, head of the Holy See Delegation to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, delivered the closing statement on the summit's plan of action on Sept. 4.
“The Holy See … is pleased to join the consensus of the Plan of Action of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. … At the same time, the Holy See reaffirms all of the reservations that it has previously expressed at the conclusion of the various United Nations Conferences and Summits, as well as the Special Sessions of the General Assembly for the review of those meetings.”
The reservations concerned attempts by governments to regulate population growth and other initiatives that threaten human dignity in the name of preserving ecology.
Vatican Slams ‘Evil Nun’ Movie
ANANOVA.COM/EDINBURGH MORNING NEWS, Sept. 10 — The Magdalene Sisters, a film that depicts alleged cruel mistreatment of young women by religious sisters in Scotland, won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival last week. Vatican Radio has responded angrily, calling the film by Scottish director Peter Mullan “clearly false,” Ananova.com reported this week.
The movie depicts one “Magdalene convent” — run in the 1960s by religious sisters to house unwed mothers — as a place where young women were virtually imprisoned and treated cruelly.
Vatican Radio pointed out that director Mullan “likens the Catholic Church to the Taliban,” and said that awarding top honors to the film was “offensive and pathetic.”
The director, who had a Catholic upbringing, responded that the Catholic Church must face up to “huge worldwide levels of abuse” against the faithful if it wished to survive the 21st century, according to the Edinburgh Morning News. Mullan said he had been “taken aback by the backlash” from the Church.
“It surprised me, actually. I didn't think they would be that stupid. I actually thought they would just kind of dismiss the film,” he said. “I've been a bit surprised at that and I've been more than a little bit disappointed at the Vatican's lack of humility.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Justice and Truth Bring Freedom and Peace DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul II traveled to the Vatican from his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo for his weekly audience on Sept. 11. Since it was the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the Holy Father commemorated the victims in his short address and condemned once again every form of terrorism.
“One year after Sept. 11, 2001, we repeat: No unjust situation, no feeling of frustration, no philosophy or religion can justify such an aberration,” he said.
The Holy Father called for a renewed effort to begin political and economic initiatives to resolve injustice and oppression. “Freedom and peace can only come from truth and justice. It is possible to build a life worthy for man on these values. Otherwise, there is only destruction and ruin,” he noted.
The general audience ended with a special prayer of the faithful, during which pilgrims of various nationalities read prayers for peace and justice in their native languages.
All over the world countless people are remembering New York City today, where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed following a brutal attack on Sept. 11 of last year, burying many of our innocent brothers and sisters in their ruins.
One year later, we wish to remember once again the victims of that terrorist attack and entrust them to God's mercy. At the same time, we wish to express once again our spiritual support to their families and their loved ones. But we also want to question the consciences of those who planned and carried out such a barbaric and cruel plan. One year after Sept. 11, 2001, we repeat: No unjust situation, no feeling of frustration, no philosophy or religion can justify such an aberration. All humans have a right to have their own life and dignity — which are inviolable goods — respected. This is what God tells us, international law confirms, the human conscience proclaims and coexistence in society requires.
Terrorism is and always will be a manifestation of inhuman cruelty, which, precisely because inhuman, can never resolve conflicts between human beings. Oppression, armed violence and war are choices that sow and generate only hatred and death. Only reason and love are valid means for overcoming and resolving disputes between peoples and nations.
Nevertheless, a simultaneous and determined effort is urgently needed to launch new political and economic initiatives capable of resolving the scandalous situations of injustice and oppression which continue to afflict so many members of our human family, thereby creating conditions that foster the uncontrollable explosion of a desire for revenge. When fundamental rights are violated, it is easy to fall prey to the temptation to hatred and violence. We need to build together a global culture of solidarity that can restore hope in the future for our young people.
I wish to repeat to all of you a word from the Bible: “The Lord … comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with his truth” (Psalm 96:13). Only from truth and justice can freedom and peace flow. On these values it is possible to build a life worthy of man. Otherwise, there is only destruction and ruin.
On this very sad anniversary, let us pray to God that love will replace hatred and, with a commitment from all people of good will, harmony and solidarity will be affirmed to the ends of the earth.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Shariah on Trial: Implications of the Nigerian Stoning Decisions DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:IBADAN, Nigeria — Islamic courts in Northern Nigeria have recently sentenced two women, accused of adultery, to death by stoning. The courts base their decisions on Shariah, considered by Muslims to be divinely revealed law.
Dominican Father Joseph Kenny, an expert on Islam who teaches at the Dominican Institute in Ibadan, Nigeria, discussed some of the implications of Shariah with Register staff writer John Burger. A Chicago native, Father Kenny has lived in the West African country for 38 years and has taught at the University of Ibadan.
Why was Amina Lawal condemned to death by stoning?
A few days ago, I passed through Funtua, the town of Amina, the illiterate village woman now famous throughout the world for being condemned to stoning for being found pregnant without a husband. Life was going on normally, with no concern for outcries over the case from the outside.
The Koran (24:2,4) merely prescribes flagellation for such a case, but there are Hadiths, incorporated in the Maliki law holding in Nigeria, increasing the penalty to stoning to death for adulterers who ever have been married. Pregnancy convicts the woman, but the man can only be caught by four eyewitnesses to the act.
It sounds like something out of the Old Testament.
Of course: Deuteronomy 22:22-24. Muslims generally do not like to admit that the Koran borrowed anything from the Bible, but in the case of Hadith they frequently refer to “Isra'iliyyat” — material that got into the Hadith through Jews converted to Islam. The conservative Muslims of Nigeria have not gone so far as to question the origin and validity of Hadith prescribing stoning for adultery.
When was Shariah introduced into Nigeria?
Shariah, to some extent, came with the introduction of Islam to Nigeria. There were some Muslim kings in the north as early as the 11th century. Most of them were not very serious about Islam or Shariah until the jihad of Usman dan Fodio, founder of the Sokoto caliphate at the beginning of the 19th century. But his reform had limited application, since most of the people in the north were not Muslims. They still are not the majority.
British colonial rule allowed Shariah courts to continue where they existed, but they were disallowed from condemning to death or mutilation. Just after independence in 1960, a common penal code, inspired by Shariah but not including all the usual penalties, was promulgated in the north of Nigeria with the blessing of the Muslim leaders at that time.
Only in the late 1970s did Muslims, under Saudi instigation, begin agitating for “complete” Shariah. This project did not succeed on the national level. Only in the past three years did the formula of Shariah on the state level emerge.
Isn't Nigeria a secular country? How can a court impose a religious law like that?
The constitution allows for Shariah courts limited to personal law, and this existed throughout the 20th century. The constitutionality of the present extension of Shariah to criminal law has never been tested in the Supreme Court — maybe because it has a majority of Muslims — but many jurists have been vociferous that it is not constitutional. Political factors do not give an easy hand to the president [Olusegun Obasanjo] in pursuing the matter vigorously.
Does the spread of Shariah pose a threat to the country?
The spread of Shariah is a decoy for the political interests of a northern elite who wish to re-establish the northern region broken up by [former military leader Yakubu] Gowon in 1966, and thereby control the federation. Toward that end, much thuggery and ethnic cleansing is going on to recapture states lost to Muslim rule. But the rest of the country is [sensitized] to this threat and is resisting.
Further violence is always possible, depending on the stakes and the desperation of the parties to the conflict. Yet, as Archbishop [John Olorunfemi] Onaiyekan [of Abuja] said, Muslims and Christians are not going to fight over whether Muhammad is a prophet or Jesus is the Son of God. If they fight, it is over the control of political and economic turf.
If Shariah is posing problems, why doesn't the government do something about it?
It would stir up a hornet's nest to make a frontal attack on Shariah. Besides, I really think Obasanjo and company are confused as to what tactic to take. They could take it by particular issue, but have not done so. They mostly hope it will just vanish.
There is considerable opposition to the present governor of Zamfara State (the home of Shariah), and it is quite possible that the 2003 elections will bring in someone else, who will just let Shariah fade to the background.
Is Islam spreading in Nigeria? How strong is Christianity, and is it threatened by Islam?
The approach to political Islam in Nigeria since independence has been to impose rather than persuade. The threatening image of Islam has, in fact, inoculated the population against Islam, just as Sept. 11 inoculated Americans (except perhaps some Hispanics and blacks in prison), many of whom previously were attracted to Islam because of its culturally rich heritage and exotic flavor. So it is not expanding in Nigeria. Rather, more Muslims are converting to Christianity than the other way around.
All religion is very much alive in Nigeria. There seems little risk that Christianity in Nigeria can go the way of early Christianity in North Africa. In the southern part of the country, where I am most of the time, I have never seen Muslims more open to dialogue and cooperation for peace and progress. They appreciate the many gestures the Pope and Catholics here have made toward Muslims.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:London Host to Islamic ‘Celebration’ of Sept. 11
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, Sept. 9 — Sept. 11 saw mourning and commemoration throughout the United States and the world, but extremist Muslims in London planned to mark the day with celebrations, according to The Daily Telegraph.
The London paper noted that Islamic clerics organized a meeting in Britain's capital to “celebrate the anniversary of al Qaeda's attacks on America and to launch an organization for Islamic militants.” Organizers advanced the argument that “the atrocities were justified because Muslims must defend themselves against armed aggression.”
The meeting was intended to “launch the Islamic Council of Britain, which will aim to implement Sharia law in Britain and will welcome al Qaeda sympathizers as members,” the paper wrote.
Omar Bakri Mohammed, 44, heads a group called al-Muhajiroun, which favors a worldwide Islamic state. “The people at this conference look at Sept. 11 like a battle,” Mohammed said, “as a great achievement by the mujahideen against the evil superpower.”
Australians Flock to Church to See ‘Weeping’ Statue
ABC NEWS ONLINE, Sept. 9 — The latest popular devotion in Perth, Australia, centers on a statue of the Blessed Virgin that, according to devotees, has begun weeping rose-scented tears. Thousands of Catholics have flocked to the parish in western Australia that hosts the statue to see the statue, which is exhibited publicly on Sundays.
Skeptics suggest “the weeping is probably a trick or the result of some type of condensation on the statue,” ABC News Online reported. The small fiberglass statue was bought by parishioner Patty Powell at a religious shop in Thailand for about $82 eight years ago. When she noted the unusual secretions that smelled like roses that first appeared in March, around the Feast of St. Joseph, she presented the statue to her pastor for safekeeping.
The bishop of Perth has made no comment on the phenomenon.
Exquisite Old Church Destroyed by Fire
REUTERS, Sept. 6 — As Americans mourn the loss of the World Trade Center a year ago, Brazilians are lamenting the loss of a historic, 17th-century church that burned down Sept. 5.
The cathedral-sized Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Pirenopolis was one of the few remnants of Portuguese colonial architecture in the area. Reuters reported residents “watched in dismay as the walled remains of the three-century-old church smoked and its tower crumbled. … Built by slaves in 1728, the church was decorated with imported treasures as Pirenopolis developed into a rich regional center for silver mining.”
The cause of the fire is unknown.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Archbishop Tauran on Intervention in Iraq and Terrorism DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:ROME — The decision to launch a military operation against Iraq must be made at the United Nations, and only after all options are exhausted, says Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, in this interview.
The clouds of war are gathering over Iraq. What is the Holy See's position?
Always to favor dialogue — never to isolate a country or a government, so that it can insist on duty with greater efficacy from the one who has transgressed the rules of international law.
Obviously, evil cannot be combated with another evil, adding evil to evil. If the international community, inspired by international law and by the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, considers recourse to force opportune and proportionate, this should take place with a decision in the framework of the United Nations, after having studied the consequences for the Iraqi civilian population, as well as the repercussions that it might have on the countries of the region and on world stability.
Otherwise, only the law of the most powerful would prevail. It is possible to question legitimately if the type of operation being contemplated is an adequate means to make authentic peace flower.
The wound in the Middle East is still open. In your opinion, what are the basic conditions to arrive at a stable peace?
First of all, that arms be silenced. Then, that one and all respect the other and his legitimate aspirations; that all apply the rules of international law; that the Occupied Territories be evacuated; and that a special statute be elaborated, guaranteed internationally, to safeguard the unique character of the holy places of the three religions in Jerusalem.
Then the international community should be more present on the site, to help the contenders look at, and speak to, one another.
This year, the Pope has insisted a lot on the condemnation of terrorism and the rejection of all connivance of religion with violence. What effect have his teachings had on world public opinion?
I believe that the Pope's numerous appeals in this connection have had the great merit of helping all to understand that there cannot be a theology of terror, that some extremist groups inspired by Islam cannot be confused with authentic Muslims.
Many initiatives and statements have repeated that there is solidarity in faith among Jews, Christians and Muslims, which must be the source of reconciliation for all societies.
And, what effect has it had on governments?
Many heads of state who have visited the Vatican have expressed satisfaction over the fact that the Holy See alerted before any possible confusion and has wisely directed an independent word to all.
Many have appreciated particularly what the Pope said to the international community last Jan. 10: “To kill in the name of God is a blasphemy and perversion of religion, and I repeat this morning what I said in my message of Jan. 1: ‘It is a profanation of religion to proclaim oneself a terrorist in the name of God, to do violence to man in his name. Terrorist violence is contrary to faith in God the Creator of man; in God who cares for him and loves him.’”
Have the Holy See's relations with the Muslim world changed since Sept. 11?
I think that at present it is clear that to combat terrorism does not mean to combat Islam. The U.S. bishops, who are in contact with a numerous community of the Islamic religion, were wise in affirming it immediately after Sept. 11. The Pope and his collaborators have repeated it on many occasions.
In this connection, I would like to recall what His Holiness said to the representatives of the world of culture in Kazakhstan, on Sept. 24, 2001: “I wish to reaffirm the Catholic Church's respect for Islam, authentic Islam: the Islam that prays, that is in solidarity with the needy. Calling to mind the errors of the past, including the recent past, all believers must join forces so that God will never be hostage to the ambitions of men. Hatred, fanaticism and terrorism profane the name of God and disfigure the authentic image of man.”
In sum, do you think that terrorism has been combated effectively over these 12 months, or is there something that remains to be done?
What is important is that at present no responsible politicians worthy of this name and no religious leader can justify terrorism, regardless of the place where terrorism wishes to perpetrate its work of death. This is already in itself a very important result.
Those who are culpable, of course, must be punished and placed in a situation where they cannot cause harm. But we must pay attention not to confuse justice with vengeance and must avoid that whole populations pay for the cruelties of those responsible for the attacks. But much still remains to be done.
The Holy Father recalled this specifically last Saturday: to combat situations of violence and inequality among peoples, to put an end to wars that remain to be resolved, to inculcate in young generations a culture of legality and tolerance. The media, in particular, must pay attention and not publish images that incite mistrust, hatred, abuse.
And, finally, the way in which the history of religion is taught in schools is extremely important: if we wish the situation not to be as it was before Sept. 11, it is indispensable to promote a culture of reciprocal respect.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: What Have We Changed? DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:What has changed since Sept. 11, 2001? Some say everything has changed, fundamentally and irrevocably. Some say nothing has changed but the length of airport lines. Catholics already know the truth: If any one day changed everything, that day happened 2,000 years ago.
After that, cataclysms come and shake us up and then fade from memory, but they aren't what change people. The only lasting change in our world comes when people are brought to Christ.
So, the question isn't what has changed since Sept. 11 but what have we changed in the world?
It's a less comfortable question, and it demands that we take a hard look at things we didn't want to face last year.
What is the purpose of extending American freedom?
Soon after Operation Enduring Freedom was over, some American political leaders began to act like it was Operation Enduring Freedom to Choose. Some American leaders began pushing to legalize abortion in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, back at home, other American leaders have been pushing other false freedoms: Homosexuals are closer than ever to having their (usually temporary) sexual arrangements treated like marriages, scientists are expanding their opportunities to experiment on human beings and pornography's popularity rises unabated aided by an approving pop culture that is itself sliding further into the muck.
This isn't American freedom at all. America was founded on the “law of Nature and of Nature's God,” says the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If America rejects its unique, moral vision of freedom in favor of one uprooted from its original religious vision, then extending American freedom will do no good at all. In fact, it will do much harm.
This changing understanding of America is related to another uncomfortable question Catholics can ask themselves after Sept. 11.
Have we spread the religion of love as effectively as others have spread religious hatred?
The Islamic religions of the Mideast are sweeping up large numbers of adherents (sometimes by force). At the same time, American culture is still very much in the grip of secularist attitudes that consider it impolite to mention God.
The more our country flees faith, the more the practices and attitudes that Pope John Paul II calls the culture of death will gain ground in America. The more secular we become, the more odious we will seem to people overseas.
In his 2001 World Day of Peace message, the Pope criticized the cultural exports of the West. The most powerful such exporter, of course, is America.
“Western cultural models are enticing and alluring because of their remarkable scientific and technical cast, but regrettably there is growing evidence of their deepening human, spiritual and moral impoverishment,” he said. “The culture which produces such models is marked by the fatal attempt to secure the good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”
The allure of the cultural products of America can be a great threat or a great opportunity. They can export secularism — or they can export America's moral vision of freedom. They can hasten the culture of death or they can prepare the ground for a flowering of the culture of life.
The vision America brings to the world can be transformed by Catholics. We have a full understanding of what human happiness requires. We have the incomparable tools of the Gospel and the sacraments. We have the wisdom of centuries. We also have the mandate given us by Christ.
A year after Sept. 11 is a perfect time to renew our commitment to bring the Gospel to all sectors of society, to all people, but in a special way to those people capable of setting the tone in our parishes, neighborhoods, localities, states and eventually our nation. Bettering our communities can better America — and bettering America can better the world.
What have we changed since Sept. 11?
----- EXCERPT: EDITORIAL ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Tough-Loving Church DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Thank you for Father Andrew McNair's column “Voice of the Unfaithful? New Group's True Colors” (Aug 18-24).
The reason I'm writing is very simple. Father McNair exposes a group that will do harm to the Church, but he fails to address the underlying reason for the existence of these groups. The fact still remains that, until Church officials stop allowing sexual abuse by priests and others, groups like this will easily find a following.
I suggest you stay a little more focused and in line with the reason for the reaction of the “laymen.” Groups like Voice of the Faithful will come and go, but will always be there when the Church does not solve its own problems. The current problem with homosexual priests is not a tough problem to solve — it simply requires a “tough Church.”
ALAN MERWIN
Fatima, Portugal
Viva EWTN!
I was perplexed that Archbishop John Foley never mentioned the wonderful coverage of EWTN, the global Catholic TV network (“The Church & the News,” Aug. 25-31).
We saw EWTN's coverage of Pope John Paul II's trip to Poland while we were in Albany, N.Y., visiting my daughter. It was beautiful! In addition, we viewed many of their other excellent programs, featuring people like Father Benedict Groeschel, Msgr. Eugene Clark and Father George Rutler — all wonderful!
Here in Manhattan we are hoping to have EWTN added to our cable network soon. It is seen in most all the country and the world. It is made available free to cable systems like Time Warner and RCN. There are no commercials. They depend on donations. Their Web site is www.ewtn.com.
ANNE MCLAUGHLIN
New York City
Meetings Don't Mend
I read recently that, when Pope John Paul II called the bishops together when the priest scandals first broke, he said dissent from the Church's teachings on sexuality was the root of the problem. We are still not hearing clear teachings on sexuality and, as far as I can tell, that issue was not addressed at the U.S. bishops' meeting.
In your editorial “Blaming the Pope” (Sept. 1-7), I still do not hear that addressed. It seems to me that more meetings will not solve the problem of lack of constant, clear teaching on the Church's stand on sexuality.
SUSAN CARFAGNO
Atkins, Arkansas
Intolerable Patience?
The Holy Father's style of leadership is superior to many of his predecessors and has been more than successful in the most important areas (“Blaming the Pope,” Sept. 1-7).
What disappoints many is the almost unbelievable patience with which he has tolerated those with positions of responsibility — bishops — who clearly have not defended the faith and actually seek to undermine Catholic teaching.
MARK E. MEDVETZ
Henniker, New Hampshire
Mission: Michigan
Thank you for the article about Jennifer Granholm's pro-abortion position and her pastor's irresponsible defense of her position (“Abortion Politics: Tale of Two Parishes,” Sept. 1-7). In Michigan we have been blessed to have John Engler, a very pro-life governor, for the past 12 years. His current lieutenant governor, Dick Posthumus, is running against Granholm. Posthumus is solidly pro-life and voters have a clear and distinct choice this November.
Priests in Michigan should not miss this opportunity and should follow the excellent example of Colorado's Father Hilton by informing their parishioners of the voting records of pro-life and pro-abortion candidates and reinforcing the official position of the Church. Charles Rice said in your article: “There is no legal restriction to parishes informing people about voting records and telling them they should vote pro-life.” Sadly, so many Catholics are ignorant about these issues.
AGGIE LANGSCHIED
Lambertville, Michigan
The Education Project
I was gratified by your “Making the Case for a Classical Education” (Sept. 1-7) because it highlights the need for the study of classical languages in any truly humane education. But I was mortified by the following offhand statement by Mr. Simmons: “Incidentally, make sure that the parents aren't running the school, because that's a recipe for an oozing demise of anything like real education.”
This statement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the project of education and of what a school really ought to be. This misunderstanding, so common in our contemporary culture, is responsible for much that is wrong in education today. We Americans seem to have the attitude that we ought to stand back and let the “experts” educate our children (usually that means those “experts” hired by the state). But God has entrusted the primary responsibility for the education of a child with his parents. They should not abdicate that responsibility, even to such finely educated men as Mr. Simmons.
A school is really a moral institution of families who have come together to educate their children. They do this because they judge that they can do a better job educating their children in common than they could individually. But the creation of this institution never absolves parents from their responsibility as the primary educators of their children. So of course parents should oversee the school, no matter how fine the experts are whom they've hired to help them educate their children.
With that said, I hope Mr. Simmons’ book does lead to a revival of the study of Latin and Greek in our schools. Classical languages are the foundation of a classical education, because they teach an elegance and precision of grammar that cannot be learned from modern languages. Grammar is the way that we understand and express the nature of reality, and so without it we can learn nothing else. That is why grammar is the first of the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy.
We need scholars like Mr. Simmons to help us educate our children. We just need to remember that we parents are in charge.
STEPHEN HOLLINGSHEAD
San Antonio, Texas
The writer is principal of Our Lady of the Atonement Academy.
‘I Believe in Miracles’ — But …
Ted Hickel's letter to the editor is false and offensive for insinuating that I disbelieve in miracles (“Miesel and the Miracle,” Letters, Aug. 11-17). What I'm skeptical about are the allegedly miraculous images in the Guadalupana's eyes. I've read both the description of the phenomenon in The Handbook of Guadalupe and seen the pictures themselves in The Image of Guadalupe. What the unenhanced photo shows — before considerable computer amplification — are random white blobs of fiber arbitrarily outlined to form heads and bodies.
How arbitrary? One half of a double blob is taken as a knee, but the rest of the leg is made out of nothing at all. And so on. I remain underwhelmed.
Why must we drown this lovely image of Mary in pious tosh about “God's miraculous Polaroid”?
How do the faces of Juan Diego and the bishop wind up facing the same direction in the Virgin's eyes when they were facing each other when the cloak was opened (as the “primitive account” describes)?
And if the reflections are taken from those in the eyes of an invisible apparition, as Mr. Hickel claims, how do those invisible eyes reflect light?
If they're the reflection in the eyes of the actual image, how much could the small Virgin held by a short man “see” with bent head and lowered eyelids? A whole crowd of people? Really? And where's the vanishing point of her field of view? (Try this yourself and see what I mean.)
I believe in many miracles, but I don't believe that we're dealing with a miracle here.
SANDRA MIESEL
Indianapolis, Indiana
----- EXCERPT: LETTERS ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Radio-Ready Catholics DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:The increase of Catholic radio stations in the United States is indeed a welcome development (“Catholic Radio Takes to the Air,” Aug. 25-31). Although this growth appears to be spontaneous and a recent development, it is noteworthy that the Vatican II fathers, writing in 1963, gave particular attention to the need for Catholic radio stations and other media of mass communication.
As noted in the Decree on the Means of Social Communication, Inter mirifica, Catholics have a duty to support Catholic radio (as well as television and the press). The council “advises them of the obligation they have to maintain and assist Catholic newspapers, periodicals and filmprojects, radio and television programs and stations, whose principal objective is to spread and defend the truth and foster Christian influence in human society.”
As a member of the Advisory Board of WHFA, a Starboard Broadcasting Catholic radio station serving southern Wisconsin, in addition to the welcome support of our bishop and diocesan officials, I have had the opportunity to see the gratifying outpouring of support from numerous parishes, some by no means wealthy, when they are presented with the rich apostolic opportunities offered by Catholic radio.
As pointed out in Inter mirifica, “It is quite unbecoming for the Church's children idly to permit the message of salvation to be thwarted or impeded by the technical delays or expenses, however vast, which are encountered by the very nature of these media. At the same time, the synod earnestly invites those organizations and individuals who possess financial and technical ability to support these media freely and generously with their resources and their skills, inasmuch as they contribute to genuine culture and the apostolate.”
Happily, a response to the council's call for Catholic radio is now manifesting itself.
DAVID R. J. STIENNON
Madison, Wisconsin
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Want Better Business? Tell the Truth DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:The ongoing saga of the stock-market gyrations and the corporate accounting scandals presents a real challenge to a writer for a weekly newspaper.
By the time I figure out something intelligent to say, it's out of date. Now that this story has been developing quite a while, there is some chance of getting a bit of perspective on it. But don't get too excited. I'm not about to give stock tips.
The Bush administration has to deal with the fallout from the corporate accounting scandals, but the problem was well under way before George W. was even nominated. The Clinton years were the “go-go” years. The economy was booming and the stock market chalked up record gains. The nation was so fat and happy that we were willing to let Clinton get away with perjury. “It's the economy, stupid,” Clinton famously told his aides during his first campaign. And most of the nation seemed to agree.
Now comes a Commerce Department update to some of the economic data collected during the Clinton years. Respected columnist Robert Novak recently related that the government's growth figures may have been artificially inflated. Citing recent revisions to the Commerce Department's profit figures for 2000, Novak states: “[T]hrough all of President Clinton's last two years in office, the announced level of before-tax profits was at least 10% too high — a discrepancy rising close to 30% during the last presidential campaign. Most startling, the Commerce Department in 2000 showed the economy on an upswing through most of the election year while in fact it was declining.” Judging by these figures, a recession was already under way, even during the 2000 presidential campaign.
Novak goes on to show that the corporate-accounting scandal is about something more insidious than poor corporate performance. It's about lying. The market can handle poor performance. It simply punishes weak companies by beating up their stocks. But the market won't run without reliable information. Systematic lying delivers a double-whammy to the company that does it. Once discovered, it tips investors off to two devastating facts: The company is performing poorly and its data can't be trusted. How fast can you holler “Sell!”?
For quite a while, this is exactly what the stock market did. The market as a whole did not collapse right after Enron's announcement that its reports should not be relied upon. The overall thrashing of the entire stock market took place later, in response to poorly focused political pronouncements on “getting tough” on corporate crime.
What does Bill Clinton have to do with it? The culture of justifiable lying is largely his legacy to the nation. Sure, lots of people lie. Richard Nixon lied. But his lies destroyed his presidency. The Clinton difference is that he thought he was enTITLEd to get away with it. First he convinced himself it was okay, then he convinced his supporters.
Does this seem like a long stretch? Check this out. I went looking on the Internet for an issue of The American Enterprise magazine with a cover story TITLEd “What Ever Happened to the Truth?”
The editor noted Warren Buffet's opinion that misrepresentations and accounting gimmicks are becoming a serious problem in the investment sector. “Many major corporations still play things straight,” he said, “but a significant and growing number of otherwise high-grade managers … have come to the view that it's O.K. to manipulate numbers and deceive investors.” Buffett continued: “These managers often say that … in using accounting shenanigans to get the figures they want, they are only doing what everybody else does. Once such an everybody's-doing-it attitude takes hold, ethical misgivings vanish.”
Old news, big yawn — right? Except for one small thing: The story ran back in the spring of 1999. Warren Buffet's concern about fraudulent corporate accounting was a mere aside in the overall discussion, which was centered on the impeachment of then President Clinton. (The issue is posted online at www.theamericanenterprise.org/taemj99.htm.)
How prescient the editor of The American Enterprise appears in retrospect. He introduced the issue by saying, “for four decades now there have been intellectual trends underway which blur truth and encourage lying. We see the results in universities, in politics, in professions like the law, in popular entertainment and the media, even in places like business.”
Now we come to find out that the profits that generated that prosperity and those stock prices were over-inflated. Maybe intentionally, maybe accidentally. Either way, I think we can safely say that the strong economic performance of Bill Clinton's presidency no longer looks like such a feather in his cap. And we all have a stake in reversing the attitude that lying is acceptable if you can get away with it.
Jennifer Roback Morse, a fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif., is the author of Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jennifer Roback Morse ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Of War and Sanctions DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Every American believes two contradictory things about foreign relations. The first, that we should not interfere in other peoples’ business. The second, that we have an obligation to act when innocent people are being threatened. Trying to reconcile these principles — and possessing the means to achieve what we decide — gives America a dynamic approach to the world no other nation can match.
But how to reach the goal is always a complicated question. In the current debates in Washington and around the world about going to war against Iraq, the answers naturally divide into two large camps: those that propose further negotiations and nonmilitary sanctions, and those that counsel war.
Among Catholic leaders there has been a strong emphasis on nonmilitary means. Though the Holy Father and the Vatican have said in the past that some armed response to the 9-11 atrocities was probably necessary, more recently they have tried to promote negotiations without wholly ruling out combat. The U.S. Catholic bishops, too, stated on the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorism that our response should be largely nonmilitary, addressing root causes such as poverty and restraining terrorist groups by economic and other sanctions. The Holy Father has rightly reminded us that we even have a duty to forgive our enemies.
All this must figure into current deliberations. But we also have to keep in mind some historical facts and think very carefully since so many lives and important principles are at stake. Dealing with root causes is necessary but largely irrelevant to the situation. Few people know or remember that the United States was providing $190 million in aid to Afghanistan in the year prior to al Qaeda's attack. Such generosity does little to deter terrorist regimes and movements, since they are driven by ideology not poverty. Further, even in the best case, it will take decades if not the rest of the century for the Muslim world to repair the damage that a half-millennium of misrule by its own leaders has inflicted on it. We of course want to help poor countries to find their way to prosperity and peace, but we should make no mistake: We will also have to deal firmly with the violence-prone in the meantime.
The call for stricter sanctions has similar limitations. Sanctions do not have a good record in stopping or changing the behavior of tyrannies. Cuba has been under economic embargo for more than 40 years, the last decade without Soviet subsidies. Fidel Castro has not changed his policies in the slightest, even though it has cost him and his people a great deal.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq has been under U.N. sanctions since the early 1990s. During that time, no small number of children, the elderly and others have gone without medical treatment or even died partly owing to economic restrictions. Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid has often reminded the Church and the world of that fact.
Sanctions, like war, are a blunt instrument in dealing with looming international threats. So however much we want to strengthen them and target offenders, not innocent civilians, they inevitably harm some of the same people we try to protect during warfare.
But we also have to take into account that Iraq's president could have remedied this situation by negotiations and cooperation with U.N. programs to monitor weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Tyrants and their henchmen are quite capable of taking care of themselves under even the strictest system of sanctions. In Saddam's case, he has quite openly used poison gas against his own people. So it is no surprise that he is not inclined to come to terms with the international community to spare the Iraqi people further suffering.
Who's to say there are not many intelligent races of being in the universe?
The only case in modern times in which sanctions have actually altered a government's behavior was in South Africa. And there the change in heart probably had more to do with the fact that South Africa's white rulers were embarrassed by international condemnation of their racist apartheid system than harmed by any economic pressures.
In the world we inhabit today, then, we cannot expect sanctions and other nonviolent measures to do much against a regime such as Iraq's. Aristotle famously remarked almost 2,500 years ago that no man becomes a tyrant merely to keep warm. The current view that we may be able to talk past our differences with tyrants owes much to Kant's notion in Perpetual Peace that “The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.” What he primarily means by this is that where people are reasonable — not perfect, but capable of recognizing that compromise will usually get them more of what they want than intransigence — it is possible to set up institutional structures that will allow us to maintain peace.
But the weakness in Kant and many Europeans who have carried out this admirable work among reasonable nations is that a “race of devils” does not act reasonably or even in self-interest. Christians are rightly reluctant to judge anyone as devilish, but all we have to do is to consult our own lives to see how stubborn and unreasonable we all are, even when we know it will not do us any good. And few of us approach the evil proportions of a Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.
So as we deliberate in the coming months about what to do about Iraq, we will want to consider a host of prudential questions. Do Saddam's clear intentions to develop weapons of mass destruction (he has a formidable stockpile of chemical and biological weapons already and some means to deliver them) call for an immediate and overwhelming armed response? Or can we achieve the goal through more leisurely, limited attacks? Should we do this ourselves, or must we persuade the international community first?
Personally, I believe that we would do well to deal with this threat swiftly and decisively, before Iraq grows into an even worse threat. The historical record is clear. Sanctions and negotiations in recent years have slowed Iraq's weapons programs, but they will not and cannot contain a ruler like Saddam Hussein. Only military force can do that. And a clear-sighted Christian appraisal of the situation does not allow us to shirk our responsibilities.
Robert Royal writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Royal ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Youth's-Eye View: It's Morning in Milwaukee DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:The Aug. 28 installation of Archbishop Timothy Dolan was, of course, an exhilarating day for Milwaukee's Catholics.
But it was a particularly important event for the city's young Catholics. Archbishop Dolan made it clear that he intends not only to lead a wave of spiritual and cultural renewal throughout the diocese but also to minister in a focused way to the city's youth. He sees in us the hope of the Church and he intends to challenge us. I have a feeling we will rise to that challenge.
While the archbishop said a lot of inspiring things in his homily at the inauguration Mass, we shouldn't reduce that Wednesday's event only to what was said. What happened, and what was experienced, were just as critical as what was spelled out.
From the very first moments of Archbishop Dolan's entrance into St. John's Cathedral, it was clear that his new flock was eager to receive him. In fact, even before he set foot inside the church he was greeted by banner-waving enthusiasts eager to express their support and, I suspect, relief. Shortly thereafter, led by the innumerable priests already assembled inside, the standing-room-only crowd broke into spontaneous applause. As the archbishop made his way down the center aisle, the excitement of the congregation was matched by his obvious delight in being there to return it.
Those gathered outside the cathedral seemed to duplicate that enthusiasm with equal intensity. One friend waited to greet Archbishop Dolan as he made his way into the church, ran home to watch the event unfold on television, then returned to see the archbishop emerge from the cathedral as the new spiritual leader of Milwaukee's 700,000 Catholics.
After Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo read Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter making the installation official, Archbishop Dolan took charge of the proceedings inside the cathedral. By his demeanor as well as his message, he made it clear that he would carry out his new duties with confidence — not in his own abilities but in God's grace. During the liturgy, at the point where the celebrant is compelled to pray for the local bishop, Archbishop Dolan referred to himself as an “unworthy servant.”
The archbishop's homily was both humorous and sober. Flights of rhetorical elegance were rhythmically tethered by jovial quips and witticisms. His eyes may have been fixed upwards, but his feet were planted on the ground. I got the sense that, for Archbishop Dolan, there is no crucial conflict between faith and reason, no necessary tension between the human and the divine, no antithesis between the spiritual and the material. For him, it seemed to me, faith is normal. It occurred to me how deeply that kind of authenticity resonates with young people like myself.
Archbishop Dolan also outlined the broad contours of what he has in mind for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. In his homily, he focused on the concepts of fear and fidelity. Echoing the inaugural words of Pope John Paul II, Dolan admonished the faithful: “Be not afraid!” And he encouraged them to join him on an “exhilarating adventure of fidelity.”
In those two phrases, the new archbishop captured the present condition of the local Catholic Church and demonstrated a penetrating apprehension of the problems we face. Much like the Holy Father, to whom he emphatically pledged his loyalty and obedience, Archbishop Dolan addressed the doubts and concerns of the young people of Milwaukee.
The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is in a state of disrepair. Over the past two and a half decades, every indicia of vitality and growth — from seminary matriculation to the involuntary elimination of individual parishes — has revealed a marked diminution of morale. For example, it has not been uncommon for young men and women my own age to travel to another diocese in order to explore a potential religious vocation. The young are attracted to vitality and strength and, while those two characteristics can be found many places in the Church today, Milwaukee has not possessed them in abundant supply. That's putting it euphemistically.
The bitter brouhaha over the renovation of Milwaukee's cathedral and the recent revelations regarding the sexual indiscretions of now-retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland seemed to land a solid one-two punch in the gut of Milwaukee's faithful. Despite the fact that wrongdoers really represent a small minority of Catholic clerics, all the sex scandals and in-house disagreements have lately seemed to dominate public attention and daily humiliate those of us who love the Catholic Church. Political rhetoric and radical polarization replaced spiritual dialogue and informed deliberation. These sorts of controversies leave many people, especially the youth, utterly nonplussed. The political categories of “liberal” and “conservative” — and the old disputes that they often classify — fail to capture the imagination, or even the attention, of today's young Catholics. Few of us in the “JPII Generation” think of ourselves as either “traditional” or “progressive”; we just want to be Catholic.
I think that's why Archbishop Dolan is so appealing to us. He is able to transcend ideology and speak directly to his people. In his view, the current crisis of confidence is not a result of what faithful Catholics believe. Rather, it is a result of what individual Catholics have chosen to do in moments of infidelity. He would not get mired in controversies about celibacy and lay involvement or find fault with the traditional teachings and practices of the Catholic Church. Problems have not emerged, as of late, because of the principles and practices already established. Instead, they came forth because individuals deviated from them.
So Archbishop Dolan is suggesting that Catholics see the current crisis not as an occasion to retreat but as an opportunity for renewal. As a college-age Catholic, I can tell you that his approach not only makes sense to me, but it also awakens my own sense of Catholic pride, an important sentiment that recent events have somewhat dampened.
Fidelity to the basics of the Gospel of Jesus Christ will turn the Archdiocese of Milwaukee around. Fidelity — not just to the truths that are, but also to a vision of the way things ought to be — is the only real antidote for the fear felt by many modern Catholics. As those of us who are familiar with World Youth Day already know, that same challenging fidelity has the capacity to animate and inspire a new generation of Catholics.
John Paul Shimek, of Brookfield, Wis., is a student at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Paul Shimek ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: How Will the Renewal of Catholic Higher Education Succeed? DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:The New Evangelization called for by Pope John Paul II has ushered in a springtime of Catholic renewal that has been perhaps most noticeable on some of the campuses of Catholic universities in the United States.
Besides the fact that Georgetown University recently restored crucifixes to its classrooms, examples of the restoration and growth of university Catholicism abound across our country. In Michigan, St. Mary's College of Ave Maria University has begun to apply the principles of Pope John Paul II's Encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) to form an integrated core curriculum whereby the truths of Catholic doctrine are utilized to inform all the other academic disciplines. In Ohio, Franciscan University of Steubenville unabashedly requires all its theology professors to obtain a mandatum. In the southern states, newer colleges like Our Lady of Corpus Christi College (Texas) and Southern Catholic College (Georgia) have prepared mission statements that particularly emphasize their Catholic identity and reflect the principles of Ex corde Ecclesiae.
Catholic university organizations have also been involved in the new evangelization of Catholic universities. Organizations such as the Cardinal Newman Society and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars are gaining greater influence over their publicly dissenting counterparts, such as the Catholic Theological Society of America, of which Cardinal Law stated “has become an association of advocacy for theological dissent.” The 1967 Land O’ Lakes decision of some Catholic university presidents to secularize their institutions has now for more than a decade been overshadowed by the momentum-building implementation of John Paul's 1990 apostolic constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae, which calls Catholic universities to restore their Catholic culture and identity. The renewal of Catholic universities in the United States is indeed under way.
While acknowledging the successes of the Catholic university renewal to date, now is also a good time for evaluation. Catholic university administrators should ask whether their efforts thus far toward a revitalization of Catholic higher education have fully encompassed the entire vision of the Holy Father's plan in Ex corde Ecclesiae. For if they have, then we must address the question raised recently by professor Gerard Bradley of Notre Dame as to why not a single Catholic university has as of yet completely succeeded in reorganizing itself according to the guidelines of Ex corde Ecclesiae since the 1990 document was issued.
Unambiguously Pro-Ex Corde
The fact remains that Catholic universities have not yet fully realized the plan of renewal advocated by Ex corde. Instead of building a city of God that is at its core Catholic, many Catholic universities are still focused on building a city of man, one that intentionally has little more than a window dressing of authentic Catholicity. The current renewal would perhaps have greater success if it focused on building a university that is essentially a microcosm of the Kingdom of God. Such a community of faith would be one that successfully integrates faith with reason — faith with all the different disciplines of human knowledge (including science and technology); faith with life, culture and society; faith with authentic Christian witness. Unfortunately, to date, many of those engaged in the renewal of Catholic higher education have been looking in from the outside, focusing more on trying to renew their Catholic universities within the old framework of secularism than on removing the stains of secularism and then proceeding toward renewal within a truly Catholic framework. What they fail to realize is that Ex corde Ecclesiae is not a call to simply re-badge secular higher education with a “Catholic” decal.
Perhaps the heart of the problem is a reliance on entrenched administrative models, most of which are decidedly secular at their core. Like their public counterparts, the schools that follow such models rightly have vice presidents of academics, student life, admissions, university relations and the like to oversee each discrete aspect of their secular and academic affairs. But while a few Catholic universities have given administrative status to positions that focus on university mission — i.e., their founder's original vision — or on campus ministry and evangelization — i.e., chaplaincy, retreats, areas of community service and social justice — none have given senior-administrative status to the faith aspect of their Catholic university identity. Thus, efforts of renewal have so far only been able to succeed in one area or another (such as the theology faculty, the core curriculum or the campus ministry program). What is still lacking in the renewal plans of many Catholic universities in the United States is the unification of faith and reason across the entire campus and within the overall university administration itself.
For the Catholic renewal of higher education to come into full flower, the Catholic university perhaps needs to reorganize its administrative structure to include a qualified vice president of spiritual affairs, equal in authority with the vice president of academic affairs. Together, these two offices would make up the two great lungs of the university's administrative body, with the president as its head. This model would allow faith and reason to support one another as the two pillars of the college experience, side-by-side at the heart of the university, guaranteeing “the distinctive Catholic character of the institution” (Ex corde No. 21) from the top down and on all levels.
Big Spirit on Campus
Just as the academic disciplines are overseen by an academic dean, the overall spirituality of a Catholic university is best suited to an administrator of spiritual affairs. For this model to succeed, the VP of spirituality would have to have a sphere of authority that is both campus-wide and duly influential. For example, he might be responsible for guaranteeing that the entire academic curriculum is faithful to Church teaching, that all advertising and recruitment policies respect and actively foster the college's distinctively Catholic identity, that the campus itself is “an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ” (Ex corde No. 21), that student organization and commencement speakers represent sound Catholic teaching and that the university's board of trustees and president are advised on the details of implementing university-related Church teachings.
While Catholic university renewal begins with the university president, it must include more than just the theologian or campus minister along with him. The fact remains that having a pro-Ex corde university president does not in itself guarantee that the university he directs will automatically become solidly Catholic, as is currently attested to at a number of schools that are Catholic in name only. For not every Catholic college has a Cardinal Newman to put wind in its sails (as he did at the Catholic University of Ireland in the 1850s) or a charismatic president such as Father Michael Scanlan (who beginning in 1974 turned Franciscan University of Steubenville from a “party school” to a dynamically orthodox Catholic university) or a Catholic power-house such as Father Joseph Fessio (the new chancellor of Ave Maria University of Florida). And while not all Catholic universities may be privileged to have such leaders, all can assure their Catholic identity is permanently safeguarded and developed by restructuring their administrative bodies to include a permanent full-time senior administrator to oversee all Catholic Spiritual Affairs. Perhaps only within this new administrative model will “Catholicism [finally become] vitally present and operative” (Ex corde No. 14) on every level of our Catholic universities.
Overseeing the whole spiritual revitalization of the Catholic university, the director of spiritual affairs would offer the needed hope of success and integral unity from the top down. Under the direction of the Holy Spirit, working to advance the truth with love, he or she would greatly assist “Catholic universities and other institutes of higher studies to fulfill their indispensable mission in the new advent of grace that is opening up to the new millennium” (Ex Corde, No. 11). The Catholic universities of the United States, under this new Catholic administrative model, would be able to make important contributions to the Church's work of evangelization and become “better able to respond to the task of bringing the message of Christ to man, to society, [and] to the various cultures” (Ex corde, Conclusion) of the third millennium.
Kelly Bowring teaches sacred theology at St. Mary's College of Ave Maria University in Michigan.
----- EXCERPT: Special Issue ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kelly Bowring ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Sept. 11 and the Separation of Church and School DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:In Sanford, Fla., officials at the Seminole County School District barred the Seminole High School gospel choir from singing at a Sept. 11 memorial service because the event was held at a church.
The Seminole County School District could soon face a similar legal challenge of its decision barring the Seminole High School gospel choir from participating in a Sept. 11 memorial service being held at a church.
After hearing of the school district's decision, Liberty Counsel, a religious rights advocacy group, faxed a legal opinion outlining three federal court of appeals cases stating that school choirs may sing religious songs, and that barring such choirs from singing is unconstitutional. The Seminole County decision was especially imprudent, Liberty Counsel said, because the school choir was to appear in conjunction with a 9-11 memorial.
“According to the school district, the same high school choir could sing the same song, so long as they were not at a local church,” said Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel, in a press release. “The school took the extreme position that the location of the event being held at the church would somehow violate the Constitution. Such a notion is utterly absurd.”
The district said it was adopting a new policy that would ban any school choir from ever participating at any event held on church grounds.
Liberty Counsel is considering a federal lawsuit against the school district.
— Register staff
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Let All Tragedy Hit Home DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:A picture is worth a thousand words. Last year's terrorist attacks touched us deeply, not only because it was a massive calamity, but also because we saw it.
We saw the Twin Towers collapse. We saw the fire and the rubble. We saw the pictures of the fallen.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was in upper Manhattan. I saw the dark clouds devouring downtown.
Two days later, as a Red Cross chaplain, I met hundreds of the victims’ relatives. Many showed me the pictures of their beloved ones. I remember the picture of Linda's, Mary's and Julie's husbands. The three men, all in their early 30s, were sitting at a restaurant with their arms embracing each other's necks, smiling. Their wives said they were the best friends in the world. You could tell. Linda told me a few stories about how Eric, her husband, helped people in need. She was rocking her 4-month-old baby — her first and only baby.
Everyone keeps in his soul a few pictures. Through them we catch a glimpse of the dimensions of this tragedy. We will never forget these visual impressions. We know we won't. Wherever we may be, the pictures of 9-11 will come back to our minds and hearts from time to time. In the first anniversary of the heartbreak the TV channels replayed the same scenes. We saw, again, the victims’ families. We celebrated and prayed. Thus, we will remember the innocent killed, the heroes and their relatives.
Yet, there are pictures we never see — of other tragedies, other victims, other families.
We will feel compassion for them. We will pray for them. Always.
Yet, there are pictures we never see — of other tragedies, other victims, other families. They are pictures no photographer takes, no paper prints, no TV channel shows. Relatively few people remember the fallen in the war in Sudan (approximately 2 million people), in Congo (between 2.5 and 3 million people), in Rwanda and Burundi (at least half a million), in Iraq (the embargo has provoked many deaths), in Bosnia and Kosovo, in Moluccas, in Colombia, in Afghanistan and in so many places. Those victims, too, left behind weeping babies, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers.
For them there is no flag, no wreath, no epitaph, no funeral, no bagpipes, no rolling Requiem — no picture. Our souls, however, can fill their want. How? By taking, with the camera of our imagination, charged with the batteries of Christian love, the pictures we never see. We have seen Sept. 11. We are trained to picture buildings collapsing under bombs, cities in rubble, villages in fire, faces without breath, tears of the living left behind.
Taking these pictures is a way to expand the heartfelt love for the American victims to other unknown victims. It is an attempt to see the tears of God and to hear the beatings of his heart. It is a step toward becoming peacemakers, so as to be called children of God. It is a mode of loving others as we love ourselves and our beloved ones, for all we do to others we do to Christ himself.
If we see these pictures we have never seen before, we will not forget these victims. We will remember them. We will feel compassion for them. We will pray for them. Always.
Legionary of Christ Father Alfonso Aguilar writes from Thornwood, New York.
----- EXCERPT: Spirit & Life ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alfonso Aguilar ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Faith on the Frontier DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Although now framed by new high-rise office buildings, the steeple of St. James Catholic Church still towers above the skyline of the Pacific Northwest's oldest community — just as it has for the last 117 years.
For two decades the cathedral of what became the Archdiocese of Seattle, the brick-and-wood, Gothic-revival church is today a monument to the enduring presence of the Catholic faith at the northwest corner of the American western frontier. Built to serve the oldest permanent settlement in the Pacific Northwest, it now symbolizes the hopes and dreams of pioneer Bishop Augustine Blanchet, whose remains were laid to rest below the sanctuary.
Alongside him was laid the remains of his friend and successor, Bishop Aegidius Junger, who completed construction of the church and consecrated it on Nov. 1, 1885. Although the crypts of both bishops, along with Msgrs. Louis Schram and Felix Verwilghen, were later moved to the Catholic cemetery in Seattle, their markers remain in the sanctuary of the church they built.
The current St. James Church is the second in Vancouver to have the name and the fourth Catholic church to serve the community since 1838. Established as a mission of Quebec by two Montreal priests, Father Francis Norbert Blanchet, older brother and future superior of Augustine, and Father Modeste Demers, the first church was in a storehouse inside the walls of Fort Vancouver, on the northern bank of the Columbia River.
They arrived through the assistance of John McLoughlin and James Douglas of the Hudson's Bay Co., who requested the missionaries over the objections of Gov. George Simpson, chief executive of the British fur-trading company. Within a few years, again with the assistance of McLoughlin and Douglas, the church moved to a cabin outside the fort while a house was constructed for the priests inside the stockade.
Eight years later, in 1846, Pope Gregory XVI created the Archdiocese of Oregon City, with the Diocese of Walla Walla and Vancouver Island. Father Francis Blanchet became archbishop in Oregon City and Father Demers was appointed bishop of Vancouver Island.
For Walla Walla, the archbishop suggested his brother, Father Augustine, a canon in Montreal. Shortly aterward, Blessed Pope Pius IX rearranged the archdiocese, merging Walla Walla into the new Diocese of Nesqually and moving Bishop Augustine Blanchet to Fort Vancouver.
Nothing remains of the first St. James Cathedral except its name. Constructed with Hudson's Bay Co. materials on company land, it was dedicated to St. James the Greater and in honor of James Douglas, who assumed control of the fort after the retirement of McLoughlin. The wood-frame church stood for almost 40 years until it was destroyed by fire in 1889.
The cathedral that still stands in downtown Vancouver was built by Blanchet and Junger to symbolize the achievements of nearly half a century. However, its days of glory were short-lived. By 1902, the third bishop of Nesqually, Bishop Edward O'Dea, was living in Seattle. By Dec. 4, 1904, a new St. James Cathedral was consecrated as the archiepiscopal see for the elevated and renamed Archdiocese of Seattle.
Heavenly High Altar
Today, 98 years after its demotion, St. James Church remains the sentimental heart of the Catholic faith in southwest Washington and a historic landmark. Untouched by modernization efforts that transformed the interiors of other cathedrals, including its namesake in Seattle, the church remains as Bishops Blanchet and Junger conceived it — as the epitome of late 19th-century Catholic church design and decoration.
The interior is dominated by the high altar, which stands in front of a soaring carved oak reredos featuring statues of St. James, St. Augustine and St. Patrick. A mural depicting the Holy Spirit as a dove floats over the altar in the high vault of the sanctuary.
A carved altar rail marks the boundary between the nave and the sanctuary; it is flanked by side altars to Mary Queen of Heaven and Our Lady of Sorrows.
The large nave is under a towering vaulted ceiling, supported by carved wood pillars designed to imitate granite. Ornately carved and painted Stations of the Cross flank the nave, which is bathed in the light from stately stained-glass windows.
At the rear of the nave are matching confessional boxes and heavy, carved wooden doors, leading to a small narthex with statues of seraphim in niches on either side and a stained-glass panel of the Root of Jesse above the entry.
The sanctuary has been under continuous restoration since the mid-1970s — the emphasis has been on care rather than speed. The exterior restoration is complete; here a contemporary courtyard blends seamlessly with the historic church and rectory. The interior, while carefully maintained, continues to show numerous signs of wear, as well as the beginning of restoration efforts. However, this does not detract from the grace or overall beauty of the interior.
More than a century since it was built, St. James continues to mark the history of the Church on the frontier and celebrate the unity of the Catholic faith and the pioneering legacy of the Pacific Northwest.
Philip S. Moore writes from Camas, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: St. James Church, Vancouver, Washington ----- EXTENDED BODY: Philip S. Moore ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Web Doctor Will See You Now - or Anytime DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:I am not a doctor. I have no medical training.
Yet I am in charge of health care here in our monastery.
Of course, for serious medical conditions a physician is a necessity. But, for minor problems, you'd be surprised how much you can take care of with a computer and Internet connection. My abilities in this area started to grow when family members of the brothers began coming to me with questions. Then friends of the family members began to ask for information.
Not long ago I had a very simple case to deal with. One of the brothers came down with a persistent case of the hiccups. He just couldn't stop. We tried a couple of the usual remedies, such as having him hold his breath, but nothing seemed to work.
So I went to WebMD (www.-webmd.com), looked up “hiccups” and got some surprising advice. According to the Web site, if you take your tongue and curl it back as far as it will go while touching the roof of your mouth, the hiccups will stop. I told this brother to try that — and it worked!
How about more serious medical conditions? Can the Web be of any help there? One of the brothers developed a pain in his wrists that wouldn't go away. A friend of the monastery who developed carpal tunnel syndrome had to have corrective surgery to cure it. Did the brother have the same problem? How serious was it? Did he need surgery? Would the surgery permanently correct the problem? These are some of the questions that went through both of our heads.
The old saying “ignorance is bliss” just doesn't work with medical conditions. It's what you don't know that tends to worry you most. So I went to WebMD and looked up information on carpal tunnel syndrome. I learned that his condition wasn't serious — yet. Certain remedies could be applied at home for one to two weeks; in most cases, according to the site, these should cure the problem. We ascertained that, as of yet, no serious nerve damage had taken place. However, if the pain persisted after a two-week period, a doctor would have to be called. We tried applying the home remedies and, lo and behold, his wrist pain quickly disappeared.
Before the Internet, I'm sure I would have sent this brother to a doctor right away. But with so much medical information at my fingertips, I could make an informed, cost- and time-saving decision about his condition and what to do about it.
I have also looked for supplemental information online for people after they have seen a doctor and can give me a specific disease name. I remember once going in with a brother who had a medical problem and having the doctor suggest that we look online for more help on the condition. To be sure, some doctors would not take kindly to your walking into their office with medical printouts from the Internet. But I do believe in being informed enough so that one can ask intelligent questions of one's doctor. And some doctors just don't take the time to tell a patient all the relevant information they need to know about their illness. I have even seen cases where a doctor has told a patient no treatment was available for his or her condition. These patients went online, found a treatment and cured themselves.
Of course, we don't always know the name of the illness or injury we're dealing with. Sometimes all we have are some symptoms. For those times, try the National Medical Society's site at www.medical-library.org. It has a section called Online Diagnosis that you can use to diagnose symptoms; it runs a program created by 1,500 specialist physicians. Online Medical Diagnosis includes treatments for 1,200 diseases. You can describe your symptoms or click on one of their descriptive links. You will then be asked more questions. This service costs $9.95 per year.
Then there's the online-consultation option. Yahoo's health site, for one, has an “Ask the Doctor” page at http://-health.yahoo.com/health/expert. There you can get a doctor's answers to you specific questions on a wide array of health-related topics.
If it's prescription drugs you need to know more about, go to Drug Digest at drugdigest.org/DD/Home. This helpful site has a drug library with information on drug interactions, side effects and alternative treatments.
I have more than once joked about opening my own medical practice with a laptop computer and Internet connection. I would see the patient, get the diagnostic information and then go online for the treatment protocol. So what's stopping me — aside from not having a medical degree? I couldn't afford the malpractice insurance!
Brother John Raymond, co-founder of the Monks of Adoration,writes from Venice, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Brother John Raymond ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Monthly Web Picks DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Since it's back-to-school time again, this month's picks will look at a few resources for students referred to by Catholic schools.
Holy Family School is for students in kindergarten through sixth grade in Sauk Centre, Minn. They have a Student Resources page at rc.net/stcloud/hfs/index9.htm that includes online links for educational references, science resources, social studies resources, news and current events, language arts resources and art resources.
Brother Martin High School in New Orleans has a resource link called Homework Central at bigchalk.com. This massive site claims to have the world's best free study and research help. Elementary, middle-school and high-school students will find a load of homework help here. There are also resources for teachers, librarians and parents.
St. Timothy School in Philadelphia has a links page that led me to College Board at collegeboard.com. What is this site useful for? You will find advice for planning for college, taking the SAT and PSAT tests, finding the right college, getting into college and, last but perhaps not least, paying for college.
Other resources can be found by looking through the school links in my online Catholic directory at monksofadoration.org/hischool.html.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Return to Never Land (2002)
This worthy sequel to the 1953 Disney animated classic Peter Pan uses computer-generated images and modern songs to recapture some of the original's magic. The setting is London during World War II, and a grown-up Wendy has two kids: 12-year-old Jane and the younger Danny. Jane is fed up with her mother's stories about Peter Pan and fairies who can fly. But when she's kidnapped by Captain Hook and taken to Never Land, she soon becomes a believer.
Hook hopes that Jane has the key to finding the lost treasure he's been searching for during the past 25 years. The young girl must learn the value of “faith, trust and pixie dust” in order to save the life of Tinker Bell, rescue Peter Pan and the Lost Boys from Hook and return home to London.
War Games (1983)
The threat of nuclear destruction is once again a hot topic as the debate intensifies about Iraq. During the Cold War, of course, it was the Soviet Union we were worried about. War Games, a cross between a teen flick and a Cold War thriller, will be especially pleasing to those afflicted with ‘80s nostalgia.
David (Matthew Broderick) is one of the screen's first computer geeks. An outcast of sorts at high school, he tries to hack into the file of a new electronic firm to play a game called Global Thermonuclear War. But, by mistake, he breaks into the U.S. government's NORAD mainframe. While he thinks he's just playing the game, national security officials decide it's the real thing. Their computers begin the countdown to World War III. David must somehow stop it. The action is fast and the messages are worthwhile.
Hatari! (1962)
Several generations of American males learned what it was to be a man from John Wayne's movie persona. He was courageous, strong and didn't open his mouth except to make a point. This film places Wayne in Africa as the leader of a group of international adventurers who capture wild animals for zoos. Not only are Wayne's notions of masculine virtue put to the test, but he also must cope with the rivalry between two young hotshots who are always at each other's throats and the arrival of an attractive female photographer whose presence creates romantic tensions within the group.
Director Howard Hawks masterfully alternates suspenseful action scenes with personal conflicts and moments of comic relief. The footage of the group stalking its prey is breathtaking as Wayne and his cohorts take great risks. Also memorable is a humorous sequence with some baby elephants orchestrated to a catchy Henry Mancini tune.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUN.-THURS., SEPT. 22-26
The Civil War PBS, 8 p.m.
First broadcast 12 years ago, Ken Burns’ dramatic documentary on the War Between the States returns with enhanced images and sound, as well as new commentary by Burns, the noted historian Shelby Foote, Stanley Crouch and George Will.
MONDAY, SEPT. 23
The Ship: Preview History Channel, 11 p.m.
A 40-member crew mans a replica of HM Bark Endeavour, which Captain James Cook (1728-1779) sailed in the late 1760s on the first of his three voyages to the South Seas.
TUESDAYS
Archbishop Sheen: Prophet for Our Times EWTN, 10 p.m.
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) ordained Franciscan Father Andrew Apostoli to the priesthood in 1967. In this exciting new show, Father Andrew visits churches associated with Archbishop Sheen to relay the eucharistic and Marian themes of this great and universally loved author, scholar, preacher, convert-maker and television pioneer.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 25
Living with Color Home & Garden TV, 10 p.m.
Christine Pullara hosts this hour-long program on the secrets of using color to best advantage in your home.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 26
Action Heroes Biography Channel, 8 p.m.-midnight
Starting at 8 p.m., four hour-long shows follow the trails of major figures in the history, life and lore of the American West: Davy Crockett (1786-1836), Daniel Boone (1734-1820), Geronimo or Goyathlay (ca. 1829-1909) and Crazy Horse (ca. 1845-1877).
FRIDAY, SEPT. 27
Portraits of Courage EWTN, 3 a.m.
You can set your VCR to record this powerful two-part documentary on the group Courage, which Father John Harvey founded to help homosexuals live in grace and chastity. Hear profoundly grateful members testify how Courage has helped change their lives.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 27
House and Home Products History Channel, 10 p.m.
At 10 p.m., Household Wonders tells about inventions that transformed housework, such as the sewing machine, stove, refrigerator and vacuum cleaner. At 11 p.m., Home Tech picks up the theme by looking at products such as garbage disposals, dishwashers, SOS pads and Teflon coating.
SATURDAY, SEPT. 28
The Landscapes of Frederick Law Olmsted Home & Garden TV, 5 p.m.
Inspired by the City Beautiful movement of the 1850s, Olmsted (1822-1903) helped establish landscape architecture as a profession in the United States. This hour-long show looks at some of his most famous projects, such as New York City's Central Park, which he designed with his associate, Calvert Vaux, and the U.S. Capitol grounds.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: New Ink on Campus: Catholic Newspaper Project DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:FALLS CHURCH, Va. — For a growing number of Catholic college students returning to school there will be a new presence on campus this fall: independent Catholic newspapers.
The effort is the work of the Catholic Campus Media Network, a project of the Cardinal Newman Society that was launched last year. This fall, students will find such newspapers on at least seven of the nation's 235 Catholic college campuses. The organizers and the newspapers’ editors hope the papers will provide a voice where there previously has not been one.
“At so many schools there are faithful Catholics looking for an authentically Catholic voice on campus,” said Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online and volunteer director of the project. (She is also a Register correspondent.) “If the students have to be the ones to provide it, so be it.” Lopez is a graduate of Catholic University of American in Washington, D.C.
The Cardinal Newman Society launched the network in an effort to help establish campus publications that provide news and commentary from a Catholic, traditional-values perspective.
It was motivated to the project after seeing the success newspapers such as Georgetown University's The Academy and Boston College's Crossroads have demonstrated in presenting a Catholic viewpoint on campuses. The project's advisory board includes such names as Crisis magazine publisher Deal Hudson, First Things editor Father Richard John Neuhaus and Dr. Ralph McInerny.
“At many colleges and universities, campus publications focus primarily on general news and pay little attention to Catholic issues and perspectives,” said Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society. “But the network's members are dedicated to building a Christian campus culture.”
Reilly pointed to the “crucifix campaign” at Georgetown in 1997 to demonstrate how independent student publications can effectively raise concerns and effect changes in university policies.
A Measured Tone
Five years ago, students at Georgetown formed the Georgetown University Committee for Crucifixes in the Classrooms, petitioning the administration to have crucifixes placed in the classrooms. The move set off a campus debate. Georgetown's independent newspaper The Academy successfully argued the case for crucifixes, which were eventually installed.
“We were happy once it succeeded,” said Barry Schiffman, editor-in-chief of The Academy and a second-year law student who has been working with the paper since his sophomore undergraduate year in 1998. “I wasn't personally involved, but it was an effort we definitely supported.”
Reilly noted that although any effort to present Catholic teaching on campus is likely to encounter opposition, the network encourages careful journalism and a measured tone that appeals to students.
Last November the Cardinal Newman Society presented an award to Boston College's Crossroads for its low-key but engaging discussion of campus issues from a Catholic perspective.
Currently, alternative Catholic newspapers exist on approximately six Catholic university campuses: The Academy at Georgetown, Crossroads at Boston College, Justice at the University of Dallas, Fenwick Review at College of the Holy Cross, CUA Worldat Catholic University of America and Villanova Times at Villanova University.
Organizers say they expect new papers to emerge at Gonzaga University, University of San Diego and Fordham University. One of the most recent is Justice, published at the University of Dallas. It is beginning its second year.
“While the University of Dallas campus newspaper did an outstanding job reporting happenings on campus, there was no section devoted to issues of special interest to Catholic students,” said editor Jason Van Dyke. In response, Van Dyke created Justice.
Van Dyke is no stranger to starting a newspaper. A former student at Michigan State University, Van Dyke started The Spartan Spectator after being dismissed from the university's State News staff for articles he wrote criticizing the campus’ homosexual-rights movement. On the advice of Father Bill Keebler, pastor of St. Lawrence Catholic Church in Penfield, Ill., Van Dyke transferred to the University of Dallas. A former Southern Baptist, Van Dyke entered the Church this past Easter.
Now, Van Dyke hopes to help other students do likewise. He is c reating a student handbook for others who want to start independent newspapers.
“The handbook will teach students how to do all those things necessary to starting and maintaining a successful Catholic newspaper on their campus without breaking the rules,” Van Dyke said.
Facing Challenges
Rules or not, the establishment of independent newspapers is not without its problems. In addition to university protocol, there is frequent turnover, and funding can be difficult to find.
Father Robert Friday described two of the hurdles. “Independent newspapers, such as Utopia, [the former alternative newspaper at CUA, no longer published] must go through the student activities office to obtain permission for distribution,” said Father Friday, former vice president for student life at Catholic University of America.
Explaining the turnover, Father Friday said, “Like many student organizations, newspapers come and go depending upon the student environment and leadership.”
Additionally, because the newspapers are independent, they seldom receive funding from the university. Instead, they rely largely on alumni and advertising for support.
The project already has its critics. Monika Hellwig, executive director of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, said the Cardinal Newman Society preaches a narrow definition of Catholicism. Members of her association suspect the society is trying to use student newspapers to further its ideology. She worries that such papers could create divisiveness on campus.
“The idea for student publications is great, but it should be coming from within the campus,” Hellwig told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “This is kind of a super-campus, one that is trying to control and dominate what is going on there.”
Asked about The Academy's presence at Georgetown University, Laura Cavender, associate director of communications, declined to comment because, she said, “The Academy is not a university-recognized or -funded program.”
Organizers, however, disagree. In fact, Lopez said what she is most encouraged by is the fact that the effort has been student-driven. “For the most part, there has been no prodding involved,” she said. “At places like [College of the] Holy Cross [in Worcester, Mass.], for instance, where the administration allows plays such as ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ the newspaper serves as an oasis.”
“Catholic colleges rarely evangelize and catechize students, yet many young Catholics come to school unprepared for Theology 101,” Reilly said. “This is exactly what the Church needs: faithful Catholic students reaching out to their peers. Most Catholic colleges will welcome such a positive and exciting program.”
To bolster its efforts, the network is partnering with two nonprofits — the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Leadership Institute — to offer training and startup grants for independent newspaper editors.
“Conservative or traditional ideas have been maligned, silenced or censored at 98% of universities in America,” said Rich Moha, spokesman for the Leadership Institute. The Leadership Institute embarked on a project to start independent conservative political newspapers on college campuses in 1983. To date, it has helped start at least 70 such publications.
Reilly is quick to point out that Cardinal Newman Society is interested in supporting student publications of all political stripes, as long as they accurately present and embrace Catholic doctrine.
In addition to training, the network also hopes to coordinate subscription, fund raising and advertising efforts. It is establishing a Catholic College News Service to distribute members’ articles to national media, an e-mail network so editors can share ideas and a network whereby advertisers can purchase space in its member publications.
“While still in its embryonic stages, our goal is to help students know that they have fellow travelers across the nation,” Lopez said. “This is especially important when the Catholic headlines college students are seeing are not exactly recruitment videos for the truth.”
Tim Drake is the Culture of Life editor.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:True Diversity
TOWNHALL.COM, Sept. 5 — As part of its effort to erode the liberal and secular thinking that dominates most universities, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture has launched a “Campaign for Fairness and Inclusion in Higher Education,” reported former leftist David Horowitz in a column for the Web site.
As part of its call for universities to recruit faculty with a variety of political, social and religious outlooks, the center calls for adding the categories of political and religious affiliation to federal laws that prohibit discrimination.
Horowitz argued that university officials have “interpreted diversity to mean anything but a plurality of viewpoints — arguably the most important diversity of all.”
Semester in Rome
FRANCISCAN UNIVERSITY, Sept. 4 — Ten graduate theology students from the Ohio university will inaugurate a new semester abroad program in Rome this fall.
The students will take classes at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelicum, and also study Roman art and architecture and the influence of Christianity on Rome. They will reside at a house on the grounds of the headquarters for the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, the congregation that operates Franciscan University.
New Support
DIOCESE OF PITTSBURGH, Sept. 1 — Two new programs — a traditional endowment fund and one that operates on tax credits — are providing key support to Catholic school students, the diocese announced.
The Scholastic Opportunity Scholarship program is a means for local businesses to use tax credits to direct support to needy families for Catholic school tuition. The program has earmarked $2.5 million for Catholic schools.
The Bishop's Education Fund was established in 1995 as a direct fund-raising mechanism to provide tuition assistance for families in need and has grown to become a $12 million endowment.
Battle Looms
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, Sept. 13 — George Washington University has changed its student health-insurance plan to cover prescription contraceptives in response to the threat of a lawsuit claiming violation of TITLE IX, the federal law that forbids gender discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds, reported the weekly journal.
Those pressing the issue, including Planned Parenthood, said they plan to do the same at other colleges and universities, including religious institutions, even though TITLE IX allows consideration for policies that would conflict with the tenets of a religious institution.
“But that doesn't necessarily rule out” that even religious colleges could be required to change their health policies, said one proponent. “There would definitely be a legal battle in that regard.”
Death of a President
CHRISTIAN BROTHERS UNIVERSITY, Sept. 3 — De LaSalle Christian Brother Theodore Drahmann, the university's former president, died Sept. 2. He was a religious for all but 20 of his 76 years.
A former superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, he served as president of the Memphis university from 1980 to 1993. He was also a longtime member of the board of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.
Since 1998 he had been on the faculty at St. Mary's University of Minneapolis.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Musings of a Home Schooling Mom DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Only a few more weeks, and I get my freedom back,” my friend said, referring to the start of the school year. After nine weeks of dealing with her children all day, every day, she was longing for those 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. stretches of solitude.
“Only a few more weeks, and I lose my freedom,” I countered.
For me, having the kids around all day is fine. It's making them learn things that can be a drag. That's the breaks when you choose home schooling.
But I don't envy my friend any more than she envies me. A classic non-morning person, I'm blissfully free of that early rush to awaken, feed and scrounge lunch money for my offspring. I don't have to scramble to find lost permission slips, nor have I been presented with impossible, last-minute, school-related requests.
No, I can rev up slowly each morning, coffee in hand, and smile out the window at those poor souls shivering at the bus stop. But then 9 rolls around, and it's time for my daylong teacher act.
Yes, it's very rewarding to teach little ones to read and write. And it's such a joy to pass on the Catholic faith to them, rather than delegating this precious task to someone else. But my day isn't my own.
Housekeeping suffers, to put it mildly. Not only are peak house-cleaning hours taken up with the three Rs, but all my children use our home the whole day. All the mess they would be normally be creating at school is created here.
The tide turns back in my favor toward evening.
Since nearly all the “homework” is done during the school day, I have a relaxed evening that isn't punctuated with incessant cries of “Mom, I don't get this stuff.” Instead, we read aloud, play together, pray together or just pursue our favorite pastimes individually.
But no matter what parents do about their children's education, there's always plenty to worry about. It's par for the course.
When one of my children has trouble with a subject, I worry big-time. After all, I can't blame the school system: I'm the school system.
If the problem is the textbook we're using, I have to locate a better one. If my child is being unco-operative and lazy, I have to enforce better discipline. If the child has a genuine learning problem, I have to figure it out.
This kind of accountability can be a burden. As a result, I've become something of a bore socially, except when I'm with other home schooling moms. We can happily obsess about Josh's spelling and Emily's algebra a nd fantasize about the latest curriculum cure-all we've seen on the Internet.
On the other hand, public- and private-school parents worry about their kids’ souls and psyches a lot more. It's disconcerting when they learn that their child's fourth-grade teacher has convinced the class that people are parasites destroying the planet. It's upsetting to find out that the ninth-grade health teacher has given a demonstration of condom use, explaining that the kids had to “decide for themselves,” so long as they were “responsible.”
Then there's the relentless peer influence that can take place even in the best Catholic schools.
It's not teachers who awaken the desire in 8-year-old girls for compact discs of a teeny-bopper star who dresses like a prostitute and sings about sex. Teachers don't encourage teens to mutilate themselves with piercings and tattoos. Or drain their brains of the ability to carry on a polite conversation with anyone older than 30. Or use language that … well, no one needs to hear this list.
For most home schooling parents, these things are rarely a problem. Adolescent rebellion certainly occurs among their kids, but it's pretty low-key. Incidents of sullenness and disrespect can be counted on one hand. And this isn't because we're all such strict parents.
For my part, I'm something of a pushover, all too willing to give in to our children's wants. But when kids don't have six hours per day of exposure to hordes of peers telling them what they ought to want, they're far less likely to want dangerous, ugly or just plain sinful things.
So, choose your crosses, parents. You're bound to have them.
There's an old story about a village where everyone complained about their troubles too much.
An angel came down from heaven, collected each villager's troubles in a separate bag and set the bags on a hilltop. He told the people that at dawn they could choose any bag of trouble. But they must choose a bag, he said, for suffering is a necessary part of life.
As the sun came over the horizon, each villager raced to secure his or her own familiar troubles rather than get stuck with someone else's. From then on, complaints were way down in that village.
The story works for me. I'll take my messy house and full-time, unpaid teaching job any day.
Daria Sockey is a contributing writer for Faith & Family magazine.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Daria Sockey ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: His Hands Are Our Hands - Here's Proof DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:THE LIVING CHRIST: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIVES OF TODAY'S SPIRITUAL HEROES
by Harold Fickett Doubleday, 2002 288 pages, $22.95 Available in retail and online bookstores.
How does Jesus live through the lives of believers today? Although convinced that our Lord's earthly life continued “on this earth, even after his death” and that Jesus is “truly present in his followers,” Catholic author Harold Fickett longed “to draw a portrait of the living Christ through contemporary stories.” That experiment produced this powerful collection of profiles of ordinary people whose willingness to be the “hands of Jesus” led them into extraordinary lives of service.
In The Living Christ we meet a Southern Baptist truck-stop chaplain, a visionary who for her living, cleans restrooms at a McDonald's, an American priest who conducts healing services in Mexico City, a missionary who rescues Thai girls from prostitution, a Pope whose vision and courage changed the world and four Assembly of God pastors who were martyred in Iran during the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini. What do these diverse individuals have in common? All are humble, focused and utterly given over to serving the God they love.
Fickett is above all a journalist who, by asking the right questions, can paint so lifelike a word picture that readers feel as if the subject of the story is a longtime acquaintance or even a friend. In researching situations where his subjects were engaged in their Christlike work, he “quickly became aware that the recipients of this work were a big part of the story.” Viewing his material from both angles enriches the profiles. For example, in writing about American Baptist missionary Lauran Bethell and her work in Thailand, Fickett begins by telling the riveting story of the young Akha girl Melee who is torn from her family and forced into prostitution in Bangkok. Once he has broken the readers’ hearts, he begins to weave in the background of the woman missionary who will ultimately rescue Melee from this “almost unimaginable world of violence and exploitation.”
Most of the details in Bethell's and the other stories are based on personal interviews and public records. But to “protect people's privacy and any and all confidences,” Fickett has changed “some of the names, details, and elements of the secondary stories’ dramatic actions.” He also used fictional techniques, reportage and other narrative devices, attempting in each instance to, as he puts it, “render the world of the story as well as its action.” The composite accounts are compelling in detail and rich in atmosphere, although one of Fickett's techniques is bothersome. In telling the multilayered stories, he cuts back and forth from one character, time period or location to another. While often effective, this device occasionally seems unduly complex.
Each story demonstrates a particular way in which Jesus shines through the lives of modern Christians. In South Carolina we see Christ as the wayfarer. In Mexico City he is revealed as the healer. On the California coast we encounter Jesus, the man of prayer. In Thailand he becomes Christ the liberator, and in Rome he assumes the role of the prophet.
The profiles themselves offer a number of interesting theological insights and, at the conclusion of each, Fickett connects the human story with the aspect of Jesus it reveals. Fickett knows his Bible, and he effectively anchors his arguments in Scripture. He also encourages his readers to pursue the three theological works that, he says, have most informed his understanding of Jesus: N.T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God, Romano Guardini's The Lord and Louis Bouyer's The Church of God.
At book's end, Fickett writes with affection about how various members of an Orthodox church in Kansas live out Christ's love and goodness in their daily lives. It is an instructive and wonderfully reassuring account for readers who may be feeling inadequate in the shadow of the spiritual giants portrayed in earlier chapters.
Ann Applegarth writes from Eugene, Oregon.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ann Applegarth ----- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Tithing and Tuition DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Q
We were wondering what the Church teaches regarding tithing for the Catholic education of our children.
A
Section 222 of the Code of Canon Law describes our obligation to support the Church as follows: “The Christian faithful are obliged to assist with the needs of the Church so that the Church has what is necessary for divine worship, for apostolic works and works of charity and for the decent sustenance of ministers. They are also obliged to promote social justice and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist the poor from their own resources.” The Church also teaches that parents are the primary educators of their children and providing them with a proper formation certainly falls within the activities described in section 222.
As to whether we should use a portion of our tithe for this purpose depends on the circumstances of the situation. Remembering that the primary reason we tithe is to increase our love for God and neighbor, we should strive to have our sacrifices be used for the good of others. When, due to a lack of resources, a family is faced with not being able to provide an authentic Catholic formation for their children, certainly it would be permissible to use a portion of the tithe for that purpose.
A good decision over whether you should use your tithe for this purpose will depend on your willingness to objectively review your financial situation and apply Christian principles in this area of your life. It wouldn't be uncommon in our materialistic society for families with sufficient resources to both tithe and pay for their children's education to feel that somehow their resources weren't adequate to do both.
I would encourage you to take the following steps as you strive to make a decision which pleases our Heavenly Father.
E My first recommendation would be to do a complete review of your financial position (balance sheet, summary of debts and budget worksheet). You could use my workbook, Catholic Answers’ Guide to Family Finances, as a starting point. Especially helpful may be our guideline budgets that are included. Even if a family believes that it would be impossible to reduce spending, a fresh and objective look at the situation would be a good place to start.
E Be as creative as possible when looking at the cost of educating your children. When considering parochial schools, take this opportunity to discuss your situation with the school and investigate the financial-assistance programs that are offered. We are aware of some Catholic schools where the education is free after the third child. Contact the school and investigate the different possibilities. Have you considered home schooling? It is a much less expensive approach than most private schools.
E If you find that the only way you can afford a Catholic education is by using virtually all of your tithe, I would recommend that a minimal amount (say $5 per week) be committed to your parish via a weekly donation. Our Lord can multiply the amount and at the same time, the visible nature of the gift will provide a good example for your children.
Phil Lenahan is executive director for Catholic Answers in El Cajon, California.
----- EXCERPT: Family Matters ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:CLOSE TO MOM AND CHASTE
Mothers worried that their daughters are having sex have more influence than they might imagine. According to a recent report, teen-age girls who are close to their moms are more likely to stay virgins. The key for parents, experts say, is not just talking about sex but being deeply involved in their children's lives.
Percentage of mothers that disapprove of their daughters having sex
96%
Percentage of mothers aware that their daughters are sexually active
50%
Source: University of Minnesota, Sept. 4, 2002; KRT Illustration.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Diagnosis: Diabetes ... Prognosis: Fun DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:University of Illinois student Megan Lagoski is jumping into her first year of medical school, but her study load doesn't intimidate her. A few weeks ago she was spending 18-hour days checking blood sugar, delivering insulin shots, counseling homesick hearts and helping direct the energy of a cabin-full of preteen girls.
Lagoski has finished her second summer season at Camp Sweeney, a one-of-a-kind camp where diabetic children ages 6 to 18 can participate in more than 30 activities, from riding jet skis to bungee jumping, and at the same time learn how to manage their lifelong disease.
Hundreds of kids come from all over the country and as far as Mexico and El Salvador to this wooded lakeside funfest located off a sleepy country road 70 miles north of Dallas. Their days are packed with swimming, basketball, lacrosse, paintball, computer design, tae kwon do, fishing and more, as they make friends for a lifetime in a place where their diabetes doesn't make them feel different.
The 73 counselors come a long way, too — a considerable number, like Lagoski, are students at or graduates of University of Notre Dame.
“You kind of become addicted to working here,” says Lagoski, who hopes to return next summer as a medical staff intern. “I love kids and I love to play.”
The Good Doctor
Biology graduate Irish Thompson of South Bend, Ind., was a first-time counselor this summer, taking his memories with him to physical therapy school in Philadelphia. “[The kids] are just great,” he says. “You know they have diabetes, but you don't know that when they're at camp — they're just the same as anyone else.”
The counselors’ role model, the one who makes the games run on time, is Dr. Ernie Fernandez, a single Catholic and one of Dallas’ busiest pediatricians. He has served as volunteer camp director for the past 15 years.
When Fernandez first arrived at the established Camp Sweeney as a medical intern in the mid-1980s, research was beginning to show that if diabetic children could intensify their medical management they could live longer and healthier lives. “It became evident that this program could change its focus from just being a sports-recreational facility to what we call a lifestyle program, or a behavior-modification program, to inspire these kids to want to do much more with their diabetes control than had ever been asked of them before,” he says.
And inspire he does. If there's a “wow” about today's Camp Sweeney — and there are several — Fernandez is behind it, the staff says.
He buys Gameboys and X-Boxes to give as prizes to students earning high scores on their medical knowledge tests. He sponsors a pull-out-the-stops carnival at the midpoint of each three-week session to ease any lingering homesickness. He takes the senior campers on outings to places like Six Flags Over Texas. Campers’ families don't foot the bill for the extras — Fernandez quietly admits to donating half his pediatrician's salary to the camp.
His generosity is not just in money but time. During the summer the doctor makes a 150-mile round-trip commute so he can see his regular patients from 9 a.m. to noon and then spend the rest of the day and night at camp. He developed and maintains an interactive computer network so campers can do spot-checks for their blood sugar levels and be constantly monitored by the on-site hospital staff. With a background in broadcasting, he created a camp radio station (KPFC, for “Perseverance, Faith and Courage”) that is No. 1 in the area because of its upbeat, commercial-free music format.
“You're just in awe,” says Thompson. “The counselors talk about it all the time. You think he's done, and then there's something else.”
“We don't know when he sleeps,” quips counselor and morning disc jockey Justin Winters, a North Texas State University student. “Some of us think he's robotic.”
Fernandez's priest friend, Father John Dick, who celebrates Mass each weekend for the Catholic staff, says that while not explicitly Catholic, the camp is Christian in spirit because of the natural law and virtues that form its “Code of Living.”
“Ernie prayerfully and concretely puts into practice the ‘greatest’ commandments, love of God and love of neighbor,” Father Dick says. “I believe he must constantly hear Jesus' command to ‘love one another the way I have loved you.’”
Says Fernandez of his contribution: “We're only on this earth for a very short time to serve. If you're lucky enough to find the thing to do, it's your obligation to do it.”
Feeling Normal Every Day
The Bernet family of Mary Immaculate parish in Dallas is grateful Camp Sweeney turned out to be the doctor's special calling.
It was exactly 13 years ago when they began their long journey with type 1 diabetes, the severe kind, the kind that not many years ago used to leave kids blind or with damaged kidneys and radically shortened lives.
Dianne Bernet had just given birth to twins and she and her husband, Mark, their 3-year-old-son, Drew, 1-year-old Aaron and the girls drove to Illinois for the babies’ baptism. Drew developed some symptoms, including an unquenchable thirst, so his parents decided to check with a doctor. Within hours the boy was admitted to a hospital, his condition so advanced he would have been in a coma by that night if they had not intervened.
The Bernets’ life became a whirlwind of doctor appointments, trips to the hospital, the nightmare of giving shots to an uncomprehending 3-year-old or filling his cheeks from tubes of sugar icing to keep him from having a seizure.
Then came a new hurdle. Drew turned 5 and went into a kind of denial. He didn't want to take his shots and he didn't want to stick to his diet of unlimited protein and carefully managed carbohydrates. He ended up in the hospital for a week.
Through their son's doctor, the Bernets learned about Camp Sweeney. Though the camp normally doesn't take children until they are 6, Fernandez made room for Drew during its last week.
“He was the youngest camper there,” says Dianne. “He was so small they had to put a cot in the middle of the hallway of the cabin. I remember calling every day at camp and talking to Ernie. He told me not to worry — Drew was having a great time, and all the counselors were carrying him up on their shoulders.”
Drew did so well, in fact, that he eagerly returned when he was 6 for the three-week session and has not missed a summer in 11 years. He even attends the one-week winter sessions, Dianne says.
“We could never understand the bond these kids have. These kids are so close to each other,” says Mark Bernet. “When camp over it takes at least a half hour to leave, because they're all hugging each other. We lose track of Drew; he's just off saying goodbye to someone.”
“Camp Sweeney allows the kids to feel ‘normal,’” Mark adds. “What is not so obvious is Camp Sweeney gives the families a much-needed break from diabetes management.”
The counselors are happy to provide that break. Lagoski said she will be taking what she has learned at Camp Sweeney with her, as she pursues a possible specialty in pediatric endocrinology. “Despite the problems that happen with medicine, the managed care,” she says, “I really just want to help people any way I can.”
Ellen Rossini writes from Richardson, Texas.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Disciple of Christ, West-Point Tough DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:The call to service is in his bones. The seeds were planted when he was a captain and a star defenseman on his high-school hockey team who sacrificed his offensive potential — the ability to score goals — to play rock-solid defense, all for the good of the team.
During that same period in his life, the blare of a military trumpet beckoned. At the time, he remembered thinking to himself, “I don't want to attend just any college or university.”
So what did Paul Hurley do? He received an appointment to the United States Military Academy and graduated from West Point in the spring of 1984.
Today Father Hurley lives out his urge to serve on the highest rung of the service ladder, the ministerial priesthood. He is a Catholic chaplain (and a major) in the U.S. Army. Currently, Father Hurley is completing advanced chaplain school, officially known as the Chaplain Career Course, at Fort Jackson, S.C. In December, his next assignment in the Army will take him to Korea.
As for his evolving sense of service? “There is something deep down and internal that resonates with what I do as a priest,” he says. “To be a priest — to be chosen and personally selected by Christ — is pretty special. Just to think: God wants to use me by working through me.”
Vocational Vision
The watershed event of his adult life took place during his junior year at the academy. Father Tom Devery, a priest assigned by the Archdiocese of New York to Holy Trinity Parish, which is located on the grounds of West Point, invited him to make a “TEC (Teens Encounter Christ)” weekend, a popular form of retreat geared for students and young adults.
“It was one of those great experiences of a lifetime,” Father Hurley recalls. “For the first time in my life, I experienced God's presence and during the retreat I thought about the priesthood for the first time.”
However, before he entered a seminary, six grueling years in the Army would test the authenticity of a possible vocation to the priesthood. After graduating with the Long Grey Line, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the field artillery branch of the Army and sent to Germany for three years.
Spiritually, he said it was a bone-dry, barren time in his life. “It was a struggle,” he remembers. “I think I was running away, but not consciously.”
Reflecting back on that period in his life, he recalls that he was searching: “Searching can be expressed in many ways. Sometimes it takes you to wayward places.”
Following a tour of duty in Germany, he was reassigned to Fort Bragg, N.C. Although his thoughts about the priesthood had waned, he plunged into parish life and became active at St. Patrick's in Fayetteville, N.C. At the same time, he met two dynamic priests, Father John Durbin, the pastor, and Father Tom Forry, a priest-chaplain from Boston with the 82nd Airborne Division.
Father Hurley said that his involvement in parish ministry became like a magnet, pulling him more deeply into the life and mission of the Church. “The more I became involved in ministry,” he says, “the more I realized that it brought me great satisfaction; that it ran deep; that it connected with the real me, with who I really am as a person.”
After six years in the Army, Father Hurley resigned his commission. Soon after he applied, was accepted and entered St. John Seminary in Boston. He was ordained a priest by Cardinal Bernard Law on May 20, 1995, at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
One of his classmates was Father John McLaughlin, a parochial vicar at St. Mary's Parish in Foxborough, Mass. Like his friend and fellow priest, Father McLaughlin pursued a career before entering the seminary. He was a high-school teacher and a coach. “I always kid Paul by telling him I coached a real sport — wrestling,” says Father McLaughlin, laughing. “All he played was a game — hockey.”
Tender Toughness
Father McLaughlin adds that there is a dichotomy about his friend, Father Hurley. “There is a toughness to him,” he explains. “At the same time, he has a great heart. He is very caring and very compassionate.” Father McLaughlin says that Father Hurley had to exercise toughness and resiliency just to withstand the grind at West Point. “He is a bright guy,” says Father McLaughlin. “But he found the academic load at West Point very difficult. He is a real worker. When he starts something, he is determined to finish no matter how difficult it becomes.”
Bob Donovan, Father Hurley's former high-school hockey coach, says he was not the least bit surprised when he learned that his former star defenseman had decided to become a priest. “I knew Paul would get through West Point,” says Donovan. “Nothing he does will ever surprise me. He was a star hockey player, but he's an even better person. He is grounded solidly in all the virtues. He is one of the finest young men I have ever coached.”
Following ordination, Father Hurley worked for five years in a parish. He joined the National Guard before rejoining the regular Army as a chaplain. While in the National Guard, he heard stories about soldiers who were part of the peacekeeping force in Bosnia going six, seven and even eight months without seeing a priest and being able to participate at Mass and receive the sacraments. “I wanted to do something about that,” he reflects. “I wanted to help fill that void. Without the sacraments, everyone is lacking or missing something.”
Before enrolling in the Chaplain Career Course, Father Hurley was attached to the 18th Artillery Brigade of the 82nd Airborne. “I tell people,” he says, jokingly, “that my faith was strengthened by having to jump out of perfectly good airplanes.”
Father Hurley is the son of John and Rita Hurley. His father, a retired accountant, has had to work through a series of three severe strokes. He said his dad has taught him much about all that it means to be a fighter. “My father is a real battler,” says Father Hurley. “He fought through those strokes and refused to be beaten. My parents are strong people and they have always had great faith.”
As he looks to the future, Father Hurley says the key for him is “to remain tenacious in his prayer life. Whenever I have heard about anyone getting into trouble or having difficulty in matters of faith, without exception it can be traced to a diminished prayer life. None of us can afford to let our personal prayer life slide.”
Wally Carew, author of Men of Spirit, Men of Sports writes from
Medford, Massachusetts.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Wally Carew ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 09/22/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 22-28, 2002 ----- BODY:Brainwaves in the Womb
BBC NEWS, Sept. 6 — A test that can measure the electrical signals in an unborn child's brain could one day help doctors protect babies from damage sustained in the womb.
It is one of the first times that the activity of the brain has been measured and showed that babies before birth could even respond to a bright light shining through their mothers’ abdomen. The research, carried out by scientists at the University of Arkansas, is called magnetoencephalography (MEG). The practical benefits of this scanning system could prevent, or at least reduce, brain deficits caused by lack of nutrients from the placenta.
Spiritual Needs
EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS, Sept. 2 — Dr. Scott Murray is teaching students at Edinburgh University's Medical School how to take a spiritual history as well as a medical one during consultations.
Murray told the Edinburgh Evening News that patients make a better recovery if they receive spiritual help alongside traditional treatment. His work has convinced the Scottish Parliament to give him $31,000 to further investigate how the National Health Service should treat people's spiritual needs.
Murray's research involved interviewing terminally ill patients, many of whom raised spiritual issues as major concerns.
Birth Rate Spurs Israel
HA'ARETZ DAILY, Sept. 4 — The Israel Council for Demography met after five years of inactivity to find ways to encourage Jewish households to have more children using government grants, housing benefits and other incentives. It will also examine issues such as abortion and mixed marriages between Israelis and foreign workers.
The decision to reconvene what was generally considered to be a defunct organization was taken by Labor and Social Welfare Minister Shlomo Benizri. Benizri said he was spurred into reviving the committee in light of the large number of social and demographic challenges facing Israel: the non-Jewish immigrants who have arrived here over the past decade, the communities of foreign workers, mixed marriages and the drop in the Jewish birthrate.
Depo-Provera Users Face Risks
BBC NEWS, Sept. 2 — The scientific community is tentatively admitting health risks associated with Depo-Provera contraceptive injections, billed as a “convenient alternative for women” rather than swallowing the pill every day. Women who are given the long-lasting contraceptive injections may suffer physical changes that increase their risk of heart disease.
A team of scientists from Imperial College School of Medicine say the drug may, if taken over a longer period, restrict the ability of the body's arteries to contract and expand.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: No-Kneeling Rule Sparks Widespread Outcry DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:LINCOLN, Neb. — A new directive on the posture for receiving Communion is being implemented in a way that those who wish to receive kneeling are often humiliated.
The new directive merely codifies what has been a practice since the 1960s, and it isn't meant to prevent those who still receive kneeling, usually at an altar rail, from doing so.
Nevertheless, Adoremus Bulletin editor Helen Hull Hitchcock and EWTN news anchorman Raymond Arroyo said they have heard from people all over the country who are being forced to stand.
“We've gotten a lot of reports from Southern California of people being interfered with, told they must stand during the distribution of Communion, stand until everyone has received and refused Communion if they knelt,” Hitchcock said.
The July issue of the U.S. bishops' Committee on the Liturgy newsletter says that kneeling is “not a licit posture for receiving holy Communion in the dioceses of the United States of America unless the bishop of a particular diocese has derogated from this norm in an individual and extraordinary circumstance.”
In fact, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., “has given a derogation so people can kneel if they prefer,” said Father Mark Huber, chancellor. “There has been a lot of confusion” about the new norm, said Father Huber, who speculated that there will “probably be enough questions sent to Rome to lead them to make a clarification.”
The new norm comes out of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM), a set of directives on how to celebrate and assist at Mass. Published with the new edition of the Roman Missal, the GIRM says communicants may receive standing or kneeling, as established by the bishops' conference.
The U.S. bishops requested a number of other adaptations to the GIRM. Before approving them, Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, insisted that the bishops add a clarification that communicants should not be denied the Eucharist because they kneel. The adaptation says that instances of people kneeling should be addressed pastorally “by providing the faithful with the proper catechesis on the reasons for this norm.”
Cardinal Medina's letter, from Oct. 25, 2001, stated: “This dicastery [Vatican department] agrees in principle to the insertion [of the standing adaptation]. At the same time, the tenor of not a few letters received from the faithful in various dioceses of [the United States] leads the congregation ... to urge the [bishop's] conference to introduce a clause that would protect those faithful who will inevitably be led by their own sensibilities to kneel, from imprudent action by priests, deacons or lay ministers in particular, or from being refused holy Communion for such a reason as happens on occasion.”
Msgr. Anthony Sherman, assistant director of the bishops' Committee on the Liturgy, affirmed that one can not be refused Communion for failing to stand, but he said that people ought to “accommodate themselves to the new norms.”
But insistence on standing is causing angst for many individuals and groups riding the wave of what they see as a return to traditional pious practices but which others see as nostalgia for the pre-Vatican II Church. It also is presenting a dilemma for people who are aware of the need for obedience to priests and bishops but feel a need to show respect for the Blessed Sacrament in what they consider a traditional, more reverent posture.
Parishioners at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Fort Worth, Texas, say several people have been humiliated by priests or eucharistic ministers who have insisted that the communicants stand before they are given Communion. They say their complaints to Fort Worth Bishop Joseph Delaney and Msgr. Hubert Neu, pastor of the cathedral, have not yielded satisfactory answers.
The parish council wrote to Cardinal Medina. An undersecretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship replied July 1, reiterating the stipulation that communicants who choose to kneel are not to be denied Communion on those grounds.
“The priests have stopped coming to the altar rail,” said Robert Gieb, an attorney who is president of the parish council. He pointed out that parishioners never stopped the practice of receiving at the rail after Vatican II. He said many parishioners were angered by implementation of the new norm, which started in the diocese on the solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ in June.
“The Eucharist is the heart of the Catholic faith,” said parishioner Bobby Ryan, 40, who finds it hard to give up the devotional kneeling he has learned since he became a Catholic in 1995. “For people who have knelt all their lives, and a bishop saying you shouldn't kneel, there's something wrong. ... I'd think it would make a bishop happy to have people in his diocese who want to kneel.”
Gieb, who said he and a few other parishioners still kneel, complains of what he calls the “posture police, who want to prohibit the faithful from dropping on their knees before God.”
Msgr. Neu said he does not deny or delay Communion to anyone who kneels. “We're going by the norm,” he said, pointing out that the bishops want uniformity in practice. People who kneel are “going contrary to the norm, but I've given Communion to them.”
Bishop Delaney could not be reached for comment.
Risen With Christ
The U.S. bishops' liturgy committee, in an article TITLEd, “Postures and Gestures at Mass,” said that standing is a sign of respect and honor: “This posture, from the earliest days of the Church, has been understood as the stance of those who are risen with Christ and seek the things that are above [emphasis in original]. When we stand for prayer we assume our full stature before God, not in pride, but in humble gratitude for the marvelous thing God has done in creating and redeeming each one of us. By Baptism we have been given a share in the life of God, and the posture of standing is an acknowledgment of this wonderful gift.”
Communion, said the unsigned article, one of a series of bulletin inserts on the Roman Missal, is “the sacrament which unites us in the most profound way possible with Christ who, now gloriously risen from the dead, is the cause of our salvation.”
The article, which can be read on the committee's Web page (www.nccbuscc.org/liturgy/girm/bul 3.htm), gives a brief overview of the history of kneeling. It says kneeling signified penance in the early Church, when kneeling was forbidden on Sundays and during the Easter Season and “the prevailing spirit of the liturgy was that of joy and thanksgiving.” In the Middle Ages, kneeling signified the homage of a vassal to his lord, it said, and more recently, the posture has signified adoration. The article does not cite authorities for this historical overview.
The committee's July newsletter noted the GIRM emphasizes that in matters of gesture and posture “greater attention needs to be paid to what is laid down by liturgical law and by the traditional practice of the Roman Rite, for the sake of the common spiritual good of the people of God rather than to personal inclination or arbitrary choice.”
In their consideration of the GIRM, the U.S. bishops “repeatedly recalled the need for uniformity in all prescribed postures and gestures,” the newsletter said. “Such uniformity serves as a ‘sign of the unity of the members of the Christian community gathered for the sacred Liturgy’ and it ‘both expresses and fosters the spiritual attitude of those assisting,’” said the newsletter, quoting the GIRM. “Likewise, a lack of uniformity can serve as a sign of disunity or even a sense of individualism.”
The new norm also instructs the communicant who stands to receive to bow his head before the Host or Precious Blood as a gesture of reverence. It does not say anything about genuflecting or making the sign of the cross, which some Catholics do before receiving from a priest at the head of a line.
But Bishop William Higi of Lafayette, Ind., wrote in his diocesan newspaper in June that “a person is not to genuflect before receiving.” He speculated that many people genuflect in response to reports of low levels of belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. “However, the sign of reverence has now been clearly determined for the United States,” he wrote in his weekly column in The Catholic Moment. “It is a bow of the head.”
“Should a person insist on kneeling for the reception of holy Communion, Communion will not be denied, but they clearly will be demonstrating dissent from the mind of the Church,” Bishop Higi continued. “Rather than reverence, the emphasis will be refusal to embrace particular law approved by the Vatican for the United States.”
Father Gerry Pokorsky, who heads Credo, a society of priests advocating high-quality translations for the Mass, finds it “disproportionate” to insist that kneeling is “illicit” when there have been so many other problems in the Church in recent years.
As to the liturgy committee's article claiming that kneeling was an act of penance in the early Church, Father Pokorsky cites St. Paul's dictum that, “At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow.”
“That doesn't sound like penance to me, it sounds like adoration,” the Arlington, Va., priest said. “Why this aversion to acts of piety? It's such a one-sided emphasis. Will the bishops now be attendant to all the liturgical abuses?”
As an example of those abuses, Father Pokorsky spoke of priests failing to perform the ritual washing of the hands after the presentation of the gifts. Other Catholics pointed out that some celebrants fail to genuflect after the consecration and lay ministers in the sanctuary often are exempted from the requirement to kneel during the Eucharistic Prayer.
What many Catholic lay people are complaining about is that priests who are cavalier themselves about following obligatory liturgical norms become draconian in enforcing an optional directive on lay people. And bishops who ignore flagrant liturgical abuses by priests promote strict adherence to liturgical norms when it comes to a common posture for lay people.
Dominican Father Giles Dimock, a former professor of liturgy and now dean of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., said it's helpful to have a uniform posture, but that this goal must be balanced against individual devotion and the common good.
“I would never dream of refusing Communion to someone who wants to kneel,” Father Dimock said. “They feel it's necessary” to show reverence in such a way.
At the same time, communicants should be aware that Communion needs to be distributed to others in an orderly way. As a professor at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, Father Dimock was accustomed to giving Communion to students on their knees, but he said a few knelt a bit longer than a regard for others in line would allow. For those few students, the priest said, it was “like their own personal holy hour.”
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: John Burger -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Meeting Pro-Life Standards Gets Harder for Candidates DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — As Americans consider how to vote in this fall's elections, a recently publicized decision by Georgia Right to Life not to endorse candidates whose opposition to abortion allows for exceptions in cases of rape or incest has rekindled a long-standing debate in pro-life circles.
Catholics especially have struggled with this issue because Church teaching considers all abortions intrinsically evil. But some have interpreted a section of the 1995 papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which deals with so-called imperfect abortion legislation, as allowing for exceptions by political candidates as well.
“When it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law,” the encyclical states, “an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well-known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.”
Although the encyclical refers to legislation and not the positions of candidates, Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said it seems obvious that if legislators are being told they can vote that way the same standard would apply to candidates.
Georgia Right to Life, an affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee, voted unanimously two years ago to bring its candidate-endorsement practices into line with its bylaws effective after the election of 2000. The recent Aug. 20 primary was the first major election cycle the change affected.
“Our bylaws say we protect all human life from conception to natural death,” said Nancy Stith, executive director of the group. “To endorse candidates that don't hold to that belief, we felt like we were not raising the standard.”
Although some candidates have disagreed publicly with the group's stance, Stith said Georgia Right to Life also heard from many who applauded the decision. “We had an amazing number of candidates who have either been there and said, ‘Yes, we're with you,’ or were given our material to read and said afterward, ‘Yes, we're with you on the issue.’”
The best affirmation came with the election results. Stith said 77% of the candidates endorsed by Georgia Right to Life were winners in the Aug. 20 primary.
Stith said the group took its lead from Michigan Right to Life, which has always declined to endorse candidates who allow exceptions for rape and incest and seems to be making more gains legislatively.
“We have seen very little success in Georgia legislation,” she said. “We don't even have a women's-right-to-know bill and we feel that's the minimum. What's been going on for the last 15 years hasn't worked.”
Michigan, by contrast, has passed an informed-consent law for women and a parental-consent law for minors in addition to abolishing state funding for welfare abortions. Since 1987, the abortion rate in Michigan has been reduced by 45.4% while Georgia's has not decreased.
The National Right to Life Committee, which supports national candidates who allow for abortion exceptions for rape or incest, declined to comment on the Georgia decision except to say that the action had not affected the state group's standing as an affiliate of the national body.
American Life League, which does not support candidates who allow for such exceptions, hailed Georgia Right to Life's move as a good decision that will promote a 100% pro-life position.
“We feel that allowing for exceptions in the political arena continually hurts our position overall because really what we're trying to do is defend the dignity of the person,” said Mo Woltering, director of public policy for American Life League. “Even persons conceived in rape and incest have equal dignity.”
Woltering said allowing for abortion exceptions in legislation has not helped the pro-life movement. “We really have not rolled back abortion laws adopting this approach. I think Georgia Right to Life is taking a look at the situation and saying to themselves, ‘We need to stand on principle, not pragmatism.’”
It is important, he added, to evaluate so-called imperfect legislation in light of Catholic tradition about the purpose of law. This views the law as having a teaching role, not just a restrictive one. “It teaches us what is the thing to do to obtain a good end in the moral life,” he said.
For example, Woltering said, a bill outlawing all third-trimester abortions might be acceptable because even though it does not stop all abortions, it does not provide for abortion anytime or in any case in the third trimester. Thus, such a law would not further the right to an abortion but would restrict what is already allowed.
Conversely, he said, a law that would prohibit all abortions except those in the case of rape or incest would continue to provide the right to an abortion in certain cases.
“We don't want a law that continues to give the right to abortion because that law teaches that even though you're outlawing the majority of abortions you're still giving the right to an abortion,” Woltering said.
However, Doerflinger of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities said he finds that argument unconvincing.
“Whenever you pass an imperfect law, someone might imagine that you're teaching that abortions left untouched are being approved. ... The important thing is that you are reforming the law as well as you can at the present and allowing the opportunity for further improvement later.”
Cardinals' Opinions
Doerflinger said that, besides Evangelium Vitae, statements from the late Cardinal John O'Connor and Cardinal Edouard Gagnon, former president of the Pontifical Council on the Family, have supported voting for abortion laws that allow exceptions.
Cardinal O'Connor's 1990 statement, “Abortion: Questions and Answers,” said in cases where perfect legislation is clearly impossible, it would be morally acceptable to support a pro-life bill containing exceptions if the following conditions were present: There is no other feasible bill restricting abortion laws to a greater degree, the proposed bill is more restrictive than existing law and the proposed bill does not rule out the possibility of future, more restrictive laws.
Cardinal Gagnon made similar arguments in a 1987 correspondence with activist Paul Weyrich, saying Catholics may push for imperfect legislation as long as they make it clear that they remain opposed to all abortions.
Doerflinger said a law that banned all abortions except those to save the life of the mother and in cases of rape or incest would cover about 98% of all abortions. “That would be an enormous change for better in the law. ... The question is what direction are we moving in — greater protection for life or against greater protection?”
Tony Lauinger of Oklahomans for Life said although his group does not officially favor rape or incest as abortion exceptions, he would prefer a candidate who supported those exceptions be elected rather than someone who favored abortion on demand.
“It's a question of whether a person wants to make a statement or make a difference. If being 100% pure in our position makes us feel better, but candidates who are 98% pro-life are defeated by candidates who are 100% pro-abortion as a consequence, I think we've failed to do what we ought to be doing.”
Judy Roberts writes from Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Swaziland Nurse Program Provides Model for AIDS Treatments DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:TEMBELIHLE, Swaziland — When sores began to appear on the head of Miriam Dlamini, a 38-year-old widow with five children from Christ the King Parish in Swaziland, a trained parish nurse, Sybil Khumalo, went to visit her. The parish nurse encouraged the sick woman to visit the hospital for testing. Dlamini followed her suggestion and discovered she was HIV-positive.
When family members and others in the village found out Dlamini had AIDS, rather than giving her comfort, they avoided her. Her brother-in-law refused to take her to the hospital in his car. She was considered “unclean.” The only person willing to care for her was the parish nurse.
Dlamini died in a hospital shortly after being diagnosed, leaving her children to fend for themselves. When Khumalo checked up on the children, she found them alone, surviving on cooked pumpkin porridge. She fed the children for many days and, after that, ensured they were properly cared for.
Khumalo, and other parish nurses like her who care for AIDS and HIV patients, is part of a program that includes 22 parishes across the nation of Swaziland in a first-ever parish nurse program called “A New Robe.” The innovative program, initiated by a Montana-based organization called Maternal Life International, which works in conjunction with the Catholic Church in Swaziland and Bristol-Myers Squibb, gives concrete expression to the Catholic model for treating AIDS and HIV patients.
Everything about the program, even its name, alludes to Christian ideals.
“The New Robe alludes to the hemorrhaging woman who touched Jesus and was healed, and to the man by the side of the road,” said Dr. George Mulcaire Jones, medical director for Maternal Life International and the one who conceived the structure of this program. “The New Robe is a metaphor for a new way of thinking about AIDS prevention and care. We not only teach our nurses how to protect themselves and how to move a patient with bedsores, but we also teach them about the infinite value of the human person. We ask that they see an AIDS patient with eyes of mercy before eyes of judgment, because a real issue in Africa is stigmatization. So many people think that AIDS patients are unclean.”
In fact, the program received $273,000 from the Bristol-Myers Squibb “Secure the Future” program because of its unique approach.
“The program was approved by the advisory boards because it offers a novel approach for home-based care using parishes as a centerpiece for community support and destigmatization,” said John Damonti, director of the Secure the Future Foundation. “It's a strong de-stigmatization program. We wanted to test that model to see if other communities could use this.”
The program, taking place in a country of approximately 1 million, where the HIV-positive rate is between 30% and 40%, has gained the Church's recognition as well.
Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Academy Council for the Family, after learning about the program wrote, “Once it will start spreading it will bring a lot of good with the help of Our Lord.”
The program uses native Swazi nurses trained to combine faith and ministry, medical science and spirituality. Thandi Dlamini, a Catholic Swazi woman and former director of Swaziland Red Cross, runs the New Robe program.
Since the program's inception on Jan. 10, 2001, approximately 1,900 AIDS patients have been treated, 7,200 patients have been counseled and 6,500 education sessions have been provided to parish groups and schools. Parish nurses follow a program model called “the five S's.” When a parish nurse cares for a patient she looks at five categories: specific care, supportive care, symptomatic care, social care and spiritual care. The program strongly believes that no one should die unknown, unloved or alone.
“If you can imagine a parish nurse going to a rural homestead in Swaziland, she might take a bus or a lorry, she might have to walk up to 10 kilometers, and she has a medicine bag with her,” Jones explained about how the five categories come into play. “In that bag are antibiotics to treat infections. She has pain medicine for pain, she has diarrhea medicine. She also has rosaries and prayer cards for Catholic patients. She may bring with her a priest or a catechist, or a deacon to administer the sacrament of the sick. She's bringing all of the five S's with her.”
Another aspect of the program is that it promotes an educational behavior-change program, one that supports abstinence, not condoms.
“The reality of condoms is they don't work,” Jones said. “They are not well-received in the culture. Our program teaches them about the HIV virus and provides them with something that we call the ‘secret.’ The secret is what it means to know, to act and to love.
“We symbolize this by three inter-locking gold rings. We teach them about the HIV virus. We teach them how it is transmitted. Once they know, they act. We teach them about abstinence before marriage and faithfulness within marriage. And then finally they have to know what it means to live in the time of HIV [and] AIDS,” Jones said. “Love is greater than sex. We give them a language for behavioral change and we call it the ‘secret.’”
Jones insisted abstinence works. He pointed to a recent study done by Dr. Rand Stoneburner and Daniel Low-Beer of Cambridge University, partially funded by U.S. Agency for International Development, which found that a decline in AIDS prevalence in Uganda was related more to reduction in sex partners than condom use.
“The data is new, the Uganda study that Rand has done is so interesting,” said Dr. Ann Peterson, assistant administrator for the USAID's Bureau for Global Health — which promotes a mix of abstinence, education and condom use — on Stoneburner's study. “It shows that reducing the number of partners, especially in the young girls, was really instrumental in beginning the decline in Uganda. There is a new message emerging. In the U.S. there were misconceptions that youth couldn't and would-n't abstain. We are seeing in the U.S. and internationally that they can and they will abstain, and it does make a difference for HIV rates.”
Although Catholic models for the New Robe program have been established in Butte, Mont., where Maternal Life International is based, the program is primarily intended to empower in-country people to do the work.
Parish nurses, centered in the village community parish, help HIV-positive parish members in practical matters as well.
“In Swaziland, each family is allotted a homestead. If the family ceases to exist because of AIDS, they lose their homestead,” said John Jones, director of Maternal Life International. “What the nurses are trying to do is to develop a community-based solution where children whose parents have died from AIDS can remain in their homes. This allows them to hold onto their family's land, and it is key to their future. The parish nurses do everything possible to ensure that the orphans can continue to live in the community.”
The entire program is infused with Catholic ideals and spirituality. Dr. George Jones aptly sums it up: “An inspiration for our work is [the encyclical] Evangelium Vitae, the Gospel of Life. An African villager may never have the opportunity to pull Evangelium Vitae off the shelf and read it, but we want them to be able to know of their own infinite value, the estimable dignity of the human being from the way they are treated and cared for.”
Mary Ann Sullivan is based in New Durham, New Hampshire.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ann Sullivan -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Life After 'The Rock' DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:After six years as host of EWTN's “Life on the Rock,” Jeff Cavins will air his last show at the end of October.
He plans to focus on writing, speaking and a two-hour drive-time daily radio show sponsored by Starboard Network.
“I've been commuting for three years and my family needs me,” he said. After the break he said he would look at the possibility of a new family-oriented show on EWTN.
Cavins spent 12 years as an evangelical pastor before returning to the Catholic faith of his childhood. He authored My Life on the Rock and the recently published Amazing Grace for Those Who Suffer.
He spoke with Register features correspondent Tim Drake from his home in Minnesota.
Tell me a little about your childhood.
I grew up in a western suburb of Minneapolis in an average American Catholic home. My dad was vice president of Honeywell and my mom was a homemaker.
We went to Mass every week and both of my parents were dedicated to the family. I had two younger sisters. I was very much involved in school sports and competed in stand-up comedy at the state level.
As a young adult you walked away from the Catholic Church. Why?
As a teen-ager, I first started to realize that there was more to life than partying, sports and motorcycles. I committed my life to Christ at 18, but then at age 22 I confronted the bishop in Valley City, N.D., and walked away from the Catholic Church.
I walked away because I was frustrated with the Catholic Church when I set Catholics and Assemblies of God people side by side. The Assemblies of God people were reading their Bibles, worshipping God visibly, talking with one another and visiting hospitals.
Catholics, by comparison, never read their Bibles, didn't talk to one another and seemed to have a very private faith. When I compared the two, I felt like I wanted my faith to be really alive. I also walked away because I was angry with my parents for their reaction to the relationship I had found with the Lord five years earlier.
How would you describe your years as an evangelical pastor?
As a pastor of two churches, seven years in Minneapolis and five years in Dayton, Ohio, we were trying to understand the Hebraic roots of Christianity so we could custom-build a church that we thought resembled that. They were wonderful, profitable years. We developed very strong friendships and a lot of fruit came from that time. There were a lot of people who came to the Lord, we did a lot of counseling, especially marriage counseling, and helped many people through times of crisis.
What brought you back to the Church?
The deeper I studied the Church Fathers — the first 400 years — the more things started looking Catholic. We were studying the basic ideas of Judaism and assuming that the early Church adopted those ideas when in fact the early Church was different from that which I had studied. The Mass became very important to me, as did certain topics. The Eucharist became very important. Did Jesus give us his body and blood as a symbol? Papal authority became important. Suddenly it seemed as if there was no more authority, and I felt that was inconsistent with God throughout the entire Bible.
The sacraments, the concept of the word of God being both Scripture and Tradition, and what I would call the rhythm of the liturgical year — I began to study all of these things. As a church that called ourselves a New Testament church, we looked nothing like the New Testament. We took a few scriptures and modeled ourselves after that. We were a church without a creed. In fact, at about the time I left, we were meeting to rewrite a creed.
You tell your story in
The attraction of the book is that my journey away from and back into the Church reflects what so many have gone through, so they read it and identify with it. Many tell me it could easily have been their own story. The beauty of it is it presents theology in the midst of the story. Therefore, those who might not normally read have told me they have read this book and could not put it down. I've also heard from many who have purchased it — sometimes buying as many as 20 copies at a time — that giving it to their relatives brought them back into the Church.
Your most recent book is quite different. It focuses on suffering. Tell me about it.
Amazing Grace for Those Who Suffer attempts to explain the meaning of suffering and does two things: First, it answers the question, “Why did God have to suffer? Why not just die?” and second, it attempts to explain how, given the answer to the first question, our suffering now has meaning.
The answer is that our being joined to Christ has changed our entire life. We see now that all things work together for the good. This amazing grace that is experienced in the midst of suffering is illustrated in these 10 amazing stories of people just like you and me, who in many cases were broadsided by tremendous suffering. What makes the stories unique is the transformation that took place in their lives.
Was there a particular story that touched you the most?
Yes, the Clarey family whose 11-year-old daughter was murdered on her paper route. The father wrote the chapter, and I found myself just weeping as I sat reading it on the plane. It explains everything — how their daughter was missing and how they responded. I was inspired by their response to the tragedy, the grace of God in their suffering. That story, and the one by Joan Ulicny, a woman who suffered a near-fatal head-on collision with an 18-wheeler, had a big impact on me personally. In fact, I'm dedicating the book to all families of missing children. Their pain is not something I can comprehend.
Explain to me the value of suffering from a Catholic viewpoint versus an evangelical one. How do they differ?
As an evangelical, in general, we saw the work of Christ as really completely separate from us. Jesus came and he redeemed us and we were, in a way, spectators standing on the side. Once Jesus was done with the cross and resurrection, our position is just receiving the benefits of the cross.
As a Catholic, we certainly receive the benefits of the cross in the work of redemption. As Catholics we see ourselves as so joined with him that we participate with him in his redemptive work. In fact, he has given us the privilege of loving as he loves. That is done through suffering.
When Jesus suffered and died for us he didn't eliminate suffering, which is a presumption that many evangelicals have. They assume that if he suffered, we don't have to. Scriptures say that if he suffered, we will too. He didn't do away with suffering on earth, but he changed the meaning of it, which ultimately points to a day when there will be no more suffering.
The key is understanding our identity in Christ. We follow in his footsteps. Because Jesus trusted in the Father and poured himself out, we can trust in the Father and pour ourselves out in love. The answer to the question, “Can we trust in God?” is “Yes, in the resurrection.”
You have had your own experience with suffering, too, haven't you?
Yes, I first got interested in the subject of suffering when I started experiencing pain in my neck and arm two and half years ago. I discovered that I had a crushed disc that needed emergency surgery. I knew the term “Offer it up,” but I didn't know what was under the hood. I couldn't explain why. In the midst of my pain, I first understood what it means to be joined to Christ in participating in the redemption of the world.
Colossians 1:24 suddenly made sense. Paul understood that he had a part to play — a particle of the infinite redemption — and he rejoiced in it. In my pain I realized I have a role to play. Do I throw it away or do I offer it up in union with Christ? No one can add anything to the work of Christ, but he allows us to participate in it. We are not adding anything to what he did, but there we discover the love of God and the heart of God. The Holy Father has said that when people cannot find meaning in their suffering they fall into despair, but when they can attach meaning to their suffering, they can go through anything.
The book seems timely in light of the anniversary of Sept. 11.
Sept. 11, even for those not personally affected by the tragedy, represents the suddenness of tragedy. No one expected it, but suddenly it was there. The question is, how are you going to deal with it? The question is not if you are going to suffer, but when, and how are you going to respond? Well or poorly? If we are prepared to answer that question, then when a Sept. 11 happens, as Christians we can better respond with compassion to others who are suffering.
For more information on Amazing Grace for Those Who Suffer contact:
Ascension Press
W5180 Jefferson Street
Necedah, WI 54646
(800) 376-0520
www.amazinggraceonline.net
----- EXCERPT: Jeff Cavins ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Pro-Abortionist Charged With Pepper Spraying Toronto Pro-Life Counselo---- DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:TORONTO — Almost two weeks after he was pepper sprayed by a woman trying to induce an 18-year-old girl to have an abortion, pro-life counselor Robert Hinchey still didn't know who committed the crime.
Hinchey, a 52-year-old counselor at Aid to Women, was sprayed in late August while accompanying a woman to a medical clinic after she changed her mind about having an abortion. It was only in mid-September that he learned from a reporter that Carol Ann Trueman, an employee at a Toronto women's shelter, had been charged with the crime.
For two weeks he was told that police had no record of the incident even though police and fire officials wearing gas masks evacuated the clinic.
As well, the woman, who had changed her mind about having an abortion, ended up killing her 20-week-old unborn baby.
The bizarre pepper spraying occurred Aug. 29 at St. Michael's Family Medical Clinic in downtown Toronto.
Aid to Women occupies half of a semidetached building in Toronto. The other half houses an abortion clinic, Cabbagetown Women's Clinic. Aid to Women counselors often meet women on their way to the abortion clinic to advise them alternatives are available.
Hinchey saw an 18-year-old woman step out of a taxi in front of the clinic. He asked if she was looking for help and pointed to the Aid to Women sign, then accompanied her inside.
Hinchey and Tina Arruda, another Aid to Women counselor, talked to the pregnant girl. They learned she was an illegal immigrant from the Caribbean who, a day earlier, had a laminaria insertion to dilate her cervix and was scheduled for an abortion that morning. She thought she would be deported if she had the baby.
“We told her we could help her, that she didn't have to abort her baby,” Hinchey said. “We said we knew a doctor who would take out the laminaria for free.”
Hinchey said he reiterated what they were proposing in place of the abortion. “I said to her, ‘Is that what you want?’” Hinchey said. “She was very clear about what we were doing.”
Hinchey left to get a car to travel to St. Michael's clinic, while Arruda escorted the teen to the corner to wait for the car.
As they walked, a woman from the abortion clinic followed them and called out to the young woman several times, telling her to stop and come back. As the two continued walking, the abortion clinic employee ran ahead, according to Arruda, stopped inches from them and hit them so that they were separated.
911 Call
Arruda said she called 911 to report the incident to police, and subsequently called three more times that morning to report the alleged assault. Police have a file on Arruda's complaint but would not comment on it.
Hinchey, meanwhile, took the 18-year-old to St. Michael's clinic. As they were waiting, the receptionist told him a police officer had just called and was on her way over to speak to the young woman.
Hinchey said a female officer arrived and insisted on speaking to the teen alone outside of the clinic. After several minutes, she returned and went back to the clinic with Hinchey.
“I assumed that the officer was satisfied that [the young woman] was there because she wanted to continue with the pregnancy,” he said.
But within five minutes, Hinchey added, two large women appeared, grabbed the young woman and moved toward the clinic's elevator. “I yelled for them to stop and said, ‘They're kidnapping her.’”
Hinchey said the clinic security guard moved toward the women and demanded they stop and wait for the police. Hinchey tried to place himself between them and the young woman.
Suddenly, one of the intruders sprayed him in the face. He was immediately blinded and fell back, unable to see what happened afterward.
The same policewoman who had spoken to the young woman earlier returned shortly after the pepper spraying and told him the woman had changed her mind and had the abortion.
Clinic Evacuated
Police and fire officials were called to the scene, according to Nicole Ireland, of corporate communications for St. Michael's Hospital, and the clinic was evacuated because of the pepper spray.
John Henry Westen of Lifesite News broke the story on Sept. 5 after asking Constable Debbie Abbott of media relations with the Toronto Police Department about the incident and whether charges had been filed. She told him she had no record of the incident.
As well, Hinchey said he called police on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 to find out if anyone had been charged and was also told there was no record of the event. Police also told the Register on Sept. 10 that there was no file and no charge.
Finally, on Sept. 11 Detective Sgt. Tom Russell told the Register that Trueman, a worker at Stop 86, a Toronto women's shelter, had been charged with assault with a weapon because of the pepper spraying. She will appear in court on Oct. 28.
Russell said the charge against Trueman was filed at the scene Aug. 29 and said he could not speak for others who said there was no file.
The pro-life counselors remain concerned that there may have been a deliberate effort by Toronto police officials to keep the incident from the public eye. Hinchey wondered why he was not told about the charge on Aug. 31, Sept. 1 or Sept. 5 when he called police again and said he wanted to file a complaint about the assault. Two officers interviewed him that day but said nothing about any charges having already been filed.
He also wondered how the two women knew the girl was at St. Michael's clinic. He, Arruda and the policewoman who responded to the complaint about the abortion clinic employee's alleged interference were the only ones who knew, yet the women with the pepper spray showed up several minutes after the girl's meeting with the policewoman.
Reached at Stop 86 after police finally disclosed her name, Trueman asked how a reporter got her name. Told the police had released it, she said, “This is supposed to be a confidential matter,” then hung up.
Double Standard?
Police media relations spokes-woman Abbott said no media release was sent out because it was not a “major event.”'
Said Abbott, “I've had lots of calls on this, but not from any of the media I usually deal with. The Toronto Star [Canada's largest newspaper] called but they didn't think it was a story. What is so interesting about this?”
Aid to Women's Arruda wondered if the officer would say the same thing if the pepper-sprayer had been a pro-lifer.
“That would have been all over the media,” she said. “We're the ones who are always called aggressive and violent and extreme. When it's the other side, no one reports it.”
Joanne Byfield writes from Edmonton, Alberta.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joanne Byfield -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:NY Times Writer: Clergy Crisis Twisted by Media
THE TABLET, Sept. 14 — Writing in the British Catholic magazine The Tablet, New York Times columnist Peter Steinfels expressed his frustration at media treatment of the recent sexual scandals among some Catholic clergy.
While acknowledging the serious errors that characterized a few of the recent cases, Steinfels pointed out grave problems in media coverage of these events, which involve “the behavior of some 1.5% of the roughly 150,000 priests who served under hundreds of bishops in the course of half a century.”
He singled out The Boston Globe for publishing 250 stories about clerical sex scandals in 100 days — most of them dating from 10 or more years before, some from 30 or 40 years — acting as if they were breaking news of current events.
Steinfels pointed out that “the faltering attempts at reform that the bishops began to make in 1985 have been reported not very accurately and usually as evidence of the hierarchy's negligence. The fact that in the early 1990s many dioceses actually instituted real changes in the way that allegations were handled went largely unexamined by the media for months and then was treated grudgingly.”
He noted that media-induced outrage did lead to necessary changes in how abusive clergy are treated, but that “the outrage is of a peculiarly free-floating nature. Untethered to precise knowledge, it is expending itself in general alienation from the Church or being harnessed to agendas for Church reform.”
Steinfels warned that these proposed reforms “may now be driven by seriously distorted media-generated assumptions about priests, bishops and sexual abuse.”
Catholic Pundit Launches New Magazine
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sept. 9 — Citing his desire to “recapture the conservative movement,” conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan has launched a new biweekly magazine, The American Conservative (www.amconmag.com).
The periodical is co-edited by columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, with former New York Post Editorial Page Editor Scott McConnell. The American Conservative will challenge conservatives who favor U.S. intervention abroad, free trade, unrestricted immigration and other policies Buchanan calls “globalist.”
Long a vocally Catholic columnist, Buchanan has recently followed Pope John Paul II in calling for an end to sanctions against Cuba and in condemning the proposed U.S. attack on Iraq.
Based in Arlington, Va., The American Conservative published its first issue in late September. More information can be obtained by calling (800) 579-6148.
Pentecostal TV Targets Hispanics
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 13 — Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) is America's largest and fastest-growing religious broadcaster.
Based in Orange County, Calif., TBN features Pentecostal ministers who speak in tongues and promise deliverance from financial as well as spiritual crises. Now Associated Press reports that TBN has launched a Spanish-language network aimed at winning Hispanic converts.
After debuting in Miami on Sept. 1, the network “Enlace” will probably reach 10 of the largest Hispanic markets in the United States within a year. Competing with it is EWTN Espanol, which was launched in 1999 and features Catholic programming, liturgy and entertainment.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Republicans Not Fighting Against Rejection of Pro-Life Judicial Nominees DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON, D.C. — During the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore accused George Bush of seeking to impose a pro-life “litmus test” on judicial nominees.
As Bush's second year as president winds down, it's clear that there is a litmus test for judicial appointments — a pro-abortion one, imposed by the Democrat-controlled Senate.
And neither Bush nor Senate Republicans intend to confront the Democrats over the issue.
Senate Republicans say only the restoration of a Republican majority can prevent a repeat of the unprecedented defeat of judicial nominee Priscilla Owen by Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee members for purely ideological reasons.
Owen, a Texas Supreme Court justice nominated by Bush to the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, was defeated on a 10–9 party-line vote Sept. 5. Bush called the committee's action “shameful, even by Washington standards.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Republicans' point man on judicial nominees, said only a Republican Senate majority can change things regarding judicial appointments.
“That is the only way,” he said Sept. 17. “Without control, we can't do it.”
Asked if Senate Republicans might employ hard-nosed tactics such as procedural delays in order to force floor votes on nominees, Hatch replied, “That's only useful if it works. The only other thing we can do is get our concerns out to the press. A lot of people are concerned about it, not just in the conservative press but in the liberal press.”
In fact, even the liberal Washington Post editorialized on Sept. 13, “The Senate Judiciary Committee's rejection last week of President Bush's nominee to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, Priscilla Owen, opens a distressing new chapter in the war over judicial nominations. ... [A]t the end of the day, the objections to Justice Owen were almost purely ideological and dominated specifically by the politics of abortion.”
Another Republican Judiciary Committee member, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, agreed with Hatch that procedural pressure was unlikely to work right now.
“The problem is, the things that are out there right now are things that we favor,” he said. “Homeland Security, the Iraq resolution is coming up. That diminishes our ability to do anything like that. In the future, we may have an opportunity to do something.”
Ron Bonjean, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), said Sept. 18, “Senate Republicans are committed to seeing Priscilla Owen gets her day,” but could not outline a strategy for getting her nomination to the floor.
‘Frame the Debate’
Tom Jipping, senior fellow in legal studies at Concerned Women for America and longtime monitor of judicial nominations, said there are other things Republican senators should be doing to pressure Democrats such as Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).
Hatch's “point about procedural pressure is well-taken,” he said. “With a Republican president, what could they hold up that wouldn't hurt them? They already tried this with an appropriations bill, and Daschle went to the president and said, ‘You want this more than I do.’”
However, Jipping said, “Republican senators could be giving more floor speeches, frame the debate more properly. To ask a president who's about to invade Iraq to take up a job that Republican senators should be doing doesn't make sense.”
Of course, he said, it's easier to wage a PR battle when legal groups complain about judicial vacancies.
“They've stopped doing that since Bush became president, even though the vacancy rate is higher,” he said.
He said that Owen's defeat marked a major escalation in Democrats' war to maintain a left-wing, activist judiciary, and noted that Democrats never had to face such a situation when Bill Clinton was president and Republicans controlled the Senate.
“Republicans never defeated a Clinton nominee in committee,” Jipping said. “They voted down only one Clinton nominee. Ronnie White was defeated by the full Senate. Republicans did refuse to hold hearings and refuse to hold votes on nominees, but Clinton renominated these, sometimes more than once, and eventually almost all of them were confirmed.”
Jipping pointed out that only six times in the past 60 years has the Senate Judiciary Committee voted down a nominee. Five of those cases occurred under Democratic control. One of them, the party-line defeat of Charles Pickering, came in March of this year.
Even the nomination of Robert Bork, named by President Reagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, made it to the Senate floor, where it was voted down.
White House
So far, the White House has not indicated that it plans to engage Senate Democrats in a fight over judicial nominees.
“We would like all our judicial nominees to receive a vote in the Senate,” White House spokeswoman Mercy Viana said Sept. 18. “We believe that if Priscilla Owen and Charles Pickering would have come to the floor, they would have been confirmed.”
Owen did not make it out of committee despite receiving a unanimous “well-qualified” rating from the left-leaning American Bar Association, and even though “no one knows her personal position on abortion,” Jipping said. “No one knows her position on Roe v. Wade.” When Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked her in a hearing, “Let me ask you directly, what is your position on abortion?” she refused to answer.
Owen's opponents pointed to her pro-business decisions and her dissents in three cases in which the Texas Supreme Court reversed lower-court rulings that did not grant exceptions to Texas' parental-notification abortion law. But in nine other cases, she sided with majorities that reversed similar rulings.
The Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have been consistently obstructionist since Bush first started naming judges:
Though “45% more people have been nominated by Bush to the appeals court than by Clinton [in his first two years], his confirmation rate is less than half of Clinton's,” Jipping said.
Bush's average appeals vacancy rate is 50% higher than Clinton's.
A year and a half after their nominations, only four of Bush's first 11 appeals court nominees have been confirmed. According to Jipping, the first appeals court nominees of presidents Reagan, the first Bush and Clinton took an average of less than three months before confirmation.
Judiciary Committee Democrats plan hearings on at least two more Bush appeals court nominees, conservative law professor Michael McConnell and Miguel Estrada, before the end of the year, so the issue is likely to remain prominent during the fall campaign.
‘Pressure Point’
Michael Uhlmann, a Catholic who served as special assistant on legal policy in the Reagan White House, said Catholic voters shouldn't fault Bush for not fighting harder for pro-life judges. Instead, they should target the five Catholics on the judiciary committee who have joined in obstructing his nominees: Committee Chairman Leahy, Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Joseph Biden, D-Del., Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
“Those guys for a long time have gotten a free ride on this,” Uhlmann said. “They've gotten no pressure from Catholics and no pressure from the U.S. bishops. That's a pressure point that could be brought to bear.”
Joseph A. D'Agostino writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph A. D'Agostino -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Prayers for Flooded Guatemala
VATICAN INFORMATION SERVICE, Sept. 16 — On behalf of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state, wrote papal nuncio Archbishop Ramiro Moliner Ingles of Guatemala to offer his prayers for the people affected by the floods that have devastated that country.
“Having received the sad news of the floods that have provoked serious damage and many victims in various parts of the country, the Holy Father wishes to make present his special closeness to the victims, offering suffrage for the eternal rest of the deceased and asking the Almighty to give comfort and Christian hope to all those who are suffering this adversity.”
The Pope urged international charities and people of good will to send generous assistance to the victims.
Mel Gibson Films Life of Christ
THE ADVERTISER (Australia), Sept. 14 — Actor Mel Gibson, whose film Braveheart was seen by many as a kind of Christ story, is now buckling down to do the real thing — a serious life of Jesus that he will direct.
He is currently in Italy filming Passion in Rome and in the southern city of Matera. Gibson predicted the project would be “the most difficult” of his celebrated career.
He told reporters he was fascinated by the last two hours Jesus spent before his crucifixion, by “the drama of a man torn between his divine spirit and his earthly weakness. ... My Jesus will be shaken by his human suffering,” Gibson said. “Real blood will flow from the wound in his side and the screams of his crucifixion will be real as well.”
Gibson said the film was made in consultation with theologians and prelates in Italy.
Pope: Lift High the Cross
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 15 — Marking the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Pope John Paul II called on Christians to venerate the cross and keep it prominently displayed in schools, hospitals and homes as a weapon against increasing secularization.
The Holy Father reminded pilgrims that the central emblem of Christianity is Jesus dying on the cross.
“In the process of secularization, which distinguishes a great part of the contemporary world,” he said, “it is all the more important that the faithful fix their gaze on this central sign of the revelation.”
Church Honors Patroness of Emigrants
FIDES NEWS SERVICE, Sept. 16 — Sicily, the source of so many emigrants to the United States, held a week in honor of St. Frances “Mother” Cabrini, the patron saint of emigrants, from Sept. 16–22 in the city of Agrigento.
A statue in her honor was unveiled and organizers held a symposium, TITLEd “St. Frances Cabrini: On the Wings of the Ocean.” Organizers also exhibited period photographs of the emigrants St. Frances Cabrini aided by building hospitals and schools across America.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: God Reigns Over the Entire Universe DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope John Paul II met with 7,000 pilgrims in Rome for his general audience on Sept. 18. He continued his series of teachings on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours by reflecting on Psalm 96.
This psalm, the Holy Father explained, proclaims God's kingship over the earth and the entire universe. Even though Israel was a small nation surrounded by powerful neighbors, the Israelites understood that God is great and worthy of praise. Psalm 96 teaches us an important lesson: “We can be certain that we have not been abandoned to the dark forces of chaos or of fate,” he said. “Rather, we are always in the hands of a just and merciful Ruler.”
The Pope pointed out that the psalm also offers a lesson on prayer. “The fundamental response to the Lord King, who manifests his glory in salvation history, is, therefore, a song of adoration, praise and blessing. These attitudes should also be present in our daily liturgy and personal prayer,” he noted. “God's truth can be discovered through intimate communion with God in prayer.”
The Holy Father also offered a Christian perspective on Psalm 96 by drawing on the Fathers of the Church: “They saw in it a prefiguration of the incarnation and crucifixion, which are a sign of Christ's paradoxical kingship.” God reigns by humbling himself, he noted. “Christ ... reigns from the cross, a throne of love and not of dominion.”
John Paul ended his mediation with Jesus' exhortation from Mark 10:43–45: “For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve...”
“Say among the nations: The Lord is King.” This exhortation from Psalm 96, which we have just heard, sets so to speak the tone for the entire hymn. Actually, this psalm is one of the so-called “Psalms of the Lord King” that include Psalms 96–99 as well as Psalm 47 and Psalm 93. We have already had the opportunity in the past to examine and comment on Psalm 93, and we saw how these canticles are centered on the majestic figure of God, who rules over the entire universe and governs human history.
Psalm 96 also exalts both the Creator of all creatures and the Savior of the nations: “The world will surely stand fast, never to be moved. God rules the peoples with fairness” (verse 10). Thus, we can be certain that we have not been abandoned to the dark forces of chaos or of fate. Rather, we are always in the hands of a just and merciful Ruler.
Glorify the King
This psalm begins with a joyful invitation to praise God, an invitation that immediately gives us a universal perspective: “Sing to the Lord, all the earth” (verse 1). The faithful are invited to “tell God's glory among the nations” and to tell “among all peoples God's marvelous deeds” (verse 3). Indeed, the psalmist directly addresses the “families of nations” (verse 7) to invite them to glorify the Lord. Lastly, he asks the faithful to “say among the nations: The Lord is king” (verse 10) and states that the Lord “rules the peoples” (verse 10) and “the world” (verse 13). This universal openness of a small nation that is sandwiched between great empires is rather significant. This nation knows that its Lord is the God of the universe and that “the gods of the nations all do nothing” (verse 5).
The psalm essentially consists of two pictures. The first part (see verses 1–9) includes a solemn epiphany of the Lord “in his holy place” (verse 6), which is the Temple at Zion. It is preceded and followed by songs and sacrificial rites of the assembly of the faithful. Praises flow freely before God's majesty: “Sing to the Lord a new song ... sing ... sing ... bless ... announce his salvation ... tell God's glory ... God's marvelous deeds ... give to the Lord glory and might ... give to the Lord glory ... Bring gifts ... bow down” (verses 1–3 and 7–9). The fundamental response to the Lord King, who manifests his glory in salvation history, is, therefore, a song of adoration, praise and blessing. These attitudes should also be present in our daily liturgy and personal prayer.
Purity of Faith
We find an injunction against idolatry at the heart of this choral song. Thus, prayer is a means for attaining purity of faith, in keeping with the well-known saying lex orandi, lex credendi: The norm for true prayer is also a norm for faith, and is a lesson on God's truth. In fact, God's truth can be discovered through intimate communion with God in prayer.
The psalmist proclaims: “For great is the Lord and highly to be praised, to be feared above all gods. For the gods of the nations all do nothing, but the Lord made the heavens” (verses 4–5). Through liturgy and prayer, our faith is purified from any form of deterioration, we forsake those idols to which we so easily sacrifice a part of ourselves in the course of daily life, and we make the transition from fear of God's transcendent justice to a living experience of his love.
Lord of the Universe
We now come to the second picture, which opens with a proclamation of the Lord's kingship (see verses 10–13). At this point the universe is singing, including its most mysterious and obscure elements such as the sea, which is depicted in ancient biblical terms: “Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice; let the sea and what fills it resound; let the plains be joyful and all that is in them. Let the trees of the forest rejoice before the Lord who comes, who comes to govern the earth” (verses 11–13). As St. Paul tells us, even creation, along with man, “awaits with eager expectation ... that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:19, 21).
A Paradox
At this point, we would like to devote a little time to how the Fathers of the Church understood this psalm. They saw in it a prefiguration of the incarnation and crucifixion, which are a sign of Christ's paradoxical king-ship.
Thus, St. Gregory Nazianzen, at the beginning of an address that he gave in Constantinople on Christmas in the year 379 or 380, repeated some expressions from Psalm 96: “Christ is born: Give him glory! Christ came down from heaven: Go out to meet him! Christ is on earth: Arise! ‘Sing to the Lord, all the earth’ (verse 1) and, bringing together two different concepts, ‘Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice’ (verse 11) because he who is heavenly has now become earthly” (Omelie sulla natività, Discorso 38, Rome, 1983, p. 44).
In this way the mystery of God's kingship is revealed in the incarnation. Indeed, he who reigns “by becoming earthly” reigns specifically in the humiliation of the cross. It is significant that many people of old saw in verse 10 of this psalm a thought-provoking Christological integration: “The Lord reigned from the wood.”
For this reason, the Letter of Barnabas already taught that “the reign of Jesus is on the wood” (VIII, 5: I Padri Apostolici, Rome 1984, p. 198), and St. Justin martyr quoted this psalm almost in its entirety in his First Apology, which he concluded by inviting all people to be glad because “the Lord reigned from the wood” of the cross (Gli apologeti greci, Rome 1986, p. 121).
This was the inspiration for the Christian poet Venanzio Fortunato's hymn, Vexilla Regis, which exalts Christ who reigns from the cross, a throne of love and not of dominion.
Regnavit a ligno Deus [God reigned from the Wood]. Indeed, during his life on earth Jesus warned us: “Whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:43–45).
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: New Colombian Archbishop Faces 'Uphill Road' to Reconciliation DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:CALI, Colombia — Less than six months after the murder of its beloved archbishop, the Archdiocese of Cali has a new shepherd.
But while Church leaders in the city of about 2 million are optimistic about the appointment of Archbishop Juan Francisco Sarasti Jaramillo of Ibagué, the path to reconciliation among guerrilla groups won't be easy — with 800 priests, 1,000 religious and 2,500 murders a year, Cali is definitively a city of contradictions.
The third-largest city population-wise and the second-richest in the beleaguered South American country, Cali became famous during the last 20 years for being the center of the smartest low-profile drug cartel — as opposed to the violent, high-profile Medellin Cartel — as well as for being the Colombian equivalent to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, where warm weather, good-looking women and frequent carnivals made life easy and frivolous.
Nevertheless, in the early ,90s, the face of the Colombian “Big Easy” dramatically changed when it became the battlefield of the two major local Marxist guerrilla factions: the National Liberation Army (known as ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known as FARC).
The Church responded to the situation of violence in 1995 by appointing one of the highest-profile figures of Colombia's Catholic Church, Isaías Duarte Cancino, as the new archbishop of Cali.
Archbishop Duarte, who became famous in Colombia for brokering an unlikely peace agreement in the highly violent region of Apartadó, started his ministry by preaching reconciliation as well as energetically denouncing all violent groups — from paramilitaries to the guerrillas — and not excluding local drug lords.
Having turned into one of the most emblematic figures of both the Catholic Church and the sector that was betting on dialogue between the government and the various guerrilla groups, the 63-year-old archbishop was murdered this past March 16 after celebrating a Mass at the Church of the Good Shepherd.
Close Friends
After Archbishop Duarte's funeral, which drew thousands of mourners, the big question around the city was who would fill the void left by the archbishop. Upon learning of his new assignment, Archbishop Sarasti knew he had big shoes to fill.
“The murder of [Archbishop] Isaías [Duarte] was one of the worst blows to the Church and the peace process in the nation, because he somehow embodied simultaneously a strong position but also a true commitment to dialogue and reconciliation,” Archbishop Sarasti said.
The archbishop, who will be installed in late October, said he is not coming “to be another Isaías, because no one will replace him, but I do intend, consistently and humbly, to follow his pastoral work according to my own gifts and limitations.”
Others have expressed joy at the new appointment.
“He is probably the best thing that could happen to Cali,” said Father Octavio Lara of the new leader. “Archbishop Sarasti is a native of Cali and worked here several years but also spent a decade in Barrancabermeja, a region under the fire of both the guerrilla and drug trafficking, so he has quite an experience in violent regions.”
Father Lara, also a close friend of Archbishop Duarte, described the archbishop-elect as “a low-key type of man, very spiritual, soft-spoken but very firm in his position.”
Father Héctor de los Ríos López, pastor of Holy Trinity parish in Agua Blanca, one of the poorest and most violent areas in Cali, said, “The Holy Father made the perfect appointment” with Archbishop Sarasti.
“When he was auxiliary of Cali, we worked together in this area of the city,” he recalled, “and the wise, commonsensical pastoral guidelines he established were confirmed by Archbishop Duarte and are still in place and working fine today.”
A native of Cali and a close friend of Archbishop Duarte since their days as seminarians, Archbishop Sarasti was born on July 30, 1938, and was ordained a priest for the Congregation of St. John Eudes on March 30, 1963, in Rome.
He was consecrated auxiliary bishop of Cali on May 6, 1978, and in 1983 was appointed bishop of Barrancabermeja. Ten years later, Bishop Sarasti was appointed archbishop of Ibagué.
“We were very close in Rome and, since I was older, he attended my ordination in Rome, but I had to go back to Colombia, so I could not attend his,” the archbishop-elect recalled of his friend Archbishop Duarte. “Since then, he always joked, ‘You owe me one.’”
When Archbishop Sarasti was appointed auxiliary bishop of Cali, the then Father Duarte was on a missionary assignment in Bucaramanga, so he could not attend his friend's episcopal ordination.
“So, when I attended his episcopal ordination as auxiliary of Bucaramanga, I told him, ‘Now we are even,’ and I remember him laughing out loud,” the archbishop recalled.
“We used to visit each other on our free days, and I visited him a few weeks before he was assassinated,” he said.
Mediator
On Aug. 18, the day of his official appointment, Archbishop Sarasti announced his willingness to act as a mediator with the FARC for the liberation of 15 province congressmen kidnapped more than two months ago by guerrillas.
Germán Villegas, governor of Valle, the province where Cali is located, immediately greeted the arch-bishop's initiative, saying, “He will certainly provide the kind of spiritual leadership that we desperately need and that seems today to be the only way out of our situation.”
“I don't think the Church should be perceived as another political player, but definitively she cannot refrain from mediating and offering her service to the society,” said Archbishop Sarasti, explaining his decision to talk with the guerrillas immediately after his appointment.
“As bishops of Colombia, we understand that the Church is now the last recourse to promote a dialogue, before the current situation explodes into an open war,” he added, in reference to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's new policy of giving guerrillas a deadline to lay down their arms or face a full-scale military offensive.
“Cali, despite having the reputation of a frivolous city, has a deep religious tradition and solid Church structures, built and strengthened by continuity in ministry of the last bishops, including Isaías,” he said. “So I believe and hope that Cali can become a city from which a new source of hope can spring not only for the Valle, but also for all Colombia.
“I have come to commit all my efforts in this archdiocese, to walk the uphill road of reconciliation, at any cost, even if I have to pay the same price Isaías paid,” said Archbishop Sarasti.
“Even more, it would be an honor to pay that price for the Gospel.”
Alejandro Bermúdez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro Bermúdez ----- KEYWORDS: News ------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Gunmen Open Fire on Catholic Church in Russia
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 9 — Catholics in Russia have been under fire, on and off, for centuries. But things got worse in Rostovon-Don last week, when gunmen opened fire on a parish church, according to Associated Press.
There was no one inside at the time, since the shots rang out early on a Saturday morning. Church staff opened the doors to find 10 bullets inside and holes in the windows. No one was hurt.
Parish officials suggested the incident was not a religious gesture but a random act of vandalism by hooligans.
Bishops Accuse U.N. of Anti-Family Coercion
CNN, Sept. 5 — In South America, where bishops tend to be a bit more blunt with the media, prelates at a regional Church conference accused worldwide organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union of lobbying governments to pass laws contrary to Catholic teachings, even in overwhelmingly Catholic countries, according to CNN.
Bishops from approximately 25 countries complained that their governments were feeling pressure from foreign aid donors and other organizations to pass laws promoting privileges for homosexuals, liberalizing divorce and weakening the traditional family.
“Latin American governments have been pressured to legislate against Christian family unity by strong groups like the United Nations and the European Union, who want to impose their experiences here,” said Msgr. Carlos Aguiar of Mexico, president of the Latin American Catholic Conference.
The group is drafting a declaration condemning such lobbying, which the Vatican is expected to release on their behalf.
Italy's Ex-Fascist Leader Apologizes to Jews
REUTERS, Sept. 13 — Across Eastern Europe former communists now take part in governments through respectably renamed “successors” to their former Communist Parties. But in only one country, Italy, has an heir to a post-fascist party formed part of the government.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, head of the once-fascist National Alliance, once referred to Benito Mussolini as “the most important statesman of the 20th century.” But now he's part of a respectable government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and he has moved to atone for his party's past.
Last week, Fini apologized to Jews around the world for the fascist-era government's mistreatment of Jews, particularly racial laws passed by Mussolini in 1938 and his later deportation of some 7,000 Jews to German camps, where almost 6,000 were murdered.
“Fascism quashed human rights, and racial laws created one of the greatest atrocities in the history of humanity,” Fini told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “As an Italian, I have to accept the responsibility in the name of Italians ... the responsibility of making declarations and asking to be pardoned.”
Fini will soon make a state visit to Israel.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Editorial DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:What has changed since Sept. 11, 2001? Some say everything has changed, fundamentally and irrevocably. Some say nothing has changed but the length of airport lines. Catholics already know the truth: If any one day changed everything, that day happened 2,000 years ago.
After that, cataclysms come and shake us up and then fade from memory, but they aren't what change people. The only lasting change in our world comes when people are brought to Christ.
So, the question isn't what has changed since Sept. 11 but what have we changed in the world?
It's a less comfortable question, and it demands that we take a hard look at things we didn't want to face last year.
What is the purpose of extending American freedom?
Soon after Operation Enduring Freedom was over, some American political leaders began to act like it was Operation Enduring Freedom to Choose. Some American leaders began pushing to legalize abortion in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, back at home, other American leaders have been pushing other false freedoms: Homosexuals are closer than ever to having their (usually temporary) sexual arrangements treated like marriages, scientists are expanding their opportunities to experiment on human beings and pornography's popularity rises unabated aided by an approving pop culture that is itself sliding further into the muck.
This isn't American freedom at all. America was founded on the “law of Nature and of Nature's God,” says the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If America rejects its unique, moral vision of freedom in favor of one uprooted from its original religious vision, then extending American freedom will do no good at all. In fact, it will do much harm.
This changing understanding of America is related to another uncomfortable question Catholics can ask themselves after Sept. 11.
Have we spread the religion of love as effectively as others have spread religious hatred?
The Islamic religions of the Mideast are sweeping up large numbers of adherents (sometimes by force). At the same time, American culture is still very much in the grip of secularist attitudes that consider it impolite to mention God.
The more our country flees faith, the more the practices and attitudes that Pope John Paul II calls the culture of death will gain ground in America. The more secular we become, the more odious we will seem to people overseas.
In his 2001 World Day of Peace message, the Pope criticized the cultural exports of the West. The most powerful such exporter, of course, is America.
“Western cultural models are enticing and alluring because of their remarkable scientific and technical cast, but regrettably there is growing evidence of their deepening human, spiritual and moral impoverishment,” he said. “The culture which produces such models is marked by the fatal attempt to secure the good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”
The allure of the cultural products of America can be a great threat or a great opportunity. They can export secularism — or they can export America's moral vision of freedom. They can hasten the culture of death or they can prepare the ground for a flowering of the culture of life.
The vision America brings to the world can be transformed by Catholics. We have a full understanding of what human happiness requires. We have the incomparable tools of the Gospel and the sacraments. We have the wisdom of centuries. We also have the mandate given us by Christ.
A year after Sept. 11 is a perfect time to renew our commitment to bring the Gospel to all sectors of society, to all people, but in a special way to those people capable of setting the tone in our parishes, neighborhoods, localities, states and eventually our nation. Bettering our communities can better America — and bettering America can better the world.
What have we changed since Sept. 11?
----- EXCERPT: What Have We Changed? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion ------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Tough-Loving Church
Thank you for Father Andrew McNair's column “Voice of the Unfaithful? New Group's True Colors” (Aug 18–24).
The reason I'm writing is very simple. Father McNair exposes a group that will do harm to the Church, but he fails to address the underlying reason for the existence of these groups. The fact still remains that, until Church officials stop allowing sexual abuse by priests and others, groups like this will easily find a following.
I suggest you stay a little more focused and in line with the reason for the reaction of the “laymen.” Groups like Voice of the Faithful will come and go, but will always be there when the Church does not solve its own problems. The current problem with homosexual priests is not a tough problem to solve — it simply requires a “tough Church.”
ALAN MERWIN
Fatima, Portugal
Viva EWTN!
I was perplexed that Archbishop John Foley never mentioned the wonderful coverage of EWTN, the global Catholic TV network (“The Church & the News,” Aug. 25–31).
We saw EWTN's coverage of Pope John Paul II's trip to Poland while we were in Albany, N.Y., visiting my daughter. It was beautiful! In addition, we viewed many of their other excellent programs, featuring people like Father Benedict Groeschel, Msgr. Eugene Clark and Father George Rutler — all wonderful!
Here in Manhattan we are hoping to have EWTN added to our cable network soon. It is seen in most all the country and the world. It is made available free to cable systems like Time Warner and RCN. There are no commercials. They depend on donations. Their Web site is www.ewtn.com.
ANNE MCLAUGHLIN
New York City
Meetings Don't Mend
I read recently that, when Pope John Paul II called the bishops together when the priest scandals first broke, he said dissent from the Church's teachings on sexuality was the root of the problem. We are still not hearing clear teachings on sexuality and, as far as I can tell, that issue was not addressed at the U.S. bishops' meeting.
In your editorial “Blaming the Pope” (Sept. 1–7), I still do not hear that addressed. It seems to me that more meetings will not solve the problem of lack of constant, clear teaching on the Church's stand on sexuality.
SUSAN CARFAGNO
Atkins, Arkansas
Intolerable Patience?
The Holy Father's style of leadership is superior to many of his predecessors and has been more than successful in the most important areas (“Blaming the Pope,” Sept. 1–7).
What disappoints many is the almost unbelievable patience with which he has tolerated those with positions of responsibility — bishops — who clearly have not defended the faith and actually seek to undermine Catholic teaching.
MARK E. MEDVETZ
Henniker, New Hampshire
Mission: Michigan
Thank you for the article about Jennifer Granholm's pro-abortion position and her pastor's irresponsible defense of her position (“Abortion Politics: Tale of Two Parishes,” Sept. 1–7). In Michigan we have been blessed to have John Engler, a very pro-life governor, for the past 12 years. His current lieutenant governor, Dick Posthumus, is running against Granholm. Posthumus is solidly pro-life and voters have a clear and distinct choice this November.
Priests in Michigan should not miss this opportunity and should follow the excellent example of Colorado's Father Hilton by informing their parishioners of the voting records of pro-life and pro-abortion candidates and reinforcing the official position of the Church. Charles Rice said in your article: “There is no legal restriction to parishes informing people about voting records and telling them they should vote pro-life.” Sadly, so many Catholics are ignorant about these issues.
AGGIE LANGSCHIED
Lambertville, Michigan
The Education Project
I was gratified by your “Making the Case for a Classical Education” (Sept. 1–7) because it highlights the need for the study of classical languages in any truly humane education. But I was mortified by the following offhand statement by Mr. Simmons: “Incidentally, make sure that the parents aren't running the school, because that's a recipe for an oozing demise of anything like real education.”
This statement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the project of education and of what a school really ought to be. This misunderstanding, so common in our contemporary culture, is responsible for much that is wrong in education today. We Americans seem to have the attitude that we ought to stand back and let the “experts” educate our children (usually that means those “experts” hired by the state). But God has entrusted the primary responsibility for the education of a child with his parents. They should not abdicate that responsibility, even to such finely educated men as Mr. Simmons.
A school is really a moral institution of families who have come together to educate their children. They do this because they judge that they can do a better job educating their children in common than they could individually. But the creation of this institution never absolves parents from their responsibility as the primary educators of their children. So of course parents should oversee the school, no matter how fine the experts are whom they've hired to help them educate their children.
With that said, I hope Mr. Simmons' book does lead to a revival of the study of Latin and Greek in our schools. Classical languages are the foundation of a classical education, because they teach an elegance and precision of grammar that cannot be learned from modern languages. Grammar is the way that we understand and express the nature of reality, and so without it we can learn nothing else. That is why grammar is the first of the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy.
We need scholars like Mr. Simmons to help us educate our children. We just need to remember that we parents are in charge.
STEPHEN HOLLINGSHEAD
San Antonio, Texas
The writer is principal of Our Lady of the Atonement Academy.
‘I Believe in Miracles’ — But ...
Ted Hickel's letter to the editor is false and offensive for insinuating that I disbelieve in miracles (“Miesel and the Miracle,” Letters, Aug. 11–17). What I'm skeptical about are the allegedly miraculous images in the Guadalupana's eyes. I've read both the description of the phenomenon in The Handbook of Guadalupe and seen the pictures themselves in The Image of Guadalupe. What the unenhanced photo shows — before considerable computer amplification — are random white blobs of fiber arbitrarily outlined to form heads and bodies.
How arbitrary? One half of a double blob is taken as a knee, but the rest of the leg is made out of nothing at all. And so on. I remain underwhelmed.
Why must we drown this lovely image of Mary in pious tosh about “God's miraculous Polaroid”?
How do the faces of Juan Diego and the bishop wind up facing the same direction in the Virgin's eyes when they were facing each other when the cloak was opened (as the “primitive account” describes)?
And if the reflections are taken from those in the eyes of an invisible apparition, as Mr. Hickel claims, how do those invisible eyes reflect light?
If they're the reflection in the eyes of the actual image, how much could the small Virgin held by a short man “see” with bent head and lowered eyelids? A whole crowd of people? Really? And where's the vanishing point of her field of view? (Try this yourself and see what I mean.)
I believe in many miracles, but I don't believe that we're dealing with a miracle here.
SANDRA MIESEL
Indianapolis, Indiana
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Radio-Ready Catholics DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:The increase of Catholic radio stations in the United States is indeed a welcome development (“Catholic Radio Takes to the Air,” Aug. 25–31). Although this growth appears to be spontaneous and a recent development, it is noteworthy that the Vatican II fathers, writing in 1963, gave particular attention to the need for Catholic radio stations and other media of mass communication.
As noted in the Decree on the Means of Social Communication, Inter mirifica, Catholics have a duty to support Catholic radio (as well as television and the press). The council “advises them of the obligation they have to maintain and assist Catholic newspapers, periodicals and film projects, radio and television programs and stations, whose principal objective is to spread and defend the truth and foster Christian influence in human society.”
As a member of the Advisory Board of WHFA, a Starboard Broadcasting Catholic radio station serving southern Wisconsin, in addition to the welcome support of our bishop and diocesan officials, I have had the opportunity to see the gratifying out-pouring of support from numerous parishes, some by no means wealthy, when they are presented with the rich apostolic opportunities offered by Catholic radio.
As pointed out in Inter mirifica, “It is quite unbecoming for the Church's children idly to permit the message of salvation to be thwarted or impeded by the technical delays or expenses, however vast, which are encountered by the very nature of these media. At the same time, the synod earnestly invites those organizations and individuals who possess financial and technical ability to support these media freely and generously with their resources and their skills, inasmuch as they contribute to genuine culture and the apostolate.”
Happily, a response to the council's call for Catholic radio is now manifesting itself.
DAVID R. J. STIENNON
Madison, Wisconsin
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Cloning by Any Other Name Would Sound Just as Creepy DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Just weeks before the White House's commission on bioethics released its report on cloning in early July, the prospect of banning cloning in the United States seemed to die in Congress.
Wait. Did I say cloning? I meant “somatic-cell nuclear transplantation.”
The cloning debate has reached such a level of doublespeak it is no longer about “cloning.” That would not lend itself to the clever linguistic game that's now being played, to the glee of the biotechnology companies whose lives depend on the freedom to clone. You find the language lies nearly everywhere in the press. On the front page of the nation's so-called “paper of record,” the New York Times. Over the scrolling headlines of the cable-news TV networks. In the newswire stories picked up by just about every small-town newspaper in the country.
And so you can guess who is winning.
Even when the word “cloning” is used, there is a disingenuous distinction made between what is being called “therapeutic cloning” and “research cloning.” Many people in America — regardless of how educated or well-intentioned — have no idea what to make of the debate anymore, thanks to the word games.
This summer Congress failed in its long-awaited attempt to once-and-for-all ban human cloning in the United States. At the beginning of the year, few would have guessed it would fail. But a little misinformation can go a long way in a few months.
With the debate about cloning in America full of myths and distortions, the likes of Sam Brownback, a stalwart pro-lifer who has long fought for a complete ban on all cloning, was forced to compromise. So he floated this proposal: a complete ban on all “reproductive cloning” — i.e., you cannot implant a cloned embryo in a women's womb — and a two-year moratorium on what is being called “research” or “therapeutic cloning.” Both sides could stand to gain from it. Pro-cloners get time to see the technology progress and win people over. Those opposed to cloning get two more years to clear the air in the debate and dispel myths about the magic cures some seem to think are possible with cloning.
The compromise failed. This despite the fact that polls find that at least 61% of the public wants a ban on so-called “research cloning.” This despite last summer's vow from Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that “I am so opposed to the effort to clone under virtually any circumstances that I can think of.” He evidently thought of a few.
Meanwhile, as the debate hit a brick wall in the United States, over in Italy, a doctor claims some of his female clients are pregnant with clones. The body of baseball great Ted Williams has been fought over by his kids. (His son wanted him frozen in an Arizona cryogenics lab so that his DNA can one day make another hitter; his daughter is incensed over the idea.) And, despite what was supposed to be a rigged bioethics commission, the seminar-style proceedings concluded with a recommendation for a total ban on reproductive cloning and a mere moratorium on research cloning. That's not quite what the president had asked for (a complete, real ban on all cloning). Still, if we could get Congress there, it'd be a start.
Upon presenting the bioethics commission's cloning report to President Bush, Leon Kass, the head of the White House commission, writes: “Human cloning, we are confident, is but a foretaste — the herald of many dazzling genetic and reproductive technologies that will raise profound moral questions well into the future.” It's important to get this one right, because it will haunt all future decisions. We've done test-tube babies, we have opened egg and sperm banks, we see ads in college newspapers offering cash-strapped college girls dollars for their eggs. Yet cloning is a whole new ballgame from which human dignity may not be able to recover.
It's not altogether too late, though. As Kass has written, “[O]ur technologies of bio-psycho-engineering are still in their infancy, and in ways that make all too clear what they might look like in their full maturity.”
And so, a number of lovers of life (doctors and philosophers, they) work to clear the air — and play fair with the language. The cloning report issued by the Kass commission is a good handbook to the debate. It shows where the discussion is now, how we got here and our choices as we move on from here.
Since Congress is unlikely to do anything useful to halt the growth of the brave new world before the fall elections, the best we can hope for is that each newly elected and returning member gets a bound copy of the report to read once the session closes. There is still time to do the right thing — but not much.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Looking Back to Vatican II DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:What a difference two decades make. On Jan. 25, 1985, Pope John Paul II announced that an extraordinary synod of bishops would convene later that year. They would celebrate the 20th anniversary of the completion of the Second Vatican Council and assess how the council had been received in the Church throughout the world.
To many observers, it was painfully clear that Vatican II — the 40th anniversary of whose opening we'll remember Oct. 11 — had not fulfilled all of its promise. In fact, the intense acrimony it gave rise to among Catholics provoked Pope Paul VI to wonder if the Church had gone from “self-criticism to self-destruction.” “Satan's smoke,” he stated, “had made its way into the temple of God through some crack.”
Two problems were particularly prominent. On the one hand, the message of the council had been intensely politicized. On the other, many people had not bothered to read its documents, being content to live by its so-called “spirit.” It was not difficult to understand, therefore, why people looked forward to the 1985 synod with radically different expectations.
The “progressivists” within the Church, those who believed that Vatican II was no longer relevant, hoped the synod might be a virtual “Vatican III” — a revolutionary happening that would usher in all sorts of sweeping changes. At the opposite end of the political spectrum were the more radical “traditionalists,” those who blamed Vatican II for the Church's crisis of faith, which had become increasingly acute since 1965. Neither political group seemed to have much concern for the historical continuity of the Church, which, in fact, was an essential feature of Vatican II both in letter and in spirit.
Those who disregarded the documents and held to an amorphous “spirit” often gave themselves sufficient latitude to contradict the message of Vatican II. A prominent governor and graduate of a Catholic university, for example, stated his erroneous belief that Vatican II had done away with the notion of hell. A certain nun was interviewed by the local newspaper because of her penchant for wearing miniskirts. She rationalized her provocative attire by claiming that it made her mere approachable to the modern student — “in the spirit of Vatican II.” The popular misconception prevailed that, “in the spirit of Vatican II,” there was no longer any need to go to confession as frequently as in the past, if at all. In truth, Vatican II encouraged the frequent reception of the sacraments, including the sacrament of reconciliation.
Pope John XXIII made it quite clear in his 1962 inaugural address that the purpose of the council he had summoned was not to change doctrine, which he emphasized is unchangeable, but to enunciate the eternal truth of the Catholic faith to the modern world. “This certain and unchangeable doctrine, to which faithful obedience is due, has to be explored and presented in a way that is demanded by our times,” he said. “The deposit of faith, which consists of the truths contained in sacred doctrine, is one thing; the manner of presentation, always however with the same meaning and signification, is something else.”
In keeping with both the letter and the spirit of Vatican II, the 1985 synod neither introduced “bold” changes nor overturned the work of the council. Rather, it placed great emphasis on the Church as a “Mystery” and “Communion.” This means that the Church is not an external political institution, but the Mystical Body of Christ whose members are united by the same faith, the same baptism and the possession of the same Holy Spirit. Correspondingly, the synod played down the vague image of the Church as the “people of God” and a “popular church.”
Lend the Church an Era
Three years after Vatican II concluded, the Catholic faith's foremost philosopher, Jacques Maritain, paid tribute to the council in his book The Peasant of the Garonne: “The Pope,” he wrote, referring to John XXIII, “putting things clearly in focus, reminded us that the aggiornamento [bringing things up-to-date] is in no way an adaptation of the Church to the modern world, as if the latter were supposed to establish norms for the former; it is a disclosure of the Church's own essential position.” Maritain's criticisms were reserved for those critics of Vatican II who were calling for a “complete temporalization of Christianity” that was tantamount to “a kind of kneeling before the world.”
Ironically, there was a remarkable paucity of discussion among the critics and misinterpreters of Vatican II as to why, exactly, the Church has any obligation to adapt itself to the mores of the moment. Why should the Zeitgeist be a force that has pre-emptive authority? The great theologians of history rarely spoke of such a need. Their genius was to show how eternal values manifest themselves in each moment of history, how an eternal God speaks to temporal man.
The mood of the mid-'80s was clearly different from that of the early '60s. If Vatican II had adapted itself to its own time, it would have been irrelevant by the time of the synod. Then, too, each moment of time represents a confluence of conflicting mores. Which of these passing currents should the Church favor — the left or the right, the liberal or the conservative, the progressive or the traditionalist?
John Paul II regarded the extraordinary synod as a great gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, one that demanded both celebration and deepened reflection.
The latter activity required the Church to divest itself of liberal/conservative distinctions and similar dichotomies, and to think more deeply about the Church as a religious event that transcends political modes of compartmentalization. After all, the basis of any real unity is apolitical.
A careful analysis of the extraordinary synod's Final Report indicates that its authors agreed that there had been misinterpretations of Vatican II. It was urgent, they said, that the council documents be reread or, as the occasion dictated, read for the first time. The synod had continued the work of the council that, in turn, had continued the work of Christ, the Church's founder. The synod unambiguously stated that Vatican II was “a legitimate and valid expression and interpretation of the deposit of faith as it is found in sacred Scripture and in the living tradition of the Church.” Moreover, it did not refrain from laying the blame for some of its gross misinterpretations at the feet of the “mystery of iniquity” that affects every era.
A Call to Holiness
The Catholic Church did not begin or end with Vatican II. The “deeper reflection” that the synod urged involved a closer reading of the council's actual texts “in continuity with the great tradition of the Church.”
The Final Report reaffirmed that the primary task of the Catholic Church is “to preach and to witness to the good and joyful news of the election, the mercy, and the charity of God that manifest themselves in salvation history.” It stressed that everyone in the Church is called to holiness. More than anything else — certainly more than dissenters, critics and revolutionaries — the Church needs saints.
As an important means for establishing unity within the Church, the Final Report warranted that a catechism or “compendium of all Catholic doctrine regarding both faith and morals be prepared.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church was published seven years later, in 1992, and quickly became an international best seller. It contained no less than 785 citations from the documents of Vatican II.
To be sure, the synod did not bring divisions within the Church to an end. Nonetheless, it marked the end of a period in Catholic history. It made irrevocably clear that particular interpretations of the letter and “spirit” of Vatican II were out of bounds. It identified the temptation to self-secularize and warned against divisive labels such as “liberal” and “conservative.”
For many Catholics, their views of Vatican II were received largely through the distorting lens of the secular media. The clamor for “embracing change,” “renewed dialogue,” “relaxing moral norms,” “getting in touch with the modern world,” “becoming up-to-date” and so on were recognized precisely as clamor and therefore without substance.
John Paul II has been, since the council convened 40 years ago, the most important clarifier, champion and promulgator of the true meaning of Vatican II. The message of the council suffuses virtually all of his writings. He repeatedly invites us to read and reread the documents and reflect on them deeply and prayerfully. In so doing, he is being neither political nor authoritarian. He is asking us to go to the source and understand the rich message that Vatican II contains. He may be asking us to do what is more difficult, but, in the end, this more arduous path is incomparably fruitful.
Donald DeMarco is an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: America and Iraq: A Time for Restraint DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:With the anniversary of 9–11 still vividly in mind, the arrest of alleged terrorists in Pakistan and Buffalo came as good news.
We needed this news. Americans have a great many strengths as a people, but one of our weaknesses is impatience. We want results. We like clear problems with clear solutions. We prefer action to talk. But unless our bias for action is informed by prudence, it can lead us into even deeper problems than the ones we seek to solve.
When the “war on terrorism” began last fall, President Bush very wisely cautioned the nation that the effort would take time. So it has, and so it will. The nature of terrorism doesn't lend itself to quick battles. It's a long struggle, shaped by issues of economic and social justice as well as armed conflict.
Nonetheless, American resources, applied carefully and persistently, have begun to pay off. The people who planned the murder of 3,000 innocent men, women and children last year once seemed invulnerable. They no longer are. Our leaders deserve our gratitude for that. They've earned our support for the burdens they bear on our behalf.
Along with our support, though, our leaders also deserve our common sense. And common sense should make all of us very uneasy about any war with Iraq.
Obviously, no one can justify the actions of the current Iraqi regime. Saddam Hussein has tortured and killed many of his own people, caused conflict throughout the Persian Gulf and pursued the development of weapons of mass destruction. Nor has he paid much attention to the displeasure of the international community. He has very shrewdly surfed a wave of Arab resentment of the West, evaded embargoes and weapons inspectors, and exploited divisions between the United States and its allies.
And yet, does Iraq really fit logically into our current struggle against terrorism? I don't believe it does. Can we morally justify war against Saddam? I don't believe we can. Until we have compelling new evidence of Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 tragedy or imminent Iraqi aggression of a grave nature, we need to be guided by the same prudence that has served us so well over the past year.
American power has its limits. So does our moral credibility. We diminish both when we spread our power too thinly or exercise it in a way that seems arbitrary to the nations with whom we share the world.
Rightly or wrongly, some see the current U.S. focus on Iraq as a case of unfinished business and personal resentment. These would be dangerous pillars for any foreign policy.
Given the suffering and loss of life that come with every war, and the chaotic nature of any war's aftermath, we need far stronger reasons to justify an invasion of Iraq.
President Bush has wisely brought the case against Saddam to the United Nations. That assembly has not always distinguished itself for character or moral courage, and some of the nations who listened so politely to the president's recent address have themselves supported terrorist violence. Nonetheless, for our own sake, the sake of the Iraqi people and the sake of world peace, we need to involve the international community in any action against Saddam Hussein. We cannot act alone. Too much is at stake. This is a moment for restraint.
Starting a war is easy. Bringing it to a just and successful conclusion is a much more difficult matter. We need to remember that in the weeks ahead.
Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., is the archbishop of Denver.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Archbishop Charles Chaput -------- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Spirit & Life DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Dear Lance and Adrienne,
A little before the turn of the third century, a pagan from North Africa named Tertullian converted to Christianity. He became an articulate and productive apologist, writing about all sorts of things Christian, including modesty.
By modesty, I'm talking about resistance to bragging. I'm talking about how people cover their bodies (or fail to cover them) with clothing.
Apparently, this was an issue a couple thousand years ago, which proves that today's rock stars and fashion models did not invent indecency. Some of them, however, are doing a bang-up job promoting it.
Tertullian would not be amused. He called modesty “the flower of manners, the honor of our bodies, the grace of the sexes, the integrity of the blood, the guarantee of our race, the basis of sanctity, the pre-indication of every good disposition.”
In the Old Testament, Sirach writes: “Like the lightening that flashes before a storm is the esteem that shines on modesty.”
In the New Testament, Paul writes: “Women should adorn themselves with proper conduct, with modesty and self-control.”
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Purity requires modesty, an integral part of temperance. Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden.”
In other words, the issue of modesty has been around a long time and there is some strong advice that clothing oneself modestly is a good thing to do. Of course, I recognize that saying it and defining it are two different things.
But I do think the Catechism is right on target when it says you aren't supposed to unveil what should remain hidden. And obviously what should remain hidden are the parts of the body that other people shouldn't be touching — with their hands or their eyes.
I'm not going to suggest that all young women wear burlap sacks that cover from head to toe. I'm not going to suggest that all young men wear baggy pants, white dress shirts and their grandfathers' wingtips.
I will suggest that what young people wear should cover their bodies in such a way so as not to draw direct attention to those parts of their bodies that the entire world is not supposed to be looking at. And while it may be difficult to precisely define modest attire, it is blatantly simple to recognize that which is not modest. For example:
A girl wearing a transparent blouse with little or no underwear beneath.
A girl wearing pants cut so low that her underwear (which obviously doesn't amount to much) shows above the “waistline.”
A boy wearing low-cut pants with his boxer shorts showing several inches at the “waistline.”
A boy or girl with tattoos of various real and mythological creatures crawling around the arms, legs, necks, faces and torsos.
Bare belly buttons adorned with various stones, chains, pins and needles.
Profanity written on clothing or bodies.
I could go on, but you probably get the idea. And maybe you think I'm old-fashioned. But I would suggest that if Tertullian felt the need to campaign for modesty nearly 2,000 years ago, immodesty must be as old-fashioned as modesty.
It probably is a good rule of thumb that if something is underwear, it is supposed to go under other clothing. Remember when grandma used to say to always wear clean underwear in case you get hit by a car and must be taken to the hospital? She wanted you to be presentable to the doctors and nurses — not the general public.
Jim Fair writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: A Modest Proposal ------- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Fair -------- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: The Mission Bell Still Calls the Faithful to Their Knees DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:We didn't know how far north of Santa Ysabel we'd have to go before finding California's Mission Santa Ysabel.
Thanks to our suburbanized sensibilities, we couldn't tell if we'd driven one mile or 10 through the stark landscape ringed by the Volcan Mountains.
But soon my friend and I, making our way back from Julian, a former mining town in San Diego County, had driven through the open gates of the historic and holy site (one that I, a native Californian, was ashamed to admit I'd never heard of).
Embarrassed as I was, I had to admit that there was good reason for my unfamiliarity with the place. Santa Ysabel hadn't been an official mission, but an asistencia — a sub-mission — connected to Mission San Diego de Alcala, which was set up to serve the Christianized native people who lived far from San Diego.
It is thought that the first Mass was offered here in 1818 by Franciscan Father Fernando Martin. Apparently his surroundings did not differ too much from today's; Santa Ysabel was nicknamed “the church of the desert.”
In later years, though, the mission included not only the chapel but also a granary, houses and a cemetery. The 450 Indian neophytes raised wheat, barley, corn and beans. Fertile orchards and vineyards were also attached to the mission.
Now the grounds have receded into the same state of natural abandonment that no doubt greeted Father Martin. A lone windmill — a still sentinel the day we visited — stands near a waterless well and an outdoor crucifix. Just a few steps away is an archeological discovery: a piece of the original mission floor.
Walking through a sparse planting of locust trees, I approached a low stone wall on which stands a niche holding a statue of the Blessed Mother. Behind it, framed by nearby oak trees, is the 78-year-old, Spanish-style St. John the Baptist Catholic Church.
Palpable Peace
Inside, a dozen creaking wooden pews sat before the altar on either side of a decorative tile floor. The stairs leading to the choir loft are high and narrow, as if intended for smaller feet. The décor is a mosaic of sorts: traditional, stained-glass windows of saints, contemporary plaster Stations of the Cross, a stylized window of the Blessed Mother in the choir loft, a Native American wall hanging — a cross within a circle, feathers dangling from each corner of a surrounding diamond — from the balcony. The altar bears a mosaic of the Last Supper, and murals line the walls around it.
A deep sense of peace and solitude permeates; in fact, it's there on the grounds as well as inside the church. Weekday visitors may feel as though they're exploring a little-known corner of California history, but this is an active parish and a perfectly sited one. Outside, majestic skies overhead, and an old, humble and silent cemetery underfoot. Inside, the physical presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. It would be a very distracted believer who could fail to recognize God's presence here.
From flourishing mission to 75-family parish, the road from there to here has been a long and winding one.
Originally the Franciscan padres had anticipated building a second chain of California missions, inland from the coastal chain that stretches from San Diego to Sonoma. Santa Ysabel would have been a link in this chain. But Mexico's victorious battle for independence from Spain and the subsequent secularization of the missions in the 1830s aborted this plan. After 1836, the padres stopped making regular visits to Santa Ysabel. Soon the buildings fell into ruins.
In 1844, the Santa Ysabel Rancho was granted to Jose Joaquin Ortega and Edward Stokes. Thirty-nine years later the natives were granted lands for the Mesa Grande Reservation, and 10 years after that the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation was formed. Later still, three acres of this land were returned to the Catholic Church, Mass was once again held on the one-time mission site and a new church was established. St. John the Baptist also has a chapel 15 miles north: St. Francis Chapel, just off the highway and up a dirt road.
Humble and Holy
So, instead of heading back through small towns like San Pasqual and Ramona that had led us to Julian, we proceeded along two-lane Highway 79. The rock-speckled land stretching alongside the highway was like a moonscape.
Tiny, tile-roofed St. Francis Chapel is crowned with a rock bell-tower upon which stands the cross. The wooden door is swollen and difficult to open, but the thick-walled adobe structure is welcoming. Whitewashed beams, some of them as rough as though they were cut by hand, form an intricate design along the ceiling. Statues of the Blessed Mother and Our Lady of Guadalupe stand on the generous windowsills, arms outstretched beneath hanging plants and before the view of scrub-studded land and brown hills.
Built in 1898 by Mesa Grande Indians, the chapel is still an active church at which weekly Mass is celebrated. It marks the point where the trail of tears started for the native people who now live on the Pala Reservation that surrounds another San Diego County asistencia: Mission San Antonio de Pala.
The place they started made a fitting place for us to finish a memorable visit to a humble and holy mission.
Elisabeth Deffner writes from Orange, California.
----- EXCERPT: California's Mission Santa Ysabel ------- EXTENDED BODY: Elisabeth Deffner -------- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Hollywood Goes Family-Friendly -- Well, Sort Of DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:The summer movie juggernaut has passed, but a handful of smaller, pro-family films managed to survive and prosper and are continuing their runs in theaters nationwide throughout the fall.
This after a summer when franchise event films (Star Wars, Spider-Man, Men in Black 2) grabbed most of the attention and the money.
The most prominent of this group — My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Mostly Martha and Signs — are enjoyable entertainment experiences. They also present family ties as key to an ordered existence and central to the formulation of a moral code. However, each has flaws in the treatment of its material of which Catholics should be aware.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which is co-produced by Tom Hanks and his Greek-born wife, Rita Wilson, was released early in the summer and has built a large, enthusiastic following primarily through word of mouth.
It's easy to see why.
Actress Nia Vardalos expands her one-woman stage show into a loosely structured feature film of comic sketches, held together by a sure-footed tone and some solid performances. The subject is the difficulties faced by the daughter of Greek immigrants who wants to assimilate into present-day American culture. Writer Vardalos and director Joel Zwick choose situations and gags with such universal appeal that the members of any ethnic group that's not quite mainstream will identify with them.
Toula Portokalos (Vardalos) comes from a family that believes a Greek woman has three purposes in life: to marry a Greek man, to have Greek babies and to feed everybody until the day she dies. She has never felt completely at home in either her family's ethnic world or her contemporaries' all-American one. She's well past the age when most Greek girls marry and her parents are desperate to hook her up with their idea of Mr. Right.
Ian Miller (John Corbett) is a WASP vegetarian who teaches high school. He meets Toula at the family restaurant where she works and they fall in love. The rest of the movie chronicles their romance and the culture clash between their two contrasting backgrounds. There are no surprising plot twists nor any suspense as to whether the wedding will go off as planned. The filmmakers get in some well-placed jabs at both partners' families, but the jokes are never ugly or mean-spirited. Everyone is treated with respect.
Mostly Martha takes a fresh look at a slightly different, but familiar, subject. Martha Klein (Martine Gedeck) is an ambitious, accomplished professional woman approaching middle age with no life apart from her career. The setting is a gourmet restaurant in the German port of Hamburg, where she is “the city's second-best chef.” A neurotic perfectionist about her recipes and spotless kitchen, she obviously needs some kind of personal attachment to ground her emotionally.
When her sister is killed in an auto accident, Martha must care for her 8-year-old niece, Lina (Maxine Foereste), who's distraught and distant because of the tragedy. The four-star chef isn't good at coping with the messier parts of life like grief, nurturing or relationships. To make things worse, the restaurant's owner (Sibylle Canonnica) hires an earthy Italian sous chef, Mario (Sergio Castelitto), without consulting her. These complications put Martha to the test. She must change her priorities and the way she looks at life in order to survive. German writer-director Sandra Nettelbeck skillfully digs into Martha's soul as she tries to sort things out.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Mostly Martha are strong endorsements of traditional family values with one similar, glaring exception. Each implies discreetly and off camera that its heroine has sex with her beloved before getting married. This mars their otherwise wholesome spirit. Surprisingly, both films are rated PG.
Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable) is a master dramatist of those places and moments where the supernatural and human realities intersect. Signs, his most recent work, examines these themes within the framework of existing horror and scifi movie conventions, cleverly borrowing from Steven Spielberg (E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and Alfred Hitchcock (The Birds) to pose important spiritual questions.
The ostensible subject matter is the sudden appearance of “crop circles,” or intricately carved designs found in cornfields. Are they the creations of alien life forms from another planet? Or are they hoaxes?
Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) is a former Episcopal priest who lives on a Pennsylvania farm with his young son Morgan (Rory Culkin), 5-year-old daughter Bo (Abigail Breslin) and brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix). The sudden death of Graham's wife plunges him into an emotional numbness that results in his loss of faith and an inability to connect with surviving family members.
Shyamalan brilliantly constructs scenes of suspense and terror as the Hess family comes to grips with the life-threatening dangers the crop circles on its land portend. To surmount the crisis, it must learn to pull together once again as one.
Graham also comes to understand that these events are more than mere coincidences. He asserts the power and importance of miracles that point to the existence of God, offering hope to those who believe.
If Signs were an unpretentious, low-budget B movie, this might be good enough. But Shyamalan declares his spiritual intentions so grandly they must be held to a higher standard. Although Hess's rediscovery of his faith may be appealing to Christians, the cosmology that accompanies it is not. Its premises are murky and contradictory, with a New Age-like acceptance of UFOs and their relationship to the concept of evil.
All three of these unexpected hits aspire to be uplifting entertainment for viewers of all ages. That none of them quite gets there is perhaps more a reflection of our permissive times than anything else.
John Prizer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: Surprise successes: Signs, Mostly Martha and My Big Fat Greek Wedding ------- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer -------- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Monsters, Inc. (2001)
Monsters, Inc. is based on a clever reversal: a universe in which monsters are as scared of kids as the little ones are of them. The reason monsters leap out of closets to frighten children, see, is to collect their screams — which are the energy sources for their hometown, Monstropolis. But kids are becoming harder to scare, and there's a scream shortage. Monstropolis faces a power crisis with rolling blackouts.
Coming to the rescue are a big blue monster named Sully (voice of John Goodman) and his buddy Wazowski (Billy Crystal), a green eyeball with arms and legs. However, the crab-like Henry J. Waternoose (James Coburn) and the snake-like Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi) are working against them for their own villainous reasons. All this is complicated when a human child, Boo (Mary Gibbs), inserts herself into the monster world.
By Way of the Stars (1992)
The Wild West was both an idea and a geographic location, and it's easy to forget that these two notions had as much appeal to 19th-century Europeans as to Americans. By Way of the Stars, a TV miniseries based on a novel by German author Willi Fahrman, is an exciting coming-of-age story that exemplifies this point of view. A young boy growing up in the civilized environment of 19th-century Prussia sets out to find his long-lost father. The quest leads him across Europe and post-civil war America to the wildest parts of the Canadian frontier.
Along the way the boy, Lukas, meets up with the snooty Ursula von Knabig, the rough Ben Davis and a variety of other picturesque characters. Director Allan King and screen-writer Marlene Matthews create an epic canvas for Lukas' adventures. Intricate plot twists are punctuated by psychological insights, social observations and moving personal moments.
Wee Willie Winkie (1937)
Hidden among the melodramatic women's pictures and high-powered romances of Hollywood's Golden Age are little gems like Wee Willie Winkie, in which Shirley Temple marches with the British Imperial Army and makes peace between the colonialists and a tribe of unhappy subjects.
Director John Ford masterfully adapts Rudyard Kipling's popular story set in India in the 1890s. An American widow moves with her preteen daughter, Priscilla (Temple) into the home of her father-in-law, who's in charge of a remote British army camp. Priscilla befriends the tough Sgt. MacDuff (Victor McLaglen) and the notorious rebel chieftain, Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero), who's imprisoned there. When Khan's tribe attacks the camp, the colonel believes his granddaughter has been kidnapped. Only Priscilla's quick wit and courage prevent a bloody slaughter.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer -------- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: A Question of Degree: Most College Students Are Women DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — Noticing the influx of applications from women over the past years, administrators at the Franciscan University of Steubenville made strong efforts in male recruitment to keep an equal gender balance. Then they stopped.
“We found that we were pushing a boulder uphill,” said Dean of Enrollment Joel Recznik. “We're here to serve the Church and if we get more applications from women, then we will take them as they come.”
Females now make up 60% of the school's student body, and Franciscan University is far from alone in dealing with gender-related issues such as housing.
“We're a mirror image of what you'd see in national averages,” Recznik said.
This year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 698,000 women entered college, compared with just 529,000 men. Between 1975 and 1997, the number of women in college rose from 5 million to 8 million, but the male population remained around 6 million. In 1947, only 39% of college students were female. Today that percentage has reached 57 and is expected to keep rising.
The divide is even wider within certain ethnic groups. Hispanic men earn only 40% of degrees for that group, and two black women earn degrees for every one man.
At Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., men make up just 45% of the school's student body, and Director of Admissions Paul Heisler said he could have accepted even more women if the residence halls had enough space.
He attributes the trend to the marketplace. “The focus today of going to college is to get a job,” he said. “We're a liberal arts school, and men tend to be more interested in putting bread on the table, so I think naturally we have more women applying.”
The theories are plentiful. One speculation is that more men are entering the technology field, which doesn't necessarily require a college degree. Others claim the educational process is geared toward women's learning styles and therefore puts men at a disadvantage. Still more say women are simply better students.
Bridget Maher, a policy analyst with the Family Research Council, has a succinct answer: “Women are encouraged to focus on work and career, and family and marriage come later.”
At first glance, women seem to have made great strides. Granted, more are in college. But what happens when they graduate?
“The advantages stop after the undergraduate level,” explained Sandra Hanson, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America. Proof lies in the fact that men still outnumber women in master's and doctoral programs by a large percentage. And in the work-place, women don't hold the share of jobs that would seem to be allotted to them by virtue of college degrees.
“Women might get 17% of engineering degrees, but women do not make up 17% of all engineers,” Hanson said.
In fact, engineering is one field where women are still markedly absent in classrooms. So are science, mathematics and most traditionally male-dominated fields.
The subjects that have seen increased female enrollment are those that have attracted women all along: nursing, teaching and the life sciences. And contrary to what the trend would indicate, more women with children are choosing to stay home or work part time than in recent years, Maher said.
Social Impact
Since the trend of more women earning college degrees doesn't necessarily translate to more women entering the work force, the impact on the family remains unknown. However, researchers forecast certain societal changes.
One consequence is that women could have trouble finding prospective husbands.
In a world where education is associated with power, influence and success, a college degree is a form of social status. With more women than men earning degrees, the social spectrum shifts.
“Women tend to marry up,” Hanson said, “and relationships are more successful and more comfortable if the male has a higher status. When people go against the norm, these marriages are less likely to succeed.”
Maher points out that girls in school are taught to be career-oriented. “The emphasis is on being secure in your career first,” she said. “Consideration of who will be your spouse, who will father your children, is secondary.”
Stemming from this is an implicit choice — a woman can have a career or a woman can have a family.
That's a big problem with the educational system, according to theology professor Margaret McCarthy of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.
“Getting an education is not antithetical to a vocation,” she said, defining vocation as an individual's state of life. “These states of life become the context in which all the other activities, like work, take place. It should be an essential ingredient of a child's education to think about vocation and not just career.”
But if girls are being guided toward the career route instead of the family route, what's happening to the boys?
Nothing, researchers say. The number of men entering college has increased steadily. The skewed numbers occur because more women are entering college than pursuing the other post-high school options.
“Women have made no inroads into the unionized jobs, the production or service jobs that have been predominantly male,” Hanson said. “Men's roles haven't changed. We're just changing what we expect of women.”
However, statistics show that as early as junior high school more girls than boys say they expect to attend college.
“Girls are more willing to play the game,” McCarthy said. “If education is boring, if they're just trying to get you to pass the test, the girls will play the game longer.”
What's needed, she said, is an educational system that places learning within the context of reality.
“Education is ultimately for the formation of the human being,” she said. “Training for a trade should be secondary.”
Dana Wind writes from Raleigh, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Wind -------- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Cardinal on Board
AVE MARIA SCHOOL OF LAW, Aug 27 — Ave Maria School of Law announced that New York's Cardinal Edward Egan has joined the school's board of governors.
Cardinal Egan, a former judge of the Sacred Roman Rota, was named in June by Pope John Paul II to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature, the Church's highest court.
He has also taught canon law at several universities in Rome.
Race Matters
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, Sept. 13 — Denys Blell has filed a federal discrimination suit against Loyola College of Baltimore, alleging the Jesuit college did not consider him black enough to lead campus diversity efforts.
Blell claims that, during the search process last year, David Haddad, Loyola's vice president for academic affairs, told Blell that his light skin might not pass muster with black faculty members who had been pressuring for the hire of “someone black.”
“I have felt that the reason I didn't get jobs at other universities is that they wanted a person of color in the senior staff,” said Blell, the son of a Lebanese father and a mother who is part African. “But none of them were ever as open about it as Loyola.”
Stopping the Insanity
THE BOSTON GLOBE, Sept. 6 — Boston University Chancellor John Silber has ordered a secondary school that the university operates to disband a support group for homosexual students.
Kevin Carleton, a university spokesman, said the academy was designed to provide a nurturing environment for bright students. “If we are successful ... there should be no reason for an isolated safe haven” for homosexuals, he said.
Carleton said the group could also provide “endorsement and encouragement of the exploration of sexuality in a way that we feel is inappropriate in a secondary school that includes children as young as 13.”
The Pope and the Jews
SETON HALL UNIVERSITY, Sept. 13 — Rabbi David Dalin, visiting fellow in Princeton University's department of politics, will give a lecture on “Pope John Paul II and the Jewish People” at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 13, on the university's South Orange, N.J., campus.
A scholar of the history of Christian-Jewish relations, Rabbi Dalin will speak about why Pope John Paul II is venerated by Christians and Jews alike for his leadership. More information is available at (973) 761-9751.
Champion in Life
BAYOU CATHOLIC, Sept. 13 — Nick Saban, head football coach at Louisiana State University, told the newspaper of the Diocese of HoumaThibodaux, La., that he tells his players that the Gospel is the key ingredient to becoming a champion in life.
“Lots of people have potential,” he told the newspaper.
“But they don't have the work ethic and the self-discipline it takes to pull it through. It's about the right thoughts, habits and priorities. Everyone can be a champion,” he said, in athletics and life in general.
When a person has truly embraced the Gospel, their principles cannot be compromised and their values “come from in here,” said Saban, pointing to his heart.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen -------- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Beauty Comprehended by the Beast DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:ROMANCING REALITY: HOMO VIATOR AND THE SCANDAL CALLED BEAUTY
by Marion Montgomery
St. Augustine's Press, 2002
138 pages, $30
To order: (800) 621-2736 or (773) 568-1550
Pope John Paul II understands that the crisis of the modern world is first and foremost a manifestation of confusion about the nature of the human person. Modern American Catholic writers have also recognized this connection. Southern writers Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, for example, dramatized it. Here Marion Montgomery examines it in an extended essay.
Much of the confusion of our time can be traced to the thought of French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596–1650). He elevated the human mind to the level of the angels and ignored the human body. He was under the illusion that human reason creates reality. This intellectual pride then led to the modern philosophical error of man seeing himself as intellectually autonomous and not a being created by God or subject to the limitations of creation. Kant, Hegel and others forged this thinking into the dogma of our time.
These notions are the slogans of our pop culture. How many advertisements tell us we are in charge? That we are little gods who can recreate ourselves to suit our own fancy? That we are the final tribunals of right and wrong?
Artists have instinctively rebelled against the closed world of Descartes' modern rational materialism. But, in rebellion, many of them threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, substituting intuition and feeling for faith and reason. Montgomery writes, “this proved but a further exacerbation ... They, too, at last rest faith in autonomous intellect.”
Montgomery's book would restore us to the real world where mind and body, thought and feeling are connected. He returns to the commonsense philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas where men acquire knowledge through objects around them and have no direct angelic apprehension. Aquinas believed that the human mind and body working through the senses and guided by natural law accommodates itself to the limits of existence. “Thus intellectual autonomy is a most destructive violation of the given nature of a person,” writes Montgomery.
Romancing Reality examines the reactions against modern rational materialism by the poet Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Schiller is best known for William Tell, but his Letters on Aesthetic Education is Montgomery's focus.
Schiller's Letters urges that we leave “the living presence of things” and promises that this will lead us to transcendent truth. But this is not at all transcendent! Rather, it is an intellectual act of self-centered idealism. Man cannot achieve transcendence by an act of the mind. Montgomery points out that this so-called transcendence is bogus because it never moves beyond the empty cavern of one's own skull. As created beings we are dependent on God's will and cannot opt out of the reality of creation. (Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalism committed the same error in 19th-century New England). We are on the way to truth. This is what the Latin term homo viator from the book's TITLE means (a person on the way). We must encounter the world. We cannot leapfrog to eternity.
Tolstoy's reaction against modernism, after completing his great novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, became more severe and led him to a spiritual crisis. He came to reject the Russian Church with all of its sacraments and mysteries. Montgomery shows how Tolstoy ended up preaching “a church of Christ without Christ ... Tolstoy's scornful rejection is of both the transcendent and the immanent, in an elevation of himself as the singular spiritual entity.” Rejecting the world, he flees his family and ends up dying in a remote railway station.
Montgomery's book sometimes repeats itself, but its message is one worth reading if we are to restore the dignity of man and community — and come to experience beauty as a gift from God, whose creation is good.
Patrick J. Walsh writes from Quincy, Massachusetts.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Patrick J. Walsh -------- KEYWORDS: Books -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Weekends-Free Fatherhood
Q All of my husband's favorite hobbies are daylong ventures. While I wish he would spend more time with our kids and me on the weekends, I feel guilty asking him to give up his favorite pastimes.
A Tom: I'm giving a third-trimester pregnant Caroline time off and fielding this one myself.
This is an ages-old dilemma.
Ever since Gronk's wife disapproved of his spending all weekend hunting woolly mammoths with his cave buddies, wives have been endlessly irritated when their husbands disappeared to hit the links, the woods or the stream in the early Saturday morning hours.
I'm going to address men directly this time and come down relatively hard on them about this. Generally, after a hard day at work, most guys come home somewhat burdened, tired and a little cranky. Although we may put forth genuine effort, our families probably don't see us at our best on weeknights.
The weekend is when men thrive — rested and revived with work concerns forgotten, this is when we like to recreate, work on house projects and so forth. Wouldn't this be the perfect time to give our best selves to our families? That does-n't mean forgoing recreation and projects; it means modifying our idea of recreation to be inclusive of the family. Do things that everyone can do — even the smaller children can help paint the shed, for example.
Does this mean husbands have to give up golf and hunting? Not at all.
It just means seeking an appropriate balance in our activities. This will differ depending on what stage of your family life you are in at any given point. A retired man whose kids are grown and gone may like to golf as much as a few times a week, and his wife may not mind at all. On the other hand, a younger man with four children under the age of 7 at home, including a newborn, better think twice before heading out that door on Saturday morning.
Most of the time, it is our wives who deserve the break. Before heading out, ask yourself when was the last time you offered to take the kids somewhere so your wife could take a nap? When was the last time you stayed home with the kids while she went shopping (for herself — groceries don't count)? When was the last time you arranged for a sitter so you two could go to her favorite restaurant? If the answer to all three questions is “within the last month,” then maybe a day of golf is in order.
To those men who say, “But hunting with my buddies/dad/brother monthly is a tradition,” I offer this reply: So what? You can still honor that tradition, but now is the time to start some new ones with your own children.
Give them memories of time well-spent with you, and those traditions will become more dear to you than any other.
Tom and Caroline McDonald are Family Life directors for the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Tom and Caroline Mcdonald -------- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Facts of Life DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:The new advice for couples experiencing marital problems is “stick it out.” Researchers concluded that of the husbands and wives who reported they were “unhappy” in their marriage, the majority of those who remained committed to their marriage over a five-year period were now happy. A much smaller percentage of people who chose divorce or separation were happily remarried.
Percentage Who Remained Married Reported They Were Happy 66%
Percentage of Remarried Who Reported They Were Happy 19%
Source: Institute for American Values, July 2002
----- EXCERPT: STUDY DISCOURAGES DIVORCE ------- EXTENDED BODY: -------- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Flying With the Archangels DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Imagine you're a regular citizen, but the king of the realm has his three top princes standing ready to help you every day.
Quite breathtaking, you say? When it comes to the King of Heaven, this thought is no imaginative fairytale. Our Lord has three great Princes of Heaven only a prayer away for us and our family members. They're the archangels St. Michael, St. Gabriel and St. Raphael — the only angels named in the Bible. We celebrate their feast day each year on Sept. 29. And we celebrate the feast of their heavenly colleagues, our guardian angels, just days later on Oct. 2.
“The angels work together for the benefit of us all,” St. Thomas Aquinas tells us. These three archangels, among the seven who stand in the presence of God as the Bible makes known to us, are at our service.
St. Michael
St. Michael is first among the princes, so reveals St. Gabriel to the prophet Daniel. Michael's name means “one who is like God.” We know St. Michael is the warrior, head of the heavenly army that drove Satan out of heaven. He's the defender of the people of God. As far back as the fifth century, churches were dedicated to him.
At St. Michael's Basilica in Loretto, Pa., parishioners honor him on the Feast of the Archangels as they do every day. They call upon his intercession by reciting the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel that was promulgated by Pope Leo XIII before every single Mass celebrated daily at the basilica.
Although this prayer is no longer said after all Masses, Pope John Paul II strongly urged the faithful to restore the prayer to help combat the current evils in the world. We can take the Holy Father's advice by saying the Prayer to St. Michael on the Feast of the Archangels and by adding it to our daily prayers. He's pretty powerful when we're tempted.
St. Michael the Archangel Church in Bridgeport, Conn., celebrates the feast of its namesake by coupling it with another major devotion: the Forty Hours devotion.
“It's been going on for eons and eons, ever since I was a boy here,” says Conventual Franciscan Father James Smyka, the longtime pastor. “Next to Christmas and Easter, this is the most important event of the year” for the large numbers of Polish families who attend.
The Forty Hours devotion is a eucharistic devotion with continuous adoration of the Blessed Sacrament solemnly exposed for 40 hours. The length of the devotion comes from the calculation that Jesus was in the tomb for 40 hours before the Resurrection.
Up the map in another large Connecticut city, St. Michael's Church in New Haven, the oldest Italian Catholic church in the state, celebrates the feast of its namesake in his role as patron of policemen.
Every year on St. Michael's feast day the church honors two policemen from the city, according to Father Andrew Brizzolara. This year the mayor, the police chief and honor guards from the police and the Knights of Columbus will be part of the ceremony.
Last year, this traditional part of keeping the Feast of the Archangel Michael was especially poignant because the ceremony took place just three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In light of both events, children can be taught to pray another popular prayer to St. Michael for a particular policeman they see on their way to school. Or we all can remember an anonymous policeman doing particularly dangerous work that day. The same prayer can be said to St. Michael for our families.
St. Michael is also the patron of grocers, exorcists, mariners, paratroopers, artists, ambulance drivers, emergency medical technicians, para-medics, the dying, a holy death and sickness.
‘Strength of God’
We already honor St. Gabriel — whose name means “strength of God” or “power of God” — regularly without a second thought. Whenever we pray the Hail Mary, we first honor our Blessed Mother, of course, as we begin the Ave Maria with the words Gabriel addressed to her at the Annunciation. Want to make St. Gabriel extra joyful? Keep praying the Hail Mary to our Lady.
Traditionally, St. Gabriel is considered the archangel who announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, warned St. Joseph to take baby Jesus and Mary to Egypt, called him back to Israel and later comforted our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane.
In Rotterdam, N.Y., St. Gabriel the Archangel Church annually celebrates the feast of its patron in a variety of ways. Sometimes it holds a reception downstairs in the church and sometimes it celebrates outside with a tent and balloons. At the gathering, the church serves up angel food cake — a heavenly food — to families and all parishioners.
“Another special thing,” adds Father Leo Markert, “is that the pastor puts the word ‘angel’ around the sanctuary in six different languages, such as Polish, Greek, Japanese and Spanish. Sometimes in the evening we have a special prayer service that would have angels as the whole motif. Then there are St. Gabriel prayer cards available to people at the Masses.”
Because St. Gabriel is such a powerful ambassador of God, he's also the patron of communications workers and of radio and TV. We can ask his intercession to turn around our media, from print to movies.
For Protection
St. Raphael plays a predominant part though most of the 14 chapters in the Book of Tobit and the beautiful story of Tobit, who was just in the eyes of God. He protects Tobit's son, Tobiah, and conducts him safely on a long journey to and from home; drives a demon away from Sarah; secures a happy marriage for Tobiah and Sarah; brings healing to Tobit; and tells them to give all the praise and honor to God.
In a way, St. Raphael is the guardian angel par excellence for all the children of God. He assures the elder Tobit that, while he prayed, Raphael himself “presented ... your prayers to the Lord” (Tobit 12:12).
In St. Petersburg, Fla., St. Raphael's Church brings the parish together as a family to celebrate the feast day of its patron. “We have a dinner every year where we serve angel hair pasta and angel food cake,” says an amiable Father Michael Smith. “It's a tradition in the parish.”
Also, on the Thursday closest to the 29th, the 270 students in the parish school attend Mass together in honor of the archangel, Father Smith adds.
Families can imitate this Florida church and put angel hair pasta and angel food cake on the menu for the feast. It's a good way to spur discussion about a most powerful archangel.
Considering the story of Tobias, St. Raphael is, in particular, the patron of travelers, happy meetings and joy. He's also patron of the blind, nurses and physicians.
“We, too, can pray to St. Raphael to ask that he help us to be messengers of joy to our families and to those with whom we work,” suggests a Daughters of St. Paul booklet TITLEd The Archangel Raphael — Sent by God. We should also pray to St. Raphael to “guide us safely to our spiritual home — heaven,” it says. Meanwhile, daily we should ask him to conduct us safely to and from work and school, to the grocery store, the library, on family vacations, to and from Mass — even in our own house and backyard.
Since his name means “health of God” or “medicine of God,” we should ask him for spiritual and bodily healing, as well as to bring us always to happy meetings with others. Remember also the specific prayers to St. Raphael.
Pope John Paul II told his general audiences in his series on angels in 1986 that we see in these three glorious archangels reflected “in a particular way the truth contained in the question posed by the author of the Letter to the Hebrews: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve, for the sake of those who are to possess salvation?” (Hebrews 1–14). Let's accept our King's gracious offer and ask each day the help of his three heavenly princes.
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen -------- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Finding an NFP-Only Doctor When There Isn't One DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:COLUMBUS, Ohio — Mariely de Gessler thought she and her husband, Ben, would be kicked out of their obstetrician's office.
Pregnant with their second child, the couple was evangelizing their Catholic doctor about natural family planning (NFP). At each appointment, Mariely gave him an NFP brochure, which he simply tucked into his lab coat.
In regard to the doctor's contraceptive and sterilization practice, Ben de Gessler, who works for the Ohio Right to Life Society, finally said, “You really need to stop this right now.”
Dr. Michael Parker did not kick them out. The de Gesslers had their baby with him, and then another. Mariely prayed for him and sent all her friends to him, especially those from her FAMILIA group of Regnum Christi. Parker started listening and thinking he better learn about NFP to serve all his new patients who practiced it.
‘One More Soul’
Back when they were dating, the de Gesslers knew peace of mind from their decision to use natural family planning when they got married. They appreciate the mutual dependence NFP affords and the openness to God's will for them. Mariely does not feel used, as she might by taking birth-control pills. “My husband respects me,” she said. The problem was, when they became pregnant the first time, there was no NFP physician in Columbus, Ohio, where they lived.
Mariely, originally from Mexico City, followed her mother-in-law's advice and called One More Soul, the Dayton, Ohio, organization that maintains a directory of NFP-only physicians throughout the United States and Canada on its Web site, www.omsoul.com.
One More Soul is a lay apostolate formed to educate people that children are wonderful blessings from God and contraception is harmful, especially to women and marriage, and thus to the Church and society. Founders Steve Koob and Mary Ann Walsh believe the creation of “one more soul” is so awesome that it is more important than the creation of the entire material universe. They conceived One More Soul from the insight that contraception leads to abortion — that the contraceptive lifestyle is the driving force behind the abortion juggernaut and the whole “culture of death.”
As long as millions of couples were making their relationship, career, education and other important decisions in reliance on contraceptives, they concluded, those same couples would see abortion as essential, especially when the contraceptives fail. They promote NFP as a positive alternative.
Koob advised the de Gesslers that there were no NFP-only obstetricians in the state of Ohio, but there was an NFP family-practice doctor. The catch was that he practiced more than two hours away. The de Gesslers made the trip. Mariely recalls that he was a wonderful doctor, but she had a long and difficult delivery and should have had a cesarean section, which this doctor could not perform.
When expecting their second baby, she called One More Soul again. Koob told her there still were no NFP-only obstetricians in Ohio. But knowing the de Gesslers were so firm in their faith, he encouraged them to evangelize a doctor. This was not something they had in mind.
However, they found Dr. Michael Parker. He was Catholic, had five children and practiced NFP in his marriage: a good candidate. Ben and Mariely de Gessler went to work. They started out low-key, giving him brochures. They referred their friends. Mariely gave him a book, Physicians Healed, edited by One More Soul's Cleta Hartman. And she was praying. “I prayed hard for him, from my heart,” she said.
She could see the Holy Spirit working in him. He especially changed after reading the book about the conversions of doctors who stopped prescribing birth control. Finally, a spiritual letter-writing campaign from de Gessler's FAMILIA group moved him enough to train in the Creighton method at the Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, Neb., and become certified as an NFP Medical Consultant.
Today, Parker promotes the “great social value” of natural family planning to his patients. “I try to talk as many people into it as I can,” he said. He said he does this for a selfish reason: Both of his parents died within the last few years. “When I became the next generation, I started thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing to make it to heaven?’” He also likes the medical benefits of avoiding synthetic hormones and IUDs. He's had great success with infertility patients using the Creighton model.
Parker believes that couples who practice NFP produce children with a deep respect for God, life and human nature. “Society will change in the future in its attitudes toward life. Our kids will be counterculture,” he said. “You can't do NFP without respect for your partner. I'm not saying it's easy, but if couples work at it, it's rewarding.”
Dr. Kim Hardey, a natural family planning OB-GYN in Lafayette, La., has been an NFP-only obstetriciangynecologist since 1995. His practice has been “fairly successful,” and he believes God has led patients to him. However, he wants to encourage Catholics to support hospitals, doctors and other medical personnel who choose to follow the Catholic Church's teaching.
Koob of One More Soul sees the current crisis in the Church as larger than the crisis of a few priests having abused minors. It is a crisis in sexual morality teaching created by the failure of Church teaching.
“We're at a time in our Church history that I call a moment of grace. It's a wonderful opportunity,” he said, “to establish a culture of life through healthy human sexuality, which includes chastity, fertility awareness and natural family planning.”
Laurie Buckeye writes from Minneapolis.
----- EXCERPT: ------- EXTENDED BODY: Laurie Buckeye -------- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 09/29/2002 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: Septembar 29-October 5, 2002 ----- BODY:Abortion Aftermath Can Be Costly
HEALTH SCOUT NEWS, Sept. 5 — Women who have an abortion are nearly twice as likely to die within two years compared to women who deliver their babies, with the causes ranging from accidents to suicide. That higher mortality rate lasts for nearly a decade after an abortion.
The conclusion was reached in a new study by the Elliot Institute that appears in the most recent issue of the Southern Medical Journal.
In an analysis of 173,000 low-income California women, deaths from suicides, accidents and natural causes were all significantly higher among those who had had an abortion compared to women who delivered their babies.
Keyhole Surgery for Pre-Born
REUTERS, Sept. 5 — An international team of doctors said it had found a way to treat unborn babies suffering from a rare muscle defect that impairs lung development with breakthrough fetal surgery.
One in 5,000 to 10,000 pregnancies could benefit from the keyhole surgery that doctors from Belgium, Britain and Spain have devised to treat diaphragmatic hernias.
This type of hernia is a rare defect in the muscle that divides the lungs and intestines, leaving the baby with abnormally small lungs. In some cases, the defect is so severe babies die because of complications arising from underdeveloped lungs and high blood pressure.
Eight babies have undergone the operation so far, with six surviving.
Early Flaws May Doom Clones
REUTERS, Sept. 9 — Researchers have discovered a possible reason for why so few cloned embryos mature into healthy animals.
The study, which looked at the genetic makeup of certain organs in cloned mice, found that as many as one in 25 genes might be abnormal in a clone's placenta, according to the report published in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers suspect the abnormalities are a result of the cloning process itself, said Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Adult Stem Cell Procedure Saves ‘Bubble Boy’
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 5 — Wilco Conradi was born two years ago with severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID, which renders the immune system ineffective against microbes ordinarily harmless to others.
But a new gene therapy technique apparently has cured Conradi's disease. After a single injection of genetically modified adult stem cells, Conradi gained a normal immune system. He left the plastic bubble that had kept him safe from germs. He needs no medication or special treatment and eats a regular diet.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: As Bombs Drop, Baghdad Bishops Stay With Flock DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 BODY:BAGHDAD, Iraq — Just before dawn March 20, the archbishop could hear the missiles exploding and the answering wails of sirens.
“It was impossible not to hear,” said Archbishop Emmanuel-Karim Delly, auxiliary bishop of the Chaldean Archdiocese of Babilonia, based in Baghdad. “Please don't ask how many explosions we heard.”
He had a message for the American people, he told the Register hours after Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired at a site where Iraqi leaders were thought to have gathered.
“Pray for us — in the church, in your house,” he pleaded. “Have your children pray for us. God does not want his children to fight among themselves.”
The strikes occurred just before first light Baghdad time, 90 minutes after President Bush's deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave the country or face war. The American president ordered the opening salvo after fresh intelligence that the target was a senior Iraqi leadership compound.
Christians make up less than 3% of Iraq's 24 million people, and three of its leaders spoke to the Register by telephone as Saddam's defiance of Bush's ultimatum triggered the long-anticipated action. The bishops each vowed to stay in Iraq, praying for peace and serving the Iraqi people.
Archbishop Fernando Filoni, papal nuncio to Iraq, told the Register a day after U.S. attacks that he would remain in the Arab capital throughout the war.
As the Holy Father's representative, he said, his ministry is “a place where the sensitivities and affection for the Pope are shown to people. It is important, especially now, to be close to the Church in Iraq. All of our priests and bishops are here. Our faithful are here. All of our works of charity are here.”
Latin-rite Archbishop Jean Sleiman of Baghdad told the Register that the first night of the war was one of suspense for Iraqis.
“People waited in anguish and prayer,” Archbishop Sleiman said. “People are wondering what will happen next now that the hostilities have begun in a clear way. People are also remembering their experience of the past [war] in order to decide what to do.”
“Every night, we have been praying the rosary for peace,” Archbishop Delly said. “Our Holy Mother will protect us and help us get out of this war, safe and sound.”
They aren't the only ones praying. “All the Christians and Muslims have been united. All of us pray — the Christians in churches, and the Muslims in their mosques.”
Archbishop Sleiman, who announced that churches would provide shelter in case of bombing, said Christians have been fasting and attending liturgies for peace.
Though the initial bombing of Baghdad was considered to be an attempt at achieving war objectives quickly by going straight for Saddam and the top Iraqi leadership, Archbishop Sleiman complained that “you can't heal a person by killing [him].”
“If a person has cancer, you can't kill him in order to cure him,” he said. “In a war, you sacrifice people. You hurt souls ... In order to achieve peace, you have to work harder. Peace takes more time. You need compromise. Diplomacy is hard.”
He called the United States a “dear country” but criticized what he called its “Manichean way of acting.”
“It sees reality in black and white,” he said. “The country does not worry about the way it treats others. They speak about rights, but who is this democracy for?”
Archbishop Delly also criticized the United States, saying people in Baghdad consider the war “unjust.”
“The real issue is the oil and the strategic place of our country in the Middle East,” he contended. “This is the real reason, not to destroy weapons of mass destruction. Those were destroyed a long time ago.”
The Italian-born nuncio Arch bishop Filoni has been in the country less than two years. He had been involved in the Vatican's efforts to avert a war between the United States and Iraq, passing along a Vatican message to the Iraqi regime urging it to abide by United Nations demands to disarm itself of weapons of mass destruction so as not to give the United States any justification to attack.
Pope John Paul II also sent an envoy, Cardinal Roger Etchegarary, to urge Saddam to comply with the United Nations.
In the Register interview, Archbishop Filoni declined to answer any questions about diplomatic or political affairs or what Iraqis think about the United States.
But he said the nunciature was not doing anything in particular to prepare for war.
“We do not have gas masks,” he said. “We are living day by day, as always. ... It is outside of our logic to show fear, even though it exists. We have faith in prayer. We show solidarity with our brothers and sisters here. We are trying to live these moments with serenity.”
On March 20, Vatican spokesman Joaqu ín Navarro-Valls issued a statement on the U.S. bombing of Baghdad, in which he complimented the Iraqi Catholics, saying, “[I]t was learned with satisfaction that the various Catholic institutions in Iraq continue to perform their activities of assisting those populations.”
He also said it was a “time-honored tradition of the Holy See that its diplomatic representatives remain close to the populations to whom they have been sent, even in situations of extreme danger.”
This article was reported by Sabrina Arena Ferrisi in Rome and written by Register staff.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Sabrina Arena Ferrisi ----- KEYWORDS: -------- TITLE: U.S. Troops Returning to Church in Droves DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:KUWAIT — Two days into the war, Father Timothy Hogan, the only Catholic chaplain in Kuwait, considers himself a freedom fighter. But he isn't freeing people from Saddam Hussein. He's freeing people from sin.
The Detroit priest is pastor of a flock that waits near the front lines.
“The greatest event is the opportunity for confession,” Father Hogan told the Register from his deployment near the Iraq border. “Many of our folks are returning to this wonderful sacrament after being away for many years. They are most appreciative of the gift of forgiveness and freedom.”
Many of his troops go to daily Mass and pray the rosary after Mass when possible, he said. Many go to confession frequently. It's Lent for fighting men and women, too. They do the Stations of the Cross on Fridays.
“It is a great joy for me to see the peace on their faces after our time of prayer,” Father Hogan said. “It is a real privilege for me to serve as the instrument of freedom.”
From his office at Fort Hood, Texas, the world's largest Army base, chaplain Lt. Col. Father Robert Kincl said in the opening hours of Operation Iraqi Freedom that he has seen troops returning to the sacraments in droves.
He said he has seen “multitudes of invalidly married Catholics come back and say ‘Father, I want to get married in the Church.’”
Most Catholics in the service are dedicated, Father Kincl said, and for those who are not, “this [war] has helped them to get back to the Church.”
“It is the mystery of God at work,” he said.
The war and deployments have also speeded up the process of baptism and confirmation for some soldiers, Father Kincl said.
“Two officers in RCIA were called up,” Father Kincl said, so Military Archdiocese Archbishop Edwin O's Brien allowed him to baptize and confirm them and any soldiers who were deployed.
Some soldiers have also stepped forward to try to do more for their fellow troops on a spiritual level.
“Just this morning, I had a first lieutenant who had gone to Catholic school and said he wanted to help as much as possible,” Father Kincl said. The lieutenant wanted to become be a eucharistic minister should be given the Eucharist to distribute to Catholics in the military.
With some civilian parishes in countries such as Bahrain and with Catholic military chaplains like Father Hogan already in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, soldiers will not be totally without priests. Two chaplains from Fort Hood are being deployed to the Persian Gulf with the troops, Father Kincl said.
One priest already in the Middle East is Father Marvin Borger, a Navy chaplain lieutenant based at the naval base in Bahrain, where he runs Holy Trinity Parish.
“Here, we have a fully functioning Catholic parish on the base. ... We have Mass just about every day,” he said. “We have a parish council, choir, CCD, etc. Now that we are in Lent, we have Stations of the Cross and a special catechism study on Saturday mornings.”
“Bahrain is an Islamic nation, but other religious faiths are permitted,” Father Borger said, adding that there is also a civilian parish in Bahrain — Sacred Heart — which he said has more than 20,000 parishioners.
U.S. Marine Major Brad Bartelt, a Catholic and spokesman for Central Command Forward, the hub of the planning and command operations for the campaign, said Qatar, too, has been “very gracious” in accommodating the spiritual needs of the American troops. “We have Bibles and we can go to Mass,” he said.
In some Islamic countries, however, Christians have experienced severe restrictions on the practice of their faith.
Father Borger also said because of the generosity of his former parishioners at St. Rose Church in Perrysburg, Ohio, “I have lots of rosaries to give out. I also have some Bibles.”
Still, he said, he wishes he had more to give, especially paperback catechisms.
Both Father Kincl and Father Borger said the number of confessions has increased.
“It is common for sailors or Marines to stop by the chaplains’ office to talk. Sometimes they want to go to confession. They are always sincere and conscientious,” Father Borger said.
Bartelt agreed that everyone hopes for peace, but the troops understand they have a job to do.
Father Kincl said he believes God will bring good out of the current situation.
“The Lord is using this event to give freedom to the Iraqi people,” he said, “and to motivate the servicemen to have hearts dedicated to Jesus.”
Andrew Walther writes from Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Andrew Walther ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: From Rome, No Awe - Just Shock DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — In Rome, the first week of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq started with escalated pleas for peace and ended with prayers for the war's newest victims.
As the first news from the front lines came in, the Holy See repeated its recent condemnations of U.S. action.
After issuing a final, detailed plea for peace on March 16, Pope John Paul II delivered more generic remarks after the fighting began in Iraq on March 19.
Nevertheless, the intensity and emotion of his voice was a marked sign of his deep distress over the war.
In a week of rapid developments, there were daily statements from the Vatican or from the Holy Father himself.
Hours after President Bush delivered his 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein on March 17, papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls issued a statement widely interpreted to be a direct rebuke of the American president.
“Whoever decides that peaceful means are exhausted,” Navarro-Valls said, “assumes a grave responsibility before God, his conscience and history.”
Perhaps in response, the U.S. State Department revealed that Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke with the Vatican foreign minister, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, on March 18 and told him, “We understand the Pope's concern.”
He added, “sometimes issues come before us that cannot be avoided ... and we firmly believe this is one such issue.”
“There are many cases in history when people were reluctant to take the necessary military steps — the use of force — it was regretted later,” Powell told reporters according to a transcript on the State Department's Web site.
On March 19, at the general audience hours before the bombing began, the Pope limited himself to speaking about the feast of St. Joseph, saying “as a man of peace, we pray to St. Joseph for those threatened by war and we invoke the precious gift of harmony upon the whole human family.”
After news of the first bombing arrived in Rome, Navarro-Valls released another statement, this one apparently seeking to restore the balance missing from his earlier statement.
“The Holy See has learned with deep pain of the development of the latest events in Iraq,” Navarro-Valls said March 20. “On the one hand, it is to be regretted that the Iraqi government did not accept the resolutions of the United Nations and the appeal of the Pope himself, as both asked that the country disarm. On the other hand, it is to be deplored that the path of negotiations, according to international law, for a peaceful solution of the Iraqi drama has been interrupted.”
Until the last minutes, John Paul had hoped to convince the United States to avoid war. Emerging from his weeklong annual Lenten retreat March 16, an animated Pope John Paul II made an impassioned plea for peace before leading the Angelus from his apartment window.
Appearing more vigorous than he has in months, the Pope gestured emphatically, raised his voice and departed from his prepared text.
“Certainly, the political leaders in Baghdad have an urgent duty to cooperate fully with the international community, to eliminate any motive for armed intervention,” he said, speaking directly to the Iraqi government. “To them I address my pressing appeal: The fate of your citizens should always have priority!”
Departing from his prepared text, the Holy Father invoked his own experience of war, both to warn against its horrors and to acknowledge it is sometimes necessary.
“I belong to that generation that lived and survived the Second World War,” John Paul said. “I have the duty to say to all young people, and to those who are younger than me, who have not had this experience: ‘War never again!’ as Paul VI said on his first visit to the United Nations. We must do all that is possible! We well know that peace is not possible at any cost. But we know equally well that this is a great responsibility. And therefore, prayer and penance!”
The Pope pleaded for increased diplomatic efforts for peace.
“There is still time to negotiate; there is still room for peace; it is never too late,” the Holy Father added, clearly speaking to Bush and his allies but without naming names. “To reflect on your duties, to devote yourself to intense negotiations, does not mean humiliation but to work responsibly for peace.”
While the Pope did not speak about the war for the first two days, several senior Vatican officials were quick to condemn the resort to war.
Archbishop Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said the United States “has committed a big mistake” in going to war, warning of the risk “of a blaze that could spread across the Middle East, sowing hatred and enmity against Western civilization, perceived as an invading force.”
The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, reached a fever pitch during the week, running anti-war headlines two inches high, magnifying the Pope's limited statements as much as possible. It carried reports about the first U.S. strikes on Iraq under the banner headline, “The folly of war.”
Retired Cardinal Roberto Tucci, former head of Vatican Radio, criticized Saddam Hussein for noncompliance but reserved the bulk of his commentary for criticism of the United States for not working through the United Nations.
Cardinal Pio Laghi, the papal envoy to Bush, told Vatican Radio he heard the news of the bombing with “deep sadness, because war is precisely the wrong choice, the worst choice. There are many things wrong, but this is the worst.”
John Paul himself addressed the war for the first time on March 22 when speaking to a group from the Italian television station Telepace.
“When war, as in these days in Iraq, attacks the destiny of humanity, [it] is even more urgent to proclaim, with a strong and decisive voice, that only peace is the way to construct a society of justice and solidarity,” he said. “Violence and weapons can never resolve the problems of men.”
He turned to the victims of war at the conclusion of a beatification Mass on March 23 for four founders of religious communities.
“From Mary we implore, above all in this moment, the gift of peace,” John Paul said at the Angelus, his voice rising. “To her we entrust, in particular, the victims of these hours of war and their relatives who are suffering. I feel spiritually close to them with affection and in prayer.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Raymond J. De Souza ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Bishop Hopes Coalition Will Free His Homeland DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Bishop Bawai Soro was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, and ordained to the diaconate in the Assyrian Church of the East in Baghdad in 1973.
He left his homeland that year and continued his studies abroad. He was ordained a priest in Chicago in 1982 and consecrated bishop there in 1984.
He was involved in efforts leading to the signing of the Common Christological Declaration by Pope John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV, patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, in 1994. He was in Rome for ecumenical work when he spoke to Register correspondent Sabrina Arena Ferrisi on March 20 about the situation in Iraq.
When did you leave Iraq?
I left at age 20, in 1973. I was born and raised in Iraq. I then went to Lebanon from 1973 to 1976, in the midst of its civil war. In 1976, I came to the United States as a refugee. I can honestly say I have seen the difficult situation of war up close.
Tell me about the Christian Iraqi community in the United States.
There are a quarter of a million Christian Iraqis in the United States. One hundred thousand live in Chicago, 100,000 in Michigan and 50,000 live in California. Many Christians began to leave Iraq in the 1960s. There was a massive immigration outward. They still constitute a small minority in Iraq.
You are in favor of U.S. military action in Iraq. Why?
The Iraqi people have suffered tremendously. That is how I arrived at my position. It is a question about the right of the Iraqi people to find leaders with a paternal concern for them, as guarantors of human rights and the means to live in happiness, peace and freedom. There is currently an absence of these elements, which are basic to human existence. One develops a conscience that disagrees with how Iraq has been ruled for the past 35 years.
What factors have influenced your position?
My decision was shaped by two factors. First, my own experience as an Iraqi who lived in the country for 20 years, and then the rest of my life where I have had strong contacts with Iraqi groups and religions. As an Assyrian Christian Iraqi, I have equal love for Assyrians and non-Assyrian Iraqis, for both Christians and Muslims.
Through our suffering, deprivation and oppression, we have found a common bond that brings us to the same aspiration of freedom, justice and peace for everyone. These are the ideals of monotheistic religions. Iraqis live in deprivation. It does not matter what ethnicity or religion you are. It's about human rights.
Why have we not heard more about the human rights abuses in Iraq, particularly from those who strongly defend peace?
I am very disappointed to see, as far as some high officials in the Holy See are concerned, that their reasoning seems more pragmatic and political rather than moral and theological. I consider the suffering of the Iraqi people to be a moral issue. For me, it is of paramount importance in cases of such severity.
Followers of Christ must first speak in moral rather than pragmatic terms. For some, the concern is not to upset the Muslim people. How, then, can the world be against the United States if the last five wars that were fought by the United States were wars to protect Muslim people? The Kuwaiti War [1991 Gulf War], Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and now Iraq. These were all wars to protect Muslim people.
What are your greatest concerns for the near future?
My prayers and concerns are for various things: First, I want the suffering of the Iraqi people to be eliminated. Second, [I want] Iraqi soldiers and American military personnel to return home safely. Third, the weapons of mass destruction should be destroyed and eliminated. Fourth, there need to be plans and resources to address the inevitable humanitarian crisis in Iraq, before and after the war. Fifth, Iraq needs to become a free, just, peaceful and democratic country as a consequence of this war. Finally, the other serious issue that must be dealt with and resolved is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
On what basis can you as a bishop entertain the idea of war?
For centuries, Christian thinkers have struggled with the question of war in the context of developing their teachings about peace and justice. The universal consensus is that war is evil. However, this evil of war must be accepted when a greater evil of injustice, oppression and inhumanity can be stopped by an act of war.
I believe the minimal conditions for any “just” war must meet the following state of affairs: first, the existence of an unjust ruler; second, the war is to defend the innocent and eliminate the suffering of the people; (The United States wants to defend Iraqis. I don't know why people are not looking at that.) third, the intention to establish good after the war. (This would be the establishment of a free, democratic and just Iraq.)
Why do people say the United States is invading Iraq for the oil?
Well, let me ask a question: Why did the United States abandon Iraqi oil in 1991 when they had the opportunity to take the oil? They could have done it then but didn't.
What are your aspirations for Iraq?
Iraq is an extremely rich country at all levels: manpower, water, agriculture, oil, minerals, history, human civilization, culture, archaeology. Think about it: Why have we sunk to the level where we are today? In fairness to the civilized nations of the world in the 21st century, we can all agree that God has ordained governments to serve their people so prosperity, moral and material, individual and collective, will increase in society. This process would only happen within the context of a fair social system and moral polity. This is the basic role of government. Any government that does not facilitate such aspects and aspirations of tangible progress should come under the scrutiny of every moral society and integral person.
As an Iraqi, I know the potential of the Iraqi people is great. Assyrians, Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans and others are wonderful people. I feel it is unjust to see Iraq separated from prosperous nations not only in the Middle East but also in the world. It hurts me to see Iraq so limited.
What do you hope will happen with regard to this war?
I hope and pray the war will be extremely short, with minimal civilian casualties. I pray Iraqi soldiers and U.S. military personnel will be safe so they can return home to their families. In my opinion, a democratized Iraq will send affirming signals to the whole of the Middle East. So much so that a peaceful Middle East will not be a near impossibility, as it is today. Iraq can play a crucial role in contributing to progress in the Middle East.
What do Iraqis living outside the country think in regard to this war?
Some people who talk about Iraq do so on a theoretical basis. But if you speak to Iraqis not under the penalty of fear, what you sense is more experiential, not theoretical. That is why we are able to appreciate the American action — because it is a great charity toward the powerless in Iraq who desperately need someone to remove their cause of pain and suffering.
What do you think of President Bush?
I hope and believe that after the chaos of war, after the political rhetoric has settled down, people will see much more clearly the providential role Bush has taken in promoting the American ideals of freedom, liberty and equality for all — not only in America but also throughout the world.
Sabrina Arena Ferrisi writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Despite Order, Some Say USAID Money Still Goes to Pro-Abortion Groups DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Pro-lifers were delighted when one of President George W. Bush's first orders of business was to reinstate the Mexico City policy two days after his inauguration.
“Taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion, either here or abroad,” the Jan. 22, 2001, White House memorandum stated. The memo revived an executive order issued by President Ronald Reagan at the International Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984, which was suspended throughout the eight-year Bill Clinton presidency.
However, two years into the new administration, insiders say, a pro-abortion cadre within the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) continues to channel federal dollars to groups that support abortion, prostitution, homosexual sex and needle-sharing under the guise of “reproductive health.” Ironically, some of the pro-abortion cash is being paid out under “faith-based initiatives” and Bush's $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean.
The allegations come from Wash ington sources that support the executive order and want to ensure Bush's policy is implemented.
One, an unnamed Senate staffer, told C-Fam, the New York-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, that State Department officials are counseling nongovernmental organizations on how to extend the lifeline to pro-abortion groups. By “coaching” activists “on how to circumvent” the Mexico City policy, the Senate staffer told C-Fam's March 7 Friday Fax newsletter, bureaucrats have made Bush's policy “an empty shell.”
A three-page background paper distributed by sources in the House of Representatives documented USAID's March 13 $50 million HIV-AIDS grant to “pro-abortion, pro-prostitution, pro-needle-exchange groups.”
The money, according to USAID's press release, is for a “consortium of international development and faith-based organizations” headed by the aid organization Care, which includes the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Communication Programs, Bri tain't International HIV/AIDS Alliance, the International Center for Research on Women and the World Council of Churches.
Many of these groups openly flout Bush policy. The British AIDS group opposes “marginalization of behaviors such as sex for money, sex between men and injecting drug use” and supports “distribution of safe needles and syringes,” according to its own Web site. The World Council of Churches supports “reproductive rights.”
Another recipient, the International Center for Research on Women, promotes abortion, although spokeswoman Carole Ma honey said it is “strictly a research organization.” One of its projects in India, however, is the “interaction between abortion and women's ability to exercise reproductive rights and choice,” according to center documents.
Press releases from these organizations quote Dr. Anne Peterson, assistant administrator for global health at USAID, saying, “We cannot win this war against AIDS without much broader partnerships with faith and community-based organizations,” a reference to the anti-Bush groups.
Peterson was herself a Bush appointee then believed to have strong pro-life credentials. But in October she announced a $65 million USAID grant to the Population Council, which in September 2000 boasted of having “worked long and hard” to make the mifepristone RU-486 abortion drug “available in the United States.”
More hints of USAID complicity appear in Population Action International's booklet “What You Need To Know About the Global Gag Rule Restrictions” (“global gag rule” is pro-abortionists’ term for the Mexico City policy), a 12-page manual that explains how nongovernmental organizations can get around the regulations and promote abortion. Page 9 refers activists to allies at USAID.
USAID spokesman Alfonso Aguilar was reluctant to comment. Asked whether AIDS money is going to family planning that includes abortion, he said: “That is still to be determined. The president's policy is very clear and both State Department and [US]AID officers are following it.”
As Washington girded for war, White House spokesman Mercy Viana said only that “the president believes in strictly enforcing the Mexico City policy and ensuring that funds are not being used by organizations with family-planning programs.”
“USAID is following that policy,” she said, declining comment on allegations that the guidelines are being foiled by subterfuge.
‘Incestuous’ Network
Pro-life Sens. Rick Santorum, RPa., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., did not return calls for comment. Nor did Congressmen Chris Smith, R-N.J., and Henry Hyde, R-Ill. But sources on Capitol Hill said pro-lifers there are “constantly trying to track where the money goes,” monitoring the “highly incestuous” network of federal employees and nongovernmental organizations determined to keep abortion funds flowing.
To Deal Hudson, the editor of Crisis magazine who is seen as a key link between Bush and orthodox Catholic viewpoints, the allegations come as no surprise.
“The position of those of us who talk to the White House is not to let that money get into the pipeline at all,” he said. “What's got to happen is for the White House to recognize that family planning means abortion, not contraception.”
However, Austin Ruse, the president of C-Fam, believes “90% of the people involved don't know what the Mexico City policy is, even in the White House.”
Pro-abortion groups like it that way. The International Center for Research on Women's Mahoney said there is “a lot of unclarity about what such an application would or wouldn't do ... I haven't seen anything to date about how and when the Mexico City policy would be applied.”
As for whether AIDS money is being used to undermine the spirit of Bush's executive order, Mahoney said: “We have no knowledge of that at all. I am not sure how it applies.”
Hudson said every administration tries to implement its agenda in part by placing loyal staff in key positions. But, he added, “It can be very difficult to overcome entrenched resistance. It's a fact of life.” He said the White House is well aware that it needs to keep an eye on USAID.
Ruse called the issue a “long-term problem in any administration, getting the bureaucracy to do what it wants.”
This is especially true in the area of “family planning,” Ruse said, “because family planners have been so deeply ensconced for decades. Unless the president practically walks over there himself and gives a direct order, they will do exactly what they want.”
Chris Champion writes from Ottawa.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Chris Champion ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: MEDIA WATCH DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:New Catholic Conference Center Opens
The four-story, 50,000-square-foot Michigan Catholic Conference building cost $13 million, according to the paper. It replaces a broken-down motel that formerly was haunted by drug dealers and prostitutes in the struggling downtown neighborhood.
On March 12, Detroit Cardinal Adam Maida blessed the building, which will serve some 2.25 million Catholics in seven Michigan dioceses.
Religious Sister of Mercy Monica Kostielney, president and chief executive officer of the conference, praised the facility, which boasts high-tech computer and communications technology, including teleconferencing capabilities.
The Michigan Catholic Conference acts as lobbyist for the Church on social and economic issues, and manages benefits for thousands of Church employees and retirees.
“It is often said that the anticipation is greater than the reality,” she said. “I don't think so.”
Pews and Coffers Are Less Full in Boston
It reported some 50,000 fewer parishioners attending Mass every week in 2003 than in 2001.
An archdiocesan spokesman admitted that church attendance numbers have fallen, pointing out that the situation varies greatly from parish to parish, estimating the fall at approximately 14%.
The archdiocese also has announced budget cuts. In a letter sent to local pastors in March, apostolic administrator Bishop Richard Lennon said the archdiocesan central operating budget will be cut by $4 million in the coming fiscal year.
Iraqi-Americans Hate Saddam Yet Oppose War
REUTERS, March 16 — As they were anticipating war in Iraq, Catholics of Iraqi descent in the United States are afraid, according to Reuters news service.
Reporting from Detroit, home of approximately 300,000 Arabs — one of the largest concentrations outside the Middle East — the news service found many Iraqi Catholics and Shiites who harbor a deep hatred of embattled dictator Saddam Hussein for his cruel and repressive government.
But they are also afraid of war's effects on their relatives back home, and they overwhelmingly oppose the American attack on that country, questioning U.S. motives and intentions.
“Nobody buys that this is about freedom for the people of Iraq,” said Ismael Ahmed, leader of Access, a Middle-Eastern refugee organization. “Most people in the Arab community think this is about oil and political control.”
Others expressed fear that the attack on an Arab state would produce many civilian deaths, widespread destruction and more terrorist attacks against America. They worried hate crimes against Arab-Americans might increase, which the FBI has warned could happen if a war drags on.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: -------- TITLE: Maryland Bill Would Open Door to Unprecedented Stem-Cell Research DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:ANNAPOLIS, Md. —A ‘stemcell research” bill sitting in a maryland Assembly committee would legalize cloning for the use of the clone's adult stem cells, critics say.
The bill, House Bill 482, is unlike any other. In previous “clone and kill” bills — as pro-lifers have dubbed them — the legislation would allow for the cloning of embryos for use in medical research.
A bill currently in the U.S. Senate sponsored by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein would do just that — authorize so-called “research” or “therapeutic” cloning. A bill in New Jersey, which just nearly was brought to a vote last month, went further, allowing the cloning of an embryo and its harvesting through the newborn stage.
A bill co-sponsored by Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback and Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu — both Catholics — would prohibit all human cloning. Opponents of cloning consider it the only true ban being proposed.
The language of the Maryland bill states, “The General Assembly declares that it is the policy of the state that research involving the derivation and use of human embryonic stem cells, human embryonic germ cells and human adult stem cells from any source, including somatic cell nuclear transplantation, shall be allowed and that full consideration shall be given to the ethical and medical implications of this research.”
Somatic cell nuclear transplantation refers to a technique used to create an embryonic clone and is often used as a euphemism for cloning itself. The danger there, many say, is that it confuses the issue and downplays its significance.
Maryland is one of six states — along with universities, charitable foundations, hospitals and companies — trying to bypass President George W. Bush's August 2001 restrictions on federal funding of stem-cell research.
The report on cloning issued by the President's Council on Bioethics last summer explained, “such terminological substitution is problematic ... Although as a scientific matter ‘somatic cell nuclear transfer’ or ‘nuclear transplantation’ may accurately describe the technique that is used to produce the embryonic clone, these terms fail to convey the nature of the deed itself, and they hide its human significance.”
Curt Civin, a cancer research professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said concerns about the bill are unwarranted because an eventual act by Congress to ensure a procedure that is already technically impractical will be “forbidden and punishable legally.”
A co-sponsor of the legislation, Maryland Delegate Samuel “Sandy” Rosenberg, a Democrat, defended the bill, saying, “It is not my intent to leave the door open for cloning nor to allow obtaining adult stem cells from clones. That is not a reasonable interpretation of the bill. Two distinguished scientists at Johns Hopkins [medical school] would not have sat by my side testifying in support of the bill were this not the case.”
But on the other side of Rosenberg are four members of the President's Commission on Bioethics, who sent a letter to the chairman of the Maryland House Health and Government Operations Committee protesting the legislation.
The commissioners wrote: “The pending legislation expressly authorizes the harvesting and use of human embryonic stem cells, human embryonic germ cells (generally harvested around the eighth week of fetal development), and even human adult stem cells that originate from the human cloning method known as somatic cell nuclear transplantation.
“[T]he bill contemplates the creation of new human beings by cloning and, perhaps unintentionally, their cultivation from the zygote stage through the newborn stage for the purpose of harvesting what the legislation itself refers to as ‘cadaveric’ fetal tissue.”
The letter to Health and Government Operations Committee Chairman John Hurson was signed by Robert George of Princeton University, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard University, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo of Georgetown University, Stanford University's William Hurlbut and Gilbert Meil-aender of Valparaiso University.
The letter warns that the Maryland bill is “not the ethically sound way to go.”
Open Door
Supporters of the legislation point to a California law that allows research cloning but bans reproductive cloning, like the Hatch-Feinstein bill in Congress. But, unlike bills in other states and on the national level, the Maryland bill does not even have an explicit ban on implantation of a cloned embryo, leaving open an unprecedented door to researchers and others.
Maryland Delegate Shane Pendergrass, a Democrat, who is co-sponsoring the bill and sits on the Maryland House Health and Government Operations Committee, said she does not believe the bill leaves open the door for research on the stem cells of clones beyond the embryonic stage and confesses her “discomfort” at such possibilities.
Currently, outside of the committee hearing on March 12, there has been little statewide debate or coverage of the “stem cell research bill” in Maryland. Pendergrass said she is not concerned about the lack of coverage, with other issues such as the budget of more interest to residents.
Pendergrass said she is more concerned about people “with life-begins-at-conception ideas ... making decisions for other people.” Asked about the concerns raised by Doerflinger and members of the bioethics commission, Pendergrass said, “I am sorry, I am not an expert.”
Richard Doerflinger, the deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, testified on behalf of the Maryland Catholic Conference at a committee hearing on the legislation March 12 in Annapolis.
A bill recently introduced in the New York Statehouse would also allow human cloning “and the gestating of cloned embryos through the fetal stage, as long as this is not done for the purpose of producing a live birth,” Doerflinger said in his testimony.
He told the Register the absence of a ban on implantation in the Maryland bill “ensures that this bill in Maryland will have no legal limits.”
“It is based on California's stem-cell law,” Doerflinger said, “but it does not incorporate Cali fornia's anti-reproductive-cloning law.”
Such ban is crucial, Doerflinger said, because “if there is no ban on implantation, there is no ban on cloning to develop fetal farms. There is no practical barrier, be cause one can use women's wombs to bring the embryos to that later stage.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor of National Review Online.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Kathryn Jean Lopez ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- BODY: ----- TITLE: 'Legacy of the Popes' Exhibit Features Paintings, Plaques and Papal Rings DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Father Allen Duston, a Dominican priest from Pasadena, Calif., came to Rome in 1995 to head the office of the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums. As such, he's become the Vatican's point man for the past several years in preparing the exhibit “St. Peter and the Vatican: The Legacy of the Popes,” which just opened in Houston.
He spoke to Register Vatican View columnist Joan Lewis about this exhibit from his wood-paneled office, once the library of Pope Innocent VIII, located just off the Vatican's San Damaso Courtyard, where heads of state arrive for an audience with the Holy Father.
Tell us something about the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums.
Born in 1983 following a major Vatican art exhibit in the United States, the Patrons of the Arts is a group of people dedicated to preserving and restoring the incredibly vast and varied — and truly unique — collection of art housed in the Vatican Museums. More than 3 million people visit the Museums every year, but the cost of a ticket does not cover all the day-to-day expenses. The first to suffer when there is a lack of funds is precisely the restoration and conservation of art.
A number of interested people discovered that some of the pieces for the 1983 exhibit needed restoring, and they offered financial assistance. The next logical step, you might say, was the birth of the Patrons of the Arts, which currently has chapters in 16 U.S. states, Can ada, the United Kingdom and Ger many. The Vatican Museums are not subsidized by Vatican City, the Holy See or any other outside organization or entity, unlike other ma jor museums that receive help, for example, from governments. Thus, a group like the Patrons of the Arts is critical to maintaining the Vatican's superlative collections.
How did the current exhibit, “St. Peter and the Vatican: The Legacy of the Popes,” come about
Actually, one of Pope John Paul II's friends, Jerzy Kluger, during a visit to the United States a few years ago, was speaking to a number of people about the tremendous success of the 1998 exhibit in the United States, “From the Invisible to the Visible: Angels from the Vatican.” Ideas were bandied about and, in a nutshell, the current exhibit was born.
As I was exhibit director of the “Angels” show, they came to me to discuss the idea, which had to receive final approval from Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the governor, you might say, of Vatican City, in whose jurisdiction lie the Vatican Museums.
What will visitors see when they visit the collection in Houston, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Cincinnati and San Diego?
This is the largest collection of objects from the Vatican ever to tour North America. The exhibit occupies approximately 15,000 square feet and includes more than 380 objects, three-quarters of which have never been seen even in Rome or the Vatican. Our goal was to design an exhibit that told the history of the Vatican and to illustrate the Vatican's impact on history and culture during the past 2,000 years.
Thus, visitors will see objects as disparate as a reproduction of the Tomb of St. Peter — in fact, the exhibit starts here — a gold votive plaque found near the tomb, papal rings belonging to Pius IX, Pius X and Leo XIII, paintings of angels designed for St. Peter's dome, and a model of St. Peter's façade that was used for the luminaria — when the façade was covered by lighted candles.
There are also papal vestments, Pope Pius IX's tiara, made of silver and gold and covered in precious gems, papal documents, a 14th-century mosaic by Giotto, drawings by Michelangelo, including some for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a sculpture by Bernini and the pastoral staffs of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.
If most of these works have not been seen before, where have they been stored?
Some items are, of course, from the Vatican Museums, but others come from the archives of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the Fabric of St. Peter's, which is the office responsible for the preservation and maintenance of the basilica, and the sacristy in St. Peter's Basilica.
The largest donor, however, is the Papal Sac risty, which many call the historical sacristy. It is located behind the Sistine Chapel, just beyond the so-called Room of Tears where three sizes of white papal vestments await a newly-elected pope as he prepares to address the world for the first time.
I imagine one of your greatest concerns is the packing and shipping of items in the collection.
We have used the same company to pack items for this show as we have for past ones. Someone from each of the Vatican offices or congregations that have loaned objects to the show is involved in the preparation to some degree or another.
Vatican personnel supervise the packing of each individual item and accompany them at every stage of the trip. A courier travels with the exhibit and oversees the unpacking. “Condition reports” are written as each object is packed and unpacked. But we still hold our breath from start to finish.
What is your biggest thrill after such a long period of preparation?
The most exciting moment is seeing the exhibit installed as planned, where you can actually see the flow of movement that was intended, the story being told in a logical, sequential fashion, with a beginning and an end. And simply to see so many beautiful and historical objects in one place is very moving — and very satisfying. Another satisfaction is the publication of the 500-page catalogue that accompanies the exhibit: It is almost a work of art in itself.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joan Lewis ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: MEDIA WATCH DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:St. Peter Loses a Hand
INDEPENDENT CATHOLIC NEWS, March 14 — A medieval statue of St. Peter at the Vatican has been vandalized, according to Independent Catholic News.
The 13th-century sculpture at St. Peter's was damaged when a vandal knocked off its left hand holding the keys. The sculptor, Arnolfo di Cambio, was also the creator of the better-known bronze statue of the first pope inside the basilica. The hand had been damaged once before, and the missing hand is an 18th-century restoration.
News reports of the theft have circulated widely, with headlines such as “St. Peter Loses Keys to Kingdom.”
Rome vs. Washington
Warner writes: “Despite Islam's fierce hostility to Catholicism, the societies it controls exhibit many values whose abandonment by the materialist Western world is deplored by the Pope. Close-knit family life, in which women's role — although unacceptably circumscribed — is closer to the Marian model of womanhood than to the extreme feminism of urban America; daily life revolving around regular prayer and, in season, fasting; even the misplaced fanaticism of Muslim fundamentalists, reflecting a certainty and a spirit of martyrdom long departed from his own Church — much of this, with heavy qualification, must strike a sympathetic chord with the pontiff. Nor can he have any illusions about the kind of society that America would like to substitute. McDonald's burger bars, rap music, sexual license, individualism demolishing family life and consumerism banishing all sense of religion: Those forces have conquered Catholicism in the West — should the Pope take comfort from a similar overthrow of Islam?”
Warner suggests that with “the liquidation of the legacy of the Russian revolution in 1990, the removal of the Marxist distraction has brought the Church back into confrontation with the heritage of the French Revolution.”
He concludes: “Although Vatican rhetoric is resolutely internationalist, nothing could more menace the Church than eventual world government, predicated on some syncretic religion and employing anti-hate laws to suppress public expression of uncompromising Catholic orthodoxy.”
Vatican Garage Obstructed by Nero's Secretary
It seems Roman tombs dating from the reign of Nero have been found on the site the Vatican had designated for an underground garage and archaeological concerns have stalled construction.
The tombstone of Nero's secretary, along with well-preserved Roman remains, now stands in the way of the 300-space garage, which was started late last year, but Church officials are now reconsidering the whole idea.
“Of course, no one will destroy any archaeological finds,” responded Msgr. Francesco Marchisano, who heads the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology.
Such finds, the paper noted, block many attempted projects in the ancient city.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: 'A Privileged Space for John Paul': George Weigel on the Pope's New Poetry DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — In his 82nd year, Pope John Paul II has come out with his first book of poetry since becoming Pope.
Roman Triptych was a fruit of his trip to Poland last summer. On March 6 the Vatican released an English translation of part of the work, which was published in its entirety in Polish and Italian (the complete English translation is still pending). The excerpted part includes “Meditations on the Book of Genesis at the Threshold of the Sistine Chapel.”
Zenit, a Rome-based news service, asked papal biographer George Weigel his impressions about the part that has appeared in English so far.
It's significant that one of the busiest men in the world finds time — makes the time — to write poetry. What does that say about Pope John Paul II?
The Holy Father is a man of wide-ranging interests and extraordinary energy. His leisure time — spent reading contemporary philosophy, for example — is one part of a very integrated life.
The Holy Father is also a man who believes nothing in life is merely accidental: persons, situations, encounters with others are all, for him, moments he believes are caught up in God's providential purposes in history.
The Pope is certainly “busy,” in the conventional sense of the term, but I think it's more accurate to say that he lives his life intensely — because of his profound conviction that all of life, having been touched by Christ, is a preparation for eternal life.
I was frankly surprised the Pope had returned to poetry — not because of “time” issues, but because he had once said that poetry was a closed chapter in his life.
His last pre-papal poem, “Stanislaus,” is a very moving reflection on his martyr-predecessor as archbishop of Krakow and on living life vocationally. It seemed a fitting conclusion to the pre-papal “chapter” of the Pope's life.
Now, clearly, he has changed his mind; you'd have to ask him why. My assumption is there were things he wanted to say — things he thought important to say — that could best be said in this distinctive way.
So poetry allows John Paul to say things that wouldn't be suitable in other contexts?
I'm not sure “suitable” is quite the right term. Karol Wojtyla has always spoken in many voices, and he chooses the voice to suit the occasion and the material.
As a priest and bishop in Poland, he gave philosophical lectures, he gave sermons and homilies, he spoke on great public occasions, he wrote poems and plays, he wrote pastoral letters — they were all the same Karol Wojtyla, speaking in different “voices” as the circumstances demanded.
Popes, too, speak in many voices: magisterial, doctrinal, pastoral, prophetic. This Pope, being a literary man, also speaks in the voice of an author who believes writing is a form of conversation, of personal encounter, with one's readers.
One intriguing example of this was the Pope's international best seller Crossing the Threshold of Hope. It simply doesn't fit into any of the standard categories of papal writing. Some might find that odd, even threatening.
John Paul was content to let theologians figure out where Threshold fit, so to speak, in the taxonomy of papal writings; he had things to say — profoundly evangelical things — and he simply said them in the form of a book.
Regarding the references to the Sistine Chapel and the election of his successor — how do you read that? Is he trying to give advice to the cardinals?
The Pope is far too much a respecter of the rights and dignity of others to try to give advice to the cardinal-electors who will choose his successor.
When he suppressed the options of papal election by acclamation and by delegation, leaving only the option of choosing a pope by election, he explicitly stated this was being done in order to allow the electors to exercise the personal responsibility that belongs to each of them — and that each of them assumes when he accepts the office of cardinal.
One might even say the Pope was insisting the electors exercise the responsibility that is theirs. Remember that this is a man whose signature phrase as a confessor was, “You must decide.” Making serious decisions is, in Wojtyla's long-standing view, an integral part of what it means to be a truly hu man person. So he certainly isn't giving advice to the cardinal-electors.
The Sistine Chapel seems to be a privileged “space” for John Paul. At its rededication, after the completion of the restoration of Michelangelo's frescoes, he called it the sanctuary of the theology of the body.
In the Sistine Chapel, human beings confront the fact of their creatureliness, in its fragility and grandeur, in a very powerful way. Then there is the sheer beauty of the Sistine Chapel — an intimation of the beauty of the Kingdom, of heaven. And then there is the awesome imagery of the Last Judgment. It's very difficult to ponder that extraordinary work of art and not get a very profound sense of the truth of “you must decide.”
So it's an appropriate place to choose the successor of Peter, the keeper of the keys.
What is the historical significance of this Pope as artist? Is he trying to reconcile art and faith?
Modern religious thought has generally found room for truth and goodness as attributes of the divine, but it's been perhaps less attentive to beauty.
Yet, for the ancient philosophers as well as for the Church over many centuries, beauty, too, is revelatory of the truth of things — and the truth of things always points toward the one truth, who is God.
So beauty is a path to God, and the artist, in creating beautiful things, can be someone who attunes us to the rumors of angels — as Peter Berger happily called them — that are all around us.
The Pope is certainly not opposed to modern trends in art. But modern artistic forms can be damaged, even corrupted, by nihilism: music, the plastic arts and literature self-consciously created in order to proclaim the utter meaningless of life. The Pope's Letter to Artists was, in this sense, an appeal from one artist to others to rediscover the dignity of the artistic vocation, which has to do with beauty, which has to do with truth — which has to do with God.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: English Vox Clara Committee Continues Examining Translation Document DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — English-speaking bishops appointed to advise the Vatican on liturgical translations continued their examination of a document that will provide detailed translation principles and specific translation suggestions, the Vatican said.
The Vox Clara Committee met at the Vatican on March 12–14, said the statement posted on the Web site of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments.
The committee members, under the leadership of Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, Australia, continued their discussion of a proposed ratio translationis, which the congregation described as a tool “providing principles for translation that are specific to a given language.”
Vox Clara, which includes 11 bishops from eight countries, began reviewing the document during a November meeting at the Vatican.
The Vatican also said members continued examining sample translations of parts of the new Roman Missal, which contains the texts for all the prayers at Mass.
The congregation said the samples would be used as “exemplars of liturgical translations that conform to the criteria established by the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam,” the 2001 Vatican document stressing the need for fidelity and precision when translating Mass texts from the original Latin.
The Vatican did not say who developed the sample translations.
The press release said the committee also discussed “recent initiatives by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy to assure effective application of the principles of Liturgiam Authenticam” to work under way on the English translation of the new Roman Missal.
ICEL, sponsored by 11 bishops’
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: St. Joseph: Humble Worker, Faithful Father and Husband DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Today we celebrate the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Mary's spouse (Matthew 1:24; Luke 1:27). The liturgy describes him as the “father” of Jesus (Luke 2:27, 33, 41, 43, 48), who was ready to carry out God's plan, even when it defied human understanding. Through this “son of David” (Matthew 1:20; Luke 1:27), the Scriptures were fulfilled and the Eternal Word became man by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. St. Joseph is described in the Gospel as a “righteous man” (Matthew 1:19), and he is a model for all believers of a life lived in faith.
Joseph the Just Man
The word “righteous” refers to his moral integrity, his sincere attachment to following the law and his attitude of total openness to the will of his heavenly Father. Even in difficult and, at times, dramatic moments, this humble carpenter from Nazareth never assumed he had the right to question God's plan. He waited for a call from above and silently respected this mystery, allowing the Lord to guide him. Once the task was entrusted to him, he carried it out with docile responsibility. He listened carefully to the angel when he was asked to take the Virgin of Nazareth as his wife (see Matthew 1:18–25), at the time of their flight to Egypt (see Matthew 2:13–15) and at the time of their return to Israel (see Matthew 2:19–23). In a few short but significant lines, the Gospel writers describe him as Jesus’ attentive guardian and as a considerate and faithful husband, who exercises his family authority with a constant attitude of service. Sacred Scripture does not tell us anything more about him, but in this silence is the key to the very style of his mission: a life that was lived out in the grayness of everyday life but with unwavering faith in Providence.
Joseph the Worker
Every day St. Joseph had to provide for the needs of his family through hard manual labor. For this reason, the Church rightly singles him out as the patron saint of workers. Therefore, today's solemnity is also an appropriate occasion to reflect on the importance of work in man's life, in the family and in the community.
Man is the subject and protagonist of work and, in the light of this truth, we can clearly perceive the fundamental link that exists between a person, work and society. Human activity, the Second Vatican Council reminds us, proceeds from man and is ordered to man. According to God's will and design, it must serve the real good of mankind and “enable men as individuals and as members of society to pursue and fulfill their total vocation” (see Gaudium et Spes, 35).
A Spirituality of Work
In order to fulfill this task, a “tested spirituality of human work” must be cultivated that is solidly rooted in the “Gospel of work,” and believers are called to proclaim and bear witness to the Christian meaning of work in their different occupational activities (see Laborem Exercens, 26).
May St. Joseph, who is such a great yet humble saint, be an example in whom Christian workers find their inspiration, calling upon him in every circumstance. To this provident guardian of the Holy Family of Nazareth, I would like to entrust to day those young people who are pre paring for their future profession, those who are unemployed and those who are suffering as a result of underemployment, families, and the entire working world with its characteristic expectations, challenges, problems and prospects.
May St. Joseph, the universal patron of the Church, watch over the entire ecclesial community and, being the man of peace that he was, obtain for all mankind — especially for the peoples who are threatened at this time by war — the precious gift of harmony and peace.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Register Summary DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Pope John Paul II highlighted the “spirituality of work” when he met with several thousand pilgrims during his general audience on March 19 — the feast of St. Joseph.
Even though the Gospel writers devote very few lines to St. Joseph, the Holy Father emphasized the many ways in which St. Joseph served the Holy Family. Not only was St. Joseph the foster father of Jesus and Mary's faithful husband, he was also a “righteous man” of high, moral integrity, who sincerely followed God's law and was completely open to doing God's will.
However, Pope John Paul II pointed out that St. Joseph was also a laborer. “Every day St. Joseph had to provide for the needs of his family through hard manual labor,” he noted. “For this reason, the Church rightly singles him out as the patron saint of workers.” The Solemnity of St. Joseph, he said, is an appropriate occasion to reflect on the meaning of work.
“We can clearly perceive the fundamental link that exists between a person, work and society,” the Holy Father said. “According to God's will and design, it must serve the real good of mankind. In order to fulfill this task, a ‘tested spirituality of human work’ must be cultivated that is solidly rooted in the ‘Gospel of work.’”
John Paul ended his general audience by entrusting to St. Joseph's intercession the young who are preparing for their professions, those who are unemployed and underemployed, families and the entire working world. He also prayed that St. Joseph, a man of peace, might obtain for all mankind the “precious gift of peace” for a world threatened by war.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: 'Living Stones' will pay for half your house......but, yes, there is a catch! DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:An ambitious project is uniting Catholics from around the world to rebuild the broken lives of children while providing the opportunity for families to, at last, permanently lift themselves out of poverty. Fundamental to the project is a matching program to enable poor families to afford a dignified home in a community that offers a new parish church, a school, a clinic, job training, water and sewage treatment, basics that have been unavailable in rural areas. “We are applying a proven model, based on two other communities we have built in the aftermath of natural disasters,” said Fr. Pedro Pablo Elizondo, LC, President of
The disaster
In January and February 2001, three large earthquakes in just 40 days devastated El Salvador, the largest registering 7.6 on the Richter Scale. Ten thousand aftershocks followed. Massive landslides followed the earthquakes, destroying homes and the coffee fields that were the only source of income to so many manual laborers. Thousands of people were killed or seriously injured.
It's estimated that one million homes were destroyed in a country of only six million people. A third of the Catholic Churches were destroyed. Survivors lost everything and were left in abject poverty.
The situation today
And the world, distracted by other issues, has now turned away. Two years later, homes still lie in rubble. An El Salvadoran government official said, “We received international aid for the initial emergency two years ago, to feed and clothe survivors—but not enough to actually reconstruct. It has taken us two years to rebuild less than 25% of what was destroyed in just two minutes.”
In fact, the world has forgotten the people here – families forced to live without shelter in blistering heat, torrential rain and mosquito-filled nights. People are living in cardboard boxes, plastic bags, falling down shacks. Disease is rampant as children bathe and drink from dirty streams.
The chance for a dignified home, not a quick-fix shelter
After El Salvador's 1986 earthquakes, the government erected shelters measuring 35 square meters each and gave them free to the victims of the earthquakes...and in less than a year, these huts were overrun by gangs, drugs, and crime. Every single one of the families who had originally received the shelters had moved out to protect themselves. Following the 2001 earthquakes, similar shelters—simple one or two room huts—were built by a number of international charities, but many already lie empty and abandoned, because mere shelter does-n't really solve the problems of the impoverished earthquake victims.
Juan Jose Siman, an El Salvadoran businessman involved in the emergency relief efforts, noted, “I saw that the people we were helping weren's just survivors of the earthquakes, they were survivors of life. My experience convinced me that we required a different approach to make a permanent impact on their lives: we required Jesus Christ. I approached
The response: apply the experience from rebuilding communities following two natural disasters in Mexico. Two communities were rebuilt—one near Mexico City after an earthquake, one near Acapulco after devastating mudslides three years ago. These efforts really work, too. After 17 years, the community near Mexico City is vibrant and still growing— a proven model for long-term transformation of a community.
‘Living Stones’
A complete community
On a private donation of 17 acres, groundbreaking for the ‘Living Stones’ community took place in November 2002 after months of ground preparation to make it able to resist both earthquakes and hurricanes. Located in the municipality of Santiago Nonualco, the worst hit by the earthquakes, ‘Living Stones’ is minutes from the International Airport and near the government's industrial magnet zone. With these jobs nearby, new homeowners can also become new employees with good-paying jobs.
Real Homes for the poor...
The Living Stones community is attacking the family housing shortage by constructing 232 cement and tile roof homes at a cost of $7,000 per home ($1.624 million dollars total). Rebuilding El Salvador will take years and cost billions, but these 232 homes will be a strong beginning.
These are not only shelters, but dignified homes. Twice the size of the typical house built with charitable aid, the ‘Living Stones’ homes are 70 square meters, with separate rooms for living, sleeping, and cooking—plus running water, toilet facilities, electricity, and telephone. Instead of cramming the entire family into one immodest sleeping area, they have three bedrooms: one for the parents, one for the girl children, and one for the boys.
Plus what is needed for a healthy Catholic community...
Construction began Feb 4th on a “Mano Amiga” (“Helping Hand”) school—the 17th one Catholic World Mission will support—so area children will receive a top-notch Catholic education, offering them a bright future overflowing with opportunity. In March, work will begin on a clinic to care for the families, job training facilities to improve the skills of the breadwinners, recreation center and parks for all to enjoy, and a new Catholic church to serve all those in the parish.
Half-price homes...with a catch
The El Salvadoran government has guaranteed low-interest 20 year mortgages covering half the cost of the house— $3,500. The residents will be expected to make payments on these mortgages and will eventually own a home for the first time in their lives!
The catch? To obtain these mortgages,
“We are offering generous donors from North America the chance to ‘buy a home for half price,’ explained Fr. Elizondo. “With a gift of $3,500 to build one home for one family, a beautiful bronze plaque with your name inscribed on it will be placed in a place of honor inside the home. Parishes and other groups of Catholics are pooling their funds to make this down payment, which will be matched by the El Salvadoran government—and more than matched by the gratitude and prayers of a new homeowner in the Body of Christ.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Supporters of 'Living Stones' DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:“Living Stones is a new concept for our country.
Other reconstruction projects are only houses, just shelters...but what you are building provides health, education, job training and access to good jobs. I believe ‘Living Stones’ will launch people into a new life. Our hope is that you will be very successful, so we can have a lot of ‘Living Stones’ communities, not just for earthquake survivors but for all those who need a new beginning.”
–Patricia Fortín, General Manager FISDL El Salvador Federal Aid Distribution Office
“Living Stones is a model city. We know that there is not one like it in the entire country. Our town feels so blessed to have the first of these towns.
“I would like to assure all of those who are making the “Living Stones” project bloom in Santiago Nonualco that you are truly helping our municipality to get back on its feet again after the earthquakes. As a municipality, we thank you very much, and we ask that God multiplies all the generous help that you are sending to us.”
–Marvin Morena de Canales, Mayor of Santiago Nonualco
“Living Stones will build for us not just 232 houses, but a vision for a new atmosphere and environment for the family, which has become so weakened in our country. With the help of Catholic World Mission, we will restore the dignity of the family, create marriages where there are now only parents of children, and rescue the children from lives of ignorance, disease, and despair. I wish all God's blessings on these works.”
–Monseñor Elias Bolaños, Bishop of Zacatecoluca
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- BODY: TITLE: Five Years After John Paul's Visit, Cuban Catholics Impatient for Reform DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:HAVANA — Catholic commemorations in Cuba have been almost nonexistent since the Marxist Revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959.
Nevertheless, the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the death of Father Felix Varela, a founding father of Cuba, has sparked an unprecedented awakening that could mark a new moment for the Catholic Church.
Even Castro visited a religious institution as recently as March 8, speaking at the inauguration of a renovated convent in Havana.
The figure of Father Varela looms large in the minds of Cuban Catholics, especially since Pope John Paul II presented him as a model of Catholic engagement with public life during his visit to Cuba five years ago.
Born in Havana in 1788, the priest became a leading educator, philosopher and patriot. In 1821, he was elected to the Spanish Legislature, where he recommended the recognition of the independence of the Spanish colonies in Latin America and an end to slavery. Because of his progressive ideas, he had to flee to the United States, where he lived until his death on Feb. 25, 1853.
Several Cuban dioceses this year decided to celebrate the anniversary of that death. In some places — such as Santiago de Cuba, the diocese of the outspoken Bishop Pedro Meurice Estiú — the celebration turned into an occasion to express the increasing Catholic impatience for reform.
In fact, at a Mass in Santiago, which was attended by 700 people, including some 80 well-known local dissidents, a petition was read asking for the government to open up to Father Varela's teaching regarding human rights and religious freedom.
But probably the most important event was the unexpected pastoral letter signed by Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, archbishop of Havana. The usually reticent archbishop issued a 17-page letter in which, for the first time, he spoke out about religious, social, political and even economic oppression.
“Many of our brethren turn to the Catholic Church in Cuba, asking for a word about the future, because the Cuban people experience a widespread and generalized fear of the future,” the letter says.
Cardinal Ortega criticized the absence of Catholic schools and called for a reduction in the tax rate so people would not have to resort to “illegal work activities.”
“The time has come to go from the avenging state that demands sacrifices and settles accounts to the merciful state that is ready to lend a compassionate hand before it imposes controls and punishes infractions,” he wrote.
“Civil laws must guarantee freedom, but freedom does not originate in civil laws; man is free because God created him free,” the letter said.
In Florida, Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, said the bishops in Cuba are reacting to a variety of factors, but the most important of them is that “the Cuban regime has not provided much space” for the Church since the Pope's visit.
In fact, according to Orlando Márquez, head of communications of the Archdiocese of Havana, Cardinal Ortega has acknowledged the hope for an opening from the government has been frustrated.
“On Jan. 11, Cardinal Ortega told journalists that very little, if anything, has changed since the Holy Father's visit to Cuba,” Márquez said. “This letter, obviously, conveys that same feeling and that same message.”
Collar Ban?
In fact, daily life is not easy for Cuban Catholics. According to Luis Ramón Hernández, a journalist who covers religious events, Catholics have been facing increasing limitations on public expressions of faith, such as processions or public prayers.
“Lately, Catholics in Cuba have found their way around by not making formal requests for processions,” Hernández said. “Catholics just go out, the priests go without their clerical vestments, and they walk in silence, without incense or candles. That's the way they leave authorities without legal ground to repress them.”
But things are worse for those who dare to bring their Catholic faith to the public square.
Oswaldo Payá, the founder and leader of a civic movement to democratize Cuba called Proyecto Va rela, can speak from experience. As a militant Catholic, he was sent to a labor camp when he was 17 for not joining the Communist Youth organization. Only in the last two years has his increasing fame prevented him from being the target of the usual government harassment.
Speaking about Payá on Jan. 11, Cardinal Ortega said “the Church does not officially support the Varela Project because we have no political mission, but the Church does support freedom of conscience.” Payá, he said, has remained true to his conscience.
Despite Havana's policy of intimidation, Catholics in Cuba seem to be stirring, and, according to Suchlicki, their voices are being heard.
At a recent Mass celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Diocese of Pinar del Río, Bishop José Siro González Bacal lao urged Cuban Catholics to “re main in Cuba to build the new nation.”
Payá's attendance at the Mass despite the presence of government security agents created a stir among the crowd. Many milled around him after the ceremony, and some even dared to shout, “you will be our next president!”
Though Castro's presence at the dedication of a Brigittine convent in Havana on March 8 was described by much of the international press as a move to reach out to Catholics, local analysts are less optimistic. In fact, they point out the significant absence of Cuba's top Catholic leader, Cardinal Ortega.
“We are here today to dedicate not a school, a polyclinic, a factory, a hotel or any other of the thousands of social or economic works carried out by the revolution but rather the new home of a noble, symbolic and prestigious religious institution,” Castro said during the blessing of the two-story convent, which was broadcast live on state television and radio.
With Cardinal Crescencio Sepe, prefect of the Congregation for Evangelization, and Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez, archbishop of Guadalajara, Mexico, standing near, Castro also praised the Holy Father for his efforts to prevent war in the Persian Gulf.
According to Payá, “the government's authorization for the sisters cannot be regarded as an openness to the Church. It is no more than an isolated event.”
Alejandro Bermúdez is based in Lima, Peru.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alejandro BermÚdez ----- KEYWORDS: News ----- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Will Great Britain Persecute the Church — Again?
Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has drawn up draft regulations to accord with a European Union directive outlawing discrimination based on “sexual orientation.”
The Anglican archbishops of Canterbury and York warned that this law could lead to a “fundamental” conflict between religious freedom and the power of the state, and demanded exemptions for religious institutions.
Homosexual activist groups in the United Kingdom might be preparing to file a string of legal actions based on the new bill, the Telegraph suggested.
Spokesmen for Blair's government have said it is still too early to decide whether churches will be exempt from this law.
The Anglican bishops noted that other regulations proposed by the government would, according to the Telegraph, “bar Church organizations, charities or schools who hired Christian staff from sacking them if they became atheists or even Satanists.”
Albanian Ecumenism Can Bring Reconciliation
FIDES, March 16 — The Catholic bishops of Southeastern Europe met in mid-March in Shkoder, Albania, to discuss interreligious peace.
The bishops of Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro, Romania and Turkey focused on the theme, “Ecumenism: From Tolerance to Dialogue for Collaboration.”
Archbishop Stanislaw Hocevar of Belgrade suggested Christians from these European nations — which have witnessed great violence in the past century between religious groups — must serve as “schools of reconciliation” from which all Europe can learn tolerance and mutual respect. They suggested Catholics rediscover elements proper to the Eastern Christian tradition, such as the richness of symbols, the language of art and the sense of the sacred.
One Eastern Orthodox attendee, the Metropolitan Archbishop Joan Pelushi of Albania, said ecumenism was essential for political stability in the Balkans.
Groups of Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox young people joined discussions on the need to work together to promote human rights, fight drug abuse, promote peace and build civil society.
Churches Burn in India
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 11 — Two Hindu nationalists have been charged with torching a Protestant church in southern India, the wire service reported.
In the village of Panavilai, in Tamil Nadu state, a thatch-roofed Protestant church was destroyed by fire March 9. The same day, a Hindu motorcycle gang attacked a Catholic village chapel.
Some 15 young men arrived on motorcycles and barged into St. Pio's Chapel at Devagere, near Bangalore. The men tore the priest's cassock, spat in his face, poured red powder from a Hindu shrine around the church, damaged a statue and tried to force the priest to ridicule the Pope.
It is suspected the youth gang are members of Bajrang Dal, affiliated with the Hindu nationalist party that now governs India.
A local Christian group denounced the attack: “The indigenous terrorists are only interested in sowing the seeds of hatred to divide different communities in the name of religion,” it stated.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: For Quick Success DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:With the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq under way, the Register will take Abraham Lincoln as its role model. When President James Polk started the Mexican-American War, he could rely on Congressman Lincoln to vote for supplies and provisions for the American forces there.
But when the White House demanded a resolution from Congress recognizing the justice of the war, Lincoln refused to vote for it. He said the war was unjust. For that reason Lincoln did not seek a second term; he knew he could not have been re-elected.
Like Congressman Lincoln, we have argued that war isn't the right answer to the situation in Iraq. But now, our president has ordered the invasion. Our arguments will fall silent. We join our fellow Americans in wishing our troops well.
We even hope and pray that American intervention will be successful — that it really will establish democracy and increase world peace, and that it will be the last such invasion.
In this, we have another role model: Pope John Paul II. U.S. News and World Report in 1991 recounted how the Pope reacted when the first Gulf War was under way.
The week he ordered U.S. troops into combat, George Bush Sr. was filled with self-doubt, regretting the failure of his efforts at diplomacy. A letter Bush received from the Holy Father comforted him. It said John Paul “said he was praying for peace but if hostilities broke out, he hoped the United States would win quickly and with minimal casualties.”
It's the same spirit Bishop Donald Wuerl showed in Pittsburgh the week the new Gulf War began.
“Just two weeks ago we gathered here,” he said in a homily the day after the invasion began, “in a context of prayer for peace. Much has changed since then. ... What is fact is that our president has made this judgment and we are all called to support him in prayer that God will give him wisdom and guidance as our national leader.”
Then he added, “Across this land, men and women in uniform as part of our Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard are responding to the call of their nation in what is described as its legitimate defense. Our prayers must be with them and for them. They have not asked for this struggle but are asked to place themselves in harm's way for the sake of their nation.”
Prayers for the troops, it seems, are paying off.
Our correspondents report on the many conversions and “reversions” that are occurring as troops go to war: “multitudes” of marriages being blessed by the Church, RCIA candidates cutting to the chase and being baptized early by special dispensation, daily Masses filled with congregants who say rosaries afterward, and many men and women returning to confession after a long hiatus.
If our troops are returning to God, the people of Iraq are doing so, also — in sadness and fear.
Papal nuncio Archbishop Fernando Filoni described it to our correspondent.
“We are living day by day, as always,” he said. “It is outside of our logic to show fear, even though it exists. We have faith in prayer. We show solidarity with our brothers and sisters here. We are trying to live these moments with serenity.”
Chaldean Archbishop Emmanuel-Karim Delly of Baghdad told us, “Every night, we have been praying the rosary for peace. Our Holy Mother will protect us and help us get out of this war, safe and sound.”
His words echo the Holy Father's. “I wish to renew my pressing appeal to increase our commitment to prayer and penance to beg Christ for the gift of his peace,” the Pope said.
We can join in that prayer and penance. We wish success to the men and women who are putting their lives on the line for America — a swift, effective end that minimizes the losses to the long-suffering people of Iraq. We pray for the clearest success of all: a lasting peace.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: LETTER DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Peace and the Predator
Thank you for the analysis you provided in the “Three Catholic Voices on the Iraq Conflict” (March 23–29). The interviews, while leaving several unanswered questions in my mind, did a good job of laying out the complexities of the moral dilemma facing many Catholics and other persons of good will.
I wish to comment on one of the points made by Archbishop Renato Martino. I find his attempt to draw comparisons between the Catholic positions on just war and capital punishment to be seriously flawed.
For one thing, the issue of capital punishment comes under consideration only after the perpetrator of a heinous crime has been captured and neutralized, often after violent and potentially lethal action, by the police. In this case we are concerned with the question of how to keep the criminal neutralized and not with how to defend against ongoing attacks by an at-large predator as is the case in time of war.
Second, the argument against capital punishment is predicated on the assumption that the criminal can be kept from further violence through the application of non lethal force, that is, through incarceration. We have no such alternative with the situation in Iraq. Saddam Hussein has a history of lies and deceptions that render negotiation meaningless in his case.
Finally, the archbishop's claim that there is no proportionality between the offense and the reply seems predicated on the assumption that nuclear weapons are to be used.
In fact, it is precisely the fear that nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction are presently or soon to be in the hands of an adversary who has demonstrated a willingness to use them that has prompted us to enter into this conflict.
The weapons that we see employed by the United States, while not flawless, have thus far been less destructive of noncombatants and their property than the so-called conventional weapons of World War II.
Neither the cause of peace nor the proper formation of a Catholic conscience is well served by this kind of flawed logic and naive wishful thinking. We need a meaningful way to deal with untrustworthy aggressors that enables us to comply with both biblical admonitions: “thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13) and “nor shall you stand idly by while your neighbor's life is in danger” (Leviticus 19:16). Perhaps we are called to the total self-denial that reflects the Christ of Philippians 2:6-7, but it serves no useful purpose to claim that peace can be achieved by pretending evil people will act honorably.
ROBERT J. CHARLESWORTH Burlington, Vermont
Internal Rot Our Downfall
It is the day following President Bush's 48-hour ultimatum, and the first words from Scripture at Mass this morning were “Hear the word of the Lord, O princes of Sodom! Listen to the instruction of our God, people of Gomorrah! Wash yourselves clean!” But there is no call to repentance from our pulpits and I have hardly heard the word “confession” mentioned this Lent. Do we presume we have no sins? How else does the devil enter in?
I cannot help but think that, if our Church leaders recognized the moral malaise upon us as individuals and as an institution and directed us to the confessional (thinking that perhaps just a few of the people who receive en masse each Sunday might be eating unto their condemnation), we might be made leaven of peace for this society. And imagine if then our political leaders spent a fraction of the energy and will used in fighting terrorism to fight the deep moral problems besetting this nation, what might then happen to our country.
Evil despots have fodder for their unholy wars not because we are Christian but because we are not. Not even in the Church. If it were not so, the devil would have no door through which to enter and cause a fear of death, easily breaking down men's unwashed souls. We would be [a people] of love and so celebrating that, if persecution should then come to us, we were worthy of suffering for the Lord. But as it is, we stand confused, alone, apart from the Lord — without the grace his Bride on earth does offer.
JAMES KURT Jersey City, New Jersey
Pray for Peace, Support the War
Your editorial “Working to Stop the War” (March 16-22) rightly refers to what ought to bind the Catholic conscience but fails to command assent on American Catholics’ duty with respect to Iraq.
The arguments of the many Catholic bishops you cite in support of your position bear striking resemblance to those of countless leftist academics, Hollywood luminaries and misguided “allies” whose financial interests in the current Iraqi regime compel them to disdain any change to it and whose evident anti-Americanism impels them to compound their error in judgment. This position is uninstructive for a practical understanding of what must be done — and something must be done — to confront Iraq.
All reasonable people pray for peace, preferring peace to war. In the interest of international security, an end to Iraqi tyranny, the domestic security of the United States and the furtherance of the legitimate offensive against terrorism, war is necessary and inevitable. The United States does not require U.N. authorization to pursue its own national interests; we are a sovereign nation.
Nor does the growing international coalition require further U.N. authorization, as the Security Council's unanimous agreement on Resolution 1441 and other resolutions authorize this enforcement.
While faithful American Catholics continue to pray for peace as the Holy Father encourages, the more discerning among us also brace prayerfully for this just war. To this extent, you are correct that we need not choose between our Pope and our president, as there is harmony among their positions. This harmony reflects the binding nature of the Church's pronouncements on matters of faith and morals, and our appreciation of the demands of political prudence, about which the Church is admittedly unable to make binding pronouncements.
Therefore, the time is now for the National Catholic Register — and American Catholics — to acknowledge our duty to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is his: Pray for peace in the world, and support the president in this just war against tyranny and terrorism, on all fronts, and in building the foundation for peace in the world.
EDWARD O'CONNOR New Haven, Connecticut
Beating Back Bullies
Last Sunday there was an article in our local paper from the Knight-Ridder news service titled “Iraq's exiles in Jordan recall fear under Saddam.” It tells a very human side of Saddam's evil. It relates how one woman for failing to meet her quota of donations was badly beaten along with her family. Another woman tells how she was forced into prostitution at some of the regime's elite parties. Both women believe their newborn children were killed because “the regime needed expendable children as a propaganda tool to combat United Nations economic sanctions against Iraq.” There have been enough stories surfacing like this one for one to believe it is true. One only needs to read the biography of Stalin to understand that these things do occur in this world.
The Catholic Church teaches that we all have consciences and, properly cultivated, they are the truth we need to follow. My question is this: If you were walking down an alley and you saw some, for lack of a better word, bully kill a woman's child and rape her, what would your conscience demand?
I know what would be required of me and I would pray that the Lord would give me the strength and courage to stop the evil. I only hope that if it was your wife that was in that alley that at the very least you would be appreciative of what I was trying to accomplish.
DON MOGA Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
Older and Less Secure
Regarding “Aging America” (Facts of Life, March 9-15):
The big reason 20% of the population will soon be over 65 is because the United States has killed more than 40 million in legalized abortion. Those children will not be around to pay social security to support that 20%.
Another sad fact of the abortion sin!
FATHER JOHN R. LONG Rib Lake, Wisconsin
Upside-Down World
After reading “Canadian Laws Pit Freedom Against ‘Homosexual Rights”” (March 16-22) and many other articles, I have concluded that society has slid down the slippery slope. Homosexuals want to get married; heterosexuals only want to live together.
God help us all.
DEANNA CHARVES Marlborough, Massachusetts
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Media Bureaucrats In Ireland Trounce Religious Freedom DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Last fall a group of Christian businessmen in Ireland organized and funded an advertising campaign called the Power to Change.
Based on a Canadian campaign of the same name, it was evangelical in tone — it sold directly to people the person of Christ and told them, as the name implied, that Jesus has the power to change your life.
The campaign won the backing of all the main churches in Ireland, including the Catholic Church. After all, what theological objection could the Church raise against a campaign with such a simple message. And don't Catholics believe Jesus has to power to change lives?
The businessmen behind the campaign planned to spend well in excess of a million euros on it. In Irish terms that's big money, and nothing like this had ever before been spent on Christian advertising.
But the organizers failed to reckon on Irish broadcasting regulations and the extremely strict interpretation of those regulations by the broadcasting authorities.
Those authorities decided the ads as planned couldn't be aired because they directly pitched the Christian message. The campaign that ran into no obstacles in Canada ran into a brick wall in Ireland. In the end, a much blander version of the ad was allowed to run and as a result it failed to have the desired impact.
The newspaper I edit, The Irish Catholic, ran into a similar problem several years before. In 1999 we tried to advertise on local radio. We were blocked, and this time not because our ads contained a Christian message. It was enough that the newspaper itself was religious. It didn't matter what the ad actually said.
The argument used by broadcast regulators was that since the law banned from the airwaves any ad “directed toward a religious or political end,” we could not advertise under any circumstances. At the time, I objected that politically oriented papers were allowed to advertise with very few restrictions. But this cut no ice with the powers that be. And it came to pass that the religious press in Ireland, and religious organizations generally, found themselves operating under some of the most restrictive broadcasting regulations in the Western world.
Our ad opened with the line: ‘These are hard times for the Church, so hard it's easy to forget all the good the Church does.’ Ireland banned it.
How did this happen?
Uppermost in the minds of those who framed this law was fear of sectarianism. They were in dread of religious groups using the airwaves to attack one another. Secondly, they were worried that groups such as the Scientologists would use a liberal broadcasting law to their own advantage. Thirdly, the law ended up being interpreted in a manner that its framers never envisaged. Never did they imagine it could be used to ban a simple contents-based ad for the main Catholic paper in the country.
But that's what happened.
Happily, when news of the ban on The Irish Catholic got out, quite a number of politicians and even some of the main daily newspapers came to our assistance.
“Enough is enough” is the gist of what they had to say. This was secular, post-Catholic Ireland gone too far. Our cause was helped by the fact that broadcast regulators in Northern Ireland had no problem allowing our ads to go on air.
If authorities in religiously divided Northern Ireland had no fears of our ads fanning the flames of sectarian hatred, how could the broadcasting authorities in the Republic claim this was a real fear in the much more religiously homogeneous South?
They couldn't, and the result was that a year after the ban was imposed the offending legislation was amended and made less restrictive.
'But the story doesn's end there. This year we decided to try to advertise on the radio again. The Irish Catholic was running a series of articles reminding readers of the Church's important contributions to society. Our ad opened with the line: “These are hard times for the Church, so hard it's easy to forget all the good the Church does.”
Again, we found ourselves banned.
We were told the ad could not point out that the Church does good work. This was advertising the merits of belonging to the Catholic Church, officials claimed, and so was banned even by the revised legislation. The original Power to Change campaign was banned for this same reason. But once again, we had no problem running our ad in the North. Neither did the Power to Change campaign.
Encouragingly, the result of the ban was another fuss. Again, politicians and some columnists weighed in against the ban and said the legislation would have to be looked at one more time.
The upshot is that the minister for communications is considering how to change the legislation to prevent the broadcasting authorities from continually coming up with ludicrous interpretations that weigh far more heavily on religious publications than on secular ones.
If nothing else, the row did wonders for the profile of The Irish Catholic and illustrated that there are still people left in Ireland who believe in religious freedom properly understood.
So I guess in a perverse sort of way, we really ought to be thanking the broadcasting authorities for that.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Quinn ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Gnosticism and the Struggle for the World's Soul DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:What do Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, The Matrix, Masonry, New Age and the Raelian cult, which claims to have cloned the first baby, have in common?
Their ideological soil. Identical esoteric ideas suf-fuse the novels, the movies, the lodges, the “alternative spirituality” and the cloning “atheistic religion,” and this ideological soil has a name — Gnosticism.
“Gnosticism” is an eerie word whose meaning eludes our minds. I often meet Catholics who have heard the term but have only a foggy idea of what it means. Perhaps Gnosticism itself is foggy.
Yet, whether we understand it or not, Gnosticism may be, at the beginning of the third millennium, the most dangerous enemy to our Christian faith. Notice, I'm not saying Star Wars or Harry Potter is the danger. They provide us with good lessons and fine entertainment. They are just two signs of the power of the real enemy: Gnosticism.
Why? What is Gnosticism?
In one dense but masterful summary, we find the essential aspects of Gnosticism. In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II writes:
“A separate issue is the return of ancient Gnostic ideas under the guise of the so-called New Age. We cannot delude ourselves that this will lead toward a renewal of religion. It is only a new way of practicing Gnosticism — that attitude of the spirit that, in the name of a profound knowledge of God, results in distorting his word and replacing it with purely human words. Gnosticism never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity. Instead, it has always existed side by side with Christianity, sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement, but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian.”
Let's examine what the Holy Father is saying about Gnosticism.
‘Secret Knowledge”?
First, its nature. Strictly speaking, Gnosticism was an esoteric religious movement of the first centuries A.D., a movement that rivaled Christianity. In a broader sense, it is an esoteric knowledge of higher religious and philosophic truths to be acquired by an elite group. John Paul alludes to the first meaning with the phrase “ancient Gnostic ideas” and to the second as an “attitude of the spirit” that “has always existed side by side with Christianity.”
A Gnostic is one who has gnosis (a Greek word for “knowledge”) — a visionary or mystical “secret knowledge” capable of joining the human being to the divine mystery. Gnostics, the Pope remarked, distort God's word “in the name of a profound knowledge of God.” What is this “knowledge” they claim to have?
The Gnostic worldview is dualistic. Reality consists of two irreducible elements: one good, the spiritual world (the realm of light); and the other evil, matter (the realm of darkness). Two supreme powers or gods oppose each other — the unknowable and inef-fable god, from whom a series of lesser divinities emanated, and the evil god, or demiurge, who produced the universe from foul matter and possesses it with his evil demons.
Man is composed of body, soul and spirit. The spirit is man's true self, a “divine spark,” a portion of the godhead. In a tragic fall, man's true self, or spirit, was thrown into this dark world and imprisoned in each individual's body and soul. The demiurge and the demons keep man's spirit as a slave of the material world, ignorant of his “divine” condition. Hence the need for a spiritual savior, a messiah or “Christ,” to offer redeeming gnosis. This savior is a guide, a master who teaches a few “spiritual” people — the Gnostics — about their true spiritual selves and helps them to wake up from the dream world they live in. The Gnostics would be released from the material world, the non-Gnostics doomed to reincarnation.
What is an example of how these beliefs are embodied in popular stories? Consider the Star Wars movies. There is much good in them. The stories are admirable in many ways. But they are chock-full of Gnosticism.
Star Wars is the clash between the two supreme powers of the universe — “the force” and the “dark side of the force,” which is exploited by the “emperor” (the demiurge) and his demons (Darth Vader, the siths). The Gnostic heroes are the Jedi, who possess the “secret knowledge” of their own spiritual powers; unlike the non-Gnostic, they are able to use “the force” well. Each Jedi has a master, who trains him to acquire this redeeming gnosis. Ben Kenobi, for instance, was for a time the master of Anakin and Luke Skywalker. The greatest spiritual guide in the saga is Yoda, a respected senior member of the Jedi council and a general in the clone wars.
As Christ's followers, we must sort out the good seed from the weeds (cf. Matthew 13:24-30). I propose a distinction between the Gnostic values and its philosophy.
Gnostics promote, without a doubt, positive values. They draw a clear-cut separation between good and evil, stress man's spiritual dimension, instill high and noble ideals, foster courage and concern for others, respect nature, reject materialism and often reject hedonism, too.
Part One of Two.
The second part of this series will examine Gnosticism in contemporary culture and give tips on how to spot it.
Such values shine like pearls in an age of moral relativism that thirsts for gain, the ephemeral, the hedonistic. Aren't these some of the virtues and ideas we love in Star Wars and Harry Potter?
The other side of the coin, however, is not so positive. The good values are rooted in a Gnostic philosophical understanding of man, God and the world that is, as the Pope put it, “in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian.” Why?
Note the opposite views. The Christian Creator is love — a Trinity of persons who wants to establish with us a personal relationship of love — quite different from that unknowable God, usually conceived, like the Star Wars “force,” as an impersonal energy to be manipulated.
The God of Revelation made everything good — the angels, the world, our body and soul. Evil is not a force of the same rank as God; rather, it springs from angels’ and men's personal free choice. Salvation is offered by God in Christ, man's only redeemer.
Salvation is a grace — a free gift from God that Man can neither deserve nor earn. It is not gnosis, “secret knowledge” we can acquire by ourselves with the help of mere human guides or Christlike figures. In short, the Christian religion is a “dialogue” of love between God and man, not a self-centered “monologue” in which man divinizes himself. That's why John Paul says Gnosticism cannot lead “toward a renewal of religion.”
It distorts God's word, “replacing it with purely human words.”
Then and Now
Finally, the Pope alludes to the historic span and manifestations of this ideology. “Gnosticism,” he says, “never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity ... sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion.”
Let's look at a few representative Gnostic movements in history.
With the rise of Christianity, ancient esoteric ideas developed into Gnostic syncretism. Thus, in the first centuries A.D., the Apostles and the Church Fathers had to combat several “Christian” Gnostic religious systems, such as those of Cerinthus, Manander, Saturninus, Valentinus, Basilides, Ptolemaeus and the ones contained in the apocryphal gospels: of truth and perfection, and of Judas (Iscariot), Philip and Thomas.
The third-century dualist Mani chaean church or religion spread from Persia throughout the Middle East, China, southern Europe and northern Africa, where the young Augustine temporarily became a convert.
Teachings similar to Manichaeism resurfaced during the Middle Ages in Europe in groups such as the Paulicians (Armenia, seventh century), the Bogomilists (Bulgaria, 10th century), the Cathars or Albigensians (southern France, 12th century), the Jewish Cabala and the metaphysical speculation surrounding alchemy.
Modern times witnessed the resurgence of Gnosticism in philosophical thought — the Enlightenment, Hegel's idealism, some existentialist currents, Nazism, Jungian psychology, the theosophical society and Freemasonry.
More recently, Gnosticism has become popular through successful films and novels, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Matrix. It has also gained followers among the ranks of ordinary people through pseudo-religious “movements,” such as the New Age and the Raelian cult.
These contemporary Gnostic expressions should certainly inspire us in the good values they promote. At the same time, we should be cautious — examine their philosophical background and reject what is incompatible with our Christian faith.
At the beginning of the third millennium we seem to face the same old clash between Christianity and Gnosticism. Both fight to conquer the “soul” of this world — the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures.
For this reason, defeating Gnosticism has become an essential task of the New Evangelization. “Against the spirit of the world,” the Holy Father says in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “the Church takes up anew each day a struggle that is none other than the struggle for the world's soul.”
Legionary Father Alfonso Aguilar teaches philosophy in Thornwood, New York, and can be reached at: aaguilar@legionaries.org.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Partying With the Gnostic Mom (Parents: Try This at Home) DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:They all said I was crazy.
It was Christopher's 13th birthday, and 14 boys were staying the night.
My husband and daughter took over the burger and hot-dog detail as I tried to keep up with the burgeoning mess. I put up backpacks, neatly lined up all the shoes — many as big as coal scoops — so these man-children could find them easily in the morning. Last, I set about hanging up all the coats. I had just finished hanging up the last of them when I heard the call of the wild.
“Hey, guys!” a tall boy said. “Let's go outside!”
Half dove for my neat row of shoes, the other half tore through the coat closet, and they were gone. As the stillness settled around us in the wake of the pack, we noticed there was one small, frightened-looking fellow hanging out by the kitchen door. This was Ben, the friend who wasn't sure he wanted to stay all night.
“Mrs. Baxter, can I call my mom?” he said. “I think I want to go home.”
“Sure — but is there anything I can help with?”
“Well ...” he said. “The guys say they're going to watch a scary movie tonight. They say it's a true story. That always keeps me up.”
“I didn't give my consent to scary movies,” I said. “I don't think we'll do that.”
“But Josh likes to tell ghost stories at sleepovers. True ones. I get scared.”
Poor Ben. Terrified in his soul and ashamed of it.
“Ben, I have a little lesson to teach these guys about truth,” I said. “When they get back, we'll scam ‘em. You in?”
Ben nodded tentatively. My husband and daughter rushed to reassure him. They are well acquainted with my act: I purport to read messages the kids write and seal in unmarked envelopes — before the envelope is opened.
My daughter squealed and clapped her hands; my husband began to collect props needed for our hoax on these teens who, according to Ben, knew all about “truth.”
With night falling quickly, we called the rambunctious new teens in. They were, of course, famished. We passed around chips and salsa, and my daughter took up her portion of the “script.”
“Hey you guys, my mom is psychic,” she said.
“Sssh — honey!” I said. “You know I don't like people to know.”
“She is!” Chris speaks up, knowing the ruse. “It runs in her family. Come on, show ‘em, mom. Please.” Ben, in the back, chimed in, and the others followed. I had them where I wanted them. They were begging for it. Rule No. 1: Make them force you to scam them.
I begin with a pity-party; tell them how difficult it was for me in my childhood, how everybody called me weirdo and oddball. (I got that one off one of those talk-to-the dead entertainment shows on TV). They could relate to the bully stuff. Rule No. 2: Create empathy for yourself; if they're emotionally involved, they'll believe.
But, since they've all begged, I go ahead with it. I tell them all to write sentences. The boys grew silent as they began writing their sentences. The boys were instructed to fold their submissions in fours, put them in their blank envelopes and seal them. My husband collected them, called me back in, handed me the envelopes and called for complete silence. I picked up the first envelope. I closed my eyes, rubbed it between my fingers and frowned. Rule No. 3: Act weird.
This is the pivotal part of the scam, this first letter. You make up a note, citing some logical reason why it can't be read aloud.
“Oh, dear,” I said, dissembling. “Somebody didn't believe I could do this — I just can't; no, if I read this aloud, the person who wrote it would be really embarrassed.” I tear open the letter, nodding as though I were reading what I “saw.” I offer it to my husband for confirmation. He nods in agreement.
Only I'm actually reading the first submission from the audience. It says, “God bless America.” So I pick up the next letter, feel it, and say, “Oh, this is much better. It's a blessing — I see the name of the Lord and a country. It's — it's — ‘God bless America!””
“Oh, my gosh!” A kid in the front said. “I wrote that!” The boys are wide-eyed, amazed. Shouts of “Cool!” “Freaky!” etc., well up from the ranks as I continue, reading each boy's contribution “through the envelope” until they were all amazed senseless. At the bottom of the pile, my husband planted a blank, so that everybody's envelope was “read.”
The boys lost their minds. Could I pick lotto numbers? Help solve crimes?
What were they thinking, just right then?
“How many of you truly believe I have special powers?” I asked, at length. Most of the hands went up, even Ben's, who was in on the gag from the beginning.
“Well, you're wrong,” I tell the stunned crowd. Step by step, I take them through the trick. I explained why it was so easy: that I short-circuited their sensibilities, their God-given gifts of perception.
I tell them not to believe everything the culture tells them is “true”: that people can talk to the dead on afternoon TV, that the ghost of bigfoot can terrorize an office building in a small Midwestern town and that sex before marriage is okay. Those things may sound perfectly sensible at the time. They are, however, hooey.
And of course, I can't resist adding: Only God can know what is not seen.
With the God talk, the boys, fearing a lecture, disperse and hit the snacks once more. Chris hugs me and whispers, “Thanks.” Ben calls his mom to let her know he'll stay the night.
I survey the room, full of these overgrown puppies, these toddlers with size 10 shoes. I worry as the specters of war and terrorism cloud their playful horizons. I ask God to make them wise and discerning of anything bearing that holy pedigree, “truth.”
And I pray for all of us, for the whole world, that we are able to one day come before the throne of God — he who is Truth, Way and Life — that we may live with him in gratitude forever.
Susan Baxter writes from
Mishawaka, Indiana.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Name Me DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Call me anything you like — for a price.
That's right, I'm offering naming rights on the man currently known as Jim Fair.
I should explain.
We've been having a bit of a controversy in my hometown, Chicago, over the renaming of Comiskey Park to “U.S. Cellular Field.”
For those of you who live in the rest of the world, this historic patch of green is home to the Chicago White Sox baseball team.
Anyway, the phone folks gave the Sox $68 million for the naming rights. The Sox say they will use the money to fix up the stadium, which is admittedly a good idea. But lots of local fans are annoyed by the crass commercialism of selling the name.
And I don't blame them. Public facilities once got names to honor people or achievements.
Chicago had Soldier Field. My university had Memorial Stadium. New York had the Empire State Building. There is the Johnson Space Center (named for a president, not a wax company). Schools by the dozen are named for Lincoln and Washington.
It used to be that, if you wanted your name on something large and public, you had to be a war hero, president, astronaut or poet.
Of course, to have a Catholic institution named in your honor, you pretty much have to be a saint, bishop or pope.
But it is looking more like all you need these days is a really big bag of money.
That is where the Jim Fair naming rights come in.
I know that I'm not much of a public figure, but my name — more precisely, the right to pick my name — ought to be worth something.
Let's say Acme Peddle Products pays $1 million to me and I legally change my name to Acme Peddle. Think of the free publicity they will receive.
Every time I buy a meal at the local diner or pick up a drill bit at the hardware store, I'll use my credit card and sign Acme Peddle on the dotted line.
I'll change my e-mail address to acme ped dle@familink.com.
When I write checks every month to the gas company, electric company, phone company and the mortgage company they'll be signed by Acme Peddle.
When you see this column in the Register, it will be authored by — that's right — Acme Peddle.
I can call in to radio talk shows and they'll have to identify me as Mr. Acme Peddle.
I could send out Christmas cards signed, The Acme Peddle Family.
I'm also willing to give Acme a discount for volume naming rights. In other words, if the rights to me are worth $1 million, I'll throw in my wife and kids for another $500,000. Then, for just $1.5 million, they will get Acme Peddle, Mrs. Peddle, Teen Peddle and Baby Peddle.
This should get my personal finances in good order. And I think the Catholic Church might want to consider something similar.
If a baseball stadium in Chi cago can get a phone company to give it $68 million, imagine what we could get for naming rights to Vatican City and St. Peter's. They must be worth at least a billion bucks each.
Come to think of it, since the Pope selects his own name, he might sell the naming rights to the highest bidder.
A company would be mentioned not only every time the Pope appears in public, but throughout history, should he achieve sainthood.
On the other hand, we might return to naming things for public servants rather than corporate profits.
Jim Fair writes from Chicago.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jim Fair ----- KEYWORDS: Spirit & Life -------- TITLE: Saints of the 'Soo' DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:In the early 1600s, a group of French Jesuit priests, well educated and well born, gave up their earthly comforts for the wilds of America.
Paddling and hiking through southern Canada, they established missions, schools and infirmaries. Some were tortured and killed by In dians hostile to the friendly tribes they were serving, but on they came.
Some landed at what is now Sault Ste. Marie in the upper peninsula of Michigan, across St. Mary's River from the Canadian city of the same name. The area is now called “the Soo” by local residents. Sault is French for “leap,” and leap St. Mary's does. The Soo Locks were built to allow huge ships and sightseeing boats alike to travel in elevator fashion from Lake Superior to the other Great Lakes.
Among the most famous of the early Jesuit Fathers were St. Isaac Jogues (one of eight Frenchmen known as the North American Martyrs) and Jacques Marquette, whose name is carried today in cities and by the noted university. After being tortured and maimed, Father Jogues had to return to France — only to come back to North America to save his murderers.
With only vague school-day memories of Father Marquette and the French, I traveled to northern Michigan last year to spend Christmas with an array of cousins I had not seen in years. One morning before Christmas, my always-game cousin Joyce agreed to drive two hours to the Soo, where I was eager to see the land these heroic men had inhabited.
Snowy Sanctity
Snow was whirling around the cross-tipped tower when we arrived at the Soo. Dashing inside, we found parishioners trimming a handsome tree at the altar. Several churches had stood here before this one was built in 1881, with a wood frame under a brick veneer. Officially the Holy Name of Mary Pro-Cathedral, because it was the first cathedral parish of its diocese, St. Mary's parish is the third-oldest Catholic parish in the United States (after St. Augustine in Florida and Santa Fe in New Mexico).
St. Mary's pastor, Father Theodore Brodeur, showed us around the church, noting improvements that had partially restored the church to its pre-Vatican II splendor. In the renovations that oft-misunderstood council was thought to inspire, St. Mary's had lost not only its saints but also its hanging lamps — which were replaced with neon. Today the church is reverent and charming. As we walked, Father Brodeur revealed a far more exciting history of the area than I had anticipated.
The French Jesuits landed at the Soo in 1641. Father Isaac Joques and Father Charles Raymbault offered Michigan's first Mass and created a new mission for Indians here. They had been working from the Huron Indian Mission Post in present-day Ontario, but their mission was devastated by the Iroquois Indians during their attacks on the Hurons.
In 1668, Father Louis Nicholas was joined by Father Jacques Mar quette, who founded and named the city of Sault Ste. Marie. Father Marquette be came one of the great explorers of the American wilderness. The priests and Native Americans built a cedar stockade; this enclosed a residence for the priests, a church for Christian Indians, an infirmary and a space for animals. That church and two successive ones fell to fire and, later, the excesses occasioned by the French Revolution.
About 200 years after the French landing, Bishop Frederic Baraga, native of Slovenia, landed at the Soo. It was still a pretty rugged area of timber and fishing. He had another church built, but anti-Catholic zealots burned it. The worst of the harassment was over, though, and soon the present St. Mary's emerged.
Wearing snowshoes much of the year, toting a tin box for his priestly necessities, notebooks and perhaps his daily ration of potatoes, Bishop Baraga carried the faith he loved to the Ojibwe Indians. In the process, he wrote the first grammar and dictionary of Ojibwe, transcribing the oral language he heard into script. The language was opened to the English world, and many translations of religious texts followed. His writings are too numerous to list, but the interested reader will find fascinating information on the Internet. His proposed canonization, the cause for which is presently under way, has inspired excellent research.
The Best of Baraga
Simple but important relics of the life of Bishop Baraga are arrayed near St. Mary's East Entrance. Called the Snowshoe Priest for his intrepid snowshoe journeys through the diocese, sometimes covering many miles a day, Bis hop Baraga is remembered here with a display of his snowshoes, his tin box, a chair made for him by Indians and samples of his literary work
Next to this shrine, the Mary Room glows beneath a stained-glass window depicting St. Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows. It was or dered from Belgium by Bishop Ba raga. In the same room, a replica of the pre-Vatican II St. Mary's is faithfully depicted in dollhouse scale, with the original altar and saints.
By now my cousin was eyeing the accumulating snow, as we had a long drive home ahead of us. We took our leave of Father Brodeur and this inspiring place. We drove through protected forests, noting a wide-eyed deer watching from the side of the road. Farther along came a turnoff to St. Ignace, where The Father Marquette National Memorial tells the history of the French and Native American cultures. (I made a note of its location for another day.) From St. Ignace, the Mackinac Bridge, the world's longest suspension bridge, rises majestically; it connects the upper peninsula to lower Michigan.
The snow, raging about the car, slowed us to a careful speed, although plows were out and we had nothing to fear. But it was not hard to imagine the indefatigable Bishop Baraga — head down against the icy flakes, snowshoes crunching, trudging through the diocese thinking of the Masses he would celebrate and the priests, Ursuline teachers and parishioners he would visit. His presence must have inspired them, as it had me in the brief time I'd spent at the Soo.
Barbara Coeyman Hults is based in New York City.
----- EXCERPT: Michiganís upper peninsula: remote, but rewarding ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barbara Coeyman Hults ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Now Playing DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:AGENT CODY BANKS
(MGM). Director: Harald Zwart. Frankie Muniz, Hilary Duff, Angie Harmon. (PG)
Take One: The Spy Kids formula hits adolescence in this strongly 007-influenced, family-targeted action-comedy starring Muniz as a junior James Bond who gets nervous with girls.
Take Two: Another PG-13 movie in PG clothing, Banks issues its 15-year-old hero his very own adult Bond Girl (Harmon) and lets 15-year-old Duff condemn the villain to a gruesome death.
Final Take: Last spring's kid-power Muniz vehicle, Big Fat Liar, had trouble with the eighth commandment. This time it's the ninth. Problematic and only fitfully amusing, it's no Spy Kids.
BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE (Touchstone). Director: Adam Shankman. Steve Martin, Queen Latifah, Eugene Levy. (PG-13)
Take One: Martin plays a divorced workaholic lawyer whose staid suburban life is turned upside down by ghetto homegirl Latifah, who wants him to help her with legal trouble.
Take Two: In this movie, all whites are racists and all blacks are anarchic. We also get an incredibly violent black vs. white fight and Latifah letting Martin practice sexual aggression on her.
Final Take: A step backward for race relations in America and for black characters in Hollywood films.
TEARS OF THE SUN (Columbia). Director: Antoine Fuqua. Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci, Cole Hauser. (R)
Take One: Willis leads valiant Navy SEALs in defending helpless refugees against ethnic-cleansing guerrillas in a heroic war picture set in a Nigerian civil war.
Take Two: Complex moral issues are raised but not explored. The movie simply extols intervention and deplores inaction.
Final Take: Tears celebrates the fortitude, compassion and competence of heroic figures, but its pictures of heroes helping victims are never more than two-dimensional.
THE HUNTED (Paramount). Director: William Friedkin. Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Connie Nielsen. (R)
Take One: Tense manhunt picture stars Jones and Del Toro as larger-than-life special-ops super-heroes who clash when Del Toro goes rogue and Jones, who trained him, goes after him.
Take Two: The story's got some holes, and some questions never get answered. Intense violence includes a graphic opening combat sequence.
Final Take: Keeps the audience members on the edge of their seats, but that's as far as it goes; the violence may be too intense for some.
WILLARD (Touchstone). Director: Glen Morgan. Crispin Glover, R. Lee Ermey, Laura Elena Harring. (PG-13)
Take One: Grisly horror-comedy remake of 1971 original stars oddball Glover as an oppressed misfit whose only friends are the rats in his basement.
Take Two: Increasingly dreadful developments will leave even jaded viewers seriously skeeved, though characters merely reap what they sow. (There is one innocent victim, a cat.)
Final Take: Emphatically not for all tastes, Willard works on the audience's nerves rather than relying on easy horror-movie grossn -outs; Glover's over-the-top performance is sure to be a big draw.
Steven D. Greydanus, editor and chief critic of DecentFilms.com, writes from Bloomfield, New Jersey.
----- EXCERPT: A Registerís-eye view of five current box-office leaders ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Art & Culture -------- TITLE: Spotlight: Gods and Generals DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Christian moviegoers were recently the targets of an urgent e-mail campaign to “get the word out” to support Ron Maxwell's nearly four-hour Civil War epic Gods and Generals. The e-mail, from Protestant film critic Ted Baehr, claimed that “the politically correct nomenclature [sic] is trying to stop this great movie,” which is suffused with religious themes. Baehr — who, incidentally, happens to be the author of an official companion volume called Faith in ‘Gods and Generals’ — even offered to knock five bucks off the price of his book to anyone who sent in a ticket stub from the film.
Certainly, Baehr wasn't the only one who liked the film. Culture crusader and film critic Michael Medved went so far as to declare, in his four-star rave review, that every American owed Ted Turner a “debt of gratitude” for making “so unequivocally positive and powerful” a “contribution to [his] country and its culture.” Medved's one-time Sneak Previews co-host Jeffrey Lyons wasn't quite that enthusiastic but agreed the film was “worth the effort,” while Leonard Maltin pronounced himself “awfully glad that I saw it.”
However, it wasn't only the “politically correct” who found fault with the film. Register reviewer John Prizer found the film thought-provoking but boring for those who aren't Civil War buffs (March 9-15). Conservative Protestant critic Michael Elliot wrote, “Though individual segments are interesting and the attention to detail impressive, we remain unsatisfied. ... It never fully engages the audience emotionally, reducing the experience to a very long but incomplete history lesson.” Others who were less than satisfied included Gerri Pare of the U.S. bishops Office for Film and Broadcasting, who commented that “a little of this goes a long way,” and Nell Minow, Yahoo's “Movie Mom,” who observed that “sometimes, what is best for history is not best for drama.”
Even Catholic columnist Rod Dreher, former movie critic to the New York Post and current contributor to National Review, in his mostly positive article (not review) about the film's lack of political correctness and honorable intentions, could only say of the film's artistic failings, “If the four-hour battlefield epic doesn't work for reviewers on an artistic level, it's hard to make a case against that kind of judgment.”
Finally, in a guest review for DecentFilms.com, Catholic writer Robert Jackson argued that the film was too one-sided in focusing only on the good in both sides. He asked, “Was nobody on the Southern side a racist and in favor of slavery? ... Weren't some [Northerners] motivated by baser economic and political interests? Weren't many themselves racists who had no interest in emancipation?” While acknowledging the film's honorable intentions, Jackson ultimately deemed it “a four-hour exercise in hagiography.”
— Steven D. Greydanus
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video Picks DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Ronald Reagan: A Legacy Remembered (2002)
Great public figures often have humble private lives, and knowledge of their personal qualities and relationships can help illuminate their larger achievements.
This A&E cable-TV documentary shows how our 40th president helped the United States prevail in the Cold War and ignited an economic boom. Interviewer Frank Sesno, CNN't Washington bureau chief, seeks out family members for those telling anecdotes that defined the chief executive's personality.
Cabinet members Ed Meese and Caspar Weinberger and then-Vice President George Bush provide behind-the-scenes insights into the mechanics and broad purposes of the Reagan administration, and foreign leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev discuss the impact of his polices abroad.
His children share favorite family tales, while his wife, Nancy, presents a candid look at his life since the announcement that he suffers from Alzheimer's disease. Scholars continue to debate his place in history.
But on the evidence presented here, Reagan was always true to himself and stuck to his principles, even under great pressure.
Frontline: The Gulf War(1996)
As we face off once again against Iraq, it is useful to recall the history of our first armed confront ation with Sad dam Hussein. This four-hour documentary series, produced by the BBC, is the best video guide available. The program chronicles how the war began, with miscalculations in Washington and Baghdad, and was fought despite differences between the White House, the Pentagon and the generals in the field.
There are candid interviews with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, James Baker, Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf , Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher. They analyze the circumstances that led up to the 1990-91 conflict in which more than a million troops on both sides did battle. We also watch the allied coalition's air war, its ground assault, the liberation of Kuwait and the fallout from Saddam Hussein's retention of power. It was a tremendous military victory for America and its allies in which our state-of-the-art information-age technology proved decisive. But its political consequences are with us still. (To order, call WGBH at (800) 255-9424)
Intruder in the Dust(1949)
This adaptation of a William Faulkner novel is a brilliant, stirring re-creation of the closed society that was once small-town Mississippi.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
DAILY IN LENT
Lent Today with Father Groeschel
EWTN, 3:45 p.m.
Franciscan Father Benedict Groe schel's 15-minute daily Lenten meditations help us follow Christ's words, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”
WEEKDAYS
In the Footsteps of Christ
EWTN, 4:30 a.m., 6 p.m.
Airing Monday-Friday, March 31-April 4 and April 7-11, this series of half-hour shows visits the Holy Land to retrace our Savior's life, death and resurrection.
SUNDAY, MARCH 30
Amazing Animal Videos
Animal Planet, noon
This “Ultimate Oddities Special” features unusual pairs of little pals, including a crow and kitten, and a dog and duck, plus a dachshund that “adopts” cordless phones.
SUNDAY, MARCH 30
Garden Giants
Home & Garden TV, 9 p.m.
Master growers across the country reveal their secrets of growing record-size plants. Minnesotan Bob Dwyer grew a 242-pound watermelon. In Alaska, Don Dinkel has grown a 74-pound cabbage and John Evans raises giant carrots, beets, zucchini and leeks.
MONDAY, MARCH 31
Journey Home
EWTN, 8 p.m.
Marcus Grodi hosts Myron Moskowitz, a convert from Judaism. Rebroadcast Tuesday at 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. and Saturday at 11 p.m. For other personal stories of conversions to Catholicism, also tune in Wednesdays at 1 p.m. for “The Best of Journey Home.”
TUESDAY, APRIL1
Independent Lens: Chiefs
PBS, 10 p.m.
This documentary follows the Wyoming Indian High School Chiefs boys’ basketball team from the Wind River Reservation for two seasons, including a trip to the state tournament.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL2
Life on the Rock
EWTN, 8 p.m.
Guest Jean Philippe Rigaud, a policeman from Steubenville, Ohio, relates real-life examples of how authentic Catholic spiritual renewal can stop juvenile crime.
THURSDAY, APRIL 3
NBA Thursday
TNT, 7 p.m.
The National Basketball Association playoffs are drawing near, and TNT's Thursday night doubleheaders are a great way to catch up on your favorite team's prospects.
SATURDAYS
Mysteries of the Deep
National Geographic Channel, 10 p.m.
This adventure documentary series probes shipwreck sites from prehistoric times to the present to find out what really happened in famous naval battles and ocean disasters. Deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard hosts.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Looking for Vocations in All the Odd Places DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Pop quiz: Which school has the most alumni in the St. Cecilia Congregation of the Dominican Sisters of Nashville?
A. Thomas Aquinas College.
B. University of Dallas.
C. Franciscan University of Steubenville.
D. Christendom College.
Okay, trick question. These four schools, at least in the past, have prolifically provided vocations to many orders.
Which of these schools graduated the most future Nashville Dominicans?
A. University of Notre Dame
B. The Catholic Universiy
C. Texas A & M
Texas A & M might look like the oddball on this list as the only non-Catholic school, but six of the school's alumni have joined the 200-strong Dominican Sisters. That's just shy of the 10 women from the University of Dallas, a Catholic school with a 47-year history.
Sister Catherine Marie, the order's vocations director and director of postulants, said it's not just coincidence that a secular school is producing a high rate of vocations.
“They have an outstanding Catholic center there,” she said. More than 250 students attend daily Mass, Bible studies are full and eucharistic adoration draws crowds, she added.
Which is proof of the effect colleges and their lack of or attention to the spiritual lives of students can have on an individual's vocation discernment.
It's not news that vocation rates have steadily declined during the past three decades. Between 1965 and 1998, according to a report by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, the number of priests fell from 58,132 to 47,582; priestly ordinations dropped from 994 to 509; religious brothers decreased from 12,271 to 6,115 and religious sisters from 179,954 to 85,412.
Despite the downward spiral, certain schools are seeing their rates hold steady or even increase. They attribute it to two main reasons: adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and visible examples of people living out God's call to the religious life.
“All too often people assume what their vocation is,” said Third Order Regular Franciscan Father David Pivonka, vice president for mission effectiveness at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. “Catholic colleges have a responsibility and an obligation to create an environment where young people can discern vocations.”
The university, which has supplied 27 priests to the Diocese of Steubenville, has a unique program for vocation discernment. Not only does it host an annual Vocations Awareness Fair, monthly holy hours for women considering the religious life and information nights where young men can talk with Franciscan priests, but it also has on-campus living arrangements for students who think they might be called to the priesthood or religious life.
Women live in a household called “Mary Spouse of the Spirit.” Men discerning a call to the priest-hood enter the Pre-Theologate Program. The 75 men currently enrolled must commit to morning and evening prayers, daily Mass, adoration and frequent confession.
Each year the Pre-Theologate Program sends between eight and 15 men to seminaries after graduation, and the school can count on two to four ordinations from each class. In addition, at least three or four men who were not part of the program enter religious life or diocesan training.
At Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif., nearly 12% of each class enters the seminary, and half of those endure through ordination. After 31 years in existence, the school will mark its 34th alumni ordination in June.
“We don't see ourselves as a vocations factory,” said Dave Shaneyfelt, director of college relations. “It's a natural consequence of good liberal Catholic education.”
Father John Higgins, a priest for the Archdiocese of New York and a graduate of Thomas Aquinas, credits his alma mater with educating him in critical thinking and the interplay of man, God and world through its great books curriculum.
“A priest who will serve the Church at the beginning of the Third Millennium must be prepared to confront a culture of unbelief,” Father Higgins said. “He must correctly understand the modern mind so that he will be able to dialogue with his contemporaries. He must know how to think critically and logically if he intends to give a convincing presentation and, in some cases, defense of his belief.”
Besides the curriculum, he remembers the strong faith life of his fellow students and their dedication to daily Mass and prayer. “In this context it was easy for me to hear God calling me to serve him as a priest,” he said.
At Thomas Aquinas, those who are discerning a call have plenty of ways to seek guidance. The school holds regular vocation workshops where priests and women religious come to meet with interested students, and the three full-time chaplains provide daily examples of the priesthood and religious life.
Benedictine Father Andrew Koch works as a temporary chaplain at the college. Also a graduate of Thomas Aquinas, he said it was a convergence of two factors at the school that drew him to consider the priesthood: “The study of great books in the light of faithful guidance of the magisterium in combination with daily living of the life of faith.”
That life of faith, he said, was evident in faculty members, priests and students alike. More than half of his classmates attended daily Mass, he remembered.
One-third of Thomas Aquinas graduates who choose the religious life become diocesan priests. The rest select religious orders; the most popular is the Legionaries of Christ.
At Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., 15% of alumni have entered the religious life. The majority of men become diocesan priests, with 14 serving in the Diocese of Arlington, but alumni have also entered Miles Jesu, the Society of St. John, the Fathers of Mercy, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King and the Congregation of St. John.
Dr. Timothy o'Donnell, college president, credits the high percentage of vocations to “the natural and supernatural beauty found on campus,” which creates an atmosphere where students are “truly able to reflect upon their lives and are more easily able to hear the Lord's call and be open to it.”
Last year, o'Donnell's own daughter became one of many Christendom women to enter a Poor Clare monastery. Many others have joined Carmelite and Dominican orders.
In fact, the Christendom women named the Dominican Sisters of Nashville as an “order of choice.” Although the average age of women religious is 69, the Nashville Dominicans break the trend with an average age of 36. Most women join at age 24, and of the 200 sisters, just 15 are retired.
Sister Catherine Marie attributes the appeal to an “increased interest in dynamic orthodoxy,” fostered by her order and many Catholic colleges.
She said the most positive thing any college can do to encourage vocation discernment is to provide eucharistic adoration.
“Eight out of 10 girls who come to us say they discovered their vocation before the Blessed Sacrament,” she said. “Really, there's no reason [to pursue a vocation] if not for him.”
Dana Wind is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dana Wind ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Everyday Graces DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Sanctity: It isn't just for priests and nuns anymore. This, roughly, is how the average American Catholic perceived the Second Vatican Council's teaching about the universal call to holiness.
An explosion of books, periodicals, workshops and tapes on spirituality followed, often testifying more to a hunger for novelty than to an understanding of, or interest in, spiritual theology. Eclecticism (a little centering prayer, a few breathing exercises etc.) encouraged a cafeteria-Catholicism mentality. In recent years the Vatican has had to respond to the centrifugal forces by issuing specific warnings about Eastern meditation and New Age spirituality.
It is refreshing, then, to read The Ordinary Path to Holiness, a book firmly rooted in the tradition of Catholic spiritual theology. The author, R. Thomas Richard, a married layman, has “been elsewhere; done those things”: Before returning to the Church, he served as a Protestant pastor, earned a graduate degree and worked in religious education. He is a well-qualified guide for the many Catholic lay people who are unaware of the spiritual riches in their own tradition.
“Catholic spirituality ... is universal (‘catholic’) in scope; it is truly human in subject, having God as object,” he writes. “It has developed over many centuries, through the lived experience, holiness, and wisdom of many true saints. Catholic spirituality is wisdom learned in the crucible of divine testing and purification. It is simply Christianity, revealed to His holy ones in the experience of their life-offering.”
The great strength of this book lies in its description of sanctification as a slow and “ordinary” spiritual development. Since the early days of the Church, homilies and treatises have noted three stages of spiritual growth: the beginners, the proficient (those making progress) and the perfect.
Richard helpfully compares these stages to phases in a person's development from childhood to adulthood. “The onset of rationality, separating infancy from childhood, is analogous to conversion and acceptance of God — a most rational human act,” he writes.
To each group God offers a “way” of advancing. The purgative way purifies those who are just setting out on their journey to the Father. The illuminative way enlightens those who are committed to Christ so they may better understand and obey the Lord. The unitive way leads the devout soul to mystical union with the Trinity.
This “ordinary” progress of the Christian soul is clearly presented, relying on classical works of spirituality by St. Teresa of Avila and the theological synthesis of the 20th-century Dominican Father Garrigou-Lagrange. Richard's book is at the same time up-to-date, quoting extensively from Vatican II documents and the new Catechism.
In the later chapters, Richard discusses Scripture, prayer and the sacraments as means of preserving and nourishing the life of the soul. The excellent section on the Eucharist examines a wealth of New Testament passages. The pages on marriage, though inspiring, are less thorough. In a final chapter, “Holiness in Suffering and Dying,” the author relates the anointing of the sick and everyday difficulties and crosses to the mystery of kenosis: Christ's self-emptying and sacrifice for our salvation.
Read this book and see why, if you want to grow spiritually, there's no place like the Catholic faith. Even if — or maybe especially if — you're just an “ordinary” Christian.
Michael J. Miller writes from Glenside, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael J. Miller ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Scandal Study
The bishops’ communications office confirmed that the board and the college were in the final stages of negotiating a contract but told Catholic News Service that the Times story was “premature.”
The need for a study on the data related to the scandal and a separate study on the causes of clerical abuse of minors were agreed to by the bishops at their June 2002 national meeting in Dallas.
Library Latte
The library will include extensive wiring for Internet and other high-tech uses and will include spaces set aside for students to work in groups.
The Jesuit college also plans a cafe not unlike those found in big commercial bookstores such as Barnes & Noble that will stay open later than regular library hours.
Franciscan Roots
CHRONICLE.COM, March 10 — Franciscan Sister Margaret Carney, dean of the School of Franciscan Studies at St. Bonaventure University, has been named to the vacant position of senior vice president for Franciscan charism, reported the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The appointment, made on an interim basis, is part of the response to a scandal that prompted the resignation earlier this month of the university's president, athletic director and head basketball coach due to a recruiting violation.
Sister Margaret's task, according to the Chronicle, “will be to remind members of the university community of its religious roots.”
Reversal on Monologues
The class will be taught as part of a program dedicated to “examining cultural diversity, specifically stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination and how they relate to power in American society.”
The university president, Jesuit Father Michael Graham, first canceled the play because it would not be “an appropriate vehicle for Xavier” and later described its inclusion in a class as “a legitimate exercise of academic freedom.”
Alcohol Education
CENTURY COUNCIL, March 11 — “Alcohol 101 Plus,” a new program to disseminate information on alcohol consumption and abuse via a virtual campus on CDROM, has been unveiled by the council, a nonprofit organization funded by the largest alcohol distillers and distributors in the United States.
Among the many Catholic university participants include: Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.; DePaul University in Chicago; Santa Clara University in California; and Fordham and St. John's universities in New York.
More information about the CD-ROM program is available at www.alcohol101plus.org.
Joe Cullen writes from New York.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Culler ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: 'He Is the Reason I Am Catholic' by Jennifer Therrien DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:It was second grade. My classmates were receiving re conciliation in order to prepare for first Communion and I wasn't baptized. My mother was Jewish, my father was Catholic and I felt like I was being singled out in my class. My parents didn't know what to do, so they went to talk to Father Clark.
Father Clark respected my mom and didn't try to convert her into being Catholic. He treated her as he would a person whom he just baptized. He regarded her with absolutely no prejudice or scorn. Father was friendly, kind and convinced my parents that baptism in the Roman Catholic faith was the best choice for me. Even though I wouldn't receive reconciliation with my peers, I would receive first Communion with them. Then my parents left, and never once did Father mention my mother being baptized as well.
I recall the day I was baptized. I was so excited, I think I probably gave Father Clark a hug before and after the ceremony. My classmates watched in the pews directly in front of me. At that time, I was old enough to repeat the vows that your parents usually say. Father announced that this was a very special baptism, for I would remember it all throughout my entire life. And I will.
I just received confirmation this year. My mother is still Jewish, my father still Catholic. At the end of the ceremony we went out to dinner to celebrate. I remember Mom looking at me, saying that, if it weren's for Father Clark, I wouldn't be sitting here with my red and white gown with a smile upon my face. I would have no religion — or, at least, no confirmed religion.
If Father Clark hadn's treated my mom like he did, she would've never let me be baptized. She had said, “He is such a great person. I was comfortable with him and he made me feel like baptism was the right choice.”
I can't imagine what life would be like if I wasn't Catholic! Religion is such an essential part of my life now.
Now Father is sick. He still tries his best to make it to our Masses on Fridays, and sometimes he makes it to the Sunday ones as well. But often he is not there. I miss his sermons. They never fail to fill me with light and hope. They just make so much sense. I hope he knows that he is the sole reason why I am there, sitting in church. He changed my life. He was there for my family. More importantly, he was there for me.
It amazes me how, even though he is very sick, he still makes it to numerous Masses. I don't know why, but this trivial fact makes me feel stronger than I was before, for just seeing him in church makes me feel better. I guess it's because if he manages to lead the Church in praising God in the condition he's in, I can conquer the daily tasks that I have to do. It proves that God is more powerful than you think. He's there to guide you through the day. At least, I know he's there for me, and he's definitely there for Father as well.
Father Clark is my hero because he is the reason I am Catholic.
Jennifer Therrien, an eighth-grade student at St. Leo the Great School in Lincroft, N.J., writes from Little Silver, N.J.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jennifer Therrien ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Two Hearts, One Voice
Do you have any tips for couples trying to start a prayer life together? My husband and I strive to be good Catholics, but we aren't connecting on a spiritual level.
Tom:
You aren't alone. Oddly enough, a part of the problem can be embarrassment. As strange as it may seem, a couple that shares a bed and is intimately acquainted with each other's personal hygiene habits (both the good and the bad ones), may have trouble expressing their deepest concerns to each other in a spiritual setting. They may even be quite skillful at communicating, yet prayer is a stumbling block.
Since prayer so often involves pleas to God for an increase in our virtue, it may be that couples view prayer together as an exposure of their weaker areas. Especially for men, prayers of petition (and even thanksgiving) can be ego-bruising; after all, it involves an admission that circumstances are beyond our control. Then, when things go well, we must give the credit to God.
To vocalize this in front of one's wife requires a great degree of humility on the part of a husband. This explains why it is often husbands who are guilty of foot-dragging when it comes to prayer. But men, we must do it for the good of our family.
Caroline:
Don't expect to achieve spiritual unity in one fell swoop. Like any worthwhile part of your relationship, this one must be cultivated over time. Forms of vocal prayer are a good place to begin. The rosary and the Divine Office are easy, non-threatening ways to get used to praying together. Tom and I especially like using Magnificat, the monthly prayer journal. For Lent we've been meeting for weekday noon Mass, which is deeply unifying.
Next, try to combine your daily “wind-down” conversation with prayer. You know, that time in the evening after the kids go to bed when just the two of you share your thoughts and concerns of the day. (Warning: if this concept is a new one, start here!)
After expressing what's on your mind to each other, spend a few minutes dedicating these concerns to the Lord. This can be done as simple spontaneous prayer (“Lord, please help us do your will as we decide where to send Christopher to school”) or in the form of intentions before the rosary.
Finally, deepen your faith life by choosing some kind of spiritual reading to do together. We've recently completed the excellent book Life-Giving Love by Kimberly Hahn. Then make reflections on what you've read a part of your conversation — talk about how you can apply it in your home, for instance, and pray for the grace to do so.
To help you begin or to help you delve deeper, look for an opportunity to go on a retreat for married couples in your area.
Persevere in your efforts. The Lord will surely bless you for it, and your whole family will grow in holiness.
Tom and Caroline McDonald are family-life directors for the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom and Caroline Mcdonald ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: My Priest, My Hero DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:These days, when kids talk about priests, grownups listen.
So it should follow that, when more than 800 kids write essays on “Why My Priest is a Hero,” the adults around them will get busy reading. And learning.
That's one hope of the staff and supporters of Ascension Press, sponsors of the second annual National Catholic Education Essay Contest.
Based on the depth, thoughtfulness and quality of the winning entries, there's good reason for the organizers to be optimistic. “The essays demonstrated to the 11 judges that the future of Catholicism in America is indeed bright, and that the Church could not endure without the sacred institution of its priesthood and the fervor and commitment of its young faithful,” said an Ascension spokesperson in a statement announcing the winners.
The contest kicked off last November, when Ascension invited Catholic students from the United States and Canada to write an original, 500- to 750-word composition about a favorite priest. The entries came in by the bagful and, in early March, grand-prize winners and runners-up were selected in each of two grade groups.
Eighth-grader Jennifer Therrien of Little Silver, N.J., wrote the winning essay in the grade 5-8 category, and Rachel Elliott, a 10th-grader from Baden, Pa., took home the top prize among the 9th to 12th-graders. Each will receive a $500 scholarship to continue their Catholic education. (The winning essays are presented in their entirety below.)
The 18 runners-up (nine in each grade group) will receive scholarship funds and other prizes. All 20 winning essays are posted on the Internet at www.friendlydefenders.com.
Several of the 20 winning writers chose to spotlight such well-known priests as Pope John Paul II, Sept. 11 hero Father Mychal Judge and Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel. Most others looked at their own parish priest.
“Father [Joseph] Newell is a priest who has and is using the graces he received on his ordination to mirror Christ to his people,” writes 10th-grader Elliott in her prizewinning essay. “Through his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and Mary, his healing in confession, his preaching the truth and his ministering to my family, one can clearly see that Father Newell truly is using the graces of the priesthood to transform himself into Jesus Christ, the greatest hero of all history.”
“It amazes me how, even though he is very sick, [Father James Clark] still makes it to numerous Masses,” writes eighth-grader Therrien. “I don't know why, but this trivial fact makes me feel stronger than I was before, for just seeing him in church makes me feel better. I guess it's because if he manages to lead the church in praising God in the condition he's in, I can conquer the daily tasks that I have to do.”
Runner-up Elizabeth LeBlanc, a ninth-grader from Linden, Mich., writes of how her priest, Father Martin Erpelding, suffered a stroke while saying Mass. “Despite his life-threatening condition, he refused to leave until after he'd finished celebrating Christ's Body and Blood,” she writes. “The ambulance drivers and nurses looked on from the back of the chapel reverently as this frail old man proceeded to celebrate the Mass. As I watched Father Martin he seemed to change from a frail old man to a strong, faithful and devoted priest. For the first time, I realized the true meaning of the priesthood, a representation of Jesus on earth.”
And runner-up Kevin Goodwin, an eighth-grader from Pipersville, Pa., writes of his favorite parish priest, the late Father John Davids. “Father Davids was a very inspirational man; he never gave up on people,” he writes. “He spent his last 16 years on earth preaching to the imprisoned, truly showing that Jesus is in all of us.”
A ‘Winning’ Priest Humbled
“I'm very humbled,” says Father Scott Mansfield, the priest-hero who inspired 11th-grader Elizabeth Malone's essay. Malone writes about Father Mansfield's defense of life and dedication to young people. She describes how easily he moves from delivering a powerful homily to playing football with the young people of the parish.
“In the midst of the scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church recently, it's wonderful to be appreciated and loved instead of being looked upon with suspicion,” says Father Mansfield.
There were a few uncanny occurrences among this year's winners.
For example, the judges received essays in a blind format, which gave them no indication as to who wrote which one. Yet three schools each placed three students among the top 20 finalists.
Home schoolers accounted for six of the top 20 winners. Two finishers in each grade group were from the same family.
And this year's second-place winner in the grade 5-8 category is the brother of last year's second-place winner in that same category.
The 11-member judging panel was made up of Catholic authors, catechists, theologians, directors of religious education and evangelism at archdiocesan and national levels, and creators of home-school programs.
Judges commented that they had an “extremely difficult task” identifying the winning essays in each grade category and, this year as last, remarked on the quality and inspiration of these essays from today's young Catholics.
“In a world currently overshadowed with the threat of war, among other uncertainties, this year's essay contest sheds a bright light that gives us hope,” says contest judge Matthew Pinto, president of Ascension Press.
“It shows our kids’ love for their priests and, really,” he said, “the affection of Catholic families at large for their priestly leaders.”
----- EXCERPT: Young Essayists Stand Up for Catholic Clergy ----- EXTENDED BODY: Register Staff ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Why My Priest Is a Hero DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:St. Francis of Assisi once said that, if he were to meet an angel and a priest on a road, he would hail the priest first and kiss the ground on which he had walked.
As Christ revealed to St. Catherine of Siena, priests “are My anointed ones ... I call them my Christs, because I have given them the office of administering me to You. ... The angel himself has no such dignity, for I have given it to those men whom I have chosen for my ministers, and whom I have appointed as earthly angels in this life.”
These quotes beautifully illustrate the “venerable dignity of priests, in whose hands the Son of God becomes incarnate anew” (St. Augustine) and the tremendous grace that is bestowed upon them. So much grace is poured upon a priest on the day of his ordination that it is enough to transform him into a hero, Jesus Christ. Some priests do not use this grace, but most do.
Here is a story of a priest who does use the grace that was given him; it is the story of Father Joseph Newell.
The Catholic parish of rural Cranberry Township, Pa., in the early 1960s was composed of a handful of parishioners who gathered every Sunday to celebrate Mass in the local fire hall. Assigned to this small parish was a young Irish priest with jet-black hair and a skip in his step. Over time, this parish has grown into a large parish with over 5,000 families and still the spunky priest remains, giving cheer and advice to his parishioners. He is a true father, a priest both compassionate and firm, a man with an Irish heart and an Irish backbone. He has devotion to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament and is daily seen praying in front of the tabernacle. He is a true son of Mary and prays her rosary every day.
He hears confessions whenever he can, saying after each daily Mass, “I'll be available for confessions.” It is in this sacrament that he truly ministers to his people. Once, in the confessional, a lady came to him burdened down with much suffering. Moved by her troubles, Father asked her if she was Irish, to which she replied, Yes. Then from the confessional came the voice of Father Newell, singing the song, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The lady walked out with a grin on her face and a lighter heart.
As a preacher, Father Newell never short-changes the truth. He doesn's shrink from preaching on subjects that are “politically incorrect.” Once, he preached that youth sports events should not be scheduled on Sunday morning because this prevents many people from attending church. He was then interviewed on TV on this subject, and he delivered his message without watering it down for the public.
This “straight talk” is given in such a kind way that the people do not feel like they are being “preached down to.” And, in all his sermons, there is a delightful shot of Irish wit. These things have made Father Newell a sort of celebrity; his birthday was named a holiday by the township and there is a street named after him, “Newell Boulevard.”
But what truly makes him a hero in my eyes is the wonderful way in which he has ministered to my family. He instructed my father in the Catholic faith, baptized him, gave him his first holy Communion, heard his first confession, and confirmed him. He married my parents in the Church and blessed our house. He enthroned the Sacred Heart of Jesus in our home and consecrated us to him. He blesses our medals, scapulars and rosaries and is our family's confessor. He visits our home and shares with us the story of his meeting St. Padre Pio, visiting Rome and meeting Pope Paul VI. He encourages us in our home school and always has a smile for my sister and me.
Much more could be said of Father Newell, and it would all be good. But, from the stories already told, it can be seen that he is a priest who has and is using the graces he received on his ordination to mirror Christ to his people. Through his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and Mary, his healing in confession, his preaching the truth and his ministering to my family, one can clearly see that Father Newell truly is using the graces of the priesthood to transform himself into Jesus Christ, the greatest hero of all history.
Rachel Elliott, a 10th-grade, home-schooled student, writes from Baden, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Rachel Elliott ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 03/30/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: March 30-April 5, 2003 ----- BODY:Aborted, Abandoned — Alive
Doctors caring for the baby think the 34-year-old mother drank something to start labor. Once she delivered, the mother and an accomplice wrapped the boy in newspaper and a plastic bag and left him in a car at an auto-body shop. An employee there recovered the baby and called police.
The baby, who weighs less than 2.5 pounds, remains in the neonatal intensive care unit of a local hospital. The mother and a woman who provided the abortion-inducing substance have been arrested and charged with attempted murder.
No Board Post for Pro-Abort
THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE , March 12 — Encouraged by the voices of West Virginians for Life, the West Virginia state Senate has rejected the appointment of Pat Hussey, a former nun, to the state medical board. Hussey quit the Sisters of Notre Dame in 1988, stating that she could not accept the Church's teaching on abortion.
The newspaper also reported that, under the state's new informed-consent law, doctors who fail to follow the 24-hour waiting period for abortions, or fail to provide women with materials outlining abortion risks and alternatives, will be disciplined by the medical board.
Aware at 24 Weeks
Although Baroness Susan Greenfield, a professor of neurology at Oxford University, fell short of calling for changes in the abortion laws, she urged doctors and society to be cautious when assuming unborn babies lacked consciousness.
The London daily reported that Lady Greenfield is skeptical of philosophers and doctors who argue that consciousness is “switched on” at some point during the brain's development. She believes instead that there is a sliding scale of consciousness and that it develops gradually as neurons, or brain cells, make more and more connections with each other.
Gov. Gray Davis Apologizes