SEATTLE—To sit, to stand, or to kneel—that is the question.
New directives from Rome and the U.S. bishops make small but significant changes, and some parishioners and priests fear that their dioceses are asking to give up good customs, and the reverence they add to Mass.
The revised General Instruction of the Roman Missal, with adaptations for the United States, was published by the U.S. bishops in April.
In a few dioceses—including Seattle; Gary, Ind.; Los Angeles; and Monterey, Calif.—the bishops have acted on a clause in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal that allows them to depart from a 30-year national custom of kneeling after the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God).
A vocal minority in those areas is confused and troubled by the change.
In Seattle, Archbishop Alexander Brunett has established the practice that all in the assembly will continue to stand after the Agnus Dei, while in the majority of U.S. dioceses the people kneel. Also, Seattle parishioners are asked to remain standing through the rest of Communion, until all have received, at which time they may sit or kneel for a period of sacred silence.
Archbishop Brunett said the new practice is not a change but a renewal of the original meaning of Communion.
“It's the same kind of theology and practice that the Church has had for centuries,” he said. “The idea is for a hymn to be sung [at that time] and not to stand for the sake of standing. We come forward as a joyful community. We stand as an act of praise or acknowledgment. … They don't drop immediately into their private devotion but enter into that communal event.”
Although priests are being catechized on the new posture and are encouraged to catechize their people, no one will be disciplined for not standing, the archbishop said.
“It's not a mandate,” he said. “Our procedure here is that if this is any kind of a burden or hardship on people, they can certainly sit or kneel. If they don't feel they want to enter this aspect of communio theology, I'm not going to look down on it.”
Gail Rowan, a mother of two in Mount Vernon, Wash., said she is deeply disturbed to be asked to stand at a time she is inclined to kneel out of reverence and adoration, and she wrote of her concerns to the bishop and the Vatican.
“It didn't feel right,” she said. “People have told me, ‘I used to pray [after receiving Communion], but now I'm looking around.’”
Though most parishioners appear to be going along with the new practice without objection, Rowan said she and her family continue to kneel.
“You miss that time for prayer and giving thanks to God,” she said. She pointed out that the amount of time to kneel and pray personally after Communion had been cut from several minutes to a matter of seconds.
The General Instruction of the Roman Missal now says that while the priest is receiving Communion, the Communion chant is begun.
“Its purpose is to express the communicants' union in spirit by means of the unity of their voices, to show joy of heart and to highlight more clearly the ‘communitarian’ nature of the procession to receive Communion,” say the new guidelines. “The singing is continued for as long as the Sacrament is being administered to the faithful.”
The new rules allow sitting or kneeling for the “period of sacred silence after Communion.”
Seattle parishioners say their priests have instructed them that the new practices are in accord with Rome and the U.S. bishops, which leaves little room for questioning.
In fact, customary practice of kneeling remains the norm in the United States, according to the new General Instruction of the Roman Missal. But it also allows bishops the option to depart from that norm.
The kneeling norm in the United States is an exception to the norm for the rest of the world. Throughout the world, the faithful kneel only for the consecration—they do not kneel during the whole Eucharistic prayer or during the “Behold the Lamb of God.” Exceptions to this rule were requested by the U.S. bishops after the Second Vatican Council and granted by the Vatican.
Kneeling Debate
The subject of kneeling has been in dispute for years and culminated recently in some cases of individuals being refused Communion because they knelt to receive. In one extreme situation, a priest called in the local police to arrest a kneeling communicant, said Charles Wilson, a canon law expert with the St. Joseph Foundation in San Antonio.
Although the General Instruction of the Roman Missal states that standing is the normal posture for receiving Communion in the United States, it also states: “Communicants should not be denied holy Communion because they kneel.” Rather, the document continued, those who kneel should be instructed “pastorally” on the reasons for the norm.
Canon 843 states that “sacred ministers may not deny the sacraments to those who opportunely ask for them, are properly disposed and are not prohibited by law from receiving them.”
Responding to several letters from Catholics in the United States who said they were being forced to stand, the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship wrote, “The faithful should not be imposed upon nor accused of disobedience and of acting illicitly when they kneel to receive Communion.” And Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said kneeling for Communion is a centuries-old tradition.
Edward Peters, professor of canon law at the Institute for Pastoral Theology of Ave Maria University in Ypsilanti, Mich., said, “I don't think there's any question but that withholding Communion from someone who chooses to kneel is a serious violation of that person's fundamental canonical rights under Canons 213, 843 and 912.”
“The argument that unity of posture is important at Communion time seems to me exaggerated here,” he said. “Of course unity is important, but it should be a unity in important things, such as our belief in the Real Presence or our willingness to show our love for Jesus in Communion, and not on something mostly external, let alone divisive.”
Helen Hull Hitchcock, editor of the liturgical journal Adoremus Bulletin, said many Catholics find it inexplicable that a bishop would object to people's expression of devotion to the Eucharist through kneeling.
“Many liturgists have been convinced that kneeling is a posture only used for penance,” she said. “This argument was steadfastly advanced during the whole time the bishops were considering the revision of the “Roman Missal.”
Richard Stith, a Catholic who teaches law at Valparaiso University in Indiana, said kneeling in prayer after Communion does not conflict with an attitude of communion with others but focuses momentarily on the very source of that communion—Christ himself.
“The tradition of folding oneself, internally and externally, around the Body of Christ—embracing and communing with Christ dwelling within one after Communion—is the closest to an ecstatic union with our Lord that we non-mystics ever get to experience,” he said. “It also is the greatest source of our union with others. We are united with others because of our union with Christ. He is the axis of the wheel, and we are the spokes.”
Archbishop Brunett said the people who have written him about their discomfort with standing are not aware of the different liturgical gestures in Catholic churches around the world, where, for example, it might not be the custom to kneel during the Eucharistic prayer.
“Most of the letters I get about this issue show a not-very-well-developed understanding of Eucharistic theology,” he said. “They … show somebody is doing something from habit but not with understanding for why they did it.”
Ellen Rossini writes
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Ellen Rossini ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Mass Changes in Brief DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:What else does the new General Instruction of the Roman Missal call for during Mass? Here are a few of the major points:
•Standing. Stand, then say “May the Lord accept the sacrifice we offer you …” Says the general instruction: “The faithful should stand … from the invitation, Orate, fratres (Pray, brethren), before the prayer over the offerings.”
•Kneeling. The congregation “should kneel beginning after the singing or recitation of the Sanctus until after the Amen of the Eucharistic prayer, except when prevented on occasion by reasons of health, lack of space, the large number of people present or some other good reason. Those who do not kneel ought to make a profound bow while the priest genuflects after the consecration. The faithful kneel at the Agnus Dei unless the diocesan bishop determines otherwise.”
•Bowing. “An inclination of the head should be made when the three Divine Persons are named, at the name of Jesus, of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the saint in whose honor Mass is celebrated.”
•Silence during Mass. “Sacred silence … as part of the celebration, is to be observed at the designated times … Within the Act of Penitence and again after the invitation to pray, all recollect themselves; but at the conclusion of a reading or the homily, all meditate briefly on what they have heard; then after Communion, they praise and pray to God in their hearts.
•Silence before Mass. “Even before the celebration itself, it is commendable for silence to be observed in church, in the sacristy, in the vesting room and in adjacent areas, so that all may dispose themselves to carry out the sacred action in a devout and fitting manner.”
Source: U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on the Liturgy
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Canon Law on Liturgy DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Canon 838 of the Code of Canon Law states: “The ordering and guidance of the sacred liturgy depends solely upon the authority of the Church, namely, that of the Apostolic See and, as provided by law, that of the diocesan bishop.”
It continues: “Within the limits of his competence, it belongs to the diocesan bishop to lay down for the Church entrusted to his care liturgical regulations that are binding on all.”
Canon 835 says the “sanctifying office” in the Church is exercised principally by bishops, “who are the high priests, the principal dispensers of the mysteries of God and the moderators, promoters and guardians of the entire liturgical life in the churches entrusted to their care.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Parents Take Nothing for Granted DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:CHICAGO—Jill and Tim Thompson won't be sending a child to Loyola University of Chicago next year.
The Searcy, Ark., couple wants to find a school near family in the Midwest, but they say they have no way of determining who has a mandatum at Loyola.
Jill Thompson said she's well aware of recent studies suggesting that students are even more likely to lose their faith at a Catholic college than at a secular one.
“Our parents were more likely to turn over our care blindly because of the confidence that they had in the Church at that time,” Thompson said, “but we've been living in the Catholic Church for the past 30 years and I'm not taking anything for granted.”
When the Register called to ask which professors at Loyola University of Chicago had canon-law mandatums to teach theology, neither theology department chair John McCarthy nor university president Father Michael Garanzini responded.
“Most of it is being handled internally,” said Bud Jones, associate vice president for public relations.
In February, Chicago Cardinal Francis George wrote about the mandatum in a column published in the diocesan newspaper, Catholic New World. In that article he publicly stated which institutions' professors had sought the mandatum.
“I gave the mandatum to about 20 Catholics who teach Catholic theology in the four Catholic universities in the archdiocese,” Cardinal George wrote.
“Almost all the Catholics who teach Catholic theology at the two smaller Catholic universities in the archdiocese, Dominican and St. Xavier, have received the mandatum. At Loyola University, most of the Catholic professors in the Institute for Pastoral Studies have received the mandatum, but many of the Catholic professors in the theology department have not.”
The cardinal's public statement provoked an outcry within Loyola's theology department.
A Jesuit institution, Loyola University of Chicago is ranked 69th among national doctoral universities by U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Colleges 2003.
The Register is investigating Catholic colleges and universities featured in U.S. News & World Report's college guide, asking: Are parents allowed to know whether those who teach theology even intend to teach in communion with the Church? Or has the opposite happened—is the canon-law mandatum being used to protect dissenters?
During his meeting with U.S. cardinals last year, Pope John Paul II said parents “must know that bishops and priests are totally committed to the fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality, a truth as essential to the renewal of the priesthood and the episcopate as it is to the renewal of marriage and family life.”
Since 1983, canon law has required that a theologian teaching in a Catholic university receive a mandatum from the local bishop showing the theologian's intention to teach with the Church. The requirement was highlighted in a footnote in Pope John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution on higher education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church). U.S. bishops began requiring the mandatum in 2001.
“According to the [bishops' conference's] ‘Guidelines Concerning the Academic Mandatum in Catholic Universities (Canon 812),’ which received the recognitio of the Congregation for Catholic Education on May 3, 2000, all full-time and part-time professors of sacred Scripture, theology, canon law, liturgy and Church history at any Catholic institution of higher learning are to seek the mandatum,” said canonist and author Pete Vere. “It is the responsibility of the individual to seek it.”
Yet parents say universities won't tell who has a mandatum.
Private or Public?
Canon law is silent as to whether the mandatum should be private or public, and opinions vary widely.
“The president has told us that the university isn't going to say anything publicly,” said Loyola theology professor Dennis Martin. “You can see where this is going to end up. No one will end up with the mandatum.”
Thompson agreed.
“I disagree that this is a private issue,” she said. “That idea is not consistent with an active laity in the Church. If parents are paying $10,000 or $20,000 a year to send [their children] to a Catholic school, they have a right to know what they are paying for.”
“These professors are not private tutors,” Vere said. “He or she is teaching in an open classroom at a Catholic university.”
Moreover, Vere argued, an institution's mission can be confusing to parents.
“If pursued as a public matter, the mandatum would be of great assistance to parents and students who seek a Catholic university rather than a university historically founded in the Catholic tradition,” he said.
While few at Loyola are speaking publicly, Chicago Cardinal Francis George has voiced his concerns.
“The mandatum is a public reality,” Cardinal George told the Register. “It's a personal act, but personal acts are sometimes public—like receiving the sacraments.”
“Being a professor is a public thing,” Martin said. “Media people come to professors for commentary on Catholic issues. If he responds he is acting in a public way.”
“Some of the theology faculty members were up in arms about it, but at this point no one cares,” said Larry DiPaolo Jr., who received his master's degree in theological studies from Loyola and is currently seeking a doctorate in New Testament from the school.
“Frankly, it seems as if it has died out,” DiPaolo added. “I would say that the mandatum is in limbo.”
How Do Parents Know?
Still, parents such as the Thompsons would like to know who has a mandatum.
Asked how a parent would know who has received the mandatum at Loyola, Cardinal George told the Register he would instruct interested students and parents to contact individual theology faculty members.
“The mandatum is a public matter,” Cardinal George said. “Whether to publicize it or not is a private matter. If a faculty member isn't willing to tell a parent, that says something.”
Theology professor Martin also encouraged parents to ask questions of the universities.
“Parents and students should know who has applied,” he said. “It's like any product—if you do not receive a satisfactory answer or if you get evasive answers, you go elsewhere.”
Cardinal George said his column about the mandatum was “purposeful.”
“I traced it to the secularization of these institutions,” he said. “Many of the disciplines have secularized themselves.”
Jesuit Superior General Peter Hans Kolvenbach was once quoted by Father Richard John Neuhaus as saying, “For some [Jesuit] universities, it is probably too late to restore their Catholic character.”
Martin pointed to the July 1967 Land O'Lakes Conference, led by former University of Notre Dame president Holy Cross Father Theodore Hesburgh, as evidence of the secularization of Catholic colleges and universities.
The university presidents and administrators at that conference declared, “The Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”
“The Land O'Lakes conference intended to secularize colleges,” Martin said. “Why should anyone be surprised that it has succeeded?”
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Archbishop Faces Chaos in Liberia DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:MONROVIA, Liberia—A Liberian bishop who has tried to mediate between warring factions in this West African country has said law and order has “completely broken down” there.
Interviewed in early July, Archbishop Michael Francis of Monrovia spoke of government troops recently “going about molesting people” and looting houses from those who are displaced.
“The little [that people] had, they had taken from them,” he said. “It's a miracle how the people are coping.”
President Bush, visiting Africa from July 8-11, was considering whether to send U.S. troops to intervene. Both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Relief Services strongly encouraged him to support the deployment of an international stabilization force for the country of 3.29 million people founded by freed American slaves. The Economic Community of West African States meanwhile announced plans to send 1,000 peacekeeping troops.
The situation rapidly deteriorated after two rebel groups, the Liberians United for Democracy in Liberia and a sister force, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, overran the country and made incursions into the country's capital, Monrovia, held by President Charles Taylor. The attacks during the past six weeks alone have left an estimated 1,000 civilians dead and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.
“The government is trying to constrain [the lack of discipline],” Archbishop Francis said. He added that a “tenuous cease-fire” brought a halt to the unrest.
Society of African Missions Father Thomas Hayden spent 17 years in Liberia. He is monitoring the situation from the order's American province headquarters in Tenafly, N.J., where he is vice provincial. Five Society missionaries still work in Liberia, along with Salesians, Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, Missionaries of Charity and Consolata Sisters.
He said a major problem is the lack of any trained army, police or security force in the country for almost 20 years.
“What you have on the ground are young men with machine guns over their shoulders, walking around,” he said. “Generally speaking they didn't bother people until the end of February.”
Earlier this year the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy in Liberia and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia marched into the country from Guinea and Ivory Coast in an attempt to overthrow Taylor.
“They drove 28,000 people from their homes in the south of the country. They looted everyone's home, all of the churches, rectories, homes of the aged,” Father Hayden said. “They took everything that wasn't nailed down.”
Refugees, including Bishop Boniface Dalieh of Cape Palmas and two Society of African Missionary priests, poured into Ivory Coast.
Bishop Dalieh would like to return, Father Hayden said after receiving an e-mail message from him July 10, but the bishop is concerned about the “child soldiers” who make up most of the rebel force.
“They're boys aged 9 to 15, riding around in stolen cars with guns,” Father Hayden said. “They're dangerous because they don't know how to handle the guns and too immature to realize their importance.”
Both Archbishop Francis and Father Hayden are also concerned about food shortages. The archbishop described the food and medicine situation as “very, very difficult and dangerous.”
Father Hayden said there had been no fresh food in Monrovia for the last two months.
“It wouldn't take much to spark massive fighting in Monrovia,” he said.
Aid and relief efforts have also been severely curtailed. Archbishop Francis, who is also in charge of the Liberian Church's aid and development federation, Caritas, revealed that all its warehouses have been raided. Before that, all the facilities of Catholic Relief Services were looted.
“The same thing happened to three of our parishes, and the pastors were dehumanized and ill-treated,” the archbishop reported.
Country's Decline
Liberia's deterioration began 23 years ago when Samuel Doe seized power in a military coup. Widespread human-rights abuses followed, creating instability and international condemnation and, eventually, a revolt almost 10 years later led by warlord Charles Taylor.
Taylor's insurgency quickly turned into an ethnic civil war, the downfall of President Doe and his eventual execution. Ever since, the autocratic Taylor has been trying to extend his influence, coercing thousands to battle against foes in neighboring countries and bringing instability to the whole region.
Archbishop Francis has tried to mediate between the warring factions and leads the Interreligious Council of Liberia, a body admired for its effectiveness.
“The council is very interesting because it's made up of Muslims and Christians—perhaps the only council of its kind in all of Africa,” Father Hayden said. “Many members of the [Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy in Liberia] are Muslims, but they're not allowing religion to enter this conflict at all, and that's to the credit of the interreligious council.”
Father Hayden estimates that 25% of the country's population is Christian, 10% Muslim and the remainder traditional African religions.
Indeed, except in the south of the country, most of the priests and religious have been relatively safe and have remained in the country. Father Hayden said he believed they were “at risk” but did not think they were in much danger from a rebel group, although “Taylor has an intense dislike for the archbishop,” he said.
People have told Father Hayden the only person Taylor fears is Archbishop Francis. The archbishop “is not afraid to criticize Taylor anytime he steps over the bounds on human rights as he's done over and over again … but Taylor respects him for his integrity,” he said.
However, he said, the Church's leader in Liberia is not worried. “If you kill me they'll find another archbishop,” he is known to have remarked.
Taylor vowed in early July to step down and possibly accept asylum in Nigeria once peacekeepers arrive. But Archbishop Alberto Bottari de Castello, the apostolic nuncio to Liberia, is pessimistic.
“He is a master of presentation and deception who will change his mind,” Archbishop Bottari de Castello said. “He's a terrible man and very difficult to believe.”
“He speaks very convincingly but during his presidency he signed seven negotiated peace treaties and didn't keep one of them,” Father Hayden said of Taylor. “So the question is, will he keep his word? I have my doubts because he just cannot be trusted.”
Taylor has already hinted any exile would be a “cooling off” period before he returned to Liberia.
Archbishop Francis said he was disappointed by the seeming reluctance on the part of the United States to assist Liberia because of the country's historic ties and its significant help during the two world wars and the Cold War.
But according to Father Hayden, ending the conflict would be just the “first phase.” The nation's infrastructure is all but ruined and the country lacked a skilled work-force for 20 years.
Asked about his feelings for the country's future, he replied, “I am hopeful, but I'm not terribly optimistic.”
Edward Pentin is based in Rome.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Edward Pentin ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Activists Planned for Bay State Homosexual Marriage Ruling DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:BOSTON—As the Register went to press July 14, the Massachusetts Supreme Court was expected to declare the state's matrimony laws to be discriminatory for not allowing homosexual couples to marry.
With the decision, the commonwealth would become the first state to recognize marriages between two people of the same sex.
“It has always been the role of the courts in our system of government to say when a law draws the wrong line,” said Mary Bonauto, an attorney for the Boston-based Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. She argued the case on behalf of seven same-sex couples.
“Only ‘marriage’ conveys the love and commitment that others automatically understand and respect. … Equal marriage rights would strengthen these families and the communities of which they are an integral part,” Bonauto said.
But Matt Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage, said such a decision could wreak havoc on the future of the American family.
“Americans want our laws to send a positive message to children about marriage, family and their future,” Daniels said.
He said a pro-homosexual marriage decision in Massachusetts, “with legal consequences for our entire nation, would dramatically confirm that the Federal Marriage Amendment is the only way to allow the American people to determine the future of marriage and the family under American law,” he said.
He added that U.S. cardinals and the Vatican have supported an amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage in the United States as only between one man and one woman.
“The Pontifical Council for the Family has said that judicial efforts to destroy marriage as the union of male and female are contrary to the common good and truly unjust,” Daniels said. “This is why my friend Cardinal [Anthony] Bevilacqua has joined with Cardinal [Edward] Egan, Cardinal [Francis] George and scores of bishops in endorsing the Federal Marriage Amendment.”
Family groups were prepared to lambaste the ruling. Genevieve Wood, spokeswoman for the Family Research Council, noted that government's role is to recognize, not change, marriage.
“Marriage is an institution which no court has the authority to redefine, and yet, left unchecked, that is exactly what they are attempting to do,” Wood said. “We have three separate coequal branches of government in this country. The White House and Congress must not let our nation's court system run amok with no accountability.”
She noted that homosexual activists used the courts because they couldn't win at the ballot box.
“Time and time again, in states like California and Hawaii, when the people of this country have voted on the issue of creating same-sex marriage, the answer has been a resounding No,” Wood said. “The Massachusetts Supreme Court must refrain from overriding the will of the people and should base its forthcoming decision solely on the Constitution.”
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., announced his opposition to same-sex marriages in an interview with the Washington Post.
“I do not support [same-sex] marriage … it's just a personal belief about what the relationship of marriage is and how it works, but I'm in favor of civil unions,” Kerry said. “I've supported all forms of partnership union. I think gays should have all of the rights of ownership, of partnership, of visitation in hospitals, of inheritance and so forth.”
“Marriage is an institution between men and women for the purpose of having children and procreating,” he said. “That's my belief, and some people may not like it. I've been willing to take my lumps on everything that I think enhances people's rights and gives people equality, but I think there is something special about the institution of marriage—the oldest institution in the world.”
Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor for National Review, said it would only be a matter of time before same-sex marriage reached the Supreme Court.
“The Massachusetts decision is going to increase the pressure on politicians to support a Federal Marriage Amendment,” he said. “Because if they can do this in Massachusetts, they can do it anywhere.”
And like other conservatives, Ponnuru doesn't believe the federal Defense of Marriage Act will stand up to a constitutional challenge.
“Congress can regulate the status of the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution,” Ponnuru said.
But he noted that the Supreme Court in 1995 overturned a Colorado referendum that prohibited special status and privileges to homosexuals. The court's reasoning was that the amendment was passed with “animus” toward homosexuals.
“The Supreme Court could strike down marriage laws for any number of reasons: depriving people of equal protection, ‘animus’ toward gays or due process,” he said.
Robert George, professor of political philosophy at Princeton University, said it is possible citizens in Massachusetts won't let the decision stand.
“When the Hawaii Supreme Court sought to redefine marriage in that state, the people responded by amending their state constitution to overturn the court's ruling. Hawaii, like Massachusetts, is a liberal state,” George noted. “It is possible that the citizens of Massachusetts will respond in the same way.”
But George said only one thing would settle the matter and ultimately protect marriage.
“I hope that the people of the United States as a whole will respond by enacting the Federal Marriage Amendment,” he said, “to protect marriage as a union of a man and a woman from judicial redefinition.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Josh Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: He Saw St. Bernadette, Dead, in His Living Room DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Noah Lett, a Lutheran pastor turned Catholic, works as a theologian with the Eternal Word Television Network.
Last year, Lett co-hosted the 13-part EWTN television series Black and Roman Catholic with Dolores Grier. He has also-been a guest on EWTN's “The Journey Home.”
Lett spoke from his home in Leeds, Ala., with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.
Tell me about your childhood.
I was born in April 1956 and grew up in Marion, Ind. I have one younger sister.
My father worked at and retired from General Motors. My mother worked in the cafeteria at the local high school.
There was no attempt in our home to pass on the Christian faith; I don't even know if my parents had the faith to pass on or if they were ever baptized. They rarely attended church and they didn't make my sister or me attend. On the rare occasion when they attended church they went to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a denomination founded during the Civil War.
The result of all of this is that my religious education at home consisted of the moral conduct of my mother and father and the dinner prayer, “Jesus wept. Amen.”
You were ordained as a Lutheran pastor?
I graduated from Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, and was ordained in 1986 in the American Lutheran Church, just prior to its merger with the Lutheran Church of America, which created the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. My first assignment as pastor was in Queens, N.Y.
What led you to the Church?
It was the culmination of a process that had begun when I was 6 or 7. At that age, I had heard the story of Solomon's dream from an older relative. I thought it was wonderful. And so I would ask my friends what they would do if they could have one wish like Solomon. One of them told me they would wish for a tricycle. I responded, “Oh, no. You want to be smart so you could fix it and have it forever.”
Then one day, about a week later, a voice said to me, “Why don't you ask the God of Solomon to bless you like he blessed Solomon?” and so I looked up and hollered out, not knowing how to pray, “God of Solomon, bless me like you blessed Solomon.” At that moment I felt my natural curiosity swell in agitation like a hungry fire wanting to consume all knowledge. Two questions created this agitation, this hunger, and this is exactly how they came to me at the time—what makes existence worthwhile and why don't you know right now, because it makes all the difference in the world.
For the next 11 to 12 years, I tried to answer the questions. I would come upon things I thought were the answer but find them unsatisfactory through a process that was more like tasting rather than analyzing. Eventually, at the age of 17 in 1973, I heard the Gospel for the first time, found a certain measure of peace and moved on with my new Christian life.
I had been a Lutheran pastor for about 10 months when one day, in 1988, I went home to fix myself lunch.
I walked through the hallway and the dining room into the kitchen, when suddenly, I found myself standing in front of the incorruptible body of St. Bernadette in Navarre, France. I had never been to Navarre, but I was not afraid at that moment. Rather there was a feeling that this is as it should be.
A voice rang out in the chapel asking, “Noah, what do you see?” I looked upon the lovely body of St. Bernadette and said, “I see a woman who loves you dearly.” After a pause the question was repeated.
From where I stood I looked more closely at Bernadette's uncorrupted body and replied, “I see that you have the power to prevent the corruption of death.” A third time the voice asked, “What do you see?”
Her uncorrupted body lay there in front of me, but in my mind I could clearly see the many moments, with all her subtle nuances of movement, when she had received Our Lord at Mass. So I thoughtfully answered, “I see that the Roman Catholic sacraments give what they promise.”
At that moment I felt as if I had crossed a vast frontier. And just as suddenly as it began it was over. I found myself back in Queens, N.Y., standing in the doorway to the kitchen. I was also aware that I had become Roman Catholic and that I needed to lay down my Lutheran ministry, since it could not provide the Eucharist of the Catholic Church.
So I resigned that week but stayed on for several months, at the congregation's request, until a new pastor could be found.
What did you do next?
My family and I returned to Columbus, Ohio. I went to the nearest Catholic church, which happened to be Holy Name Catholic Church, and introduced myself to the pastor, Father William Reichert, with these words: “Hello, my name is Noah Lett. I no longer want to be a Lutheran pastor, I want to become a Catholic.” Father Reichert contacted the bishop and eventually the date was set for my daughter and me to be received into the Church in 1989.
What have you found to be the most difficult hurdle as a black Catholic?
One of the things that concerns me now—this is something that I had given very little thought to until recently—is the widespread ignorance most African-Americans have of the Church and her teachings. How sad that so many are unaware of this healing treasure so near to them.
Of the 32 million African-Americans in the United States, about 4 million are Catholic. Yet they have, for a variety of reasons, very little influence in the African-American community. The Black Muslim movement in the United States is less than 70 years old and numbers less than 4 million members and yet their influence is much greater.
I would like to be instrumental in helping African-American Catholics pass on the faith to their children and in helping them develop new tools with which to evangelize their neighbors, who presently know nothing about the Church but who could at any given moment be incited to become genuinely curious.
What are the most common misconceptions about black Catholics?
The most common misconception held by white Catholics, especially many in leadership, is that black Catholics are, as a group, interested in having Baptist-like actions of worship mixed in with the Mass. Any parish with African-Americans that does not allow or encourage this is assumed to be yet another obstacle on the road to progress. Most African-American Catholics want what Pope John Paul II wants—a Mass celebrated according to the rubrics in the Roman Missal. This is what our Catholic parents passed on to us and what we desperately want to pass on to our children.
Non-Catholic African-Americans have a unique misunderstanding. They look upon black Catholics as an oddity, so they treat us, with all sincerity of heart, as if we are members of just one more denomination. In my family, for instance, they make this assumption. Fortunately, from time to time they become curious, and I try to answer their questions about how being Catholic is different than being a member of a denomination.
Tell me about your television program. I understand it is still running in reruns on EWTN, correct?
Yes. It began airing last September. The genesis of the program was Mother Angelica's wish that her friend, Dr. Dolores Grier, host a series for the network. Eventually, I was asked to assist Dr. Grier. Early in the development of the series, we agreed that our personal love for the Church and our individual practices of traditional devotions should be evident in every program, no matter what the topic. This was to show that we were not dissidents or experimentalists, complaining about the Church because of some political or other kind of agenda. But like the ordinary Catholic, we love the Church and attentively listen to the magisterium. The series was well received and continues to air.
How has Catholicism shaped your view of race?
I was never ashamed of being black; however, I was inattentive to it—I was just a man. The Catholic Church is teaching me that yes, I am a man, but also a black man, and this is a gift of God given to me for my salvation, the good of others and the glory of God.
I never had an interest in evangelizing a particular place or people, but now because of the grace of the sacraments, I find myself wishing like St. Stephen that I could go and share the riches of the Church with the race of my birth. How wonderful it is to be Catholic and discover, by our sacraments and teaching, that every one of us should be attentive to our race, because it is a gift meant to enrich the whole world.
Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tim Drake ----- KEYWORDS: Inperson -------- TITLE: A Modest Proposal: American Psychiatric Association Ponders Pedophilia DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:ARLINGTON, Va.—Controversy surrounds the American Psychiatric Association in the aftermath of news reports that presenters at its annual conference in May called for pedophilia and other sexual problems to be considered sane behavior.
Psychiatrist Charles Moser of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco and psychologist Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa argued before the American Psychiatric Association membership that the logic of the association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for mental disorders is flawed.
Citing the 1973 decision to removed homosexuality from the third edition of the authoritative manual, Moser said the fact that some abnormal sexual preferences are not considered mental illness means none can be classified as mental illness, even if they are morally objectionable or even, as in the case of pedophilia, illegal.
The current edition of the manual, with revisions, is referred to by professionals as DSM-IV TR. It speaks of disorders known as paraphilias and defines them as “recurrent intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviors that generally involved nonhuman subjects, children or other non-consenting adults, or the suffering or humiliation of oneself or one's partner.”
Defending his position in a prepared statement, Moser said, “Some individuals have interpreted [the report] as suggesting that we support child sexual abuse. We are strongly opposed to child sexual abuse and believe that anyone convicted of this crime should be punished.”
Quoting from his presentation to the American Psychiatric Association conference in late May, he said, “We would argue that the removal of pedophilia from the [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual] would focus attention on the criminal aspects of these acts and not allow the perpetrators to claim mental illness as a defense nor use it to mitigate responsibility for their crimes.”
Also in a prepared statement, the American Psychiatric Association disavowed any implied support for Moser's proposal or the possibility that paraphilias would be removed from the diagnostic manual. The association reiterated its position that “mentally ill” is defined as “anything that harms an individual or others,” and said, “There are no plans or processes set up that would lead to the removal of the paraphilias from their consideration as legitimate mental disorders.”
What's Normal?
Although controversial, Moser's proposal is not the first to challenge the American Psychiatric Association's standard for mental illness as vague and subjective. Since 1973, some psychologists and psychiatrists have been arguing that lacking a scientifically provable definition of normal behavior, the mental health field cannot accurately define abnormality without reference to legal or moral definitions specifically rejected by the American Psychiatric Association as a standard.
Dr. Michael First, text editor for the DSM-IV TR, insists that this is unjustified.
“The issues surrounding the concept of the definition of mental disorder are no different than issues involved in the definition of medical disorder in general,” he said.
Citing the changing definition of “high blood pressure” as an example, First said, “There are, in fact, no hard boundaries separating normal from disorder, and as we learn more about the negative consequences of conditions, boundaries could change. [For both] the condition must represent a biological or psychological dysfunction in the organism and it must be of sufficient severity as to result in harm to the individual or others.”
First said psychological dysfunction is defined as causing distress, functional impairment or future significant risk for harm. “Empirical data that sheds light on the nature of the dysfunction as well as the manifestation of harm,” he said, “can be helpful in readjusting normal-abnormal boundaries.”
Dr. Janet Gebelt, assistant professor of developmental psychology at the University of Portland, calls these “fuzzy criteria.” She agrees with Moser that the definitions are subjective and personal.
“Is a person feeling unhappy because of the behavior or because of other people's reaction to the behavior?” she asked.
“Distress caused by prejudice or discrimination is not a form of distress that meets the definition of disorder,” she said. “I don't think any psychologist would say society is always right.”
While Gebelt insists psychology can be based on scientific experiments and observations, she said the studies will only define normal as “common” behavior, not necessarily “right” behavior. “Normal is an absence of abnormality,” she said.
Noting that a 1963 study by Dr. Stanley Milgram induced a large number of randomly selected people to deliver what they believed to be fatal electric shocks to another person, she said, “You can take perfectly ordinary people and make them do evil. This doesn't constitute mental illness, but that doesn't make these actions excusable.”
Oblate of St. Frances de Sales Father John Harvey disagrees with Moser's claim that sexual disorders rest on cultural definitions.
“Cultural concepts can change the definition somewhat,” said Father Harvey, director of Courage, an organization for Catholics with homosexual tendencies. “However, it's one thing to say you don't know where the line is and another entirely to say you can't define normal.”
However, Dr. A. Dean Byrd, vice president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality and clinical professor of medicine for the University of Utah, disagrees with some of Moser's conclusions—but not his assertions about the subjectivity of the diagnostic manual. He calls the American Psychiatric Association's standards political activism masquerading as science.
I do not object to the [American Psychiatric Association] presenting a worldview,” he said. “I do object to the [American Psychiatric Association] presenting one world-view and labeling it as science.”
Science neither has nor can provide answers to moral dilemmas,” Byrd said. “So, how do we resolve this disagreement about the definition of mental illness? The [American Psychiatric Association] could begin by acknowledging the value-ladenness of the mental health enterprise.”
“An open dialogue and spirited debate is needed to discuss these issues. What factors enhance human dignity? How do we define human flourishing?” Byrd said. “The [American Psychiatric Association] slides down a slippery slope when it advocates what amounts to a virtual censorship of the scientific investigation of politically unpopular views. Science advances by asking interesting questions, not by avoiding questions whose answers may not be helpful in achieving a particular political agenda.”
Philip S. Moore is based in Vancouver, Washington.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Philip S. Moore ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Unborn Lost in the Translation
According to a June 29 report by the Columbia Daily Tribune, two of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president omit their strong pro-abortion stances on their Spanish Web sites: the (formerly pro-life) Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
Is it a strategic choice, knowing that many Hispanics, Catholic and not, wouldn't vote for someone they know to favor killing the unborn?
When contacted, the congressmen's campaigns said they simply had not finished their translation work on the sites. They promised that the candidates' strong “pro-choice” positions would find their way onto the sites when they were completed—although, according to the paper, they did not specify when that would happen.
Wal-Mart Embraces ‘Gay Rights’
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 2—After an extensive lobbying campaign conducted by a small group of homosexual-activist shareholders, America's largest private employer, Wal-Mart Corp., has decided to include homosexuals in the list of protected groups in its anti-discrimination policy, according to the Associated Press.
The Pride Foundation, which led the shareholder campaign, boasted about the policy change it had wrought:
“The change means nine of the 10-largest Fortune 500 companies now have rules prohibiting discrimination against gay employees, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The one exception is the Exxon Mobil Corp.,” it said in a statement.
For those concerned with the traditional family, the news was a disappointment, coming less than two months after the retail chain removed several racy magazines from its shelves. Wal-Mart also will require its 1.1 million employees to undergo “sensitivity training.”
Ten Commandments Un-American?
CNSNEWS.COM, July 2—In what CNSNews.com called a stinging rebuke, a federal appeals court on July 1 demanded that Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore remove his display of the Ten Commandments from his courthouse—and asserted that the commandments had played no major part in American history.
The three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals compared Moore's refusal to remove the monument to past refusal of southern governors to comply with desegregation orders.
“That there were some government acknowledgments of God at the time of this country's founding and indeed are some today, however, does not justify under the Establishment Clause a 5,280-pound granite monument placed in the central place of honor in a state's judicial building,” the court ruled.
One of its arguments against the monument was that it used a specific Protestant translation and ordering of the commandments, which Jews and Catholics might find objectionable—although no Catholic groups were involved in the attempt to remove the monument.
Moore has garnered vast public support among Alabama
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Pro-Lifers Press on With Agenda After Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Victory DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:WASHINGTON—The first federal law banning an abortion procedure since abortion was legalized nationwide in 1973 is about to become law.
The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are preparing to iron out differences in bills both houses passed this year banning partial-birth abortions. Republican leadership was trying to appoint representatives to a conference committee over Democratic objections the week of July 7, but many expect that President Bush could sign a bill into law by summer's end.
That would be a sweet victory for pro-life activists after an eight-year struggle over banning such abortions—years that saw vetoes by former President Clinton and failures in Congress to override those vetoes.
But activists credit the debate—which engendered vivid descriptions of a fully formed baby being stabbed in the neck while in the process of being born—with educating the American public about the horrors of abortion.
Surveys seem to indicate that the ongoing effort has had an effect.
A Gallup poll indicated in May that almost as many Americans identify themselves as “pro-life” as they do “pro-choice,” with “pro-choice” edging out “pro-life” 48% to 45%. As recently as 1995, Americans favored the “pro-choice” label by a 56% to 33% margin.
“Soon we will have over 50% of Americans who call themselves ‘pro-life,’” said Cathleen Cleaver, director of planning and information for the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “[Abortion activists] are going to have a problem painting half of America as the fringe.”
They might also have a problem convincing people that women want abortion.
Changing Hearts
A recent poll conducted by the pro-abortion Center for the Advancement of Women found that 51% of women said the government should prohibit abortion or limit it to extreme cases, such as rape, incest or life-threatening situations.
In addition to federal measures, there are many states working on—or that have already passed— incremental legislation for parental consent or notification, a 24-hour waiting period, unborn victims of violence and the end of state funding of abortions.
But legislative efforts to end or curtail abortion are not the only avenue to bring about a culture of life. Some pro-life activists are devoting more energy to educational and cultural activities.
In March the Society of Jesus issued a major statement against abortion. It read, in part: “The close linking of service of faith and the promotion of justice has been a hallmark of Jesuit ministries from the very beginning. There can be no service of faith without the promotion of justice. Jesuits, therefore, must seek an end to the injustice of abortion.”
Jesuit Father Richard Ryscavage serves as head of social and international ministries for the Society of Jesus in the United States. He said the 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision provided “a good time to weigh in on the debate.”
“Congress is so fickle. If they had their choice, they wouldn't deal with abortion,” Father Ryscavage said. In the absence of political courage, he suggested local activism.
“I think the Church needs to get more involved in providing alternatives at the local level,” he said. “In a way, Jesuits haven't been known for talking about this collectively. Now is the time to talk about it in the parishes and in the schools.”
Judie Brown, president of American Life League, noted that her organization has abandoned the legislative arena for now. This is partly due to her opposition to the partial-birth abortion ban bill. She opposed the bill because it featured an exemption for the life of the mother and because the two-year penalty for committing a partial-birth abortion ranked considerably lower than regular sentences for homicide.
“What we are saying is that the child that is nearly born doesn't carry the same sentence as any other murder,” Brown said. “The partial-birth abortion ban is a scam. It doesn't ban anything.”
So Brown said her group would focus on four major educational outreaches.
“We've decided—and I think we should have done this years ago—that we'll win the battle politically when we win the hearts and minds of the people,” she said.
The first is the organization's construction of a $50 million Campus for Life center on 135 acres in Stafford, Va., that would educate Americans on the early stages of human development and provide online courses for credit.
She also has a goal of peacefully closing every Planned Parenthood clinic in the country within six years through the grass-roots activism of two American Life League affiliates, Rock for Life and Stop Planned Parenthood.
Another initiative of American Life League caught significant media attention when the organization took out newspaper ads in the Washington Times, which labeled 12 senators who were abortion supporters and Catholic as the “Dirty Dozen.”
The ad campaign inaugurated the organization's new affiliate, the Crusade for the Defense of the Catholic Church. The newspaper spots drew immediate fire from the senators, but individual bishops have not expressed anything negative about the campaign.
“We've said we can take the arrows. In that case, the bishops don't get the arrows,” Brown said. “It's a no-lose situation for souls.”
Powerful Images
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life is very focused on educational matters as well. His group has asked a medical company to provide the most accurate pictures that depict an actual dilation and extraction abortion, which is the most common abortion procedure in the United States. He also intends to order a similar picture series for a vacuum abortion, which is used in the first four months.
“When we look at how we won the debate on partial-birth abortion, we realize that for the first time, people saw what abortion was about,” he said. “The pictures showing the procedure have been on C-SPAN, in newspaper advertisements and at rallies.”
Father Pavone wants to make the general public just as aware of the other two abortion procedures through these medical diagrams.
“The anti-smoking movement, the anti-fur movement, the cause against drunk-driving have all used visual images,” he said.
While pictures can be worth a thousand words, sometimes the best arguments in American society are personal stories. For many years, this worked against the pro-life cause because the unborn child was unable to speak in his own defense, except in the case where he survives an abortion.
In the public debate during the last several decades, the only stories Americans often heard were of women asserting a need for an abortion because of some personal tragedy.
But the bishops' conference's Cleaver said that's all changing with an organization called the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. It is made up of women who have had abortions but later began to regret their decisions.
“The most credible voice on abortion is not doctors or feminists but women who've had an abortion,” Cleaver said. “Finally, after 30 years, we have this voice that is being heard.”
She said even the media, often seen as biased in favor of abortion, is receptive to retelling the stories of these women.
“The mainstream can't help but report on this,” Cleaver said. “They're showing the pictures of the women holding the signs saying, ‘I regret my abortion.’”
She said support for abortion in America rests on two things: denial of the personhood of the unborn child and the belief that abortion is a problem-solver for women.
“We've all but won the argument on the humanity of the child. Every time they see a photo, like the GE commercial [for ultrasound technology] or the Newsweek cover [showing babies in the womb], it reinforces what they already know,” Cleaver said.
But abortion will remain legal, she said, until Americans reject the notion that abortion is good for women.
“In 1992, the Supreme Court said that abortion could not be made illegal because women have come to rely on abortion,” Cleaver said. “That is all that abortion is standing on now.”
Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joshua Mercer ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Vatican Ponders U.N. Membership
“We will have to weigh carefully the consequences and the advantages and disadvantages of such a step,” the archbishop told reporters. “We are at the stage of elaborating the project, which is currently being studied by lawyers in the [Vatican] State Secretariat.”
The Holy See is currently represented at the United Nations in New York by its permanent observer, Archbishop Celestino Migliore.
Archbishop Tauran said no decision had yet been made on full U.N. membership.
Hindu Nationalists Denounce Pope's Remarks
TIMES (INDIA) NEWS NETWORK, July 7— In a resolution passed July 6, the Hindu nationalist group RSS called on the Indian government to lodge a protest against Pope John Paul II for alleged interference in Indian affairs, reported India's Times News Service.
According to the resolution, the Pope's call for Christians to spread their faith in India as in every other land constituted an attempt “to infringe on our national ethos and disturb peace.”
RSS called John Paul's statement a “direct challenge” to Indian local “sovereignty” and suggested that force, fraud or bribery were involved in many conversions to Christianity. It asserted that “conversion is not just a change of the form of worship of prayer but subversion of national loyalty.”
The past months have seen ongoing tensions between local Indian officials with ties to extremist nationalist groups and the Holy See, which points to attacks on local Christians and attempts to persecute missionaries as violations of international human-rights agreements India has signed—and by which it is bound—which include the freedom of religion.
Vatican Seeks Agreement With Czech Government
CTK NEWS AGENCY, July 5—According to Prague-based CTK News, the Holy See still awaits an official note from the Czech government clarifying the relations between the Church and the Czech state. The news service cited a July 5 statement by Czech Catholic Bishops' Conference spokesman Daniel Herman.
This past spring, the Czech lower house of parliament, its Chamber of Deputies, refused by a strong majority of votes to ratify the agreement previously signed between the Vatican and Prague.
“The Holy See has expressed its surprise and regret over the rejection of the agreement by the Czech Parliament,” Herman told the news service. “The main question on which it is necessary to agree will be whether the Czech government and the parties supporting it are interested in an agreement with the Holy See.”
The Czech Republic is one of the last post-communist gov-
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: In Times of Distress, Prayer Restores a Zest for Life DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Register Summary
“The best thing for us is the union of our will with the will of our heavenly Father, because only in this way can we receive all his love, which brings salvation and the fullness of life,” Pope John Paul II told 7,000 pilgrims who gathered for his general audience July 9. The Holy Father was offering his reflections on Psalm 143 as he continued his series of teachings on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours.
Although Psalm 143, one of the seven penitential psalms found in the Book of Psalms, is characterized by a note of gloom as the psalmist cries out in distress, the psalm invokes God's promise of salvation and recalls God's marvelous deeds in the past, the Holy Father said. When God's people are faced with adversity and trials, they do not lose hope. On the contrary, they cry out to him, confident that he will help.
“The psalmist is aware of this and therefore expresses this desire,” John Paul noted. “He professes a faith that is genuine and fitting to God his savior, who rescues him from distress and gives him a zest for life.”
This is the true power of prayer, the Holy Father said. “When it arises from a situation that is particularly distressing, prayer leads to hope, joy and light, thanks to sincerely following God and his will, which is a will of love. This is the power of prayer, which generates life and salvation.”
Psalm 143, which we just heard, is the last of the so-called “penitential Psalms,” which are seven psalms of petition that are spread throughout the Book of Psalms (see Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143). They are used in our Christian tradition to ask the Lord to forgive us our sins. The text that we wish to examine more closely today is one that St. Paul, who perceived the radical sinfulness of every human being, was particularly fond of: “Before you no living being can be just” (verse 2). This phrase formed the basis of the apostle's teaching on sin and grace (see Galatians 2:16; Romans 3:20).
Morning prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours proposes this petition to us as a profession of our faithfulness and a plea for God's help at the beginning of the day. In fact, as we pray the psalm, we say to God: “At dawn let me hear of your kindness, for in you I trust” (Psalm 143:8).
A Plea for Help
The psalm begins with an intense and insistent cry to God, who is faithful to the promise of salvation that he has made to his people (see verse 1). The psalmist acknowledges that he has no merits of his own that would make him worthy; therefore, he humbly asks God not to assume the attitude of a judge (see verse 2).
He then portrays the dramatic situation, which is like a deadly nightmare, with which he is struggling. The enemy, who represents the evil in history and in the world, has led him to the threshold of death. In fact, we see him prostrate in the earth's dust, which is already an image of the tomb; we see the darkness, which is the negation of the light that is God's sign of life; finally, we see “those long dead” (see verse 3), among whom he already seems to be banished.
The psalmist's life itself has been devastated. At this point he cannot breathe and his heart seems like a piece of ice that is unable to keep on beating (see verse 4). Only the hands of this faithful man, who has been knocked down and trampled upon, remain free, and he raises them up to heaven in a gesture that is both a plea for help and a pursuit for support (see verse 6). Indeed, his thoughts turn to the past, when God worked wonders (see verse 5).
Hope Amid Darkness
This spark of hope melts the frozen stream of suffering and trial in which the psalmist feels like he has been immersed and about to be swept away (see verse 7). Nevertheless, the tension is still strong, but a ray of light seems to emerge on the horizon. At this point, we move on to the second part of the psalm (see verses 7-11).
This part begins with a new and urgent appeal. The faithful man, feeling as though his life is slipping away, cries out to God: “Hasten to answer me, Lord; for my spirit fails me” (see verse 7). Moreover, he fears that God has hidden his face and distanced himself from him, abandoning his creature and leaving him to his own devices.
The disappearance of God's face causes the man to fall prey to despair, indeed, to death itself, since the Lord is the source of life. It is precisely at this extreme that his trust in God, who does not abandon us, flourishes. The psalmist multiplies his pleas and backs them up with declarations of trust in the Lord. “For in you I trust … for to you I entrust my life … for in you I hope … for you are my God …” He asks to be delivered from his enemies (see verses 8-12) and freed from anguish (see verse 11), but he also repeatedly makes a request that manifests a profound spiritual aspiration: “Teach me to do your will, for you are my God” (verse 10a; see verses 8b, 10b). We must make this very admirable request our own. We must understand that the best thing for us is the union of our will with the will of our heavenly Father, because only in this way can we receive all his love, which brings salvation and the fullness of life. If it is not accompanied by a strong desire to be docile to God, our trust in him is not genuine.
Source of Life
The psalmist is aware of this and therefore expresses this desire. He professes a faith that is genuine and fitting to God his savior, who rescues him from distress and gives him a zest for life, in the name of his “justice,” which is his loving and saving faithfulness (see verse 11). When it arises from a situation that is particularly distressing, prayer leads to hope, joy and light, thanks to sincerely following God and his will, which is a will of love. This is the power of prayer, which generates life and salvation.
Fixing his gaze on the morning light of grace (see verse 8), St. Gregory the Great, in his commentary on the seven penitential Psalms, describes the dawn of hope and joy in this way: “It is the day illuminated by that true sun that knows no setting, clouds that do not darken and fog that cannot obscure … When Christ, our life, appears, and we begin to see God with his face uncovered, it is then that every shade of darkness will disappear, the smoke of ignorance will vanish, and the mist of temptation will dissipate … It will be the most luminous and splendid day, prepared for all the elect by the one who has snatched us from the power of darkness and has transferred us to the Kingdom of his beloved Son.
“The morning of that day is the future resurrection … In that morning the happiness of the righteous will shine forth, glory will appear and exultation will be seen, when God will wipe away every tear from the eyes of the saints, when death, at last, will be destroyed, when the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of the Father.
“That morning, the Lord will make his mercy felt … saying: ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father’ (Matthew 25:34). Then the mercy of God will be manifested, which the human mind cannot conceive in the present life. In fact, the Lord has prepared for those who love him, that which no eye has seen, no ear has heard and that has not entered into the heart of man” (LF 79, coll. 649-650).
(Register translation)
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Vatican -------- TITLE: Mostly Christian Southern Sudanese Continue to Feel Effects of Civil War DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:KHARTOUM, Sudan—Even as President Bush prepared to visit nearby Uganda on July 11, there were indications the Islamic government of Sudan just north of there was preparing for more possible military action against Sudanese freedom fighters.
Sudan watcher Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., reported July 7 that the National Islamic Front government has been preparing military resupply efforts in a southern garrison town in violation of cease-fire agreements.
President Bush and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights have made assurances that a peace process is on track. Yet the people of Sudan seem to be no better off than they have been during a civil war that has dragged on since 1982.
President Bush did not make Sudan part of his five-nation African tour in early July.
The country's civil war has been primarily between the Arab Muslims in the north and black Africans in the south, where a significant part of the population is Christian.
At times, there has been intertribal fighting in the South, and some Southern tribes have even sided with the government against the Sudan People's Liberation Army, the main rebel group.
However, the Africans have borne the brunt of the war. War and famine have killed more than 2 million people and displaced in excess of 4 million—the vast majority being Southerners.
U.S., U.N. and Sudan
Last year, the U.S. Congress passed the Sudan Peace Act, which requires the president and secretary of state to make six-month reports to Congress on the progress of peace negotiations in the northeast African country.
If the president certifies that all parties are negotiating in good faith, then negotiations and financial support for them will go forward. If the opposite determination is made, the president has authority to sanction the offending party.
The first report, made in late April, found that the two main parties, the government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and its army, have been negotiating in good faith. This finding came despite the fact that there were numerous cease-fire violations, most of which, observers say, came from government forces.
Since the April report, news reports indicate that not only has the government carried out aggression against civilians in the South, but it has also stepped up oppression in the North, including repression of media and those who oppose the government.
In early April, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which was chaired by Libya, narrowly voted to remove Sudan from a list of countries that have a “special rapporteur,” an individual who gives information to the United Nations on human-rights abuses. Sudan was also part of the commission but did not abstain from the vote. Many people, including Sudan's Catholic bishops, opposed this move since it would essentially give a free hand to the Islamic government to increase oppression.
According to Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the United States was ready to acquiesce and allow the vote to go forward without raising opposition to it. However, she said, a member of the delegation started working at the last minute and got the European nations to oppose such a move. It was not enough, though, and the African countries voted as a bloc on the issue.
The result is there is no longer a U.N. observer to independently verify reports of human-rights abuses, something Sudan advocates say is necessary in order to keep international pressure on the government.
That pressure is clearly needed, but some critics say it's not coming sufficiently from the United States. These critics cite two recent attacks as proof. A midnight attack of 10 villages on May 22 by Sudanese government forces killed 59 people. And 13 months earlier, government troops in the same area of Sudan massacred 3,000 people.
The larger massacre was supposed to have been investigated by the U.S. State Department, but Dennis Bennett of the evangelical relief group Servants Heart, who reported both attacks, claims the investigation didn't happen soon enough, and Khartoum felt free to do it again—even when the cease-fire was in place.
State of Negotiations
Gen. Omar el-Bashir, president of Sudan, and John Garang, head of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and its army, met in April for the first time in 20 years and stated that a peace agreement should be reached by the end of June. Talks resumed July 6 and were expected to last a week. More negotiations about permanent security were scheduled to take place later.
Additionally, issues on the status of Khartoum, the capital, are beginning to crop up. The peace agreement calls for the South to remain part of the country for six years, but it would not be under Islamic Shariah law (the religiously based law of Islam) as is the rest of the country. After six years, a vote would be taken on self-determination for the people of the South.
But Garang has recently asked for Khartoum to be given a secular status during that time and not to be under Shariah law, since it is the capital of a diverse nation. Bashir is opposing the move, saying Shariah is the law of the land and should be especially so in Khartoum. Bashir has also called for a renewed jihad in the South.
These events are happening at the same time that the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative in northern Uganda is claiming Sudan is again providing arms and equipment to the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda.
The Lord's Resistance Army is rebelling against the Ugandan government and has become a terrorist group, according to the United States. It has assisted the Sudanese government against the people of the South along with fighting its own war in Uganda.
Sudan denies the claim, but news reports cite several witnesses who have seen Lord's Resistance Army guerillas in the area with new uniforms and weaponry.
Additionally, the Lord's Resistance Army is targeting Catholic clergy and nuns. Father Carlos Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, told Reuters news agency that the head of the Lord's Resistance Army, Joseph Kony, ordered his commanders to kill Catholic priests and nuns.
“We have no reason to doubt the message was authentic,” Father Rodriguez said. “In the last five weeks [the Lord's Resistance Army] has burned, bombed and desecrated churches on nine occasions.”
Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz is based in Altura, Minnesota.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Media Watch DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Feminists Defend Fujimori Population Programs
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/REUTERS, June 30—Even as a Peruvian congressional commission concluded that former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori conducted a “no-holds-barred sterilization campaign” aimed at minorities, the impoverished, Catholics and traditional families, Peruvian feminist groups have rallied behind the disgraced, deposed president's family planning policies, according to the Associated Press.
The congressional commission said in the June report that Fujimori's programs had the help of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.N. Population Fund.
Susana Chavez of the feminist organization Manuela Ramos defended Fujimori's program as “excellent in terms of access and information.” She attacked current Health Minister Fernando Carbone and Prime Minister Luis Solari for cutting government funding for artificial contraception and refusing to support the abortifacient “morning-after pill.”
The Manuela Ramos group claims that of the 600,000 Peruvians born each year, at least half are unwanted or ill timed; the organization does not say how it knows this.
The AP reported that current president Alejandro Toledo's health ministry has focused its energy on making births safer rather than preventing them.
Belfast Campaigners Laud Review of Abortion Law
INDEPENDENT CATHOLIC NEWS, July 7—The leading pro-life group in Great Britain, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, has welcomed a decision by Belfast high court Justice Brian Kerr to review the legality of abortion in Northern Ireland.
Independent Catholic News quoted Betty Gibson, chairman of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children in Northern Ireland, who said: “The pro-abortion lobby … wants to make abortion widely available in Northern Ireland and claims that the law here is unclear. [The society]'s case is that the law is perfectly clear. The law on abortion in Northern Ireland gives considerable protection to unborn children, which is what the overwhelming majority of people here want.”
As Mo Mowlam, a former secretary of state for Northern Ireland, once put it when she complained about the strength of opposition to abortion here: “It's called democracy.”
Two Leading Bishops Die
CHALDEAN NEWS AGENCY/VHEADLINE.COM, July 7—July has seen the deaths of two important Catholic clerics at opposite ends of the world, according to local news services.
In Beirut on July 7, Chaldean Patriarch Mar Raphael I Bidawid, an outspoken critic of U.N. sanctions against Iraq since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, died at age 81 after nine months of illness. After studies in Rome, he returned to his native Iraq as a priest in 1947. He served as rector of the seminary in Mosul and bishop of Amadya in northern Iraq. In 1966 he was transferred to the Diocese of Beirut and became patriarch of the Chaldean Catholics in 1989.
In Venezuela, Cardinal Ignacio Velasco Garcia, archbishop of Caracas, died July 6 at age 74, Vheadline.com, a Venezuelan news Web site, reported. Cardinal Velasco gained renown recently by taking part in the civil campaign to recall and remove from power leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Cardinal Velasco was ordained a priest in the Salesian order in 1955. He was made a bishop in 1989 and appointed archbishop of Caracas in 1995.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: News -------- TITLE: Massachusetts' Marriage Mess DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:It's hard to write about homosexuality nowadays. If you make a moral argument against homosexuality, you'll sound judgmental to modern ears—and your argument will be mistaken for hatred of homosexuals themselves. On the other hand, those of us who see a moral problem with homosexual conduct have a hard time believing those who defend things like homosexual marriage. We are so used to seeing honesty on this question sacrificed for political correctness that we have a hard time believing homosexuals' claims about their own relationships.
But now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court is set to weigh in on the debate—in a decision that will likely send the question up the ladder to the U.S. Supreme Court—we have to look at homosexuality and homosexual relationships very openly and honestly.
In such a culture, how do we convince people that homosexual marriage is wrong? For most people, the morality of a thing and its consequences are inextricably linked. They know it's immoral to lie, not because it harms truth, but because it harms liars.
What are the consequences of homosexual “unions”?
One thing has to be admitted at the outset: There are homosexual couples who are committed, caring people who mean well and really do love each other. To dismiss all homosexual couples as pariahs is unhelpful and unfair.
But to be honest, we also need to admit that those sorts of homosexual relationships are rare in the homosexual world.
One of the ironies of our society is that we see what homosexual life is like, right in front of us, and insist on keeping only an ideal image of it in our minds. Take homosexual entertainment. A homosexual channel was started in Canada, but it got extremely low ratings until it added hard-core homosexual pornography. Is that a sign of a healthy community?
The honesty of John McKellar is refreshing. A homosexual himself, he is against homosexual marriage. He told Crisis magazine: “Our lifestyle is very much about party, pageant, parade and promiscuity. We want to have our cake and eat it, too. There was an article in the gay press last year titled, ‘How to Stay Married and Still Be a Slut.’”
It's also ironic that we who have more sociological data about the consequence of domestic violence and divorce than any other society before us are on the verge of allowing homosexual marriage.
Domestic abuse is common among homosexuals. Web sites for homosexuals include a lot of information about the high rates of violence among homosexual lovers. They even offer friendly tips like “What to do if you're being abusive.” Salon magazine reported in 1997 that incidents of “gay-on-gay” violence were far more common than anti-homosexual violence. Lori Girshick's research on lesbian battering has shown how prevalent it is.
And what about sexual abuse of minors? Pedophilia is a different disorder entirely, but it is undeniable that homosexuals see sex with teen boys as a rite of passage. That concept has appeared in the show “Queer as Folk.” One episode featured “the deflowering of a 17-year-old preppie hungry for initiation,” according to one promotion. Canada's homosexual cable-TV channel features a series of movies called “Boy's Life.”
This world is not one in which children thrive.
So how do we stop homosexual marriage in the face of opposition from the court? Exactly as Peter Wolfgang suggests on the opposite page: with elbow grease.
Massachusetts' decision will have enormous consequences, but it should not prompt defenders of marriage to surrender the battle. In America, there are American ways to stop legal changes. The democratic system doesn't give the final word to any branch of government. If anyone has the final word, it's voters.
Whenever homosexual marriage is put to a vote, it fails. So we should start putting it to a vote. The best way is the Federal Marriage Amendment. Find information on it at: www.allianceformarriage.org.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Letters DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:The Content of Our Catechesis
The editorial “A Year After Dallas” (June 29-July 5) discussed the implementation of national sex-abuse policy by the U.S. bishops. The editorial stated that “In St. Louis the bishops discussed three questions a plenary council would address: the need for catechesis, the role of laity and the spiritual life of priests and bishops.” The item then goes on to say that these topics “go to the heart of the crisis”—presumably the sex-abuse crisis.
From the point of view of this layman, there is one issue even more fundamental than these three topics: the ignoring of Humanae Vitae by the bishops and priests in our country.
There is a profound schizophrenia in the U.S. Catholic Church over the issue of sexual morality that stems from the-semi-rejection of Humanae Vitae by bishops and priests. Why do we have an organization known as Priests for Life? Are not all priests for life? Well, no, many are for artificial contraception and abortion. Is there any wonder we are having a sex-abuse crisis?
The embarrassed silence on this issue on the part of bishops and priests speaks volumes to the faithful. Before catechesis we need to address the content of the catechesis. Even the role of the laity and the spiritual life of priests and bishops is mere tinkering around the edges unless and until the bishops themselves demonstrate their obedience to the vicar of Christ.
How will the faithful know that their bishops and priests embrace Humanae Vitae? By hearing-it proudly proclaimed by-their shepherds.
May we address the real problem in the sex abuse crisis and end this-tragic episode in the history of the American Church.
BILL MCKENZIE
St. Louis
Nothing Doing at Notre Dame
Thanks to Tim Drake for addressing Notre Dame's dirty little secret (“Notre Dame to Parents: We Won't Tell,” July 6-12).
The article barely scrapes the tip of the iceberg of the increasingly lax attitude toward Church mandates within the Notre Dame community. I graduated from Notre Dame's sister school, St. Mary's College, in '99, and was often dismayed at the non-Catholicism of the theology department. I did take one course “across the street” in Mariology at my brother school, and fortunately found the professor (a Jesuit priest whom I never, ever-saw in a Roman collar) mostly in line with the teachings of the Church. However, rumblings in the conservative community regarding the non-Catholicism-of the theology department increased throughout my time there.
My faith did grow as a member of the Notre Dame family, as I became a member of the Ladies of Columbus and served as an acolyte at Basilica Masses. These activities, however, were detached from the theology department and were decidedly extracurricular. A student attending St. Mary's or Notre Dame can find some wonderful fostering there regarding their Catholic faith, but they're going to have to look pretty darn hard.
Keep up the great work.
MARY BETH ELLIS
Orlando, Florida
Embryo Adoption Again
Well, a letter on the subject of embryo adoption has finally appeared (“Embryo Adoption,” Letters, July 13-19).
There are three things to answer in Kitty Cleveland's letter. First is the notion that surrogacy is defined by what happens after birth. This is the position of the advocates of embryo adoption, i.e., that unless the woman who is carrying another woman's child surrenders the child she is carrying to the genetic mother, then no surrogacy is involved. This is completely erroneous. The evil of surrogacy consists in the pregnancy (one woman carrying another woman's child) and not in what happens after birth.
The second thing to answer is whether the quote from Donum Vitae is taken out of context. Yes, it is taken out of its original context but that does not mean that the concept it embodies could not be applied to another context. And the words in the document that the spare embryos are exposed to an absurd fate—i.e., that they have no place to go is a statement of fact, independent of context. Were the authors of this document not aware of the possibility of embryo adoption to solve this dilemma?
The third thing to answer is the implication that Msgr. William Smith has no other basis to oppose this notion. However, in the original article, he speaks of embryo adoption as an additional trespass to the one incurred with in vitro fertilization. This is where he hits the nail on the head, in my view. Embryo adoption merely expands the original evil intent of the scientist who practices in vitro fertilization. The act of implantation of the embryo into the womb of the genetic mother is evil and hence so is the act of implantation into the womb of a surrogate. Orthodox Catholics should know that the ends do not justify-the means. To borrow Msgr. Smith's term, embryo adoption is an additional trespass on the procreative design of the Creator. And it is he, not creatures, who determines who shall live or die. Who are these advocates of embryo adoption to play God, anyway?
Spare embryos are in the same boat as aborted fetuses. They've reached the end of their earthly sojourn. They are victims of the evil design of men. They may be seen as martyrs to the moral law and hence receive an implicit baptism of blood. These human creatures who have no personal sin are more precious in the eyes of God than any of us who have lived and sinned on the earth. Let them go to the arms of God.
PAUL A. TROUVE
Montague, New Jersey
Pray for Gregory Peck
Local Catholic papers printed a long eulogy on Gregory Peck from the Catholic News Service saying what a great man he was and an exemplary Catholic, but the article failed to mention that he was a strong outspoken proponent for the killing of 4,000-plus pre-born babies a day in abortion. I hope he repented before he died. (The Register noted the actor's death in “Memorial Service Held for Gregory Peck,” Media Watch, June 29-July 5).
According to Gerri Pare, director of the U.S. bishops' New York-based Office for Film and Broadcasting, Peck “embodied both in his personal and professional character a strong moral presence …”
However, when the pro-life Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court, Peck became the radio voice for the People for the American Way announcements used to distort Bork's record and mobilize public opinion against him. Peck helped mightily to defeat Bork, and what a difference that has made in our society where even the barbaric, medically unnecessary and high-risk procedure known as partial-birth abortion was sanctioned by a Bork-less Supreme Court.
If Bork had been confirmed, the moral standards of the country would be much higher now.
WILLIAM J. HOGAN, M.D.
Rockville, Maryland
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Opinion -------- TITLE: Ave Maria Fallout DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:I served as the academic dean at St Mary's College of Ave Maria University, the college whose closing you reported in your recent issue (“Ave Maria Pulls Out of St. Mary's in Michigan,” June 22-28). Please permit me to offer a few corrections and observations:
1. Ave Maria University came into existence as a legal entity sponsored by Orchard Lake Schools and Ave Maria College; St. Mary's College is its only campus and its only accredited entity. When St. Mary's College closed on June 30, Ave Maria University will have no accredited educational entities. It is but an empty, legal shell.
2. The money pledged by Thomas Monaghan for the continuation of the core curriculum is not for “technology or library,” as the article states; the original grant made in 2000 was so designated. Although the technology was upgraded, the library promise was not kept by Mr. Monaghan.
3. The majority of excellent teachers with their hearts in the core program remain with it.
4. The reason given for the closing of the college, the deficits, is very misleading. The whole financial plan was made by Monaghan and his team, and monitored by them. The expenses were never over budget, but the college failed to bring in sufficient revenue. The greatest failure to raise revenue came from the development department—and it was Ave Maria that agreed to build up this department and did not do so. No college can run on tuition money alone, but the Ave Maria team expected St. Mary's College to run without development income.
5. Patrick Reilly's concerns are misplaced. No one will “gut” the core program and there is no reason to monitor the situation. The new Integrated Catholic Core needs additional funding; perhaps more people will come to support it.
6. David Twellman describes the Monaghan vision as something good—but it has a dark side to it—and it excludes some key Catholic features. The dark side is the dependence upon Monaghan's arbitrary focus or level of interest and its idiosyncratic definitions of Catholic faith. Mr. Monaghan seems oblivious to Church doctrine on social justice in his treatment of faculty and staff as “at will” employees. He also spurns centuries-old academic customs and protocols, especially those pertaining to faculty status and governance.
Unfortunately, the quest for authentic renewal of Catholic higher education has taken some wrong turns under the Ave Maria auspices.
JOHN HITTINGER
Pontiac, Michigan
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Hittinger ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Gay Marriage (And Its Imitations) Can Be Stopped DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:In his June 23 column, “Time to Face Facts: Homosexuals Gain Victory,” National Review's Jonah Goldberg argues, “The gays have won.”
Goldberg writes that the “signs of the gay victory have been all around us for years.” But the only “signs” he cites are the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada and support for homosexual rights among liberal media elites. He offers no further evidence on behalf of the dismal conclusion that “like it or not, the traditionalists have lost.”
I would not go so far as to call Goldberg a “sniveling capitulationist,” as his National Review colleague John Derbyshire did June 20 on the magazine's blog, “The Corner.”
But it was National Review that reminded us in the run-up to the Iraq war that nations whose views differ with ours would have little bearing on the direction of U.S. policy and it was Goldberg himself who explained in a cover article for the magazine how out of touch Canada is. So for Goldberg to cite Canada as proof for anything the United States might do, even in “dispassionate analysis,” is a little odd.
I offer my own experience as proof that Goldberg's second point—liberal media support for homosexual rights equals a homosexual victory—is mistaken. I am the Knight of Columbus district deputy who organized last November's petition drive to stop the Connecticut Legislature from legalizing same-sex marriage or its facsimile. This was done in partnership with our ecumenical allies at the Family Institute of Connecticut.
Remember the electoral map from the 2000 presidential election, with the conservative Bush-voting states in red and the liberal Gore-voting states in blue? Connecticut is about as blue as a blue state can get, complete with everything that implies. With very little opposition, pro-homosexual marriage state Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, and his cronies had been quietly furthering the homosexual agenda at the Connecticut Capitol for years.
Lawlor claimed the state would inevitably legalize homosexual marriage. All the media elites in this state happily agreed. In fact, the only media outlet based in Connecticut that supports traditionalist views is the editorial page of this newspaper. And even Waterbury, Conn., Republican-American columnist Lee Grabar wrote last November that the petition drive amounted to closing the stable doors after the horses had escaped.
My own experience shows that, with a little elbow grease, marriage can be defended.
But both our friends and foes proved to be wrong. We gathered 70,000 signatures in little more than a month, making ours the most successful petition drive in state history. This caused three significant results at the state legislature:
1) In January the Judiciary Committee chaired by Lawlor forwarded to the General Assembly its “study” of same-sex marriage with no recommendations. The homosexual lobby had hoped that a recommendation favorable to them would increase the pressure for same-sex marriage.
2) In April the Judiciary Committee voted against a bill legalizing “domestic partnerships” (a phony “compromise” in place of “civil unions,” which in itself was a phony compromise in place of same-sex marriage) by a vote of 26-16. Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin Sullivan, a supporter of domestic partnerships, expressed surprise at how little support there was for it in the Judiciary Committee.
3) At the end of the legislative session in June, an amendment legalizing domestic partnerships that Lawlor attached to an unrelated bill died a quiet death.
Lawlor continues to claim the pro-homosexual side is winning, but even the Hartford Courant, in a line buried deep in its June 6 article “A Day to Stress Positives: Lawmakers Focus on Accomplishments,” wrote, “One of the most prominent bills that failed was gay marriage, representing a major victory for the Catholic Church and a defeat for gay-rights activists.” (You can be sure that if things had turned out differently the Courant would have run a blazing headline across its front page.)
What does all this mean?
First, not only are homosexual-rights extremists not gaining victory in Connecticut, they're actually losing ground. The more Lawlor claims otherwise, the more he resembles “Baghdad Bob,” the hapless Iraqi information minister who insisted to the bitter end that Saddam Hussein was winning.
Second, that homosexual marriage's seemingly inevitable march to legalization in Connecticut has been halted and reversed proves Goldberg wrong.
Yes, the legalization of homosexual marriage is still possible, and those who support the sanctity of marriage must continue to remain vigilant. But after our experiences in Connecticut, one of the bluest-of-blue states, we can claim with some reasonableness that homosexual marriage is not inevitable.
So buck up, Goldberg! Homosexual marriage and its imitations can be stopped. All it requires is a little elbow grease.
Peter J. Wolfgang, of New Hartford, Conn., is the Knights of Columbus district deputy
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Peter J. Wolfgang ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Paul VI's 'Last Homily' DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:On June 24, on the feast of St. John the Baptist, Pope John Paul II blessed a new marble bust of his predecessor Pope Paul VI. It will adorn the atrium of the audience hall that bears Paul VI's name.
The date of the blessing was chosen with care—Paul VI's baptismal name was Giovanni Battista—coming as it did only days after the 40th anniversary of Paul VI's election (June 21, 1963). In the course of his remarks, John Paul recalled the homily Paul VI delivered on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul in 1978.
“On June 29, 1978,” the Holy Father said, “in the last public celebration for the 15th anniversary of his election as Supreme Pontiff, Paul VI gave a talk that had the solemn and heartfelt tone of a last will and testament.”
As we prepare to celebrate the 25th anniversary of John Paul's pontificate this coming Oct. 16, it is worth rereading that “last will and testament” of Pope Paul VI. Rereading that unforgettable homily gives a sense of what the Church was going through in 1978 when John Paul was elected.
Roiled by Events
Pope Paul VI died 25 years ago next month, on Aug. 6, 1978. In his actual last will and testament Paul VI indicated something of the times in which he lived: “Now that the day is dying, and everything is ending and the bond of this stupendous and dramatic, temporal and earthly stage is dissolving, how to thank you once more, O Lord, for the gift, after that of natural life, greater still, of the faith and grace in which solely in the end my still-living being takes refuge?”
Throughout the 15-year pontificate of Paul VI (1963-1978), the world and the Church were roiled by events both stupendous and dramatic, and it often seemed as if the certainties of the faith itself were dissolving. In 1972, on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, Paul VI spoke of the “smoke of Satan” entering the “temple of God.”
“We believe in something preter-natural that has come into the world for the very purpose of disturbing and stifling the fruits of the Second Vatican Council, and to prevent the Church from bursting into a hymn of joy at having regained full awareness of herself,” Paul VI said, speaking of the devil's attacks upon the Church in late 1960s and 1970s.
By the last months of his life, Paul VI was greatly afflicted by divisions in the Church and tragedies in the world. The communist world was expanding, and his tireless efforts to secure the freedom of the Church in the Soviet empire had borne little fruit.
His pleas on behalf of the poor and suffering grew more urgent.
In May 1978, one of Italy's leading politicians and a personal friend of Paul VI, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and assassinated by terrorists. The anguish was so great that at the funeral Paul VI pronounced a prayer of great biblical power, adopting the psalmist's lament that God was not listening to his prayer:
“And who can listen to our lament, if not you, O God of life and death? You did not hearken to our supplication for the safety of Aldo Moro, this good, meek, wise, innocent and friendly man; but you, O Lord, have not abandoned his immortal spirit, sealed by faith in Christ, who is the resurrection and the life.”
Pope Paul VI was able to cry out with St. Paul: ‘We have kept the faith! I can say today, with the humble but firm conciousness of never having betrayed “the holy truth.”’
All this was before Paul VI's eyes as he delivered his last Peter and Paul homily, on the 15th anniversary of his election and six weeks before his death. Even 25 years later, it still speaks powerfully of the apostolic soul of Paul VI.
“This [is] the Church's faith, the apostolic faith,” he said. “The teaching is preserved intact in the Church through the presence within her of the Holy Spirit, and through the special mission entrusted to Peter, for whom Christ prayed. … Such is the untiring, watchful and consuming purpose that has carried us forward during this 15 years of our pontificate. ‘I have kept the faith!’ we can say today, with the humble but firm consciousness of never having betrayed ‘the holy truth.’”
Taking after his pontifical namesake, St. Paul the Apostle, Paul VI was able to cry out—those who were there say he pronounced the words in almost solemn defiance of his critics—“I have kept the faith!”
Paul VI had faced widespread dissent from his teachings during his pontificate, and he was stating his case before the Church and before God that he had not failed in his obligation to protect the deposit of the faith. And to those who would not follow his lead, Paul VI had stern words.
“We give them this paternal warning: Let them refrain from disturbing the Church,” he said. “The moment of truth has come, and everyone must know his or her own responsibilities before decisions that must safeguard the faith, the common treasure that Christ—who is the petra, the rock—entrusted to Peter, the Vicarius Petrae, the Vicar of the Rock, as St. Bonaventure calls him.”
On no issue did Paul VI face more opposition than on his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which restated the immorality of contraception. He acknowledged his own suffering at the hostile reception many Catholics gave to his upholding of the ancient tradition.
“The commitment to teaching in the service and defense of truth, which we have offered at the cost of much suffering, includes, we believe, as an indispensable part, the defense of human life,” he said. “The defense of human life must begin at the very source of human existence. … We did no more than accept this charge when, 10 years ago, we published the encyclical Humanae Vitae. … We have made these statements, motivated only by our supreme responsibilities as universal teacher and pastor, and for the good of humanity.”
Toward the end of his life, Paul VI clearly felt that, while he had done all that he could do, the times were against him and it would be left to his successor to find a way forward. Another day might be more favorable for preaching the Gospel, but as the sun set on Paul VI's life, he could say with a clear conscience that he had never betrayed that Gospel.
Calling him a “strong and humble apostle,” Pope John Paul II spoke about the courage of Paul VI at his general audience June 25. He remembered that Paul VI “wanted the ecclesial community to open up to the world without giving in to the spirit of the world. With prudent wisdom, he knew how to resist the temptation of ‘conforming’ to the modern mentality, sustaining difficulties and misunderstandings, and sometimes even hostility, with evangelical strength. Even in the most difficult moments he did not cease to bring God's illuminating word to his people.”
“Let us give thanks to God,” John Paul concluded, “for the gift of [Paul VI's] pontificate, a solid and sage guide for the Church. … In the light of our eternal goal we understand better how urgent it is to love Christ and to serve his Church with joy.”
Father Raymond J. de Souza is the Register's Rome correspondent.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Father Raymond J. de Souza ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: Too Grabby? A Tale of Greed at the Ballpark DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Barry Bonds hit his historic 73rd home run Oct. 7, 2001—the last game of the regular season—at San Francisco's beautiful Pacific Bell Park.
The ball sailed majestically toward the walkway behind right field and into the glove of a restaurateur by the name of Alex Popov.
Thus began a tale that raises issues my mother warned about.
“Your eyes are bigger than your belly,” my mother used to say. I don't think she meditated at length on its philosophical implications, but she was fond of reiterating this cozy maxim. Its timeless message did not fall on deaf ears or a forgetful memory.
“Wanting more than you need” is a simple definition of greed. I prefer my mother's version because it indicates what fools we make of ourselves when we travel along greed's perfidious pathway. I can easily imagine inhabitants of Dante's Inferno having eyes that are literally larger than their bellies. This is a fit punishment, indeed, for a vice that makes lust larger than life. “Keeping up appearances” is not possible in hell, although “keeping up with the Joneses” is.
Which brings us back to Candlestick—pardon, Pacific Bell—park. The batted and bruised spheroid lingered in Popov's Spalding softball mitt for exactly six-tenths of a second, at which point a horde of anxious souvenir-seekers descended, unmercifully, upon the defenseless fan. After a one-minute melee, Patrick Hayashi, a software engineer, emerged with the ball clenched tightly in his hands.
Does six-tenths of a second constitute “possession”? Is it permissible, according to the unwritten code of “fan culture,” to attack and mug a fan the moment he catches a fly ball?
It was obviously a matter for the courts to decide. Let us not talk about being sensible. After a year of litigation, a San Francisco judge ordered the two men to sell the immortal icon and split the proceeds between them. As a result, what Popov and Hayashi had refused to do by private agreement, they were forced to do by judicial decree.
The ball fetched a disappointing $450,000 at auction, far less than the $2.7 million that was paid for Mark Maguire's 70th home run ball in 1999. But greed's insatiable appetite then took an unexpected turn.
Martin Triano, Popov's lawyer, charged his client $473,500 for services rendered, $23,500 more than the ball's auction price and a whopping $248,500 more than Popov's share. Triano is now suing Popov for the sum, which the latter regards as “way overblown,” while Popov himself is exploring the option of suing his former attorney on the grounds of “legal malpractice.”
St. Thomas Aquinas had a more elaborate definition of greed that included other vices it set in motion. For the angelic doctor, greed can be “a sin directly against one's neighbor, since one man cannot over-abound (super-abundare) in external riches without another man lacking them … a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, inasmuch as man contemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things,” and also a means by which “man sins against himself, because it causes disorder in his affections” (Summa Theologiae IIII, 118, 1. ad 2).
St. Thomas was right. Greed involves more than mere covetousness. It includes un-neighborliness, injustice, injury to self, an inordinate concern for material things and contempt both for God and things eternal. Geoffrey Chaucer once warned, “Radix malorum est cupiditas” (the root of all evil is greed). And Dante spoke of how greed can “submerge mortals” and render them powerless “to draw their eyes from” its “blinding surge.”
The retail value of an ordinary Major League baseball is $14.99. The price of greed is considerably higher. Moreover, greed has an insidious way of causing the appetite to grow by feeding it. This is a most frustrating and vexing predicament. We thus become hungrier the more we eat. If we are not content to want merely what we need, how much beyond what we need will it take to make us content?
Danish philosopher S⊘ren Kierkegaard talked about the “bad infinity” (das schlechte Unendlichkeit), the endless craving for things that will never bring us spiritual satisfaction. In other words, if we are not satisfied by having what we need, we will never be satisfied and will be doomed to eternal frustration. Greed intensifies the very dissatisfaction it is supposed to placate. Like all the other deadly sins, its mode of operation is essentially diabolical.
The opposite of greed is temperance, that wonderfully balancing virtue that properly proportions our eyes and our bellies so we would not be humiliated if people could see us exactly the way we are. If my mother speaks to me in the next world, I hope she will tell me how suitably proportioned my eyes are in relation to my belly.
Don DeMarco is professor emeritus at St. Jerome's University and adjunct professor at Holy Apostles
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Don DeMarco ----- KEYWORDS: Commentary -------- TITLE: To Trust Like Skinny Bones DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:I have always viewed an infant as a tiny miracle from God. But I never imagined that having a baby would require a miracle.
Since our marriage almost five years ago, infertility problems have so far prevented my wife, Florence, from becoming pregnant. As the years and the tears have gone by, we have relied more and more on faith and the power of prayer. But, as the saying goes, be careful for what you pray for because what we've ended up with, for now, has been a cat—and a lesson in trust.
Let me explain. Several months ago, at the beginning of Lent, Florence and I met a scruffy black kitten with a white nose and white paws that was wandering around in a park. That someone had abandoned him was obvious. Terribly thin, he was peering into a garbage can when we saw him and acting as lonely and hungry as a homeless person. He soon leapt on my wife's lap and received a fur massage while we sat on a bench. I tried my best to ignore him. He was cute, but he was a cat. I didn't like cats. After leaving the park that afternoon, I thought we would never see him again.
My wife had other ideas.
For three straight days, starting with the afternoon we met him, she went back to the park and fed the kitten. On the second day, she tried to bring him home. But he leapt out of her arms and escaped. Reflecting on the cat's refusal to accept her good intentions, Florence told me later that day that God's sorrow must be infinitely greater each time we, his children, turn our backs on his tender care and providence.
The next day, when she couldn't find the kitten, she prayed to God that, if he wanted one of his creatures to be helped, she needed some divine assistance. God heard her prayer: Not only did she find the kitten, whom she had nicknamed “Skinny Bones,” but she successfully took him home this time. I was not surprised. Her maternal instincts needed to nur ture. Skinny Bones wasn't a baby, but he was innocent and trusting, and he needed care.
There have been many ups and downs in trying to get pregnant. There have been many times when we questioned God and wondered why so many obstacles have been in our way, and there have been many times when we have felt it will be impossible to either conceive a child or afford to adopt one in the future.
Witnessing Skinny Bones' acceptance of life's twists and turns has been a real blessing and a great inspiration. One moment he was running freely through a park and the next he was confined in a foreign apartment with two strangers. Once he adjusted, he completely accepted our small home as his. Since then, his love for us has been total and unconditional. He sprawls on our laps as if he has known us for years. He follows us every-where we go in the apartment. (As I write this, he's asleep in the chair next to mine.) He's grateful when we feed him. He is at peace because he trusts.
To us, this kitten with the big yellow eyes represents a gift from God. And the greatest gift has been the reminder that we shouldn't worry about today's problems, but to abandon ourselves to our heavenly Father and his love, which will give us what we need when we need it—but only if we trust in him completely.
Carlos Briceno writes from Seminole, Florida.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Carlos Briceno ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Caribbean Prayer-away DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Its 1752 founding date makes Santa Ana Basilica the oldest church in the Netherlands Antilles.
The church, a defining feature of the Caribbean island of Curacao, was named after an older church dedicated to the mother of the Blessed Mother, the Cathedral of Santa Ana in Coro, Venezuela (about 35 miles away). Curacao was at one time part of the Coro Diocese. (July 26 is the feast of St. Ann and her husband, St. Joachim.)
Curacao had been discovered by the Spanish in 1499. Because they were in search of gold and there was none to be had here, most of the Spaniards moved on. Then, in 1634, the Dutch came and conquered the land. The new arrivals were Protestants, and they used the island as a slave colony. Nevertheless, they allowed their slaves to be Christians, and Catholic priests—mostly Franciscans and Dominicans—were allowed entry.
Eventually, in 1842, the Vicariate of Curacao was formed with a Dutch bishop as apostolic vicar. In 1870, the Vatican ordered the Dutch province of the Dominicans to accept the responsibility of what would later become the Willemstad Diocese as a whole. The Dutch Dominicans then took over all six islands; the Willemstad Diocese was established on April 28, 1958.
From 1820 to 1824, there was an influx of 50 missionary priests who, as victims of the struggle for independence in Venezuela, came, evangelized and left. Though today there are only nine Dominicans in the diocese, between 1870 and 1966, there were, at one time, as many as 66 Dominicans, and they were considered the clergy of the diocese.
Three of the six islands, Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire, are predominantly Catholic. There are three other small islands where the population is only 10% Catholic. These include St. Martin (or St. Maarten), Saba and Statia (named after St. Eustatius)
Because Aruba has become independent, five of the six islands form the Netherland Antilles—what used to be called the “Dutch West Indies.”
Today, six Dominican priests are active on Curacao. One is responsible for one of two churches which have been combined into one parish. These are the Basilica of Santa Ana and Holy Family Church.
Native Faith
The original Church of Santa Ana, which was built by missionaries from Austria, was relatively small. Through the years it was enlarged to its present size. Because it was the oldest church on Curacao, and also to ensure that it would not be torn down, the church was raised to a basilica in 1977.
Santa Ana, which holds 400 people, is situated between the main street of Curacao and a side street. The side street is called Conscience Street because people go there for confession—to have their conscience cleansed. At the Santa Ana Basilica, confessions are heard in church both before and after the Masses. In addition, confessions are also heard in the rectory by request.
The lovely Stations of the Cross in Santa Ana are mosaics. They came from a convent on the island that was abandoned. The stained-glass windows, tabernacle and other artwork all came from Holland.
In Curacao, unlike Catholic churches in the United States, rather than having one choir for a church, there are a number of choirs that on the weekends walk from church to church, singing during the Masses in each church they come to. However, there are special choirs for Christmas and Easter.
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, there is a Mass at 9 a.m. The Mass on Monday morning is very crowded because large numbers of people who live on the outskirts of town come to the city. Before they go to the market, they attend Mass.
Catholics who come to Curacao on cruise ships, in particular those cruise ships that stop during a Panama Canal cruise, often stop to pray at Santa Ana Basilica, which is the closest church to the port.
However, the cruise ships usually don't usually come early enough for the Catholic cruise passengers to make it to the 9 a.m. Mass. Unfortunately, most recently, the basilica has also been closing early in the day to avoid the possibility of vandalism.
On Sundays, Mass is at 8 a.m. and again at 7 p.m. The Mass of anticipation is said at 7 p.m. at Holy Family Church (Santa Familia), which is the other church in the parish. Visitors are also welcome to attend an 11 a.m. Mass on Sunday at Holy Family Church.
A charismatic group is active in the Basilica of Santa Ana. Each Monday, following the 9 a.m. Mass, the charismatics hold a prayer meeting from 10 a.m. to 11:59 a.m.
Annually at the Santa Ana Basilica, there is a special nine-day novena to St. Anthony, patron saint of the poor, beginning on June 5 and culminating on June 13, the feast day of St. Anthony.
In all of the Catholic churches of Curacao, all of the Masses are said in Papimentu, the native language of the island of Curacao. Since 1840, efforts have been made to write out what was traditionally only a spoken language.
During the past 20 years, greater efforts have been made officially to write out the Papimentu language. For example, currently the Bible has been translated into Papimentu, as have been many religious booklets.
I certainly found it a most moving experience to pray at a basilica that has seen more than 250 years of history, with missionary and diocesan priests celebrating Masses and other liturgies and multitudes of Catholic faithful of all nationalities praying, worshiping and receiving the sacraments.
I found myself thinking: Imagine what stories would be told if only these walls could talk—even if only on the feast of this basilica's patron.
Joseph Albino writes from Syracuse, New York.
----- EXCERPT: Santa Ana Basilica, Curacao, Netherlands Antilles ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Albino ----- KEYWORDS: Travel -------- TITLE: Sick of Superheroes? DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:This year might be the year in which feature-length documentaries come into their own.
Grown-up moviegoers seem to be tiring of Hollywood's endless parade of comic book-like franchise extravaganzas (Terminator, Charlie's Angels, Matrix, The Hulk, etc.). Ordinary ticket buyers are now willing to plunk down money at their multiplexes for the kind of fare previously shown only on PBS or at obscure Greenwich Village art houses.
It's been a long time coming. Over the past 10 years occasional docs like Hoop Dreams, The War Room and Startup.com have found a large audience in mainstream commercial theaters. But the flow of product has never been steady.
This year is different. Michael Moore's loathsome Bowling for Columbine, with its distorted depiction of contemporary American gun culture, has grossed more than 10 times its costs in theatrical release. Equally profitable revenues from broadcast, video, DVD and foreign distribution are predicted. This unexpected blockbuster success has encouraged other distributors to program similarly low-cost documentaries against this summer's big-budget franchise films.
Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans, currently in selected theaters across the country, are two very different documentary experiences. The first, which follows the teen-age contestants in the 1999 National Spelling Bee, is positive and uplifting. The second, which investigates a much publicized pedophilia case, is difficult and disturbing, raising more questions than it answers. Both are better than most of this summer's feature films.
The Oscar-nominated Spellbound is a compelling portrait of eight national spelling bee contestants—five girls and three boys of different races and geographic areas. The first section is a series of character studies that pays careful attention to social context, focusing on each kid's family background and hometown.
The second section is the suspense-filled contest itself, in Washington, D.C., where 249 final-ists vie for top honors. The stakes are high. The prizes, which include college scholarships, can make a substantial difference in these teenagers' lives.
One of the film's greatest strengths is that director Jeff Blitz gets us to root for all of his main characters. Our hearts are broken when any of them misspells an obscure word (like cephalagia or cabotinage) and is forced to drop out of the contest.
The movie's subtext is the continuing power of the American dream. A disproportionate number of the finalists are from first-generation immigrant families for whom good spelling is proof of assimilation and a ticket to social and economic advancement.
Angela Arenivar's dad, Ubaldo, is a Texas ranch manager who doesn't speak English. He illegally crossed the border from Mexico before she was born in hopes that his children would get an education. Angela's victory in the regional championships is the fulfillment of his dreams, and the family will get to travel to the nation's capitol for the first time in their lives.
Nupur Lala is also the daughter of recent immigrants. “You don't get second chances in India the way you do in America,” her father explains after she wins her regional bee in Florida.
Some of the kids have had to overcome other kinds of obstacles. Ashley White, an African-American girl from southeast Washington, D.C., is from a single-parent family. Even though she's received almost no community support or recognition, her dreams remain intact. “I'm a prayer warrior,” she exclaims. “I just can't stop praying. I rise above all my problems.”
We cheer when one of the movie's characters finally gets the grand prize (I won't spoil things by revealing which one), and we walk out of the theater believing that all of these kids are winners. Their passion, intelligence and hard work leave us feeling good about America and its younger generation.
Andrew Jarecki presents us with a darker view of contemporary culture. He originally wanted to make a film about children's birthday party clowns. But after interviewing Manhattan's top performer, David Friedman, he realized he had stumbled onto a bigger story. Capturing the Friedmans went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.
David's father, Arnold, and his younger brother, Jesse, were convicted as child molesters in a controversial 1987 case in Great Neck, N.Y. In a bizarre twist, David videotaped his family's response to these traumatic events, and this footage becomes the centerpiece of Jarecki's film, along with present-day interviews with the surviving Friedmans, law enforcement officials, the alleged victims and their families.
Arnold Friedman is a moral monster, an admitted pedophile and consumer of child pornography. But as the film progresses, it's not clear if either he or his son were guilty of the molestation charges. The police and the surrounding community may have succumbed to a kind of hysteria that blinded them to the truth.
This is tough material, definitely not for children or family viewing. But Jarecki never exploits his subject matter; nor does he take a definitive position on Arnold and Jesse's innocence or guilt. Arnold appears capable of the monstrous acts with which he's charged, but it's also possible the police framed him. The only certainty is that the Friedman sons paid a terrible price for the sins of their father.
These two challenging films may be only the beginning of what could become a constant stream of dramatically satisfying, theatrically released documentaries.
If you look hard enough in the months ahead, you may discover at a multiplex near you docs with titles as diverse as Bonhoeffer, Al Sharpton, Balseros and People Say I'm Crazy.
John Prizer writes from Washington, D.C.
----- EXCERPT: Documentaries like Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans: Signs of things to come? ----- EXTENDED BODY: John Prizer ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly Video/DVD Picks DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:The Peter Rabbit Collection: The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends (1993)
Beatrix Potter's timeless nursery tales are sensitively brought to life in nine animated episodes of the BBC-produced The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends (available complete in a four-DVD set; individual episodes are also available on VHS). With evocative watercolor backgrounds and character design strongly reminiscent of Potter's illustrations, animation ranging from fine to excellent, and dialogue and narrative drawn straight from the source material, the series is remarkably faithful to the text, spirit and look of Potter's beloved stories.
Like the original stories, The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends includes incidents both charming (e.g., the work of the mouse tailors in “The Tailor of Gloucester”) and alarming (e.g., the kidnapping of the bunny children in “The Tale of Mr. Tod”).
Each episode is framed by lovely though irrelevant live-action sequences, featuring Potter herself writing the stories in letters to children, which neither add much nor detract much.
A pleasant piano score and lilting Celtic theme song provide ideal accompaniment.
The Quest for the True Cross (2002)
Based on the rather misleadingly named bestseller co-authored by scholar Carsten Thiede, this documentary challenges the academic community's knee-jerk dismissal of Christian relics as medieval forgeries.
Theide, who previously made waves arguing for an early dating of the Gospels, now investigates a purported relic of the titulus cruces—the placard over Jesus' head bearing the charge “King of the Jews”—for centuries housed at the Santa Croce Church in Rome, where tradition holds it was brought by the mother of Constantine, St. Helena, following her pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Theide marshals a number of interesting arguments against the titulus being a forgery. For example, the Greek and Latin lines as well as the Hebrew are written right to left—an aberration that could conceivably be the work of a first-century Jewish scribe but is scarcely imaginable in a medieval Christian artifact.
A popular critical documentary, Quest for the True Cross is secular in outlook and presents various scholarly points of view, requiring critical viewing.
Still, as a challenge to academic skepticism and an apologetic for what would be the most direct archaeological evidence to date relating to Jesus, Quest For the True Cross makes worthwhile viewing.
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Witty dialogue, romantic complications and class-skewering satire are hallmarks of screwball comedy, but George Cukor's classic The Philadelphia Story doesn't turn on absurd situations, outlandish behavior or unpredictable plot twists. Instead, it's a more mature and humanistic social satire, a comedy of manners skewering every kind of snobbery: not only the class-based snobbery of the rich against the poor—and the poor against the rich—but also the intellectual snobbery of the literate against the popular, and above all the moral snobbery of the self-righteous against the imperfect.
Like the heroines of The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday, Katharine Hepburn plays a divorcée caught between flawed ex-husband Cary Grant and a respectable but somehow unsuitable fiancé (John Howard).
But Philadelphia Story goes beyond the formula by throwing in surprise contender Jimmy Stewart as a disgruntled novelist-reporter—an unexpected source of conflict and uncertainty that eliminates the need for Grant to resort to the underhanded tricks he needed to show up his rivals in Awful Truth and Girl Friday.
The late, great Hepburn shines in the role she originated on Broadway, and Stewart won his only Oscar for his terrific performance.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Steven D. Greydanus ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: Weekly TV Picks DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:All times Eastern
SUNDAY, JULY 20
British Open
TNT, 6 a.m. and ABC, 8 a.m.
Follow the final round of the 132nd British Open at the Royal St. George's Golf Club. The course, in Kent, England, is one of golfdom's most storied. The Open's recent winners: Ernie Els (2002), Dave Duval (2001) and Tiger Woods (2000).
SUNDAY, JULY 20
Frozen Treats from Martha's Kitchen
Food Network, 10 p.m.
Is the hot summer getting to you? You can cool off in a hurry with these strawberry malts, sodas, cherry ice cream and banana-blueberry ice pops.
MONDAY, JULY 21
The Most Active Vacation: The Grand Canyon
PBS, 2:30 p.m.
In this “America's Walking” episode, the Grand Canyon Institute outfits us for a camping trip in the fabled chasm. Then we head out, taking the area's new transit systems and striding along the canyon's new and improved trails.
TUESDAY, JULY 22
P.O.V.: Flute Player
PBS, 10 p.m.
Adopted by U.S. aid worker and Lutheran minister Peter Pond, former refugee Arn Chorn-Pond has overcome boyhood horrors in which Cambodia's Khmer Rouge killed his whole family and sent him to a slave labor camp for children. There the pitiless communists spared him from execution only so he could play their political tunes on a flute. In recent years he has returned to post-communist Cambodia to rescue the few surviving musicians there from destitution and help them preserve their country's traditional music. Advisory: inspiring for adults but too disturbing for children.
THURSDAY, JULY 24
Life on the Rock
EWTN, 8 p.m.
Newly ordained diocesan priests need fraternal life, guest Father Jeff Huard reminds us. He explains the concept of Companions in Christ.
FRIDAY, JULY 25
Contraception: Why Not?
EWTN, 5 a.m., 10 p.m.
Children are a gift from God, says Dr. Janet Smith, echoing Scripture, yet too many Catholic couples and some clergy still do not trust him and admit contraception is sinful. Birth control often acts to abort new babies, not prevent them. Smith notes that, before 1930, all Christian denominations called contraception evil. She urges everyone to read Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (On the Regulation of Births) and see what it really says. The Holy Father praised married life and made predictions, since fulfilled in spades, that contraception would harm souls, worsen social evils and lower public morality. Smith reminds us that openness to children makes marriages happy.
SATURDAYS
Sport Fishing with Dan Hernandez
Familyland TV, 4:30 p.m.
Fishing writer, speaker and guide Dan Hernandez applies his angling expertise at the best fresh and saltwater fishing spots in (upper) California and Baja (lower) California.
Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Dan Engler ----- KEYWORDS: Arts -------- TITLE: The Theology Drain in Catholic College Presidencies DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:FRONT ROYAL, Va.—Dr. Timothy O'Donnell is an anomaly in the world of Catholic academia today.
Like most of his counterparts at other American Catholic colleges and universities, the president of Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., is a layman.
Unlike most, he holds a doctorate in sacred theology.
As recently as 35 years ago, a Catholic college president with such a degree or comparable religious training might have been the norm, not the exception. But a new study on lay Catholic college presidents confirms what many have suspected for a long time: that most of the people leading Catholic colleges and universities today are lay men and women who lack a thorough education in the faith.
The study by Father Dennis Holtschneider and Melanie Morey—titled “Leadership and the Age of the Laity: Emerging Patterns in Catholic Higher Education” and released at a lay leadership conference at Fairfield University in Connecticut in late June—found that only 4% of lay presidents have terminal degrees in theology. Forty-three percent, by contrast, have graduate education degrees. Fifty-five percent of the lay presidents have no religious training past high school and nearly a third lack any kind of formal religious education, although more than a fourth have had some type of religious formation in seminaries or religious congregations.
Interestingly, even though most of those surveyed agreed that inadequate spiritual and theological lay preparation was a problem for the future of Catholic higher education, only 9% said they personally felt ill-equipped to lead the religious mission of their institutions.
The survey, to which 55% of the nation's Catholic college presidents responded, also found the number of women presidents in decline. And many of the presidents who participated in the survey said they considered faculty an obstacle to effective leadership in Catholic character, mission and identity.
Dr. Monika Hellwig, president and executive director of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, said the study gives statistical support to a trend she has been observing for some time. She added that the association has commissioned its own survey to identify resources that might help address the problem, including workshops for college trustees and institutes for new administrators.
“We needed to know this,” she said. “We need to know it in order to plan.”
Father Holtschneider, the executive vice president of Niagara University in Lewiston, N.Y., said although the trend toward lay leadership already has been seen in elementary and secondary schools, Catholic hospitals and Church social-service agencies, it is even more important that those who lead universities be fluent and knowledgeable about the tradition they are charged with preserving because universities are intellectual enterprises.
Here to Stay
Of the 222 Catholic institutions of higher learning in the United States, 116 are led by lay presidents and 106 by presidents who are priests or religious. This likely means, Father Holtschneider said, that lay presidents are here to stay.
A Vincentian priest who holds master of divinity and theology degrees and a doctorate in higher education, Father Holtschneider said among those who responded to the study at the conference, most didn't think a president necessarily needed a theology degree. Several college presidents and others interviewed by the Register concurred, with most citing qualities such as vision, will and a commitment to give a university a palpable Catholic identity as more important than formal theological training.
Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman Society, an organization that seeks to restore Catholic identity in Catholic colleges and universities, said he considers the president's theological background to be less important than whether the person understands the role of authentic Catholic theology in Catholic higher education and the need to relate all other disciplines to it.
“The real problem is Catholic universities are no longer centered [on] a real Catholic theology,” he said. “The president needs to make that a priority regardless of what his background is.”
Christendom's O'Donnell believes his own preparation—which includes a licentiate in theology—was ideal in some ways but would not be necessary if a president had a solid formation in the faith and recognized that the fundamental purpose of a Catholic university is to educate under the guiding light of the faith, as Pope John Paul II made clear in his 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church).
Rather than require college presidents to follow a specific program of study, O'Donnell said the boards of trustees who choose them might be better off with someone who has a sound theological formation, is deeply familiar with the Catechism of the Catholic Church and is faithful to the magisterium.
“The president is probably the most significant in setting the tone for a college or university,” O'Donnell said. “Formation is important, but even more important than formation is a deep faith commitment. That's not something you go to school for.”
Dr. Daniel Curran, the first lay president of Ohio's University of Dayton, a Marianist institution, said although he brings little formal theological training to his job, his 23 years at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia as a faculty member and administrator taught him about the needs of Catholic institutions and provided opportunities for spiritual formation with the Jesuits.
“When the Marianists were looking for a [president],” he said, “they were looking for an individual who had gone through a process of spiritual formation. They clearly were looking for a practicing Catholic, but very important to them was that I could articulate my personal position on my faith.”
Father Thomas Berg, who has helped develop plans for the Legionaries of Christ's University of Sacramento in California, said a theology degree in and of itself has little bearing on the ability of a lay president to effectively pursue and foster the Catholic mission and identity of an institution.
What is needed, he said, is a person who can generate or embrace a vision and then carry and promote it along with the school's identity and mission.
“That has to be incarnate in that person,” he said.
“What is necessary,” he added, “is that this individual has a genuine appreciation for the history of Catholic higher education, sees no conflict between the pursuit of genuine academic freedom and fidelity to the magisterium and is ready to work with administration and faculty to articulate … and communicate the elements of that institution's Catholic identity and mission within the parameters of fidelity to the Catholic magisterium.”
Speaking from the perspective of a faculty member, Dr. James Hitchcock, professor of history at the Jesuits' St. Louis University, said he thinks the will of a Catholic college president is a bigger factor than professional training or intellectual ability.
“Do you want a Catholic college and if so, are you willing to make the decisions that bring that about, some of which will be unpopular?” he asked.
But Dr. Janet Smith, chair of life issues at Detroit's Sacred Heart Major Seminary and a former faculty member at several Catholic schools, including the University of Notre Dame and the University of Dallas, said she thinks Catholic colleges need to look more carefully not just at presidents but at the trustees who choose them.
“Many received their education 40 years ago and have not a clue about what things are like on Catholic campuses today,” she said. “Some don't even know there are huge divisions in the Church and how careful you must be about hiring people.”
Judy Roberts writes from Millbury, Ohio.
----- EXCERPT: New Study Says Lay Catholic Presidents Lack Doctorates ----- EXTENDED BODY: Judy Roberts ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Common Sense for Uncommon Times DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:WHAT WE CAN'T NOT KNOW: A GUIDE
by J. Budziszewski
Spence, 2003 266 pages, $27.95
To order: (888) 773-6782 www.spencepublishing.com
In his Autobiography, G.K. Chesterton relates how he redis-covered faith while immersed in the effete, decadent world of art for art's sake: “It was not that I began by believing in supernormal things. It was that the unbelievers began by disbelieving even in normal things. It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane or rational possibility of secular ethics.”
The perverse precepts of a minuscule segment of Western society at the turn of the 20th century have been mass-produced, with typical American efficiency, on college campuses for almost two generations. Lawlessness—or, more accurately, the law of the jungle—has become the new “orthodoxy.”
In this book J. Budziszewski, professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, sets out to defend commonsense morality against the determined forces of relativism, skepticism and politically correct “tolerance.” I am happy to report that he engages his foes in full gear and fine fettle.
“People become angry when one asserts the moral law,” he writes. “This outrage is itself an amazing fact. It needs to be explained.”
Budziszewski covers much of the same material that might be presented in a first-year college course on Catholic moral theology: the natural law, the nature and workings of conscience, the first principles of morality (for instance, the Golden Rule) and how particular moral imperatives like the Ten Commandments follow therefrom.
He cites St. Thomas Aquinas effectively, yet his message for the most part is not specifically Christian. Rather, the author tries to formulate arguments that will provide a common ground for all people of good will who realize that being human necessarily has moral consequences.
“The desire to know truth is ardent, but it is not the only desire at work in us,” he writes. “The desire not to know competes with it desperately, for knowledge is a fearsome thing. So it is that oftentimes we groan about how difficult it is to know what is right even though we know the right perfectly well.” Underlying such frank discussion is a vivid sense that an identifiable, standard-issue human nature exists, but that something has gone wrong.
Indeed, we are programmed, in a sense, to distinguish right from wrong; this is part of “what we can't not know.” “The mind is so designed as to acquire [first principles] on its own, as the eye is designed to see on its own,” he points out. “What we call teaching only helps the process along.”
Budziszewski gives a remarkably thorough presentation of natural-law thinking by resting his case upon four pillars, rather than the usual one or two. These “witnesses” to the basic moral law are: one, deep conscience, that built-in program; two, the intelligible design of the universe; three, the design of our own species (we are not only rational animals but also social beings); and four, the natural consequences of our actions.
At key points the author himself becomes the fifth “witness”: As a former atheist who converted to Christianity and traditional values, he is well acquainted with the intricacies of the battles—both political and interior—that are being fought.
As the title suggests, What We Can't Not Know is often colloquial in tone. That may be its greatest weakness as well as its greatest strength, for these are serious issues. Yet anyone brave enough to watch a contemporary courtroom drama on TV could enjoy the clash of worldviews here. And this very sophisticated book has rock-solid philosophical and theological foundations.
Americans have expended enormous efforts in unlearning the obvious. Professor Budziszewski, with wit and wisdom, guides readers in relearning what we have known all along.
Michael J. Miller writes from Glenside, Pennsylvania.
----- EXCERPT: Weekly Book Pick ----- EXTENDED BODY: Michael J. Miller ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Campus Watch DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Bridesmaid BC
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 1—Boston College has been turned down for membership in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which opted to admit only Virginia Tech and the University of Miami to its ranks.
With Miami gone, that leaves the Jesuits' BC as the only school with a major football program in the Big East conference. For the Big East to be able to “hold together,” the AP said, it will need to retain its spot in the Bowl Championship Series, which leads to the selection of a national champion, as it looks for another member with a major football program.
Tenacity Needed
NATIONAL CATHOLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, June 29—Catholic schools and individual students in poor areas “have to have good relationships [with public schools]” because all federal money goes through the district first, said educator Steve Perla at an association conference in Boston.
He urged Catholic educators to apply for direct funding from their state's Department of Education; to speak to superintendents in urban areas who, under Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act, have a certain amount of money set aside for private schools; and to form coalitions with groups who have similar interests.
Polar Priest
Father Birkenhauer, who earned a doctorate in geophysics with an emphasis on seismology, became known as the “polar priest” because of the 15 months he spent in the late 1950s as chief seismologist and chaplain with a team of 28 American scientists conducting studies of the polar ice cap in Antarctica.
Strict Policy
In addition to reporting on the likelihood that Belmont Abbey's next president would be a layman—an increasingly common phenomenon for Catholic institutions—the Nor th Carolina newspaper also reported a little-known fact about one of the country's most famous Catholic universities:
“Notre Dame University … has strict requirements for its presidents, who must come from the Indiana Province of the Holy Cross order of priests.” It added that few colleges have a similar policy regarding their sponsoring religious communities.
Urban Wildlife
The project is par t of BioBlitz, a larger effort to survey and record the numerous life forms that exist in the park and to introduce others where possible. So far, the newspaper said, the owls “seem to be enjoying their new digs.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joe Cullen ----- KEYWORDS: Education -------- TITLE: Family Matters DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Divorced, Remarried … and Coming for Dinner
We're faced with more than one divorce and remarriage involving close Catholic family members. We worry about the effect on our children. Do we embrace the new unions with hope of bringing the wayward siblings home to the Church? Or show our disapproval in an effort to teach our own children right from wrong?
This dilemma is a tough one and, sooner or later, most Catholic families face it. We want to be very clear at the outset: There is no catch-all answer to this question. Every divorce and remarriage situation is unique, and our response to each one will be unique as well. (For example, are they well aware of Church teaching, or have they received conflicting information from some authority figure?) A blanket, right-or-wrong reaction simply isn't possible here. But we offer considerations that may help.
First, as odd as it may sound, how your reaction will affect your children should be a secondary consideration. In other words, how you should treat these family members is a question to answer in its own right, apart from whether you have children. Decide what the Christlike response to the situation is first; only then decide how to convey this to the children.
What, then, is the Christlike response? First, Christ created scandal by associating with all manner of sinners in order to make his grace and mercy available to them. Yet he never shied away from delivering his message for fear of driving people away. Many abandoned him because of one or another of his challenging teachings—but he never abandoned them for failing to live up to it.
Second, while Christ did associate with sinners, he never excused their actions. He may have stopped the crowd from stoning a prostitute, but, in the same breath, he urges her to “Go, and sin no more.”
Our response should be both straightforward and merciful. Our close relatives should know exactly what we believe and why but never be talked at with a spirit of condemnation. “Speak the truth in love,” St. Paul urges. In our experience, we've found that a carefully written, well-thought-out and well-prayed-out letter can be effective.
If children are old enough to fully understand what's happening, we should discuss it frankly with them. They should know why we do not approve, framed in the beauty of the Church's teaching on marriage. Above all, they should know that we love “Uncle Bob and Aunt Rose” and are praying for their change of heart.
On a practical level, if these were our relatives, we'd certainly still have them over for family gatherings and welcome them warmly. We'd include them in all the holidays and birthdays. We personally would not, however, have them spend the night in our home. This would constitute turning a blind eye to their living situation, perhaps even seeming to condone it. That is a line we could not cross.
Ultimately, it is exposure to our own family's loving faithfulness that will do our dear relatives the greatest good.
Tom and Caroline McDonald are family-life directors for the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.
Reach Family Matters at familymatters@ncregister.com
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Tom And Caroline Macdonald ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: MORE MOMS HOME DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Facts of Life
Nearly 10.6 million children were being raised by stay-at-home mothers last year — an increase of 13% in a little less than a decade, according to a newly released Census Bureau report. Of the 41.8 million children younger than 15 who lived with two parents last year, more than 25% had mothers who did not have a job outside the home.
Source: Associated Press, June 17 Illustration by Tim Rauch.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Are Video Stores Safe for Families DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Karen Thomas, a mother of three boys from Wolfeboro, N.H., worries whenever she learns her sons have been shopping in video stores.
“They like to go shopping with their friends. Let's face it,” she says, “they're at an age when they don't want me by their side. I just pray that if they happen to see a video or DVD cover that's a bit risqué, our family training will kick in and they'll move on.”
Thomas is not alone in her concerns. Countless numbers of parents fret about their children being exposed to profanity, illicit sex and low moral standards while browsing through video stores—even if they don't buy or rent the wares.
It doesn't have to be this way. And, in some video outlets, it isn't: A number of large video chains have set up safeguards to protect children from being exposed to these temptations.
One conspicuous example is Blockbuster Video, the world's leading renter of videos, DVDs and video games (it's got more than 5,500 stores in the United States alone). You won't find any films or video games rated X or NC-17 in Blockbuster outlets.
“We pride ourselves in providing quality home entertainment. A big part of that is being a family-friendly destination,” says Blockbuster spokesman Randy Hargrove.
Parents point out that even at Blockbuster, there are plenty of offerings that they'd rather not expose their children to. Hargrove says that Blockbuster offers a free service called Youth-Restricted Viewing, which allows parents to limit what products their minor children can rent or purchase from its stores.
Blockbuster says it also helps children pick appropriate selections. For example, this summer it launched a Kids Club program. For a one-time donation of $2, which benefits Boys and Girls Clubs of America, families can rent one free video every day of the summer. The only caveat is that the video has to be listed on the company's family-viewing guide. Nor are movies on this list restricted to undesirable titles; up for free grabs are such popular offerings as Cats & Dogs, Shrek and Inspector Gadget.
When it comes to being family-friendly, Blockbuster may lead the pack—thanks to its sheer size—but it has plenty of company.
Sean Devlin Bersell, vice president of public affairs for the Video Software Dealers Association, points to Hollywood Video, the second-largest rental chain in the country, and Movie Gallery, the third largest, as examples of other stores committed to providing a family-friendly environment.
Of course, the picture is not all sunshine and light. “Most of the video chains do have ‘family sections’—but, for the most part, the stores are filled with PG- through R-rated films, which constitute the vast majority of theatrical releases,” says Brother Bill Johnson, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate who works with the Oblate Media and Communications Corp. in St. Louis.
Brother Johnson is quick to point out that the responsibility lies not only with the video stores but also with the parents.
“I am a firm believer that the family is the first and primary source for the faith-development of children,” says Brother Johnson.
He sites the apostolic letter Familiaris Consortio, in which Pope John Paul II calls the family “the first community called to announce the Gospel to the human person during growth and to bring him or her, through a progressive education and catechesis, to full human and Christian maturity.”
Says Brother Johnson, “Parents who take their role of ‘an educating community’ seriously need to interact with their children and help them learn to evaluate and make choices as they grow in maturity.”
Bersell says “parents should educate themselves about the movie and video game rating systems, talk to their local video store about what restrictions they want placed on their children, examine the ratings and the rating reasons before renting or buying movies and video games. They should talk to the clerks to learn more about a particular movie or video game and monitor their children's entertainment consumption.”
Though lawsuits are under way, parents can still rent films from companies that edit out offensive material. (See “Edited DVDs Cleaning Up Hollywood's Act,” from the Register's Feb. 8, issue, at www.ncregis ter.com/Register_ News/020203dvd.htm.)
Love Guides
Which puts the focus back on the family.
“At a certain point in growing up, a child will find himself in a video store or other media outlet without benefit of a parent,” says Brother Johnson. “A key developmental task of all children is to eventually develop their own sense of identity and maturity.
“A child who has been affirmed, has experienced love and respect, and has been helped to learn the consequences of choices and behavior in the family of origin will carry respect and reverence into a video store, the mall, the halls of education and the community in which they live.”
There are some “sure bets” out there. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, for example, have assisted in the creation and production of a video distributor called Videos With Values (www.videos withvalues.com) that offers a very safe choice for families.
Brother Johnson explains: “One of the goals of our media ministry is to provide families with alternative entertainment choices not found in the video stores.”
Gradually, video stores are implementing programs that create “family” areas and personal parental screening systems.
In the end, however, the decision to avoid inappropriate videos and games must be made by well-formed, responsible kids and teens—making choices under the watchful eyes of the parents who love them.
Mary Ann Sullivan writes from
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Mary Ann Sullivan ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: All the LifeNews That's Fit to Present DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Prolife Profile
“I read it religiously,” says Cathleen Cleaver, secretariat for pro-life activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It is an extremely important source of information for anyone working in the pro-life movement.”
“I've used it since its inception,” says Catholic University of America law professor Helen Alvare.
“It's absolutely terrific,” says Joe Kral, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, based in Houston.
What is “it”? The Pro-Life Infonet—or, rather, what used to be the Pro-Life Infonet. This spring, founder and editor Steven Ertelt transformed his operation into the new and improved Life News.com.
For 10 years Ertelt ran Pro-Life Infonet essentially as an Internet news-clipping service. But the times prompted this major new endeavor, he says, because Pro-Life Infonet had to maneuver over roads filled with pothole-sized gaps in accuracy and deceptive detours from the truth.
“Many of the mainstream media outlets weren't picking up seven or eight out of 10 stories with a pro-life angle, or they were reporting it with biased coverage,” Ertelt explains from his home base in Helena, Mont. They ignored developments that could hurt the abortion lobby, for example, like reports of women who died during abortions and the well-established link between breast cancer and abortion.
Even the editor of the staunchly liberal L.A. Times, Ertelt points out, had to take his reporters to task for their bias in this regard. (See the Register editorial “L.A. Times in the Mirror,” June 15-21.)
Also: When the secular media reported on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, they often referred to a live baby outside the womb as a “fetus.” “[That] doesn't make any sense at all,” Ertelt says, clearly aghast at the irresponsible journalism.
“All of this is the culmination behind creating LifeNews.com,” explains Ertelt. “Our goal is to report the news in an accurate way without all the biases and inaccuracies found in the mainstream media. We're going to get the facts and report those issues in a faithful manner. The pro-life community can look to us to provide accurate and timely pro-life news.”
Indeed, pro-life leaders already know Ertelt for these qualities from LifeNews.com's predecessor.
“To me its standout quality is its relentless keeping up,” says Alvare. “It's got a wide variety of things I need. I never miss it. You wouldn't know the trends, how many states are considering bills in the pro-life direction” if not for Ertelt, she continues. The only time mainstream media reports these developments “is when the anti-lifers are whining about something going on against Roe v. Wade.”
From Houston, Kral recalls the time Idaho was trying to pass an unborn victims’ violence law establishing mother and unborn child as distinct victims—“instead of recognizing only the mother and treating the child as chattel, property.” “Legislators were getting confused,” says Kral, adding that he believes Pro-Life Infonet clarified the situation.
“I remember that very well,” he says. The two-victim approach ultimately prevailed and “we were able to fend off an anti-life challenge.”
Culture-Wars Veteran
On LifeNews.com, Ertelt presents originally written news and features that his reporters, all with extensive journalistic experience, glean from national, state and local venues “to get it done right the first time,” he says. That includes the gamut of pro-life issues—abortion, euthanasia, bioethics issues, assisted suicide, human cloning, stem-cell research, legal and legislative issues.
At age 29, Ertelt is no Johnny-come-lately to the pro-life cause. At Hendrix College in Arkansas, he was president of the American Collegians for Life, then left to help the National Right to Life Committee found National College Students for Life. Going back even further, as a pre-college teen, Ertelt read about pro-life work.
When he learned about the numbers of babies being aborted, “I was completely dismayed that so many people were dying,” he says. “Look at all the potential doctors, teachers, nurses—people who could have made a wonderful contribution to the community and who could be making such a beautiful impact on society today” if only they'd been allowed to be born.
After graduating college in 1996, he became full-time public-affairs director for Indiana Citizens for Life. “One of the things I was most proud of,” he says, “is that we were one of the first states in the country to pass a partial-birth abortion ban.”
In 1996, at a meeting of pro-life groups in Indiana, he met his wife, Sally Winn, now vice president of Feminists for Life. She was the chair of the Marian County right-to-life organization in Indianapolis. They have two daughters, Emily, 9, and Hannah, 7.
Ertelt next became executive director of Montana Right to Life; from there all roads led to LifeNews.com. “I felt this is where God wanted me to be,” he says, “and the best place where I could use my talents.”
And how. LifeNews currently has a subscriber list 45,000 strong. “It's a blessing and joy to see the impact the site has had on public policy,” says Ertelt. Whether it's spurring pro-life people into action, informing them which companies donate to Planned Parenthood or inspiring them with the details of the latest victory on the pro-life front, LifeNews clearly is making a difference.
“We can take these things, learn from them and apply them,” says Kral. “I use the stories in our talks to legislators,” explaining how they “can learn from the bad and the good things that are going on in other states.”
The far-reaching effects even mean running more efficient pro-life meetings. Cleaver explains that, as pro-life staffers from various locations meet together, time and again someone will reference a story from LifeNews.com. Inevitably, it becomes a rallying point.
“We all got it from Steven,” says Cleaver. “It always helps us come together around an incident, and it saves us several steps because everyone has read it.” His service “gets us up to speed much more rapidly.”
Web of Support
One of Ertelt's goals is to license the news from LifeNews.com to pro-life-friendly newspapers, radio, television, magazines and Web sites.
There's plenty of opportunity to make that happen. His worldwide subscribers include fledgling pro-life groups in South Africa and another in Israel, which join better-established groups from America, England, Australia and New Zealand.
“One of the things we haven't seen,” Ertelt says, “is a big growth in subscribers in Asian countries.” China, with its forced-abortion policy, is an example. But, since this information isn't going out via letter, phone or mail, he hopes to see subscribers increasing. “That's one of the great things about the Internet,” he says.
Because of all the information out there, “it's impossible to read everything—to distinguish the wheat from the chaff,” notes Cleaver. “Steven Ertelt has done that for everyone.”
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: Joseph Pronechen ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life -------- TITLE: Prolife Victories DATE: 07/20/2003 12:00:00 PM CATEGORY: July 20-26, 2003 ----- BODY:Shorter Gap, Healthier Babies
REUTERS, June 30—Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have found that mothers who separated their children by an interval between one and three years were 50% less likely to have a stillborn child, compared with women who waited at least six years between children.
The findings, which appeared in the Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, were drawn from a review of the outcomes of two consecutive deliveries of 410,021 women who gave birth in Sweden between 1983 and 1997.
Suprising Support
Richard Seron, who has filed suit against his former employers at the now-closed Pre-Term Health Services and Planned Parenthood, claims his bosses reprimanded him for advising a clinic escort not to confront pro-lifers outside the clinic.
“They also instructed me to tell incoming clients to not listen to the sidewalk counselors,” said Seron, who claims he was told to confiscate all pamphlets.
Three sidewalk counselors claim the buffer zone law passed in 2000 tramples their free speech rights by barring them from coming within six feet of patients who are within 18 feet of a clinic.
No Planned Parenthood Funds
LIFENEWS.COM, June 26—By a vote of 16 to 10, the Louisville city council has scrapped $6,000 earmarked in the city budget for an “abstinence” program at Western Middle School sponsored by Planned Parenthood.
Pro-life advocates appealed to the city council to oppose funding the local affiliate of the largest abortion business in the country—whether the funds were used for abortions or not.
“Taxpayers understand that by funding Planned Parenthood, this council will participate in freeing other resources that will be used to promote abortion,” explained Joyce Daugherty, vice president of Right to Life of Louisville.
Fetal Homicide Law in UK
Shields' anger over her son's death turned to determination to have the law changed so no other mother would suffer as she had.
Her emotional written submission to a review board was instrumental in the state government creating a new law for the killing of an unborn baby. The law will come into effect by the end of the year.
----- EXCERPT: ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: Culture of Life --------