In the late 1700s, eastern North Dakota saw a steady stream of Canadian fur traders paddling down the Red River to a camp area known as the “Grand Forks.”
The spot, just over the line from present-day Minnesota, had been so dubbed because it sat at the forklike junction of the Red with its sibling tributary, the Red Lake River.
Priests often accompanied these hardy souls, and Masses were probably offered here before 1800. The first clear records of liturgies on this land date to the 1820s. The bishops of what is now the Archdiocese of St. Boniface, Manitoba, directed these activities.
The first Catholics of the territory were, for the most part, French-Indian people who were called the Métis because they were a mix of French voyageurs with Cree and Chippewa Indians. It was the devoutly Catholic Métis, of course, who provided the manpower behind the trapping trade; this eventually spread out across the northern plains.
The French and Métis-speaking priests, mostly Oblates of Mary Immaculate, sometimes Jesuits, and not too infrequently diocesan priests from Montreal and Quebec, would travel with the Métis. They would later venture out onto the prairies to harvest the buffalo, selling furs and meats to the military and civilian settlements developing around the Red River.
When the Métis began to move back into Canada, northern Minnesota or Turtle Mountain Reservation (in northern North Dakota), the bishop of St. Boniface found it difficult to supply priests for North Dakota. Catholic priests were called in from Dubuque, Iowa, and St. Paul, Minn. These were American priests of French and Irish descent. They were also seasoned frontiersmen.
After a series of small church structures went up only to succumb to fire and the elements, Catholics emigrating from Europe began to arrive en masse, increasing the demand for a more substantial sanctuary. The city of Grand Forks incorporated in 1881 and, by 1909, the Catholics of the town had completed the fifth St. Michael's Church. They dedicated it on Oct. 17 of that year. That's the structure that stands here to this day.
What a beautiful place to pray for the intercession of the Archangels — Michael, Gabriel and Raphael — on their feast, Sept. 29.
The families of St. Michael's are likely doing more than their share to pray for and aid the suffering along the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for they can relate to the experience.
Post-Flood Perfection
Catastrophe struck St. Michael's Church in April of 1997 when the Red River, which flows north into Canada, flooded the entire Red River Valley. The fast-rising waters were the product of a massive amount of snow and ice that created a blockage in the northern part of the river.
Some 50,000 people had to evacuate Grand Forks. The church and parish school sustained $5 million in damage, and for a solid month Mass wasn't said in the church. Yet, within three years, the damages were repaired. The guidelines for the refurbishment stressed concern for the historical integrity of the parish's buildings.
The present St. Michael's Church is mainly of Romanesque design, as reflected in the rounded arches of the windows and doors, and the barrel vaults of the nave. But the church incorporates other design traditions as well.
The two bell towers are topped with bronze-plated cupolas associated with the style called German Renaissance and characteristic of bell towers peculiar to the Alpine regions of Europe. The four bells, named in honor of St. Michael, St. Mary, St. Margaret and St. Louis, were blessed and put in place in 1912.
The main entrance of St. Michael's faces east and is entered by 12 steps, symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 Apostles. The same symbolism is carried out in the nave of the church, which features 12 columns, six to a side.
Four medallions on the chancel arch each represent one of the four Evangelists. At the very top of the chancel arch is a painting of a dove representing the Holy Spirit.
The sanctuary apse is in the shape of a half-dome, hinting at heaven. Within the apse are three ceiling panels. The center panel is of Christ ascending among the clouds. His arms are outstretched, for he is the lover of mankind. He is flanked on both side panels by an angel.
Great Vision
On the far left of the high altar is a statue of St. Michael the Archangel, pictured in his classic pose: slaying a serpent representative of evil and sin in the world.
To the far right of the high altar is a statue of St. Patrick. He is pictured with a bishop's crook in one hand and a three-leaf shamrock, symbolic of the Holy Trinity, in the other. It seems the Irish parishioners at the time of the church's construction insisted that the high altar contain a statue of St. Patrick right up there close to Jesus.
Also present on either side of the High Altar are two statues of angels in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
To the left of the high altar is an altar dedicated to the Mother of God. It contains a statue of Mary holding the Christ Child. Below is a bas-relief showing the Annunciation. The tabernacle on this altar serves as the altar of repose after Holy Thursday.
The carved-wood Stations of the Cross, which are finished to appear as natural stone, line the walls between the windows. The stained-glass windows, made by artists of the Munich Studios of Chicago, depict the entire life of Chris beginning with the Annunciation.
When St. Michael's Church was built, the pastor, leaders of the parish and the parishioners themselves insisted that all the work be done with great craftsmanship and elegance. They were fortunate that the work was done in the early 20th century, when many old-time craftsmen of varying specialties were there to carry through on their vision of what a great church should be.
Joseph Albino writes from Syracuse, New York.
Planning Your Visit
In 1988, that the U.S. Department of the Interior enrolled St. Michael's Church in the National Register of Historic Places. For information on Mass, confession and Eucharistic adoration, call (701) 772-2624.
Getting There
From Interstate 29, take Gateway Drive Exit. Go east on Gateway Drive. Take a right on to North Fifth Street. St. Michael's Church is on the right.
Prayer to Saint Michael
Archangel Michael, defend us in battle. Be our protector against the devil's viciousness and his deceptive traps. ‘May the Lord restrain him,’ we humbly pray. Leader of the army of heaven, use the power God has given you: Hurl Satan into hell, and with him, all the evil spirits prowling about the world to lead people to their destruction. Amen.
----- EXCERPT: St. Michael's Church, Grand Forks, N.D. ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Albino ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Poetic Pickles DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Gabrielle thinks she wants candy, but what she really needs is a nap.
I am late getting lunch and, as I try in vain to make a row of peanut butter-and-jellies, my precious 2-year-old is clinging to my legs and whining for a lollipop she can't have before lunch.
Meanwhile the electronic buzz of the clothes dryer summons me from the next room. Wearing a red cape and brandishing a wooden sword, 4-year-old Stephen chases the dog through the living room. The older children, freshly arrived from a morning of swimming lessons at the lake, drape the furniture with wet bathing suits and sandy towels. Just as Baby Raphael grows weary of his infant swing and commences an enthusiastic fuss, I realize that we are out of peanut butter. And jelly.
With Gabrielle secured to one leg, I limp to the sink and begin to fill a pot with water for macaroni and cheese. When I kneel down to explain to my daughter that she may have a lollipop after lunch, she screams, throws herself to the kitchen floor and pounds her tiny fists against the tiles.
At that moment, I recall an article I wrote once where I waxed poetic about the joys of raising a large family. Silently I rebuke myself for putting such hogwash to paper. Standing there in my sweltering kitchen, caught in a whirlwind of confusion and commotion, I feel anything but poetic. I feel rather like that old nursery-rhyme woman who lived in a shoe.
Though feelings like these are real, it is a fortunate thing that my husband and I do not make decisions about the size of our family in the morass of such moments.
John Paul II once pointed out that “Americans are known for generosity to your children. And what is the best gift you can give your children? I say to you: Give them brothers and sisters.”
Children are a gift to one another? These too are poetic words, but they also acknowledge the trials involved in answering the call to raise a family. Like any gift we offer, like anything we do out of love for our children, raising a large family requires personal sacrifice.
John Paul was right to call brothers and sisters a gift to one another. When we give them siblings, we give our children the gift of learning early on that they are not the center of the universe. More important still, we give them the gift of learning early on that they are loved much — and by many.
This truth is never more evident to me than when my son Stephen sings to his baby brother. He leans over Raphael where he lies playing on the floor and sings to him softly: “Hush little baby, don't make a peep. Papa's gonna buy you a Hummer and Jeep.”
I gave up trying to correct the words weeks ago. Raphael doesn't care about the words anyway. When Stephen sings, he gazes up at his big brother and his entire body beams and wriggles with admiration and delight.
Today Stephen sings softly and then brings his face down close to Raphael's. He presses his cheek against the baby's and then the two are motionless for a moment while each inhales his brother's breath. What a gift these boys are to one another: Stephen, my husky, gravel-voiced little man and Raphael, my drooly, milky-white baby.
Not all of family life is poetry, but some of it surely is. And that is God's gift to me.
Danielle Bean writes from Belknap, New Hampshire.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Danielle Bean ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Mass Power DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:PROLIFE PROFILE
When Mary Ann Harold asked Our Lady how she could promote life, she was led by way of the Rosary right to Jesus in the Eucharist — on a nationwide scale.
“Mother Mary is our CEO,” she says with a smile.
Harold began a small pro-life apostolate — a “rosary quilt of prayer” — with some friends several years ago in Medford, Mass. Since then, their efforts have blanketed the country with a collective prayer apostolate that now focuses on the Eucharist.
Harold's group is the apostolate Prayers for Life. Its newest mission is a Mass Line: a chain of Masses celebrated regularly across the country for Our Lady's pro-life intentions. The goal is for every parish in America to celebrate at least one pro-life Sunday Mass each month.
“If hearts change, then laws will change,” Harold tells the Register. “The growth of a pro-life Mass Line will certainly impact the outcome of this great spiritual battle.”
With this Year of the Eucharist winding down, Prayers for Life has mailed an invitation to enlist to nearly every parish in the U.S. To date, 15,000 Masses have been celebrated or pledged.
Harold recalls how the apostolate took off after Pope John Paul II blessed it on Dec. 12, 2001, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the unborn.
After that pilgrimage to Rome, Harold envisioned the Mass Line as a spiritual outgrowth of the Rosary project. As John Paul later said in Rosarium Virginis Mariae, his 2002 apostolic letter on the Rosary, because this meditative prayer focuses on the key events in Christ's life, it “helps us to be conformed ever more closely to Christ until we attain true holiness.”
“And the Mass is the highest form of prayer,” Harold points out.
The Diocese of Beaumont, Texas, was the first to respond with 96% of its parishes, 47 pastors, joining the Mass Line. Volunteer Mary Ann DeCoux of Beaumont laid the groundwork by meeting personally with each pastor over a three-month stretch.
“The next year, it took me only two mornings to renew by phone,” DeCoux says. “Grassroots works best.”
Grassroots Growth
Both the Mass Line and the Rosary project are ongoing, but Harold hopes that the Holy Spirit prompts people to realize the urgency. One Wisconsin couple, Kevin and Leslie O'Brien of suburban Milwaukee, responded quickly.
“When we finally realized what abortion is, we were shocked. We realized that we'd been misinformed,” says Kevin O'Brien, a 35-year-old former pro football player for the Buffalo Bills. “Now we're hoping to help educate others, especially in our age group. Prayer is such a powerful tool.”
The Mass Line's spiritual director is Father Donald Mulrenhan of Divine Word Missionaries in Boston.
The apostolate began with the motto of St. Pio of Pietrelcina: “The Rosary is the weapon!” Founders aimed high: Generate three million Rosaries, one million in honor of each Person of the Holy Trinity.
Harold and quilter Mary Jo Ridge started with one hand-stitched quilt. They asked participants to pray 50 five-decade Rosaries in addition to their regular prayer commitment. After the prayers were offered, the person's name was sewn on the quilt. Another 50 Rosaries, or an additional 50 hours of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, earned a red silk rose next to the name.
Then the quilt traveled on display. “People felt that they had helped by seeing their names on the quilt, and seeing that encouraged others,” member Natalie Shaw of Medford says.
Msgr. Walter Rossi, rector of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, welcomed the quilt display again this year. It had first debuted in Washington, D.C. at the 1999 March for Life. During the next few years, volunteers began separate quilts in at least 20 different states.
San Antonio Archbishop Patrick Flores joined the prayer effort. “As these special Rosaries are being offered, a quilt of life is being built,” he wrote in a letter supporting the apostolate.
“This is something everybody can participate in,” Harold stresses. “It's really a personal call to deeper holiness and commitment.”
Time to Act
In addition to St. Pio, the group's spiritual patrons are Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and St. Leopold Mandic, a Croatian priest who was a gifted confessor. The themes of repentance, reparation and Divine Mercy are key.
Two large hand-painted Divine Mercy of Life banners can accompany the national quilt on tour. One banner first waved over Boston's Fenway Park during a Jubilee Year youth celebration.
Marian of the Immaculate Conception Father Seraphim Michalenko, of the Divine Mercy Shrine in Stockbridge, Mass., served as artistic adviser on the banners. “I believe that the Chaplet of Divine Mercy is a powerful prayer for life,” Father Michalenko says.
Even if a woman is unready to admit or to confess her abortion, Prayers for Life members are committed to praying for her. Harold recounts one poignant case of a woman who turned to the Rosary following an abortion. After praying, the woman had her baby's name embroidered on the quilt. Then in a dream her son said to her, “I love you and I'll see you in heaven.”
The woman told Harold, “I finally realized that I could ask God's forgiveness and I could start to forgive myself.”
The idea for a national prayer apostolate was conceived in 1998 when Harold saw the graphic video Hard Truth, which showed an aborted baby in a dumpster. She realized that she had to act.
Then 53 and the mother of four, she felt fearful about “being on the line.” But she realized that the U.S. Catholic bishops were urging more prayer in defense of life, and she remembered her own father's advice: “Stay home and pray more.”
And so she began to do her part in response to John Paul's plea in Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life): “[A] great prayer for life is urgently needed, a prayer which will rise up throughout the world.”
Gail Besse writes from Hull, Massachusetts.
Information
Prayers for Life
Phone: (781) 391-1396
Web: prayersforlife.com
E-mail: maryann@prayersforlife.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Gail Besse ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: My Brother, The Priest DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:I ordinarily mine some untapped deposit of my family's past in order to feed the machine that has become this column, “An American Catholic Family.”
This one though is going to be a little different. It's not only grounded in the past, but pertains to the present and probably to the future as well.
In 1980 the national debt was $914,000,000,000. The minimum wage was a whopping $3.10. The average salary in the United States was $15,751. You could walk into a Mercedes Benz showroom, plunk down $14,800 and drive away with a brand new 280 E Sedan, and President Reagan hadn't even gotten started on the “Evil Empire.”
And in the summer of 1980, my brother Joe was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
This summer, the summer of 2005, the national debt is virtually incalculable, the minimum wage has more than doubled, $14,800 won't get you the down payment on a used Mercedes, school children actually ask “The Soviet what?” and my brother Joe just celebrated 25 years as a priest.
I have tried to quantify how many weddings, baptisms and funerals my brother Joe has presided over but always find myself losing count and having to start all over again.
Let's just say my brother Joe the priest is infused within the fabric of our family in ways that are impossible to measure.
When it came time to celebrate my brother's 25th anniversary to the priesthood, the family decided to go all out. We were going to treat it like a silver wedding anniversary.
In short order it evolved, or devolved, depending on your perspective, into one of those “Brennan” affairs. We just aren't sit-down-in-the-hotel-banquet-hall kind of people. For one thing, you need money for that, and financial acumen is an evolutionary element that has skipped this particular strain of Brennans since they left County Kerry just in front of a potato famine.
So be it. We would do this party like so many other parties in the history of this family. First, we'd get our sister Kathy to do all of the planning, all of the arranging, and 89.9% of the work. As usual, she threw herself 100% into the process and, before we knew it, there were more than 200 people coming to Joe's parish hall for a party of food, drink and a cacophony of relatives the likes of which hadn't been seen in a very long time.
It was a grand event to be sure. We had cast the net far and wide, and pulled in cousins, second cousins, friends, old parishioners, new parishioners and a bunch of people I had never seen before.
Somebody made a video collage of still photos that chronicled not only the 25 years of my brother's priestly life, but the 25 years that preceded them. In a haze of black-and-white photographs, we all got teary eyed, laughed, and took turns grimacing as we found ourselves up on the screen along with our brother. There were hair-helmet haircuts, glasses with pointy frames, and a wardrobe the Salvation Army would turn away.
It was a grand event.
Watching all of those images of my brother's life as a priest with parishioners, people he had married, baptized and buried, flash before my eyes gave me a sudden realization.
Our brother Joe didn't “belong” to us anymore.
We have had to learn how to share him and to let go of him.
He has a more comprehensive calling than just keeping his brothers and sisters in line, guiding them by his example, and loving us in that special spiritual way possessed by every good priest I ever had the pleasure to have known. Maybe it's DNA, some kind of recessive gene whose mystery some future bio-medical doctorate student will unlock some day. Whatever the organic compound is, it resides in the soul of my brother Joe, and I am grateful for it.
And so are others.
In the interim of writing this piece, very close friends of mine lost their only son to a drowning in a river. This couple was married by my brother Joe. It was my brother Joe who has helped guide the father closer to the Church. He's not all the way back, but we're working on it.
When their son was lost in the river, I was given the job of sending out the SOS and finding my brother Joe. This is not always an easy task, as the life of a parish priest can be quite frenetic. But through the grace of God and one or two collect calls to the Blessed Mother, I got a hold of Joe, informed him of the tragedy, and he went into action.
The death of a young person in these circumstances is nothing short of total devastation. Yet, there among the rubble, the despair, the sorrow, stood my brother Joe.
During the grieving process, my friends who suffered the loss as well as their friends and relatives would come up to me and tell me how much Father Joe meant to them during this time of extreme trial. I told them I had seen it all before on occasions too numerous to itemize. My brother Joe would deny it because that's the way he is, but his power to transmit the love of God and the saving power of the Church is nothing short of inspiring.
Which brings me back full circle to that 25th anniversary of his ordination.
At his anniversary party, my brother Joe spoke of the very “first” seminary he attended — our home. He spoke of the examples of many of the people I have written about in this very column: our dad, our mom, Uncle Rich, Father John.
When I attended the Rosary for my friends’ deceased son, I thought about those grainy black-and-white photographs at my brother's anniversary party, and thought again how fortunate I am to have come from the family that I do.
My friends never knew my mom or dad or my uncles, but they were being touched by them just the same.
At times, I wish I could wave a magic wand and have all my friends think and feel about Christ and his Church the way I do, the way my brother Joe and my other brothers and sisters do. But I can't.
It would be a serious miscalculation to think the tragedy my friends suffered somehow put a pall over the celebration of my brother's priestly milestone. If anything, it was an exclamation point to it and more evidence that a broken, flawed, and oh-so-imperfect Catholic family like mine can have a ripple effect on others for the good.
Of course it doesn't hurt to have a great front man like our brother, Father Joseph V. Brennan.
Robert Brennan is a television writer living in Los Angeles.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Robert Brennan ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Origins of Life
REUTERS, Aug. 16 — Harvard University is planning a scientific study of how life emerged on Earth that will consider intelligent design, the idea that nature is so complex it could not have occurred by random natural selection.
Opponents of evolution theory said that Harvard's research project is proof that science has yet to disprove alternative theories to Darwinism, including intelligent design.
Others are skeptical of Harvard's intention.
Even if that is the case, the need by a major university to debunk intelligent design proves that it has emerged as an important possibility.
Cursing Okayed
A running tally of how many times the one particular four-letter-word has been used will be kept on the board. If a class goes over the limit, they will be “spoken to” at the end of the lesson.
The policy was described by the newspaper as “astonishing,” and one that was “condemned by parents’ groups and members of Parliament.”
“This appears to be a misguided attempt to speak to kids on their own level,” said the father of one pupil at the Weavers School in Wellingborough.
There She Goes Again
CATHOLIC.ORG, Aug 25 — History seems to be repeating itself, as St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago will have pro-abortion Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan as its featured speaker at its annual Women's Council dinner.
Last year, another Jesuit institution in Chicago, Loyola University School of Law, honored Madigan with an honorary degree despite the public objections of many Catholics, including Cardinal Francis George.
Madigan once pledged to close down Illinois crisis-pregnancy centers, which she deemed “phony” because they do not offer abortions.
Shrinking Number
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 30 — Immaculata University near Philadelphia has this fall admitted its first male undergraduate students as the school, founded in 1920 by the Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, turned coeducational.
“Out of 190 women's Catholic colleges in United States in the 1960s, fewer than 20 exist today” for women only, reported the Associated Press.
The school made the choice as its research showed that only 4% of female high-school students considered single-sex schools.
Faith Formation
THE UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON, Aug. 24 — In an effort to minister to the growing Hispanic population of Los Angeles, the Ohio university and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles have developed four Spanish-language Catholic faith formation classes on the Internet.
The Marianist-run university plans to expand the program, which began in Los Angeles in August. It is already in use in 100 American dioceses and in seven countries.The Internet classes in Spanish are valuable because teachers of the faith are in need of updating and because of difficulties with English materials.
The classes can also be taken at times that are convenient for the catechist.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: To Play or To Pray? DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:For residents of Fuquay-Varina, N.C., choosing between church and sports on Sunday morning is an easy one.
According to Rose John, town clerk, the town has a policy that ball fields may not be used until noon Sunday — after church services are over.
Of course, that's not to say the policy sets well with everyone. This past May, there was a request for an exception to the policy.
No go, said the town.
“The reason they would not allow the exception is that the field was in close proximity to churches,” recalls John. “One of our commissioners quoted Scripture about remembering the Sabbath during his part of the discussion on the subject.”
Would that every city and town across the United States were so respectful of Christianity the first day of each week.
They're not, but that needn't cause most Catholics much consternation. After all, most parishes offer multiple Sunday Masses to choose from.
For Phil and Barbara White of Clio, Mich., sports are as much a part of family life as sibling rivalry. But one activity that never gets second billing for them and their three children is Sunday Mass.
“We hope to show, by our words and our actions, that our faith is our No. 1 priority,” says Barbara. “We have never had to choose between playing in a soccer game and going to Mass. If we did, there is no doubt which we would choose.”
In fact, she points out, as long as Mass is understood as mandatory — and sports as optional — the latter can offer families a perfect (and relatively low-cost) way to spend Sunday afternoons together.
“My husband and I have always gone with the kids to their travel-team tournaments out of town,” she explains.
“We make the event a family activity. There have been times when it was inconvenient to go to Mass, but it was always possible, so we did it. Our kids found it interesting, because they've been to Mass so many different places.”
This attitude sits well with Father Joseph Krupp, chaplain and assistant coach of junior-varsity football at Lansing Catholic Central High School in Lansing, Mich.
“I think the challenge for parents is this: What is more important to you — your child's success on the field of athletics or their pursuit of holiness?” he says. “Parents answer this question in how they raise their kids and what their priorities are in scheduling. I challenge any parent who has a child involved in sports to let them love the game. Challenge their attitude when they want to blame; explain to them that excelling in sports happens when we give our all for the one who gave his all for us.”
For his part, Father Krupp relishes the fact that coaches seek him out. “They'll change a schedule or even request a special Mass,” he says. “I can't think of any coach who doesn't. Coaches will call me up and ask me to come and bless the kids. Even a couple of our non-Catholic coaches are particularly strong about bringing their players to our weekday Masses and attending with them.”
Linda Doyle of Grand Blanc, Mich., appreciates the effort it takes to meet various — and apparently competing — commitments.
“It's kind of a shock when you move from recreational soccer to competitive,” she says. “It gets more serious. If you realize you are over-committed, you must reevaluate. Scheduling, structuring and following through were a learning process for us. At times you have to make judgment calls.”
On occasion, her children have had conflicting practice times mandated by different teams. But the family philosophy was set.
“Through it all, we wanted to teach the kids that, when you make a commitment, you follow through,” says Doyle. “You have obligations. But if the kids ever felt pressure to play rather than go to church — which rarely happened — they knew what we felt was a priority: church.”
Family First
As a football coach and guidance counselor at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School in Palos Hills, Ill., Tim McAlpin is not a stranger to setting faith as a top family priority.
“You have to look at why the person is missing practice or a game,” McAlpin says. “Church or family would be acceptable. Family first, program second. Take care of your family. Do what you need to do and if that means you're missing a practice or a game, we'll deal with it. I've never had to discipline — never would — an athlete for choosing church.”
For McAlpin, the question is, “Are you a good person? Are you working hard, part of the team, keeping your commitment?”
He recalls one time when the football team was going to the state finals during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The Muslim players needed to fulfill their religious obligation to prayer and fasting. He happily accommodated their request to leave practice for a few minutes to pray.
It was especially challenging for them to play while fasting every day from dawn until sunset, but they brought sack lunches and ate after the sun went down. The witness of their dedication was not lost on the other students, Catholics included.
For many dedicated sports families, the desire to teach their young athletes the primacy of faith comes through parental example. When the challenge is raised to choose church over sports, ultimately it is the parents who must show up for the game.
Janet Cassidy writes from Grand Blanc, Michigan.
----- EXCERPT: When Sunday sports compete with the Lord's Day ----- EXTENDED BODY: Janet Cassidy ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Catholic Dating In a Whole New World DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Can the Internet save dating?
I didn't have it back when I was dating. My original attempts to woo my wife, then-girlfriend, Mary, almost met with utter failure.
“He's Lutheran,” her mother protested. “Surely, you can find a good Catholic boy to date.”
“I've dated Catholic boys, but Tim takes his faith more seriously than any of them,” Mary told her mother.
Twenty years after we started dating and 16 since our marriage, I remain thankful that neither Mary nor her mother protested too much, for it was the living faith of her and her family that helped draw me into the Church.
Now that I'm a columnist with a Catholic Internet dating organization, I can see that our experience ended up drawing a lot of its strengths from the same things that make online dating successful.
Mary and I were friends first. We didn't really begin dating until late in our freshman year at college. Not long after we began dating, summer break arrived, separating us by hundreds of miles, a three-hour drive and no cars to call our own. We resorted to long letters and — much to the consternation of our parents — equally long telephone calls.
Through those letters and calls, though, we truly got to know one another. After a day spent working at the nursing home, Mary would tell me about her work and the residents for whom she cared. I could imagine growing old with her. I would share the joys and frustrations of my own day — all in preparation for the day when we would be doing the same as an “old” married couple.
A wedding and five children later, I shudder to think of the contemporary dating scene and its many perils. Dating is certainly different from my high school days of chaperoned dances, a shared pizza or a movie.
Today, the Catholic single needs to beware not only of the suitor who doesn't practice his or her faith, but also of the sexually “liberated” single whose love life is a series of “hook-ups.”
While doing research for my book Young and Catholic: The Face of Tomorrow's Church (Sophia Institute Press, 2004), I discovered that Internet dating is a bright spot in the darkness. It's a place that has kept the art of letter-writing — and soul-to-soul sharing — alive, albeit in an electronic form.
Here, at just the click of a mouse and within minutes, you can find out far more about someone than you can at your local bar or restaurant. Through detailed questionnaires, singles can learn not only about a potential suitor's personality, but also about the practice of his or her faith-life, and if the member so desires can send an e-mail or chat online with the other member. What a wonderful way to weed the garden.
The beauty of such services is that they allow the Catholic single to forgo the uncomfortable aspects of dating to quickly find out what their potential suitor believes and practices. There's no need for the painful experience of a bad blind-date, or a series of dates to learn that you are completely incompatible. In fact, there's no need to even talk with the other person online unless you decide to do so.
Of course, Internet dating has its share of downsides, too. Couples who meet online are missing a key element until they meet in person. And I never would have met Mary through an online dating service — we would have been incompatible from a faith perspective, and who knows when or how I would have found my way into the Church without her?
For every story like mine, though, I've heard others that make the opposite point. Some tell stories of those entering their late 30s, resigning themselves to a life of single-hood, when at the urging of a friend or parent they go online and discover someone they never before knew existed.
I've heard many of their stories, and never cease to be amazed.
Benedict XVI, writing about the importance of families, said “The vocation to love is what makes man the authentic image of God: He becomes like God in the measure that he becomes someone who loves.”
Online services are helping many a Catholic man or woman to become someone who loves — and someone who builds a strong family.
It's amazing that the Holy Spirit can use something like the Internet to allow faithful Catholics to meet, safely exchange e-mailed letters, enter sacramental marriages, and start new Catholic families of their own. At present, the three most prominent Catholic Internet dating services collectively account for more than 1,000 such marriages.
I find tremendous hope in that, not only for marriage, but also for the future of the Church.
Tim Drake writes from St. Joseph, Minn.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Gigantic Effort Aids Families and Churches DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:BATON ROUGE, La. — In the days following Hurricane Katrina, Catholics stepped in where the government often could not.
Their unprecedented, monumental relief and recovery effort is bringing spiritual, financial and emotional support to those hardest hit by the disaster.
Hundreds of faith-based organizations and Catholic parishes throughout Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and elsewhere immediately mobilized to offer survivors food, clothing, shelter and more. Their response is bringing much-needed help and assistance to evacuees who lost their homes, jobs and loved ones.
Financial assistance alone has been overwhelming. At press time, U.S. charities had raised more than $600 million in cash and pledges, amounting to twice the amount gathered after the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001. Catholic Charities and the Knights of Columbus are among the groups spearheading major fund-raising efforts.
The Knights of Columbus Supreme Council (KofC.org) announced the largest disaster relief effort in its history, pledging a minimum of $2.5 million in financial assistance. The Knights plan to match any funds in excess of that amount donated to the Knights of Columbus Katrina Relief Fund over the next 60 days.
Assistance goes far beyond the financial. It also includes the spiritual.
Churches, relief centers, arenas and individual homes have opened their doors to thousands of evacuees from the region. The population of cities such as Houston and Lafayette, La., has risen dramatically. The populations of capitals Baton Rouge and Jackson, Miss., have doubled in a little over a week.
In Texas, the American Red Cross has opened shelters in Catholic churches such as San Juan Diego in Pasadena, St. Francis Cabrini in Houston, and St. Mary's in Brenham. Catholic parishes as far away as San Francisco are offering housing as well.
Many priests have been offering spiritual guidance and the sacraments to evacuees in shelters such as the Cajundome, home of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Ragin Cajuns’ basketball team. Father Bryce Sibley, pastor of St. Joseph's Church in Parks, La., is one of them. Although he admits that he wasn't able to minister to a great number of people because the majority has not been Catholic, he did use the opportunity to evangelize.
“I gave out a number of prayer cards to refugees and volunteers alike, some of them not even Catholic,” said Father Sibley. “Along with it, I was able to explain the importance of the Rosary and the faith.”
Legionary Father Patrick Murphy of Atlanta has also been meeting with evacuees at the Cajundome to offer counsel and the sacrament of reconciliation. He told the heartbreaking story of meeting with a man who had lost his wife and two daughters.
“This man had received a call from St. Bernard County that morning,” said Father Murphy. “They found his wife and two girls dead. Before they died, they had written him a note that the caller had read to the man. His wife had said, ‘I love you and want you to get married again.’ The girls had said, ‘Daddy, please name your future children after us.’
“He broke down crying and told me, ‘God has a reason.’ As he sat on his mattress he told me, ‘You don't know how much it means to me just to have you here.’ All I could do was listen to him, be there for him, and pray with him.”
The sudden influx of evacuees has also meant the need for additional classrooms. Catholic schools and universities across the country have opened their doors to students displaced by the hurricane. An estimated 64,700 Catholic elementary, high school and college students in Biloxi and New Orleans were impacted by the disaster.
Communities such as Little Rock, Ark., Shreveport, La., and Jackson have welcomed the students, even if they don't quite know how they will meet the need.
“The Catholic educational system in some areas is doubling in size,” said Ken Davison, executive director of Catholic World Mission, a Connecticut-based relief organization that is partnering with the Register in relief efforts. “We are launching an effort to help the Catholic education system absorb those families, and are focusing on tuition assistance.”
The organization's first financial aid was sent to St. Joseph's Parish in Pounchatoula. The parish was experiencing an increase in the size of their parish school and was housing a displaced priest.
“We sent them money to help them absorb their students,” explained Davison. “We're also looking at supplying them textbooks.”
Fifth-grade school teacher Mandy Chocheles from Metairie, just outside New Orleans, was overwhelmed by the reception her family received from St. Thomas More Catholic School in Baton Rouge when she went to register her granddaughter. Chocheles, her husband, daughter and family evacuated their home in Metairie and have been staying with her sister in Baton Rouge.
“We were notified by the state superintendent of schools that we needed to enroll our children,” said Chocheles. “Friday morning we went to St. Thomas More, and they could not have been nicer. They told us to come back on Tuesday. When we did the entire gym was filled with uniforms, socks, underwear, backpacks and school supplies that had been donated by families.
“I was speechless,” she added. “They are starting an entirely new kindergarten, and my granddaughter starts school on Thursday. Whether we're here for two weeks or six weeks she'll have that structure. She needs that.”
The Church in New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., was hardest hit by Katrina.
“Sunday was perhaps the first time since 1725 that Mass has not been said in a parish church in New Orleans,” said New Orleans Archbishop Alfred Hughes a week after the disaster.
At least 14 Catholic churches in the Biloxi Diocese were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
“Virtually every one of the [diocese's 57] buildings are damaged,” Biloxi Bishop Thomas Rodi told the Biloxi Sun Herald.
But when one part of the body of Christ suffers, other parts pitch in to help. Catholic churches as far away as Michigan and New York have helped in the relief efforts.
When Father Brian Stanley at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Coldwater, Mich. asked parishioners to make donations, they responded immediately, filling the church's gymnasium and church hall with donations of linens and clothing that will be donated to evacuees who will be staying at nearby military bases.
When a local store heard what parishioners were doing, the store offered customers a 20% discount on linens and towels.
“The U.S. Army sent us a PLS, which is a large, flatbed truck with 10 wheels,” said Father Stanley. “On the back was a metal container for 33 cubic meters, or 1,165 square feet. I am most happy to report that our little parish filled that container with sheets, blankets, pillows and clothing. We had it packed and on the road in half an hour.”
The Catholic Youth and Young Adults group in New York is working together to organize several fund-raisers to assist evacuees. “Let's perform a marvelous act of charity,” said organizer Mario Bruschi.
In response, the group is planning Catholic art exhibits, concerts, and Eucharistic adoration days for praying for the suffering. The group plans to post events online at www.events4jc.com.
Davison spoke of the important need for faith-based organizations to step up to the plate.
“The rebuilding of families and the Church won't be done by secular relief organizations,” said Davison. “That's where we need to step in.”
Tim Drake is based in St. Joseph, Minnesota.
Information
The National Catholic Register is teaming with Catholic World Mission to provide material and spiritual assistance to Hurricane Katrina survivors. Catholics know that body and soul are one, and yet many aid organizations treat the body but not the soul. Catholic World Mission has already begun rebuilding the families and the faith of hurricane survivors. Read more about what we are doing on page 10.
Register Reader Response
Catholic World Mission
33 Rossotto Drive
Hamden, CT 06514
(203) 230 3802
CatholicWorldMission.org
----- EXCERPT: KATRINA'S AFTERMATH ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: 'A Human Catastrophe of Epic Proportions' DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Archbishop Alfred Hughes has felt the full fury of Katrina's impact.
He evacuated New Orleans to Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Baton Rouge when Hurricane Katrina rolled in.
“I never thought the Lord was going to ask me to take this on at this age,” the 72-year-old leader of half a million New Orleans Catholics told reporters Sept. 4.
Register staff writer Tim Drake spoke to the archbishop Sept. 9 about the shape of his archdiocese and efforts to restore some sense of normalcy.
With your home underwater and drying out, where have you been staying?
I have been staying at Our Lady of Mercy rectory in Baton Rouge. Bishop Robert Muench has been extraordinary in helping us set up an administration in exile here. The administration is meeting on a daily basis, keeping one another informed of the progress being made. There is much happening on many fronts.
Have you had much contact with the evacuees?
Yes, I've been to all of the shelters, and will be returning. Tomorrow, I will be going into the city, with the blessing of the governor and lieutenant governor, to try to persuade people who are still holding out to leave for their own safety and health. Conditions have deteriorated so rapidly that disease now could very well take their lives.
What has the toll been on your flock?
It's a human catastrophe of epic proportions. We're trying to focus on the people first — their rescue, survival, medical care, food, water, shelter and helping them get reconnected with their families. We are also offering sacramental and pastoral care, being a pastoral presence and letting evacuees know that we want to walk the journey with them. We are also helping those who are going to need long-term relocation to get that.
The New Orleans archdiocese comprises eight civil parishes, known as counties in most other places. We're really hoping to be operational in five of the eight civil parishes, but three are completely devastated — Orleans, where the city is located; St. Bernard parish, which is east of the city; and Plaquemines parish, which is both southeast and southwest of the river.
Because we are focusing on people, we want to continue to make sure that the basic needs are being responded to, but we also want to keep our Catholic Church together — the employees. To do this without the offerings from the parishes will be a huge challenge, but we want those people who are willing to make an agreement that they will continue to serve in the archdiocese, we want to continue that even if it has to be a reduced salary. So many of them have lost so much else. We need extraordinary help.
At one point you were unable to account for 150 of your 300 total priests. How many have you found?
I do not know that number. They are scattered all over, and communications has been very difficult. Each day we are hearing from more priests. There is one priest that we are almost certain died. His church and rectory were carried out into the Gulf.
We have developed a pastoral response on the part of our priests. We have about 30 priests here in Baton Rouge. Our priests are working alongside the priests here. In a particular way, they are reaching out to those who are in the shelters because they are the poorest of the poor. They have the least support and need the presence of the Church signaling God's fidelity.
We have identified priests in those cities with the largest concentration of evacuees — Lafayette, Lake Charles, Thibodeaux, Shreveport, Alexandria, Jackson, Miss., Houston, Dallas and Atlanta — to work with the bishops there in providing pastoral support.
What about your seminarians?
We are relocating our seminary to St. Joseph's Abbey in Covington, [Ky.] About 100 seminarians will report back and resume studies on Oct. 1 with a revised calendar. The abbey has shut down their retreat house and turned it over to us. They have opened their guestrooms to faculty, and are opening a wing of a college dormitory for our seminarians.
We want the seminarians to remain close to the experience of the people whom they will be serving. The seminarians will have to make sacrifices and live in a very cramped situation, but feel that the experience will be formally very important.
Have you been encouraged by how the Church has responded to the tragedy?
Catholic Charities is working closely with community services here in Baton Rouge, and Catholic Relief Services and the American Red Cross have been working in the delivery of the basic needs for people. This is the first time that Catholic Relief Services, whose mission is to respond to disasters in other countries, is helping with a domestic disaster. We are grateful for Catholic Relief Services’ help because of their expertise in responding to last December's tsunami in Asia.
How have Catholic schools responded?
We've been placing a significant number of our children who had been enrolled in Catholic schools in Catholic schools here. Five thousand have been placed in Baton Rouge schools, and by Oct. 3 we will reopen two closed elementary schools here. We will have two elementary and two high schools conducted by New Orleans administrators and faculty.
Tim Drake writes from St. Joseph, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: Send the Faith Along With Aid DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:EDITORIAL
Hurricane Katrina victims need more.
The outpouring of generosity following nature's deadly assault on the Gulf Coast was an important antidote to the many recriminations and accusations in the aftermath of the tragedy.
But hurricane victims also have an urgent need, above all, for hope. Catholics should insist that the aid they send to victims includes a spiritual element.
The tragic reports of the events following Hurricane Katrina were difficult to watch. The stories this time were about destruction and despair: We heard of people who lost everything, tales of survivors dying while waiting for rescuers, a New Orleans policeman committing suicide, of looters running amok.
But there was something far more important in the story of Katrina.
Early predictions of as many as 10,000 dead in New Orleans were unfounded. Reports of sexual assaults and dead babies in the Superdome shelter were untrue, say police. Predictions that New Orleans’ levees were difficult or impossible to rebuild were disproven within days.
There was a force at work in the Gulf Coast whose power was much greater than the destruction of the hurricane: hope.
CNN brought us a microcosm of the larger story of the hurricane when the network reported on one family's three-day ordeal in New Orleans.
A grandmother, mother and two daughters fled to the attic when their house began flooding. As days passed with no rescue coming, the grandmother died in the heat of the small windowless room. The mother, delirious with the heat and dehydration, urged her teenage daughters to take enough pain killers to put themselves out of their misery.
Now, says the mother, she owes her life to one teenage daughter who “screamed for hours” about the future: experiences she wanted to have, career paths she wanted to try, her future children.
By forcing her to see beyond the present moment, the girl was able to provide hope when all seemed lost.
For the victims of Hurricane Katrina, hope is the most precious commodity. Aid is pouring in, but people have lost their loved ones, their jobs and their property. What they need now is someone who is willing to tell them tirelessly that they have great things to look forward to.
In other words, they need Catholics who are willing to evangelize.
But Catholics in the West too often hesitate to share their faith. Even our own aid organizations often limit themselves to material aid and skip evangelization. We've bought the idea that sharing the faith is an arrogant imposition on others.
But families don't just need food, shelter and temporary comfort. They need to be told the truth about what has happened to their loved ones. They need to know they can pray and offer sacrifices for the souls of the dead. They need to know that their suffering isn't absurd.
The Catholic faith uniquely understands the place of suffering in the human experience — and in the divine experience. We know that when God asks us to suffer he's not asking us to do something he isn't willing to do himself.
Our Church began with the crucifixion of its founder, grew during a time of persecution in which its most prominent members were martyred, and now requires that each church feature a crucifix in its center and Stations of the Cross along its walls.
This central truth of our faith transforms tragedies into hopeful occasions, all by itself, because it has the power to transform sudden death into eternal life — and assures us that all of our suffering leads to resurrection, not defeat.
That's why the Register is partnering with Catholic World Mission to try to send aid to Hurricane Katrina victims. Catholic World Mission is able to do what the Red Cross and other aid organizations can't or won't do: deliver faith along with aid.
The material need is great, and must be met. But the spiritual need is greater, and can't be ignored.
We know that our readers may have given money to hurricane-relief efforts already, but we urge readers to donate money to our “soul aid” effort as well.
Register Reader Response
Catholic World Mission
Hamden, CT 06514
(203) 848-3324
ncRegister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Back to School (Barely) DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:ST. PAUL, Minn. — When part of St. Bernard's School in St. Paul, Minn., was threatened with closure, the community sprang into action.
A growing debt led the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to shutter the elementary portion of St. Bernard's, a K-12 school. The 115-year-old parish is an anchor in the urban neighborhood and crucial for its revitalization efforts, according to parishioner Frank Sprandel, the father of two St. Bernard students. He rallied local business owners for help, while other parents began an alumni appeal.
Today, St. Bernard's school is in the black and regarded as the archdiocese's “miracle story.” But it illustrates the plight of hundreds of inner-city Catholic schools that are faced with demographic shifts, declining enrollment and rising costs.
Many schools and parishes have found creative ways to keep open schools that had been struggling.
“Our neighborhood has transitioned from German and Austrian families to new immigrants from all over,” said St. Bernard's President Jennifer Cassidy. “Many of them are just getting a starter house, they don't have cars, they look at our school with uniforms and tuition and say, ‘no way.’ How do we make sure the kids living across the street look at our school as a place to go?”
Small rural parishes are also feeling the stress of rising costs. St. James Church in Randall, Minn., pays one-third of its income to the Catholic school in nearby Little Falls, and only six of its parishioners attend the school.
Trustee Tom Koenig is concerned there isn't enough money left for needed repairs on the church and rectory.
“It's becoming clear that rural parishes have to decide whether they can continue to support Catholic schools or keep their own doors open. That's where it's at with us.”
According to a statement released this summer by the U.S. bishops, “Renewing Our Commitment to Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Third Millennium,” Catholic schools are the most effective means for the Church to educate its children, and often the most effective contribution to the poor and disadvantaged families. The document also states that “it is the responsibility of the entire Catholic community … to make Catholic elementary and secondary schools available, accessible and affordable to all Catholic parents and their children, including those who are poor and middle class.”
Challengers
Yet, since 1990, despite the fact that more than 400 new Catholic schools opened in the United States, there has been a net decline of more than 850 Catholic schools, mostly in urban, inner-city and rural areas. Tuition has doubled.
“The challenge each church has is trying to keep a presence in those (inner-city and rural) areas, and certainly one of the best ways is through the schools, but there's only so much money to go around,” said Christian Brother Robert Bimonte, executive director of Elementary Education at the National Catholic Education Association in Washington, D.C.
Last year, a wave of Catholic school closings in several metropolitan areas was a wake-up call for many dioceses. Schools like St. Bernard's in St. Paul are starting to establish capital campaigns, alumni appeals, endowment funds and partnerships with local businesses and organizations to defray costs, said Brother Bimonte.
Nicholas Wolsonovich, Superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Archdiocese of Chicago, is a strong advocate of the Wichita model and is concerned that Catholic schools will exist only for the wealthy unless changes are made.
“We really believe that the financial responsibility for financing Catholic schools cannot continue to be placed upon the users. About 80% of the per-pupil cost is borne by users, and it's causing financial pressures on families to say they just can't afford it anymore,” said Wolsonovich.
Since 1964, enrollment in Chicago's Catholic schools has declined by 260,000 and 250 schools have closed. Tuition has increased from just a few dollars to an average of $3,200. Today, only about 23% of Chicago's baptized Catholics regularly attend Mass, and give 1% of their income. Wolsonovich contrasts that with Wichita, Kan., which has seen enrollment increase by one-third in its schools, well-paid teachers and new or expanded schools.
“Something significantly different has to happen. I firmly believe it has to be stewardship where the Catholic community gets together and supports the schools, not just the users,” said Wolsonovich. “Money follows vision and if people aren't practicing their faith, they're not going to contribute to something they don't believe in.”
Father James Dean, pastor of Our Lady Queen of Mercy Church in Montgomery, Ala., introduced a stewardship plan two years ago, asking parishioners to tithe so the parish could retire a $135,000 debt, and begin offering free tuition to registered, active parishioners. Within a year the debt was paid and 23 families won tuition-free status at the school. School and parish enrollment has steadily increased, air conditioning was added to the gymnasium and a new kitchen installed in the 40-year-old school.
“People started coming to Mass, and the parish started attracting younger people. It generated a lot of excitement,” said Father Dean. “The atmosphere definitely changed. It was a response to the enthusiasm toward stewardship and taking ownership of the church.”
Wichita Models
The Catholic school system in the Diocese of Wichita, Kan., relies on stewardship to provide a tuition-free elementary and high school education to active Catholic parishioners. Superintendent of Schools Bob Voboril said parishioners are asked to give 8% of their income to their parish. In turn, parishes contribute, on average, 70% of their income to Catholic schools, which are viewed by parishioners as a critical mission of the Church.
“Stewardship is not a way to fund schools, but a way to live one's faith, and tuition-free schools is one of the blessings,” said Voboril. “Our view is that Catholic schools don't have a money problem; they have a faith problem. If you get people to practice their faith in the parish, they'll be generous, and the parish will then provide for the Catholic education of its children.”
Barb Ernster is based in Fridley, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: Many have found creative ways to keep classes open ----- EXTENDED BODY: Barb Ernster ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Language Arts DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:FACTS OF LIFE
A polling firm recently asked 1,000 adults what subject they wish they had taken more of in school. The most popular answer: foreign languages. “We are the only industrialized nation that routinely graduates students from high school with knowledge of only one language,” said Marty Abbott, director of education at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
Source: CNN, Aug. 17 Illustration by Tim Rauch
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Rauch ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Fall Book Picks DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:No Time Like Fall for a New Springtime
THE THIRD SPRING: G.K. CHESTERTON, GRAHAM GREENE, CHRISTOPHER DAWSON AND DAVID JONES
by Adam Schwartz
CUA Press, 2005
416 pages. $64.95
To order: (800) 537-5487
Convert and Cardinal John Henry Newman proclaimed a wave of celebrity conversions in the 1890s that included Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde to be “the second spring” of the Catholic faith in England. This book looks at four leaders of a “third spring” of intellectuals who rejected modernity several decades later by likewise saying Yes to the Catholic faith — that is, Christianity at its most muscular, intellectually and artistically speaking.
Part biography and part literary criticism, the book is at its best when exploring how the conversion experiences of its subjects — essayist and storyteller G.K. Chesterton, novelist Graham Greene, historian Christopher Dawson and poet David Jones — influenced their critiques of the spirit of their age.
Boarding-school crises proved especially profound for Chesterton and Greene. Chesterton responded to a nihilistic classmate by first becoming a materialist, then a Protestant and finally a Catholic. Chesterton would always oppose the emptiness he found in modernity with the joy he found in creation.
Bullied horribly in a private school, Greene developed an appreciation of evil that neither liberal Christianity nor modern thought could explain. But while Chesterton loved Catholicism's optimism, Greene appreciated the faith first for its firm grasp on evil.
“To be Catholic is to believe in the Devil,” he wrote once. What brought him to a more Chestertonian understanding was his first love and first wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who preceded him into the Church.
“When I see that Catholicism can produce something so fine all through,” he wrote her, “I know there must be something in it.”
David Jones, a World War I veteran who used modern free-verse forms to defend a traditionally Catholic understanding of the organic union of the spiritual and material, was raised in a staunchly Low Anglican home. He began at 6 years old to express his faith sacramentally, first by building a cross on Good Friday and marching in solo procession around his backyard.
“Upon beholding this sight [his father] James Jones admonished his son that ‘there were people called Roman Catholics who did that sort of thing,’” Schwartz relays, “‘but that true Christians carried their cross in their hearts.’”
Undeterred, young David soon began kneeling during the recitation of the words “He became man” in the Nicene Creed. “I just had to,” he told his mother.
On the Western Front, it was love at first sight when he chanced upon his first Catholic Mass being celebrated by candlelight in a hayloft with all the intensity of a mystery cult. Here was the unity of past and present, of humanity and divinity, that he would seek all his life through his poetry.
Christopher Dawson, by contrast, grew up High Anglican, but as a schoolboy mistrusted its claims. After a brief descent into high-school agnosticism, Dawson reclaimed his Christian faith even though he was aware it was based on what Schwartz terms “suprarational” experience rather than intellectual conviction.
His study of medieval history impressed him with the Catholic faith's contribution to Western culture while trips to Italy revealed a surprisingly vibrant post-medieval and baroque Catholic culture. Dawson ultimately rejected Anglo-Catholicism because it seemed to him insufficiently strong — and insufficiently divine — to stand up to secularism. As a historian, Dawson would prove counter-cultural twice over, practicing meta-history as others moved into micro-history and affirming the crucial significance of Catholic Christianity and religion generally in Western culture.
Sadly, Schwartz notes, Vatican II took the wind out the third spring. “While its pronouncements were consistent with traditional Catholic doctrine,” he writes, “the council's symbolic changes, such as the alterations in the Mass, signaled to many Catholics that their Church no longer saw uncompromising challenge of modernity as a hallmark of its identity.”
Nonetheless Schwartz urges that the challenge these men mounted should inspire us all to follow suit. His case is compelling.
Steve Weatherbe writes from Victoria, British Columbia.
Pull Up an Armchair With An Archbishop
CALLED TO BE HOLY
by Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
OSV, 2005
224 pages, $12.95
To order: (800) 348-2440
or catalog.osv.com
We all wonder what God wants from us in life, what his will is for us.
Does he want me to become a priest? Enter a convent or monastery? Marry and have a family? Should I become a doctor? A teacher? A soldier?
In his First Letter to the Thessalonians, St. Paul shows us that, even though these sorts of questions are important, the Catholic answer cuts through them and gets to the heart of the matter: “This is the will of God: your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).
In other words, particulars aside, God simply wants us to become saints.
But how do we do that? Most of us know by now that God doesn't just zap us at baptism and voila! — instant holiness. We know we have to train ourselves in this area. Sometimes we need a little coaching.
Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan provides exactly that in his new book. It's a reworking of the first section of his book Priests for the Third Millennium (OSV, 2000) — but much of what he originally intended for priests applies equally to lay people: “[T]he Church needs holy priests and a holy laity.”
The archbishop's conversational writing style and evident love of illustrative stories, especially from his own life, make Called to Be Holy a quick and easy read that is nevertheless full of deep insights and useful wisdom. He starts off with a list of essential daily practices for what he terms “the stewardship of the spirit,” a spiritual game plan that will help the Christian grow in holiness.
“A steward carefully takes stock of what gifts, what treasures, what items he has at his disposal,” he writes, “realizing that he needs to draw upon them continually.”
The items in our Catholic stockroom include the sacraments, the Liturgy of the Hours, personal prayer, spiritual direction, spiritual reading, the cardinal and theological virtues, devotion to the Blessed Mother and the saints, and human formation.
This last attribute — human formation — is an often-overlooked component of personal holiness but one the archbishop emphasizes with particular passion. He recalls asking a pastor about an alumnus of the North American College who was working out of his parish. The pastor rolled his eyes and shook his head. Archbishop Dolan then asked a litany of questions, trying to determine why the young priest was so unsuitable:
“‘Is it his preaching?’ ‘No.’ ‘His liturgical style?’ ‘No.’ ‘His lack of a prayer life?’ ‘No.’ ‘His inadequate theological foundation?’ ‘Not at all.’ ‘What's the problem then?’ ‘The guy's obnoxious.’”
“He elaborated,” explains Archbishop Dolan, “that the guy was haughty, dismissive with the people, selfish with his time, arrogant with the staff, a know-it-all … nothing all that supernatural here, but a man whose manner, style and personality drove people away instead of bringing them closer to Christ.”
At one point the archbishop shares something even more revealing from his personal life.
“One time while I was hearing confessions, I lost my temper and yelled at the penitent,” he admits. “She left the confessional — I'm sure in tears — in the middle of my tantrum. To this day I repent of that sin. To this day I pray for her. To this day I know that, when I stand before the judgment seat of God, that point will be brought before me.”
Thanks to such generosity and openness, the book ends up being as much an archbishop's inspiring personal witness as an opportunity to learn from one of the Church's top teachers.
One thing I thought could have improved the work: I found it unfortunate that Archbishop Dolan allowed his challenging and motivating theme of spiritual stewardship to peter out after only a couple chapters. But that's a minor quibble. Anyone who has ever asked what a Christian should do to become a saint need only read this book to connect the dots.
Clare Siobhan writes from Westmont, Illinois.
Rally ’Round the Imagination, Christians
RALLYING THE REALLY HUMAN THINGS: THE MORAL IMAGINATION IN POLITICS, LITERATURE, AND EVERYDAY LIFE
by Vigen Guroian
ISI, 2005
254 pages, $25
To order: (800)
526-7022 or isi.org
Vigen Guroian, professor of theology and ethics at Loyola College in Maryland, acknowledges that his most recent book “has neither the unity nor the coherence of a conventional monograph.”
However, that lack of unity does not detract much from a collection of essays containing much food for thought along with some thoughts that will provide fodder for spirited discussion — especially now that school is back in session.
Guroian has written numerous essays and books on literature (especially children's literature), politics, ethics and morality. These topics are all addressed in this work. Although Guroian is Eastern Orthodox, his major influences here are Catholic, or Anglo-Catholic: G.K. Chesterton, Flannery O'Connor, Russell Kirk and, to a lesser degree, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot.
Chesterton, O'Connor and Kirk are the focus of the opening section, “Three Voices of Christian Humanism.” The author's affection for and knowledge of the three is obvious, making for a warm, helpful introduction to their work. While many readers will be familiar with Chesterton and O'Connor, they may not be familiar with Kirk, best known for The Conservative Mind, but whose wide-ranging work was not limited to politics. As Guroian rightly observes, “Most of Kirk's interpreters have failed to dig deeply into his views of religion and culture. … Yet Kirk often stated his belief that political questions are rooted in matters of morality, and that both of these, in turn, are grounded, explicitly or implicitly, in religious faith.”
Not coincidentally, this book sets out to explore the connection between politics, ethics and morality. In the second section, “On the Moral Imagination,” Guroian highlights the oft-neglected connection between imagination and public morality. Imagination always exists since it is part of human nature. “The important question is what kinds of imagination our contemporary culture encourages. … Imagination both expresses and trains the reason and the will.”
The moral imagination recognizes man as a moral being, not merely an animal or object. But this imagination is often at the mercy of “modern educators,” a group Guroian views with disdain. “In their penchant to treat fact as god,” he writes, “event as illusion, individual as datum, person as chimera, norm as relative value, and human nature as social construct, they leave the moral imagination to perish.”
As a defense against this subversive influence, he describes the three forms of moral imagination and the opposite, corrupted forms of the same.
The third section, “Wanderings in the Wasteland,” tackles complex topics such as the nature of family, “gay marriage” and sexuality, and contains the books most provocative comments. Although filled with excellent observations, these chapters are also marked by inconsistency and incompleteness. For example, in a chapter about childhood, “The Lost Children,” Guroian complains that the work of Catholic theologian John Saward, author of The Way of the Lamb, addresses childhood with “an element of Christian absolutism and exclusivism that can make one deaf to the truth of others’ beliefs.”
Yet in the chapter “On Gay Marriage,” he recommends that Christians pursue a “two-tiered arrangement” in which the distinction between civil marriage and sacramental marriage is strongly and absolutely made. Although the topics differ in many ways, the respective approaches seem to reflect inconsistent principles.
Also puzzling is the evident absence of any awareness of Pope John Paul II's monumental work regarding family, marriage and sexuality. In “The Vision of John Chrysostom,” a chapter devoted to the family and its relationship to the Church, no mention is made of John Paul II's repeated teachings about the “domestic church” and the incarnational nature of the family in the world. As familiar as he is with so many recent Catholic thinkers, one wonders how Guroian has overlooked the thought of one of the greatest Catholic thinkers in modern history.
Although flawed, Rallying the Really Human Things is a worthwhile reflection on timeless truths and a timely call to regain the moral imagination — an endeavor so desperately needed in the intellectual wasteland that is contemporary culture.
In other words, it will make for fine fall reading.
Carl E. Olson is editor of IgnatiusInsight.com.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carl E. Olson ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Missing Rehnquist, They Look to Roberts DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON — Chief Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist's death Sept. 3 was not unexpected. The talk among Washington's political class had been that the 80-year-old jurist, stricken by thyroid cancer, would not survive the summer.
Still, his death at his home in Arlington, Va., quietly shook national politics, even as the nation's attention was turned instead to the destruction of one of its major cities.
Depending on the Supreme Court appointments of the next three years, Rehnquist's influence could disappear altogether. But more likely, he will be remembered as a Moses figure — the pioneer of a revolution that he did not live to see through himself.
“He's been one of the towering chief justices in the history of our Supreme Court,” said Bernard Dobranski, dean of the Ave Maria School of Law. “People are only now starting to realize what a long shadow he cast.”
Rehnquist, who was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon in 1972, worked through what was a trying time for the American court system — a period during which control of the court became the key to control of American politics.
At the time of his appointment, the Supreme Court was dominated by justices who saw their own role as that of a national super-legislature, with a right to set national policies on such topics as the death penalty, school busing and birth control. Rehnquist gained a reputation as the “Lone Ranger” for his dissenting opinions, which were often very much out of step with the rest of the court.
Among Rehnquist's first cases was arguably the most controversial decision of the 20th century. He was one of only two on the high court to dissent from the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that created a constitutional right to abortion and forced wide-ranging abortion policies on states. He found himself outnumbered in his defense of states’ rights to impose capital punishment.
Rehnquist's importance increased after his 1986 elevation as chief justice, and especially when like-minded Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined the high court. In 1992, Rehnquist and three other justices came one vote shy of overturning Roe in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
By the late 1990s, after a decade at the helm of the nation's judiciary, Rehnquist had gone from a dissenting bomb-thrower to a shaper of the Supreme Court's direction. He led the judiciary branch in limiting federal power and reasserting state control in landmark cases involving gun control, domestic violence and other issues.
Rehnquist also held together a unanimous Supreme Court in two 1997 cases in rejecting the idea of a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, instead leaving states free to continue criminalizing the practice. In 2002, a 5-4 decision allowed the City of Cleveland to keep its school voucher program in Zelman v. Simmons.
As he neared his final days, however, Rehnquist watched the Supreme Court enter one of its most aggressive phases of moving domestic social policy in a different direction.
In 2000, he was in the minority in the 5-4 Stenberg v. Carhart decision, which created a right to partial-birth abortion. In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, Rehnquist was on the losing side of a 6-3 decision that reversed precedent and created a right to homosexual sodomy. He also found himself in the minority as the 5-4 eminent domain Kelo v. City of New London decision this year eroded Americans’ property rights vis-à-vis their state and local governments.
Dobranski noted that fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, more than any personal ideology, was the driving principle behind Rehnquist's jurisprudence throughout his career. He noted that Rehnquist's dissent from Roe, for example, “didn't come from a pro-life philosophy of sorts — which also doesn't mean that he didn't have that. But he was more committed than anything to acting within the traditional limits of the Constitution.”
“He wrote a blistering dissent against Roe when it was first decided,” said Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice. “He really stuck with that till the end and was pretty tough about it through his career. He probably would have voted to reverse Roe, had he ever had the opportunity.”
Rehnquist, a veteran of World War II, served as an assistant attorney general in the Nixon administration prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court. Since 1986, when President Ronald Reagan elevated him to the position of chief justice, he oversaw the entire federal judiciary and presided over the Supreme Court's secret deliberations.
Although the Milwaukee-born Rehnquist was a Lutheran, his funeral was held at St. Matthew's Catholic Cathedral in downtown Washington — a departure from the normal venue for high-ranking government officials’ funerals, the Episcopal National Cathedral.
In a prepared statement released by the Washington Archdiocese, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick remarked on his own personal friendship with Rehnquist. “I had the privilege of knowing him personally and of being with him many times over the years,” McCarrick wrote. “He regularly attended the Red Mass, celebrated each October here in our nation's capital, to pray for those in the administration of justice. He was always most gracious and thoughtful in his comments on those occasions.”
Enter Roberts
The nominee to succeed Rehnquist as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Appellate Judge John Roberts, clerked for the late chief justice during the 1980-81 Supreme Court term. Roberts, a jurist on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, was originally chosen by President Bush to replace the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor.
Rehnquist's death altered the face of the Roberts confirmation battle. Upon learning of Rehnquist's death, Bush altered the Roberts nomination, naming him instead to replace his former mentor. Bush also asked O'Connor to remain on the Supreme Court until a new replacement is found for her and confirmed.
Rushton remarked that Rehnquist's death does not affect Roberts’ nomination as much as it affects the next nomination for the high court, which is expected to come sometime this month.
“I don't see that it does anything for the Roberts confirmation,” said Rushton. “That's a done deal.”
Pro-abortion groups, particularly Naral Pro-Choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League), have attacked Roberts in television ads as an enemy of abortion “choice.” But his qualifications are impressive enough that nothing has put a dent in his confirmation process. In fact, several Senate Democrats have praised him in public.
“They obviously want to stop the guy, but they can't come up with a good reason for that,” said Rushton.
If Roberts’ nomination can be sufficiently delayed or slowed by controversy, Senate Democrats may be emboldened to block Bush's next nomination. As an alternative, Bush could be cowed into nominating someone Democrats will approve. But Dobranski pointed out that Bush has an excellent track record in selecting judicial nominees.
“He's been lopsidedly good,” said Dobranski, pointing out several of Bush's lower-court appointments. “I don't see any bad nominations.”
Rushton also expressed confidence that Bush would follow through with a second appointment. “We're just counting on him doing the right thing and following through,” he said. “And I think he will.”
Roberts is likely to receive between 60 and 70 votes for confirmation, if not more. A spokesman for Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., expressed satisfaction with the nominee. “Sen. Brownback liked the president's move of nominating Roberts to the top job,” said spokesman Brian Hart. “He feels mostly comfortable with Roberts, but he still wants to ask him some questions.”
For the next nominee, Hart said that Brownback “would prefer a conservative female, but it's not an absolute requirement.”
David Freddoso writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: David Freddoso ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: The Return of Reasonably Rewarding 'Rom-Com'? DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Five years ago, Bonnie Hunt's 2000 charmer Return to Me, starring David Duchovny and Minnie Driver, won particular praise in Catholic circles for its affectionately depicted cultural context of Catholic faith and piety.
At the same time, some Catholics have taken legitimate exception to that film's implicit acceptance of heart transplantation, which remains an open issue in Catholic moral theology. (Pope John Paul II accepted brain death as a morally responsible standard for determining death, but the question has yet to be definitively addressed by the Church.)
Mark Waters’ Just Like Heaven has more than a little in common with Return to Me. Both are winsome romantic comedies with at least a hint of the supernatural, and address death and loss as well as love and laughter. Both are wiser than the average date movie about the temptation to withdraw from life and human relationships in the face of grief, and also about the annoyance of well-meaning friends trying to draw one out for one's own good.
Both films are also chaste romances about a couple who fall in love without tumbling into the sack. (Indeed, this isn't even a possibility in Just Like Heaven — though the film does include some decidedly unchaste behavior from a supporting character, as well as a good bit of rude dialogue.)
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Just Like Heaven is its distinctly life-affirming, even pro-life twist with respect to end-of-life issues — especially since it's a romantic ghost story of sorts.
Here is a light comedy that — without remotely getting maudlin or morbid — dramatizes how a person not yet incapacitated is in no position to sign away life-sustaining measures in case they should ever become incapacitated, since, should it ever actually happen, they might well feel completely differently. Then, too, incapacitated patients may be more aware of events around them than we might give them credit for, doctors who compassionately counsel pulling the plug may well be blatantly misrepresenting the facts, and family members need to resist such pressure and defend the rights of their loved ones.
Waters’ previous hit comedies, Mean Girls and Freaky Friday, each had their problems, but boasted smart scripts and assured direction as well as solid performances from talented stars. Just Like Heaven may be more formulaic than his earlier films, but it has the same basic strengths.
The film benefits greatly from its appealing stars, Reese Witherspoon (Vanity Fair) and Mark Ruffalo (13 Going on 30). Witherspoon especially shines as Elizabeth, a dedicated but overworked young emergency-room doctor who has no life outside the hospital walls until that life is taken away from her in a way she can't understand.
Ruffalo brings brooding charisma to the role of David, a withdrawn young man who seems to have no connection to anything or anyone, except that he seems to have a connection somehow to Elizabeth, who mysteriously appears out of nowhere in his apartment — or is he in her apartment? Only Darryl (Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder in a similarly surreal supporting role), a kind of stoner Zen-talking clerk in an occult bookstore, has any real insight into the uncanny goings-on. (Darryl roughly corresponds to Whoopi Goldberg's character in Ghost.)
The themes of the workaholic professional who needs to find a life outside the workplace and the withdrawn loner who needs to rejoin the human race are common ones in comedies, but they're developed here with more conviction than usual. The script is smarter than the typical rom-com, and Waters directs cannily, never letting either the emotion or the comedy get out of control.
Plotwise, the film is refreshingly clever about the dilemma of characters dealing with an extraordinary situation that they will have trouble convincing other people is real. I appreciate the forethought David puts into what he will need to say to one of Elizabeth's relatives in order to persuade her that he isn't crazy — and also how the conversation doesn't quite go as planned.
It's not without drawbacks. In contrast to the positive Catholic milieu of Return to Me, Just Like Heaven turns to the Catholic faith only for a satiric punchline, with a brief parody of a scene from The Exorcist (along with Ghostbusters, etc.). To be fair, it's more a movie joke than a religion joke, but it's still in wincingly poor taste. And the aforementioned unchaste behavior from a supporting character, a temptress neighbor of David's, goes further than it needs to (though nothing happens and her behavior isn't condoned).
Some viewers may also be turned off by the flaky new-age spin on the movie's circumstances represented by Darryl. For me, though, any misgiving about the film's spirituality is short-circuited, first of all, by the way things turn out not to be quite what you might expect, and also by the sheer goofiness Heder brings to Darryl. Clearly it's all a fantasy conceit; the movie isn't in the least making a serious statement about spirituality, as it is with respect to end-of-life issues.
What makes Just Like Heaven even more notable is the remarkable dearth of decent romantic comedies in the five years since Return to Me. In that time Hollywood has churned out a steady stream of disposable date movies featuring likeable stars in variously eye-rolling, embarrassing or downright insulting stories: 13 Going on 30, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Maid in Manhattan, Kate & Leopold. (Okay, My Big Fat Greek Wedding was all right, but that was technically an indie film.)
Just Like Heaven is the first Hollywood film since Return to Me that I would put in the same league as that earlier film, and that's saying something.
Content advisory: Sex-related talk and crude language; a crass attempted seduction; a brief, arguably profane parody of an exorcism. Mature viewing.
Steven D. Greydanus is editor and chief critic of DecentFilms.com.
----- EXCERPT: Just Like Heaven hits some surprisingly pro-life notes ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steven D. Greydanus ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Parents Don't Understand DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:FAMILY MATTERS
I try hard to understand my teenager's feelings about things but whenever I stand my discipline ground, I hear remarks like, “You never listen” or “You just don't understand.” What am I doing wrong?
Probably nothing. For a couple of generations now, parents have been hammered by the experts about the dangers of being communication Neanderthals, and about the “how-to” magic of being psychologically savvy listeners. It's no surprise so many wonder “What's wrong?” when their kids accuse them of being cruel dictators.
Going back 100 years, a farm most likely sat on the spot you now live. That farm mom had a 5% chance of having a high-school education. But she could have instinctively told you, “Kids won't understand or like much of what you do as a parent. They will someday, and that's what matters most.”
Nowadays parents are made to feel incompetent if Sherlock doesn't understand them. Obviously, they're passively listening instead of actively listening. They're using a “you message” when an “I message” is called for. Their ratio of positive to negative statements is only 3 to 1. It needs to be at least 7 to 1 for maximum results.
Certainly parents can communicate poorly. Teens do bring out the worst of interaction styles in us adults. And certainly there are plenty of ways to make a tense discipline confrontation worse. But my experience with parents, teens and discipline has taught me repeatedly that, when a parent is truly trying to understand the child, more often than not, it is the child who is being unreasonable rather than the parent.
When Holmes accuses, “You never listen to me,” or Harmony whines, “Just once I wish you would see my side,” I regularly find that the parent listened quite empathetically, with heroic patience even. In the end, she just didn't change her decision, and that's what brought on the recriminations.
The only foolproof way to be perceived as an awesome listener is to give your teen exactly what she wants. “You mean you'd like to go to the mall unsupervised with your friends? Of course! Now I'm hearing you!”
Unfortunately, the cost of avoiding the poor listener accusation — i.e., giving in — is way too high a price for a parent, and more so for the child. Better to listen as long as you see fit, then quietly end the discussion with, “I do understand your point, but I don't agree with it. And I must do what's best for you because I love you.” (That “love” line really makes kids mad because down deep they know you mean it.)
Active listening, to use modern psychological jargon, means hearing what the speaker truly means. Okay, then, what Oral is often saying when she says “You don't listen” is really “You don't change your mind to agree with me.”
So, next time you get charged with lack of listening, you could reflect back: “What I'm hearing you say is that I'm not agreeing with you.” So you see, even if you're “not listening,” you're actually therapeutically listening.
Tricky stuff, this psychology.
For more of Dr. Ray Guarendi's wit and wisdom, visit DrRay.com.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dr. Ray Guarendi ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Catholic School Exempted From Collective Bargaining DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Teachers at Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield Hills won't have to unionize under the auspices of the Michigan Education Association. That's a relief for school officials, who say the union holds beliefs contrary to Catholic doctrine.
A decision by the Michigan Court of Appeals in mid-August noted that forcing the school to collectively bargain with a public union poses the “significant risk” of entangling church and state.
Brother Rice teachers, disgruntled by the policies of a new principal, initiated contact with the Michigan Education Association in 2003. Union officials assured them that they would not seek to change the religious focus of the school.
“I do not believe that the school's ability to teach the faith to young men would be infringed upon by allowing [teachers] to have union representation and to bargain over secular issues such as wages, benefits and working conditions,” David Crim, a union organizer, said.
The school was concerned, however, that its ability to adhere to Catholic teaching would have been compromised if the teachers joined the Michigan Education Association. Brother Rice, for example, may have been asked to provide domestic partner benefits or to include abortion and contraceptives in healthcare packages, Patrick Gillen, trial counsel for the Thomas More Law Center and the lead counsel for Brother Rice, said.
“The very notion that demands could be made for such benefits, leading to proceedings concerning the basis and authenticity of a refusal to provide such benefits, presents a serious chilling effect to an institution trying to ensure that it stands for the Catholic faith in word and deed,” he added.
Despite the school's objections, the march toward unionization continued. The Michigan Education Association gathered the teacher signatures it needed to hold an election for union membership. The matter went before the Michigan Employment Relations Commission — the state regulatory agency that handles labor issues — which conducted hearings and decided that the election should proceed.
Brother Rice, a school owned by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, appealed the commission's decision in the courts, citing a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Union officials argued that the real issue was one of control.
“Employers do not want employees unionized. They prefer to have all the decision-making power,” Crim said.
The appellate court ruled that Michigan law does not give Michigan Employment Relations Commission jurisdiction over parochial schools. The Michigan Education Association is considering whether to appeal to the state Supreme Court.
While Brother Rice, a school with 645 boys and 44 teachers, used Catholic doctrine to fight the proposed unionization, proponents of unionizing said that Catholic social teaching furnishes a strong case for it.
“The Catholic Church has been at the forefront of the right of employees to join unions,” Crim said.
Pope John Paul II, in the 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), called unions an “indispensable element of social life,” and, in a 1986 pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called upon Church institutions to “recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively.”
“It is a scandal of the faith when a Catholic institution ignores this part of our social teaching under whatever guise they use,” said Father Sinclair Oubre, a canon lawyer and priest of the Diocese of Beaumont, Texas, who is a co-founder of the Catholic-Labor Network. The network is an online forum for religious and lay persons interested in the relationship between worker issues and Catholic social teaching. He called the argument about protecting religious doctrine a “smokescreen.”
Yet, Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Workers), wrote that unions “must pay special and chief attention to the duties of religion and morality.”
“This makes it difficult for a Catholic faculty to be represented by a union which is a clear pro-abortion, pro-homosexual lobby,” said Bruce Cameron, an attorney for the National Right to Work Foundation, which is opposed to compulsory unionization and which filed a brief supporting the school.
“This is not an anti-union position. It is an anti-state involvement position,” Charles Taunt, chairman of Brother Rice's School Board, said. He noted that the faculty has an association, which in the past had “effectively negotiated” contracts.
“Since we are a family, all of our policies and decisions regarding the faculty and school should be prayed over, discerned and then decided as a community,” Thane Hall, a Brother Rice theology teacher, who opposed unionization, said.
New Administration
The teachers who contacted the Michigan Education Association did not feel their concerns were being addressed, Hall said, predicting that if an election were held today, the majority of teachers would vote against unionization.
“We have a new administration, and things have gotten a lot better,” he said.
Fellow Brother Rice teacher Marcel Gagnon, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was one of the strongest proponents for unionization.
He wrote in a letter to the Detroit Free Press: “The three members of the Michigan Appeals Court lost the opportunity to make a historically significant improvement in the way private schools — especially Church-affiliated schools — deal with wages, benefits and working conditions for their teachers.”
Monta Hernon is based in La Grange Park, Illinois.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Monta Monaco Hernon ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Letters to the Editor DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Thanks, Kid. We Needed That!
I am an 11-year-old Catholic home schooler and I think your newspaper is wonderful. My favorite part is Umbert the Unborn. I read Umbert every week and he always makes me laugh. I am his biggest fan!
I also like Facts of Life. The information is really neat.
Your articles are really interesting and I also enjoy Baby Mugs.
Keep up the good work and God bless you!
MICHAEL GIRARD
Downingtown, Pennsylvania
Evolving Theories
While I agree with much of Ben Wiker's comments in “God and Matter: The Evolution of the Evolution Debate” (Commentary & Opinion, Aug. 14-20), I think he constructs a straw man of neo-Darwinism by describing it as necessarily including a materialist philosophy.
Of course all Catholics should oppose atheistic philosophies. But neo-Darwinism need not include an atheistic philosophy; it can simply be a non-metaphysical scientific theory attempting to explain biodiversity from within the limitations of contemporary empirical science by way of chance genetic mutations and natural selection.
The reality of contingency and chance in nature is not incompatible with the Catholic faith or absolute divine providence. Given Cardinal Schönborn's clarifying comments, there is no indication that the cardinal thinks either that there is no non-metaphysical form of neo-Darwinism or that the non-metaphysical form of neo-Darwinism is incompatible with the Catholic faith.
BRYAN CROSS
Saint Louis, Missouri
Ecumenical Apprehensions
Regarding “Christian Churches Not Together Yet” (Media Watch, June 19-25):
I'm no fire-breathing traditionalist, but sometimes I read things that make me really wonder what's going on in our episcopate. Last week's edition had an article about ecumenical efforts with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, Calif., said it was “very painful” to not be in full communion with the Lutherans and that he was going to join them in mounting a campaign to “combat fundamentalism.”
I too am sad that we are not in communion with Lutherans, but wouldn't the best way to overcome that consist in convincing them to become Catholic? How else is the issue going to be resolved? I hope that resolving our differences over the Eucharist, for example, doesn't mean we as Catholics have to budge one iota on the meaning and theology of that most blessed of sacraments. If it does, then count me a staunch opponent of ecumenism.
Then there's that shared commitment to combating “fundamentalism.” First, to the Register, please instruct your journalists to do the most basic of tasks: Define your terms. There was no description of what that term means or why it was necessary to combat it.
But, given that the term probably refers to those Christians who are “fundamentalist,” why would the Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Orthodox churches want to spend their precious time fighting against their brothers and sisters who, if anything, are guilty of being a little too zealous in their faith? After all, most fundamentalists at least have the sense to acknowledge, as St. Peter did, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
I think our time would be better spent combating people and movements on the other side of the spectrum, those who would further dilute our theology, make Christ into a little more than a great teacher and relativize the faith.
TREY HOFFMAN
Peachtree City, Georgia
Hiroshima and Mary
Thank you for your excellent editorial “After Hiroshima” (Aug. 21-27). In response, I would like to clarify that I would have been satisfied with the Pakaluks’ commentary (“Effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Still Being Felt,” August 7-13) if only they had called for a “World Atonement Day” rather than declaring the bombing of Hiroshima “Our National Sin.” Again, the Second Vatican Council and the Catechism are clear regarding “collective guilt,” which cannot be imputed to future generations (No. 597).
May I suggest reading Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen's The World's First Love, Chapter 22, “The Woman and the Atom.” Not once does Bishop Sheen single out America for special condemnation, but always refers to the sin of “man” or “humanity” as the true cause of the atomic conflagration. This is also true of the apparition of our Blessed Mother revealed at Fatima in 1917. She said that, if men repented, a great era of peace and prosperity would come to the world. But if not, another world war (WWII), worse than the first, would begin. This war would be the means by which “God would punish the world for its crimes by means of war, of hunger, and of persecution of the Church and the Holy Father.”
The only country Our Lady singles out for spreading its errors is Russia. Bishop Sheen is careful to explain that it's not the Russians themselves but “communism that must be crushed.”
The Pakaluks’ column utterly failed to show the moral difference between America and Japan during the Pacific war. The “After Hiroshima” editorial did a much better job of putting everything in context.
May I suggest that we follow Bishop Sheen's lead in the following prayer which ends his book: “Advance, Woman, in thy assault upon Omnipotence! Shame us all into enlisting thy warriors of peace and love!”
ROBERT CALL
Puyallup, Washington
Atomic Evil
Thank you for your excellent editorial “After Hiroshima” (Aug. 21-27), which provided an eloquent defense of Church teaching in response to the criticism you received for printing Catherine and Michael Pakaluk's commentary “Effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Still Being Felt” (Aug. 7-13).
I, too, am startled and amazed that you received such an angry response from many of your readers (even to the point of canceling subscriptions), and so I wanted to send you a letter of support. None of the other Catholic publications I receive has written a clearer and more forceful explanation of what the Catholic Church teaches on the evil of nuclear war.
I am sure that most, if not all, of your readers accept the teaching of the Church on the immorality of targeting the unborn by the act of abortion. How is it that some of these same people cannot accept the teaching of the Church on the immorality of targeting civilians by a nuclear weapon?
Perhaps some people defend the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki out of a misplaced sense of patriotism. However, while love for one's country is good, we must nevertheless remember that God's laws come first. We also must keep in mind the words of St. Paul: “As you well know, we have our citizenship in heaven.”
Please continue to bring the light of truth to our troubled world by your unwavering fidelity to Jesus Christ and his Church. In some small way, I want to help you to do that, and so I am going to immediately renew my subscription and send along an extra donation to help make up for the subscriptions you lost. I hope that many of your readers will do the same.
CAROL LUPARELLA
Elmwood Park, New Jersey
Never Again
Regarding “After Hiroshima” (Editorial, Aug. 21-27):
I am not angry and I do not wish to cancel my subscription. I did write a letter in defense of the bombing but I in no way believe freedom has no boundaries and no limits. Catholics always believe in boundaries and limits. I do believe that our dropping of the bomb in no way was saying that we wanted no boundaries and no limits. War is hell and all we wanted was to end it, which we did. I believe that you had to have lived at that time in history to understand how the average American citizen felt.
I also believe that not even our scientists — let alone the average American citizen — knew of the awful effects and consequences of the bomb. Had they known, they might have just continued with the firebombing of Tokyo, which incidentally killed more Japanese than both of the A-bombs, along with the fire bombing of other Japanese cities.
Yes, looking back it is easy to see that our leaders of that time made a morally bad decision but I in no way believe that I, or the average American citizen of 1945 through 2005, should be held morally responsible. What we are morally responsible for is to see that it does not happen again. That we, as a nation, are doing.
ADELINO R. LORENZO
Tigard, Oregon
Corrections
The Inbrief section of our Sept. 4-10 issue misstated the situation in which the Little Sisters of the Poor found themselves when they evacuated from New Orleans. Mother Paul did not institute the community's first evacuation plan, as we reported. One had been in existence for about five years, as required by the state. Mother Paul added to it by arranging an agreement with another nursing-care facility so that the residents would have a place to go other than a shelter. This was indeed providential, as it brought the sisters to a Franciscan-run nursing home in Baton Rouge, normally just 75 minutes away. The original evacuation site was in Mobile, Ala., which was further away and was hit by the storm.
Also, a graphic on page 1 of our Sept. 11-17 issue reported that 30% of New Orleans was Catholic. Actually, more than half of the city's residents are Catholic.
Finally, our driving directions to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, N.M. (“La Conquistadora's Home Quarters,” Travel, Sept. 4-10), should have instructed visitors to drive north on I-25 from Albuquerque, not south.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: What if Heather Does Have Two Mommies? DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Every once in a while, a case comes along that makes me truly grateful to be a Catholic.
Our Holy Mother Church has been looking out for us and trying to keep us out of trouble, even when we chafe at her constraints.
But when I see the trouble people get themselves into, I am grateful for our Holy Mother's foresight.
That is how I felt when I read the California Supreme Court's ruling on the April 22 case, K.M v. E.G. Perhaps you don't remember a case by that name, but surely you remember the headlines: “California Establishes Lesbian Parental Rights.”
When I downloaded the case from the Internet, I expected to be outraged, or upset or worried. But when I read the facts of the case, mostly what I felt was sad for these two women and the deep hole they have dug for themselves.
Here are the facts, as reported in the case.
“On March 6, 2001, petitioner K.M. filed a petition to establish a parental relationship with twin 5-year-old girls born to respondent E.G., her former lesbian partner. K.M alleged that she “is the biological parent of the minor children,” because “she donated her eggs to respondent, the gestational mother of the children.”
E.G. moved to dismiss the petition on the grounds that although K.M and E.G. “were lesbian partners who lived together before this action was filed,” K.M. “explicitly donated her ovum under a clear written agreement by which she relinquished any claim to offspring born of her donation.”
The weird fact is: These children do have two mothers. K.M. is their genetic mother, who donated her eggs, and E.G. is their gestational mother, who carried them to term. The problem before the court is how to assign parental rights to these two women.
Is the egg donor more like an anonymous sperm donor, who existing law treats as a “legal stranger” to the child? If so, K.M. is not entitled to visitation or any other parental relationship with the twins.
Or is this case more like a surrogate mother case, in which a married couple each contributed genetic material and the child was carried to term by a surrogate mother?
The couple clearly intended to raise the child together as husband and wife, mother and father. The surrogate mother had no claim on the child that she carried to term, under a contract with the genetic parents. If this case is more like a surrogate mother case, then the genetic mother, K.M. certainly has some parental rights, which the gestational mother, E.G. can not deny.
What does our Holy Mother, the Church (not our genetic or gestational mother, but our spiritual mother) have to say about this sort of case?
Look at the Catechism, No. 2376: “Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple, (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus) are gravely immoral. These techniques infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ right to become a father and a mother only through each other.”
K.M. and E.G. separated the gestational from the genetic aspects of motherhood. The father of this child, an anonymous sperm donor, is nowhere in sight. No one takes seriously the right of these twins to have a relationship with their father.
Now why would these women choose to reproduce in such a convoluted way? Listen to their testimony:
“E.G. testified that she first considered raising a child before she met K.M. at a time when she did not have a partner. …K.M. and E.G. began living together in March 1994 and registered as domestic partners in San Francisco.
“E.G. visited several fertility clinics in March 1993 to inquire about artificial insemination and she attempted artificial insemination, without success, on 13 occasions, from July 1993 through November 1994. K.M accompanied her to most of these appointments. K.M. testified that she and E.G. planned to raise the child together, while E.G. insisted that, although K.M. was very supportive, E.G. made it clear that her intention was to become ‘a single parent.’
“E.G's first attempts at in-vitro fertilization failed because she was unable to produce sufficient ova. … E.G. asked K.M. to donate her ova, explaining that she would accept the ova only if K.M. ‘would really be a donor,’ and E.G. would ‘be the mother of any child,’ adding that she would not even consider permitting K.M. to adopt the child ‘for at least five years until she felt the relationship was stable and would endure.’ E.G. told K.M. that she ‘had seen too many lesbian relationships end quickly, and she did not want to be in a custody battle.’ E.G. and K.M. agreed they would not tell anyone that K.M. was the ova donor.”
It was reading between these particular lines that sadness welled up within me: Neither of these women really trusted one another.
These are not pioneering women, standing bravely on the vanguard of social change. They were afraid: afraid of each other, afraid of being hurt. This custody dispute, which has been going on for four years now, is the nightmare scenario they were trying to avoid. They were “registered domestic partners,” but they still could not really entrust themselves to each other.
Listen to our Holy Mother once again. In the abstract theological language of Catechism No. 2377, she tries to warn us against, “dissociat[ing] the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person.”
These two women, for whatever reason, did not want to form a relationship with their child's male parent. They thought they could use technology to bypass the problems associated with a messy relationship with the opposite sex.
In the end, they could not really give themselves to each other either. They ended up with a pair of twins whom they both love, and a life-long entanglement with the “other mother.” Neither of these women got what they wanted or expected.
Our Holy Mother would hardly have been surprised. And she shakes her head, and weeps for her children's foolishness.
Jennifer Roback Morse is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Jennifer Roback Morse ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: National Media Watch DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Tucson Will Incorporate Its Parishes
KVOA, Sept. 6 — The Diocese of Tucson, Ariz., plans to separately incorporate its 74 Catholic parishes in order to prevent them from being sold to pay diocesan debt, reported KVOA-TV.
Tucson Bishop Gerald Kicanas said that he expects that the incorporations will not have any effect on parishioners. Last year, the Tucson diocese became the second diocese to seek bankruptcy protection in the face of rising sexual abuse lawsuits. The incorporation of parishes had been written into the bankruptcy plan approved by federal Judge James Marlar.
At least seven U.S. dioceses have taken similar action. They include Baker, Ore., Davenport, Iowa, Lincoln, Neb., Stockton, Calif., Rhode Island and the archdioceses of Milwaukee and New York.
“Making them individual corporations gives them a structure that's external and legal and much closer to the canonical world,” said Baker Bishop Robert Vasa, who incorporated 60 parishes and missions in 2002.
Kansas Attorney General Seeks Abortion Records
Kline is seeking the medical records of 90 women and girls who received abortions in Overland Park and Wichita. He has argued that the records will allow him to go after child rapists and abortion businesses that provide illegal late-term abortions. The businesses filed a lawsuit to prevent Kline from acquiring the records.
In 2004, 79 girls under the age of 15 received abortions in Kansas. Kansas law requires medical providers to report suspicions of child molestation and bans abortions after the 22nd week of pregnancy.
California Lawmakers Snub People's Will on Marriage
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 7 — Members of the California Legislature who helped pass a bill allowing same-sex “marriage” received this reaction from Republican Assemblyman Jay La Suer, according to the Associated Press: “History will record that you betrayed your constituents and their moral and ethical values.”
Both the state Senate and Assembly passed a same-sex “marriage” bill that had been defeated earlier in the year. It was reintroduced using the bill number of a fish-and-game marine research bill.
But Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Sept. 7 he would veto the legislation. In a statement, he cited Proposition 22, a ballot initiative voters approved five years ago that said, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
The statement said Schwarzenegger believes the matter should be determined by a court decision or another plebiscite. “We cannot have a system where the people vote and the Legislature derails that vote,” it said.
The California Supreme Court is likely to decide next year whether Proposition 22 is constitutional, said the Los Angeles Times Sept. 8. California already gives same-sex couples many of the rights of marriage if they register with the state as domestic partners.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: REGISTER TO JOIN 'SOUL AID' EFFORT DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:The National Catholic Register is teaming with Catholic World Mission to provide material and spiritual assistance to Hurricane Katrina survivors. Catholics know that body and soul are one, and yet many aid organizations treat the body but not the soul. Catholic World Mission has already begun rebuilding the families and the faith of hurricane survivors. Read more about what we are doing on page 10.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Conference Will Highlight Adoration During Bishops' Synod DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — In the first week of September, Pope Benedict XVI asked Catholics to pray and reflect on next month's Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist in Rome.
The synod will conclude the Year of the Eucharist and will follow on the heels of World Youth Day 2005 in Cologne, Germany, celebrated under the theme “We Have Come to Worship Him.”
Young people lucky enough to be in Rome during the synod's first week will have a distinct opportunity to carry out the Pope's wishes. Youth Eucharistic adoration groups from around the globe will gather Oct. 2-9 for a week of adoration, formation, evangelization and dialogue.
The event, formally called the Second International Meeting of Eucharistic Adoration Youth Groups and known as Adoremus 2005 for short, will be held under the theme, “The Eucharist and Man's Identity.” Centered on the Eucharist and adoration, the conference will be made up of prayer, a series of challenging talks by expert speakers, processions and dinners.
Event organizers within the Vicariate of Rome say the meetings are intended “to stimulate a reflection on the consequences of the encounter between Christ and man, and how the contemplation of His face reveals man to himself.”
The talks, meanwhile, have been chosen “to reflect the all-encompassing importance of the Eucharist in the everyday life of man.”
Subjects include Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body, his encyclical Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man), Our Lady of the Eucharist, Christianity in politics, and the role of the Eucharist in the workplace. The latter talk will be delivered by Francois Michelin, head of the Michelin Group.
Mass celebrants include Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna and Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity.
Antidote to Relativism
But the most important element of the weeklong activities is the Eucharist and adoration.
“It's important that many young people take part in Eucharistic adoration at a time when the Church is facing difficulties in a society suffering from relativism,” said Stefano Cascio, who first had the idea for the meeting of adoration groups during the Jubilee Year. “Meditating in front of the Blessed Sacrament is a good way of confronting these problems.”
Cascio was inspired to spread the importance of Eucharistic adoration among youth after hearing Pope John Paul II's words during World Youth Day in 2000.
“Dear friends,” the Holy Father said at Tor Vergata in Rome, “when you go back home, set the Eucharist at the center of your personal life and community life: Love the Eucharist, adore the Eucharist and celebrate it!”
Soon after, a weekly adoration group began meeting at the Church of Sant'Agnese Agone located in the famed Piazza Navona in the heart of Rome. The church soon became a center for youthful dynamism and today about a hundred international youth, including students, seminarians, young professionals and families, gather there every Thursday evening to attend Mass and join Eucharistic adoration until midnight.
Some of them also go out on to Piazza Navona and evangelize. Known as “Lights in the Night,” they invite bystanders to enter the candle-lit church and take part in prayer.
Now they are staging the second meeting of Eucharistic Adoration Youth Groups, the first having taken place in October 2004. But this year's event will have a larger international element: Three groups from Africa are expected to attend, along with others from Eastern Europe and the United States.
In total, organizers anticipate approximately 250 participants. Registration is still open for other groups wishing to take part.
“It's important to have relations with other groups,” explained Cascio, a 26-year-old seminarian from Nice, France. “A lot of people don't know what adoration is and why we are doing it, so I see these meeting as important for formation — we have to know what we are doing [during adoration] and why we are doing it. Then comes evangelization.”
Vocations
Cascio also sees Eucharistic adoration as vital to discernment, especially when discerning a vocation.
“Without adoration I couldn't have taken the decision to enter the seminary,” he said. “It's most important to have this relationship with God in adoration. … You understand who you are when you have God in front of you.”
For Gabriel Olearnik, a 25-year-old member of the British adoration group Youth 2000, Adoration is an opportunity to reflect and grow.
“I like the way time is swallowed up in eternity,” he explained. “It allows you to step outside of life, to see where you're going and to do so in serenity and in the light of eternity.”
He sees the upcoming Adoremus gathering as important because of its profoundly focus on the Eucharist.
“You cannot have adoration without the Mass, and Adoremus has the Mass, adoration and procession all together,” said Olearnik, a London lawyer of Polish descent. “That's what makes Adoremus so good — it combines all three elements and they dovetail well.” And, he adds, the sacrament of reconciliation is always offered too.
The hope now is to spread the concept of Adoremus abroad.
“We hope to open it in different cities all around the world,” said Marthe-Marie Casey, an American Catholic working at the Vicariate of Rome's Pastoral Youth Service. “We're hoping to extend it every year.”
Cascio also has plans to make the event available through the Internet.
“I want to build a website where all these groups which, say, hold adorations at 9 p.m. on Tuesdays, will be able to link up and find each other on a map,” he said.
Added Cascio, “The website would be a forum, a point of reference, after which we could perhaps all meet in the United States or France. It needn't always be in Rome.”
Edward Pentin writes from Rome.
Information
Adoremus 2005
www.veniteadoremus.org
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Pentin ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: The Fallaci Fallacy DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:VATICAN CITY — For Italian-born writer Oriana Fallaci, the idea of moderation in Islam is a fraud and an illusion; tolerance of Muslims is a comedy; integration by them is a lie; and multiculturalism is a farce.
And, she warned recently, Muslim immigration at a time when Europe is suffering declining birth rates is turning the continent into “Eurabia.”
It's not surprising that a person with such strident views against Islam is highly controversial. So many wondered why, just three weeks after expressing these sentiments in an Italian newspaper, Fallaci was received Aug. 27 by Pope Benedict XVI in a confidential private audience at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.
The audience, which was requested by the 76-year-old author, was supposed to be kept confidential in accordance with Fallaci's wishes, but one of Fallaci's associates is believed to have leaked news of the meeting to the press.
Fallaci, a New York resident, has become notorious for her outspoken attacks on Islam since the Sept. 11 attacks. In the three books she has written on Islam — all bestsellers — her comments have been so strong that an Italian judge recently ordered she stand trial for offending Muslims in her most recent book, The Force of Reason.
Fallaci's previous diatribes have also made her subject to legal proceedings in France and Switzerland.
Why They Met
So why did the Pope agree to meet Fallaci? Vatican officials say it is in line with the ministry of every pope to grant, or at least carefully consider, audiences to all those who request to meet him, in keeping with the universal nature of the Church.
Furthermore, they say the meeting with Fallaci reflects the wisdom of a Pope who is willing to listen carefully to secular opinion — Fallaci describes herself as a “devout atheist”— and express his concerns about the effect her works might have on others.
“That the Pope should receive Oriana Fallaci and talk with her should not surprise anyone,” Bishop Rino Fisichella, auxiliary bishop of Rome, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera Sept. 4. “It is set in a cultural context. It's a part of the meetings with learned men and women that Cardinal Ratzinger always had and that Benedict XVI will continue to have.”
The bishop, who is also rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, said the meeting was not “political.” Rather, Benedict sees Fallaci “as an interpreter of our times” who “raises an alarm signal on a danger, and asked to speak with the Pope in a discreet way,” he said.
Father Justo Lacunza-Balda, director of the Pontifical Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, said a meeting with someone like Fallaci was “extremely important” as she “raises polemics and makes people debate the issues.” And just because the Pope is aware of the need to talk with those holding her perspectives, he added, “doesn't mean that he necessarily agrees with her views.”
Indeed, if he did, the Holy Father's address last month in Cologne, Germany, to Muslim communities during World Youth Day — during which he highlighted the commonalities that exist between Muslims and Christians and the need to work together on these shared values — would have seemed disingenuous at best.
“Anyone who is claiming that Pope Benedict agrees with the views of Fallaci — or even 10% of them — must be presuming that he was being dishonest when he spoke to Muslims in Cologne and several times called them ‘dear and esteemed Muslim friends,’” said Jesuit Father Daniel Madigan, president of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University. “I prefer to believe that the Holy Father says what he means, and means what he says.”
Fallaci is believed to have wanted to explore with Benedict possible parallels in their attitudes to Islam. If so, she was probably being unrealistic, particularly as some of her harsh criticisms of Islam are historically inaccurate, critics said following the Aug. 27 meeting.
Pietro Citati, of the Italian daily La Repubblica, dismissed Fallaci as an exhibitionist and intellectual lightweight, saying that she “ignores that Jews and Christians inherited Greek culture not from St. Augustine [as she writes] but from traditional and ancient Arab texts.”
Added Citati, “She ignores the fact that the caliphate of Cordoba was a period of splendor, the most civilized place on earth.”
Shared Ideas
Aside from their differing judgments on Islam itself, there are other areas of greater convergence in the ideas of the Pope and Fallaci. Both see freedom of thought as being threatened in Europe, although for Pope Benedict, secularism and relativism are largely the cause; for Fallaci it is an “Islamic invasion.”
Both also see a rejection and self-hatred of Europe's past — manifested in a failure to recognize Christian roots for Benedict, and in ignorance of history for Fallaci — as leading to a collapse of civilization. And both see this problem arising in declines in morality and spirituality that, according to Fallaci, is fueled by decadence.
“The moment you give up your principles and your values … the moment you laugh at those principles and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead,” Fallaci said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in June. Fallaci later spoke of her admiration for the Holy Father. “I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger,”she said.
Whatever the underlying reasons for the Aug. 27 papal audience, it was entirely fitting for Benedict to grant it, Father Lacunza-Balda stressed.
“The important thing in a pope's ministry is that people meet,” said Fr. Lacunza-Balda. “This meeting will have helped [the Pope] to understand her works, see things more clearly and avoid approaching them in a confused mind.”
Edward Pentin writes from Rome.
----- EXCERPT: Meeting with Islam critic doesn't mean the Pope agrees with her ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Pentin ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Quivering Lips
Scientists played a 90-decibel noise to the unborn child, roughly the equivalent of a tummy rumbling, and recorded the effect via ultrasound. “It was strikingly like an infant crying,” said pediatrician Ed Mitchell. “Even the bottom lip quivers.”
“The findings … reinforce the fact that babies experience pain and discomfort well before many abortionists claim,” reported The Age, a New Zealand publication.
More Babies, Please
The government now pays for procedures to reverse vasectomies and tubal ligations as well as care for a couple's third or fourth child.
Not just an urban phenomenon, the low birthrate has hit rural places where residents now buy air-conditioners, “and they expect television sets in each room.”
“Disturbingly low birthrates” have transformed South Korea's rural landscape, shuttering schools, shrinking class sizes.”
Bumper Impact
ARCHOFTRIUMPH.ORG, Aug. 15 — A bumper sticker may have provided the spark that convinced a young pregnant woman to carry her child to term, reported the pro-life news site.
Dave and Mary Labun came out of the house one recent morning to find a note on one of their cars. It read: “I am 17 and pregnant. And on my way to school one day … I was really thinking about abortion, because I was scared.
“As that thought came to mind, I walked past your car and happened to look over and saw your bumper sticker, ‘Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.’
“I believe God was talking to me through that sticker, and I also believe I will never think about it again. … And I'm not that scared any more.
“Thank you for helping me make the best choice of my life.”
Complaint Dropped
Norm Greenfield agreed to drop the complaint following a conciliation session at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. A second similar complaint against Bishop Henry is still pending.
Sun columnist Rick Bell observed: “Sadly, the commission isn't going to go after [Greenfield] for instigating this episode in the theater of the absurd.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Register Outreach to Families and Faith DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:The National Catholic Register is partnering with Catholic World Mission in an effort to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina spiritually and physically rebuild their lives. Many of those most affected by Katrina were already among the poorest in our country. Catholic World Mission has been on the ground in the aftermath of other hurricanes, earthquakes and mudslides. Their expertise can rebuild the lives and transform the futures of families on the Gulf Coast.
Families affected by Katrina have lost almost everything. Immediately after the hurricane, the police agreed to escort two Legionary of Christ priests into the Houston Astrodome to pray, hear confessions and comfort survivors. Catholic World Mission is sending more Legionary priests to affected area.
Catholic World Mission funds have also gone to Dominican Father Justin Kauchak, of St. Joseph's Parish, 30 miles outside of New Orleans. Displaced families want to enroll their children in the only Catholic school open for miles.
“We sent them money to help them absorb their students,” explained Catholic World Mission's Ken Davison. “We're also looking at supplying them textbooks.” Circle Media, which publishes the National Catholic Register, is providing Catholic textbooks at a vastly discounted rate.
Secular organizations will never offer the kind of support Catholic World Mission does — enabling displaced priests to restart their ministries and providing authentic Catholic textbooks to strapped schools.
By partnering with other Catholic organizations, Catholic World Mission is able to make their efforts more effective, more efficient and more rapid. Catholic World Mission has funded a special mission from young volunteers with Youth for the Third Millennium, who provide the one-on-one human touch that cannot come from a check or material gifts.
One hundred percent of money donated to Catholic World Mission's relief effort will go directly to support fully-Catholic efforts on the Gulf Coast. Donations to Catholic World Mission are tax deductible. The tragedy is enormous and the need is great.
Legionary Father Patrick Murphy told Tim Drake about one encounter he had with an evacuee at a Lafayette, La., evacuation center.
“This man had received a call from St. Bernard County that morning,” said Father Murphy. “They found his wife and two girls dead. Before they died they had written him a note that the caller had read to the man. His wife had said, ‘I love you and want you to get married again.’ The girls had said, ‘Daddy, please name your future children after us.’ He broke down crying and told me, ‘God has a reason.’ As he sat on his mattress he told me, ‘You don't know how much it means to me just to have you here.’ All I could do was listen to him, be there for him, and pray with him.”
To help rebuild
families and faith:
Register Reader Response
Catholic World Mission
Hamden, CT 06514
(203) 848-3324
ncRegister.com
CatholicWorldMission.org
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Faith vs. The Storm DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:NEW ORLEANS — Blessed Sacrament Sister Grace Mary Flickinger says the acts of kindness she witnessed during Hurricane Katrina aren't likely to make CNN.
But she and other survivors of the historic storm are beginning to tell their stories as recovery efforts get under way and flood waters recede. What is emerging is a tale of faith and heroism by priests, religious and ordinary laypeople who prayed and sheltered others as Katrina battered the Gulf Coast.
Sister Flickinger, a professor of biology at Xavier University in New Orleans, was among more than 250 Xavier faculty, administrators, sisters, students and others who hunkered down during and after the storm on the campus founded by St. Katharine Drexel.
Because the school's original thick-walled, limestone buildings have withstood previous hurricanes, Sister Flickinger said, “We decided it was safer to stay.” Everyone in the group, except Arthur Simmons, an elderly man who was a friend of the college, survived.
Simmons died peacefully while the storm raged outside, Sister Juliana Haynes, public affairs coordinator for the Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Bensalem, Pa., said. His body was covered with a blanket and left in the music building, where he and his wife, Eloise, had been staying. A funeral home later removed the body, but services and burial have yet to be held.
The Xavier group fared well until a nearby levee broke, spilling flood waters onto the campus.
College administrators and campus police found and used a rowboat to travel between buildings where various groups had taken shelter. They used the boat also to retrieve food from storage so meals could be cooked. On Aug. 31, the vice president for fiscal affairs rowed the boat to the Louisiana Superdome to notify authorities that survivors were on the campus. They were rescued the next day.
In the meantime, the group dined on red beans, rice and sausage, and hot dogs and baked beans. The day of their rescue, Sister Flickinger said, they had a turkey in the oven, but when they were told they had only 15 minutes to get ready for departure, they left the food for their rescuers.
Once they were evacuated by boat, the group's ordeal wasn't over. They were relocated to a section of Interstate 10, where they remained with other evacuees for about eight hours.
St. Katharine Drexel
As sunset approached, Sister Flickinger said, “I kept saying over and over, ‘Mother Katharine, you've got to get us out of here before dark because our students could get hurt.’ You didn't know what would happen after dark. All of a sudden, the army trucks came.”
The Xavier evacuees were taken to buses that transported them to Baton Rouge, where Xavier alumni and others were waiting to greet and house them.
The Sacred Heart Brothers, who operate St. Stanislaus College School, a boarding and day school for boys in grades 6-12 in Bay St. Louis, Miss., also remained on their campus during Katrina to be with about 50 of their foreign students.
Faculty members, their families and neighbors of the school joined the group in a building that was thought to be the most secure because it had been constructed after Hurricane Camille. Brother Ivy LeBlanc, Sacred Heart provincial, said the building is on what used to be Beach Boulevard. “There's nothing there now,” he said. “We're still there, but we're about it.”
Eventually, the group was rescued by a group of brothers from Baton Rouge who drove to Bay St. Louis to get the students and 20 brothers from an assisted-living unit.
Brother LeBlanc said the experience of staying on campus during the hurricane was harrowing.
“Everybody was scared,” he said. “It was a very dangerous thing. They could look out and see the water and what it was doing. It was very frightening. We're men of deep belief, but also very practical men. We build practical buildings, we take steps to protect our kids and we pray. It's a holistic approach to integrating our faith and our life. Did God protect us? Unquestionably. It's only by the grace of God that some of our men are here.”
St. Benedict
Mike Dorner of New Orleans, known as the “Catholic Radio Answer Man” for his Catholic Radio Directory, also credited prayer, specifically the intercession of St. Benedict, with saving his home. “There was no damage, either from water or, surprisingly, wind,” he said. “A large pine snapped in half and just missed our eaves.”
Dorner, who was staying with relatives in Lafayette, La., said an elderly woman who has lived much of her life near the Benedictine Monastery north of Covington, La., told him some years ago that a house and a person carrying a St. Benedict's medal receive many blessings.
“She gave me a medal back then and told me to put it over my front door,” Dorner recalled, adding “that St. Benedict would bless the house and protect it. She said that despite decades of hurricanes passing over and nearby, her house, built in the mid-1800s, has never had significant damage from a hurricane, which she attributed to St. Benedict.”
Although the woman's suggestion initially struck him as a bit like superstition, he put the medal over his front door. “One of the last things I did before leaving at 5:45 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 29, was check to see that the medal was still there. It was,” he said.
Many other homes in Dorner's neighborhood escaped damage from falling trees as well, he said.
Dorner said he wouldn't want to conclude that all the houses that were spared had St. Benedict medals. “What I do think and emphasize is God does reward faith, in one way or another, for his own reasons and in his own way,” he said.
Knights to the Rescue
Members of the Knights of Columbus, a group known for its charitable work, also responded during the emergency.
Bryant Collins of Birmingham, Ala., state deputy of the Knights’ Alabama State Council, said a Knight helped rescue a little girl from a flooded home in Bayou La Batre, outside Mobile. Collins said, “There was a family trying to get out of a house and the mother said, ‘I can't find my daughter.’ [A Knight] in the crowd took off running back inside the house. The water was coming in, and he brought her out. She was looking for her stuffed animal.”
Collins said the Knight belongs to a council at St. Margaret's Church that had been reinstituted June 30 after being dormant more than 30 years. The council's 30 members had banded together to rescue people from flooded homes.
Collins also told how Maurice Dupont of Mobile, the Knights’ Alabama state treasurer, was housing employees of his construction firm in Pascagoula, Miss., in his home and helping them clean out their houses before dealing with his flooded office.
“He felt like it was his job to take care of his workers,” Collins said. “He said he had to get them settled first.”
Judy Roberts is based in Graytown, Ohio.
Sisters Stared Down the Storm
NEW ORLEANS — Last week, we reported about the sisters who evacuated themselves, those they care for, and their employees’ families.
But some of the sisters in the many convents of New Orleans stayed put.
Take the two Sisters of the Holy Family who remained in their New Orleans motherhouse to care for Precious, their dog, and Juana, their parrot.
Sisters Canice and Canisius La-strapes, 83-year-old twins, were eventually rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard, along with their pets, and flown to El Paso, Texas, where they are staying with the Loretto Sisters.
Asked if she was afraid during the two nights before rescuers came, Sister Canice said, “Not at all.”
Sister Canice said she and her sister were taken to the Sisters of Loretto after a chance encounter with a bishop as they were getting off a bus in El Paso. “He said, ‘Oh no, sisters, wait. I know some sisters who will take you in,’” Sister Canice said.
Carmelite Sister Cheryl Scheaffer, a nursing assistant at University Hospital in New Orleans, also stayed in the city during and after the hurricane as she was part of the hospital's activation team, which remains at the facility during storm threats.
By the afternoon of Aug. 29, she said, “We thought everything was okay.” Then, with the levees breached and the flood waters moving in, the hospital lost all power. Worse yet, efforts to evacuate the most seriously ill patients were hampered by snipers shooting at rescuers. By Sept. 2, however, most of the 160 patients and staff had been moved to safety.
“I'm glad I was there to be able to help out,” Sister Scheaffer said. “There were times when it was frightening. … From day to day, I wondered if they were going to get us out.”
Elsewhere, many religious communities opened their buildings to evacuees even as they were dealing with the effects of the storm themselves.
The School Sisters of Notre Dame in Chatawa, Miss., for example, sheltered 180 people at their St. Mary of the Pines retirement home and retreat center about 90 miles east of New Orleans. A week after the hurricane, 100 people were still with them.
The Divine Word Missionaries in Bay St. Louis, Miss., housed 23 local people in their former novitiate even though their campus sustained severe damage.
“We share our food and water and some help us out by cooking,” Divine Word Father Augustine Wall wrote in a memo. “I was quite happy to see we had opened our doors to as many people as we were capable of helping.”
In New Orleans, the Little Sisters of the Poor opened their damaged Mary-Joseph Residence for the Elderly to firefighters and several police precincts for use as a command post. The home was evacuated before the storm and the residents moved to a nursing home in Baton Rouge. Although most of the roof was blown off the New Orleans building, some floors were habitable, and the sisters were pleased that the food they had stored was being used.
“We're happy about that because we had a lot of food in the freezer, and now they'll eat it,” Mother Paul Mary Wilson said. “It won't rot!”
— Judy Roberts
----- EXCERPT: New Orleans Catholics Say the Saints Came Marching in ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: U.N. Scientists Warn of Pill's Link to Cancer DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:LYON, France — A group of international scientists under the aegis of the World Health Organization has concluded that use of oral contraceptives constitutes a definite risk of cancer.
However, the risk is not great enough to get the organization to recommend any change to the United Nations’ family planning programs.
But Catholic medical experts say the findings should induce health authorities in the United States and in other countries to rethink their promotion of the contraceptive pill, given the mounting evidence of the dangers it poses to the health of women.
Women increase their risk of breast, cervical and liver cancer if they use oral contraceptives, according to a July 29 press release by the Lyon, France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organization (WHO). Other recent studies show the greatest cancer risk is to young women, particularly teenagers, who use the pill.
“These conclusions are of enormous public health importance, since it is estimated that worldwide, more than 100 million women — about 10% of all women of reproductive age — currently use combined hormonal contraceptives,” said Dr. Gian Luigi Gigli, president of the World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, headquartered in Vatican City.
An international ad hoc working group of 21 scientists from eight countries surveyed the existing scientific literature at a June meeting but did not engage in any independent research. Many epidemiological studies have investigated associations between the use of combined oral contraceptives and the onset of cancer.
The scientists published a summary of their findings in the August 2005 issue of Lancet Oncology, a British medical journal. Worldwide, an estimated 300 million women have used oral estrogen-progestagen contraceptives at some time, according to the report.
‘Carcinogenic’
According to the Lancet Oncology article, “An IARC Monographs working group has concluded that combined estrogen-progestagen oral contraceptives … are carcinogenic to humans [Group 1], after a thorough review of the published scientific evidence,” Group 1 is the highest cancer-risk classification.
Hormone therapy for menopausal symptoms was placed within the same category of Group 1 cancer risk by the working group in the same report.
“What is significant is that they are using terminology to call it a carcinogen,” said Dr. Chris Kahlenborn of The Polycarp Research Institute in Altoona, Penn., an organization that promotes ethical research and dissemination of medical information in conformity with Catholic teachings. “I am surprised, very surprised.”
Ovarian and endometrial cancer risk declines with use of oral contraceptives, the working group also noted. Both findings had been previously reported.
“Because use of combined contraceptives heightens the risk of some cancers and reduces that of others, it is possible that the overall net public-health outcome could be beneficial, but a rigorous analysis is needed to show this,” the World Health Organization ad hoc group said in their report. “Such an analysis is outside the scope of an IARC monograph meeting.”
The warning about elevated risks of some cancers when using oral contraceptives is the first such statement from the World Health Organization, but it follows acknowledgement in 2003 by the National Cancer Institute of elevated breast cancer rates tied to use of the pill, particularly among women under 20.
In addition, a 2004 presentation to the American Association for Cancer Research by a professor from the University of Lund in Sweden found a sharp increase in breast cancer risk among young women who use the pill. The incidence rose 17% for each year a woman under 20 used oral contraceptives, according to the study of 259 women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer by the age of 40.
While the World Health Organization, which is the U.N.'s specialized agency for health, has not called for oral contraceptive use to be discontinued, the acknowledgement of cancer risks is a break from the pro-pill position of another prominent U.N. agency. The U.N. Population Fund promotes use of oral contraceptives as one of several contraceptive options.
In the United States, minor children can obtain artificial contraception in all 50 states without parental knowledge — in many cases funded by the states and in other cases paid for by the parents’ health insurance policies, according to Mike O'dea, executive director of the Southfield, Mich.-based Christus Medicus Foundation.
On its website, the Planned Parenthood Federation recommends use of the pill as one of several forms of artificial contraception, dismissing the risk of cancer from use of oral contraceptives under a heading of “Myth No. 5.”
“It is particularly irresponsible that Planned Parenthood is not warning teenagers of the risks involved with pill use,” said Peter McFadden of the marriage-preparation-focused Love and Responsibility Foundation of Cold Spring, N.Y. “Planned Parenthood's website for teenagers [TeenWire.com] responds to a 14-year-old girl nervous about the pill's possible side effects by telling her the pill is ‘safe.’ Nowhere is she told that teen use of the pill is tied to early onset of breast cancer.”
Planned Parenthood did not return a telephone call for comment. According to Planned Parenthood's financial statements, it receives about two-thirds of its income from sale and distribution of artificial contraception — approximately $200 million in 2004.
The Catholic Church teaches artificial contraception is morally unacceptable. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible is intrinsically evil” (No. 2370).
The president of the World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations is heartened by the World Health Organization-sponsored group's conclusions.
“Oral contraceptives are presented as an easy response for an important problem,” said Gigli in an e-mail to the Register. “The United Nations has been actively promoting [and even imposing on some developing countries] a policy of so called ‘reproductive health.’ It is a package including abortion and OCs (oral contraceptives) as a ‘must’ of civilization and democracy.”
Said Gigli, “It is important that for the first time WHO, a U.N. agency, invites [us] to balance benefits and risks and acknowledge the serious risks of cancer implicit in the use of OCs.”
Valerie Schmalz is based in San Francisco, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Valerie Schmalz ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:VARIOUS
Women's Issues
For the Third Millennium
Familyland TV
Hostess Betty Kelly and her guests discuss topics such as prayer, differences between the sexes, marriage, motherhood, the role of women and fostering joy and self-worth. Airs Mondays at 8:30 a.m., Thursdays at 1:30 p.m. and Fridays at 6 p.m.
SUNDAY, SEPT. 18
Journey Home Roundtable
EWTN, 10 p.m.
In this special, host Marcus Grodi interviews three converts from Mormonism who analyze their former religion's history, theology, practices and stance toward the Catholic faith. Re-airs Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 2 p.m. and Friday, Sept. 23, at 3 a.m.
MONDAY, SEPT. 19
Guess Who Lived Here?
Home & Garden TV, 9 p.m.
This special shows us where movie and music stars lived before they became famous. Interviews with relatives, friends and the present owners of the homes shed light on the early years of Bing Crosby, Miles Davis, James Dean, Walt Disney, Judy Garland and others.
TUESDAY, SEPT. 20
Nova: Mystery of the Megaflood
PBS, 8 p.m.
“Mainstream” scientists scorned geologist Harlan Bretz in the 1920s because he hypothesized that an ancient thousand-foot wall of water was the cause of a sheared, boulder-strewn landscape in eastern Washington. He was vindicated decades later when evidence surfaced that at the end of the last ice age a half-mile-high ice dam in western Montana had collapsed and unleashed an unimaginably high wall of lake water.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 21
Modern Marvels:
Civil War Tech
History Channel, 6 p.m.
Military firsts in the Civil War included aerial observation, metal ships, the machine gun, forward battlefield medicine, instant communication and even the aircraft carrier.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 22
Live from Lincoln Center:
A Night of Firsts
PBS, 8 p.m.
In this two-hour broadcast, the New York Philharmonic performs Chopin's First Piano Concerto with soloist Lang Lang and follows that with Mahler's First Symphony.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 23
Search for the Sea Serpent
Travel Channel, 4 p.m.
Move over, Nessie. Beautiful Seljord Lake in the mountains of southern Norway supposedly has its own lake monster, dubbed “Orm.”
SATURDAY, SEPT. 24
Ask This Old House
A&E, 8:30 a.m.
In the first of three half-hour episodes, we learn about sawhorses, outdoor faucets and composting. Next up are paint sprayers, fireplace dampers and how to split logs, and after that are shower faucets, robot lawnmowers and how to “critter-proof” a house.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Vatican Media Watch DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Pope Seeks to Heal Orthodox/Catholic Rift
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 5 — Unifying all Christians and healing the 1,000-year rift between Catholics and the Orthodox is “particularly urgent,” Pope Benedict XVI said in a message reported by Associated Press.
The Sept. 4 symposium, held in the town of Assisi, was organized by the Pontifical Antonianum University and the theology department of the University of Thessaloniki in Greece.
Benedict said it was “unfortunate” that the lack of full unity meant that Orthodox and Catholic priests couldn't jointly celebrate Mass.
He said, “Realizing full communion of Christians must be an objective for all those who profess faith in” one Church.
International Convention Commemorates
AGI, Sept. 1 — More than 400 participants — including approximately 100 bishops — from 98 countries, met in Rome Sept. 14-18 at a national Bible convention called “The Sacred Scripture of Church Life,” Agenzia Giornalistica Italia reported.
The Holy See's press office stated that the meeting, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Constitution Dei Verbum, will be chaired by Cardinal Walter Kasper. Kasper himself, together with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a bible scholar, will be the main speakers.
Joseph Ratzinger also worked on the Constitution. One of the most important innovations of the II Vatican Council was to reaffirm the centrality of the Bible in the Church and the world. The document, approved just before the council's closure on Nov. 18, 1965, was vital in the affirmation. According to Cardinal Kasper, it was a text that “brought about an increasing awareness of the importance of the sacred Scriptures.”
Holy Father to Declare 5 New Saints
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 5 — Pope Benedict XVI will declare five people saints next month and another 17 candidates are to be beatified soon — an indication that the Vatican shows no sign of slowing the process under the new Pope, Associated Press reported.
Benedict himself will preside over his first saint-making ceremony, canonizing the five in St. Peter's Square on Oct. 23, Vatican Radio reported Sept. 5.
Among the five is Josef Bilczewski, the Polish archbishop of Lviv, Ukraine, who was greatly admired by Catholics, Orthodox and Jews alike during World War I, Vatican Radio said. The archbishop's life spanned the time during which Lviv was under Polish control, after which it reverted back to Ukraine.
Also being canonized is a priest from Lviv, Father Zygmunt Gorazdowski, who founded the Congregation for the Sisters of St. Joseph to care for the sick and poor. A Chilean Jesuit, Father Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, and Italians Felice da Nicosia, a Franciscan lay brother who lived in the 1700s, and Father Gaetano Cantanoso, who founded a religious order, will also be canonized.
Vatican Radio ‘Owns’ Pope Benedict's Voice
SPERO NEWS, Sept. 5 — Pope Benedict XVI has entrusted Vatican Radio with the exercise and protection of the copyright and intellectual property rights to his voice, Spero News reported.
A note made public Sept 2. stated that, Vatican Radio, the radio station of the Holy See, has the duty to compile, store and administer the audio archive of the Holy Father, ensuring its sake-keeping and overseeing, exclusively and in all circumstances, its copyright and intellectual property rights.
The report stated that the agreement covers all audio recordings of Pope Benedict's voice dating back to the period prior to his elevation to the Chair of Peter, with the exception of those rights already legitimately acquired by third parties.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Video Picks ... Passes DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Wallace & Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures: PICK
(1990)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: PASS
(2005)
Born Into Brothels [Calcutta's Red Light Kids]: PICK
(2005)
This week on DVD, the British are coming. The absurdist sci-fi world of English humorist Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker's empire makes the jump to feature film, with mixed results. British photojournalist Zana Briski's inspiring, devastating documentary Born Into Brothels [Calcutta's Red Light Kids] offers hope and heartbreak. And with dotty English inventor Wallace and his loyal but dubious dog Gromit finally coming to the big screen in October in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, of course we need another DVD release of their original, classic shorts.
Directed by Garth Jenning, the new Hitchhiker's film gets the whimsical look and absurdist feel of Adams’ universe right, but lacks the subversive commentary, the razor-edged deconstruction of human foibles.
Adams was a convinced atheist and, in his stories, a nihilistic sense of cosmic absurdity — along with satiric barbs at religion — jostles with an intriguing preoccupation with the notion of meaning and ultimate answers. The movie ventures a broadly satiric poke at religion, and goes through the motions of the quest for the ultimate answer of life, the universe and everything. But it's too interested in its “mostly harmless” status to have teeth.
What could have been a bitingly Gilliamesque Men in Black comes off as a hit-and-miss Britcom Galaxy Quest. That may be adequate for moderate Adams fans (like myself) who know enough to get the jokes but aren't emotionally invested enough to be outraged by the film's shortcomings. For most viewers, though, the film falls between two stools, neither satisfying diehard fans nor engaging newcomers.
Zana Briski visited and finally moved into Calcutta's red light district, intending to make a film about brothel life before finding herself and the children who lived there mutually drawn to one another.
If Born Into Brothels merely recorded the marginal lives of these beautiful, all-but-doomed children, it would probably be nearly unbearable, though potentially still worthwhile. But Briski, who has a master's in theology and religious studies, did more than document the kids’ milieu: She empowered them to document it themselves, giving them cameras and teaching them to use them.
As seen in the film, the results are arresting. The kids love photography and, while their work isn't always inspired, some of it has real power and verve (visit kids-with-cameras.org to peruse — or purchase — samples).
Photography offers Briski's voiceless, powerless students the power to speak across oceans and language barriers. There are gallery shows, a Sotheby's auction — proceeds from which could pay for education, the only hope for escaping the cycle of destitution and dissolution. Born into Brothels is one of the most constructive, inspiring takes on the power of art and artists to make a difference that I've ever seen. Next to Briski's enacted prayers, what prayers I might offer for these children half a world away seem woefully inadequate.
Jam-packed with dazzlingly inventive sight gags and quintessentially eccentric British humor, the classic Wallace & Gromit shorts deserve a place on every film lover's shelf. Compared to previous DVD editions, Three Amazing Adventures lacks commentary by director Nick Park, but boasts the previously unavailable “Cracking Contraptions,” 10 mini-shorts featuring Wallace's latest inventions.
CONTENT ADVISORY: Hitchhiker's Guide contains slapstick violence, mild crude language and a brief sequence of broad religious satire. Born into Brothels contains documentary depiction of brothel life (nothing explicit), including drug abuse and a few strong obscenities, and might be acceptable for mature teens. The Wallace & Gromit shorts contain some comic menace and are fine family viewing.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steven D. Greydanus ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Christ Is the Author of Peace and Harmony DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:Register Summary
Pope Benedict XVI met with 20,000 in St. Peter's Square for his general audience on Sept. 7. His teaching centered on the canticle found in St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians, which is recited each week during the Liturgy of the Hours.
In the canticle, Christ is presented as the “icon,” or “image,” of the invisible God — a word that St. Paul often used and applied both to God and to man.
“However, man, through sin, ‘exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man’ by choosing to adore idols, thereby becoming like them,” the Holy Father pointed out. “For this reason, we must constantly model our image on the image of the Son of God since we have been ‘delivered from the power of darkness and transferred to the Kingdom of his beloved Son.’”
“For the Apostle Paul,” Pope Benedict went on to say, “Christ is the basis for cohesion, the mediator, and the ultimate goal toward which all of creation is converging. He is ‘the Firstborn among many brothers’, that is, the Son par excellence in that great family of the children of God that baptism makes us part of.”
The Pope noted that the canticle also reminds us that Christ is head of the body, the Church, by means of his incarnation.
“He entered into the community of mankind in order to rule over it and to form it into one ‘body’ — that is, into a harmonious and fruitful unit,” the Holy Father said. “Mankind's durability and growth find in Christ their root, their live-giving basis, their ‘beginning.’”
The Holy Father noted that the fullness of God dwells in Christ and radiates throughout creation and in all mankind, becoming the source of peace, unity and perfect harmony.
“By shedding his blood and giving of himself, Christ has poured out peace,” he noted. Consequently, Pope Benedict XVI said, mankind now faces “a resplendent panorama of reconciliation, unity, harmony and peace.”
In the past we have reflected on this majestic portrait of Christ, the Lord of the universe and of history, which towers over the hymn at the beginning of the St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians. In fact, this canticle is recited in each of the four weeks in which the Liturgy of the Hours’ evening prayer is divided.
At the heart of the hymn are verses 15-20, where Christ, who is described as the “image of the invisible God,” appears in a clear and solemn way (verse 15). The Apostle Paul is fond of the word eikon (Greek for icon). He uses it nine times in his letters, applying it either to Christ, the perfect icon of God (see 2 Corinthians 4:4), or to man, the image and glory of God (see 1 Corinthians 11:7).
Through sin, however, man “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man” (Romans 1:23), by choosing to adore idols, thereby becoming like them. For this reason, we must constantly model our image on the image of the Son of God (see 2 Corinthians 3:18) since we have been “delivered from the power of darkness and transferred to the Kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13).
The Firstborn of Creation
Christ, then, is proclaimed to be the “Firstborn of all creation” (verse 15). Christ precedes all of creation (see verse 17) since he was begotten from all eternity. Thus, “all things were created through him and for him” (verse 16). Ancient Jewish tradition also acknowledged that “the whole world was created in view of the Messiah” (Sanhedrin, 98b).
For the Apostle Paul, Christ is the basis for cohesion (“in him all things hold together”), the mediator (“through him”), and the ultimate goal toward which all of creation is converging. He is “the Firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29), that is, the Son par excellence in that great family of the children of God that baptism makes us part of.
Head of the Church
At this point, our attention shifts from the world of creation to that of history: Through his incarnation, Christ is already “the head of the body, the Church” (Colossians 1:18). Indeed, he entered into the community of mankind in order to rule over it and to form it into one “body” — that is, into a harmonious and fruitful unit. Mankind's durability and find in Christ their root, their life-giving basis, their ‘beginning.’”
It is precisely because of this primacy that Christ can become the beginning of the resurrection of all, the “Firstborn from the dead,” because “in Christ all shall be brought to life, but each one in proper order: Christ the first fruits; then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22-23).
The Fullness of God
The hymn moves onto its conclusion by celebrating the “fullness” (pleroma in Greek), that Christ has in himself as a gift of the Father's love. It is the fullness of the divinity that radiates both throughout the universe and throughout mankind, becoming the source for peace, unity and perfect harmony (Colossians 1:19-20).
This “reconciliation” and “reestablishment of peace” was brought about through “the blood of the cross” by which we are justified and sanctified. By shedding his blood and giving of himself, Christ has poured out peace, which, in the language of the Bible, is the sum total of the messianic blessings and the fullness of salvation that is extended to all of creation.
The hymn ends, therefore, with a resplendent panorama of reconciliation, unity, harmony and peace, solemnly presided over by the image of its author: Christ, the “beloved Son” of the Father.
Cyril of Jerusalem
Writers from our ancient Christian tradition have reflected on this brief yet profound passage. In one of his dialogues, St. Cyril of Jerusalem quotes this canticle from the Letter to the Colossians in responding to some anonymous person who asked him: “Do we say, therefore, that the Word begotten by God the Father suffered for us in his flesh?” The answer, in accordance with the canticle, is yes. In fact, Cyril affirms that “the image of the invisible God, the Firstborn of all creatures both visible and invisible, by whom and in whom everything exists, has been given, Paul says, to the Church as its head. Moreover, he is the firstborn from the dead” — that is, the first in the series of the dead who will rise again.
Cyril goes on to say that he “made as his own all that is of the flesh of man and ‘endured the cross, despising its shame’ (Hebrews 12:2). We say that it was not simply some greatly honored man, that — I know not how — that by his union with him was sacrificed for us, but that the very Lord of glory is the one who was crucified” (Perché Cristo è uno: Collana di testi Patristici, XXXVII, Rome, 1983, p. 101).
Before this Lord of glory, who is the sign of the Father's supreme love, we, too, raise our song of praise and bow down to adore him and thank him.
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: World Media Watch DATE: 09/18/2005 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: September 18-24, 2005 ----- BODY:King Juan Carlos Invites Pope Benedict to Spain
AKI, Sept. 5 — King Juan Carlos invited Pope Benedict XVI to Spain for the 2006 World Meeting of Families in Valencia, the website for AdKronosInternational reported.
The international meeting on family issues was originally convened by Pope John Paul II. It will be held in early July. The king presented the invitation on behalf of Premier Jose Luis Zapatero. Both Juan Carlos and Zapatero supported the homosexual “marriage” legislation that Spain passed in June. Spain became the third country to legalize homosexual unions.
Benedict XVI has spoken out against same-sex unions, although he hasn't specifically targeted the Spanish law, AKI reported. On June 6, he referred to homosexual “marriage” as anarchic “pseudo-matrimony.”
Paisley Demands End to Sectarian Attacks
Following weeks of sporadic petrol and paint bomb attacks on homes in Ballymena and nearby towns, Paisley, an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church, insisted convicting the culprits was the only solution.
“There is no excuse for it, it has to stop and I have made that clear in the recent attacks on Roman Catholic Church property in Ballymena.
Paisley said he had met with Catholics in Ballymena to discuss the sustained attacks. He also said he had visited staff at St Louis’ school in the town which was badly burnt in a gasoline bomb attack.
Paisley said, “What you have to do: We have to insist that both communities reveal to the police what they know; and the sooner people are charged and found guilty and imprisoned, if needs be — that will stop it; nothing else will stop it.”
Bishops Request Probe Into Priest's Murder
WEBINDIA123, Sept. 6 — The Catholic Bishop's Conference of India (CBCI) asked the Assam government to probe the murder of a 65-year-old priest in Tezpur, the wire service WebIndia reported.
The CBCI said the killing of Father Mathew Nellickal, the vicar general of Tezpur who was found dead Sept. 3, was yet another instance of increasing attacks on the Christian religious personnel across the country.
“The CBCI, the apex body of the Catholic Church in India, expresses its distress at the killing of a 65-year-old priest, who served in Tezpur for the last 30 years. We condemn the dastardly murder,” the bishops said in a press statement.
Bishop Percival Fernandes, the secretary general of CBCI, regretted that Church leaders were attacked in the northeast despite the “sterling development work they are doing in the area.”
Adoptions by Homosexuals Place Children ‘in Peril’
BBC NEWS, Sept. 4 — Cardinal Keith O'Brien of Scotland said proposals to allow homosexual couples to adopt would place children “in peril,” BBC News reported.
Cardinal Keith O'Brien said youngsters would be guinea pigs in a “distorted social experiment.” He said studies had suggested that drug use, homosexuality, stress and mental illness were more common among those raised by same-sex couples.
The Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland have both spoken out against the proposals, which were unveiled in June. People have until 31 October to have their say on the new legislation, which would allow unmarried and same-sex couples to adopt if they could prove that they were part of an enduring family relationship.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Cardinal O'Brien accepted that the current adoption system was failing children. He urged Catholic families to come forward, predicting that if they did so there would be no need to widen the definition of those able to adopt.
“We ignore a wealth of global evidence and place innumerable children in peril if we forget certain immutable truths; children need a male and a female role model in a permanent relationship,” he said. “Scotland's adopted children must not become guinea pigs in some distorted social experiment aimed at redefining marriage, subverting the family and threatening the good of society.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News --------