ROME — Catholics, said G.K. Chesterton, are bound in faith to agree on a few things, but tend to disagree about everything else.
That's what's been playing out in the wake of recently revealed letters that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger apparently wrote to the author of an anti-Harry Potter book.
The letters, which were publicly released by Lifesite News July 13, have reopened the debate among Catholics as to the moral quality of the Harry Potter series just days before the release of J.K. Rowling's sixth Potter tome, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Cardinal Ratzinger's comments — made as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, two years before his election as Pope Benedict XVI — were included in two letters to Gabriele Kuby, a German author. Kuby had sent him a copy of her book Harry Potter — gut oder böse? (Harry Potter: Good or Evil?)
“It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly,” he wrote in the first letter. In the second, Cardinal Ratzinger “gladly” gave permission to Kuby to make public “my judgment about Harry Potter.”
In an e-mail interview with the Register, Kuby said that she is surprised by the global media attention, but is glad that the world has received a warning from the Pope.
“What he says, to my understanding, is this: It takes time for faith to take root in the soul of a young person,” Kuby said. “If that inner space is filled up with fascinating — and therefore seductive — imagery that has no room for God, Christian faith cannot grow.”
J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter novel was published in 1998, and fans ate up the story of the adventures the title character faced with his friends and foes at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft.
Harry was 11 years old in the first book — and most of his fans are in elementary school, though adults have also taken to the long chapter novels.
The sixth Harry Potter novel went on sale at midnight, July. The stories have been successful in film versions of the novels in a series that began in 2001.
Potter Pros and Cons
As one of the foremost critics of Harry Potter, Michael O'Brien — artist, author and father of six — said that he was also heartened by the Pope's statement.
“The blessing in Cardinal Ratzinger's letter is that his points will have to be considered seriously on their own merit. It's no longer possible to dismiss critiques of Harry Potter as fundamentalism or hysteria,” he said from his home in Combermere, Ontario. O'Brien recognizes this as an opportunity to reassess Harry Potter.
“In his letter, Cardinal Ratzinger points out that the long-range effects of these books are very subtle and very corruptive; because of their subtlety, large numbers of people of good will have accepted them,” he said. “We have an opportunity to take some time out and do some real thinking about the effects of a cultural phenomenon such as the Potter series on the formation of the coming generation.”
It's a discussion many Catholics have already been involved in over the growing popularity of these books. Regina Doman, a young adult fiction author and mother of six based in Front Royal, Va., was once a critic of Harry Potter but now is a defender.
Doman is the author (with illustrator Ben Hatke — see page 12) of Angel in the Waters, a pro-life children's picture book.
“I have gone from feeling the books were a threat to considering them possibly the greatest literary coup of the 21st century — stealth Christianity in the form of children's fiction — and out-of-control bestsellers to boot,” said Doman. “Before reading them, I had presumed that the books were so wildly popular because they were demonic in origin. I hope that, as a Catholic critic of most teen literature, I can be forgiven for not thinking that the books might be incredibly popular because they are incredibly good books. But that's what I have found.”
As for the recently revealed Ratzinger letters, Doman said, “I can appreciate that Harry Potter is a thorny issue, and if the cardinal hadn't read the books himself but only read about them, I can quite understand his reaction. Sadly, the critics of Harry Potter tend to exaggerate the books’ problematic areas.”
It was not clear from news reports whether Pope Benedict had read the books, and the Vatican was not commenting.
Protecting Young Readers
Many Catholic parents continue to be concerned about what Harry Potter teaches children. One mother of four, Vivian Dudro of San Francisco, said that she has steered clear of the fantasy series because the books make sorcery and witchcraft appear to be morally neutral and encourage a disordered quest for supernatural power.
“I don't want my kids to be confused about the moral and spiritual life — I want them to be in a position of strength about the faith,” she said.
Dudro, who also works in book publishing, said that she appreciates the support of Pope Benedict.
“I was comforted to see the Holy Father say that it's potentially corrupting to youth because I've gotten a lot of flak for taking this position.”
Msgr. Peter Fleetwood, a former curial official, told Catholic Insider that he suspects the letter was penned for Cardinal Ratzinger by an assistant. He pointed out that the “subtle seduction” referred to in the letter is not specified — a clue to him that “it was a generic answer.”
He also said he found Kuby's book “unconvincing.”
“I don't think she understands English humor,” he said of Kuby. “For example, she said: One sign that these books are making fun of Judaism and Christianity is that Voldemort, the wicked magician, who is the great evil power against whom Harry Potter has to fight, is referred to often as ‘he who must not be named,’ and she takes this as an insult to the name of God” which was never spoken, traditionally.
Msgr. Fleetwood continued, “I replied to her: Don't you know that even within English families, men who make fun of their relationship with women in a nice, lighthearted way say: ‘Oh, she who should not be named,’ meaning the power in the house, their wife?”
Keeping Perspective
Distinguishing a personal position from a Church teaching is imperative, said Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio, founder of Ignatius Press and provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla.
Father Fessio studied theology as a protégé of Father Joseph Ratzinger in Germany. In light of the letters, Father Fessio said, “It is important to remember that the statements of a pope are not engaging the infallible authority of the Church except under very certain circumstances. There is always a danger of blurring the person and personal ideas of the pope with his official statements.
“The better the pope, the more beloved and the more intelligent he is, the more that blurring will occur,” he said. “People will want to accept what he says even if he isn't always authoritative.”
But Father Fessio, a friend of Pope Benedict's, stressed the wisdom in listening to the Pope's personal opinions.
“All that said, I think someone with his love of culture, art and literature — and considering his wide knowledge and prodigious reading — his judgment is worth giving some heed to. We should be disposed to want to follow the leadership of our superiors in the Church, even in areas in which they don't necessarily have proficiency.”
Annamarie Adkins is based in St. Paul, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: Uncovered Letter Revives Catholic Debate ----- EXTENDED BODY: Annamarie Adkins ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: CAMPUS WATCH DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Chutzpah
Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, is the author of several controversial books, including The Holocaust Industry, which criticizes Jewish organizations and Israel for exploiting the Holocaust and Jewish suffering. He is an assistant professor of political science at the Vincentians’ DePaul University in Chicago.
Beyond Chutzpah is harshly critical of Dershowitz — mostly for his arguments defending Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Weiner, who teaches history at the University of California-Irvine, described Dershowitz's “campaign,” which included numerous other letters of protest to University Press officials, as “simply unacceptable,” especially coming from a “civil liberties attorney.”
Schiavo Scholarship
The Terri Schindler-Schiavo Scholarship aims “to carry on Terri's name and assist future priests and laypersons in creating and developing a Catholic culture of life.” Terri Schiavo died March 31 from dehydration after her feeding tube was disconnected by court order.
Numerous priests and religious gave comfort to her family and helped opposed the removal of her feeding tube as a violation of Christian principles.
Ave Maria, which graduated its first class this spring, has been conducting classes in temporary facilities pending completion of its campus next year.
Otherwise Permissible
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 4 — A federal judge has ruled that a policy of Florida's Lee County School district prohibiting ads on the school grounds that officials deem “obscene, libelous, political or religious” is unconstitutional.
“The policy operates to exclude materials that deal with an otherwise permissible subject solely because the materials address the subject from a religious viewpoint,” wrote U.S. District Judge Virginia Hernandez Covington. “For this reason…the policy is unconstitutional.”
Student Center
Student centers are not among the land uses allowed under the area's zoning, but churches are. Judge Kistler ruled that any building devoted to religion should be considered a church, at least in a legal sense.
The project would supplant three established homes with a 21,773-square-foot building with 22% of interior space committed to worship.
Losing Support
REUTERS, July 4 — Armin Luistro, president of Manila's De La Salle University, have joined calls for President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to step down amid economic woes and charges of corruption and election cheating, reported the wire service.
Reuters said Luistro's stand is indicative of a loss for Arroyo of “some support from the middle class and the Catholic Church — two of the key constituencies.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Group Dedicates Jerusalem Meeting to John Paul II DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:JERUSALEM — The soaring stone walls of the ancient Old City of Jerusalem served as the backdrop for the June 19-21 meeting here between Vatican officials and top Israeli rabbis.
The event marked the second time the Bilateral Commission for Dialogue Between the Holy See and Chief Rabbinate of Israel, a high-level committee devoted to improving relations between Catholics and Jews, was convened in Jerusalem. Three such meetings have been held in Rome.
The participants, which included Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Vatican's ambassador to Israel, dedicated their encounter to Pope John Paul II, who did so much to heal wounds between Christians and Jews by denouncing anti-Semitism in all its forms.
During John Paul's 2000 pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which included visits to the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, he acknowledged that Christians have often persecuted Jews over the centuries. He also referred to Judaism as the “older brother” of Christianity.
“This initiative was born after the visit of Pope John Paul II to the Holy Land,” Archbishop Sambi said during a break in the proceedings. “This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Nostre Aetate [the Second Vatican Council document that called for better relations between Catholics and Jews], which declared that Jews and Christians have a great deal of Biblical heritage in common, and that the future relations between us should be marked by dialogue and study of this common heritage.”
Archbishop Sambi said that the commission has an ongoing mandate to meet “because our main purpose is the one expressed by Pope John Paul at Yad Vashem: to build a future in which there is no anti-Jewish feeling among Christians, and no anti-Christian feelings among Jews.”
To achieve this, the archbishop said, the Catholic and Jewish delegations invested a great deal of effort to get to know each other on a religious level as well as personal level. During each of their five meetings to date, they selected a topic for study, and then presented their respective theological views on the subject. Lively discussions inevitably ensued, the nuncio added with a smile.
Said Archbishop Sambi, “We do what will guide us to greater understanding, of one another and ourselves.”
Church-State Relations
At last month's meeting, whose sessions were closed to the media, the participants focused on the “The Relationship Between Religious and Civil Authority” from Christian and Jewish perspectives.
The Holy See's delegation, which was headed by Cardinal Jorge Mejia, the Vatican's former chief archivist and librarian, and the Jewish delegation, which was led by Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, the chief rabbi of Haifa, discussed how people of faith “can best impact on secular structures to promote the moral and ethical concerns of their tradition,” according to Rabbi David Rosen, one of the participants.
Rosen, the international director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, said in an interview that the group addressed the challenges of being religious in a largely secular world.
Israel, Rosen said, “is a secular democracy, not a theocracy, in which the vast majority of its operations are divorced from any religious interests and sometimes even alien to them.” At the same time, he stressed, the country is “saturated by Jewish culture that is rooted in religion. This creates special dilemmas.”
Rosen noted that the Catholic Church faces a range of challenges because it functions in so many different kinds of societies.
“Some, like Poland and Ireland, are culturally religious, even though the Church and state are not synonymous; in Italy, the Church has a formal concordat defining the extent to which issues of religion and state impact on one another. Then there's the case of Israel, where you have a Catholic minority within a culture of another faith.”
Whereas Israel and the Vatican have a formal agreement, “there are certain Muslim societies, most notably Saudi Arabia, where the Church isn't even allowed to function,” Rosen said. “All these models were examined as to how to best advance the well-being of not only one's own religious community but society at large.”
Ethical Obligation
At the meeting's conclusion, the committee issued a statement declaring “religious values are crucial for the well-being of the individual and society.”
It said that “while emphasizing the importance of democracy … it is essential to legally protect society from extreme individualism, exploitation by vested interest groups and insensitivity to the cultural and moral values of religious tradition. Freedom of religion must be guaranteed to both individuals and communities by the religious and civil authorities.”
The statement underscored that “legislation for the promotion of particular religious values is legitimate when done in harmony with the principles of human rights. We have an ethical obligation to demonstrate religious responsibility in these regards, and especially to educate future generations through engaging media opinion makers as well as through conventional educational channels.”
The participants said that it is the “responsibility of the state” to “guarantee the rights of all religious communities, giving special attention to the situation and needs of the Christian communities in the Holy Land, as well as the needs of Jewish communities around the world, facilitating full social and political equality without undermining particular identities.”
Father Norbert Hofmann, secretary to the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, said that the meetings “have become an ordinary event, which is in itself extraordinary. We're becoming friends, our confidence is growing, and we are more and more open.
Concluded Father Hofmann, “It's an extraordinary dialogue.”
Michele Chabin writes from Jerusalem.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michele Chabin ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Who Do Your Kids Say He Is? DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:“Who do you say that I am?”
Jesus asked that of Peter just before explaining to the apostles that he, Jesus, was about to suffer and die in order to take away the sins of the world.
Our Lord's question has been reverberating through history ever since.
Of course, St. Peter had the right answer: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Soon after, Jesus gave him a new name and made him leader of the Church.
One day, each of our children will be asked to seriously consider the same question. Will they be prepared to give the right answer — and live by it?
Their chances will improve if we pray for them and prepare them for that time, starting from when they are very young.
In these selections, younger children are introduced to Jesus’ life and love while older kids are invited to dig deeper. All will be encouraged and challenged to consider what it means to say you believe in Jesus — and to live like you really mean it.
THE STORY OF JESUS
written by Patricia A. Pingry
illustrated by Rebecca Thornburgh
Candy Cane Press, 2001
24 pages, $6.95
Available in bookstores
Little kids will need to buckle their seatbelts because this board book covers a lot of ground in just over 160 words. Starting with familiar images, the author explains whom we celebrate at Christmas and Easter, and then drops in on special times in the life of Jesus. Young readers will especially like those stories in which they see small folk like themselves. Jesus invites the children to come to him. He feeds thousands after a boy offers his lunch of bread and fish. He cures a sick child. Sturdy pages and colorful pictures add to the appeal of this starter Gospel. Ages 2 to 4.
JESUS IS MY FRIEND!
written by Josep Codina
illustrated by Roser Rius
Pauline, 2003
20 pages, $5.95
To order: (800) 836-9723
or pauline.org/store
The life of Jesus is presented from a child's perspective in this book: “Jesus, you were once little like me. You also enjoyed playing with your friends. … I want to be your friend!” Part prayer and part story, this picture book provides a look at the loving acts of kindness that characterized Jesus’ life and interactions with others. Originally published in Spain, it features watercolor illustrations that have a European flavor; they would serve as a great springboard for chatting with preschoolers about the life of Jesus and the love he offers each of us. Ages 3 to 6.
MIRACLES: WONDERS
JESUS WORKED
written by Mary Hoffman
illustrated by Jackie Morris
Phyllis Fogelman Books, 2001
28 pages, $16.99
Available in bookstores
Clever titles and introductions set the stage for a re-telling of each of nine favorite miracle stories. In “Remote Control,” for example, children are reminded how difficult it was in the days in which Jesus lived to connect “long-distance.” No e-mailing. No phoning. No nothing! In spite of this, Jesus reaches out over the miles to cure someone he had never met, the servant of the centurion who believed. “What struck people,” the author writes, “was not the healing of an illness, but the fact that Jesus wasn't even there when it happened.” Large watercolor illustrations. Ages 6 to 12.
JESUS
written and illustrated
by Brian Wildsmith
Eerdmans, 2000
32 pages, $20
To order: (800) 253-7521
or eerdmans.com
Jesus’ story unfolds scene by scene in this beautifully presented picture book. Each page focuses on a different event in Jesus’ life, beginning with the Annunciation and concluding with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Detailed illustrations are set in gilded frames, reminiscent of stained-glass windows. The direct, well-chosen text supports the powerful visual stories conveyed through the artwork. Ages 6 to 12.
JESUS GROWS UP
Written and illustrated
by Pilar Paris,
Josep M. Lozana and Maria Ruis
St. Anthony Messenger
Press, 1997
64 pages, $15.95
To order: (800) 488-0488 or catalog.americancatholic.org
Originally published in Spanish, translated into French, and later adapted for English, this picture book has found a home around the world. The story begins with the Annunciation and ends with Jesus returning home to Nazareth after being found in the Temple. The authors tell the story in words that communicate the heart of the message but never overwhelm young children. “The Holy Spirit will take care of everything,” the Angel Gabriel explains to Mary, “for the child will come from God … he will be called the Son of God.” Thoughtful illustrations. Children will enjoy seeing Jesus spending time with his family, playing with the village children and growing “in strength and wisdom before God and those who knew him.” Ages 4 to 8.
JESUS: A STORY OF LOVE
written by Claire Dumont and Suzanne Lacoursière illustrated by Caroline Merola Pauline, 2003
32 pages, $5.95
To order: (800) 836-9723 or pauline.org/store
The title says it all. This simple biography of Jesus is the story of love — the love of God the Father who sends the Son to earth, the love shared within the Holy Family, the love that Jesus shows in helping, curing and being with others. Love is the reason Jesus shares himself at the “special supper” and dies on the cross. “When we love and are kind,” young readers learn, “we are like Jesus!” Ages 4 to 8.
PROVE IT! JESUS
by Amy Welborn
Our Sunday Visitor, 2002
128 pages, $6.95
To order: (800) 348-2440
or osv.com
Not a biography, Prove It! Jesus, delves into apologetics and addresses a bevy of challenging questions: Who is Jesus? What does it mean to have a relationship with him? Why do people have different takes on Christianity? What's the Catholic perspective on all this? The information is presented in anything but a stuffy textbook format. Rather, the author assumes her readers are smart, capable learners who are able to wrestle with tough theological issues and who above all else want to know the real truth about the real Jesus. Sprinkled with Scripture and an array of cool quotes, this book would be an excellent resource for youth groups and religious education programs, as well as for independent reading. Ages 12 and up.
Trish A. Crawford writes from Winter Park, Florida.
Kerry A. Crawford writes from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Trish A. Crawford and Kerry A. Crawford ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: MARRIAGE: PROTECT IT, DON'T REJECT IT DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:On Dec. 21, 1942, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a divorce granted in Nevada must be accepted by every other state in the union.
Justice Robert Jackson was one of the two dissenters. In objecting to the court's decision, he wrote: “To declare that a state is powerless to protect either its own policy or the family rights of its own people … repeals the divorce laws of all states and substitutes the law of Nevada to all marriages.” He called the ruling, “demoralizing.”
This decision, together with its attendant objections, makes interesting reading in light of the current imbroglio concerning same-sex “marriages,” and whether another Supreme Court decision will require all states to recognize what the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has joined together.
The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act bars federal recognition of same-sex “marriages,” and guarantees states the right to make their own choices on the matter. Nonetheless, President Bush has stated that courts may “have little problem striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. Overreaching judges could declare that all marriages recognized in Massachusetts or San Francisco be recognized as marriages everywhere else.”
The institution of homosexual “marriages” is the ultimate and unhappy outcome of a disintegration of marriage and the family that began with the dissolution of heterosexual marriages.
We have come to take divorce lightly, though more concern is now expressed for the children who are its innocent victims. It was naively believed that contraception and sterilization would strengthen a marriage by allowing a husband and wife to avoid the burden of unwanted children and, with it, an important factor that contributed to divorce.
But statistics have shown that where there was a greater use of contraception, there was an increase in the divorce rate. Also, contraception was notorious for failing to prevent pregnancy. As a result, people clamored for abortion. But abortion only added more weight to already overburdened marriages.
The isolation of the wife and mother from her husband and children weakened family ties even further. In addition, the current climate of sexual permissiveness, with its glut of readily available pornography that quite often alienates the father from his family, has also contributed significantly to the disintegration of the family from an organic unity to a loose assemblage of mere individuals. And it must be remembered that if marriage is reduced to a juxtaposition of solitudes, it is inevitable that society will become more and more a gathering of strangers.
Recognizing the sad and shattered situation of marriage today, philosophy professor Gary Dann, who teaches at the University of Waterloo has issued the following post mortem: “Marriage is an archaic institution that has lost its moral force. But if we wish to provide a healthy, loving environment in which to reproduce our species, we'd better think up something quick to replace it.”
There are honest, thinking people still around, however, who believe that it would be the final act of madness to replace God's concept of marriage with a quick fix. And if they believe that marriage is truly an “archaic institution,” it is only because they recognize that it is eternal.
Moreover, what environment is healthier and more “loving” than one in which a husband and wife form an indissoluble bond of love, commitment, and responsibility to each other and to their children?
What we need is not a replacement for marriage, but its restitution, not its rejection but its protection, not its dismissal but its development.
If we fail to return a carton of milk to the refrigerator, we will find that its contents will soon go sour. But this discovery should not cause us to give up on milk and eliminate it from our diet. Nor do we need an anti-milk brigade to tell us that milk is an archaic drink that has lost its taste. It should make us realize that we must treat things properly if we want them to remain fresh and functional.
In her book, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, Mary Ann Glendon points out that American divorce law in practice “seems to be saying to parents, especially mothers, that it is not safe to devote oneself primarily or exclusively to raising children.”
Selfishness and devotion to marriage and the family are antagonistic concepts. Marriage will fail if it is founded on selfishness. The solution is not to jettison marriage, but to establish it on its vivifying principle of loving a commitment between a man and a woman. We should make good the promise of the prototype.
Marriage is simply indispensable and irreplaceable. We have no choice other than to assist marriage in growing from its proper root while protecting it from its enemies. There is nothing on earth that is so impervious to assault that it can withstand decades of abuse without losing something of its proper functioning.
Though written in 1981, John Paul II's Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Commnio seems even more timely and pertinent than it was when written: “At a moment in history in which the family is the object of numerous forces that seek to destroy it or in some way to deform it, and aware that the well-being of society and her own good are intimately tied to the good of the family, the Church perceives in a more urgent and compelling way her mission of proclaiming to all people the plan of God for marriage and the family, ensuring their full vitality and human and Christian development, and thus contributing to the renewal of society and of the people of God.”
Donald DeMarco is adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Donald Demarco ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Families Hope for Tax Relief From New Bill DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:VALLEY VIEW, Texas — The Zimmerer family is fully supportive of new tax relief efforts in Congress.
Jackie Zimmerer has been a stay-at-home mother to her four boys for the past seven years. As much as she would like to continue to remain at home, family finances related to her husband's company downsizing have made that impossible. In March, she took a part-time job.
A bill in Congress known as the Parents’ Tax Relief Act (PTRA) is designed to help families like the Zimmerers. The legislation was introduced June 23 by U.S. Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., and U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, R.-Kan., with 12 Republican cosponsors. If enacted, proponents say it would help families care for their young children in the manner they best see fit.
“As a stay-at-home mom I have felt punished by the system,” said Zimmerer. “What I do for my family is not, according to the laws of the country, worthy of much of anything. With increasing costs I've had no choice but to return to work part-time when I would far rather be at home with my kids.”
The legislation is based upon ideas raised by family advocate Allan Carlson in his book Fractured Generations: Family Policy for the Twenty-First Century. Carlson is president of The Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, and international secretary of the World Congress of Families. He said the contents of the act grew out of a meeting he had with Terry's legislative aide, Caroline Baird, and representatives from the Family Research Council.
“Congressman Terry wanted to do something to help stay-at-home parents,” said Carlson. “We brought a parcel of ideas.” He described it as “the most important piece of pro-family legislation to be introduced in decades.”
“This legislation will end the long-standing inequity in the tax code that encourages day care above stay-at-home parenting,” Terry said, introducing the act. “This bill will also help families spend more time with their children by increasing family-friendly employment opportunities.”
For families, the act promises to:
“Make the dependent care tax credit currently available not just to those with children in day care, but to stay-at-home parent families.
“Make the $1,000 child tax credit permanent, and index it to inflation.
“ Eliminate the “marriage penalty” — a quirk in the tax code that results in some married couples paying more in taxes than they would if they were both single filers.
“ Increase the personal income tax exemption from $3,100 to $5,000.
“Provide stay-at-home parents with employment credits toward future Social Security benefits.
“Surveys consistently show that at least 70% of parents believe that having one parent at home with a child is best for preschool children,” said Terry. “An overwhelming 94% of parents believe a parent should be at home with children age 2 and under.”
“Taxes take a big bite out of the income for those in the middle class,” said Stephen Krason, president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists and a professor of political science at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. “Anything that can help alleviate that burden would be beneficial for families.”
Government Oversight?
While most families would welcome the relief, some are a bit more cautious.
“I would probably take advantage of it, but I don't want the government involved in my decision,” said Cay Gibson, a stay-at-home mother of five from Sulphur, La. “We've never had government assistance.”
Krason mentioned that potential downside as well.
“One has to be cognizant that whatever advantages are established for the family, that they will not mean more government monitoring,” he said. He noted, however, that such monitoring does not usually occur with taxation.
Those familiar with the act said that it doesn't increase government monitoring, but merely changes information gathered on the tax form.
“This simply creates different check-offs on the IRS form,” said Larry Jacobs, spokesman for the Howard Center.
Carlson noted that the major criticisms of the legislation have concerned the reduction of government revenues.
“The tax base is so frail that some are saying we can't cut revenues anymore,” he said. “Those who have their own tax policy plans, or those who want a flat tax or consumption tax, don't want to deal with these kinds of issues.”
Still, Carlson added that the legislation has received support from an “interesting coalition,” including Focus on the Family, the National Association for the Self-Employed, and the National Federation of Independent Business.
The MicroEnterprise Journal praised the legislation as “full of lovely things for home-based microbusiness.”
“This is a Catholic idea. Catholic thinkers of the past have stressed that the family should be the center of the economy,” said Krason. “In the modern economy, the family got pushed to the margins.”
Though Carlson is not a Catholic, Krason recognizes his contribution to the legislation.
“Dr. Carlson's writing has tried to stress the idea that home is the center of work and family life,” said Krason. “That would tend to be promotive of good family life, without having one or two parents going elsewhere for large parts of the day. He's looking for ways to return to this.”
That's an idea that's been receiving more attention lately.
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., tackles that subject in his book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good.
“In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to,” Santorum writes.
While families like the Zimmerers and Gibsons would welcome the relief, it may be a long time coming. Typically, the amount of time that passes between the date an act is introduced and the date it is signed into law is seven years. By then, the Zimmerers’ and Gibsons’ children may be ineligible.
Still, Carlson is hopeful.
“This one has an attraction that gives it a real opportunity. It should find bipartisan support,” said Carlson. “I see no reason why centrist Democrats shouldn't love this bill.”
Tim Drake is based in St. Joseph, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: WEEKLY DVD/VIDEO PICKS DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Manna From Heaven (2003)
New on DVD, fledgling Catholic production company Five Sisters’ third feature Manna From Heaven made a modest splash in indie film circles a couple of years ago, though critics were more favorably impressed with the faith-oriented film's sweetness and moxie than its logic or polish.
An old-fashioned morality tale in sitcom dress, Manna tells about a group of family and friends who decide to repay God for a 30-year-old cash windfall from which they all benefited. In fact, three decades after $20,000 in cash mysteriously falls into their laps, they decide that God intended the money not as a gift but as a loan — and that the time has come to pay it back. This leads to hare-brained fund-raising schemes including a car raffle and a ballroom-dance competition.
Like Leonardo Difilippis’ similarly produced Thérèse, the film is well-intentioned and devout, but underdeveloped and oversweet. Still, it benefits from generous performances from pros, including Shirley Jones, Cloris Leachman, Frank Gorshin and Wendie Malick.
Content advisory: Brief crude language and a couple of sexual references. Teens and up.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Like one of Wonka's own sweet-and-sour confections, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a bizarre little film, part Wizard of Oz fantasy-musical, part gleefully punitive morality tale, but with something slightly creepy and unsettling about it. It may not have wicked witches or flying monkeys, but Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka is a more subversive and unpredictable presence than Frank Morgan's Wizard, and the world over which he presides is just as difficult to negotiate.
Based on the Roald Dahl novel, the film is full of Dahl's whimsical flourishes, from Charlie's four grandparents permanently stationed at the four corners of their shared bed to the wonky Dahlian names: Everlasting Gobstoppers, Oompa-Loompas, Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
The film also shares the book's impression of humanity as largely selfish and superficial, as the much-coveted golden tickets send the world into a frenzy. Yet where the film takes the same gleeful pleasure as Dahl's book in punishing the spoiled children, it also adds a redemptive twist by having Charlie stumble before proving himself honorable.
Content advisory: Brief frightening imagery. Fine family viewing.
Twentieth Century (1934)
A 2005 DVD release, Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century, an acerbic satire of show-business ego and superficiality starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, is often credited as Hollywood's first screwball comedy. Though the director went on to make other better-known films in this genre, including Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, Twentieth Century is possibly the most breathlessly funny of the three, if also the most cynical and subversive.
Barrymore plays Oscar Jaffe, an egomaniacal Broadway impresario who regards the drama of his own life as the greatest story of all. Much given to firing his put-upon underlings, Jaffe is so completely in his own world that when he decides to begin grooming a shop girl for Broadway glory, he expects her to answer to the stage name he's settled on even before telling her what it is. But when his plans succeed too well and his protégé abandons him for Hollywood, Jaffe is desperate to do whatever is necessary to win her back.
Content advisory: Sexual situations and innuendo. Teens and up.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steven D. Greydanus ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: BLAMING ISLAM DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:EDITORIAL
In the wake of the London bombings and the savage terrorist attacks in Iraq, you can hear a new chorus on the talk shows and commentary columns.
“Let's have the courage to tell the truth,” they say. “It's time to admit that Islam itself is the problem.”
In this view, the Koran itself is at the root of terrorist violence. But there are a couple of problems with this view.
One is the profile of the London suicide bombers that is emerging: They were the well-off children of culturally assimilated British families.
“The most common stereotype of a suicide bomber is that of a young man or teenage boy who has no job, no education, no prospects and no hope,” wrote American academic Robert Pape in his new book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. “[But] in general, suicide attackers are rarely socially isolated, clinically insane or economically destitute individuals, but are mostly educated, socially integrated and highly capable people who could be expected to have a good future.”
They are disaffected, bored Westerners picked off by radicals.
“They know very little about religion, and what they do know is out of context,” Rohan Gunaratna from Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies told the Australian. “They know selected passages of the Koran that the [radical] imams have told them.”
Another problem with the attempt to condemn the whole Islamic world for terrorism is that it ignores a key piece of information: Our own culture is hardly in a place where we can blithely assert our superiority.
The progression of abortion, euthanasia and attacks on the family in the West has gotten so bad that Pope John Paul II called ours a “culture of death.” He said our culture is “is marked by the fatal attempt to secure the good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”
There is, of course, a crucial difference between the “culture of death” in the West and the violent extremism of the East. Muslim extremists attack in the name of religion. Our own culture's evils come as we reject our Christian roots.
So how can we isolate and address the real faults of Islam and the West?
This is where Catholics are in a unique place to play a key role in the central conflict of our times. Catholics can be re-evangelizers of the West to overcome our own culture's weakness — and we can be partners in a dialogue with the East to emphasize the best in Islam and find a larger role for Christianity in the Middle East.
“Dialogue” can sound like a weasel-word to our ears. We think it means ducking from a problem by throwing words at it.
Pope Benedict XVI doesn't think of it that way. On April 24 he said it is “imperative to engage in authentic and sincere dialogue” with Muslims.
Pope John Paul II provided a model of that dialogue in Crossing the Threshold of Hope when he wrote about Islam.
“As a result of their monotheism, believers in Allah are particularly close to us,” he wrote. He praised Muslims who “without caring about time or place, fall to their knees and immerse themselves in prayer.”
But he added that while some of the “most beautiful names in the human language are given to the God of the Koran … He is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us.”
And what they believe about God affects what Muslims believe about the human person, he said.
God taught us about ourselves by becoming one of us, dying for us, and remaining with us in the Eucharist; he taught us the great dignity of the human person. In Muslim beliefs, God never went so far to affirm that dignity in his people — and as a result, fundamentalist Muslim countries have an impoverished view of human rights.
Pope Benedict put his finger on the best way Christians and Muslims can bridge their basic theological difference when he said that any dialogue with Muslims must be “built on respect for the dignity of every human person, created as we Christians firmly believe, in the image and likeness of God.”
If we can't find commonality in God's redemption, perhaps we can find it in his creation.
But we can't do it as a secular anti-family bloc. A re-Christianized West is our strongest defense against Islamic extremism. That's a tall order — but one that John Paul II reduced to achievable goals when he asked Catholics to promote four basic practices: Sunday Mass, confession, prayer and service. If the Church took up that challenge, the speed of the results would surprise us.
A vibrant, Christian culture of faith and life can prevail against an extremist religious onslaught. A culture of death and doubt cannot.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Phoenix To Lower The Age of Confirmation DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:PHOENIX — It's one of the key sacraments called the sacraments of initiation. It's the sacrament most focused on the Holy Spirit — and on the courage to spread the Good News.
So it was distressing to a task force in the Diocese of Phoenix, Ariz., when it found that the sacrament of confirmation was falling out of favor. Only 40% of its adolescents were getting confirmed, and the percentage of adults was even lower.
The finding has led Bishop Thomas Olmsted to lower the age of confirmation from 16 to third grade (usually age 8). Now the sacrament will be received during the same Mass as first Communion.
In a pastoral letter on the new policy released in June, Bishop Olmsted said, “Since over 60% of our teens are not confirmed, we have thousands of adults attempting to face the challenges of the modern world without the grace of confirmation to help them.”
By lowering the age, said Director of Youth Ministry Bill Marcotte, the diocese hopes to help young people and their parents understand what the sacrament is — a fulfillment of their baptismal graces given as a free gift to further grow in the faith. The diocese hopes to confirm more youths and evangelize the parents by requiring their involvement.
Marcotte also hopes the new policy will benefit youth ministry programs because confirmation will no longer be viewed as the “carrot” to draw teens in.
“You have people coming in with the end in sight, instead of understanding confirmation as a beginning that leads to a vision of how they can impact the world,” said Marcotte. “If a kid has to go through a youth program with no understanding of what it means to have a relationship with God, it can be really empty. By having confirmation in third grade, the Eucharist then becomes an ongoing model for faith formation. We never stop being formed.”
The Phoenix task force also wanted to restore the original order of the sacraments of initiation: baptism, confirmation and then Eucharist. Since apostolic times, the sacrament of confirmation has been seen as the second sacrament of Christian initiation. For the first five centuries in the Church, baptism, confirmation and Eucharist were celebrated together in one initiation rite, for adults and children. Orthodox Christians continue to be confirmed at baptism. But by the 13th century, infant baptism was the norm, and confirmation was celebrated at the age of discretion (7), while first Eucharist took place in pre-adolescence.
It was not until the 20th century, in 1910, that the age for Eucharist was lowered to 7 or 8, by Pope St. Pius X, who wanted to encourage more frequent reception of the Eucharist. Confirmation was then celebrated between 8 and 18. It was the first time in Church history that the Eucharist was first received before confirmation.
Today, the Church sets the age for confirmation at the age of discretion or older, according to Canon 891. Shortly after the new Code of Canon Law was approved in 1983, the U.S. bishops conference authorized each bishop to determine the age of confirmation in his own diocese. The age of first Communion is dictated by Canons 913-914 of the Code of Canon Law:
“The administration of the most holy Eucharist to children requires that they have sufficient knowledge and careful preparation so that they understand the mystery of Christ according to their capacity and are able to receive the body of Christ with faith and devotion….
“It is primarily the duty of parents … to take care that children who have reached the use of reason are prepared properly and, after they have made sacramental confession, are refreshed with this divine food as soon as possible.”
Phoenix is the eighth U.S. diocese to restore the original order of the sacraments, according to a study conducted by Stella Jeffrey, director of evangelization and catechesis in the Diocese of Fargo, N.D., which initiated third-grade confirmation in 2002. Nearly 50 other dioceses have either partially restored the order, are considering it, or have reverted back from such a policy.
To Think Like Christ
Results have been mixed in Fargo, noted Jeffrey. One parish had a 40% drop in attendance at catechesis programs as young as fourth grade; another parish of identical size has not lost even a single high school student in religious education. But what is emerging among her counterparts across the country is a new focus on confirmation and what keeps young people engaged in their faith.
“The way to get them to keep coming is to introduce them to Jesus Christ,” Jeffrey said. “When he has touched their lives, they will want to know him more. One key is catechizing parents. Parents whose hearts are on fire will pass that zeal on to their children.”
She added, “I'm so excited when I hear New Evangelization, and then I think, ‘But please don't make it be another program.’”
Jeffrey said Pope John Paul II wrote in Catechesi Tradendae, the 1979 apostolic exhortation on catechesis, that the aim of catechesis is to inspire the person to “set himself to follow Christ, and learn more and more within the Church to think like him, to judge like him, to act in conformity with his commandments and to hope as he invites us to.”
The restoration of the sacraments, she added, gives the person great hope because they have the strength to actually think, judge, act and hope like Jesus Christ.
On the other hand, the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas, reverted to a 10th-grade confirmation from a second-grade policy several years ago after it experienced a major drop in attendance at religious education programs. The diocese is strengthening its catechesis to anticipate the teen-age group.
“We're trying to develop interactive programs that focus on areas of discipleship to instill in them that now is the time to go forth [after confirmation], rather than thinking, ‘I'm done,’” said Delia Carranza, Corpus Christi's program coordinator for youth ministry. “A lot of the youth are really stepping up and deciding to live out their faith, sometimes on their own initiative.”
Dominican Father Brian Mullady, adjunct theology professor at Holy Apostles Seminary and College in Cromwell, Conn., favors a policy of seventh- or eighth-grade confirmation, when kids are more open to the faith.
He said many 16 year-olds just don't care about their faith.
“One of the liabilities of having it at 16 is that by that time … they've already been through a lot of temptations — especially sexual temptations — which occur at a lower age every year,” Father Mullady said.
‘Personal Pentecost’
Mary Polasek of Sobieski, Minn., whose son was confirmed at 16, agreed.
“At 13, my son was still into his faith, but in high school, church meant less to him. I think third grade is too young, but if they can get the grace earlier, maybe it would help them get through the rebellious years.”
Despite good pastoral reasons behind current Church practices, most sacramental theologians favor restoring the original order of the sacraments, said Father Andrew Cozzens. He is a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis who has a licentiate in dogmatic theology with a focus on the sacraments from the Angelicum, the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.
He said, “It's difficult to say to a young person who's 15 and preparing for the sacrament of confirmation, ‘Now you're going to be a full-fledged member of the Church,’ when they've been receiving Communion since second grade.”
Father Cozzens believes Rome will eventually have to rule on the issue.
“From the earliest times, confirmation was considered to be a sealing of baptism with the power of the Holy Spirit, which strengthened the person for the living of their faith in the world,” he said. “It is meant to be a personal Pentecost, and it's at Pentecost that the Church goes from being inwardly focused to being outwardly focused.”
Barb Ernster is based in Fridley, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barb Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Tim Burton's Bittersweet Treat DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is enough to make any fan of Roald Dahl's most beloved novel cry — with delight at all the film gets so magically right, and with frustration that, in spite of its winsome appeal, the film is still nearly ruined by Burton's obsessions and a spectacularly miscalculated performance by star Johnny Depp.
No one but Burton could possibly have so perfectly nailed Dahl's blend of whimsical fantasy and withering comeuppance, or the Dickensian glee and extravagance of its morality-play tableau, with abject poverty and decency lavishly rewarded while excess, gluttony and decadence are mercilessly punished.
And no one but Burton could possibly have thought it would be a good idea to give candymaker extraordinare Willy Wonka unresolved issues from childhood stemming from a traumatic relationship with his dentist father, leaving Wonka unable to say the words “family” or “parents,” and subject to disorienting childhood flashbacks.
But when the climax and denouement have played out and the scenes keep coming, there can be no doubt that Tim Burton has driven his film off the rails.
Meanwhile, who on earth could have thought it was a good idea to have Johnny Depp play Willy Wonka with deathly pale-gray makeup framed by a black bob? Did anybody but Depp himself think that his portrayal of Wonka as an emotionally stunted, antisocial misfit with a chilly nervous giggle, who delivers lines like “Let's boogey” and “You're really weird” as if coining new catchphrases, was an improvement over Dahl's character? As badly as Gene Wilder botched the role in the modestly entertaining 1971 film, this is worse.
Yet take out Wonka, and what's left is little short of brilliant, far outstripping the 1971 film. From young Charlie Bucket (Freddy Highmore, who previously co-starred with Depp in Finding Neverland), his extended family and their crazy ramshackle house, to the wonders of Wonka's factory, including the Oompa-Loompas and their zany musical numbers, to the over-the-top rottenness of the other four children (and for the most part their parents), this Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is both faithful and inspired, true both to the spirit and the letter of the book, even as it goes beyond it in ways. It's so good, it has the makings of a modern family classic, the dark childhood fantasy that all the Harry Potter films and Lemony Snicket are trying to be.
And yet at the center of it all is one of the best actors in Hollywood working as hard as he can to ruin the film, aided and abetted by tacked-on excursions into yet another cinematic rehashing of Tim Burton's father-figure issues (Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands).
For those who haven't read the book, allow me to introduce you to a character you won't meet in either film: Mr. Willy Wonka. As Dahl introduces him, we learn of “marvelously bright” eyes “twinkling and sparkling at you all the time” in a face “alight with fun and laughter.” Dahl rhapsodizes about “how clever he looked,” how “quick and sharp and full of life,” in his movements “like a quick, clever old squirrel at the park.”
He looks and behaves, in fact, like a diminutive, hyperactively excitable Santa Claus welcoming visitors to a North Pole workshop of candy rather than toys. For some inexplicable reason, it's a characterization neither film version comes within a million miles of.
Wilder's Wonka in the earlier film was the polar opposite of Dahl's: low-key and detached, quietly self-amused, less like a “clever old squirrel” than an inscrutable, capricious cat, politely disdainful, seemingly friendly, but with ready claws.
Now Depp takes the character in a direction at right angles to both Dahl's and Wilder's versions. Dahl's Wonka was genuinely friendly; Wilder's Wonka at least knew how to fake it. Depp's character doesn't. In fact, he's so socially dysfunctional, he has no idea how to make a speech of welcome or respond to basic questions without a stack of note cards from which he reads as mechanically as a first-grader sounding out Dr. Seuss.
Strange Subversion
On one level, of course, only fans of the book will be bothered by the film's radical reinterpretation of the character — though it's a crying shame that the film bothers to be so brilliantly true to the book in almost every other respect, only to subvert it so thoroughly in this one crucial respect. Yet will anyone, even newcomers to the story, find this Willy Wonka engaging, interesting, or in any way appealing?
Although the creep factor of Depp's Wonka is real, the effect is somewhat exaggerated by external factors, including timing and Depp's previous roles.
Recent events make it nearly impossible, watching this film, not to think of another emotionally stunted, reclusive millionaire child-man with pale skin and black hair who built a fantasy wonderland for himself and then invited children into it. The “Neverland” connection of Depp's last film, in which he played yet another emotionally stunted child-man who created fantasy worlds — and was explicitly suspected of pedophilia — doesn't help matters. Yet there's no hint in Depp's brittle performance of Michael Jackson's mannerisms or speech patterns.
And the rest of the film is good enough that it may be worth gritting one's teeth and looking past Willy Wonka. From the hyper-competitiveness of Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb, Because of Winn-Dixie) — and of her ex-cheerleader mother, who competes vicariously through her daughter — to the aggressive, impatient computer-game mentality of video junkie Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry), the film's cautionary satire hits bull's-eyes.
The casting — again, Depp aside — is perfect. Old David Kelly (Waking Ned Devine) is note-perfect as Grandpa Joe, and Indian actor Deep Roy (Big Fish, Planet of the Apes) brings solemn dignity to the role of all 100 Oompa-Loompas, whose show-stopping musical numbers, composed by longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman with lyrics drawn (unlike those of the “Oompa Loompa Song” of the earlier film) straight from Dahl, made me want to stand up and cheer. If only the camera didn't keep coming back to Depp every time the music winds down.
Content advisory: Some unsettling images and mild menace to children; an instance of minor profanity; one grating MTV rock-video type musical number. Not for sensitive children.
Steven D. Greydanus is editor and chief critic of DecentFilms.com.
----- EXCERPT: Charlie has its charms, but Wonka will give you the willies ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steven D. Greydanus ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Is European Ennui Contagious? DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:THE CUBE AND THE CATHEDRAL:
EUROPE, AMERICA AND POLITICS WITHOUT GOD
by George Weigel
Basic Books, 2005
202 pages, $23
To order: (800) 371-1669
or perseusbooks.com
The “naked public square” is how, more than 20 years ago, Father Richard Neuhaus described efforts in some quarters of American law and culture to erase religion from our country's public life.
Any manifestation of religion in American civil life, proponents of the naked public square argue, breaches the “wall of separation” between church and state supposedly erected by the First Amendment.
Advocates of the “naked public square” are alive and kicking in Europe, too, often occupying key places in government and the opinion-making circles of both high and popular culture. Last year's debate over whether the proposed constitution of the European Union should include references to God in its preamble, argues George Weigel, is a perfect illustration of this secularist trend.
What does this have to do with everyday life?
America's relations with some countries in Europe, especially during the war in Iraq, have been tense. Lots of ink has been spilled over why. Robert Kagan captured part of the problem when, adapting John Gray's phrase, he argued that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.”
Americans and Europeans do “see the world and world politics…differently,” admits Weigel. The question is: Why?
The answer, according to Weigel, is: It's the culture, stupid. Transatlantic tensions have political and economic components, but neither politics nor economics alone suffices to explain, for example, why a rich and contented Europe is undergoing population implosion. Culture, says Weigel, accounts for many of Europe's most pressing problems: its baby bust, its flight from the rough-and-tumble of politics, its economic enervation, and its wobbly-kneed responses to terrorists.
“History is not simply the by-product of the contest for power in the world,” he writes. “History is certainly not the exhaust fumes produced by the means of production, as the Marxists taught. Rather, history is driven, over the long haul, by culture — by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.”
Weigel has no doubt that Europe is in the midst of a culture war, in which secularists want to drive religion off the public square and into the sacristy where, given abysmal church attendance, it can die of loneliness. In contrast to America, Weigel argues, the secularists have gotten much further in Europe — a fact that doesn't augur well for the United States.
Why are the stakes in that struggle so critical? Invoking the Christian humanism of Pope John Paul II, Weigel insists that democracy bereft of a transcendental reference must ultimately destroy itself. Absent an opening to something beyond itself, human life closed on itself will be devoured, as Jacques Maritain observed, by the “Minotaur of history.” He shows how the bloody history of the 20th century, where the “culture of death” was born in the run-up to World War I, continues to reap a sorrowful harvest.
Weigel writes with finesse, making even the most complex subjects accessible to all. No Catholic interested in state, society, culture or modern life should miss this book.
John M. Grondelski writes from Warsaw, Poland.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: John M. Grondelski ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: THE CALLING DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Priest shortage? What priest shortage?
From where I'm sitting, it looks as though the trend is turning. In addition, it looks like it has everything to do with the Holy Spirit using the witness of Pope John Paul II to call good men to the altar.
I have been fortunate to interview, for magazine articles, eight men ordained over the past two years. All are faithful, highly qualified, dedicated priests. They're ready to love and serve the Church. From what I've heard, it seems that the same type of men are being ordained throughout the country.
“That's all great,” you might say, “but isn't it going to take several decades to make up for the steady decline since the middle of the 20th century, and to get back to where we should be as far as the number of priests that we need?”
Perhaps. But now it's no longer just John Paul or a few bishops or priests who lead others to the priesthood. As these new men are ordained and begin serving, their enthusiasm and holiness is drawing many others.
At our diocesan ordination in early June, almost all of the priests of the Diocese of Lansing, Mich., were there to welcome the five new members into their ranks. It would be difficult for any young man present not to be affected.
Like the 16-year-old sitting next to us. I noticed him every once in a while during the Mass. He was paying attention, participating, understanding, engrossed. Not at all like me at that age.
Afterward, I asked him if was going to be up there on the altar some day. “It could happen,” he replied. Behind his ready answer and the enthusiastic look in his eye were the unspoken words: “It's a long way off, but I hope, I really hope, that God is calling me.”
Instead of avoiding or not even considering the priesthood because they would much rather do something else, a growing number of young men are hoping that they will be called. They are getting a glimpse of a life of adventure, challenge and sacrifice. A life of knowing and following Jesus with other men — men of outstanding character with whom they can do their part to save souls and change lives.
Youth are looking for meaning, for something to devote their lives to. That was evident in the untold hordes of young people who showed up in Rome for John Paul's funeral. It was a statement that the Church is still — and ever — young, as Pope Benedict reminded us.
The youth are taking over. The priesthood is for young men with fire in their heart, with a zeal that can consume. In addition, as more of them answer the call, becoming role models themselves, they will make the priesthood even more enthralling to those who are looking — just as John Paul did on a large scale.
Right now, we talk about the shortage of priests in America. Before long we will be wondering where they all came from. Instead of one or two in a parish, or one for several parishes, there will be a number serving together at each parish. Their brotherhood will attract even more.
When our bishop held his annual luncheon for young men considering the seminary, 15 to 20 guys from our little parish showed up. Sure, that's unusual. However, it can become the norm.
The Holy Spirit, with the help of John Paul, Benedict XVI, bishops, priests — and us — is issuing a call. Do you know of someone who needs help noticing it? Now would be a great time to point it out.
Bob Horning writes from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Bob Horning ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Bail Them Out or Let Them Swim? DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:FAMILY MATTERS
My husband and I are fortunate to have no debt other than our mortgage. I can't say the same for our two grown children, who are more than struggling. As a matter of fact, they are sinking quickly. How can we help?
You would be surprised by the number of people at conferences who ask this very question.
While I know you are dealing with older children, I would like to take this opportunity to encourage parents of young ones to begin teaching a sensible approach to finances now. Forming them in the virtues, teaching them how to tithe at an early age, showing them how to manage a checkbook and budget — all of these can be done during the childhood years (Proverbs 22:6).
With grown children, bad habits may make the job more difficult, but just as with the prodigal son, Our Lord continually calls us back “home.” Look for an opportunity where your children would be open to suggestions. I have frequently found that many young couples (engaged or newly married without children) may not ready to hear about such things as budgeting and prioritizing expenses. They are often still starry eyed — thinking they'll be in a financial position to satisfy all of their wants.
Yet, when that same couple has their first child, it's amazing to see the changes that take place. All of a sudden, the new parents seem to grasp the magnitude of the job ahead of them and realize — maybe for the first time — that resources will be limited. This can be an opportune moment to reach out to them. Share what it was like for you and your husband to manage the affairs of your family, including the more difficult times. Let them know that God has a design for life that leads us to true freedom — even in the area of our finances.
While it's impossible for me to give specific counsel without knowing more about your situation, the following guidelines would be a good place to start:
If your children are in the midst of a true emergency, you may want to offer sufficient assistance to “buy” the time needed to develop a sound financial plan. They would do well to read Catholic Answers’ Guide to Family Finances and use the forms included in the workbook to create their plan. The balance sheet, summary of debts and budget worksheet show where you are now — and where you are headed. Reading the workbook and filling out the forms can be completed in a few weeks.
To what extent you offer further help will require prudent judgment. On the one hand, if your children have learned their lesson and are now living by Christian principles, I see nothing wrong with providing additional assistance. This can be a good way to reinforce responsible behavior and help them learn good habits that will last a lifetime. You'll need to determine whether your financial assistance takes the form of a loan or an outright gift.
On the other hand, if your children show no signs of changing their behavior, you can continually expect them to come back to you for help. In this case, it may be better for them in the long term if you apply a little “tough love” and hold out until they are willing to change their behavior. God love you!
Phil Lenahan is director of finance at Catholic Answers in El Cajon, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Phil Lenahan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:The Bishops And Lay Ecclesiastical Ministries
Pertinent to “Bishops of America Say They Share Evangelization Concerns” (June 26-July 2):
After several years of ecclesiastical confusion, my wife and I attended a Catholic family conference and, taking a speaker's advice, bought the 16 decrees of the Second Vatican Council. Prior to that, we (like so many) only knew what we had been told. While studying the documents and the Catechism, much confusion disappeared.
Then I watched EWTN's recap of the June bishops’ meeting in progress. Talk about déjà vu! The debate was about LEMs. This is an acronym for lay ecclesiastical ministers. Yes, Virginia, the Church (not to be left out) also uses acronyms. A lay ecclesiastical minister is not a typical extraordinary minister of holy Communion, lay catechist or lector, which we are so accustomed to in a typical parish. Rather, LEMs are usually people with degrees in theology, canon law, ministry, etc., who have positions in parishes, chancery offices or perhaps on committees of the national bishops’ conference. And, we were told, there are some 30,000 of them in the United States alone, almost all working for a salary.
The bishops were discussing their status and compensation issues, and have a committee studying the whole concept. Some of the bishops were somewhat critical of their [performance] in some areas, for example their roles in the deterioration of catechesis from the 1970s on. One metropolitan archbishop told about interviewing young priests about parish work and learned that they often didn't have much to do, because so much had been turned over to lay ministers. Most of the bishops seemed to take this state of affairs for granted, going on about these wonderful people giving their services to the Church in the “spirit of Vatican II.”
A bit of research will show that the sense of the council was that the laity should be renewed in their understanding of the Gospel so that they would be equipped to take the message from the Church to the world at large, which needs to be evangelized. The Gospels usually have Jesus taking the Good News to the streets. Unfortunately, most of this effort is involving laymen in Church jobs that have little or no impact on the spreading of the Gospel to the world at large.
It has been written often that strong Catholic opposition could have prevented the Roe v. Wade decision. But the focus was on involving the laity in internal Church jobs. Pope John Paul II wanted the Church to evangelize the culture. Some bishops have called for a plenary council to address the issue. Pope Benedict XVI, in his pre-election preaching, seemed to prefer, finally, implementing Vatican II instead.
We all should pray and work that his admonition and his call for a New Evangelization are carried out.
JOSEPH CALLAGHER
Shingle Springs, California
Pro-Life Organ Donation
I appreciated “To Give and Not Count the Cost” regarding organ donation (July 17-23).
Indeed, it is pro-life to consider donating our organs to improve and/or extend the life of another human being. But your article does not mention the dangers in organ donations: Many healthcare providers are not pro-life.
Unfortunately, today's medical ethics have become increasingly utilitarian and devoid of a “sanctity of life” ethic. Secular ethicists might be eager to improve the “quality of life” of a human being, but many have no problem hastening the death of a donor in order to obtain an organ for another human being. This is certainly not in the best interest of the donor.
Persons who want to be donors — or anyone concerned about their God-given right to life — should strongly consider filling out a pro-life healthcare advance directive, e.g., a “Will to Live,” offered by the National Right to Life Committee at nrlc.org. This document has a general presumption for life and specifically forbids hastening the death of a donor for organ procurement.
DEBORAH STURM, RN
Member, National Association
of Pro-Life Nurses
Aliquippa, Pennsylvania
Mass Teaching Opportunity
Regarding “Bishops Postpone Action on Mass Adaptations” (July 3-9):
One of the prayers from the Mass under discussion is the memorial acclamation “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”
The holy sacrifice of the Mass involves both God and his people. The other memorial acclamations include the people of God. Theologically, the memorial acclamation under discussion is deficient.
I believe that this could be cured, and provide a pastoral teaching opportunity, if the memorial acclamation was changed to “Christ has died for us, Christ is risen for us, Christ will come again for us.”
JOEL FAGO
Phoenix, Arizona
From the Front Line
Thank you for your support, prayers and prayer books [Guide to the Rosary]. The men of ADA 944 are very grateful.
The men and young soldiers and Marines are making tremendous sacrifices every day. Their conviction to duty humbles me. I pray for my men daily. I place all of my faith in Christ. I have a son at home, Luke, who is 1 year old. I pray the Lord will see fit I may return to him.
The month of May was tough on us forces. Eighty were killed in action, the second highest death toll since the onset of the war.
We are making a difference down here. The Iraqi soldiers and locals we interact with on a daily basis are very grateful toward us. The foreign fighters are the main problem.
Thank you again for your prayers. God Bless and peace be with you.
MASTER SERGEANT MIKE CUTONE
U.S. Army Special Forces
Iraq
Prayerful Gratitude
Thank you so much for the special John Paul II edition of the Register (April 10-16). We are so grateful, as we truly enjoy your publication and we just absolutely love and miss our dear beloved John Paul II the Great.
Please know that we are praying for all of you and your work and as we adore Jesus, our Eucharistic King!
THE NUNS OF OUR LADY OF
THE ANGELS MONASTERY
Hanceville, Alabama
A Call to Care
Pertinent to “Gospel Rock Stars” (Prolife Victories, June 19-25):
This is a reminder to your readers. Do you have a friend or a relative living in a nursing home? How long has it been since you visited them?
Two years ago, my sister died in a nursing home. She was 93 and had endured many health problems. The home was rated a good place, probably as good as it could be, considering the limitations of budget, frequent turnover and insufficiency of staff, etc. However, the caregivers I met were always kind and cheerful.
What impressed me the most on my visits was the collection of patients sitting in wheelchairs drawn close to the entrance. Every time I entered, I would see heads lift and eyes watch expectantly. Then, the gaze would drop and shift away with the realization that I was not the someone they had hoped to see. Their expressions dimmed into a sadness that I found very eloquent. I always smiled and greeted them, but they would just silently turn away. I was just another disappointment.
The director had told me how often mothers or fathers might be brought in and, thereafter, the escorts neither called nor came again. I believe “warehousing” or “abandonment” would describe it. Such patients must feel that hey have already died.
How much good and comfort is expressed by even a brief visit, holding a hand, sharing a kiss or a hug, a few murmured words of sympathy and love? Just the difference between despair and the courage to keep going.
I keep remembering that even Christ was deserted. Do you recall the biblical description of him in the garden when even his closest friends and followers slept while he suffered his agony alone? He later asked them: “Could you not watch one hour with me?”
Can't you spare on hour in a week, or even a month? To the lonely and forlorn, it could be the only reason to soldier on. So, be there!
ELENOR LOARIE SCHOEN
Shoreline, Washington
Benedict Bonanza
I don't write many letters to the editor, but I feel compelled to thank you for all the wonderful articles and terrific photographs of our new Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI. We will never see any of these photos in the secular press — they only want him to look unfriendly!
Also, I was glad to read the letter in the July 3-9 issue titled “Off Centering.” It did seem to me that this concept of centering prayer was a bit controversial. I had an experience with it many years ago at a diocesan retreat house. We were all told to lie flat on the floor in the dark and repeat a mantra. It all seemed a ridiculous approach to spirituality at the time and still does. Sort of like Zen.
Anyway, keep up the terrific job you are doing. You are much needed!
ISABEL KOTLINSKI
Columbus, Ohio
See You in August
The next issue of the Register will be dated Aug. 7-13.
The Register is published every week except during our midsummer skip and our Christmas break.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Bill Would Require Parental Notification When Teens Seek Contraception DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — A new bill introduced in Congress aims to give a boost to parental rights in the formation of their children. The legislation, introduced by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., would require federally funded health clinics to notify the parents of any minors seeking contraception at least five days before dispensing the contraception.
The legislation, dubbed the Parents Right to Know Act, would recognize at least a formal role by parents in the lives of their teen-agers. For years, courts have put the rights of minors over parents.
“As a practicing family physician, and as a member of Congress, I have seen first-hand the painful consequences associated with our federal policy that allows children to make potentially life-changing reproduction decisions without their parents’ knowledge,” Coburn said. “This government-sanctioned veil of secrecy is contributing to a growing sexually transmitted disease epidemic and encourages unintended teen pregnancies and abortions. Few government policies are more irrational or hostile to the vital relationship between a parent and child.”
Opponents of the legislation say that it could discourage teens from seeking “reproductive health care services” and could lead to more sexually transmitted diseases and “unwanted” pregnancies.
One such opponent, Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, wrote in her blog on the organization's website that the legislation would amount to having teen-agers “punished for having sex.”
She asked, “If your son or daughter felt they could not tell you about their decision to have sex — for whatever reason — wouldn't you feel better knowing that your teens could get the health care they need?”
For Coburn, however, this argument flies in the face of common sense.
“Parental involvement can help delay or stop risky sexual behavior among our children,” he said. “We owe it to our children to be involved in their lives and provide them with the best medical advice possible.”
Added Akin, “It is inconceivable that children can walk into a Title X clinic and be administered a potentially life-threatening birth control medication without their parents’ knowledge. Yet, frequently, when children walk into the local mall to get their ears pierced, parental permission is required.”
Parental Roles
Christopher Slattery, founder and president of Expectant Mother Care, which operates 15 crisis pregnancy centers in the New York City area, said that notification would give “good parents” the chance to discourage sex outside of marriage.
However, he added that it won't necessarily discourage teens from accessing contraception, especially in areas like New York City, where parents often encourage or condone the use of condoms by their teen-agers.
Though the Parents Right to Know Act would not give parents the right to block their children from receiving contraception, it is a step in the right direction, according to supporters of the legislation.
“For a generation and a half, the courts have been extolling the rights of minors and restricting the rights of parents,” said Stephen Krason, president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists and professor of political science and legal studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville. “What you're seeing here is an attempt to try to restore some parental role.”
Mike O'dea, founder and executive director of the Christus Medicus Foundation in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., an organization that promotes authentic Catholic healthcare, said that the legislation could reopen the debate on this subject, a debate that he said has been going on for more than 20 years with very little success for parental rights.
“For years now, the courts have been restricting parents’ access to their children's medical information when it comes to abortion and contraception,” O'dea said. “What this legislation will do is reopen the debate on parental notification for all government-funded health clinics, not just federal.”
Culture at Odds
Restoring the rights of parents is exactly what Coburn has in mind.
“No federal bureaucrat or Title X official should have the authority to usurp a parent's role in an area of their child's life, in which one bad decision can have severe and long-lasting emotional and physical consequences,” he said. “I urge my colleagues to support this legislation that will protect the vital relationship between a parent and child.”
Title X of the Public Health Service Act passed in 1970 is the only federal program devoted entirely to family planning and reproductive health care. It supports roughly 4,600 clinics and has a budget of $288 million for the 2005 fiscal year.
The program, which is administered within the Office of Population Affairs, was designed primarily to provide access to and information about contraception. Its creation came shortly after the Supreme Court's 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, which overturned a Connecticut law criminalizing the use of contraceptives, claiming the law violated the right to marital privacy.
Subsequent court rulings and Title X have flown in the face of Catholic teaching on contraception, a doctrinal stance reiterated by Pope Paul VI in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, and have created a culture increasingly at odds with Catholic teaching.
The Parents Right to Know Act will begin the process of bringing back the “right of conscience” to health care services, O'dea said. “Legislation like this is necessary to give us the freedom to have faith-based health care in this country.”
Eduardo Llull is based in New York City.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Eduardo Llull ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Case for the Senate's Apology DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Few people live to tell what it's like to be lynched. James Cameron did.
At 91, he recalls dangling from a maple tree in Marion, Ind., in 1930. His offense: being a black man. He still remembers the rope cutting into his neck, his tongue bulging out of his mouth and his legs kicking frantically in the air.
Cameron saw death up close. Yet he escaped death barely when someone with a conscience in the lynch mob pleaded for his life. Cameron's executioners spared him.
The history of lynching black people in the United States didn't begin or end with Cameron. From 1882 to 1968, lynch mobs killed 3,446 black men, according to the Charles Chestnutt Digital Archive. Others went undocumented. At the turn of the last century, more than 100 lynchings occurred each year, primarily in the South. The problem was extremely serious.
Seven presidents lobbied Congress for anti-lynching legislation. The House of Representatives gave the White House what it wanted, three times passing legislation to make lynching a federal offense. However, the Senate blocked the anti-lynching bills each time.
Influential Southern senators, such as Richard Russell Jr., filibustered to block votes. Congressional records show that some senators, like Russell, believed anti-lynching laws would undermine states’ rights. Other senators argued that lynching helped reinforce the base Jim Crow laws of racial segregation. In a word, the Senate struck down legislation that would save lives.
Last month, the Senate approved a resolution apologizing for its failure to ratify federal anti-lynching measures. The apology says, “Protection against lynching was the minimum and most basic of federal responsibilities, and the Senate considered but failed to enact anti-lynching legislation despite repeated requests by civil rights groups, presidents, and the House of Representatives.”
Most Senators felt they did the right thing by apologizing. However, some senators refused to co-sponsor the measure. They questioned the wisdom of an official apology. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., commented, “I don't think I'll get in the business of apologizing for acts that previous Senates took.”
His colleague, Sen. Trent Lott, also saw no need to co-sponsor an apology. “Where do we end all of this? Are we going to apologize for not doing the right thing on Social Security?” remarked Lott.
From a moral viewpoint, can these objections hold up to scrutiny? Let's consider each one.
The content of Cochran's objection suggests that today's Senate, as a governmental institution, has no moral responsibility for what it did in the past. This contradicts the ethical principle of accountability. Accountability for good or bad actions of individuals or institutions applies not only to the present, but also to the past. Justice requires individuals and institutions to accept moral responsibility for all their actions as long as they exist. To do otherwise would constitute an injustice.
In fact, senators in the past have co-sponsored official apologies for wrongdoing, in which many had no personal responsibility. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II stands out as a classic example. An official apology offered by the Senate isn't about senators accepting personal culpability for wrongdoing. It's about making institutions morally responsible for their actions.
Sen. Lott's objection deals with the issue of closure. His question, “Where do we end all of this?” seems to be another way of saying, “that was a long time ago. Let's get over it and move on.”
However, experience shows that old wounds caused by social injustice do not go away simply by ignoring them or pretending they never happened. Time alone doesn't heal all wounds. In the mind of the Church, only a serious commitment to the process of reconciliation will bring healing and definitive closure to wrongdoings of the past. How does this process of reconciliation work?
It begins with mutual forgiveness. Mutual forgiveness lays the foundation for reconciliation. In his 1997 World Day of Peace message, Pope John Paul II said, “The weight of the past, which cannot be forgotten, can be accepted only when mutual forgiveness is offered and received; this is a long and difficult process, but one that is not impossible.”
Mutual forgiveness means renouncing hate and violence by practicing mutual respect and eventually charity. However, mutual forgiveness, from a moral standpoint, does not eliminate the next step of reconciliation, which is justice.
In his 1981 encyclical on Divine Mercy (Dives In Misericordia), Pope John Paul II explains the correct relationship between mutual forgiveness and justice: “Properly understood, justice constitutes, so to speak, the goal of forgiveness,” he says. “In no passage of the Gospel message does forgiveness, or mercy as its source, mean indulgence towards evil, towards scandals, towards injury or insult. In any case, reparation for evil and scandal, compensation for injury, and satisfaction for insult are conditions for forgiveness.”
Consequently, it isn't enough just to say “Sorry” for past faults. Reconciliation necessarily involves reparation for wrongdoing.
Reconciliation brings maturity when it leads to the truth. Truth demands complete disclosure of social injustices so that adequate restitution may occur. Complete and truthful disclosure of social injustices also does justice to historical accuracy. Sweeping injustices under the carpet will only deform historical truth and prolong healing from painful experiences.
The Senate's official apology last month for not doing what it could to stop lynching reminds us all of something very important: It's never too late to say sorry.
Legionary Father Andrew McNair is a theology professor at Mater Ecclesiae College in Greenville, R.I.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Andrew Mcnair, LC ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: NATIONAL MEDIA WATCH DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:San Francisco Archdiocese Settles for $21 Million
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 10 — The Archdiocese of San Francisco has settled 15 of 60 pending priest sexual abuse claims for a total $21.2 million, Associated Press reported.
The archdiocese will pay $6.6 million of the total. The remainder will come from the archdiocese's insurers.
“It is our hope that the settlement of these cases will facilitate the process of healing,” said San Francisco Archbishop William Levada.
All 15 claims were filed in court as a result of the 2001 state law that extended the statute of limitations holding the Church responsible for incidents that occurred in the past. Confidentiality rules prohibit revealing how much the 11 men and four women received from the settlement.
Federal Boy Scout Funding Nixed
The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and two religious leaders who argued that public money should not be used for a group that excludes those who do not take an oath to God.
“We think government should be neutral,” said ACLU spokesman Edwin Yohnka. “It shouldn't entangle itself in favoring people who practice a particular religion in its funding schemes and its support.”
The lawsuit dates back to a 1999 claim that was partially resolved when the Department of Defense agreed to discontinue its Boy Scout funding.
Chicago Public Schools Lease Catholic Classrooms
The Chicago Public School District is leasing three buildings, which can hold approximately 930 students.
The school district plans to use Good Shepherd School, St. Bride's School and St. Camillus School to relieve overcrowding.
N.Y. Bishops Urge Governor to Veto Bill
The bishops, in a July 6 letter, said that emergency contraception can cause an abortion because it can work to prevent an embryo from being implanted in the uterus.
“It is difficult to imagine why anyone would support restricting parental rights and potentially exposing young girls to harmful and powerful medications on a repeated basis in this way,” the bishops wrote.
Pataki's spokesman, Andrew Rush, said that the bishops’ letter would be taken into consideration. Once Pataki, a Catholic, receives the bill, he would have 10 days to sign it, veto it or take no action, in which case it would automatically become law.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Composer Says Passion Symphony Is 'My Personal Act of Faith With God' DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:ROME — Most Catholics have probably never heard of John Debney, but a lot of them know his music — he's the composer of the musical score for Mel Gibson's blockbuster The Passion of the Christ.
An expanded version of the Passion score was performed as a symphony for the first time July 6 in Rome. Register correspondent Edward Pentin spoke with Debney the day after the performance.
How did you come to write the musical score for
I came to the film in a sort of very strange way. I knew one of the producers of the film [Steve McEveety]. I'd grown up with him, and had not spoken with him in a number of years. So one day I received a phone call from him, and he asked if I would watch a film that he was on. I said, “Sure, what is it?” and it was The Passion of the Christ.
I sort of fell off my chair because I'd heard a lot about this film, and so I watched the film, was deeply moved, deeply touched by it. Based on my inspiration of watching the film, I then offered to write some music. A couple of days later, Mel Gibson came over, said he liked what he heard, and so he hired me. It was a wonderful, amazing experience.
Then, lo and behold, about six months after the film, I started to ponder how wonderful it would be to revisit and experience the film, and to try to expand it into a larger work. That's how the symphony began, to expand on what I'd already done — write new material and use the old material to create a work of personal faith. It's taken just about a year to really get it all done, but we were there last night and it was wonderful.
Could you tell us a little about your Catholic background, how you grew up in the faith and the influence of your parents?
Sure. I've always been Catholic. My father was Catholic. I grew up in Glendale, Calif., a suburb of L.A., and I actually went to Catholic school in Hawaii, then Catholic grammar schools, Loyola High School, which is a Catholic high school. Then, I went on to Loyola University.
In my junior year at Loyola, I decided I really wanted to pursue music, so I transferred and went to the California Institute for the Arts, which is an arts school in Los Angeles, and so got my degree there.
I am a practicing Catholic, and I would say in my adult life, a number of years ago, like a lot of people, I had crises in the faith where I probably lost a bit of the faith along the way. Then things happened.
One of the major things that happened was that I lost my mother four years ago or so. Through that process of her dying I started to rediscover my own personal faith, found great strength in it, and then started go to on my own personal quest of re-finding my faith, and started to actually read about saints.
I would say that on this journey I came back to my own Catholic faith, and toward the end of that journey, The Passion of the Christ came about. I never thought I'd have the chance to write music about what is truly the greatest story ever told. So the film became another vehicle for me to cement my faith, and that's exactly what happened.
Through the film, through these events, I found it to a huge degree, and now live and breathe my faith. Out of that, my desire was to write the symphony, which was my personal act of faith with God, and that's what this symphony represents.
So a lot of the crises you've experienced come across in the music?
Very much so. In composing the symphony — which is truly a musical representation of the 14 Stations of the Cross, the Passion and, I might add, I include in my version a prologue which is in the Garden [of Gethsemane] and an epilogue which is the Resurrection, of course — I really guess I have tried to represent my own beliefs. And, in doing that, I hope that it touches people. I hope that, with the work, it will touch a heart or soul and bring them back to God.
It's not easy work, of course, this journey of faith. But this is really my desire, and it's born out of this personal desire to get back to the faith.
Do you see your music as a work of evangelization?
That's a big question. One of the things I don't want to do is to preach. The work is more my personal expression of my beliefs, but I hope that someone of any faith or no faith, I hope they might ponder the possibility of God, not unlike when one goes to the Sistine Chapel and glances up, and sees something made of human hands that is truly inspired by someone else, a higher power.
As in a lot of religious art, you'd like your work to point and direct people towards God?
That's exactly right. What I say in my mission statement, as it were, in my symphony, is that I hope it fosters a turning back to God. I believe in this world, through all the problems that we have, we have somehow, in the last number of years, lost our focus on God.
I believe this is one of the things great art can do — religious art especially. It might remind us that God exists and maybe we can get back on track worked by him — that's my personal belief, so our turning back to faith in God is very interesting, wonderful and beautiful.
Edward Pentin writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Pentin ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: LONDON CALLING: DIALOGUE IN A TIME OF TERROR DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald's job involves dialogue amid danger.
In our day and age, easy assumptions about other religions are being challenged as never before. In the wake of the July 7 London transit bombing, reports of British street gangs targeting Muslims showed that some blamed all Muslims — not just terrorists — for the attacks.
Register correspondent Edward Pentin spoke to Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. The archbishop is England's leading curial official.
What kind of toll has the last few weeks taken in England?
We feel very much for all the people who have been personally affected by these tragic events, who have lost members of their family, or who have people in their family or friends who are seriously injured, and we assure them of our prayers. We pray that this may not weigh on their hearts, that they will come out of this with peaceful sentiments, with a feeling of gratitude of those who have taken care of them — so many of the public services have been wonderful in how they've gone about things — and to be full of gratitude for the lives that have been spared. We pray they will take this as a resolve to build up a more humane community.
So you think the moderate branches of Islam could come into closer relationship with the Church following such events?
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Muslims have felt the need to explain what Islam is. As they reject what certain Muslims are doing, so they feel the need to explain that Islam is really a religion of peace, and they are looking for help from Christians in that explanation. This has been going on in different parts of the world and this will only reinforce these attempts.
So good can come, even from this?
That is very often what happens from sad events — they help to create solidarity. We saw the solidarity evoked by the recent tsunami, and even by 9/11. But of course there is that element of suspicion, and that is where the interreligious dialogue comes in, to facilitate contacts between people, so that suspicion can be overcome.
I've only felt that [suspicion] once in my own life, being of Irish origin, and that was at the time of the Birmingham bombs [an atrocity committed by the Provisional IRA in 1974] and I think it was the only time one felt that because you were Irish, you were suspect. It's very rare. We know from our Muslim brothers and sisters, particularly those of Middle Eastern origin, [that they] are very often subject to this sort of suspicion. Of course we shouldn't be naïve about this, but certainly a blanket suspicion is unjustified.
But most people realize that it's a very small minority, don't they?
I hope so, yes.
Some experts in Islam say Muslim religious leaders need to do more than just condemn these atrocities, and take more concrete action. Do you agree?
I think action has been very often taken by Muslims, but it doesn't always get the publicity. I remember that after 9/11, the mosque council in Britain sent a letter to all the mosques asking them to be careful and to be sure about the people who come to the mosques. That didn't get any publicity at all. They really wanted their communities to be communities of prayer and not to be centers of intrigue and terrorist cells.
I think the Muslim communities are aware of this. There are Muslims who are speaking out, but very often they are not listened to on a wider scale. I suppose all of us have more to do — declarations about poverty are not enough. We have to take action as well. Here, maybe the same thing applies.
Yet some say these attacks point to something defective in Islam — even some Muslims have begun to question their faith because of them. What is your view?
Well they're not the only ones doing this [committing such atrocities]. You have bomb attacks in Corsica, you also have ETA placing bombs [in Spain]. We don't say there's something defective in Christianity because they're doing this. The difference is that Muslims that are doing this are appealing to Islam to justify their action. But as we know, other Muslims will say that is not legitimate — it's a misuse of Islamic principles and the Koran.
So just as Christianity can be abused, so is Islam in these cases?
Most of the terrorist activity perpetrated by Christians is not done in the name of Christianity, so that's one of the differences. But there are terrorist attacks and kidnapping of civilians — it's going on all the time. You only have to think of Latin America, where there are armies fighting against the forces of government. We don't think of these as Christian wars and are right not to do so. But we also attribute these [recent] attacks to Islam, and so we have to be careful there.
Were the Crusades of Christian motivation?
There were all sorts of motivations for the Crusades. The Crusades are, of course, still vivid in the subconscious of Muslims. They still feel the kind of oppression of these invaders who were coming to free the Holy Places — that was the official reason for the Crusades, but there were other motivations, too. That is a whole area of history where we would have to look at it together, Christians and Muslims, but look at it calmly on the basis of the sources and perhaps make a new assessment.
Where wrong has been done, we ask for pardon from God for the wrong that has been done, but of course there was an Islamic expansion as well. Christians have suffered from that expansion, and we have to look at that, too.
Are you nevertheless hopeful and optimistic that relations with Islam will improve in spite of these atrocities?
I am always hopeful, because that is a virtue we have to have, and whatever setbacks befall, we cannot despair. We have to rebound, as it were. I am hopeful, from what I've heard and seen, that communities that have established relationships do not want to be divided by such events. They don't want to let this interfere with what is going on.
There are groups of Christians and Muslims who are meeting regularly and coming together. I was reading an example just this morning of a Catholic school in Birmingham that is offering one of its classrooms to the Muslim community because they haven't a mosque; they're building a mosque. And because they're going to pray in this school, they're meeting regularly; they have organized, regular meetings until the mosque is built. Then we hope the meetings will continue.
I heard about a similar thing in the United States, in Chicago, not with Christians but with the Jewish community. The mosque had had an open day, and had welcomed people of the area, and a Jewish rabbi came to this open day and made contact with those responsible for the mosque.
When this synagogue was being refurbished and [the Jews] couldn't use the synagogue, they asked if they could use the Muslim premises for their Jewish prayer, and they were accepted. This has developed a good relationship between the Jewish and Islamic community in that particular area. These are signs of hope, definitely.
Edward Pentin writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Pentin ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Best Buy Regulates Game Sales
Following a 2004 sting operation in Illinois, which found that a 15-year-old boy was easily able to purchase two video games rated for mature audiences at a Best Buy, the chain has revamped its policy.
New provisions of the policy include: programming cash registers to prompt cashiers to ask for ID, and a “mystery shopper program” to monitor cashiers for compliance.
Christian Brothers Investment Services said that company's new rules may be the toughest policy in place among major U.S. retailers. Christian Brothers and other Catholic investment groups prompted the policy review by means of a shareholder initiative.
Pro-Life Activists Win One
The four are members of a Protestant organization that depicts the graphic and gruesome reality of abortion at school campuses throughout Southern California, reported the Long Beach daily.
In addition to violating the group's free-speech rights, the U.S. district court ruled that the school district and city had violated their freedom from unlawful arrest, and freedom from unlawful search and seizure.
Forced Abortion Thwarted
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, July 13 — A visibly pregnant Hong Kong woman — with her two children in tow — experienced the intensity of China's one-child policy during a recent visit to relatives on the mainland, where she found herself surrounded by hostile “family-planning” officers, reported the French news service.
Some eight officials stripped the 31-year-old woman of her travel documents and tried to force her to a Hunan hospital to abort her unborn baby, reported Hong Kong's The Apple Daily.
She was freed after Hong Kong immigration officials informed the family planning officials that, as a citizen of Hong Kong, the woman was not subject to the one-child policy and that their actions were illegal.
Court Okays Abstinence Content
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, had previously defended the website of the Governor's Program on Abstinence (abstinencedu.com) as offering constitutionally protected “discussion of religious issues,” including links to other sites that promote prayer and repentance.
The suit was the second to be brought against the program by the American Civil Liberties Union.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: 'HE'S SPEAKING FOR JESUS' DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:PRIEST PROFILE
Father Kevin Augustyn's reputation precedes him. When couples at his parish begin to prepare for marriage, they know they're about to get steeped in the teachings of Pope John Paul II.
The parish is Our Lady of Fatima in Lakewood, Colo., where he is parochial vicar.
“He tries his best to share the Theology of the Body with them, and seems to be good at it,” says the church's pastor, Msgr. Walter Nickless, who is also vicar general for the Denver archdiocese.
Msgr. Nickless has found that, when his 28-year-old associate runs up against the daunting numbers of people living together before marriage, he's patient with the misunderstandings and criticisms that inevitably come out — but he's also clear and unflinching as he lays out what the Church teaches.
“I love marriage preparation,” says Father Augustyn, who was ordained in May 2004. “It's such a wonderful opportunity to evangelize.”
In fact, he says he approaches every aspect of his ministry at Our Lady of Fatima with an eye on evangelization. One of his favorite ways is through preaching.
“It's both the best and the hardest thing to do,” Father Augustyn says. “It's the most challenging and the most rewarding.”
He often preaches on what he calls the “big picture”: the history of salvation and how we who make up the Mystical Body of Christ are caught up in that great drama.
“We're in the same story as Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus, Peter and Paul,” he reflects. “Salvation history began a long time ago but continues in our lives.”
Father Augustyn's other dominant theme is how we're called to be both disciples and apostles. “You can't be a Christian without accepting a mission from Jesus,” he explains. “To be a Christian is to be a missionary.”
Eucharistic Emphasis
A native of Fort Wayne, Ind., Father Augustyn recalls that, as a college student at Franciscan University of Steubenville, he spent summers teaching with Wichita's Totus Tuus parish missions to children and teens. As a seminarian, he moved to Denver's Totus Tuus program, of which he's still director.
“In Totus Tuus I learned how to preach the Gospel in all circumstances and methods,” he says. “I appropriated the New Evangelization not just through Totus Tuus, although that was a huge part of it. I loved preaching the Gospel day in and day out, and knew I wanted to do that the rest of my life.”
In this Year of the Eucharist, that has entailed preaching a great deal on the importance of faithful attendance at Sunday Mass and living “a Eucharistic spirituality,” he says. He's noticed more people becoming more faithful and attentive Mass attendants, along with a widening attendance in adult-education classes.
“He can take a sentence out of the Gospel and bring it to life,” says parishioner Lynda Fitzsimmons. “He's not afraid to say what needs to be said. He's here speaking for Jesus.”
She adds that she and her husband Rickey, along with their pre-teen daughters Gianna and Angela, are not only not put off by the young priest's emphasis on evangelization and traditional Church teachings — they are eager to learn more from him.
Msgr. Nickless seems equally exhorted.
“He loves to read and reflect on theology, and he's doing his best to help other people do the same,” says the pleased pastor. He then points out that that, in his first month at the parish, Father Augustyn reopened the parish library, which had fallen into disrepair. He also opened a bookstore offering the works of solid Catholic authors — Peter Kreeft, G.K. Chesterton and the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger are favorites — and he maintains a stock of informational pamphlets to make sure parishioners and visitors have easy access to the Church's true teachings on a variety of subjects.
“I think it's a real mission,” says Msgr. Nickless. “Father Kevin is helping people learn their faith.”
“It's nice to have a library of books that come recommended from a priest you respect,” explains Lynda Fitzsimmons. She describes how she went into the library to find something for her 18-year-old niece who was losing her way.
“Father said, ‘Here's a good book, you can read this one, and this is a good one for her.’ Then one of my daughters was home sick. Because Father's got books on the saints, I called her on the phone, and she picked one.”
Angela Fitzsimmons likes the choices.
“I got a book about St. Thérèse of Lisieux,” the 11-year-old says eagerly. “And I saw the movie. Father recommended it.”
She looks forward to Father Augustyn's classroom visits in the parish school, and the way he invites questions. She likes something else, too
“He teaches us Latin and Greek,” says Angela. “He taught us right before they elected Pope Benedict XVI how to say Habemus Papam.”
Msgr. Nickless points out: “Another secret mission of his is to get more Latin around in the school and in the music and the Church.”
The pastor highlights how this young priest tries to visit every classroom weekly and his unique way of memorizing all the children's first names and not leaving until he gets every name right.
Says Msgr. Nickless: “The kids love that he knows their names.”
Footsteps of John Paul
One Sunday a month, Father Augustyn pulls together a group of 20- and 30-somethings — his peers — to discuss books or movies. One month they might hash over George Weigel's Letters to a Young Catholic, the next Chesterton's Orthodoxy.
For all his emphasis on teaching and preaching, Father Augustyn's most effective evangelization tool may be his actions.
“He's a great inspiration to use the sacrament of confession and not be afraid of it, and he models that himself,” says Msgr. Nickless. “He talks about it and he goes! He's not afraid to tell people he, too, is a sinner and needs the forgiveness the Church offers.
“He's a true product of John Paul II,” concludes the pastor, “and his quest for the New Evangelization — the re-evangelization of the Church.”
Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Activists Still Pine for Women Priests DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:LYON, France — The debate about women's ordination rages on.
Doctrinally, Pope John Paul II ended the debate in 1994 when he wrote:
“Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (see Luke 22:32), I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer, priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.”
The election of Pope Benedict XVI left no room for doubt. As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had excommunicated seven women “ordained” on the Danube River in 2002.
All the same, advocates of women's ordination appear to be turning up the volume on their call for change.
A French woman said she was ordained by three women who call themselves bishops in a July 2 ceremony on the Saone River near Lyon.
Nine more women — seven Americans, a German living in the United States and a Canadian — also plan to be “ordained,” four as priests and five as deacons, July 25 in a rite to be conducted on the St. Lawrence Seaway between the United States and Canada.
The diocesan newspaper in St. Cloud, Minn., published a June 23 editorial, “The Half-Full Stained Glass,” calling on the Church to once again discuss the possibility of ordaining women. In it, Joseph Young wrote that the Church's all-male hierarchy can only live up to half its potential if it does not tap into feminine wisdom, judgment, expertise and talent.
“I think it is just a convergence of things,” said Kathleen Strack, one of the candidates for “ordination” as a deacon July 25. She added, “It's gathering steam; obviously, this isn't going to peter out in the next five days.”
Indeed, Victoria Rue, who said she will be “ordained” a priest July 25, pointed out that 70 women, including 38 from the United States, are in the preparation program that produced the “Danube 7” in 2002. Two of those women, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger of Austria and Gisela Forster of Germany, have called themselves bishops since 2003 and say they will “ordain” the group of nine later this month.
“We look forward to this happening every year,” Rue said. In addition to these public ceremonies, she said, small house churches have continued to “ordain” their own leaders as part of the women's ordination movement.
Kelly Reed, a theology teacher at Cardinal Stritch High School in Oregon, Ohio, sees the latest developments as an opportunity to educate Catholics about the Church's teaching on the priesthood.
“Most of these issues come down to a lack of education,” Reed said. “People know what they want to know, but they're not well-informed on some of these topics. Sometimes, I think the Spirit moves us so we will educate ourselves. When people educate themselves, they can unite and strengthen the Church, instead of being divisive.”
Reed studied the women's ordination issue while pursuing a master's degree in theology. As part of her research, she surveyed the faculty and staff at two Catholic high schools in Toledo, Ohio, and found that 90% thought the Church should ordain women. Fewer than 10%, however, had ever read anything on the topic, much less a Church document.
“Really, people don't know,” she said. “They have no clue why the Church teaches as it does.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “Only a baptized man validly receives sacred ordination. The Lord Jesus chose men to form the college of the twelve apostles, and the apostles did the same when they chose collaborators to succeed them in their ministry” (No. 1577).
“The Church recognizes herself to be bound by this choice made by the Lord himself,” the Catechism continues. “For this reason the ordination of women is not possible.”
Bride and Groom
However, Jennifer Ferrara, a former Lutheran pastor who gave up her ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America when she became Catholic in 1998, said a more compelling argument against women's ordination concerns the differences between men and women that are built into the economy of salvation.
“In the traditional Catholic way of viewing things,” Ferrara said, “Christ is the bridegroom, the Church is his bride. The priest represents Christ the bridegroom, the head of the Church, and this is especially true in the Eucharist when Christ is exercising his ministry of salvation. Women cannot represent Christ as the bridegroom.”
Advocates of women's ordination contend that all Christians are called to represent Christ in the world.
But Ferrara said those who argue that women can represent Christ as priests think of femaleness as an attribute similar to nationality or skin color and thus minimize the differences between male and female.
“According to traditional Catholic teaching, she said, “the differences between male and female are a constituent part of who we are…. Men and women are both images of God, but they are distinct. [Women] can't image Christ's masculinity. Women cannot image Christ to the extent that he was a man.”
Ferrara attributed those ideas to Pope John Paul II's Catechesis on the Book of Genesis and the 1976 “Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood.
If women are ordained, Ferrara said, the Church will have a more Protestant idea of ministry, which is functional and amounts to somebody doing a job.
“The priest is an icon of Christ and acts in persona Christi at the altar and in the confessional,” she said. “You have to disregard the importance of that entire symbolism of Christ as bridegroom, the Church as bride, in order to make the argument for women's ordination. It has to be jettisoned altogether, because the feminine cannot represent the masculine.”
Ferrara thinks that if the Church should ordain women, much would be at stake.
She has no doubt that women can do “the job” of ministry as well as men.
But, “I think that to insist upon women's ordination is to deny what is noble and holy about being women,” she said.
She said, “That's what people conclude without understanding the theology and that's what would be lost if we ordain women.”
Judy Roberts is based in Graytown, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: FEEDING-TUBE HORRORS DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Kate Adamson, a stroke survivor and author of Kate's Journey: Triumph over Adversity, perhaps knows better than anyone else what Terri Schiavo experienced in the days after her feeding tube was removed.
Following her stroke, Adamson was unresponsive and diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. She was awake and aware of her surroundings — just unable to move any part of her body. When she appeared recently on “The O'reilly Factor,” host Bill O'reilly asked Adamson about the dehydration experience:
O'REILLY: When they took the feeding tube out, what went through your mind?
ADAMSON: When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I thought I was going insane. I was screaming out in my mind, “Don't you know I need to eat?” And even up until that point, I had been having a bagful of Ensure as my nourishment that was going through the feeding tube. At that point, it sounded pretty good. I just wanted something. The fact that I had nothing, the hunger pains overrode every thought I had.
O'REILLY: So you were feeling pain when they removed your tube?
ADAMSON: Yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. To say that — especially when Michael [Schiavo] on national TV mentioned last week that it's a pretty painless thing to have the feeding tube removed — it is the exact opposite. It was sheer torture, Bill.
Adamson further described her experience to author Wesley Smith for an article that appeared in The Weekly Standard.
“The agony of going without food was a constant pain that lasted not several hours like my operation did, but several days. You have to endure the physical pain and, on top of that, you have to endure the emotional pain. Your whole body cries out, “Feed me. I am alive and a person, don't let me die, for God's sake! Somebody feed me.”
Adamson's experience is worthy of reflection after the release of a medical examiner's report in the Schiavo case that some have assumed vindicates Michael Schiavo and those who fought so hard to see Terri starved to death.
Terri Schiavo collapsed Feb. 25, 1990, and went into cardiac arrest. Her heart stopped beating, and the lack of oxygen to her brain resulted in serious brain damage, which, we are now told by the medical examiner's report, left her in a persistent vegetative state from which she had no chance of emerging.
Her husband Michael sued and obtained a $1 million medical malpractice settlement, most of which was earmarked for his wife's care and none of which was meant to be used in a protracted legal battle to terminate her life. Nonetheless, earlier this year he famously fought, and won, his attempt to have Terri's feeding tube removed, which resulted in her death March 31 from dehydration and starvation.
Most recently, Schiavo took one final slap at Terri's parents, who had fought to keep her alive, by burying Terri without notifying them and inscribing on her bronze grave marker the words “I kept my promise” — a “promise” never mentioned until many, many months after Terri's collapse and the medical malpractice claims.
The medical report, as written, backed Schiavo's contention that his wife had no chance of recovery. It concluded that Terri's brain was half the size of a normal adult brain, that she was blind and unaware of her surroundings. (No mention was made was made in the media of the impact the method of her death may have had upon her.)
The report's conclusion was seized upon by the right-to-die proponents as a refutation of claims by Terri's parents that she was responding to them. It has even become a partisan issue in Washington where those congressional leaders who fought for federal court review of the Schiavo case are being accused of making incorrect statements about Terri's condition. One website accused the “Christian Taliban” and congressional leaders of torturing Terri by trying to keep her alive.
But the opinions formed after the autopsy and the media coverage in its wake have yet again missed the larger and most crucial point. It is not about how active Terri Schiavo's brain was, but how actively we treasure the life of even the most helpless among us. In this sense we as a nation, from our courts to the media and the medical profession, have failed Terri Schiavo.
Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, made the point perfectly: “Terri did not die from atrophy of the brain. She died from an atrophy of compassion. … Even if this autopsy report showed that Terri was 10 times more damaged than she was, our moral obligation to respect and protect her life would not change at all. We don't have to pass a test to qualify for our human rights.”
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II discussed the theory that euthanasia is a merciful act, concluding that it is actually false mercy. “True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another's pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear.”
He said euthanasia was a “false mercy.”
“The height of arbitrariness and injustice is reached when certain people, such as physicians or legislators, arrogate to themselves the power to decide who ought to live and who ought to die.”
And who will set the standards?
In this, as in all things, our model ought to be the example of Jesus Christ. In one of the first appearances of his public ministry, at the synagogue in Nazareth, he read a passage from Isaiah 61: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.”
The term “persistent vegetative state” appears nowhere as an exception. Jesus didn't care about the size of anyone's brain. He could have been talking about Terri Schiavo or any of the countless people whom science and the culture of death in their arrogance have decided no longer deserve to live.
Alan Sears, a former federal prosecutor, is president and CEO of the Alliance Defense Fund (www.telladf.orgz), America's largest legal alliance defending religious liberty through strategy, training, funding, and litigation.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Alan Sears ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: TEENS BELIEVE DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:FACTS OF LIFE
U.S. teen-agers overwhelmingly support religious expression in school and public life, according to an American Bible Society poll. According to the summer report, 82% favor “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, 72% think students should be allowed to pray in school, 82% say the slogan “In God We Trust” belongs on currency and 83% feel it's appropriate to sing “God Bless America” at athletic events.
Source: Chicago Tribune, July 1
Illustration by Tim Rauch.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Rauch ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: WEEKLY TV PICKS DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:SUNDAY, JULY 24
Anniversary Special:
Titanic Live
Discovery Channel, 8 p.m., 11 p.m.
The RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912, on its first voyage. This special features probes of the wreck. Re-airs Saturday, July 30, at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
SUNDAY, JULY 24
Nature: The Real Macaw
PBS, 8 p.m.
To save endangered macaws in the Amazon rainforest, Charlie Munn, a U.S. doctor, promotes eco-tourism. He hires former poachers as guides for tourists who watch the magnificent birds instead of being tempted to buy them through smugglers. A re-air from 2004.
MONDAY, JULY 25
History Detectives
PBS, 9 p.m.
Tonight's segments involve a Bible in the Cherokee alphabet invented by Sequoyah (born George Gist, 1776-1843); a possible slave banjo; and the United Empire Loyalists, who left the new United States for Canada after the American Revolution.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 27
The Wild Seas of Iceland
Travel Channel, 6 p.m.
“O Lord, Your sea is so great and my boat is so small,” goes a fisherman's prayer. This show portrays the great courage and hard life of the fishermen of Iceland.
THURSDAY, JULY 28
Life on the Rock
EWTN, 8 p.m., live
Guest Chris Godfrey, founder of Life Athletes, was right guard for the Super Bowl XXI champion New York Giants. His message is, “Virtue! Abstinence! Respect for Life!”
THURSDAY, JULY 28
Live from Lincoln
Center: A Concert at Mozart's House
PBS, 8 p.m.
On the 2005 Mostly Mozart Festival's opening night at the Lincoln Center, soprano Renee Fleming and pianist Stephen Hough guest with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra under Louis Langree.
FRIDAY, JULY 29
TIPical Mary Ellen: Get Your Kids to Read
Home & Garden TV, 8 a.m.
Some ideas: Set aside 15 minutes before bedtime to read with your children; create a reading nook for them; get them to read cereal boxes and other material in addition to books. Other segments: cooking game meats and selecting good hostess gifts.
SATURDAY, JULY 30
Movie Night
Familyland TV, 8 p.m.
At 8 p.m. in The Star Packer (1934) and at 9 p.m. in Texas Terror (1935), John Wayne is a Western lawman and George “Gabby” Hayes his grizzled- but-game sidekick (“Yer durn tootin’” was a trademark line of his). At 10 p.m. in the wartime morale-boosting film Gung Ho! (1943), Randolph Scott and Robert Mitchum are U.S. Marines in the South Pacific.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: VATICAN MEDIA WATCH DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Vatican May Declare John Paul II a Martyr
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 1 — Vatican officials no longer are dismissing outright the notion that Pope John Paul II could be declared a martyr, the Associated Press reported.
Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said it was up to groups of theological experts to decide if the May 13, 1981, attempt on John Paul's life — as well as his long, public suffering before he died — warranted a declaration of martyrdom.
“In a technical, theological, juridical and canonical sense, the martyr gives his life for the faith,” Cardinal Martins said in response to questions at a news conference, according to the Apcom news agency.
“`We have to verify the motive for the attempt on the life of [Karol] Woytyla. And this will be the work of theologians.”
According to AP, Cardinal Camillo Ruini stated, “John Paul truly spilled his blood in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, and then again, not just his blood but he offered his life during the long years of his illness.”
Pope Benedict Accepts an Invitation to Israel
AKI, July 6 — Pope Benedict XVI said visiting Israel was a “priority” after accepting an invitation to visit the country from Israeli premier Ariel Sharon, the news agency AKI reported.
“I have already a long list of commitments to visit foreign countries, but Israel has a priority,” Israeli communications minister, Dalia Itzik, quoted the Pope as saying, in an Israeli radio report. Benedict XVI received stamps marking the visit of the late John Paul II to the Holy Land and the Church's upcoming World Youth Day in Cologne during meetings at the Vatican with Itzik and Germany's finance minister, Hans Eichel.
According to the report, Itzik used the opportunity to present Benedict XVI, who was elected Pope in April, with a letter from Sharon inviting the Holy Father to visit Israel, said Oded Ben-Hur, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See.
Follow-Up to Exorcism Class Offered
ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 12 — To help priests combat a growing interest in Satanism, Regina Apostolorum University is offering a follow-up to a course on exorcism given earlier this year, the Associated Press reported.
The new course, which will start in October, will explore biblical, theological, historical and legal aspects of satanism. Exorcists will give the last lesson in February.
University officials said fascination with Satanism is on the upswing and priests need “solid preparation” for it. Officials said recent crimes related to Satanism show it's a problem that's often underestimated.
When the first course began, Italy was gripped by the ritual satanic deaths of three people, including a 19-year-old allegedly stabbed to death because her killers believed she personified the Virgin Mary. The report said two rock band members were later convicted of murder.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: GOING PLACES DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Images of the baby in Angel in the Waters are more than cute and cuddly. They are lifelike — and maybe life changing.
The publisher, Sophia Institute Press, claims that the book will make your children pro-life in the two minutes it takes to read the pages. The in utero illustrations by Ben Hatke make the claim credible.
“It was a very rewarding experience working on the book,” says Hatke, who collaborated with the author, Regina Doman. “It was my first children's book and it is a topic I really believe in.”
Hatke, 27, has been drawing since the time when, in his boyhood, he saw a picture of a cheetah in full stride and felt he had to trace it. His pastime became a passion while he attended Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., from which he graduated in 2000.
In the solidly Catholic atmosphere, he dedicated his talents to tracing the glory of God in creation, and his career as an illustrator is now hitting full stride. The bulk of his work appears in the textbooks of Seton Home Study School, also based in Front Royal, but he has worked on comic books and other secular projects.
“Christendom did not offer me the opportunity to develop the technical skills I've come to use, but my education there gave me a grounding, a context in which to put my artwork,” he says. “I was given a lens with which to look at life.”
Hatke lives in Front Royal with his wife, Anna, a 2003 Christendom graduate. They were married in 2001, while she was a sophomore at the school, and have two girls, ages 21/2 years and 4 months. She is a stay-at-home mom and writes regularly for Celebrate Life, the magazine of the American Life League in Stafford, Va.
Hatke had previously worked at Human Life International in Front Royal while doing art projects in the evening. When he decided to become a full-time artist, “It was scary at first,” he admits. “But the flow of work has been increasing steadily.”
“The Church and the art world are thirsting for new art,” he adds. “I think we're poised at the edge of a lot of good things, and I'm eager to be a part of them.”
Catechetical Questions
Mary Claire Almeter had doubts about the Church and the Bible as a teen-ager, but now she is passing on the truth and beauty of the Catholic faith as a parish director of religious education. The change came while she attended Christendom College, and it was solidified by earning a master's degree in theology from Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.
“The faith is so much of who I am, I can't imagine not being Catholic,” she says.
Almeter, the eldest of six children, was born in upstate New York, but her parents later moved to Dearing, Ga., to join the Alleluia community, an interdenominational but mainly Catholic group that runs its own K-12 school. While in the high school section, she began rebelling against the faith of her family. She enrolled in Christendom because it was a small liberal-arts college, not because of its strong Catholic identity.
“I was totally surprised by the pervasive Catholic character of the school and the students, but after one semester I was won over,” she recalls. “In a course with [school president] Dr. Timothy O'donnell, I fired question after question about the validity of the Bible and he answered every one.”
After earning a B.A. in 1997, Almeter went on to graduate studies at Franciscan University, but decided after a year that she needed some practical experience. She joined Focus, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, in which young people live in teams near college campuses and share their faith with young adults. After four years, she returned to Steubenville to complete an M.A. in theology with a concentration in catechetics.
Now 29 years old, she is director of religious education at St. Louis parish in Alexandria, Va. The fact that she once had her own adolescent doubts helps when dealing with the questions of teens in her program.
“I have to bring my Catholic faith into my daily work,” she says. “But my daily work is merely an outgrowth of my belief in and love for Christ and his Church.”
Faithful Fund-raiser
Charles Mollenhauer works just outside of Cologne, Germany, where Pope Benedict XVI will preside at his first World Youth Day in August. Yet, Mollenhauer laments, you would never know from the media that such a huge event was coming to the Pope's home country.
“There's nothing in the media and we have a month to go,” he says. “If any other event was coming to Cologne with 800,000 young people, it would be all over the news.”
Mollenhauer grew up in Verona, N.Y., and graduated in 1989 from Magdalen College in Warner, N.H. How he got to work in Germany for the Legion of Christ with little knowledge of German is the story of the progression of his faith.
“Growing up in upstate New York we had a really good parish priest who taught us the essentials of the Catholic faith,” he says. “The next step was when I went to Magdalen and really grew in my faith. I received a really good and comprehensive education there, and it opened my eyes to the depths of the faith through studying the documents of the Church. After graduating, I began working for the Legion of Christ, which has taught me how to apply my faith in a deeper, more profound way, and given me a view of the universal Church.”
A lay member of the Legion's apostolic movement, Regnum Christi, he worked as a fund-raiser and information-technology expert for 10 years at the Legion's development headquarters in Hamden, Conn. Six years ago he became director of development in Germany, where the Legion has a novitiate for seminarians.
As a fund-raiser, Mollenhauer says he meets people from all backgrounds and beliefs. Drawing from his traditional liberal arts education at Magdalen, he is able to speak to them about universal truths that draw the attention even of intellectual skeptics.
“I love the fact that the Catholic faith is the center of everything I do,” he says. “If you're not trying to be a missionary to the world, even as a layman, you're not truly living your faith.”
Stephen Vincent writes from Wallingford, Connecticut.
----- EXCERPT: Notable Catholic grads bringing the Gospel to the world ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Vincent ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: New York's 'Other' Cathedral DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:A block beyond the bustle of downtown Brooklyn, across from the courthouses, the technical colleges and the business towers, a century-old cupola with a gold dome beckons the faithful to noontime prayer.
A shiny bronze statue of St. James with a walking staff, nestled in an alcove above the door, welcomes those who answer the call to attend the weekday 12:10 p.m. Mass. (His feast is July 25.)
The sturdy, weathered, red-brick building that speaks of permanence in a city of change is St. James Cathedral-Basilica, the episcopal seat of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which encompasses the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
Once a lively neighborhood a few blocks from the docks of the East River, this business and civic section of Brooklyn now has relatively few residents, and attendance at the cathedral has dwindled over the decades. While St. Patrick's Cathedral on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue attracts crowds of worshipers and tourists each day, the smaller St. James finds a place on few itineraries. Only two weekend Masses are celebrated, one at 5 p.m. Saturday and the other at 10:15 a.m. Sunday. Combined, they draw a total of about 200 worshipers.
“We call this New York's ‘other’ cathedral,” said Msgr. John Strynkowski, who was appointed rector of St. James in February, after working for years in the nation's capital at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. St. James is humbler, as Brooklyn is compared to Manhattan, he said, but it has its own identity and rich history.
In addition, the Brooklyn cathedral boasts what its larger brother across the river does not. It is a minor basilica, so designated by Pope John Paul II in 1982, three years after he visited the site during his first papal visit to the United States.
A plaque on the brick façade bears an image of the Pope and the words: “On Oct. 3rd 1979, Pope John Paul II visited this historic St. James Cathedral. He walked in our midst, touched our hearts, and despite torrential rain, he brought the sun.”
Urban Ambience
Inside the solid bronze doors is a splendid cruciform cathedral that is much more spacious than it appears from the outside. First to catch the eye is the baldacchino rising above the altar in the sanctuary. The high pulpit, in cathedral style, is on the right side from the congregation's view.
The stained-glass windows depict a mix of traditional Christian images — Jesus and the apostles, the Blessed Mother and angels — and history of the diocese. One window shows Bishop Edward McDonnell, the second ordinary, who headed the diocese from 1878 to1903. Two windows of Mary adorn either end of the transept. The stained-glass image of the Immaculate Conception is especially breathtaking.
The cathedral is a place of peace amid the asphalt landscape, yet urban reminders remain. The pews vibrate at regular intervals from the subway trains rumbling through tunnels below. Sirens and honking horns can be heard from nearby eight-lane Tillary Street.
The people of Brooklyn and Queens know the cathedral mostly through television. The weekday Mass is televised live on a cable station that reaches 1.2 million homes. Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio celebrates Mass on a regular basis there, and all major diocesan events such as ordinations and the Chrism Mass take place in the cathedral.
Founded in 1822 along a stretch of Jay Street now named Cathedral Place, St. James was the first Catholic church on Long Island. It was made a cathedral in 1853, when the Brooklyn Diocese was formed out the Archdiocese of New York, with Bishop John Loughlin as the first ordinary. Brooklyn was its own city at the time, before being incorporated into New York City in 1898.
The present cathedral, the fourth church at the site, was built in 1903 after fire damaged the previous one.
“It was at first called the pro-cathedral because there was a plan to build a bigger cathedral in another area of Brooklyn,” explains Pat McNamara, the diocesan archivist who has written a history of the diocese. “This is the place where it all begins. There is a lot of history here. Although the size of the congregation has dwindled over the years because of changes in the neighborhood, St. James is a much revered place in our diocese.”
The Bridge Boom
The first Catholic school on Long Island was founded in the church's basement in 1823, and the remnants of the first Catholic cemetery on Long Island lie in a small garden linking the cathedral to the rectory behind it. The area's first Catholic high school, St. James, also got its start at the cathedral. It has since moved to another part of Brooklyn and was renamed after Bishop Loughlin, but the De La Salle Brothers still run the school.
McNamara describes in lively detail the origins of the diocese, when Bishop Loughlin traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the Fulton Street ferry in November 1853 to claim his new episcopal territory. It marked the beginning of great growth for the city. Ellis Island was teeming with European immigrants, many of them Catholic, “yearning to breathe free” as their boats passed the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
In 1884, the city changed forever by the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, linking Brooklyn and Manhattan and solidifying its character as a booming metropolis and a crossroad of cultures.
The influx of immigrants continues today from a wider range of areas throughout the world, including the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, Africa, Asia, Russia and other former Soviet republics. Mass is celebrated in 19 languages throughout the diocese. As Bishop Emeritus Thomas Daily often said when he led the diocese, “The whole world comes to Brooklyn.”
Although the cathedral is geographically cut off from the borough's lively neighborhoods by the long vehicular approaches to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, which converge near its doorstep, the area around St. James is seeing a gradual residential revival. Young professionals are fleeing the sky-high Manhattan prices to fill pockets of new construction or converted commercial space in the area. Msgr. Strynkowski anticipates new pastoral opportunities in what may become another chapter in the cathedral's history.
“There is a building of 260 condos opening nearby in the fall,” the rector says, “and we will be reaching out to those residents.”
Stephen Vincent writes from Wallingford, Connecticut.
PLANNING YOUR VISIT
St. James Cathedral-Basilica is located at 250 Cathedral Place in Brooklyn, N.Y., near the intersection of Jay and Tillary Streets. Call ahead to make sure the sanctuary is open: (718) 852-4002.
Getting There
By subway, exit at the Borough Hall Station. By car, take the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to Exit 29, Tillary Street. On foot, walk from Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge.
----- EXCERPT: St. James Cathedral-Basilica, Brooklyn ----- EXTENDED BODY: Stephen Vincent ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: TEACHER PUNISHED ON HOMOSEXUAL ISSUE CONTINUES FIGHT FOR FREE SPEECH DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:VANCOUVER, British Columbia — British Columbia public school teacher Chris Kempling isn't done fighting the war on the immorality of homosexuality — yet. But he is running out of options in his fight against a mindset that appears to be gaining ground.
That mindset, in the eyes of some, appears to equate Christian moral discourse with intolerance. And there are signs that it is taking root in the United States as well.
Kempling, a few years ago, wrote letters to the editor of his local newspaper pointing out the mental and physical health risks of homosexual activity. The provincial College of Teachers, the professional body that licenses and disciplines public school teachers in British Columbia — said he was guilty of unprofessional conduct.
Saying Kempling brought the teaching profession into disrepute throughdiscriminatory comments at odds with the pluralistic, tolerant values of the college, the body suspended his teaching license for one month.
Kempling, a 49-year-old father of three, lost two subsequent appeals.
On June 13, the British Columbia Court of Appeal, in a unanimous decision, endorsed the suspension.
“I am now applying for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada,” Kempling remarked. “I'm not giving up.”
Kempling, an experienced teacher and counselor with a doctorate in psychology, added: “Even though I'm an evangelical Protestant, my most committed supporters are generally Catholics.”
And small wonder: Due to the twists and turns of Canada's history, Catholic schools in several provinces are fully or partially funded by taxes, making them vulnerable to human rights complaints.
“It's a worrisome development,” admitted Paul Schratz, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Vancouver, noting several recent human-rights rulings have turned the movement for homosexual rights from “what was once a cry for tolerance into the exact opposite.”
In Ontario recently, the courts forced a Catholic school to allow a homosexual senior to bring his boyfriend to his graduation dance.
And, of course, the Canadian Senate is poised to ratify Bill C-38 redefining marriage to include homosexual “marriage.”
“These decisions all have an impact,” said Schratz. “Who can say what kind of a chilling effect they will have on what teachers or priests are willing to say in public?”
‘I Refuse’
But the British Columbia Supreme Court and now the Court of Appeal have ruled that the right of homosexual students to a discrimination-free public-school environment has been violated by Kempling's remarks and supersedes his own rights.
“These statements demonstrated that Mr. Kempling is committed to fulfilling his public and professional responsibilities in an intolerant and discriminatory manner,” the appeal judgment stated. “Proof that he had actually discriminated against a particular student, or evidence of a poisoned school environment, was not required to prove that the school system had sustained harm.”
Among Kempling's published comments cited by the judges as proof of his discrimination is this: “I refuse to be a false teacher saying that promiscuity is acceptable, perversion is normal, and immorality is simply ‘cultural diversity’ of which we should be proud.”
While the College of Teachers would not comment on the decision until the 60-day appeal period has expired, Murray Mollard, executive director of British Columbia's Civil Liberties Association, which backed the college in this case, said, “We've always opposed censorship, but we've also maintained there have to be limits on freedom of expression.”
The limit, according to Mollard's reading of the court ruling, was crossed when Kempling indicated his judgments about homosexuality would influence his conduct as a public school counselor.
Mollard believes provisions in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedom protecting religion would cover Christian schools, which teach traditional sexual morality. However, only recently (July 11), the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal agreed to hear a complaint against the provincial Ministry of Education that the curriculum discriminated against homosexuals by ignoring them. Catholic schools in the province receive half their funding from the ministry in return for teaching the public school curriculum.
Meanwhile, a Knights of Columbus council faces a complaint with the same Human Rights Tribunal for refusing to rent its hall for a lesbian “wedding” reception. Mollard suggested the Knights’ chance of success would be strengthened by evidence of a consistent policy of refusing service to other transgressors of Catholic moral teaching, such as people remarrying after divorce. If they've singled out homosexuals, it's likelier to be judged discrimination.
U.S. Cases
Philip Horgan of the Toronto-based Catholic Civil Rights League, which intervened on Kempling's behalf in the recent case, said that the teacher hurt his case by failing to appear at the initial hearing of the College of Teachers, so he was unable to argue the truth of his opinions in his appeals. The college's initial assessment that his views were intolerant went unchallenged. The only issue was whether charter provisions for religion and freedom of thought permitted his “intolerance.”
Commented Horgan, “What seems to have been lost here is that one can hate the sin and love the sinner.”
That distinction is also being blurred in the United States. In Montpelier, Vt., a Catholic couple that provides wedding services at their family-run motel has been the target of a complaint to the state Human Rights Commission. Their offense: informing a prospective lesbian client that their religious beliefs would make it difficult to put their hearts into their event.
And in Northbrook, Ill., Allstate Insurance fired J. Matt Barber for writing an online column attacking same-sex “marriage.” Barber had written the column on his own time and without mentioning that he was employed by the insurance company.
“What is happening,” said Kempling, “is an effective muzzling of any expression of faith in public school teachers, social workers, pharmacists or any regulated professional. But I'm going to keep fighting for the cause of the Christian public square to the best of my ability.”
Steve Weatherbe writes from Victoria, British Columbia.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steve Weatherbe ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: WORLD MEDIA WATCH DATE: 24/07/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 24-August 6, 2005 ----- BODY:Mexican Bishops Urge Anti-Euthanasia Law
REUTERS, July 8 — Mexico's Roman Catholic bishops said there was no such thing as a right to death, amid pressure by some lawmakers, doctors and academics to have a national debate on euthanasia, Reuters reported.
The Mexican Bishops’ Conference, representing some 120 bishops, said in a statement that it sought a law protecting life “from the moment of conception until natural death.”
“Today we have numerous methods of strengthening human capacities and reducing physical pain. We cannot intervene for anybody's death, even in extremely painful situations,” said Bishop Francisco Chavolla of the Diocese of Toluca near Mexico City.
Bishops said that helping anyone to end their life is wrong and that terminally ill people should be encouraged to fight on. Matehuala Bishop Rodrigo Aguilar referred to Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who was staved to death when her husband had her feeding tube removed.
“Terri Schiavo was a human being and should have been treated with dignity. Her death was provoked,” said Bishop Aguilar. “We must respect and defend human life.”
Dress Code Requested for India's Churchgoers
BBC NEWS, July 12 — Miniskirts, tight outfits and plunging necklines are inappropriate for Sunday Mass, Cardinal Ivan Dias stated, and urged the faithful to dress modestly.
According to BBC News, Church officials say it is an attempt to discourage vulgarity.
Dolphy D'souza, president of the Bombay Catholic Forum, told the BBC that issuing such guidelines was nothing new and the Church had been reminding followers about dress codes for some time.
Cardinal Dias told The Times of India, “Whereas in days gone by, the ‘Sunday best’ used to become at times a sort of fashion parade, the modern tendency would seem to go to the other extreme. People [are] wearing attire which is considered casual and unbecoming of the sacred dignity of the church and the members of its congregation.”
Catholic Diocese Bars Politician From Ministry
CANADIAN PRESS, July 8 — Member of Parliament Joe Comartin has been barred from involvement in Church ministry because of his support of homosexual “marriage,” Canadian Press reported.
Bishop Ronald Fabbro of the Diocese of London said in a letter, “a person who does not accept Catholic teaching on fundamental matters is disqualified from acting on behalf of the Church in a public capacity.”
Comartin had been an altar server, extraordinary minister of holy Communion, and most recently taught marriage preparation courses with his wife. A spokesman for the diocese said Mr. Comartin will still be able to attend Mass and receive Communion.
Father Gerry Compeau, pastor of Comartin's church, Our Lady of the Rosary in Windsor, Ont., said Comartin is “very friendly and courteous, and has a lot of respect for the clergy. But I think he has to realize, like I have to realize, that we follow the Church's law, and I follow it and he should be following it.”
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