Epiphany

Defending Lila Rose

2011-02-16T20:17:00.005-06:00

There are many, many people commenting on Live Action's video recordings and the claim that Lila Rose and her companions lied in order to get Planned Parenthood's employees to talk and that that lying was illicit. Robert George, Christopher Tollefson and the people at The New Theological Movement have all said that it was completely wrong, while Monica Miller, Joseph Bottum and Pia de Solenni have all made various claims giving it some defense.

I had posted a response on Joseph Bottum's piece and it got a little bit of attention, but I'm posting it here with some revisions because I hope it will get more (though I doubt it since I haven't posted anything for nearly two years). Here goes:

What few – if any – people are looking at are two things: the intent of the lie and the Scriptural precedent for what Live Action did.

In normal lying, a person is either trying to protect himself or gain something for himself. For example, Mother asks Junior, “Did you take a cookie from the cookie jar,” and Junior says, “No, I didn't, Mommy,” yet he has cookie crumbs plastered all around his mouth and on his hands. Junior is lying to cover up something he did wrong and protect himself from Mommy’s just anger.

There is also lying to obtain something, whether it is a material good (e.g., writing a bad check) or a relational good (e.g., telling the girl at the bar she's the prettiest thing you've ever seen even though she has a huge wart on her nose).

Whether it's protecting oneself or another from the justice that should be meted out when one is caught in wrongdoing, or illicitly obtaining something that does not belong to oneself, the ultimate purpose of the lie has a selfish motivation behind it.

What is different about the “lying” that Lila Rose and Live Action have done is that they are “lying” in order to save lives that are being unjustly taken and this has plenty of good precedent in Scripture (these three quotes are from the New American Bible):

“The king of Egypt told the Hebrew midwives...‘When you act as midwives for the Hebrew women...if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she may live.’ The midwives, however, feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt had ordered them, but let the boys live. So the king summoned the midwives and asked them, ‘Why have you acted thus, allowing the boys to live?’ The midwives answered Pharaoh, ‘The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women. They are robust and give birth before the midwife arrives.’ Therefore God dealt well with the midwives. The people, too, increased and grew strong. And because the midwives feared God, he built up families for them” (Exodus 1:15-21).

“So the king of Jericho sent Rahab the order, ‘Put out the visitors who have entered your house, for they have come to spy out the entire land.’ The woman had taken the two men and hidden them, so she said, ‘True, the men you speak of came to me, but I did not know where they came from. At dark, when it was time for the gate to be shut, they left, and I do not know where they went. You will have to pursue them immediately to overtake them.’ Now, she had led them to the roof, and hidden them among her stalks of flax spread out there” (Joshua 2).

“As Judith and her maid walked directly across the valley, they encountered the Assyrian outpost. The men took her in custody and asked her, ‘To what people do you belong? Where do you come from, and where are you going?’ She replied: ‘I am a daughter of the Hebrews, and I am fleeing from them, because they are about to be delivered up to you as prey. I have come to see Holofernes, the general in chief of your forces, to give him a trustworthy report; I will show him the route by which he can ascend and take possession of the whole mountain district without a single one of his men suffering injury or loss of life’” (Judith 10:11-13).

All of these women directly deceived in order to save lives. In fact, the Hebrew midwives and Rahab directly lied to those who had lawful authority over them. In all three cases, Scripture says the Lord blessed their efforts and personally blessed them later on – because of their deception to save lives from unjust action. The midwives were blessed with families themselves. Rahab and her family were saved from slaughter and, even more importantly, she is mentioned directly in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus as one of His human ancestors. Judith saved all of Jerusalem from certain slaughter by the Assyrians by her deception to get into the enemy's camp.

Pia de Solenni raises Thomas Aquinas’ argument on this in Summa Theologica II-II, q. 110:

The midwives were rewarded, not for their lie, but for their fear of God, and for their good-will, which latter led them to tell a lie. Hence it is expressly stated (Ex. 1:21): “And because the midwives feared God, He built them houses.” But the subsequent lie was not meritorious.

Let me say that I am certainly no Thomas Aquinas, and his equal – and definitely not his superior – has yet to be found since his death in 1274. But permit me the audacious liberty to disagree. Here's why – notice that immediately after the text says that the midwives lied, it then says, “Therefore God dealt well with the midwives.” They lied and therefore He dealt well with them. If Shiphrah and Puah had told Pharaoh the truth, what would have been the result? They most likely would have been put to death and Pharaoh would have assigned Egyptian women as midwives who would have carried out his orders, including on Moses himself. If that had happened, history would have been completely changed. Instead, they lied and we were given Moses and the rest of salvation history followed.

Deception and outright lying is exactly what Catholics and others did in World War II to save Jews from certain death - deception and lying that were practiced by members of the hierarchy, probably even at the direction of Pope Pius XII himself. False papers are false papers – lies meant to deceive someone. Whether it’s falsified birth certificates or fabricated baptismal certificates for people who were never baptized, showing those papers to the Nazi soldiers constituted hundreds, if not thousands, of outright lies. But the false papers were used to protect those who were unjustly condemned to death. Today, we honor those who printed the papers and those who did the lying, including making films about people like Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame.

We Catholics cannot forget the various times of persecution aimed at our brothers and sisters as well. There were those in Elizabethan England who hid priests in priest holes to protect them from certain torture and death and who lied to the authorities to throw them off the trail of the priests. Blessed Miguel Pro disguised himself – deceived the lawful authorities – so he could carry out his ministry during the Mexican persecution. Other examples are plentiful.

Notice what seems to be the rule and pattern here. This isn’t “the ends justifies the means,” nor “doing evil that good may come of it.” It appears to me that in the very specific case of when innocent people are in danger of being put to death unjustly, it is perfectly justified – and indeed perhaps even necessary – to keep those who would do the killing ignorant of the truth in order to protect those lives.

Planned Parenthood is a corporation that is unjustly – yet legally – making millions of dollars from the slaughter of innocent, unborn children. Lila and her group deceived those who are carrying out this unjust slaughter (and who are adding other evils on top of it) in order to save the lives of unborn children who are doomed to die unjustly. They are not doing this to protect themselves or to get something that is not theirs. They are doing exactly what the Lord has blessed in the past and which, despite all of the nitpicking naysayers, He will continue to bless.

God bless Mary Ann Glendon

2009-04-27T11:14:00.002-05:00

What more can you say than that Mary Ann Glendon has once again shown herself to be a worthy woman? "Give her of the fruit of her hands and let her works praise her in the city gates." (Prov. 31.31)

As I said in my previous post, Ambassador Glendon single-handedly held up the promotion of abortion through the United Nations at the 1995 Beijing Conference. Now she has rightly embarrassed the president of Notre Dame for his hypocrisy. She realized she was being used as justification for inviting Obama to speak there and she would have none of it. Thanks be to God for her courage and fortitude and may He reward her richly for her actions.

Notre Dame's invite to Obama will worsen abortion worldwide

2009-04-01T13:36:00.005-05:00

One aspect that has been overlooked in this whole President Barack Hussein Obama and University of Notre Dame flap is that the school is also going to be honoring Mary Ann Glendon with the Laetare Medal. For some reason, this medal has been taken by many to be considered the highest award that the Church in the United States can confer on anyone. I suppose back in the time when N.D. could be considered a Catholic university that may have been true, but since the abdication of their Catholic identity in March of 1967, I don't think that's the case anymore.

Professor Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and has a long and distinguished career in that field. She was also the most recent ambassador of the U.S. to the Holy See, a post she relinquished on January 20th of this year.

But she may perhaps be best remembered for the fact that in 1995, she led the delegation of the Holy See to the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing. That was the first time that a Holy See delegation to an international conference was led by a layperson, never mind a woman. But John Paul the Great made that decision because he knew it was going to be a tough fight.

Put the words "woman" and "United Nations" near each other and "abortion" -- or should I say, "reproductive rights" -- is not far behind. This conference had the potential to write into U.N. doctrine and documents the notion that abortion is a "right" that knows no boundaries and is to be given to all women around the world. That would have been devastating to the pro-life movement the world over and it would have vastly increased the pressure, especially on so-called Third World countries, to legalize it everywhere, for any reason, and at any time in the pregnancy.

This conference was held in 1995, during the years of the Clinton administration, which was pushing on the U.N. and other international bodies to further abortion overseas. And since the U.S. has a huge voice at the U.N., any opposition to this measure was going to come with consequences.

Enter Mary Ann Glendon. In my opinion, she single-handedly held back the overwhelming tide of abortion throughout the world. She and her staff worked throughout the conference to get an alliance together consisting of many Third World countries, which included most Muslim nations, in order to oppose this move. To the consternation of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Maria Stopes International and other pro-abortion, feminist and homosexual groups around the world, she was able to lead this ragtag group of countries to oppose the much larger nations that wanted abortion and homosexuality imposed around the world. For this, she and the Holy See were excoriated in the press.

Fast forward 16 years and this May in South Bend, Indiana, Ambassador Glendon will march in an academic procession with President Barack Hussein Obama at what Cardinal Francis George recently called the "flagship Catholic university" in our country. She will join him on the dais as she is awarded the Laetare Medal and he is granted an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

(And, yes, I will insist on using his middle name. Saddam Hussein killed many Iraqis. B Hussein O is authorizing the deaths of unborn infants overseas and, if he has his way, will soon add more to the regular total here in the U.S.)

Catholic commentators of all kinds -- lay (Bill McGurn's is the most penetrating analysis I've seen yet), priestly (see Fathers Schall's and Rutler's comments here) and episcopal -- have already listed B Hussein O's sins regarding abortion, so I will not detail those again. What I will point out is that the U.S. embassy to the United Nations will no longer try to stop the "reproductive rights" language. In fact, the official stance of our country will be to encourage it and see that it gets into the documents, as the Clinton administration had done when it was in power.

Lots of folks have been focused on the Freedom of Choice Act, and rightly so. But most are overlooking the fact that the State Department will one day soon bring the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to the floor of the U.S. Senate for ratification. That document, along with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, will undermine U.S. federal and local laws on abortion and parental rights. Once they are ratified, according to the U.S. Constitution, they will override all other laws of this country.

The efforts and pressure that the Committee on CEDAW is putting on countries that have signed the document into liberalizing, if not eliminating, their abortion laws are well-known. Few have held out. Most have buckled and will continue to do so.

I do not doubt that B Hussein O will find encouragement for his agenda in this recognition. Why shouldn't he? After all Notre Dame is the "flagship Catholic university," and the order that oversees it and the school are recognizing him and his accomplishments (whatever they are).

The fact that Bishop John D'Arcy, the Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, encouraged Ambassador Glendon to accept the award because of the "opportunity such an award gives her to teach" is indicative that she had serious qualms about being on the same stage as the president, for obvious reasons.

So on that day in May, we will have on stage to be honored at the University of Notre Dame -- the University of Our Lady -- the woman who stopped abortion from taking over the world and the man who will be responsible for reversing her actions. Good show, ND.

From whence shrines come

2008-12-20T09:04:00.001-06:00

The La Crosse Tribune's coverage of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine church dedication included this interesting bit:

Corinne Dempsey, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, said that for a church leader like Burke to initiate the building of a shrine is backwards.

Shrines come from the people, she said, not authorities.

“Pilgrimage sites do not start from the top down, but from the bottom up,” said Dempsey, who has taught a course on popular Catholicism and studied pilgrimages.

Other sites of pilgrimage, like the site where Our Lady of Fatima is said to have appeared in Portugal, grew from a groundswell of popular interest, and the official church later becomes aware of it, Dempsey said.

“Pilgrimage shrines historically have been places that began based on miracles that happen to people, not to popes,” she said. “I don’t know how well central Wisconsin is set up for that kind of thing either. These kinds of pilgrimage sites are not typically a mainstream American phenomenon.”

I beg to differ. Notwithstanding Bob Moynihan's excellent rejoinder that people like Dempsey “represent the pointy-headed intellectuals who have lost contact with the base,” there's a lot more to be considered.

First, there are the opposing statements about 'the people' and those in authority. “Pilgrimage shrines historically have been places that began based on miracles that happen to people, not to popes.” Funny, I thought popes were people, too. And miracles have happened to popes just as much as 'to people.' Consider, for instance, the miracle of the August snow which brought about the building of St. Mary Major. But Dempsey's thinking is typically Marxist -- those in authority aren't real people. In their minds, those who have power will necessarily abuse it, therefore, they aren't 'real' people because 'real' people would never abuse power.

Second, the shrines at Fatima, Lourdes, Tepayac, La Sallette, Knock and so many other places of Marian devotion, actually did begin from the top down. They came because the Mother of God herself requested them. If that isn't authority, I don't know what is.

Third, she's wrong about the relationship between those who have the visions and Church officials. These are private revelations subject to the authority of the local bishop. It is he who must give approval for any devotion at the alleged apparition site and the approval for any church that might be built there, as with any church built within his diocese. Indeed, in the Diocese of La Crosse itself there is a "shrine" in Necedah that has been in the process of building since the 1950's. The reason it's taking so long -- it has never had the approval of the local bishop because they were false apparitions. In fact, one of the reasons Archbishop Burke started the Shrine in La Crosse was to provide an authentic place of pilgrimage within the Diocese.

Fourth, she's wrong about all pilgrimage shrines starting with apparitions. While Marian shrines have started with them, there are plenty of other shrines that didn't. For instance, the second most important pilgrimage site in the world after the Holy Land itself is Santiago Compestela. That was founded by a bishop who had obtained the bones of St. James. There is a Shrine to the Divine Savior in Las Vegas. That was begun by the bishop of Sin City in order to help tourists, travelers and the immigrant population of the area.

Too bad for the readers of the La Crosse Tribune who were subjected to such glib and false analysis. All Dempsey did was to give more ammunition to those who already hold this false 'people/leader' dichotomy.

Hispanics against themselves

2008-09-26T18:57:00.003-05:00

Eduardo Verástegui, the star of Bella, has a video on YouTube called Hard Reality. In it, he asks a pointed question and makes a pointed statement: "Most abortion centers are found in Hispanic neighborhoods -- why?" and "Abortion is not only a lucrative industry, it is also used by people who are racists as a means to eliminate our people since they consider us to be a threat to democracy in this country."

Unfortunately, Eduardo may also have to look to some of his own people for that threat. From 1999-2003, as part of my position as editor of the Catholic Times in the Diocese of La Crosse, I was a member of the Catholic Press Association. I went to three annual CPA conventions - Chicago, Dallas and St. Paul.

Unfortunately, I don't recall some significant details of the Dallas convention -- the year or who the speakers were. However, I do remember that there was a demographer of Hispanic origin who gave a talk on Latino demographics in the U.S. In fact, it was one of the main talks and was heavily attended because writers and editors wanted to find out what was happening with the Latino population around the country so we could try to address it and help bring the Good News to them.

However, it was clear that the speaker had no faith; he was simply a man of statistics. This became more evident during the question and answer session. He had earlier given a comparison of the birth rate for white women vs. Latino women. I don't recall the specifics, but I do know that whites were below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman of child-bearing age (still are), and Latinos were well above that level (still are as well, though that rate is slowing down. In Mexico, it's down to about 2.4).

That statistic got me to thinking, so during the Q&A I asked him something along the lines of, "Given the fact that Hispanics have such a high birth rate and given the fact that Planned Parenthood targets minorities for abortion, are you at all concerned that they are going to be putting clinics into more Hispanic neighborhoods and targeting the Latino population for abortion?"

I will never forget the first part of his reply: "They already are, and they should." After that, I blanked out. The rest of the audience was somewhat stunned as well. I was in total amazement that this man could say that his own people should be marked for death. I don' remember the reasons he gave at all. It could have been a global population thing, maybe even global warming -- who knows. All I know was that here was this well-off man, middle- to upper-middle-class, saying that his own people -- the majority of whom are in gut-wrenching poverty -- should be gotten rid of.

So Eduardo, while you're right about the racist intentions of many people in the abortion industry, unfortunately there are Latinos who are just as intent on getting rid of themselves as non-Latinos are.

The soon-to-be Cardinal Raymond Burke

2008-06-27T18:45:00.002-05:00

There are loads of stories out in cyberspace about Archbishop Raymond Burke being named as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura and all kinds of reactions. I'm late to the game, but it was a little difficult sorting out what I was going to say.

First, it was not unexpected, at least by me, that he was going to Rome. My last post on this blog was about his appointments to the Pontifical Council on Legislative Texts and the Congregation for the Clergy. He had already been appointed as a judge at the Signatura last year. He was the only American non-cardinal archbishop with three assignments in Rome. In fact, he may have been the only non-cardinal archbishop with any assignments in Rome since those are usually reserved for cardinals.

Second, he didn't want the appointment and wasn't looking for it. The comments sections in the La Crosse Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch have been filled with venom with many people accusing him of seeking this appointment. That is an outright lie. He was in La Crosse last month for the annual May Crowning at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I semi-congratulated him on his appointments, but told him that while I know the Holy Father appreciates his abilities, I hope the Pope won't tax them too much. He turned his head down and looked away as though he was worried and gave me this very brief reply -- "I hope so, too." It's obvious that he was hearing the rumors that Cardinal Ruini was going to retire and that Cardinal Vallini would take his place, which would leave the Signatura post vacant. He told Jennifer Brinker at the St. LouisReview that the two previous curial appointments "...made me a bit concerned. I was honored by the trust, but I was becoming concerned that it might be an indication of (the Vatican) wanting me more full time." This is an understatement. His manner of speaking with me betrayed much more than concern.

He teared up today in his press conference in St. Louis. He did the same when he left La Crosse. These were not Hillary tears. These were the tears of a man who dearly loves those people for whom he cares, even if he was in conflict with some of them.

Third, this is a loss for the Church in the United States. For all his lack of media savvy, Archbishop Burke forced a conversation that has been needed in this country and the wider Church for a while and is still needed -- the need for absolute fidelity to the teachings and discipline of the Catholic Church. Besides Bishop Leo Maher, late of San Diego, denying Communion to a pro-abortion pol back in 1989, no one had pushed this as hard as Archbishop Burke did. His slap-in-the-face statement about Kerry (which unfortunately became the defining statement of him in the American imagination) woke people up to the reality that Holy Communion in the Catholic Church isn't a 1968 love fest to which everyone is invited. There are rules around It, rules that come, not from old celibate men sitting in ivory towers in Rome, but from the very nature of the Eucharist. Cardinal (oops!) Burke has the courage, but more importantly, the clear-mindedness to see that those rules must be enforced, otherwise they are mere sentimental statements. Let's hope that some of his actions have rubbed off on his brethren.

How he will effect the rest of the Church in this new position remains to be seen. Assuredly, whatever influence he has will be behind-the-scenes. Starting in late August, we'll most likely not be seeing anymore headlines about Burke and Catholic politicians. I'm sure he'll be glad of that. That omnipresent Jesuit voice in the media (can they never find anyone else to comment?), Father Tom Reese told AP, "Every pro-choice Catholic Democrat politician should be very nervous. He made his name in the U.S. by denying Communion to pro-choice politicians. If he gets that view articulated strongly in Rome, he could become the voice for having that position for the universal church." Well, Father Tom, then that means more than Catholic Democrats need to be nervous. So do Catholic Republicans and Labour and Social Democrats and every other politician of whatever political stripe who might support abortion. And that would be a very good thing.

It's funny. With all the hoopla surrounding his appointment, the press missed something big in St. Louis. His last major act as archbishop there was issuing a decree of interdict against a Sister of Charity for participation last November in the pretend ordination of a woman in a synagogue. Why they didn't leap at this chance to get one last dig in on his pastoral style is beyond me.

Archbishop Burke's new appointments

2008-05-07T12:34:00.002-05:00

Archbishop Burke has been appointed by the Holy Father to two important dicasteries at the Vatican: the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts and the Congregation for Clergy. The former is clearly a recognition of his great talent in canon law. Note that this comes after his brilliant exegesis of Canon 915 in Canonica, as well as his two decrees of excommunication for the women who play-acted at becoming priests and the two members of St. Stanislaus Corporation who joined the board of that former parish, and after his decree banning canon lawyer Father Thomas Doyle, O.P., from his archdiocese because Father Doyle was incompetent in his duties towards his clients, who happened to be members of St. Stanislaus Corporation.

The latter appointment, however, may seem a little less obvious. The Congregation for Clergy, as the news sources have pointed out, oversees the seminaries and other priestly formation. It's also the congregation that hears complaints about priestly behavior. But it's also the congregation that is concerned with catechesis (its origin lies in bringing a correct interpretation of the norms of the Council of Trent). And this is probably where Archbishop Burke fits in.

As is probably not very well-known, he is the National Director of the Marian Catechists, the group founded by the late Father John Hardon, SJ. Father Hardon basically anointed then-Bishop Burke to take over the group after his death. And what isn't known at all outside of people in La Crosse who took his class, is that when then-Father Burke was teaching at Aquinas High School in La Crosse, he was developing his own text on moral theology. It actually went over very well with his students. (In fact, it was going so well that when Bishop Frederick Freking of La Crosse called Father Burke to tell him that he was sending him to Rome to study canon law, Father Burke, then only ordained three years, replied by saying that he was doing really well at Aquinas and he would like to continue doing that work. There was, then-Bishop Burke related to me, a long pause on the other end of the phone and then Bishop Freking said, "I didn't think I was asking you.")

Yet, I pity the poor man. It's not like he doesn't have enough to do already. Still, I will make a prediction -- a red hat at the next consistory.

Why are saints considered luxurious?

2008-03-13T12:31:00.003-05:00

I've often wondered this: why do we associate saints' names with luxury? I was just looking at an advertisement in the NY Times for the St. Regis Hotel and they are offering timeshare opportunities. The place, of course, is extraordinarily luxurious. Along with the timeshare, you get your own butler and all the service money can buy.

But who was St. Regis? Actually, the closest I came to finding a St. Regis was St. John Francis Regis, a French Jesuit of the 17th century. He was a zealous priest who especially went in search of women of the night. He was, of course, not looking for his own pleasure, but working to bring them back to the Lord. He successfully converted many of them (oftentimes at his own peril as jealous johns and pernicious pimps threatened his life on more than one occasion) and even established centers where they could have honest employment.

He was zealous in his own mortification. He always slept on the bare floor and his consistent supper was a bowl of milk and some fruit. That certainly doesn't go along with my idea of luxury.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, the most luxurious hotel is The St. Paul. While it's not quite the St. Regis, it would certainly pass as a high-class place.

But who was St. Paul? Well, we know him as one zealous for the Gospel, one who was beaten, whipped, run out of town on more than one occasion, shipwrecked, spending a day and a night adrift on the open sea, left for dead, constantly on the move until he was imprisoned, etc. Being that the City of St. Paul was at one time named Pig's Eye, it's easy to see why a hotel would prefer a saint's name over the porker moniker.

But I ask my question again -- why do we associate saints with luxury? Besides the royal saints, no saint that I know of was a person of luxury. And even the royals did penance on a regular basis and provided for the poor out of their own means. For instance, after St. Elizabeth of Hungary's husband died, she donned the simple garments of a Franciscan tertiary and gave away her own money to care for the poor in hospitals and to give them food.

In other words, being a saint doesn't entail luxury. "The birds have nests, the foxes have lairs, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head," Jesus told someone who wanted to follow Him. He also said, "Take up your cross and follow in My footsteps." The last I checked, the cross wasn't exactly a place of sumptuous recreation.

It's hard to see the St. Regis offering their customers bare wooden floors with barely heated rooms as an option. And I don't think they or The St. Paul will open their doors to the poor and homeless who, no doubt, wander the streets just outside their doors. In fact, The St. Paul is across the street from Rice Park, where many homeless congregate during the day and night. It would require a direct intervention from God for the owner to even think about opening its doors to one of them.

I wonder if this is a Catholic doing? Could it be that since our great cathedrals are named after saints and the world considers them to be places of luxury, that they then feel free to name luxury hotels after them? Or perhaps it comes from innkeepers in old Catholic countries naming inns after saints?

Whatever the way it happened, in my mind it makes for a confusing situation. Any thoughts?

I want to sue Al Gore

2008-02-07T17:29:00.001-06:00

One Dr. David Suzuki, apparently a well-known scientist in Canada, has proposed twice now that politicians who do not work on legislation to curb global warming should be arrested and jailed for "an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years."

His spokesman claims it was a joke, a statement of frustration, but it's the second time he's made it, according to the National Post.

As a joke, I want to sue Al Gore and his ilk, including Dr. Suzuki. You see, they keep promising global warming. But I live in Minnesota, and so far, I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence for global warming, especially this winter. We've had a whole lot of snow and a whole lot of cold. I've never seen as much hoarfrost as I have this winter. We're about to get another blast of Arctic air that is going to plunge temperatures down below zero again. After all, we've been enjoying the relative balm of the 20's this last week-and-a-half after the blizzard we got at the end of January.

But I say once again, Gore and Suzuki have been promising global warming. Well, where is it? If the earth is supposed to be warming up, why aren't there palm trees in my front yard?! I want palm trees! I want to plant my garden in February, not April or May!I want a winter when I don't have to worry about how much propane is in my tank, or if I can get my car out of the driveway or if the car is going to slide off the side of a hill because of ice!

But that's not happening, so can I sue them?

Why I will never vote for a Mormon as president

2008-01-08T22:50:00.000-06:00

I know that very soon after I post this, those who have "Mormon" for a Google search term will find this posting and try to start in on me. But I'm blocking comments on this posting. I don't have the time to deal with replies, but I have been wanting to say this for some time now. However, what I say is not said with any personal animosity toward anyone at all (except, perhaps, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young), least of all Mitt Romney whom I have never met and have only the most remote connections to.

That said, if I can help it, I will never vote for a Mormon as president. Now there are probably Catholics out there who will pounce on me and tell me that the Constitution says we can't have a religious test for anyone who holds public office. Amen to that. But that's a governmental regulation for those who hold official posts. It isn't meant for individuals like myself who are using their best judgments to choose the best candidate possible.

So without further ado, here are some reasons why I will not vote for a Mormon:

1) Mormon theology is (to be blunt) screwy.

The reason this is important is because how a person believes guides how a person behaves. Now I know that many people will throw the "Catholic" politicians like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry at me. And still I say, yes, as a person believes, so a person behaves. Kennedy, Kerry, et al, do not believe that what the Catholic Church teaches really binds their consciences, so they are free to do as they wish. And they do as they wish.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is by all accounts a faithful Mormon. That is, of course, better than being one who claims to be Mormon but does not live the faith or who claims to be Catholic but says the Pope can go to hell. But that he is a faithful Mormon should give us pause because Mormonism's doctrines are strange.

They believe that God the Father - who is the god of this planet, not the God who created the universe and who has no beginning and no end, as Christianity has always taught - had sexual intercourse with Mary in order to beget Jesus.
They believe that men who are faithful Mormons will, after death, get to have their own planets over which they are gods and that they will each have a bunch of spirit wives with whom they will generate spirit children, and then the created people on that planet will be expected to have sex in order to incarnate those spirit children as happens here on Earth.
They believe that "as we are now, God once was. As God is now, so we will become."
When a couple are married in a temple ritual, the woman is given a secret name. After death, the only way that she can make it into the highest heavens, the highest happiness, is if her husband calls her by this secret name.

I could go further, but this should demonstrate perfectly well that Mormonism not only isn't a Christian belief, but the strangeness of their beliefs can lead to some strange behaviors.

I for one don't want a president in office who believes that a woman's highest happiness depends entirely on her getting married and her husband calling on her secret name after death.

Or who believes that he will someday be the god of his own planet.

2) Mormonism is part business, part religion

Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were Americans through and through. The religion which they developed is an American religion. Their connections are all American.

That may seem obvious and pointless, but consider this: the Mormon church owns many huge businesses and it has many faithful members who either own or are chairmen/CEO's of huge businesses. To name a few: Ryder, La Quinta, Franklin/Covey, Iomega, American Express, SkyWest, Tropical Sportswear, Sports Capital Partners, Cadence Design, Five Star Quality Care (based in Newton, Mass., of which state Mr. Romney was once governor), Headwaters, Central Pacific Bank, Black and Decker. Others hold influential positions like CFO or are presidents of key operations of major corporations. Oh, and did I mention Marriott and JetBlue?

This doesn't include the rather lengthy list of businesses owned directly by the church itself, businesses like Beneficial Life, Bonneville Broadcasting, and just about everything with the name "Deseret" in it. The Mormon church actually owns the largest ranch in the country, which isn't in the mountain West somewhere, but outside of Orlando. Their agribusiness companies are huge. In fact, TIME magazine said that if Mormonism would be considered a business, it would fall in the middle of the Fortune 500, somewhere between Nike and Union Carbide.

Along with this, one must take into consideration that all faithful Mormons are required by their religion to tithe 10 percent of their incomes to the church. If they don't do that, they find themselves on the outs with their local leaders. So all these corporate leaders who are making loads of money are giving 10 percent of their personal income to the church. And who's to say they're not doing that with their corporations' money as well?

In other words, Mormonism isn't like other religions. It's part business, part religion. When the church itself owns at least 23 major companies, one must seriously question what the primary purpose of its existence is.

3) Influence doesn't only come from Salt Lake

When JFK ran for president, we all know what happened and what the accusation was. Many were expecting that he would be taking orders from Rome and from the bishops in the U.S. Of course his speech Houston cleared that up -- he wasn't going to take orders from anyone except himself.

Some people say that Romney's recent speech did the same thing. But there's a huge difference between Catholicism and Mormonism. (Well, there are actually dozens of huge differences between the two, but we'll stick to discussing politics right now.) With Catholicism, you have a very clearly defined hierarchy that is separated from the laity. The clergy are celibate, and they are supported by donations from the faithful, donations which are voluntarily given.

With Mormonism, however, there is no separate hierarchy. All "bishops" and "elders" are laypeople. They may work for the church itself, but most work at regular jobs. That means that the president of Franklin/Covey, for instance, could just as easily be the president of his local stake or the bishop of his ward. In fact, he could even be on the highest levels of the church, acting as counselor to the president, Gordon B. Hinkley, who is the so-called prophet, seer and revelator.

In other words, it is not inconceivable that a President Romney or one of his staff would consult with a so-called apostle of the Mormon church, for whatever reason.

In fact, the Salt Lake Tribune reported on 30 December that former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who is now the U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services, held meetings with his staff to figure out how they could get Mormon doctrines implemented into Utah state policy. (Personally, I'm not sure why that was needed. The state legislature is around 97 percent Mormon and they vote on their beliefs.) Leavitt says he hasn't done that on the federal level, but there's really nothing to prevent him from doing so.

Nor is there anything to prevent a Mormon president from doing the same thing.

This story from AP also shows that Mormon business owner can have an influence over Mr. Romney. (Let's not forget that he is the one who saved the Salt Lake Olympics when they were under the cloud of a corruption scandal.) These business owners live Mormon theology daily and they themselves work to see their faith grow in influence. And since these guys have the money and the connections, their influence is very strong. That it would extend to the president of the United States is a scary thought.

4) Race

Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal wrote a superb column about the problem of race in the Mormon church. It is well-known that in their scriptures (i.e., The Book of Mormon, Doctrines and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price), Mormons look upon dark-skinned people as inferior to whites. This is written in their documents as well and was enforced until a lawsuit that went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 suddenly prompted a "revelation" that blacks could be part of the church hierarchy.

That racism persists to this day, Riley says, and I wouldn't doubt it a bit. For just as Mormons still cling to polygamy (just try to criticize that practice in front of someone who descends from a polygamous line) as the pure way to go despite the ban that was placed on it so that Utah could enter the Union, so racism is not easily eradicated after being told for more than a century that whites are the superior race and non-whites are cursed by God Himself.

5) The Mormon church is not 100 percent pro-life.

Despite the image to the contrary, Mormons are not pro-life people. I got a lesson in this back in 1997 when I went to the Roe v Wade rally at the Utah state capitol on January 22. I was expecting the nearly 5,000 people that I see annually at the Minnesota state capitol and was stunned when I got there and there was no one around. I went inside and all I saw was, at most, a couple hundred people gathered under the rotunda, most of them Catholic. Someone explained to me that Mormon theology actually does allow for abortions. In fact, I found out that at that time, Utah had the highest rate of abortions among married women in the country (I don't know if that still holds true.) The reasons for the abortion have to be serious, but they still do allow for the taking of innocent human life.

Conclusion
These are but a few of my reasons for not voting for a Mormon as president. If I had to choose between two Mormons for a legislative race, I wouldn't have too much difficulty with that because legislators aren't executives who have things like executive privilege within their grasp; they can be held in check by fellow legislators. But because of his executive powers, a president is a different story and requires far more consideration than legislators.

Is Romney better than Hillary? Certainly. And in that kind of contest, I'm not sure what I would do. But while we're in the primary season, I am not going to give any kind of consideration to Mitt Romney at all.

Kiera Knightly raps

2007-10-16T23:22:00.000-05:00

My wife is part of a chat group that discusses teaching history for home schoolers. They were talking about using films to teach history and someone brought up the 2005 Pride & Prejudice with Kiera Knightly playing Lizzie. It's a lousy film in many respects, most of all in fidelity to the book, but also in execution.

Here's what one lady in the group said about it, though: "The 2005 Pride & Prejudice has grown on me--I remember making all sorts of grrr comments to my dh when we attended it in the theaters, but we do like it now."

And here's the response of Maria Rioux, the group's moderator (slightly edited):

That's called desensitization. Entertain something long enough, and you'll start to find it acceptable, regardless of objective merit or the lack thereof.

Next thing we know, you'll be telling us about this great new rap song that seems a little jarring at first, but is, in fact, musically as complex and beautiful as Mozart's 40th. You just have to train your ear by rapping on it. This happens naturally because, when first forced to listen to any rap music, people have a tendency to bang their heads against the closest wall...which, happily, is the very thing that adapts the ear to relentless pounding.

The data are not yet complete on whether the concomitant mental trauma affects the ability to make a judgement. Study subjects seem to be having trouble expressing themselves coherently in English.

Touché, Maria!

Happily eating crow

2007-04-24T09:15:00.000-05:00

Back in June, I made the prediction that Bishop Samuel Aquila of the Diocese of Fargo was to be named coadjutor of the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis within short order. I was wrong and I apologize.

But though my prediction was wrong, both in person and in time, I am quite happy to say that I really don't care that I'm wrong. Today, the Holy See announced that Bishop John Nienstedt of New Ulm has been appointed as coadjutor. This is great news.

In October of 2005, I had the pleasure of having dinner with the new archbishop at the Catholic Medical Association Conference in Portland, Ore. (see his talk here). I also had a chance to meet Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix at that same conference.

In an elevator ride, I told Bishop Olmsted how impressed I was with what he was doing with all the obstacles he had to overcome. But he would hear none of it. The difficulties he encountered, he said, were nowhere near as tough as what other bishops had. That surprised me given the fact that his immediate successor had been arrested, charged and convicted of a felony, that the former vicar general (who, by the way, had established a very popular youth program) had been arrested for sexual misconduct, and that the bishop had open rebellion on his hands involving a sizable number of priests.

But no, he said, those problems were nothing. He had priests and seminarians and the diocese had a fair amount of money. Compare that to someone like Bishop Nienstedt, he said, who had no money, no seminarians, hardly any priests (42 priests for 82 parishes), and where respect for the priesthood had gone out the window in favor or laywomen or nuns running the parishes (my words, not his). Now that, he said, was someone to look up to.

Archbishop Nienstedt has not had it very easy given the way his diocese was left in shambles by his predecessor, Bishop Raymond Lucker. But in the six years he's been there, he has begun to change it without much open rancor. Of course, the National Catholic Reporter went after him since Bishop Lucker was one of NCR's patron saints. But other than that, he's been able to carry out his ministry with a fair amount of calm.

Moving from the most rural diocese in the country to one with somewhere between 646,000 and 830,000 Catholics (depending on who you talk to -- the new coadjutor says the former, the StarTribune says the latter and the Pioneer Press says 750,000) and being made the Metropolitan of the province is quite a change in responsibility. May God give him the strength and courage he's going to need to handle all of his duties and the opposition he will necessarily face when he carries them out.

In defense of the CMA

2006-11-04T17:31:00.000-06:00

Over on the Whispers in the Loggia blog, Rocco Palmo noted an article in Newsday (scroll down to the one entitled "More from the Fall Classic") about a Long Island pastor who pulled a brochure from his parish church's rack. Why Newsday thought it was worthy of a story is beyond me.

Oh, wait a minute. The brochure is entitled "Homosexuality and Hope" and was authored and published by the Catholic Medical Association. That's why a pastor removing it is so important (though he did it after only two people complained about it). Apparently, he also had the support of the Bishop, William Murphy.

The Newsday article claims that the priest and diocese thought the content of brochure contained a lot of speculation and that its theories on the development of same-sex attraction were outdated.

Interesting.

The people who wrote that brochure are all professionals working in the field of psychiatry and psychology and have many years of experience of dealing with people who struggle with same-sex attraction. They have studied, from a Catholic perspective, what the causes of that attraction are. Their conclusions, based on their lived experience and success in treating these patients, indicate that these unwanted attractions are not genetic, but lie in various other sources, including difficult parent-child relationships, sexual abuse, and/or difficult relations with same-sex peers while growing up.

Simply because two people complained about the brochure doesn't mean it doesn't belong in the rack nor that it was in error. Either the brochure presents the truth or it doesn't. So rather than saying its theories were outdated, they should have said (if this is what they are claiming) that it was untrue.

However, I don't think that's what they were claiming. I think they're like too many priests and bishops who lack backbone and were afraid of a couple of people's reactions, who would then turn to the media who would write the pastor and bishop up as the ultimate intolerants, and they would, in turn, experience a lot of grief. (Something about "Do not be afraid to suffer hardship for the sake of the Gospel" comes to mind at this point.) So rather than saying "it's untrue," they make themselves more media friendly by stating, "it's outdated."

But the last time I checked, truth is timeless. If it isn't, then the bishop and pastor are wearing some pretty old-fashioned clothing and leading people in an ancient ritual that has absolutely no relevance for today.

Out of the mouths of babes

2006-10-21T22:33:00.000-05:00

A conversation between son number 3 (4-years-old) and daughter number 1 (17):

S-3: Will we still be here [in our house] when we go to heaven?

D-1: No, we'll be in heaven.

S-3: You mean with Jesus?

D-1: Yes.

S-3: [Emits gasp of great excitement] Can we bring our light sabres?

Reuterville's misleading again

2006-10-21T22:26:00.000-05:00

Reuters today published a story about Pope Benedict's speech at the Lateran opening the academic year. Here's a quote from the story as it appeared in the Khaleej Times Online:

Like his predecessor Pope John Paul II, Benedict is against stem cell technology, which researchers say could help cure serious illnesses but the Church opposes it because it often relies on cells from embryo tissue.

This, of course, is nonsense. Benedict doesn't oppose all stem cell technology, only that which comes from embryonic stem cells. Notice the set-up -- bad pope ("Benedict is against stem cell technology") vs. good scientists ("which researchers say could help cure serious illnesses").

And then comes this zinger:

The Vatican teaches that human life begins at conception.

As if the Vatican made that up all by themselves. They totally discount the fact that human embryologists, those scientists whose study is solely the human embryo, have established their own scientific nomenclature and teach "that human life begins at conception," i.e. fertilization, when the sperm penetrates the egg. (It strikes me, though, that the reason they probably discount it is that they most likely don't know it because they haven't taken the time to ask human embryologists about it.)

Whoever wrote this is being deliberately misleading. How like Reuters.

Home Is the Soldier From War

2006-10-17T16:36:00.000-05:00

Here's another one from my daughter's collection. She wrote this last year when my father died and then gave it to my wife's family when my father-in-law died.

Home Is the Soldier From War

Home is the soldier, home from war.
Hard was his fight, now it is o’er
Well was it fought, now he is resting.
Now at peace, God he is praising.
He will suffer no more.
Home is the soldier from war.

Home is the soldier, home from war.
Happier than ever before,
buried with honor and our love,
he is resting with God above.
Sorrow he knows no more.
Home is the soldier from war.

Home is the soldier, home from war.
The flag of his country flies o’er,
o’er the grave where he is sleeping.
He served that flag without resting.
Now his fighting is o’er
Home is the soldier from war.

He has fought the good fight.
He has finished the race.
Now in eternal light,
he sees God face to face.
His exile is o’er.
Home is the soldier from war.

By: Regina M. Szyszkiewicz

Daddy the wasp killer

2006-10-17T16:29:00.000-05:00

This was written by my daughter for my birthday a couple of years ago. I've been meaning to post it and am only now getting around to it.

It originated from an incident in a bathroom. A wasp appeared there and I was called to take care of it. As I got the swatter, I said to my daughter, "Daddy, the wasp killer, huh?" Well, that was all her poet's mind needed to get her going...

Daddy the Wasp Killer

Armed for the deadly combat,
Daddy firmly grasped the swatter.
Under his breath he muttered, “drat,”
Daddy, the deadly wasp killer.

From behind the bathroom door,
came a “buzz” from the buzzing fighter.
Daddy looked fiercer than before.
Daddy, the dreaded wasp killer.

He swung that door open wide,
(louder buzzed the buzzing fighter)
and crossed the floor with one stride.
Daddy, the fearsome wasp killer.

Then with a “crash,” “bang,” “wack,” “swat,”
Daddy wielded the swatter.
Daddy’s fury was boiling hot.
Daddy, the awful wasp killer.

Then, victory for Daddy!
He had killed the buzzing fighter!
From the bathroom, triumphantly,
came Daddy the wasp killer.

By: Regina M. Szyszkiewicz

Clinton and bin Laden

2006-09-19T00:25:00.000-05:00

Actually, what the folks at ABC presented in "The Path to 9/11" probably isn't too far off the mark. What was supposed to be in the broadcast version and what got cut was the sequence where Clinton decides not to go after Osama bin Laden, and then there was an immediate cut to Clinton in the witness stand saying, "I did not have sex with that woman."

Critics have decried this as overblown, but anyone who has had any kind of addiction can tell you that it's not far off at all; in fact, it's quite logical. Clinton was having an affair with Monica. His mind wasn't on the protection of the country but on the pleasures he could have with the intern.

That this is what happens in these situations is borne out by the fact that this kind of thing occurs all the time -- people become obsessed with sex, porn, drugs, alcohol, gambling or whatever and everything else in life goes by the wayside. The stories are too numerous to recount, so I don't think that's necessary. There's plenty of evidence that this happens on a regular basis.

That it could also happen to the former White House occupant is, for some reason, an idea that's repugnant for some people to think about. So what if he was a Rhodes scholar or a Yale graduate or had any other number of accolades and privileges? All of that doesn't matter when it comes down to the raw desire of seeking the next pleasurable tryst. All of those things go by the wayside as do considerations about propriety and decency or about what other priorities are more important than getting his zipper down while he's in the room with her.

Going to the dogs

2006-09-12T11:50:00.000-05:00

Ed Peters sent out this piece to folks like me, "uberbloggers" as he calls us. Seems a priest in New Jersey can't get along without his dogs and even brings them to Mass and lets them sit unleashed in the sanctuary.

When this came in, I was on the phone with my good friend, Jeff Gardner, my partner at Catholic Radio International (check it out). So I told him about it and got to the part where Ed says, "Although the apparently untethered canines 'have been known to growl' at late-comers," when Jeff says, "Right -- now all we have to do is teach them to sniff out those who aren't in a state of grace!"

And then when I told him that, "Fr. Scurti assures us that his dogs 'don't remove the sacredness of the liturgy at all,'" Jeff says, "This gives new meaning to 'I shall be healed.'"

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

They've made the connection in Australia

2006-07-20T09:58:00.000-05:00

As I have talked about elsewhere on this blog, there is a connection between the lower number of children being made by Catholics and the fact that Catholic schools are closing, a connection the bishops of this country are unwilling to confront with any real boldness and leadership.

In Australia, the independent schools have made the connection and are at least looking at the situation. When we in the U.S. will acknowledge it -- if ever -- is anyone's guess.

Yours truly in the L.A. Times

2006-07-16T23:53:00.000-05:00

Responding to a column in the Los Angeles Times, I wrote the following letter. I certainly didn't expect it to get published, but there it is.

Abstinence is the best prevention against virus
July 2, 2006

Re "Ideology won't prevent cancer," Opinion, June 29

Julie Kay's column on the human papilloma virus vaccine was inane at best. Instead of engaging the argument that abstinence before marriage is the best prevention against the virus, and therefore cervical cancer, she dismisses it as religious, and therefore nutty. However, the logic is simple, scientific and elementary. It goes like this: Human papilloma virus is a sexually transmitted disease. One does not get a sexually transmitted disease if one doesn't have sex.

Therefore, the way to avoid this virus is by not having sex until marriage — and hope one's spouse has followed the same logic.

This has nothing to do with religion or religious views. It is a simple and scientific fact and can be followed by anyone. To say otherwise is demonstrably false.

THOMAS A. SZYSZKIEWICZ

Peterson, Minn.

An oxymoronic priest

2006-07-12T10:09:00.000-05:00

So this guy is going to combat AIDS? While he's openly gay? Right. And the Mob is going to support the Vatican's call to combat the trafficking of weapons.

Archbishop Burke's additional assignment

2006-07-10T11:09:00.000-05:00

As if Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis didn't have enough to do already, the Holy Father has laid on him another task. It was announced today from the Holy See that he has been appointed to be a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.

I heard the other day that he was in Rome for the pallium ceremony, most likely because of his good friend, Archbishop Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston. It's obvious, then, that he had other meetings while he was there and was asked to be part of the Signatura. (As an aside, he probably also celebrated his birthday (June 30th) and the anniversary of his priestly ordination (June 29th) at his favorite restaurant, a great place on the outskirts of Rome right near the catacombs. But for the life of me, I can't remember its name.)

This is high recognition of Archbishop Burke's canonical skills. His resume includes working for five years as Defender of the Bond at the Signatura, which is really the Church's highest court (outside the person of the Holy Father himself, of course). In fact, he was the first American to be appointed to that post. He was appointed to be the Bishop of La Crosse by Pope John Paul II when he was working in that office, and then ordained a bishop by the Pope himself on January 6, 1995.

Archbishop Burke told me when I first met and interviewed him for Inside the Vatican back in the Fall of 1998, that while he was Defender of the Bond, he only had about a handful of cases where he actually defended the bond. The Signatura oversees the world's canonical courts and when marriage cases reach there, rather than the Roman Rota, that means the cases are being appealed on technical or procedural grounds, and not on the contents of the case. Those kinds of marriage cases are few and far between. So he primarily worked on really difficult non-marital canonical cases, cases that had been in the making for a long time and where the parties were deeply entrenched in their mutually hostile positions. For this work, he is still well-regarded in the Vatican and has many, many friends there.

I think it's striking that after 11 years of not being at the Signatura, the Holy Father still recognizes Archbishop Burke's abilities and thinks so highly of them that he would appoint him to that post. There are some who think that what he said about John Kerry and the ensuing flap during the 2004 elections caused him to become out of favor with Rome, but that is obviously not the case.

This is also vindication for his handling of the St. Stanislaus case (see posting below). Apparently the powers that be in the Holy See think that he went about the case just fine and that it didn't matter that the excommunications came not too long before Christmas, as some in St. Louis complained.

But when it comes to polticians, we now have an interesting situation. Archbishop Wuerl is in D.C. and is dead set against denying Communion to Catholic pols who vote for and vocally support abortion. Archbishop Burke, on the other hand, interpreted Canon 915 to mean that someone like John Kerry can and should be denied Communion. Yet, it is Archbishop Burke who will now be able to do something should a case work through the Catholic Church's bureaucracy and land itself in the Signatura's case pile.

I also find it interesting that there was in Rome at one time this trio of archbishops -- Burke, DiNardo and Wuerl -- for the same occasion. Burke and DiNardo are friends. DiNardo and Wuerl know each other since they are both originally from Pittsburgh. (Actually, DiNardo was born in Steubenville, Ohio, but then his family moved 45 miles east to grow up in Pittsburgh and was ordained for that diocese.) Could there have been some discussion between the three of them in a quieter moment? Perhaps we might see something good come later on.

Update
See Ed Peters' entry on this at his blog.

Update 2
Tim Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch confirms Ed's observations in this report. However, his description of the Defender of the Bond as being similar to the U.S. Solicitor General is inaccurate. The Defender of the Bond has the responsibility of presenting to the Court, whether it be a diocesan tribunal, metropolitan tribunal, the Roman Rota or the Signatura, "everything which reasonably can be brought forth against nullity or dissolution" (canon 1432). Since, as I said above, the Defender at the Signatura doesn't have a whole lot of marriage or ordination cases to defend, he has additional responsibilities assigned to him, which may or may not be similar to those of the Solicitor General (I simply don't know). However, they are in addition to the office of Defender, not part of it.

Excommunications in St. Louis

2006-07-07T13:31:00.000-05:00

This posting comes well after the fact as these excommunications took place in December of 2005. This article appeared in the February 2006 issue of Catholic World Report, however it wasn't put on the web. I think it has some import, so I'm making it available here.

Excommunications in St. Louis
By Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz

It’s not often that seven Catholics are publicly excommunicated from the Church on a single day. So when Archbishop Raymond L. Burke of St. Louis proclaimed “with heavy heart” in December that the six members of the board of the civil corporation of St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish in St. Louis and the priest they hired to be pastor were excommunicated for an act of schism, it made national news.

Father Marek Bozek, a priest of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau and a native of Poland, left his post as associate pastor of St. Agnes Cathedral in his diocese against the express wishes of Bishop Joseph Leibrecht, and took up an offer from the board of directors of St. Stan’s Parish to become their pastor. By this act, both the board and the priest committed an act of schism and ruptured their communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

This was not what Archbishop Burke wanted. Pundits have wagged their tongues over the controversies that follow this shepherd wherever he goes. From his decisions to build a multi-million dollar shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Diocese of La Crosse, to his ban of CROP Walk there, forbidding that diocese’s AIDS Ministry from participating in a fund-raising walk with gay-rights groups, telling pro-abortion Catholic politicians after years of dialogue with them that they could not receive Communion until they publicly repented their position, and then when he moved to St. Louis telling Senator John Kerry that he could not receive Communion in his archdiocese while the presidential contender was campaigning there and putting the members of the St. Stanislaus board under interdict, Archbishop Burke is not one to shrink from difficult decisions.

In an interview with this writer back in June of 2004 during the heat of the presidential election, he said, rather bemusedly, “I always seem to be getting myself into trouble.” But this controversy with St. Stan’s was not one he relished or found in any way humorous. In fact, in his weekly column in the St. Louis Review, he wrote, “I write, with heavy heart, about a situation which I, as bishop, had hoped I would never have to address.”

St. Stanislaus Kostka, on the city’s north side, is in an anomalous situation. It was founded in 1880 as a regular ethnic parish to serve the Polish immigrants in the area. But the historical circumstances of the time would lead to then-Archbishop Peter Kenrick, who was toward the end of his life and, according to local historians, not in the soundest of mind, to forge a compromise with the parish.

At that time in the nation’s history, the Catholic Church was coming out of the throes of trusteeism, the movement that put “jus patronatus” in the hands of the common laity. The concept of “jus patronatus” came from Old Europe where royalty or nobles established churches or dioceses and had the right to name the priest or bishop to those. To use modern American terms, whoever paid for it had the naming rights.

When the emigres came here in the 18th and 19th centuries, they brought this concept with them and applied to themselves in the land where no nobility existed. They paid for the purchase of the land and the building of the church, schools and convents, so, they figured, they had the right to own it themselves, not the Church. (See Catholic World Report, October 2005)
At the same time this was going on, Polish immigrants were feeling slighted by their primarily Irish and German bishops. This caused feelings of resentment and bitterness to rise up and eventually brought about the schism in Pennsylvania that resulted in the rise of the Polish National Catholic Church. Numerous Polish parishes around the country were either going or threatening to go the same way.

Enter St. Stanislaus Parish in St. Louis, Missouri in 1891. Archbishop Peter Kenrick was most likely facing a similar situation, according to local historians. It is quite likely that this parish was wanting to break for the PNCC, though no one today is fully sure of the circumstances of the time. Many believe the archbishop was not in the soundest frame of mind at the time a deed was signed and a lay board of trustees took control of the buildings and land. He still retained control over the naming of priests to the parish and the pastor was the chairman of the board. But the laity now had a firm grip on what happened there.

Through the years, there had been various moves to try to bring this parish into line with canon law, according to Msgr. Vernon Gardin, the vicar general for the archdiocese. “It was still an irregular situation back then,” he said, and during the 40's and 50's the chancellor tried to do something, but was unsuccessful. It was let go during the 60's, but it arose again in the 1970's from the most unlikely source – Pope John Paul II.

At that time, he was still Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, but he was visiting the U.S. in 1969. Being that this was a Polish parish, he stopped in to visit and celebrate Mass. That gave the parishioners a shot in the arm to believe their stand on the case was correct. Then when he was elected pope in 1978, that gave them even greater hope.

But that hope would eventually be dashed. As the board began to perceive that things were not going the way they wanted them to go, they made unilateral changes to their by-laws in 2001 and again in 2004. The original by-laws had the archbishop assigning the pastor, who would also serve as president of the board, and gave him the ability to appoint the members of the board. But the first change had the members of the board elected by the parish, an election that was then confirmed by the archbishop. The second change completely wrote the archbishop out of the picture – the word doesn’t even appear in the document – and there is also no mention of the parish being part of the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Instead, the document refers to the “competent ecclesiastical authority” but does not define who that is. On top of that, the pastor is no longer the top member of the board. That falls to the chairperson who is, according to the by-laws, a chief executive officer.

The 2001 changes are what caused then-Archbishop Justin Rigali to start raising the bar on the board and asking for a regularization of their situation. But he got nowhere with them before he was transferred to Philadelphia. So it fell to his successor, Archbishop Burke, to deal with it.
His first meeting with the board did not go well. He was told that they were in charge. The archbishop decided to call for a meeting with the parishioners, which turned out to be worse than the board meeting, with parishioners publicly verbally abusing him. It didn’t help that board members brought in some of his detractors from when he was in La Crosse.

It was a month after this parish meeting that the board revised the by-laws again.

Archbishop Burke was not pleased. Five months later, he temporarily moved the pastor, Father Michael Bene, and the apostolate to the Polish community to another parish, and in July of last year permanently moved the apostolate to St. Agatha Parish. That left St. Stanislaus without priest.

The board appealed that decision to the Congregation for the Clergy. But the dicastery ruled against them in rather strong terms. “Through careful and premeditated revisions of the By-Laws of the civil corporation,” wrote the Congregation’s secretary, Archbishop Csaba Ternyak, “you have attempted to make the role of the pastor impotent, attempted to wrest control from the local Ordinary, and attempted to transform St. Stanislaus Parish into an entity which has no resemblance to a parish as envisioned by either the tradition or current law of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Still, the board was undaunted. All throughout this struggle, they have portrayed Archbishop Burke as a man eager to get his hands on the property and the estimated $9 million in assets the parish has in order to pay for sexual abuse claims. That’s an image the secular press has engendered by portraying this as a struggle over property rights. But that’s not the case at all, said Msgr. Gardin. As well as being Vicar General, he’s also the vicar for finances and is in charge of the Finance Committee, which he emphasized is no mere rubber-stamp group. There is the overall committee and a whole bunch of subcommittees as well, meaning, he said, he has to go to 32 meetings a year. “There are scores of laypeople on these committees” who probe every single aspect of the archdiocesan funding. In short, he said, “We don’t need the money and we don’t want the money.”

In fact, there are serious questions about the parish’s financial disclosures. While the parish is claiming $9 million in assets, the archdiocese asserts that they have not done a publicly available audit. And the area of town they’re in is not the best, according to Msgr. Gardin, so the land valuation is probably not as high as they claim.

Finally, in February of 2005, the archbishop put the board under the canonical penalty of interdict. This is not a type of excommunication, but rather a penalty meant to try and bring the offenders to repentance.

Enter Father Bozek...
After the interdict not much happened. Until the second week of Advent, that is. That’s when the board announced that it had hired a priest from the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in southern Missouri to be their new pastor.

Father Marek Bozek is originally from Poland. How he got to be ordained in Missouri is a matter of some dispute. He had originally been studying for the Pallotine Fathers and then for the Archdiocese of Warmia. However, he did not complete his studies at either place. The former rector of the seminary in Warmia, Father Jan Guzowski, said that Father Bozek was dismissed from the seminary for homosexual activity. But Father Bozek disputed that with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“We thought he was homosexual,” Father Guzowski told the P-D. “‘We had several problems with him. He said he wasn't homosexual, but we had certain proof that this wasn't true.’ Asked what proof, Guzowski said that other seminarians told him so.”

The P-D quoted Father Bozek as saying that he has “a recommendation from Archbishop [Edmund] Piszcz which says I left by my own request.”

Interestingly, the Archdiocese of Hartford had a priest from the Warmia Archdiocese working for them for a short period who was arrested for sexually abusing a teenage girl. He has served his jail term and is currently awaiting deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. According to news reports in the New Britain Herald, Hartford claimed they had a letter of recommendation from Warmia, a claim Warmia disputed. Calls to Hartford seeking clarification were not returned.

A spokeswoman for the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau told CWR they had received three letters of recommendation for Father Bozek from the Archdiocese of Warmia when he was applying to study for the diocese. She would not release them for review, however, saying they composed part of his confidential personnel file. She did say, however, that there was “no mention of any homosexual preferences or practices” in any of the letters.

A request for information from the Pallotine Fathers was not answered.

...Exuent the St. Stan’s board and Father Bozek
These actions – Father Bozek leaving his parish assignment and the board of St. Stan’s hiring him – left the Ordinaries of these dioceses with little choice. Upon leaving, Bishop Leibrecht suspended Father Bozek’s priestly faculties. Upon his arrival at St. Stan’s, Archbishop Burke gave pronouncement to the automatic excommunication.

When he left his post at St. Agnes Cathedral in Springfield, Father Bozek left a diocese very much in need of priests. The Post-Dispatch reported a claim by Father Bozek that Bishop Leibrecht had encouraged Archbishop Burke to take him, but that the archbishop refused. That claim was later denied by both bishops.

Father Bozek even claimed that Bishop Leibrecht understood why he was doing what he was doing. However, Bishop Leibrecht’s statement on the matter does not betray any kind of understanding whatsoever: “Father Marek Bozek has gone from ordination to excommunication in three short years. This descent has taken place because he has not remained a man of his word. On ordination day, he promised publicly before all assembled that he would give his life to the people of southern Missouri in full cooperation with his bishop. That has not happened. Instead, division and schism in the Church has [sic] taken place.”

The board has appealed the excommunication. The appeal first goes to the archbishop. If he denies it, it then goes to the Vatican. There it will most likely go to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith given that the cause of the excommunications was schism. How the American Archbishop William Levada will respond to it will be interesting to watch.

Szyszkiewicz writes from Minnesota.

Where we Catholics are failing -- miserably

2006-07-05T23:42:00.000-05:00

What the Charlotte Observer points out in the story linked above is that the Catholic Church in the U.S. is not doing a very good job at keeping Latino Catholics Catholic. It's interesting that the California Catholic Conference is boasting that in the next few years, California will have a Catholic population that makes up 37 percent of the population. I add to that claim a definite "maybe." That's if they can hold on to the Latinos who are going there.

However, we're not alone in this difficulty. According to a TIME magazine article back in 1999, between 1960 and 1985, the number of Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestants doubled in Chile, Paraguay, Venezuela, Haiti and the Bahamas; tripled in Argentina, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic; quadrupled in Brazil and Puerto Rico; quintupled in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Bolivia and Peru; and went up by a factor of six in Guatemala, Ecuador and Colombia. Brazil is the largest Roman Catholic country in the world with more than 100 million Catholics, but only 10 percent of them show up in church on Sunday.

The difficulty is that most Latinos are cultural Catholics. They grew up poor and illiterate, went to church because that was what their parents had done and taught them to do, and so on. It's simply a part of their life and a basically unquestioned one. Now there are leaders who are versed in the Catholic faith, or at least in a version of the Catholic faith, but not one that corresponds to reality. (That would be liberation theology, of which I have written here and here.) Other than these folks, though, most poor Latinos know nothing about the "why" of the Catholic faith.

So when they come here to the States, they're confronted with a whole bunch of other religions and proselityzers who confound them with all kinds of "truth" about whatever -- the supposed idolatry of "worshipping" Mary and the saints, all the conspiracy theories involving the Vatican, the "errors" of the Eucharist, and so on. Because of their ignorance of their Catholic faith, they're easily hoodwinked into thinking that what the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostals or Evangelicals say is completely true, and they are lured away from the fullness of truth.

So we have a two-pronged problem here, and it brings to mind the fact that we U.S. Catholics cannot ignore what is going on in other parts of the world, because those problems can easily come to roost in our backyards.

What our bishops are going to do about it, I don't know. They should lead the charge, but I also want to live beyond the next few minutes, so I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for them. It will be up to us laity (who have the responsibility to be the salt of the earth and the light to the world, as the Second Vatican Council taught) working with and through our various apostolates and maybe even establishing new ones specifically for this purpose of educating Latinos in the truth of the faith. Then they will at least have something to stand on when they're confronted with the various religious salesmen who come peddling their hole-ridden wares.

Why Catholic nuns are disappearing

2006-07-05T23:41:00.000-05:00

One Ken Briggs just wrote a book called Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns.

Yes, you read that correctly -- "betrayal." You see, according to Mr. Briggs, the Council told them to do everything they did afterwards. "Most communities of nuns doffed the habit for civilian clothes, decided to permit sisters to live outside the convent, and gave sisters a choice whether to continue working within church institutions or, in keeping with a newfound mission to the broader world, to function as professionals in secular settings," he wrote in the above-linked column.

So when the Catholic Church didn't follow their lead, they were "betrayed." I wrote the following letter to the editor, which I believe sums things up nicely:

I just came across Ken Briggs' commentary announcing his new book on why Catholic nuns are disappearing. There's one thing that Mr. Briggs appears not to get. By "following their own lights," they aren't following the Light of the World, the only light the Church is called to follow. So when you have nuns describing themselves as crones (witches), giving Da Vinci Code tours and leading tours of Central America in order to help women find the goddess within (and that's all within but one community), somehow or other I just don't think too many women are going to be attracted to that as a legitimate expression of Catholic life.

The papal prayer intentions

2006-07-05T22:05:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the most neglected aspect of the Petrine ministry is the monthly prayer requests that the Holy Father has. In April, Pope Benedict requested prayers for the Church in China, a request that I don't think went over too well in Beijing. Notice that he put out the request and relations turned sour pretty quickly. Now that could have been a result of demonic influence in response to the prayer (nothing too unusual there), but it could also have been the result of Chinese officials feeling like Benedict had one-upped them. (The prayers seem to have been effective, though, if recent reports that a couple of Vatican representatives are in China are true.)

In May, he prayed that laws in the mission countries would protect human life from conception to its natural end.

Last month (the quote below is from Vatican Information Service) was another doozie:

The Holy Father's general prayer intention for June is: "That Christian families may lovingly welcome every child who comes into existence and surround the sick and the aged, who need care and assistance, with affection."

His mission intention is: "That pastors and the Christian faithful may consider inter-religious dialogue and the work of acculturation of the Gospel as a daily service to promote the cause of the evangelization of peoples."

It's the second one that's important to note. Acculturation and inter-religious dialogue are not ends unto themselves. Rather, they have to serve the cause of evangelization, the cause of bringing Jesus Christ to the world. This is a slap to those who think that inter-religious dialogue is simply a matter of getting to know one another for the sake of getting to know one another.

In other words, Dominus Iesus was not a fluke, a kind of abberation on Pope Ratzinger's stellar flight to the papacy, one that he now repudiates as having been stupid and going overboard as some have said. No, it was a document on the truth of the God-Man who changed the course of human history and who still does that today. If acculturation and inter-religious dialogue do not serve the purpose of bringing the truth of the Gospel to those with whom we dialogue, then there is no reason to engage in it.

A manly bishop he is not

2006-07-05T11:03:00.000-05:00

Notice how the Times Union is pushing this issue -- as something almost dependent on the laity when in fact, it is a leadership issue for Bishop Howard Hubbard to deal with. Granted, he can't do much if the population of the area in general is declining. But he can still do a lot when it comes to telling the truth of the Gospel and attracting men to the priesthood through that.

That's what men like Bishops Bruskevitz of Lincoln, Sam Aquila of Fargo and his now-deceased predecessor James Sullivan, and Robert Carlson of Saginaw, Michigan, have all done and they have shamed many of their big city brethren by consistently ordaining large numbers of men in areas that are losing population. And they did it simply by being men -- men who are not dictators, but truly manly in their own character, who stand up for the truth and preach it whether it's convenient or inconvenient, in season or out.

If only Howard Hubbard and his ilk would learn that same lesson.

Would that this happened in Catholic colleges

2006-07-05T10:50:00.000-05:00

Imagine if the Boston Globe ran a headline that read something like, "BC fires theology prof for supporting gays." Yeah, I can't imagine that, either, but here's what a headline read in the Salt Lake Tribune recently: "BYU fires teacher over op-ed stance; Same-sex marriage: His idea that church leaders are misguided didn't sit well."

All I can say is, "If only that happened at Catholic colleges and universities as well!"

McCarrick vs. Burke

2006-07-05T09:38:00.000-05:00

This is classic McCarrick:

"We are in this together. This is a time for respect for our common duties and different pastoral judgments as bishops, but most of all for building our unity as a body of bishops, recognizing how our individual actions affect other bishops and our entire community of faith."

Tim Townsend, religion writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reported this back in June. And he went on to make this keen observation:

The cardinal was not pointing at St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke when he
said this, but he might as well have been.

Yes, indeed. I wonder if the Cardinal has ever taken the time to sit down at a breakfast meeting (something for which he is well-known) with the Archbishop to ask him why he did what he did? Or is he simply content to make public accusations and slap Burke in the face simply because he doesn't like him and what he did?

As to the speculation in the story about why Burke has not said anything more beyond what he said about Kerry during the campaign, I don't believe he's been chastened by the uproar. I called him around that time (campaign 2004) to interview him about the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., his former diocese. When we started talking, I asked him about the controversy. His words to me, in a very bemused and sheepish sort of way, were, "I always seem to be getting myself in trouble."

In other words, he knew what he had stirred up and wasn't afraid of it.

However, what most people don't seem to realize is that he doesn't do it unnecessarily. He's not stirring up trouble for trouble's sake. He had been bishop in La Crosse for just shy of nine years. It wasn't until two days after he was appointed to St. Louis that it came out that he had written letters to politicians telling them to cease and desist their votes against life or be denied Communion. In other words, he had been working behind the scenes for many years trying to get these folks to understand the truth of Catholic teaching and it wasn't until late in his appointment that it became public. And it wasn't his decision to make it public, either. One of the politicians went and whined to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

When it came to John Kerry, though, he knew he had to make a public stand. This was a national figure who could come into his archdiocese at any time for a campaign stop and he knew that it had to be stated publicly that he was not going to allow him to receive Communion in his territory. Kerry's position was clear -- he makes no secret of the fact that he supports abortion, even to the point of speaking to groups like NARAL.

However, the pols in St. Louis are a different sort of beast. They're Catholics and Democrats, and some of them actually do adhere to Church teaching. Burke is not the kind of guy to go in and blow things up only to ask questions later. He's a very careful canon lawyer, astute and accomplished. He spent five years on the Church's highest court (Apostolic Signatura) doing a lot of negotiating between religious and their bishops. He's going to take time to carefully study who is who and what is what before making any pronouncements on anything at all.

If Cardinal McCarrick and his successor, Archbishop Donald Wuerl, want unity on this matter, then they should come around to seeing beyond official pro-life platitudes to the horror of abortion and then apply the applicable canonical norms (canon 915) in a just way, in the way Archbishop Burke has applied them in real life.

Condoms for married couples with HIV/AIDS - the state of the question

2006-07-05T09:21:00.000-05:00

(NB: I started this post in May, but got delayed in getting it done.)

Some people are very confused about the state of the question on whether or not it is lawful in the Catholic Church for a married couple in which one of the spouses is infected with AIDS or HIV to use a condom to help prevent the other from getting it. This is evidenced by the fact that even a columnist like Peter Briffa of The Times (London) writes of his fear that the Catholic Church will become like the Church of England.

That confusion is easily understood given what the press has said about it over the last couple of weeks. L'Espresso's Sandro Magister has exposed Cardinal Carlo Martini for what he is -- a dissenter on some very important issues. But to the secular press, he is a hero.

Some things to consider:

1) Cardinal Carlo Martini, the former archbishop of Venice, along with a few other bishops, has said that the Church should consider changing her position on the use of condoms when one of a married couple has HIV or AIDS. These bishops have been speaking totally on their own (with no authority on the matter whatsoever) with a view toward publicly pressuring the Holy See to make a change.

2) The news accounts proclaiming that the Church is looking at changing the teaching are totally false. Only Zenit and other Church-based news sources have reported accurately on the issue. The secular news reports serve only one purpose -- to put public pressure on the Church to change her teaching and to set up in people's minds the expectation that it is going to change. I can guarantee that when that change does NOT happen, the ensuing uproar will be near equal to that which surrounded the issuing of Humanae vitae in 1968. In fact, the headlines of the opinion columns are easy to imagine: "Catholic Church endangers more lives with AIDS," etc.

3) Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, president of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, made it clear to Zenit that the Holy Father has requested an intense study into the issue. He also made it clear that a document is not necessarily going to come from this study (he stated plainly that his department doesn't issue documents) nor that the Church will even have anything further to say about it. It is simply a study being conducted among a number of the Holy See's curial departments which includes the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers. My guess is that the Holy Father, well-known for consulting with all kinds of knowledgeable people on whatever issue he is confronting, is simply asking for a clarification of the issues. Whether or not he does anything public with that clarification is a completely different issue.

4) There is a legitimate question being raised here: whether or not a married couple has the option to use a condom in marital relations to reduce the risk (NB: a condom does not totally eliminate the risk as many would have you believe) of transmitting the disease to the other spouse. The question is if this is a matter of preventing pregnancy or choosing a lesser evil.

5) However, considering the Holy Father and those who are in charge in the curia, it is extremely doubtful that they are going to subscribe to the idea of it being a lesser evil. With the argument of choosing a lesser evil, you have to have only evil choices in front of you. But with this question there is another choice facing the couple, one which is totally virtuous, no matter how demanding it is -- to abstain from sexual relations. It is the only totally physically safe choice they have, in fact. So when you are looking at your options and you have an option for a virtuous action or an evil action, one must always choose the virtuous action. Therefore, there is no question about the lesser of two or more evils.

An appropriate day

2006-06-22T23:39:00.000-05:00

Archbishop Donald Wuerl was installed as the Archbishop of Washington today. It was concurrent with the Feast Day of two very important English martyrs, St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More. I'll leave it to you to read the links at the Catholic Encyclopedia. Suffice it to say that both of them shed their blood willingly standing up against a politician (Henry VIII) who wanted a tiny little thing called a divorce. All of the bishops of England said it was OK -- except Fisher. All of his courtiers said it was OK -- except More.

The two took divergent paths of strategy -- Fisher denounced him and More resigned the chancellorship and tried the method of silence in order to keep himself alive to care for his family. Fisher knew, though, that his strategy would get him killed.

More hoped to avoid that fate. "This is not the stuff of which martyrs are made," he tells his wife, Lady Alice, in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons. Yet, though he hoped to avoid it, that did not mean that he would yield and positively affirm that it was OK for Henry to divorce Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn. Nor would he assent to the formula that proclaimed Henry as the head of the Church in England.

For their unswerving stands, both lost their heads after having had their death sentences commuted from hanging, drawing and quartering (Fisher), and hanging (More).

Fortunately, here in the United States in the 21st century A.D., we have a few more bishops willing to take a stand than England did in the 16th century.

There are two things to observe about today's ceremonies:

1) St. Thomas More is the patron saint of politicians.

2) His Holiness, St. (oops!) Pope Benedict XVI, appointed Wuerl just at the right time so that he would be installed on this particular day. Every year, he will be reminded of that fact. Let us pray, then, that through the grace of God and the prayers of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More the new Archbishop of Washington will be one of those who does stand up against the cultural tide and stands unswervingly for the truth, even when it puts him in the media spotlight and under the unfriendly and even glaring eyes of Washington pols. One never knows what surprises the Holy Spirit might have in store.

Another document from the bishops?

2006-06-21T00:25:00.000-05:00

Bishops decide to write about teen stewardship, freeze assessment
By Jerry Filteau Catholic News Service
LOS ANGELES (CNS) -- The U.S. Catholic bishops, meeting in Los Angeles, agreed June 15 that their Ad Hoc Committee on Stewardship should draft two brochures -- one for young Hispanic Catholics and one for other young Catholics -- on teenagers and stewardship in the church.

Ah come on, now. We all know that these things just don't get read. And expecting teens to read them? Give me a break. This is simply a waste of time. They would spend their time in far better ways by being shepherds in their dioceses and not worrying about how teens are being stewards. They should be more concerned about whether or not teens understand who Jesus Christ is and their relationship with Him.

Polling on the Trinity

2006-06-20T16:26:00.000-05:00

Here's something very interesting from the Chicago Tribune. How about a poll asking about what anyone thinks would be a good substitute term for Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

You see, the Presbyterians are debating the issue at their national meeting and the Tribune apparently thinks it's something on which any American should have an opinion. Just as they should have an opinion on what substitute name would be good for Allah, right? Riiiiight.

I picked up on this story this morning as I get the Tribune's daily e-mail headlines. I clicked on a link which brought me to a poll with the following question: "Which of the following substitutes for 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' do you prefer?" Here are your choices:

Rock, Redeemer and Friend
Lover, Beloved and Love
Creator, Savior and Sanctifier,
King of Glory, Prince of Peace and Spirit of Love
Mother, Child and Womb

(No, I didn't make up any of these -- I'm not that "creative" -- or, through God's grace, stupid.)

Now this poll was there when I clicked on the link at about 11:20 this morning. But then it was gone around 1:45. So I called the Tribune and asked where it had gone. I got this reply via e-mail from online producer Melissa Goh:

Thanks for your note. The poll was discontinued earlier today due to an editorial concern. The issue has been resolved, however, and you'll find the poll once again functional on your Daywatch newsletter, or you can visit:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0606200178jun20,1,1326548.story?coll=chi-news-hed

Thanks again.

I e-mailed Melissa back and asked her what the concern was and how it was resolved, but got no reply.

What's interesting to note is that the second version of the poll has a "None of the above" option that was missing from the first one.

OK, so I don't mind the report about the Presbyterians. It's always good to know what goofy people are up to. But I do mind the Tribune asking every Tom, Dick and Harry what they think a good substitute for the ancient and venerable Trinitarian formula should be.

It certainly doesn't help that the Presbyterians think it's up for grabs -- that just makes it look like anyone can do anything they damn well please with Christian doctrine. It also doesn't help that certain Catholics are doing the same asinine thing.

Below is a commentary I wrote for the Drew Mariani Show on the subject, which pretty much gives full vent to my fury over this:

I’m not sure what the mainline Protestant churches are up to, but it doesn’t seem like it’s anything that’s really good. Yesterday, we talked about the Episcopalians and their moves away from traditional Christianity by ordaining women as priests and bishops. Today, the Presbyterians are meeting in Alabama and want to change the name of the Trinity from Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to, take your pick:

- Mother, Child and Womb; - Rock, Redeemer and Friend; - Lover, Beloved, and Love;
- Creator, Savior and Sanctifier; or King of Glory, Prince of Peace and Spirit of Love.

Now this was reported in the Chicago Tribune this morning, which is fine. It was a story they got from Richard Ostling at the Associated Press. But the Tribune has gone a step further. They have an online poll that asks readers, and I quote, “Which of the following possible substitutes for ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ do you prefer?” And then they give you the options that the Presbyterians are considering.

Now I don’t mind the Tribune reporting on what the Presbyterians are doing, in fact I appreciate that reporting because it lets us know how some folks are trying to contaminate and twist a doctrine that is the central reality of Christianity. But what I do mind is the Tribune asking everybody on the planet what they think should be used to substitute for something so central.

There’s a real problem here, folks. The problem is that this is a doctrine of the Christian faith that’s not up for grabs, it’s not up for an opinion poll from the Chicago Tribune. What do you think would happen if instead of asking about substituting Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Tribune asked, “Which of the following substitutes for Allah do you prefer?” You know as well as I do that they’d get all kinds of threats from Muslims – there might even be rioting in downtown Chicago in front of the Tribune building. Just look at what happened around the world with the cartoons of Muhammad.

What the editors at the Chicago Tribune have to understand is that just because the majority of Americans profess the Christian faith in one form or another doesn’t mean that its doctrines and practices are then up for debate by anyone and everyone. Secular Americans don’t get that, though. They don’t get the fact that what we as Christians believe is something that has been hammered out and lived for 2,000 years, that our brothers and sisters have gone to their deaths for their faith in the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the Presbyterians are debating this issue. It makes it seem to all the world that it is up for grabs, that anyone can define the Trinity as they want to. But like we talked about yesterday, that simply doesn’t work. Either God has a definitive being or He doesn’t. And if He doesn’t, then we have to start spelling the word god with a lower case ‘g’ all the time.

But that’s not what we know is true. We know that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that this truth is something that has come to us by way of revelation, not by philosophical or theological discourses. This is who God is and anyone who wants to redefine God by His attributes, rather than by the fact of His life in Himself is making an idol. Yes, you heard me right, folks. People who define God simply by His attributes and not by who He is in Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, have made an idol for themselves. God is not simply the Creator, Savior and Sanctifier. Oh sure, the Father has created the world, the Son has saved us and the Spirit sanctifies us. But the Son certainly helped in the creation of the world, the Father cooperated in the saving of the world and the Holy Spirit does a lot more than sanctify us, no matter how great and difficult a work that is.

And don’t think that people haven’t talked about these kinds of crazy ideas over the centuries, because they have. The doctrines of the Church don’t come out of thin air, but out of lived experience and great conflict. But the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that Jesus promised would lead us into all truth, not into all confusion.

And that’s something the Chicago Tribune just doesn’t bank on. They don’t bank on the fact that God is really and truly present in His Church guiding her to all truth. So they think that such teachings are up for argument, that everyone’s got a valid opinion on it. But it doesn’t matter what people’s opinions are on it, truth is truth and you can’t get away from that. For the secular world to stick their relativistic noses into the affairs and teachings of the Church is simply out of place. Like I said before, they wouldn’t do it to Muslims because they’d be too afraid of their reaction, but they don’t care if they do it to Christians because they know Christians aren’t going to riot or make death threats, which I think shows just how shallow the secular media’s courage is.

Making the weaker sex

2006-06-17T17:16:00.000-05:00

The above links to a column in the NY Times entitled, "The Weaker Sex" by one Marianne Legato at Columbia University. She argues that men are far weaker than women, contrary to what St. Peter said in his first letter (1 Peter 3:7). We men die earlier and more often in the womb, in childhood, adolescence and adulthood

She wants the National Institutes of Health to investigate men's health much more closely and try to protect us. She puts it this way:

Considering the relative fragility of men, it's clearly counterintuitive for us to urge them, from boyhood on, to cope bravely with adversity, to ignore discomfort, to persevere in spite of pain and to accept without question the most dangerous jobs and tasks we have to offer.

Well, sorry Ms. Legato, but that's coddling. And I don't like to be coddled. Now there are some men who coddle themselves by going to spas and plastic surgeons and spending hours in the gym -- even getting their nails done. But that's simply not manly.

Men are programmed by God to, "cope bravely with adversity, to ignore discomfort, to persevere in spite of pain and to accept without question the most dangerous jobs and tasks we have to offer." If we don't do that, we'll become far less than men -- we'll become a perverse form of woman.

Justice for Terri Schiavo -- and for marriage

2006-06-15T10:30:00.000-05:00

The brilliant canon lawyer Ed Peters has posted on his blog again (link above) about Michael Schiavo's attempted marriage to Jodi Centonze, the woman with whom he lived while his wife Terri was still alive. That attempt at marriage was apparently given a blessing by the current bishop of St. Petersburg, Robert Lynch.

Ed has expanded his earlier and most excellent comments on the attempt in a new article in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, a fact to which the current post is alerting his readers.

But he also makes the point that canon lawyers, unlike civil lawyers in the U.S., can only investigate a situation and make comments and suggestions. They cannot act like prosecutors or attorneys general and compel bishops or anyone else to do anything.

That is certainly the case and rightly so. The structure of the Church was established by Christ Himself and was set in place for a very good purpose. For a lawyer to try to usurp the three-fold office of the bishop -- to teach, to sanctify and to govern -- would be to usurp the authority of Christ Himself.

However, when someone like Bishop Lynch allows with virtually no comment the deliberate murder by starvation of a young woman by her husband, and then allows that husband who has murdered his wife to marry within the Catholic Church the woman with whom he lived and called "fiancé" while his wife was still alive, that cries out for justice. How that justice is brought about, I don't know. Certainly the civil authorities aren't going to do anything since the courts allowed it to go forward.

Not only is this an unjust situation in terms of the outrage against Terri Schiavo's life and the meaning of her marriage to Michael, it's also an unjust act against marriage itself. It renders marriage meaningless. That is why canon (c. 1090) -- and civil -- laws do not allow it.

So it seems to me that the Church has quite a different place to take here and that something should be pursued within her courts. Can a layperson sue a bishop in ecclesiastical court? Can it be immediately brought to the Congregation of Bishops? Should Michael Schiavo be sued in ecclesiastical court for marrying by fraud? Should his pastor be sued? If so, by whom?

If anyone has insight on this, I would certainly appreciate hearing it.

The Pope at Auschwitz

2006-06-14T00:07:00.000-05:00

I thought this story had died, but apparently it has life amongst the liberals. NCR's John Allen reported on it here and Commonweal commented on it here.

John Allen's coverage of it is pretty well balanced. There were people who liked what Benedict had to say and others who didn't. Those who liked it weren't terribly vocal; those who didn't were -- as is usually the case.

But Commonweal was less than pleased. They even took the unusual step of slapping their liberal brother, John Allen, for not being liberal enough. Apparently, you see, the Catholic Church is still supposed to be flaggelating herself over her many failures regarding anti-Semitism. It's not enough, apparently, that John Paul led the Church through a recollection and repentence of her various sins during Lent of the Jubilee Year. It's not enough that John Paul went to Israel and put a petition in the Wailing Wall seeking forgiveness for our sins. It's not enough that Pope Benedict, as a German went to Auschwitz to show Catholic solidarity with those who died there.

Now the German people, on the other hand, they've done enough. One Israeli columnist, Sever Ploker, said they've said enough:

Not that we Jews, the remnants of those destroyed communities, still need German apologies. That was done in 1953, when the chancellor of the "new Germany", Konrad Adenhauer, offered such an apology to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The theme of atonement has been repeated in the statements of many German public figures, and the decisions of many official German institutions.

No, the Catholic Church has to do more:

The German pope's apology at Auschwitz, over the graves of a million murdered Jews, should have had a different purpose: To warn against renewed anti-Semitism, and to atone for the sins of the German Catholic church, which in the best-case scenario was silent in the face of the Nazis, and in the more probable one – collaborated with them.

Collaborated with them?? Of course, there were those who did. But to say that the entire German Church is guilt of collaboration with the Nazis is simply wrong because it's simply not true, and Mr. Ploker knows it.

So to many, Benedict didn't do enough. Who knows what "enough" means. Would they want him to flaggelate himself or let them whip him? Do they want to empty the Vatican Museums? Do they want to bankrupt the Church? I'm sure some do.

But what puzzles me is why these people are not hearing what Benedict said -- to kill the Jews is to try to kill God. Now if that doesn't condemn anti-Semitism, I don't know what does. If Benedict's foes had opened their ears, they might have heard this and proclaimed to the media, "See how well he thinks of us? To try to destroy us is to try to destroy God." If they had done that, then that would have been the headline and then everyone would have known that anti-Semitism is wrong.

This could delay things a bit in the Cities

2006-06-13T09:18:00.000-05:00

The former bishop of Fargo, James Sullivan, died yesterday morning at the age of 76. With the funeral arrangements on top of the USCCB meeting this week, the official announcement for what I predict will be Bishop Aquila's appointment to the See of St. Paul-Minneapolis could be delayed until the 27th.

A study in contrasts -- Albany, Pittsburgh and Fargo

2006-06-12T23:12:00.000-05:00

I hate to harp, but sometimes one simply has to because it appears that certain people just don't get the correct concept.

Two stories from the Dioceses of Albany and Pittsburgh show that their leaders are incapable of getting enough priests to care for their flocks. This despite the fact that Albany has approximately 450,000 Catholics in its territory and Pittsburgh has 780,000.

So both dioceses are resorting to using deacons, nuns or laity to run parishes and reducing the role of priests to that of sacramental confectors and administrators. (So much for the title of "Father." Why don't they just start calling them "robot"?) For some reason, that's supposed to satisfy every need.

Contrast this with the Diocese of Fargo, whose former bishop, James Sullivan, just died. In 17 years, he ordained 80 priests (that's nearly five a year on average) in a state with a declining population and a Catholic population in his diocese of 80,000. (Who lives in North Dakota? 642,000 people placing it at 47th out of the 50 states. I suppose that's great if you want isolation.)

So what's the difference? The bishop. Bishop Hubbard is a known dissenter. Bishop Wuerl, though he's orthodox, exudes no excitement about the priesthood. He also seems to have been infected by the ideas of Archbishop Hunthausen as shown by the fact of resorting to laity and nuns to run parishes. These kinds of leadership get you nowhere.

To think that the Church can be run with laity is simply absurd. Sure, we can do some things, but we do not have the spiritual wherewithal to do what is needed -- because we are not ordained. Yes, that old teaching about the permanent change in character does still apply, especially since the priesthood is something ordained by the Lord Himself and not a human invention.

Bishop Sullivan, on the other hand, knew that the Lord is still calling young men to the priesthood. It's simply a matter that they don't know it and he made every effort to do what he could to help them realize it. This was a man truly after the Lord's own heart and he and the Diocese of Fargo were rewarded for it. May he have an everlasting reward as well. Requiescat in pace.

The new Archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis

2006-06-09T17:38:00.000-05:00

So Dennis McGrath, spokesman for the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Father Joseph Johnson, the vice chancellor for said Archdiocese, say it's all speculation about who the new archbishop is. But, sorry, this is no speculation. Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo will be coming to the Twin Cities as the archbishop. My prediction is that the announcement will be made on the 13th or the 20th.

While the reports are saying that Archbishop Flynn sought a coadjutor, the reality is that this was something pushed from the Vatican. Let's just say that a certain someone in Rome was rather unhappy with the Archbishop's response when it came to a Communion issue.

Now the real speculation to begin is what the arrangement will be. Will he come in as coadjutor or as ordinary? There are reasons to believe it will be the latter, mainly that it has been said that Archbishop Flynn is moving out of the archbishop's residence.

However, there is a history in the Archdiocese of a different arrangement. When Archbishop Brady was appointed as coadjutor to Archbishop Murray, the latter, it is said, basically gave over all responsibility to the former while retaining the title of ordinary until his death. Could that happen again?

So, how many were at Mass?

2006-05-31T23:35:00.000-05:00

That's a question we hear sometimes when coming back from a Mass. But in this case, the question is being asked of a very major event -- the last Mass Pope Benedict XVI celebrated on his apostolic trip to Poland. It was held in Krakow and the Vatican Information Service said there were 2 million people there. That's not an unreasonable number.

However, the International Herald Tribune (the New York Times for everyone else) and many other news outlets reported that there were 900,000.

Hmmm, let's see, some quick figuring and that's a difference of about 1.1 million people. Now, it seems to me that a difference of 100,000 might be reasonable when you're talking about a million people. But a difference of another million? That's hard to conceive.

The question, of course, is who should we say is more reliable in this case? Personally, I go with the VIS. Is there an agenda? Yes, but they are not unafraid to tell the truth when things don't go as well as hoped or planned. If there were only 900,000, why would VIS report 2 million and be corrected by the secular media? That doesn't make any sense at all. What does make sense is the secular media trying to downplay Benedict's impact in John Paul's homeland.

Good news in Austin

2006-05-28T19:56:00.000-05:00

According to Wesley Smith, Mrs. Yolang Vo in Austin has a reprieve (see my previous posting here). The hospital she is at, St. David's in Austin, has agreed to extend the deadline for keeping her there until July 17 (a significant date for yours truly) in order to stabilize her for home care.

As Wesley said, "Good for St. David's. I believe that most people in these situations want to do the right thing, but have a profound difference about what that 'thing' is. I also believe that casting the light of the sun into these cases helps tremendously in convincing hospital administration not to impose medical futility. Nonetheless, credit should be given when credit is due. As [Jerr] Ward [attorney for the family] also told me, 'When hospitals do something good, I think it should be noted.'"

This is certainly true. However, one wonders why it takes a public campaign like the one waged by Jerri Ward, Wesley Smith, Drew Mariani, Mrs. Vo's family and others in order for the hospital to see the way to the right thing.

An off-Broadway Mass reprise

2006-05-27T10:47:00.001-05:00

It was with dreaded anticipation that we went to Mass a couple of weeks ago at the same place where a family member had been baptized at last year's Easter Vigil -- which I described at that time as an off-Broadway Mass. The family member and her husband have two children, the surivivors of a pregnancy with triplets that ended rather too early. The occasion was their reception of First Communion.

It was another off-Broadway show, not as spectacular as the Easter Vigil, but all the elements were there. Full chorus off to the right of the sanctuary (if that little three-stair rise on which the altar sits can be called a sanctuary) with piano, flute, guitar, two clarinets (that couldn't stay in tune), and a range of singers (some of whom also couldn't sing in tune).

The star of the show was the priest with all his little adorers running around like the dancers in a chorus line or the swimmers around Esther Williams or Miss Piggy. The children receiving First Communion were instructed to set the altar cloth on the bare altar at the time of preparation and then they stayed there throughout the entire Eucharistic Prayer.

The congregation had been instructed that kneeling is prohibited from Easter to Pentecost, so when my family did it anyway, some people in back of us grumbled that we weren't supposed to be doing it and "don't they read the bulletin?" (No, don't worry about trying to locate the written norm for that instruction -- it doesn't exist, except in the liturgy committee's collective head.)

Of course, there was the choreographed show at Communion when the Communion ministers came up to get their vessels containing the Sacred Elements. One of them received a glass bowl with the Body of Christ and two received glass chalices with the Precious Blood. After receiving them, they went to the front of the altar, faced the priest, elevated them briefly (salude!) and then turned around and went to their places. And, of course, when the priest issued the general invitation to Communion ("This is the Lamb of God..."), all of the Communion ministers held up their vessels as well.

It should be needless to say that this goes against the very clear norms set out in the liturgical documents, but since it is going on, it obviously needs to be said.

Why write about this? I don't know. There's a part of me that is still in disbelief that things are that bad, that these folks have not grown up out of their very long-lasting adolescent behavior and seen that following the norms and laws of the Church on liturgical worship is not a burden, but freedom.

Hypocrisy at its worst

2006-05-26T22:31:00.000-05:00

New Scientist carried an article about an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics by one Luc Bovens of the London School of Economics. It seems Dr. Bovens believes that the rhythm method of birth spacing actually causes more embryos to die in utero than does -- what? Chemicals?

Presumably, the theory goes, since intercourse is likely to take place on the fringes of a woman's ovulation, any joining that happens in this period is more likely to be doomed than most. Therefore, if the Church is to be consistent, according to Bovens, it should outlaw NFP. (Well, he calls it the rhythm method, which is a complete, and probably deliberate, misnomer since that method hasn't been seriously used for decades.) “If you’re concerned about embryonic death,” Bovens says, “you’ve got to be consistent here and give up the rhythm method.” (Well, we did give up the rhythm method -- and replaced it with NFP.)

Anyway, here is a letter to the editor I've written to New Scientist, an Australian publication that carried the story about it:

The story on the "rhythm method" was farcical from the start. If you have a false premise, then the rest of your argument fails. In this case, no one is using the rhythm method anymore. This has long been replaced by any number of methods far more scientific in approach than rhythm ever was. Collectively, they are called Natural Family Planning. And, yes, from personal experience I can testify to its effectiveness -- at both postponing and acheiving pregnancy.

Beyond this, though, Bovens' position is absurd. The issue isn't the creation of embryos that then die naturally. That happens regularly and should cause no one any moral concern. The issue is whether or not the deaths of these embryos are deliberate. If they die a natural death, so be it. Contrary to Bovens' claims, the Catholic Church has never taught that the preservation of the embryo is the summum bonum.

However, if they're deliberately killed or killed because of the deliberate presence of a chemical known to make the womb hostile to new life, that's a completely different story. It is here that the moral agent has culpability.

Even if NFP does cause more embryos to die (which I think is highly doubtful), the couple are not liable for that, and Bovens should know that and no amount of moralizing on his part can change that fact.

It is at best reprehensible for Bovens to try to place guilt on couples who practice NFP because of this supposed finding. As much as I try, though, I cannot believe Bovens was really trying to help anyone along. It is clear from this one quote, "If you’re concerned about embryonic death, you’ve got to be consistent here and give up the rhythm method," that Bovens is trying to get in a jab at the Catholic Church. He fails miserably, leaving behind a stench of hypocritical moral superiority that reeks throughout the story -- and it is revolting.

An Ascension Day gripe

2006-05-25T10:12:00.000-05:00

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the division in the U.S. over the celebration of the Ascension of the Lord is stupid. In the provinces of Boston, Hartford, New York, Newark, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. -- in other words, most of the northeastern seaboard -- and Omaha, the bishops have decided to retain this solemnity where it belongs, on the 40th day after Easter, which always falls on a Thursday. In all the rest of the country, the feast has been transferred to the Seventh Sunday of Easter.

Those bishops who have retained its usual day appear to believe that their flocks are capable of making it to Mass on a Thursday (since this is a holy day of obligation) despite their normal tendencies not to do so. Or they at least appear to have decided that this is something that should be left in place as the norm.

The rest of the bishops, however, appear to believe that it is better to indulge their flocks' laziness and they have, therefore, moved the celebration to the following Sunday. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that they have imposed laziness upon us. We have not even got the option to go to Mass for the feast day when it actually occurs, unless we happen to be living on the border of some diocese that marks it properly.

This is a gripe, a legitimate gripe. Making Mass more convenient for people means lowering the standards to which we are to be held. It also means that people are not going to be able to show their love for the Lord on this important feast. But the bishops seem to be acting more like indulgent parents than good shepherds taking care of their wayward sheep.

Looking at the world through rose-colored glasses

2006-05-22T12:10:00.000-05:00

James Davidson of Purdue University is considered one of the three top sociologists of Catholic life in the U.S., the other two being Dean Hoge at Catholic University of America and Andrew Greeley (sorry, but I hate calling such a man, "Father").

Dr. Davidson was in the Twin Cities recently talking to the National Federation of Priests' Councils meeting there. Afterwards, he had an interview with The Catholic Spirit, a paper with which I was once briefly associated. In it, he noted the serious ideological divide between today's priests -- the so-called John Paul II priests and the so-called Vatican II priests.

His solution to resolving this divide is summed up thusly:

Priests are much the same way, in that they have hierarchies of truth. There are some things that are central to the faith and other things that are not. If I were going to bring the priests together, I would remind them of the things that they agree on and challenge them to recognize the core teachings of the church, the core truths that are central to their ministry, and then ask them to identify the things that are more optional to them — more a matter of rules and regulations that apply at a certain period of time in the history of the church but maybe not at other times.

If you did that, I think you would find that the arguments are not over core teachings. They are over the more optional or temporal issues. I think that would help them go a long way to say, "You know something, we may disagree on certain specific issues having to do with ministry, but by God, we agree on resurrection, we agree on incarnation, and we are brothers after all. It’s just that we sit in different pews."

How quaint. So saying, "We agree on resurrection and incarnation (Hey, Jim! Where did the definitive articles go?), so let's all just get along" is going to bring these divided men together? This was how he earlier summed up the divide:

There are some priests who tend to prefer a model of priesthood that involves teamwork and collaboration with lay people and with bishops. They think in sort of a horizontal model of a team of people playing together on a level playing field. There are other priests who think more vertically about the authority relationship between themselves and their bishop and see themselves as being of a status that’s higher than that of the laity. So they don’t think so much in terms of teamwork as they think in terms of authority and accountability.

What a marvelous obfuscation. It appears from what Dr. Davidson says that these priests think in a context where there is no philosophical or theological basis for their thoughts, only sociological or political considerations. Therefore, all they need do is say, "Hey, we agree there are such things as incarnation and resurrection, so let's be best buddies."

But the split flows from very different theological understandings, not mere sociological or political opinions. Those who say that the priesthood should be more collaborative do not believe in the real theological reason for the priesthood's existence, which is to teach, sanctify and govern --
*The teaching comes from the teaching of the Apostles and is handed on through the Magisterium and the Tradition;
*The sanctification comes when he offers sacrifice in the name of the people, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit;
*The governing comes from the power he has from Jesus Himself to judge -- "You will sit on thrones and judge the 12 tribes of Israel" (Matt. 19:28).

Now it is true that some priests who rightly understand their authority and the fact that they have been set aside for the service of God (the word in Latin for priest is sacerdos which has obvious roots in "sacred," which means to set aside for service to God), sometimes wield it like a club and feel themselves as superior and above the rest of humanity. This, however, does not mean they are wrong when it comes to their understanding of the priesthood's nature, only wrong in how they understand and carry out its implementation. They need a dose of humility, not to keep them from being true priests, but to show them how dependent they are on the Lord for their exalted position and how they do need the help of the governed, and that they are here "not to be served, but to serve" and to imitate Him who gave His life "as a ransom for the many."

What is interesting is that Davidson talks only of the Incarnation and the Resurrection (at least I presume he's talking about these Catholic dogmas. It's sometimes hard to tell when the definitive articles are dropped that this is exactly what the heterodox believe). Nothing about sin, the Fall, the Cross, suffering, sacrifice, redemption, salvation, the power of the Holy Spirit, deification. Only incarnation and resurrection. Just out of curiosity, I'd like to know where he would rank the Church's teaching on sexual morality and the beginning and end of human life in that hierarchy of truths.

There's no way the Davidson model will work because it is grounded solely in human understanding and categories -- much the way the "horizontal" model of priesthood is based as well. Without the divine nature of the priesthood, it comes to nothing. And because the "horizontal" model has prevailed since the end of Vatican II, men have simply failed to show up at the vocations director's door, a fact that no amount of rose-colored glasses will change.

The Mrs. Vo's

2006-05-22T11:40:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, I worked on writing about the case of Madame Vo in France. Now there is another Mrs. Vo with whom to be concerned, this one in the less-than-exotic Austin, Texas.

Mrs. Vo is another one of those people in Texas declared to be a futile care case under a peculiar state law that says a hospital's ethics committee can declare a case as futile and give the family 10 days to find another facility to which to transfer their loved one or find another doctor to provide care.

Methinks this law developed after a case here in Minnesota that I covered for the National Catholic Register back around 1990 (sorry, the story's not available online). Helga Wanglie was an 86-year-old Lutheran in Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis who was dying and her husband, Oliver, refused to admit it. She was on a respirator and some other life-support and Oliver did not want it disconnected. She had already had a respiratory arrest and been revived, and the hospital she was in didn't want her to remain there, so Oliver got her in at HCMC. However, Helga was on the county dole and the hospital wanted to cut expenses. So HCMC did the next logical thing -- they sued for custody.

Fortunately, they lost in probate court. But the implications of that case (which was covered by all the media big boys, including the BBC) went beyond the bounds of the Twin Cities. It wasn't long after that, I'm told by Texas Right-to-Life, that the Texas Medical Association started agitating for a futile-care bill.

So now Mrs. Vo is in some ways the next Mrs. Wanglie. She's Buddhist and her family don't want the life support removed and they got an extension of their 10-day deadline to some time next month. However, the only facility they've found so far that's willing to take her is one in Illinois. Shall we say that's a bit of a drive for her family to make?

Madame Vo and Mrs. Vo are both Vietnamese, both on the support of taxpayers. And both are somehow deemed less than human, not necessarily because of their ethnicity or financial situations, though in some people's minds that may be the case. No, Madame Vo could not find a court to declare that the child she lost because of a doctor's negligence was a human person, and therefore she was entitled to some compensation for her loss. What she carried in her womb, then, is a mystery -- chicken, fish, glob, monster? But since the courts in France and the EU were unable to say it was a human person, it must have been something else, so Madame Vo must be something else as well.

Mrs. Vo is now a futile-care case. Hey, an ethics committee said so. Or as the Chief Operating Officer of Seton Hospital in Austin (yes, it is supposed to be Catholic) told Mrs. Vo's attorney, Jerri Ward, "So be it. The medical committee has spoken." This means that Mrs. Vo and her family are now a case, not human persons in need of care and compassion.

In both instances, the whole human race is now less human as we declare these women, made in the image and likeness of God, who is love, to be less-than-human.

The (too) quiet Wuerl

2006-05-22T10:52:00.001-05:00

The Washington Post (link above) and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Ann Rodgers have both filed profiles of Bishop Donald Wuerl and both have come to the same conclusion -- he's a quiet man, one for talking in the background and not taking public stands unless he thinks it's absolutely necessary.

Which isn't very often.

And it shows.

Over the years, the Pittsburgh Diocese, despite its reputation as an orthodox place, has been losing priests. Indeed, this year His Excellency ordained all of one priest, an event which made the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In contrast, and despite Cardinal McCarrick's less-than-orthodox and even bad man reputation for the accusations of sleeping with (though not doing anything to) seminarians at his beach house, the Archdiocese of Washington will be ordaining 12 priests.

Now, I have no idea how well-qualified those priests are. Are they on a par with the other much-touted "John Paul" priests, known to be orthodox, faithful, firm and willing to take a stand? Or are they more in line with their avuncular leader who is on his way out? I simply don't know. But the fact that His (less than) Eminence is able to attract more men to the priesthood than His (too quiet) Excellency may spell ill winds for the Archdiocese when it comes to priestly vocations there over the next 10-14 years.

The manufactured crisis in vocations

2006-05-16T15:15:00.000-05:00

Once again we have a clear demonstration that truth is far more attractive than falsehood. The late Bishop Kenneth Untener of the Diocese of Saginaw died leaving his successor exactly zero incoming seminarians. Instead, he left behind a network of nuns and laywoman administrators in charge at parishes.

Fortunately, Bishop Robert Carlson was sent there from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in February of 2005. In the year since he's been there, he has gotten 16 seminarians and hopes to have 20 in the Fall.

Those who, like Bishop Wuerl of Pittsburgh (now being named as Archbishop of Washington, D.C., to take the place of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick), think that more lay involvement is the answer need only look at the disaster that Bishop Untener left behind him to see how false that idea is.

There are bishops, including David Zubik of Green Bay (a Wuerl protégé) and Wuerl, who say there's no difference in the parish life with the administrators versus with priests. That, however, is simply not true and I know that from personal experience.

Here in the Diocese of Winona, where we haven't had an ordination for four years, the typical set up is for two or three parishes to be served by one priest, some of whom aren't the most mentally stable. Some have lay or Religious helpers, others do not. Daily Mass is hit or miss -- sometimes Sunday Mass is as well. Confession means having to drive around to find out who's having it and when, and you need to do that within a 30-mile radius in case a priest doesn't show up when you expect him to.

These things do not change when there's a layperson, Religious or even a deacon in charge because of the priest's absence. None of them can celebrate Mass or hear confessions. None of them are fathers.

I cannot bring myself to entrust what's going on in my life and family to a deacon, much less some non-habited nun -- even a habited nun. Perhaps I can do it with a deacon if I know that man and know that his formation, training and experience are more than mine. At least with a deacon, he has the grace of orders. But I certainly cannot do it with a nun.

There will have been changes in the way parishioners relate in those parishes. With a priest, there is a father and a fatherly relationship. You can't have that with a nun. Even with a deacon, the deacon is there as a servant -- that's what his title means -- not as a father. Because the Catholic Church is based on the identity of the Trinity -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- she has to reflect that in day-to-day life and we do that through the ministry of the episcopacy, priesthood and diaconate. Without priests in parishes as fathers, the faith of the Church is going to suffer.

It's not enough for priests to come simply to dispense sacraments. That's reducing their role to mere functionaries, like a machine in an assembly plant. Their role is far more than that -- it's a human and spiritual role that is irreplaceable. Without it, the Church will not be able to live its life to the fullest.

So when someone like Bishop Carlson comes along who is strong, firm on the teachings of the Church, models manly behavior to other men, and is not afraid to make demands of young men to follow the Lord unreservedly as a priest, they inevitably respond.

It's something other bishops need to learn rather than throwing up their hands and saying, "Oh, what can I do? I'll have to rely on laity more now." Sorry, Excellency. That's going to get you and the people of your diocese exactly nowhere. Take a stand, be firm, don't waver, make demands -- and watch the seminary fill up before your eyes.

The Case of Madame Vo

2006-05-16T14:38:00.000-05:00

Below is a story I wrote for Our Sunday Visitor about a French Vietnamese emigre who lost her unborn child because of a medical error and pursued the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, where she was defeated -- and the human race along with her. At question was the humanity of the unborn child, something which the Court said it could not define.

Interestingly, when I wrote this story, I could have broken it in France. When I got a hold of some contacts there who should have known about it, none of them did.

Also, I owe special thanks to Jeff Gardner who helped me with translating the communications from M. Le Griel.

The Case of Madame Vo

In a case that has European abortion advocates all in a flutter, a French Vietnamese immigrant is asking for nothing less than that the European Court of Human Rights declare that life begins at conception and should be legally protected.

Thi-Nho Vo was six months pregnant when she went to the public hospital in Lyon in 1991 for a routine check-up. At the same time, another Vietnamese immigrant, Thanh Van Vo, was in the same hospital to have a contraceptive device removed.

Thi-Nho Vo did not speak or understand French very well and a clinic worker confused the two women’s files. When the physician on duty, Dr. Francois Golfier, walked into Thi-Nho Vo’s exam room, he assumed she was to have an IUD removed and admitted to the court that he did not do a preliminary exam. Instead, he inserted a measuring device into her cervix and punctured the amniotic sac.

Vo was then hospitalized for a couple of days with the hope that the sac would heal itself, and then released. But she was back in the hospital four days later and on Dec. 5 a “therapeutic interruption” was performed with a dead baby girl being born.

Vo immediately informed French authorities of what happened, an investigation was opened and Golfier was charged with involuntary homicide. After four and a half years, the district court in Lyon acquitted Golfier and dismissed the case. Vo appealed and won. However, the appeals court did not convict the physician under French law but under European law. Golfier was fined 10,000 francs and given a suspended sentenced of six months in prison.

When it was appealed to France’s highest court, the Court de Cassation, the European law was ignored and the court ruled that Golfier did not violate French law because the baby who was killed was not a person under French law.

Vo’s attorney, Bruno Le Griel, strenuously objects to that reading of the law. “I believe that one would have difficulty,” he told OSV, “admitting to the man on the street that what was carried in her, this pregnant woman, and what she lost by the fault of a third party, was simply a mass of cells and not a human being; a baby, her baby.”

Le Griel is making a last-ditch attempt to have that overruled by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. As he told the BBC, “I will be asking the court to recognize reality, that is to say the human life, a human being, begins at the moment of conception.”

The Convention of Human Rights for the European Union states in article two, “The right of every person to life is protected by the law. Death cannot be inflicted on anyone intentionally, save in the execution of a capital sentence by a tribunal in the case of an offense that is punished by that penalty under the law.”

Le Griel is taking his case to Strasbourg on the basis of the first sentence of that article. “Life has a right to be protected from attacks brought against it not only in a voluntary fashion, but equally in an involuntary fashion (by imprudence or negligence),” he told OSV via e-mail.
Pro-abortion people, Le Griel said, “wish to hide the truth concerning the subject of medical abortion, that it is a voluntary homicide. A legal homicide, certainly, but a homicide.”

Those who are opposing him consider him and his client “not as fanatics, but more so as champions of a retrograde and condemnable ‘moral order.’”

Le Griel is using an interesting tack in his arguments before the court. To help demonstrate the humanity of the human embryo, he points to the work done by Drs. Edwards and Steptoe, the British researchers who developed in vitro fertilization and brought the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown into existence. “They were able to definitively show,” he argued, “that at the instant of fertilization, the human embryo developed entirely by itself, by the proper avenues, and that it showed an extraordinary vitality.”

This, he said, demonstrates that the child is a completely different entity from its parents and so should be protected under European and French law.

Le Griel is fighting an uphill battle. Europeans, by and large, are secularized and protecting human life “is not the way European family law is going,” said Helen Alvare, law professor at the Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C.

“Germany surprised us some years ago when their supreme court said abortion is not good,” she noted, “but the trajectory of family law in Europe is the U.S. times two [Gerry or Cherie -- or should we say “x 2 ?] moving toward abortion.”

Indeed, Vo’s case before France’s Court de Cassation came after two previous cases involving children who were stillborn, one because of a car accident and the other because of a midwife’s negligence. In both of those cases the court did not afford any protection under French criminal law.

The appeal to Strasbourg comes after a hot debate on protecting the unborn in the French National Assembly. A legislator proposed protection against “involuntary interruption” of pregnancy, similar to the proposed Laci and Connor Act before the U.S. Congress. However, it was withdrawn because of vigorous opposition from physicians and feminists.

Despite the fact that the Vo case could have huge ramifications on the life issues in Europe, French people are surprisingly ignorant of its existence. “99.99 percent of the people know nothing” about it, said Bertrand de la Fouchardiere, a Catholic layman in Versailles. No polls have been taken on the subject.

Those papers that have covered it have characterized Vo’s Catholic supporters as being “extreme” and close to Le Pen, the ultra-nationalist party leader in southern France, Fouchardiere said. He called this a “pretty bad association” and one that is not true.

The Strasbourg court has heard arguments about whether to take the case or not. A decision is expected in the next couple of months.

Mormons and Communists

2006-05-10T10:26:00.000-05:00

The eminent canon lawyer, Ed Peters, has some interesting second thoughts on the Chinese communists ordaining a couple of bishops. He refers his readers to what he terms the "most theologically significant decision reached by CDF" under then-Cardinal Ratzinger which was the declaration that Mormon baptism is invalid.

I had first-hand experience with this. I spent a year as the Director of Education and Formation at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, about three blocks east of Temple Square. One of my duties was to be an advocate for those who petitioned the Diocese of Salt Lake City for a declaration of nullity in regard to their marriage. This meant I had to have some quick tutoring in canon law, and was ably assisted in that by Father Robert Moriarty of the diocesan tribunal. One of the things we discussed was the validity of Mormon baptism. That this was even a question was a surprise to me, but he explained that when it came to form and matter, they had everything correct. They baptize with water and use the same formula we do.

But -- and this is a big 'but' -- do they intend to do the same thing that we do? When a nurse or someone else baptizes another in an emergency situation, that baptism is valid because the form and the matter are the same as the Church's and because we know that, even if she can't articulate it to any great extent, the nurse intends to do what the Church intends in baptism -- cleanse the person of sin and bring him into the life of the Trinity.

Mormons, on the other hand, do not believe in the Trinity. Their doctrine is so totally mixed up on the nature of Jesus Christ that you can't tell from one moment to the next if you're talking about Arianism, adoptionism, Manicheeism, or any other type of heretical "ism" there is. What we do know, though, is that they do not believe that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, "one in being (homoousion) with the Father." We do know that their understanding of the Father is that he is god of this planet, not the God and creator of the universe. Their understanding of the Holy Spirit is so totally lost that one hardly knows where to even begin to look to find it. In a nutshell, we know that they are pagans -- polytheists, even.

So when a Mormon says, "I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," he is saying, "I baptize you in the name of three different gods." And it is that intention that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said was totally incompatible with Catholic teaching, and therefore it makes their baptism invalid.

So when the Chinese Communists ordain bishops solely for the purpose of thumbing their noses at the Holy See, the intent of what they're doing should be very carefully considered when it comes to evaluating the validity, never mind the liceity, of their actions.

Of sheep, shepherds, wolves and hirelings

2006-05-07T06:33:00.000-05:00

Over here at UPI's Religion and Spirituality Forum, you can find my comments on today's Mass readings. In them, I reflect on the relationship between what Jesus said about the Good Shepherd, the Pharisees' attitudes and our own calls to be shepherds as husbands, wives, singles, priests, deacons or religious.

As I reflected further on this, though, I was struck more by verse 12 of the 10th chapter of John's Gospel: "A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them."

The implication there, of course, is that Jesus is not a hireling who will run away when the wolf comes. Yes, He did lay His life down for us on the Cross at Golgotha. But He still does it today. We cannot think that when we are beset by temptations that the Lord has abandoned us. He is the Good Shepherd who remains with His flock and who knows each of us by name. We are not a faceless mass to Him, like a swarm of bugs. Because He knows each of us by name, He stays by each of us protecting us in our pilgrimage "in this valley of tears."

When the wolves of temptation come -- and they will come -- the Lord does not turn tail and run off. He sticks by us even though we may not -- and probably won't -- sense it. The fact is that this whole imagery of sheep and shepherd is just that -- imagery. When we are beset by temptations, we must call out to the Lord in faith, even when we don't sense His presence at that time. That is a tactic of the wolf-- to so overwhelm us with fear or to lull us into thinking that we are all alone and so forget that the Lord, the Good Shepherd, is nearby.

We are, obviously, smarter than sheep, but even sheep will bleet out when confronted by danger hoping that they will be heard and help will come. Our task then, is to keep in mind this fact that the Lord is present to us even in our darkest trials and we need to call out to Him and remember that He will respond.

Condoms for AIDS victims?

2006-04-24T10:26:00.000-05:00

When it comes to the secular press covering the Vatican, they are simply not to be trusted for accuracy or truthfulness. The latest case in point: AIDS victims and condoms. Reuters and other agencies are reporting on an interview of Cardinal Javier Lozano Baragan with La Repubblica. According to a report from Deutsche Presse-Agentur, found on Monsters & Critics,

"The Vatican is expected to permit the use of condoms for AIDS patients, according to an interview with a high-ranking cardinal published Sunday.

The Vatican is currently working on a document on the subject that would be published soon, Vatican 'Health Minister' Javier Lozano Baragan said in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica.

The Roman Catholic Church has up till now strictly prohibited the use of condoms even in marriage for AIDS patients and HIV-infected people.

Observers in Rome suggest that a Curial cardinal such as Baragan could only make a statement on a such a sensitive theme when it had been first agreed upon with Pope Benedict XVI.

'It is a very difficult and delicate topic,' said Baragan, considered a close confidant of the pope. 'It was Benedict who demanded an examination of this special question of the use of condoms by AIDS patients.'

However the cardinal did not provide details on the Vatican's new rules. (emphasis mine in both cases)

So the Vatican is working on a document that is supposed to allow condoms for AIDS victims, but the cardinal who said this did not provide any details on the document. In other words, it appears that at least Deutsche Presse-Agentur is setting the Vatican up. If the document allows for the use of condoms by AIDS patients, then all is well. If not, though, the people who read this "news" report will get all up in arms about the new document as happened in 1968 with Humanae vitae.

What appears to be a much more accurate report came from (of all places) Reuters.

The Vatican will soon publish a statement on the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, an issue highlighted by a call from a leading cardinal to ease its ban on them, a Catholic Church official said.

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care, declined to reveal the contents of the document in an interview published in Sunday's la Repubblica newspaper, but said Pope Benedict had asked his department to study the issue.

If Reuters was this smart all the time, they'd be trustworthy. Unfortunately, that's not the case and one has to be suspicious whenever reading secular coverage of the Catholic Church.

EIFWAIL as psychologically easier myth debunked

2006-04-17T12:47:00.000-05:00

This month's issue of Ethics & Medics from the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia has an article from one Dr. Susan Marie Meidl at the Hannibal Clinic in Hannibal, Missouri, entitled, "EIFWAIL and Psychological Distress."

Dr. Meidl looked through the literature to find what she could that would support the theory that inducing labor early in cases where the child in utero has fatal anomalies (such as anencephaly) will relieve the psychological pressure that is on the mother. This theory is what operates in hospitals like Providence Alaska, as I documented back in March of 2004. However, Dr. Meidl found no support for that theory. "Surprisingly," she writes, "the assertion that EIFWAIL relieves maternal emotional suffering is not supported in the medical literature."

Dr. Meidl then cites seven studies on the subject from distinguished journals like the British Medical Journal and Obstetrics and Gynecology. Here's her straightforward conclusion: "In sum, the above studies did not show a psychological benefit or reduction of grief in women who chose pregnancy termination compared with those who suffered [the] stillbirth or perinatal death of their infant."

Any questions? How about what should be done? Good question! And here's the good doctor's answer:

"Perinatal hospice has been presented as an alternative to EIFWAIL...Infants with abnormalities incompatible with postnatal life should receive appropriate palliative care, and their mothers should receive medical, psychological, and other supportive care. Perinatal care should allow parents and children to bond and should facilitate a normal grieving process." In other words, perinatal hospice along the lines of what Dr. Byron Calhoun has established.

I don't think it could be any clearer. Any Catholic hospital that still engages in such a heinous practice with such deceptive pablum as doing it for the mother's "psychological health" should be stripped of its Catholic identity and revealed for what it is -- a murdering facility. And any bishop who does not censure such a place and order it to cease and desist such a practice is in league with it.

Why priests should always wear their collars

2006-04-15T08:46:00.000-05:00

It's amazing what wearing a clerical collar can do.

I'm reminded of the story of the night watchman who was shot at and the New Testament in his shirt pocket stopped the bullet.

Man attacks Caribbean archbishop outside St Lucia church

Saturday, April 15, 2006

CASTRIES, St Lucia (AP) - A man with a knife attacked the eastern Caribbean's Roman Catholic archbishop outside the cathedral in the St Lucian capital, slashing his clerical collar but not causing any injury, police and church officials said.

Archbishop Kelvin Felix was speaking with a parishioner outside the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception after Mass on Wednesday evening when the man grabbed him from behind and began slashing at his throat.

Servus servorum Dei

2006-04-10T21:27:00.000-05:00

Now that Father Thomas Reese, SJ, has had his hand slapped by Rome, John Allen has become the most sought-after commentator on the Catholic Church in the secular media. Mr. Allen is, of course, the Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter.

I generally respect his point of view despite his employer. Unlike the rest of those who write in the NC Rag, Mr. Allen is fair and balanced and usually quite accurate in his reporting.

"Usually" is the key operative here. His column in the Los Angeles Times today talking about Pope Benedict dropping the title "Patriarch of the West" contained this statement:

In many ways, the Vatican retains the trappings of a royal court, which means there's a whole series of lofty-sounding titles attached to the pope: "successor of Peter," for instance, because the pope is considered to stand in the place of St. Peter as Christ's designated leader of the church. The pope is also known as the "prince of apostles." Not to mention "bishop of Rome," "servant of the servants of God" (a title added by Pope Paul VI in the 1960s to stress humility) and so on. (my emphasis)

Hmm, that last one that I italicized is an interesting one. I had the impression that it was a much older title than the 1960's, and sure enough, the 1916 Catholic Encyclopedia provides our answer, from the article entitled, "Servus servorum Dei" (Servant of the Servants of God, for all you non-Latinophiles):

A title given by the popes to themselves in documents of note. Gregory the Great was the first to use it extensively, and he was imitated by his successors, though not invariably till the ninth century.

Ah yes, we moderns are the ones who stress humility, unlike those haughty, rude and power-mongering Middle Ages popes. It's a good thing that stereotype isn't supported by the facts.

Arguing with the left

2006-04-07T23:30:00.000-05:00

I don't know if you've ever attempted dialoging with someone who claims to be a liberal, but it can be a very frustrating experience.

Not long after I became editor of what was then the Times Review, now The Catholic Times, the newspaper of the Diocese of La Crosse, one of the regular columnists submitted her column for publication. I read through it and it had an interesting beginning. She was meditating on the fact that in older houses, the most worn part of the floor is in the kitchen and that in churches, the most worn part of the floor is the center aisle where we receive Communion. This isn't something I would normally connect and there was potential here for something really good.

But then she veered off-course. She started talking about the "altar-table" and the First Communicants who were going to be "confirmed in their holiness" by the reception of the Eucharist. "Hmmm," thought I. "Where in the tradition is the altar referred to as the 'altar-table' and since when did the Eucharist confirm our holiness and not confer holiness to those of us who are desperately in need of it (which is all of us)?"

So I wrote to her asking her to support what she was saying. Where in the tradition or where in the documents is the altar called an 'altar-table'? Where in the tradition or where in the documents is it stated that the Eucharist confirms our holiness? The letter was quite polite and I was asking in genuine curiosity because she had a Master's in theology and I figured she had read something somewhere that gave that information.

The letter she wrote back, if memory serves me correctly, was rather terse: "I believe that at this time, it is best for me to move on," or something along that line. Fine. But that didn't answer any of the questions I asked with sincerity.

Assuredly it's not only people on the "left" who have this problem. There are those who will say, "The Bible says, I believe it and that settles it." But at least they are going back to a time-tested source. The problem with the left is that many of its typical ideological adherents are proposing all sorts of novel ideas without any indication that this novelty has support in the human tradition.

We humans cannot simply make up something out of thin air and expect that it's going to serve humanity well. There are reasons we do things and reasons we don't do things. We marry one man to one woman because millennia of human experience have shown that to be the best way for us to continue our existence on this planet and to build our society. We don't allow men to have sexual relations with men or women with women because human experience has shown that it can't produce children and it's not stable.

This is what is so difficult about trying to have a discussion of any substance with someone of this mindset. They make up the rules as they go and if you don't play along, then you can forget about discussing why they're doing or saying what they're doing or saying. So when you get down to the brass tacks, they're assuming an awful lot of power -- not unlike the power God has, which is not a good place to be.

Praying for China

2006-04-07T22:43:00.000-05:00

Pope Benedict is quite serious about China. Here's his prayer intention for missions this month: "That the Church in China may carry out its evangelizing mission serenely and in full freedom."

In other words, the Holy Father is intervening in China's internal affairs. Obviously, it's not a direct intervention, but it's a very effective one, because what are the Chinese going to do -- object? "No, you can't have your people pray for us. If you don't withdraw your statement, we're going to withdraw our ambassador. Oh, wait...we don't have an ambassador. We're going to arrest and torture more bishops, priests and laity."

That may not be too far off the mark. If that happens and we are praying for China, especially in these last days of Lent, then the blood of the martyrs will bring forth even more fruit there.

Who says prayer doesn't change things? Even the simple act of publicly asking for prayer changes things. That's the wonderful thing about asking publicly for prayer for obstinantly difficult people -- they can't do anything about it. It would be futile for them to object and they know it.

The China Post, a Taiwanese paper, had an editorial asking, "Holy See to convert PRC?" Unfortunately, the secular press don't pay attention to the Pope's prayer intentions, so they didn't see that that is precisely what the Pope hopes to do.

The Judas document's irrelevancy

2006-04-07T09:16:00.000-05:00

The headlines about the so-called Gospel of Judas are all reading something like what appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution: "Ancient manuscript tells relationship between Jesus and Judas" And the subhed reads: "Document says betrayal came at Jesus' request."

Give me a break. A document that was composed at least 150 years after the Resurrection is going to bring to light the proper relationship between Jesus and Judas. Right. Isn't that a little like saying my writing a fictional story in 2006 that slavery in the South in 1856 wasn't really so bad is going to be helpful to scholars in 3706 to find out about that horrifying institution?

Why the secular press are so gullible is something I'll never be able to figure out.

Bishop Vasa gets "SNAPped"

2006-04-04T23:54:00.000-05:00

Bishop Robert Vasa of Baker, Ore., is known as a straight-shooter. He's not one to mince words and he has, at times, tweaked the USCCB's policies on aspects of the sex abuse crisis. So when he decided to bring in a priest from the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston who had been accused of sexual abuse and to give him his own parish, I was not surprised.

SNAP, however -- and predictably -- wasn't happy.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) issued a statement protesting the assignment of the Rev. Richard Edelin to St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church in John Day.
The statement disclosed that Edelin was accused of sexually abusing a teenage girl in Houston in the early 1980s. It also said that the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston paid $5,000 to the accuser in 1996 and issued an apology.
A church review board cleared Edelin to return to the ministry, but David Clohessy, national director of the network, defended the decision to draw public attention to the accusation.
"If we have to err, we have to err on the side of children's safety," Clohessy said.

The accusation, however, was never substantiated -- not by the diocese, not by the diocesan review board, not by the police. The review board in Baker also reviewed his case and found nothing to be alarmed about. So, according to Clohessy, if a priest is accused, he is automatically guilty.

Wait, scratch that. "We're not presuming he's guilty. We're simply saying that Catholics need to know and deserve to know his past."

Oh, O.K., I get it now. If Mr. Clohessy's past includes an accusation of theft, rape or murder that wasn't true, he would want that to be known to every potential employer and neighbor he has, right? I thought not.

Bishop Vasa pointed this out: "Article five of the Charter states: 'When an allegation has proved to be unfounded, every step will be taken to restore the good name of the priest or deacon.'" Apparently, though, that part of the Charter doesn't have to be taken as seriously as the other parts.

I recently wrote an e-mail to Mr. Clohessy and Barbara Blaine asking them to change the status they had given to Bishop Paul Dudley on the (false) accusation against him in their tally of bishops who have been accused of abuse. The original entry made it appear as if he had resigned under pressure from the accusation, when in fact he had resigned long before the accusation because of age, besides the fact that he was cleared of the charges. Fortunately, they took it seriously and made the change to reflect that he had been cleared of charges.

Whether or not they truly believe that he was never guilty in the first place is another issue.

Benedict the Nice Guy

2006-04-03T20:43:00.000-05:00

Pretty much all the coverage about Pope Benedict XVI is almost fauning as they trip over themselves to say that "God's Rottweiler" is really a nice guy and he hasn't done anything really, well, conservative. (The exception to this is the gay press, which is excoriating him as a gay-hater.) And isn't it amazing that his first encyclical was on love, even on erotic love?

Sorry, but this is simply stupid. None of these people who are reporting on him now ever took the time to read what he had to say before he was elected pope. If they had, they would have known that he is and always has been a nice guy. None of the "conservatives" whose opinion was sought by the press ever thought of him as anything but a most gracious gentleman and they knew his style -- consultation with everyone who has expertise on a matter and then make a decision. That is obviously not the Rottweiler of their imaginings.

Those who say he really hasn't said anything "conservative" haven't read him closely. His audiences have clearly stated the truth of the Catholic faith. His addresses have clearly stated what the Church teaches and what she doesn't. As Father Fessio observed, there are logical consequences to what he said in Deus caritas est.

As for those conservatives who are upset that he hasn't done anything quickly enough, they need to cool their jets. Being pope isn't easy and it takes time to effect changes.

Mormonism thriving in heavily Catholic US Northeast

2006-04-03T12:40:00.000-05:00

This Reuters report quotes people saying that the Catholic clergy scandal is driving them to become Mormon. Stupid them. Obviously the scandal is but one symptom of a very serious problem in the Northeast -- a lack of true formation.

Get this line: "But doctrinal similarities with Catholicism could account for some of the expansion, Shipps said."

Ah yes, I remember those doctrinal similarities -- they're so similar that Rome recently said that Mormon baptism is completely invalid. This is something certain dioceses in the U.S. had been asking the Vatican to say for years so that annulment processes could be made easier. But more than that, those who live with them know that what they teach and what the Church teaches is diametrically opposed. Just as three small examples -- Mormonism teaches many gods, no hell and salvation by good works. Catholicism teaches one God in Three Divine Persons, heaven and hell, and salvation through the grace of God.

The bishops of the Northeast will need to get their collective acts together and strike back. Not by any kind of harsh rhetoric, but by evangelization. Closing parishes because Catholics are moving out of particular areas is not the brighest move they could make. What is bright is bringing a serious evangelization effort to those areas which the old ethnic Catholics have left so that those who took their place have the chance to hear the Gospel as well. "There is no other name given in heaven or on earth by which we may be saved." So, Excellencies all, evangelize away.

The truth is sharper than a two-edged sword

2006-04-03T12:16:00.000-05:00

I am all for caring for immigrants, legal and illegal. Jesus' command is clear and if believers do not obey it, we are worse than unbelievers. (As an aside -- there's a whole understanding of the parable of the last judgment that has been lost on many people -- the parable is speaking about non-believers, not believers. "The least of my brethren," which most people understand to be humanity in general (and that's a perfectly valid understanding) is actually a term for believers. So the things Jesus lists for how people should treat others are the bare minimum for Christians to do. If we aren't doing those things, then we have no right in claiming the title of Christian.)

And the point the bishops are raising is perfectly valid and the article link above which extols them for doing so is correct. However, this is actually a fairly easy thing to do. Immigrants are people outside the womb. The mainstream press are all in support of what these bishops are saying. So when Cardinal Mahoney says he will tell his priests to disobey any law that would require them to ignore the needs of some who is not in our country, the MSM love it.

But should any bishop rebuke a politician for supporting abortion or embryonic stem cell research, then that bishop has stepped over the line. So it is much more difficult for a bishop to say anything about sexual and reproductive matters than it is on immigration matters.

Contrary to Bill O'Reilly, et al., the Church is not for the illegal immigrant because of declining membership. On the contrary, we're gaining members and can't keep up with them with the shortage of priests. Actually, it is more likely that the mainstream media want the illegals here because the general population is not reproducing itself. Without immigration, our population growth would be in the negative. Without immigration, the Democratic party and its MSM cronies would find itself facing what is called the Roe effect -- the fact that "liberals" are not so liberal-minded when it comes to reproducing themselves and are contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence. Without an influx of immigrants, who generally vote Democratic, there would be no future for that party. And without people, life's a pretty dull party.

The litany of saints affects the soul

2006-04-03T12:03:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting article and is quite unlike the tone the Post-Dispatch generally takes when it comes the Catholic faith. Obviously, listening to the litany of saints as he was reviewing John Paul's funeral had some kind of effect on Mr. Townsend's soul. Let's hope there will be some sort of change in many people's hearts.

Christianity evolving?

2006-04-03T10:17:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, John Spong, the infamous Episcopalean claimant to the title of bishop, was scheduled to speak in Nashville, according to The Tenessean. The article was kind of all over the place, as is often the case when talking with someone who is not rooted firmly in the truth, so this posting is kind of all over the place as well.

While John Shelby Spong makes claims to being a Christian, it is clear that he is embracing an interpretation of the faith that doesn't square with the truth.

"Spong calls for a global 'New Reformation,' mixing old rationalism and new mysticism. Theism is dead, he says. Find new ways to speak of God. Shed religion's miracles, seek truth, give Christianity the chance 'to be the song of the universe, sung by those who have come of age.'

This "those who have come of age" is the epitome of the spirit of our age. "We are adults," the cry goes, "and we don't need anyone to tell us what to do. We can find our own way -- in fact, we can make our own way to eternal happiness." Besides the fact that goes directly contrary to what Jesus said, "Let the children come to me, for it is to just such as these that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs," and "Unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God," it also displays an arrogance on the order of that of the devil -- "No, God knows that if you eat of this, you will be like gods yourselves knowing good and evil."

This quote is most telling: "I couldn't be more excited about the future of the Christian faith," he declares, "but it will be a different faith." In other words, it won't be Christianity anymore. So why the secular press continue to call him a Christian is beyond me -- except for the fact that they don't, as the blog says, "get religion."

"A huge group goes underrepresented," The Tennesean's reporter writes, "moderates who reject literalism but who haven't given up on the Bible's strange power to energize their lives. They're alert to the Golden Rule, the prophets, and, yes, Jesus' resurrection. Who speaks for them? Neither left nor right." Then they should go to the Catholic Church which is simply true, neither left nor right.

"Truth will never destroy God," Spong says. "It might destroy my image of God, but not God." This is true -- but the truth could destroy all the false images of God in which John Spong and his followers have placed their trust. And if they have placed too much of themselves in their falsehoods, the truth could end up destroying them.

A litany for bishops

2006-04-03T09:15:00.000-05:00

We need serious prayer for our shepherds. In my family, after we pray the Rosary we have a litany of saints invoking those who are our patrons and others to whom we are particularly close. One of them is St. John Fisher, whom we invoke for bishops. After reading about the extraordinary life of St. Hugh of Grenoble (see my previous post), my wife thought that perhaps we should invoke him for bishops. "Someone should devise a litany of bishops for bishops," I replied. And my wife logically said, “Why don’t you do it?” Thank God for wives, right?

I pretend no claim to greater holiness for composing this. I pretend no claim to efficacy for this prayer. It is merely an effort to provide some sort of ordered prayer for our shepherds who are in desperate need of it, based on a tried and true formula. The saintly bishops invoked here are those on the General Roman Calendar as well as a couple who are not listed there. Permission is granted to use this freely and without attribution, but if anyone has or knows of anything better, please let me know.

Litany for Bishops

Lord, have mercy on us Christ, have mercy on us
Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, hear us Christ, graciously hear us.
God our Father,
who promised us shepherds after your own heart, Have mercy on us.
God the Son, Good Shepherd of the world...
God the Holy Spirit, poured out upon the Apostles.....
Holy Trinity, one God....
St. Peter and St. Paul pray for us
St. Andrew
St. James the Greater
St. John
St. Philip
St. Bartholomew
St. Thomas
St. Matthew
St. James the Less
St. Jude
St. Simon
St. Matthias
St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nanzianzus
St. Francis de Sales
St. Timothy and St. Titus
St. Methodius
St. Patrick
St. Athanasius
St. Boniface
St. Irenaeus
St. Bonaventure
St. Alphonsus Ligouri
St. Augustine
St. John Chrysostom
St. Cyprian
St. Ignatius of Antioch
St. Martin of Tours
St. Josaphat
St. Ambrose
St. John Neumann
St. Hilary
St. Blase
St. Ansgar
St. Peter Damian
St. Polycarp
St. Cyril of Jerusalem
St. Turibius de Mongrovejo
St. Isidore
St. Anselm
St. Adalbert
St. Augustine of Canterbury
St. Norbert
St. Paulinus of Nola
St. John Fisher
St. Cyril of Alexandria
St. Apollinarius
St. Peter Chrysologus
St. Eusebius of Vercelli
St. Robert Bellarmine
St. Januarius
St. Anthony Claret
St. Charles Borromeo
St. Albert the Great
St. Nicholas
St. Thomas Becket
St. Hugh of Grenoble
St. William of Bourges
St. Cuthbert
Lamb of God, who take away the sins of the world Spare us, O Lord
Lamb of God, who take away the sins of the world Graciously hear us, O Lord
Lamb of God, who take away the sins of the world Have mercy on us.

V. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, leading us to new and everlasting life,
R. Help our bishops to be holy and faithful to you.

Let us pray.

Merciful Father,
You have promised to give us shepherds after your own heart (Jer. 3:15). Help our bishops, whom you have anointed with the Holy Spirit to be successors of the Apostles, to teach the truth of your Son, Jesus Christ, in charity and fidelity to all entrusted to their care. May they always put the care of their flock before their own needs, even to the point of shedding their blood, in order that we may learn and live the truth that leads to eternal life. We ask this through Christ our Lord.

R. Amen

Now that's a bishop

2006-04-01T10:28:00.000-06:00

Today is the feast day (not on the general Roman calendar) of St. Hugh of Grenoble (France, †1132), a bishop for 52 years between the 11th and 12th centuries. This was no office he sought and in fact left his office vacant for a year to seek the peace of the monastic life at Cluny. He only went back after a direct order came from the Pope. Later, he would go on retreat at the monastery of St. Bruno in Chartruese (to whom he gave permission to start the monastery) and St. Bruno would have to tell him to back to the office.

What is remarkable about him is what he did in his diocese. When he got there, according to Butler's Lives of the Saints, "The gravest sins were committed without shame -- simony and usury were rampant, the clergy openly flouted the obligation to celibacy, the people were uninstructed, laymen had seized church property and the see was almost penniless."

Sound familiar? What did St. Hugh do about it? He didn't declare bankruptcy, he didn't call for dialogue, he didn't say the people shouldn't learn the truths of the faith under the guise of feel-good renewal programs. According to Butler's, "For two years he laboured unremittingly to redress abuses by preaching, by denunciations, by rigorous fasts and by constant prayer."

The last two actions particularly intrigued me. There is a story of St. Patrick going up onto the mountain now called Croagh Patrick in order to spend 40 days in fast and prayer for the people of Ireland. Not long after he started, he was tormented by demons in the shape of birds flocking around the opening of his little cave, so much so that they completely blocked out the light. After many prayers and entreaties which were unavailing, he took the bell he always carried and started ringing it. The demons started scattering and finally he threw the bell into their midst and the birds threw themselves into the sea.

But that was only the beginning. He conversed regularly with an angel because his petitions to God were five-fold:

that many souls would be free from the pains of purgatory through his intercession;
that whoever, in a spirit of penance, recited the hymn he composed that we call St. Patrick’s Breastplate, before death would go to heaven;
that the barbarians would never obtain sway in the Church in Ireland;
that seven years before the Day of Judgement, the sea would spread over Ireland to save its people from the temptations and terrors of the Antichrist;
and finally, that Patrick himself should be able to judge the whole Irish race on the last day.

The angel would say to Patrick something along the lines of, "OK, OK, we give in on this point -- now give up the fast." But, like Abraham negotiating with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, Patrick persisted on all points and won.

The stand Bishop Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., took against the National Review Board is, in a sense, bracing, even though, as Ed Peters rightly points out, he's wrong. There is also the fact that he was extraordinarily uncharitable and arrogant -- attitudes totally unbecoming of someone in the office of bishop, especially one who calls himself orthodox. But what we don't hear from any of our bishops, most of whom appear to be quite well-fed and living in rather comfortable quarters, is that they are fasting, praying and doing penance in intense ways for their flocks. We do not hear exhortations to fast and prayer from them for the crisis which now engulfs the Church in our country. We do not hear sermons like those of St. Hugh's during which "it was not unusual to see the whole congregation in tears, whilst individuals would be moved to make public confession on the spot." Nor do we hear of bishops who will sell chalices and precious stones in order to feed the hungry.

Perhaps it falls on us laity to do some intense fasting, prayer and penance for our bishops. What we have is not simply a crisis of clerical misconduct; what we have is, as then-Cardinal Ratzinger said, "a crisis of saints." And that crisis isn't going to be relieved by mere name-calling or even preaching and denunciations. As Jesus Himself said, "This kind can only be driven out by prayer and fasting."

An important distinction to make in the immigration debate

2006-03-28T09:48:00.000-06:00

Patricia Zapor of Catholic News Service has done the immigration debate a great service with the story she wrote, "In immigration law, distinctions of 'legal,' 'illegal' fairly recent."

This is the opening line of her piece: "Here's a little-understood fact about immigration law: Until well into the 20th century, pretty much anyone who showed up at a port of entry or walked across a border got to stay in the United States." It wasn't until 1924, she explains, that the U.S. started requiring visas to be obtained before coming here. And that was only after a massive influx of Italians, Russians and Austro-Hungarians in the previous years -- all of whom entered the country legally since there were no requirements for documentation.

That means my ancestors and my wife's -- and those of the vast majority of Americans today -- made it here legally. But that's no great feat and no great act of virtue since there were no laws on the books for them to break.

So, while I respect most of what you write, I'm sorry Peggy Noonan, but your grandmother was here four years before there were laws requiring her to have a visa to leave Ireland to come to this country. That makes her first night on that Manhattan park bench not as much of a virtuous act as you made it out to be.

This little revelation makes me now wonder -- why are our laws as restrictive as they are? Is it because now that WASPs and their equivalents are settled in and have taken over a land that wasn't ours to begin with, we're simply wanting to keep something so good to ourselves? And are we also not just the slightest bit racist? Just a couple of questions to ask ourselves.

From Harry to the devil

2006-03-27T12:50:00.000-06:00

There are people who have commented that Father Gabriele Armoth, the exorcist for the Diocese of Rome, is off his rocker. He stated that it takes very little for one to go from Harry Potter to the worship or service of the devil because the books contain "the signature of the Prince of Darkness."

I, for one, am not willing to dismiss these comments out of hand. Yes, sometimes being an expert in a field makes one find that field in everything one sees. However, I don't think that can be said for a man of Father Armoth's stature.

Read for yourself the two stories below and see what you make of it. Notice the hightlighted part of the second story. Doubtless, someone will say that Wicca and Satan worship are two different things. Sorry, but anyone who worships and serves the creature rather than the Creator is, when all is said and done, worshiping and serving God's ultimate enemy.

From news.com.au
http://entertainment.news.com.au/story/0,10221,18320568-7485,00.html
Harry Potter then Devil: Vatican
From correspondents in The Vatican

March 02, 2006

THE Vatican's chief exorcist yesterday claimed the Harry Potter stories could lead children into Satanism.

Father Gabriele Amorth said: "You start off with Harry Potter, who comes across as a likeable wizard, but you end up with the Devil.

"There is no doubt that the signature of the Prince of Darkness is clearly within these books."

Father Amorth, 80, who has carried out more than 3000 exorcisms since 1986, said: "By reading Harry Potter, a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the Devil."

The series of books, whose popularity with children has made millions for author JK Rowling, has already been criticised by Pope Benedict XVI.

Three years ago, before becoming Pope, he said the character was a bad influence because the stories contained "seductions which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly".

From the Battle Creek (Mich.) Enquirer
http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060304/LIFESTYLE08/603040310&SearchID=73237677091215
Man became Wiccan after leaving Episcopal church

Name: Wayne Haney, 41.

Residence: "I was raised in Plainwell and graduated from Olivet College in 1987, with degrees in music education and French. I now live in Lapeer."

Family: Wife, Ellen; two children, 13 and 11.

Profession: High school history teacher.

Raised in: "I was not raised in any church, but began attending and eventually joined St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Plainwell in my senior year in high school. I later joined St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Battle Creek while I was a student at Olivet College. Then I went to seminary at Virginia Theological Seminary to become an Episcopal priest and served for almost five years in New Hampshire and Michigan."

Now a member of: "I now serve as the minister of the Sacred Birch Society, a legally incorporated Wiccan group of nearly 40 men, women and children in the Lapeer area. I say 'minister' because that is a term people can relate to, but any Wiccan is his or her own priest. I am often the group's 'ritual leader' — maybe that's a better name for my role. I have had several teachers and have been ordained by the people of Sacred Birch. As a result, I can legally marry people and conduct funerals. And I can get into hospitals more easily to visit the sick."

Q: Have you performed any marriages yet? "Yes, two couples. One wedding took place in a woods, and the other was in the Long Way Planetarium in Flint."

Q: How long have you been a part of Wicca? "I left the Episcopal priesthood in 1997. My sense is that the strain of leading a Christian flock while not fully being able to believe the message I was preaching finally dropped me into what might be called a very early mid-life crisis. I went through a couple of years of therapy and soul-searching — one of those times when a person really asks what she/he is about, what she/he believes, what life holds. I had always been interested in spiritualities of most any kind.

"During that time I read the Harry Potter books along with my children. My curiosity about the world of Harry Potter led me to do an Internet search on magic, which led me to Wicca. Online, I became acquainted with people from a Wiccan group in Flint. Eventually my wife and I went there and immediately felt we had finally found our spiritual home."

Q: In what ways do you prefer to express your faith? "We celebrate eight major feasts (called Sabbats), which are based on the natural cycles of the solar year (the seasons). Sacred Birch celebrates those as a group. Wiccans also celebrate the lunar cycles and especially the full moons.

"But we are also active in the local community. We volunteer for the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life, we support a local domestic violence shelter and we have adopted a nearby section of the Michigan forest for patrolling and cleanup. We also make up what we call 'ritual kits' for soldiers. Wicca is now listed as one of the religions of people in the armed services.

"The impulse for us to do such things comes from our abiding sense of thanksgiving for all we have been given, not from a sense of spiritual duty as part of a life that leads to heavenly rewards."

Q: What are your sources of inspiration, your role models? "We draw on many sources. For storytelling, we got back to Greek and Roman and Egyptian mythology, as well as ancient Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, Norse, Irish, Scottish and other traditions.

"Most Wiccans do not shun technology or attempt to leave society. Quite the opposite — we are very much part of the world and of our communities, quietly living our lives and practicing our religion. We strive to model our lives on the lessons of nature herself."

Q: How open are you about your newfound spirituality? "I am not a closeted Wiccan, but like most Wiccans, I don't make it a point to advertise my spirituality or attempt to proselytize. Our main goal is to simply be a resource for others who are seeking a community to be with while they explore their own spiritual journey."

Originally published March 4, 2006

Levada -- the Pope's man

2006-03-25T12:40:00.000-06:00

This paragraph came from the L.A. Times story about yesterday's consistory:

Levada, a close ally of the pope, went first. He kissed Benedict's hand, and then the pope rose unexpectedly, placed his hands on each of Levada's shoulders and kissed each cheek.

I think that's a sign to those of us who call ourselves orthodox. Pope Benedict has made something very clear to us -- "This is my man on whom my favor rests."

Benedict does not have the same media savvy of his predecessor. But that's what makes such a move extraordinary and why we who consider ourselves orthodox should take good note of it and act appropriately.

Catechisms and big business

2006-03-23T12:21:00.000-06:00

There is some controversy surrounding the recent purchase of Saxon Math by Harcourt since Harcourt is a supporter of Planned Parenthood. In September 2004, Catholic World Report published an article I wrote on the review process the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has of catechetical texts. What I found in researching this article was the amount of influence these big companies have over the context of the books.

This article was on the Catholic World News site, but since Phil Lawler took over CWNews.com completely and is no longer editor of CWR, the article is off the web, so I thought I would post it here. I don't remember what the article was titled and what you see here is not exactly what was published since I have the unedited version.

Parents, do you know what catechism your children are reading?

That question has concerned many people since the end of the Second Vatican Council. It is well-known that after the Council catechetical texts were drastically revised to reflect “the spirit of the Council.” Those revisions meant out with doctrine and in with fuzzy concepts of community, self-esteem, “God made me special,” and even sex education.

Finally, a year after the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1993, the then-National Conference of Catholic Bishops started a Committee to Oversee the Use of the Catechism. One of the tasks the committee assigned itself early on, according to Msgr. Daniel Kutys, a priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia who is deputy secretary for catechesis at the USCCB, was that of reviewing catechetical texts to see how they were doing in passing on the faith.

After reviewing texts for a year, there were 10 areas where catechetical texts were seriously deficient which then-chairman Archbishop Daniel Buechlein, OSB, of Indianapolis found:
* the Trinity and the Trinitarian structure of Catholic beliefs and teachings;
* the centrality of Christ in salvation history and his divinity;
* the ecclesial context of Catholic beliefs and magisterial teachings;
* a distinctively Christian anthropology;
* God 's initiative in the world with a corresponding overemphasis on human action;
* the transforming effects of grace;
* presentation of the sacraments;
* original sin and sin in general;
* the Christian moral life;
* eschatology

In other words, catechetical texts were not handing on the Catholic faith as it has been known over 2,000 years. That report was issued in 1997. Fast forward six years to 2003 and hear what Archbishop Alfred Hughes of New Orleans had to say at the November USCCB meeting about high school catechetical texts:

* “Some of the texts found to be inadequate are relativistic in their approach to the Church and to faith...”
* “Our young people are not learning what we know and believe is based on objective truth revealed to us by God...”
* “The sacramental theology which our young people are being taught is also often seriously flawed...”
* “Moreover, moral teaching, like faith teaching, may be presented using tentative language, implying that morality is a matter of opinion and personal choice...”
* “Other problems which commonly recur include a studied avoidance of revealed proper names or personal pronouns for the Persons in the Blessed Trinity...”
* “The christology in texts may be unbalanced with an overemphasis on the humanity of Jesus at the expense of His divinity. Sometimes the treatment of the Holy Spirit is either missing or flawed...”
* “The interpretation of Sacred Scripture tends to rely almost exclusively on the historical-critical method and does not generally draw on the rich patristic and spiritual interpretation in the Church...”
* “The approach to the Church often overemphasizes the role of the community...”
* “In general, the high school texts are strong in their emphasis on the social mission of the Church and the moral responsibility that Catholics have in this area. The social teaching, however, is not always grounded in the divine initiative of the Holy Spirit related to personal moral teaching or to eschatological realities.”

In other words, high school catechetical texts still are not handing on the Catholic faith as it has been known over 2,000 years.

The review process was developed over four years. In it, a bishop and two others from a pool of theological and pastoral experts review a particular series that is voluntarily submitted by a publisher. The review will generally last three to six months. During that time, the team will evaluate the series from a protocol developed by the USCCB committee primarily based on the “In Brief” sections of the Catechism.

After the review, the texts are given one of three grades: found in conformity; could be found in conformity, but needs changes; and inadequate and must be rewritten.

Of the nearly 130 series and texts that have been submitted thus far, only about 10 have been given the “found in conformity” rating the first time through, according to Msgr. Kutys. The “vast majority” of others, he added, are in the second category. Around 15 percent of the material submitted is found to be completely inadequate and must be re-written.
The grade school publishers, said Archbishop John Myers of Newark, have been “quite cooperative and are anxious to be found in conformity” since many dioceses are strict about what texts are used in their borders.

But “there has been more difficulty in getting publishers of high school series and high school texts on the same wavelength as the committee,” he said.

Voluntary and confidential
The entire process of review, though, is voluntary and marked by confidentiality. Publishers, he said, have the option to submit the material or not. The reason the bishops “wanted it voluntarily submitted is they didn’t want to review material that didn’t have a chance at being changed. The whole philosophy is that the publisher gives it to them and they’re looking for help in making it better if that was necessary.”

Which of those materials are rejected, he added, is confidential, as are the committee’s other proceedings. The only thing that is known publicly is a quarterly update of those texts that have been found to be in conformity, which is listed on the USCCB website.

When material is submitted, a review committee is formed of a volunteer bishop reviewer and two theologians who are familiar with catechesis both theologically and pastorally, Msgr. Kutys said.

Who the reviewers are is also confidential. The practical reason for that, Msgr. Kutys noted, is so publishing companies won’t be tempted to go to the bishops to ask them to evaluate the text before it’s officially submitted.

It also gives the reviewers the freedom to “speak their mind and say what needs to be said,” according to Archbishop Myers.

Additionally, the list of bishop reviewers changes as their own responsibilities change. For example, if a bishop is an auxiliary or has a smaller diocese and then is assigned as an ordinary or to a larger see, he might remove himself from the list of reviewers because of the new responsibilities.

Those texts which were found to be in conformity the first time through are not trumpeted. If a publisher decides to reveal how it received its “found in conformity” status, it must reveal the entire report, Msgr. Kutys said.

Such was the case with the Faith and Life series which was first produced by Catholics United for the Faith and published by Ignatius Press, but is now entirely owned by Ignatius.
CUF was among the first groups to submit its texts for review, according to Eric Stoutz, the director of information services for the apologetic group based in Steubenville, Ohio. CUF developed the Faith and Life series in 1984, Stoutz said, because the head of the group at the time thought there wasn’t an adequate catechetical text out there.

The conformity review, Stoutz said, “was an excellent exercise they had us go through.”
While the series was one of the few found to be in conformity the first time through, he said, there were suggestions made that they pay some more attention to social justice issues. “We were strong on credal issues,” he recalled, “but there was a suggestion that we work on the social concerns area.”

“They didn’t let us off with a completely free pass,” he commented.

The series has undergone another evaluation since Ignatius Press recently took over the copyright and made revisions to the texts. That new series is on the current conformity list.
The review can also change some companies around, like William H. Sadlier, Inc. This is a family-owned group that has been in the business since the 1930's. When their texts were put through the review process, they were rejected completely, one source said, an action which devastated the family, which is strongly Catholic. In fact, they nearly gave up completely. But Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., a friend of the family, encouraged them to try again. They did and their texts have now almost become the industry standard.

It’s not perfect
The review process has greatly improved catechetical texts, according to professional catechists who are considered orthodox Catholics. But two things need to be remembered, said a diocesan catechetical director who requested anonymity. First is that the review is rather “narrow” and focuses only on “if anything is against the Catechism” and does not look at age-appropriateness or methodology. No consideration is taken into account, for example, of the document from the Pontifical Council on the Family called The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality.

This comes into play, for instance, with what should be chastity education materials but what end up being sex education materials. Two series are notorious for this – Growing in Love from Harcourt Religion Publishers and the Benziger Family Life series. Both of these series teach the mechanics of sexual activity in fifth and seventh grades. But the bishops refused to review anything that had to do with physiology, biology, sociology or psychology, said Msgr. Kutys, since it has nothing to do with doctrine. So to respond to this, Harcourt and Benziger pulled their sex education stuff out of the old books and made them into separate books. That way the books dealing with doctrine got the approval, but not the sex education materials.

The second thing, the director said, is that a text found in conformity does not necessarily mean that it is an endorsement of the text, though some publishers have presented it as such. So while the text may conform, that doesn’t automatically make it a good text.

There are other issues as well. For instance, while there is a vast improvement in texts over what had been in place before, there is no requirement for bishops or pastors to use the newer texts since the review has no particular status in canon law, according to Msgr. Kutys.

Diocesan catechetical directors downplayed how much the old texts might still be getting used. Peter Ries, the director of catechetics in the Diocese of Lansing said publishers revise their series every five years. Those that are currently being marketed on the elementary school level have gone through the review process and been approved.

But not all of the old texts are gone, as one Minnesota parent recently discovered. Brian Gibson has two children in a Catholic school in a Minneapolis suburb. He had to withdraw them both from class because his parish is using the Benziger Family Life series. As he investigated, though, he discovered that the text is older than the text that is currently on the USCCB conformity listing.

What is being used, he said, is what one would expect to come from Planned Parenthood. Gibson should know. He’s the executive director of Pro-Life Action Ministries in St. Paul, whose group pickets in front of the PP abortion clinic in St. Paul everyday.

The real problem
And that is where a real problem comes. Unlike Sadlier, or religious-owned publishing houses like Ignatius Press or Loyola Press, some of the most popular catechetical textbook imprints are owned by huge corporations. Benziger, for instance, is owned by McGraw-Hill, Brown-ROA was purchased by Harcourt and is now Harcourt Religion Publishers, and Silver Burdett Ginn is owned by Pearson Education.

McGraw-Hill is a huge company owning Business Week and Aviation Week magazines, Standard & Poor’s (including the stock tracking indexes of the S&P 500), a construction firm, four ABC-affiliated television stations in Colorado, California and Indiana, a health care publishing group and Platts, which deals with energy information services. This is all in addition to the book publishing end of things.

Harcourt is owned by a British conglomerate, Reed Elsevier Group, plc., which also owns Lexis-Nexis, the legal and media database company. And Pearson Education owns the publishing concern, McMillan.

What attracts many dioceses and parishes to these companies, say catechetical directors, is the fact that they have the money to service their clients very well by having all kinds of supplementary materials in video and DVD, giving workshops on using the curriculum and other such perks.

But what is repulsive about them is that their companies support lifestyles that are the antithesis of Gospel teachings. McGraw-Hill, for instance, pays “benefits to people in sexual immorality,” said Tom Strobhar, chairman of Life Decisions International. What he finds ironic is that the investment guidelines the USCCB publishes do not even include looking at these kinds of benefits when an investor is evaluating a particular company. Nor do they warn against companies involved in pornography, Stobhar said.

McGraw-Hill also publishes college textbooks for women’s studies programs which invariably promote Planned Parenthood.

Perhaps, though, Harcourt is even more dangerous in this area. In 1994, Harcourt bought catechetical textbook publisher Brown-ROA. It was an era, said Sr. M. Johanna Paruch, FSGM, a catechetics professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, when small companies were being bought by larger ones for the sake of survival.

Brown-ROA was already controversial for their New Creation sex education series, she said. But since then, Harcourt has published Growing in Love. Its use has stirred controversy particularly in upstate New York and some have even requested that Archbishop Jerome Hanus, OSB, of Dubuque, Iowa, remove his imprimatur from it.

Harcourt also does a large business with Catholic schools on regular school textbooks, said spokesman Rick Blake, something they’ve been doing for years.

But beyond this, Harcourt also published in 1999 A Clinician's Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortion, “the first clinical reference on abortion practice to be published in the United States in over fifteen years,” according to the New England Journal of Medicine. In addition to this, other Harcourt imprints have published such titles as Contraception: Your Questions Answered; Handbook of Contraception and Family Planning; Contraception and Office Gynecology, and The Lives of Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals as a college textbook for use in homosexual studies programs.

And to make matters worse, Harcourt has a matching grant program which contributes to Planned Parenthood, though Blake was quick to point out that the contributions were minimal and did not come from the religion division. Some pro-life organizations have said that Harcourt has given significantly to Planned Parenthood in the past, but Blake was unable to confirm that.
Archbishop Myers said that to his knowledge these connections have not been looked at, but he said, “I would find it offensive and I think it should be looked at.”

This issue will become even more pressing as the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People gets further adopted, the archbishop said. The Charter calls for children to be sensitized to inappropriate activity. He has told the USCCB offices “that the right of parents must be respected in this regard. Because it is the natural right of parents to train their children in such intimate matters. I’m saying that rather simply insist that children go through programs in our schools or in our religious education programs, there should be a form created where parents can say, ‘I have taken care of this formation for my child on my own and I find that he or she is properly prepared in this regard.’ And that would be part of the audit, rather than force every single child to go through a certain program which the parent might not want.”

Msgr. Kutys told CWR that the bishops have never really looked at the issue of who owns what and the issue has never been raised in this way before. Whenever the USCCB has gotten together with the publishers, which is an annual meeting, they have always presented themselves as being at the service of the Magisterium, not at the service of their bottom line, he added.

That bottom line might be a good thing, said Sr. Johanna. When a large company is more concerned about the bottom line rather than a particular ideology, they’ll be more willing to do, for instance, what the bishops ask them to do so the books will sell.

But Msgr. Kutys has been told that those religious education divisions do not have the same kind of pressure to produce a profit as do other portions of the companies, and that the companies view those divisions as having some particular value beyond their minimal money-making capacity.

What that value is is hard to say. Perhaps it has to do with the fact of how much these companies sell to Catholic schools, something which is disturbing to Archbishop Myers. “One of the things which has occurred across the field of Catholic primary and secondary education, especially in the United States,” he said, “is that you used to be able to get a series for primary school that included substantial reference to Catholic history. You can’t do that anymore. The examples in the math books or sociology would be Catholic. And the phenomenon which you describe with the mega-corporations moving in has really homogenized the textbooks, homogenized the teaching, and I think resulted in a less Catholic identity of our Catholic education and that’s really too bad.”

Many talk about the two lost generations since Vatican II. What is worse to think about though is that the Catholic Church has been paying to lose them. The major publishers have been dominated by secularist thinkers and publishing textbooks to reflect that thinking and Catholic parishes and schools around the country have been paying to buy them so that the faith and morals of the Church’s teaching can be undermined in our children.

Finally, someone gets it!

2006-03-22T11:45:00.000-06:00

Here are portions of an article from, of all places, Business First for Buffalo. Notice the parts I have bolded:

The Catholic Diocese of Buffalo has identified 10 schools that will participate in the pilot phase of a program designed to strengthen enrollment and fundraising...
Enrollment in Catholic grammar schools has been dropping for a couple of decades. In 1984, the diocese had 28,080 students enrolled in 125 elementary schools. By 2004, the diocese had 17,218 students enrolled in 76 schools.

The number of baptisms in the diocese has dropped 51 percent during the same period.

Why is it that it took a secular publication concerned with business to figure out that if we're not producing children, we're not going to have students to keep schools open?

Of course, Business First of Buffalo won't go into the reasons we're not having children since that's not their pervue. However, that should be abundantly obvious to anyone who can add two and two to get four: because we're ignoring Humanae vitae and contracepting and aborting ourselves out of existence.

Yet I don't expect to hear Bishop Edward Kmiec -- or, for that matter, any of his brethren -- coming out to tell his subjects, "Folks, you've got to stop contracepting, because if you don't, there won't be anyone left to send to schools or parishes. Pretty soon, we're not going to have a diocese left if you don't have more children." There's a saying about fiddling while a particular city burns that comes to mind.

Sam Alito part of Opus Dei?

2006-03-16T23:22:00.000-06:00

The link is over to the radically left site of CounterPunch. I know next to nothing about them. But I do know that they are typical in their attack on the Church being made in complete ignorance of fact.

I have my problems with Opus Dei, as I do with many of the Church's new renewal movements. However, they are not comparable to Nazi soldiers (the analogy is so overused that it is in danger of becoming trivial), nor are they any kind of elite shock troops. Yes, they do tend to reach out to the wealthy and privileged more than to the poor. But the Gospel must be preached to all, not only to the poor. And besides, as Mother Teresa constantly pointed out, there is poverty in far more ways than the lack of money.

If Justice Alito is part of Opus Dei, so what? The issue for the American people isn't his religious affiliations -- the issue is the fairness of his rulings.

As for all the other things Mr. Carmichael talks about, they're all a bunch of nonsense. What Samuel Alito's supposed membership in Opus Dei has to do with the priestly sex abuse scandal or with Cardinal Ratzinger's letter on Communion for politicians is beyond me. To be sure, the former Cardinal's letter had as much to do with Bush winning the White House as did the phase of the moon and the number of tea leaves that were raised in China that year. Such stupidity should probably be ignored, but sometimes stupidty can have the look of intelligence and it is that look that has to be defended against.

Double standards

2006-03-16T23:09:00.000-06:00

It's another one of those double-standard things that just kind of gradually hits you in the face. You're reading along in the Chicago Tribune in a two-author byline story about why there's been so much of an uproar over the cartoons satirizing Muhammad. All of a sudden you realize something -- these ladies keep referring to Muhammad as "the Prophet," complete with a capital "P."

Now isn't that something? The Chicago Tribune is making a statement of faith and no one bats an eyelash about it. "A statement of faith?" you ask. Yes, a statement of faith. Ask any believing Christian and he or she will tell you that Muhammad was not a prophet, never mind The Prophet. Ask a Buddhist or Hindu and they're more than likely to say something similar. It's only Muslims who believe this.

Now when was the last time you read an article about Jesus in the paper that used the word "Christ" after His Name or referred to Him by the title Christians ascribe to Him on a routine basis, "the Lord"? You can't remember it, can you? I thought not since it never happens.

So I wrote a letter to the editor, not of the Tribune, but of Editor & Publisher, the magazine of the newspaper business. Here's what I said:

As I was reading a Chicago Tribune story, "Why cartoons sparked furor," by Margaret Ramirez and Manya A. Brachear and published on Feb. 7, 2006, I was struck by the number of times Muhammad was called "the Prophet" in the story. Six times in this 1,250 word piece the writers refer to him as "the Prophet" with an extra two references coming from direct quotes.

This is rather curious. Do not the Tribune and all other secular media outlets realize that they are making a statement of faith about who Muhammad was when they use the phrase "the Prophet"? That is Muslim belief, not secular fact. Nowhere that I have seen does a secular newspaper ever refer to Jesus Christ as "the Lord," though that is the common parlance for Christians. In fact, most won't even use the word "Christ" since that is the Greek word for "Messiah" meaning anointed one, hence a statement of faith.

Granted, it gets rather tiresome to use "Muhammad" throughout a story. But using the title accorded to him by his followers immerses the secular press into an area it should not go -- the endorsement of a particular religion. In other words, if secular outlets are going to give equal coverage to religions, either they should refer to Muhammad simply as "Muhammad," or they should start referring to all other deities by the titles claimed by the adherents of those particular religions.

Michael Schiavo and his 'bishop'

2006-03-16T23:07:00.000-06:00

Who would've thunk it? Michael Schiavo gets married 10 months after his wife dies? Nah! You gotta be kidding me! And in a Catholic church, too?

Ah, there's the rub. Canon lawyer Ed Peters raises some good points in this posting on his blog. As another canon lawyer suggested, get in touch with His Eminence, Cardinal Francis Arinze and tell him what you think about it.

Francis Cardinal Arinze
Prefect
Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments
Palazzo delle Congregazioni
Piazza Pio XII, 10
00120 CITTÀ DEL VATICANO, Europe

A Democrat for Life who really is

2006-03-09T16:55:00.000-06:00

You know that Statement of Principles from 55 Catholic Democrats that was initiated by Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro who at one time was a member of Emily's List? The one where 35 of the signers voted in opposition to the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act? Well, for some reason which I cannot comprehend, Democrats for Life, an organization about which I favorably wrote in Our Sunday Visitor in May of 2004, has lent their support to the writers of that letter.

One person who is more than a little upset with Dems for Life over this is New York State Senator Ruben Diaz. Senator Diaz is a remarkable man. Besides being a senator representing the Bronx, he is also a Pentecostal minister. He is pro-life and, in the NY State Senate, has actually been the clearest voice defending the Catholic Church on the floor.

Senator Diaz is also a Democrat, one of those rare Democrats who do not compromise when it comes to life. So when Senator Diaz gets upset that Dems for Life is happy with the 55-Dem salute to Catholic principles, you know there's good reason to be upset. Here's a copy of the letter he wrote to Kristen Day, head of Democrats for Life:

March 7, 2006

Ms. Kristen Day
President
Democrats for Life
601 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
South Building – Suite 900
Washington, DC 20004
Sent by fax to 202/638-6957

Dear Ms. Day:

As a pro-life Democrat and elected official in one of the most liberal cities in the United States, I was shocked and dismayed to read your recent press release supporting a letter written by Rep. Rosa DeLauro and cosigned by mostly pro-abortion Democrats members of Congress. I found it to be deceptive and something I could never embrace.

Most of the letter’s signers support unrestricted abortion and have a total disregard for the grave moral disorder in our society. And to me it is obvious that no child could enjoy the programs and policies mentioned in this letter if he or she fell victim to abortion.

As a Board Member for Democrats for Life of New York, I cannot comprehend how you can officially share the goals of Representative DeLauro’s letter. Our goal, as pro-lifers, is to promote a culture of life. Their letter has been written to attack the President and promote a pro-abortion, liberal agenda, and its candidates, which includes the most of the signees. It has not been written to promote respect for the dignity of each human person at all stages of development. It has been signed by too many elected officials who choose to disregard some human life.

As a pro-life Democrat, I endure great pain, tribulation and agony by pro-abortion officials and political activists who refuse to promote the sacredness of all human life. Because of my Christian faith and its core beliefs – which include the need to respect all human life – I am the recipient of sharp and constant criticism. However, I am proud of my efforts and ask God to continue to give me the fortitude to continue.

I respectfully ask that you reconsider your support for this Congressional letter and its hidden agenda.

Fighting for a good educational system, good health services, job creation, affordable housing, and other important social services equally available to all human beings, are some of the reasons that I am a public servant, however, as I said before, an aborted baby will never be able to enjoy these services. Therefore, it is the duty and responsibility of every good Christian, good Catholic and any pro-lifer to defend the sanctity of life and not allow the sagacity of these signees to distance us from our goals.

Sincerely,

Senator Reverend Ruben Diaz
32nd Senatorial District
1750 Westchester Avenue
The Bronx, New York 10472
Phone: 718/892-7513

Jack Straw's stupid comments

2006-02-06T11:48:00.000-06:00

The Scotsman is quoting British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as saying, "If people looked at these cartoons and were to replace the images of the Holy Prophet with images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary, they can see that, even in our culture, if they were directed at the Judeo-Christian traditions, there would be similar outrage."

Right. And where was he when the films "Hail Mary" and "The Last Temptation of Christ" were being protested? Were the theatres being burned down? Did anyone storm Martin Scorcese's home and burn it down? Did people burn the American flag or threaten the theatre owners or Scorcese or the actors with death? I protested at a theatre in Minneapolis that showed Hail Mary and nothing like that happened.

Here's a note I sent Mr. Secretary via the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's feedback website:

Secretary Straw,

You are quoted in The Scotsman as saying, "there would be similar outrage" if the cartoons had been of Jesus or Mary.

How wrong you are. Not only have there been innumerable cartoons, there have been blasphemous films (Hail Mary, The Last Temptation of Christ) and more novels than you can shake a stick at. Were embassies burned? Were flags or books burned? Were murderous threats uttered? No! People peacefully demonstrated, prayed the Rosary in front of theatres, boycotted advertisers, etc. But no violence was ever done or even threatend.

That's because we're talking about two different religions here -- one teaches its followers to love their enemies and forgive; the other teaches its followers to cut off their enemies' heads or to subjucate them.

Please be truthful and don't say stupid things just to placate crowds. The truth cannot be sacrificed for the sake of mere pacification.

A new vision of Catholic education

2006-01-30T22:17:00.000-06:00

Perhaps there are a few things we need to think about when it comes to Catholic education. Steve Kellmeyer of Bridegroom Press has made the case in his book Designed to Fail, that the Catholic Church herself should not be doing the educating of children, that it should be something left to adults. That is a bit on extreme end, in my judgment.

However, he does raise a good point, and this is something I thought about when I was Director of Education and Formation at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City -- the Church really needs to be looking at adult education far more than children's education.

People today pride themselves on their education, and indeed, never before in the history of the world, really, have so many people been so well-educated. (Well, at least never before have so many people gone to college and obtained degrees. How well-educated they are is anyone's guess.) In fact, many Catholics today talk about how well-educated they are, something which has never happened before in the history of the Church.

Of course, this is true. But the education of which so many boast is education in the sciences, business, education, law, the arts and many technical fields. Yet this fact has been thrown in the face of bishops and priests as a reason the laity don't need to hear from them about anything regarding the faith and how to live their lives in the faith.

The problem, obviously, is that they have not been educated in the Faith. They have not learned the truths of the Faith because their catechesis was poor to begin with and ended, for the most part, at 8th grade. The rest they've learned from the secular media, which have been taught by the likes of America, Commonweal and National Catholic Reporter.

So we have a serious issue with adult education, hence we have a serious issue with children's education.

What should we do? Take a look at the independent school movement. There are a number of schools cropping up around the country started by parents who are less than thrilled about the quality of Catholic and public education in their area and have banded together to start their own schools. Many of these were started by Catholic homeschoolers. These are parents who take their faith seriously, have been educated in the Faith at places like my alma mater, the University of Dallas, Thomas Aquinas College, Christendom, etc., or just have done the work themselves and learned it well.

It seems to me, then, that this movement might delineate a path for the rest of the Church to follow. Teach the parents, get them excited about the truth of the Faith, and they will want to have quality education for their children and will begin teaching it to them themselves or have other parents do it for them.

As a friend of mine pointed out to me, it seems like this would be the more economical answer. Because the numbers of children are dwindling, it's becoming more expensive per child to educate a child in a traditional Catholic class setting. For instance, an administrator for a Catholic school system can be making as much as a high five-figure or low six-figure income. If a diocese has multiple systems, which many do, that means a lot of money for layers of administrators who are reaching, at best, 1,200 students. Now granted, to cut off their salaries in order to change models is not the greatest thing that can be done, but something will have to give somewhere.

The money that is saved from paying the administrators and other associated school costs is plowed into adult education and serious youth ministry. Now, we're not talking about Wednesday night lectures that no one attends or fluffy youth ministry there. We're talking about serious evangelistic efforts and outreaches, works that will be effective and able to draw people into the Church.

I've posted before about how bishops close parishes in the inner city because Catholics have moved to the suburbs. Well, guys, go make more Catholics!! We're made, not born. And we're made when the Word is preached and hearts are converted. If we seriously think we can save Catholic schools with the current rate of demographic decline, then we have another think coming. However, they can be renewed when we have a renewed vision of what Catholic education should be. They may not look like they did before, but that's OK. Catholic schools as we know them today were the invention of St. John Neumann, former bishop of Philadelphia, in the mid- to late-19th century. They aren't part of the Church's tradition reaching back, so they are a matter of prudence, not a matter of doctrine. They were a good way for the Faith to be taught from St. John Neumann's time up until the mid-1960's.

Then times changed. We will have to change as well and use the best methods for passing along the Faith in the 21st century. If we hold on to something like schools simply because that's what we grew up with, we could end up saving schools for the sake of the schools rather than seeking what the Lord might want us to do to adjust to these new realities and bring His word more effectively to a waiting world.

It's Catholic Schools Week -- how much longer will yours exist?

2006-01-30T15:16:00.000-06:00

Unfortunately, that’s a question we have to ask ourselves these days. Here are some statistics from the National Catholic Educational Association website:

In the 2004-2005 school year, 37 new schools were opened (good). But 173 were consolidated or closed (bad).

There are today, 7,799 Catholic schools in the United States. That’s down 494 from 10 years ago, or 6%, or nearly 50 schools closing a year.

There were 2,618,567 students in the 1994-1995 school year and now there are 2,420,590. That’s down 236,085 or 9%.

So if there are six percent fewer schools and nine percent fewer students, something’s going to have to give.

What’s more disturbing, though, is a breakdown of that picture shown by the NCEA. Between 1995 and 2000, the number of students in grades 9 through 12 rose by nearly 26,000. But in the next five years, it only went up by 3,600.

Add to that the fact that the number of elementary school students has dropped by 236,000 in the last five years, and things don’t look so well for Catholic schools.

The question, of course, is why is this happening? There are a lot of public schools closing around the country as well, so we’re not alone in this mess. But that shouldn’t necessarily give us any comfort. If anything, it should make us uneasy and it should make us ask the question of why there are so many schools closing.

I think we can easily point to two things that a lot of people are either overlooking, ignoring or they know it, but aren't saying it because they're afraid of the consequences. Those two things?

Contraception and abortion.

When you think about the fact that there have been 46 million abortions in this country since 1973 and start running the numbers, you’re going to come up with some scary figures. That means there are 25 million children who would have been born in the last 18 years who were not born. Couple that with the fact of the number of children who were prevented from even being conceived because of contraception and you have millions more who do not exist and who are not contributing to our lives in one way or another.

A lot of people are blaming their diocese or their parish for closing the schools. But it’s really not really the bishop’s or pastor’s fault for closing the school. It’s our fault – the fault of the married laity – because we either didn't make the babies to occupy those schools or we killed them before they were born.

OK, so maybe we're not totally at fault. Maybe we need some (gasp!) leadership on this issue since perhaps, just perhaps, we educated laity aren't all as educated as we like to think we are. Maybe we do need priests and bishops telling us it is wrong to contracept and abort and do it from the pulpit in a public way and on a frequent basis, despite the fact that the media will say the Catholic Church is obsessed with sex. Sure, they'll get heat for it. But personally, I would rather take heat for that which is a fundamental issue, rather than taking heat for the prudential issue of closing more schools.

The politics of migration

2006-01-24T18:28:00.000-06:00

It amazes me that certain people who will defend the Catholic Church on just about everything have turned around and bared their teeth at the Church because of her stand on immigration -- legal and illegal. In looking at illegal immigration, all too many of the commentators, some of whom I consider friends and/or comrades in the fight against secularism, are forgetting something -- that it is Jesus Christ who is coming to us, as Mother Teresa used to say, "in the distressing disguise of the poor."

Here are some things John Paul the Great said. I quote them because so many people quote him -- and rightly so -- about a number of other issues, including abortion, nutrition and hydration and so forth. But when it comes to dealing with immigrants crossing the border without papers, they ignore what he said or downplay it. Peggy Noonan is, unfortunately, a perfect example of this. Her book on John Paul is very well done and she always talks about him as a father figure. But then her rebellious streak shows up when she writes a column like this one where she ignores what he said about illegal immigrants.

And what did he say? Here's just one example from a 1996 speech he gave:

The Church considers the problem of illegal migrants from the standpoint of Christ, who died to gather together the dispersed children of God (cf. Jn 11:52). The Church acts in continuity with Christ's mission. In particular, she asks herself how to meet the needs, while respecting the law, of those persons who are not allowed to remain in a national territory. She also asks what the right to emigrate is worth without the corresponding right to immigrate...

In the name of the same faith, [these people] often seek pastors of souls and places where they can pray, listen to God's word and celebrate the Lord's mysteries. Dioceses have the duty to meet these needs.

In the Church no one is a stranger, and the Church is not foreign to anyone, anywhere. As a sacrament of unity and thus a sign and a binding force for the whole human race, the Church is the place where illegal immigrants are also recognized and accepted as brothers and sisters. It is the task of the various Dioceses actively to ensure that these people, who are obliged to live outside the safety net of civil society, may find a sense of brotherhood in the Christian community.

Man, particularly if he is weak, defenseless, driven to the margins of society, is a sacrament of Christ's presence (cf. Mt 25:40, 45). ‘But this crowd, who do not know the law, are accursed’ (Jn 7:49), was how the Pharisees judged those whom Jesus had helped even beyond the limits established by their precepts. Indeed, he came to seek and to save the lost (cf. Lk 19:10), to bring back the excluded, the abandoned, those rejected by society.

‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ (Mt 25:35). It is the Church's task not only to present constantly the Lord's teaching of faith but also to indicate its appropriate application to the various situations which the changing times continue to create. Today the illegal migrant comes before us like that ‘stranger’ in whom Jesus asks to be recognized. To welcome him and to show him solidarity is a duty of hospitality and fidelity to Christian identity itself.

So the Church holds that everyone has the right to seek the betterment of their economic situation and if they have to move across international borders to do that, then they have that right to do so. But if the people migrating can’t get across the border because the other country won’t them in, what’s the use of the right to emigrate?

We as Christians have to help these people. It is a divine imperative. They are our brothers and sisters. Yes, they are breaking the law by coming across the border the way they do. But that law is man-made and can be changed. John Paul said there is something else that has to be considered – who we are and who they are in Christ.

It befuddles me that those who do not want the state interfering in the affairs of the Church on certain matters like sex abuse or divorce, are saying that the rights of the state trump the rights of the Church to take care of those who are in need.

While some may bristle at this, I would suggest that the divinely instituted Church has rights that supercede the rights of the state, which is a man-made structure. There's nothing wrong with man-made structures and I am not suggesting that the Church should be above those laws which are just. But when legislators threaten the right of the Church to care for the poor, even if those poor are in the country illegally, then the Church has every right, as Cardinal Mahoney did, to say, "We will not obey unjust laws."

Is there a rat in London?

2006-01-24T17:32:00.000-06:00

I think we'd better start ignoring The Times of London when they report on happenings at the Vatican. First, it was that Judas was going to be rehabilitated by the Vatican and they even had an editorial backing that up. Now they report that the Vatican wants to charge anyone who quotes the Pope for royalties.

This, of course, got a number of people upset, not least of which was the Disciples with Microphones podcasters group I belong to. Then there were those outside the faith who thought it rather crude that the Pope should do this.

Here's what I told the DwM group:

A couple of things -- it could be that something is going on in the Vatican. However, it could also be that The Times has the story wrong -- again. Remember they were the ones who said that the Vatican was going to "rehabilitate" Judas and based it on a story in La Stampa. Turned out they mistranslated it and I haven't seen a retraction from them since, although it has been in Reuters and other sources.

Some time later, Catholic News Service had this story which showed that, well, I was right. The Times goofed it up again. No, that Milanese-based publisher had not only borrowed 30 lines as The Times reported, but had done a whole book of the Pope's speeches.

Still, some podcasters were concerned, so I called Mark Brumley, president of Ignatius Press. From what he understands (and since Ignatius was Ratzinger's official publisher for years, he's a pretty darn good source), the Vatican is more concerned with what gets published than with making money.

Remember a couple of things:

1) The Vatican has the responsibility to be sure that if someone claims to be printing what the Pope said or wrote, it actually has to be what the Pope said or wrote. One European publisher published the World Youth Day talks Pope Benedict gave without seeking permission from the Vatican. Problem was, they published only the printed texts that had been given to journalists prior to the talks -- so they ended up not being what the Pope actually said since he inserted all kinds of comments off-the-cuff and dropped other sections. When Vatican officials learned of this and called the publisher to say they got it wrong, the publisher said, basically, "Tough." If that happened to you, I don't think you'd be very happy. And since we're talking about papal material here, stuff that goes into the making and interpretation of Catholic doctrine and dogma, it's extraordinarily important to be accurate, which is the Vatican's job.

2) The Vatican has costs associated with this -- they have to pay their people who are tracking what is being published, making sure the translations are accurate, etc. Royalties go to help pay for these people's jobs.

3) Remember that The Times screwed up royally (puns intended) again. The story of the 30 lines in the Milanese publisher's book was false, just like their story about the rehabilitation of Judas.

Bottom line -- most people aren't going to have any problem quoting the Pope's material. The Vatican is basically going after book publishers who will make money off of what the Pope says, especially those who are doing it without permission and without concern for accuracy. If they're going to allow newspapers and magazines to publish documents under two very quite reasonable conditions without paying royalties, then they're not going to be breathing down the necks of most others who quote his stuff.

Perhaps someone needs to look at why The Times is publishing stories that are blatant errors -- Judas will be rehabilitated and the Vatican is going to be the copyright enforcer and money collector. Methinks I smell a rat.

We need them all

2006-01-24T15:00:00.000-06:00

A reflection on the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

I've never been a leader in the pro-life movement, though I know many of them, and I know them in many different parts of the movement. And they're all good people, people who are sincere about what they are doing and who are doing great good where they are.

But what irritates to me to no end is when they think their part of the movement is the best, or the only one necessary, or the only one that's really going to make a difference. It irritates me because they're all wrong. And it irritates me because they're giving in to pride, which will only lead to division.

What all pro-life leaders need to learn is this basic truth -- every legitimate aspect of the movement is needed. We need the lobbyists who will help to change the laws. We need the people on the sidewalks who will help dissuade women from having abortions now. We need the crisis pregnancy centers who welcome women in who are single and alone and need help. We need the advertising people to help people understand fetal development. We need the educators who will teach people about the various life issues.

No one can do it all. The lobbyists cannot say, "We don't need people in front of the clinics." Well, we do need them there because the laws haven't been changed yet. The sidewalk counselors can't say, "We don't need the lobbyists" because who else is going to work on getting the laws changed?

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. I remember an Apostle saying something like, "The hand cannot say to the head, 'I do not need you......'"

The obligations of love

2006-01-23T08:01:00.000-06:00

I know I'm late in coming to this observation. I do not doubt that if you were to make a cursory search of the great saints and theologians of Church history, it would not be difficult to find dozens who long ago arrived at what I am about to write about. However, I will give thanks that at least this little bit of light was given to me; no doubt, its seed was planted by something I read or heard over the years, so if someone recognizes this as something he or she told me long ago, please accept my thanks and let me know of that so I may give proper acknowledgment.

Over the past couple of days it has slowly dawned on me that there is something in the nature of love that is obligatory. Not that one is obliged to love, for that would contradict its very nature as an act freely chosen and freely given.

No, love is willing to make itself obligated to the beloved. If I do not have love for someone or something, then I have no obligation to help that person or thing. For instance (and this is a silly example, but let's start out small), if I have no love for a mouse and I see one stuck in a trap, I can walk by that mouse or even pick it up and throw it out. However, if I have a love for mice, even if that is simply affection, then I will do what I can to save it. My freely chosen love for the mouse has put me in the place where I am obliged to help it out.

The same goes for love of persons. Falling in love is something of a misnomer for it implies that I am impelled to love this one particular person, which is not true. It is also implies that I can fall out of love as well. However, it is in the nature of love to give of oneself to the other and that giving necessarily obligates oneself to do something for the good of the other. If I have no love for people and I see someone in need, I am not under an obligation to help that person out. There may be some exterior compulsion to do that, but it is not an interior obligation caused by love.

On the other hand, if I choose to love someone in whatever way that person is to be loved (philia, eros, agape), then I am now under an obligation to help that person who is in need. That help may be shown in a variety of ways, including so-called 'tough love.' But the obligation remains no matter how varied the help given might be.

If I marry, then I place upon myself the obligation to care for this person's welfare. In fact, love makes it obligatory that I place the needs of my beloved above my own. Love should be glad to do what is necessary for the beloved, even when what is necessary is irritating, not what I want to do at the moment, not what I think is important, or requires true sacrifice on my part.

God was under no obligation to make us. However, once He did so, He put Himself under the obligation of love to help us out of our self-imposed dilemma. His ultimate sacrifice on the Cross is the sign par exellence of what the obligations of love will do.

Catholic hospitals and emergency contraception

2006-01-15T21:21:00.000-06:00

A topic of great interest to me is the state of Catholic health care in the U.S. To me, it is one of two areas in the Church's life that are largely unreformed, the other one being social justice. Below is an article I wrote for the November issue of Catholic World Report on Catholic hospitals and emergency contraceptives (this is my original version, not the final printed copy). I hope at some point to write a book on Catholic health care as it needs to be treated rather exhaustively.

A Moral Dilemma
Catholic hospitals treating rape victims face a moral and ethical dilemma: Should they prescribe emergency contraception to these women?
By Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz

When a woman is raped and goes to the emergency room of a Catholic hospital, that raises a moral dilemma for the hospital – does she get emergency contraception (EC) or not? Here’s what the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Institutions (ERDs) from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops say about it:

A female who has been raped should be able to defend herself against a potential conception from the sexual assault. If, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already, she may be treated with medications that would prevent ovulation, sperm capacitation, or fertilization. It is not permissible, however, to initiate or to recommend treatments that have as their purpose or direct effect the removal, destruction, or interference with the implantation of a fertilized ovum.

A hospital in the Diocese of Peoria developed a protocol for Catholic hospitals that face this situation. Called (appropriately enough) the Peoria Protocol, it was put together by the staff at OSF St. Francis Medical Center and theologians in the diocese working under then-Bishop John J. Myers.

That protocol calls for the ER personnel to try and determine through various tests whether or not the woman has ovulated. If she hasn’t, then the protocol calls for the woman to be given emergency contraception. If she has, then nothing is to be done because the contraceptive actually acts as an abortifacient. And ovulation within close proximity of a rape could bring about a conception.

In 1998, the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference issued a similar protocol for use in that state’s Catholic hospitals.

“The deliberate destruction of an innocent living human fetus – no matter how conceived – is unjustified,” the conference wrote. “Sexual intercourse involved in the act of rape, on the other hand, is an unjust assault and a non-consensual act. Therefore, appropriate means may be used in treating the rape victim to prevent conception. These means, as used, may not have the effect of an abortifacient.”

This protocol also calls for an indication of whether or not ovulation has occurred.

The question arises because oral contraceptives, both the regular and “emergency” types, are supposed to work by suppressing ovulation. However, it is well known that oral contraceptives have a secondary effect, that of making the uterine lining, called the endometrium, thin and therefore making it impossible for a newly fertilized ovum to properly implant. So the child dies due to a chemical abortion.

It should only be a question, then, of timing, like in the Pennsylvania Protocol. Find out where the woman is in her cycle and if she hasn’t ovulated yet, then give the emergency contraceptive and suppress the ovulation.

But there are those who are questioning whether or not there should be any contraceptive given at all if a rape occurs early in a woman’s cycle. The reason is that some studies indicate that contraceptives do not always succeed at suppressing ovulation, even when it’s given prior to ovulation. According to a 2002 article in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy (vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 465–470), “The evidence to date supports the contention that use of EC does not always inhibit ovulation” even if it is used prior to ovulation. Additionally, it can change the lining of the uterus “regardless of when in the cycle it is used, with the effect persisting for days.” So if ovulation is not suppressed and a child is conceived, then the child will die because the endometrium is too thin.

Because of these effects, the article, co-authored by Drs. Chris Kahlenborn, Joseph Stanford and Walter Larimore, calls into question whether or not Catholic hospitals should even use EC at all. “Catholic hospitals that do allow hormonal EC use prior to ovulation may wish to reassess their policies given the findings that EC use does not consistently stop ovulation and has the potential of causing a postfertilization effect even when used prior to ovulation.”

Of the three, Kahlenborn is the only Catholic. Stanford is a Mormon based in Salt Lake City, but on sabbatical until next year at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland doing research on Natural Family Planning, and Larimore is an Evangelical who used to be vice president for medical affairs at Focus on the Family.

The trio wrote to Archbishop Myers, now in Newark, NJ, asking him to consider changing the Peoria Protocol in light of the research they did. But Kahlenborn said that Myers responded to him that his experts think Kahlenborn is “alarmist” and, according to Kahlenborn, Myers said he “simply did not know what to do.”

Archbishop Myers did not return calls requesting comment.

A request for comment from the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference was declined.

But the evidence was enough to convince the Catholic Medical Association to pass a resolution at its 2003 annual meeting that said, “‘emergency contraception’ is a misnomer as it does not consistently prevent fertilization” and that since it “has the potential to prevent implantation...it cannot be ethically employed by a Catholic physician or administered in a Catholic hospital in cases of rape.”

Morally picky?
But there are some who contend that the question of whether or not a woman has ovulated should not even be entertained. Rather, they say that the USCCB directive clearly states it’s a matter of whether or not the woman is pregnant.

This is the position held, among others, by Ron Hamel, senior director of ethics at the Catholic Health Association based in St. Louis, and Michael Panicola, who is in charge of ethics at SSM Health Care in St. Louis. In a 2002 paper published in the CHA’s Health Progress, the two spell out the differences between what they call the “pregnancy” approach and the “ovulation” approach. The pregnancy approach tests to see if the woman is pregnant and, if not, that allows for the hospital staff to administer EC. If she is, then they cannot.

The problem with the ovulation approach, in Hamel and Panicola’s view, is that, “Conception does not occur immediately after the ovum is expelled from the ovary; it can only be achieved after fertilization is complete. This is important if one recalls that fertilization is not a moment but rather a process that unfolds over at least a 24-hour period, with the possible result being a conceptus.”

Their view is that the possibilities are too remote even for pregnancy in the case of rape. The percentage of pregnancies resulting from rape is estimated to be between one and five percent. And in their review of the scientific literature, they find no evidence of what is called a post-fertilization effect, or what Kahlenborn, Stanford and Larimore name as early abortion. So Hamel and Panicola say that from their review of the literature, EC works only to suppress ovulation and or to inhibit the move of sperm from the cervix to the Fallopian tubes.

To keep this in perspective, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, there were 6,700 rapes reported in Florida in 2003. Assuming a pregnancy rate for rape between one and five percent, that would mean anywhere between 67 to 335 pregnancies resulted from these rapes. Kahlenborn and his co-authors quote a study that estimates between 13.5 percent and 38 percent of EC cases worked by some other mechanism than suppression of ovulation, that mechanism being, in their view, a chemical abortion. In that case, at a minimum, nine children conceived in rape could have been aborted through the use of EC in Florida in 2003, while at a maximum, 127 died.

While denying that they do it, Hamel and Panicola say that this is essentially the principle of double effect here – doing something that is good but that has an unintended and evil consequence, like removing an ovary because of an ectopic pregnancy. “[T]he intention in administering emergency contraception is to prevent conception and not to inhibit implantation. If a conceptus is present, but fails to be implanted and ultimately is destroyed, this would be an unintended and even an unforeseen effect, given the extremely low likelihood of conception occurring as a result of the sexual assault and the lack of evidence supporting abortifacient effects of the medications.”

But William May, considered the best moral theologian in the U.S. and one of the best in the world, said one “cannot exclude” the possibility that this can result in abortion from the moral consideration. “You may not intend evil,” he said, but “here you are conditionally intending abortion.”

Father Kevin McMahon, a moral theologian at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia, said that he would like to see stronger evidence to back up what Kahlenborn and his colleagues wrote. However, he also agrees with May and believes this is not a case of double effect. “This would not do two effects – it’s either one or the other [suppress ovulation or abort]. And you don’t even know if the good effect (suppressing ovulation) is going to take place.”

The difficulty is, according to Dr. Stanford, that in medicine “No matter what you do, there will always be some grey area.” Black and white, “just won’t happen in medicine.”

For instance, no matter how much testing is done, the tests will only pick up reactions to what the body is doing, and those reactions take time. So if there is no elevated progesterone level, for instance, that doesn’t necessarily mean that ovulation hasn’t taken place because it takes a few hours before that increase shows up in the bloodstream.

Practical measures
One ER physician in Washington, D.C. wrote in Health Progress that she had been unaware there was even a debate on the matter. Dr. Margaret Barron at Providence Hospital said that the Peoria Protocol calling for tests of progesterone levels and other similar measures is simply too cumbersome. “In most hospitals,” she said, “there is no such thing as receiving ‘stat’ progesterone level information.”

But Dr. Stanford doesn’t think there’s a whole lot to that argument. When he was at the University of Utah hospital, he could get a progesterone level test back in one day. For him, it’s more a matter of logistics rather than practicalities. If a hospital is committed to this, he said, they will find ways to be sure they have the equipment and staff on hand to do a proper evaluation.

But he did concede that for a rural Catholic hospital it would be a difficult financial proposition to have all of that available.

Catholic hospitals not alone
Catholic hospitals are mixed on this issue. According to Catholic for a Free Choice, 28 percent offer EC, a fact which Planned Parenthood criticizes on its website. But that may actually be a close reflection of what happens in hospitals generally. In June, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report showing that the majority of hospitals in Florida do not give it out consistently. According to the Miami Herald, “35 percent of hospitals and treatment centers said they consistently provide rape victims with emergency contraception.” Another 47 percent are inconsistent in their offering of it, six percent don’t do it all and the remaining 12 percent didn’t know what their policies were.

But what the CFFC survey doesn’t reflect is the number of Catholic hospitals that refer rape victims to rape victims’ centers who then, in turn, refer their clients to physicians or hospitals that will dispense EC.

Still many faithful Catholics may even wonder what the debate is all about. Complaints about Catholics hospitals distributing contraceptives and doing sterilizations abound around the country and there seems to be no change on that front anywhere on the horizon.

Call to Action's insincerity

2006-01-14T14:33:00.000-06:00

The link above goes to a column in the Buffalo (NY) News. Below is a reply I sent as a letter to the editor:

Jim Orgren's column, "The priest shortage and diocesan reorganization," is a bit on the misleading side. He cites a survey done by Call to Action first in Buffalo and then copied in other dioceses around the country to show that a majority of Catholic priests support a discussion on the question of celibacy.

That survey can in no way be considered scientifically valid. The problem is a matter of who answered the survey. It was a voluntary survey and one that did not have a very good sample because of the self-selection of those who responded.

Mr. Orgren knows very well that among Catholic priests there is a range of opinion regarding celibacy, with the majority of priests considering it a settled question. Those who are unhappy with the current state of things were more likely to respond since they know the bishops are not going to be agitating to make changes to the rule. But they did know that CTA would make a fuss about it and they wanted to contribute to that. The vast majority who did not respond also knew that CTA would use it to make a fuss and they did not want to contribute any credibility to an otherwise non-credible organization. Those who responded in the negative held the vain hope that they could try to influence the results.

If any other advocacy group does a survey and gets results that show the majority of people support the way that group thinks, those data are rightly questioned by the press. The same should be done here. CTA does not like the Church the way she is and wants to remake her according to the image of 21st century secularism rather than in the image of Christ's bride. With that in mind, their "surveys" should be viewed by the press and the general public with some rather large grains of salt.

The contest of last names

2006-01-12T15:38:00.000-06:00

Dave Wischnowsky is a blogger and reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Chicago, as is well-known, has a lot of Poles. Not quite as many as Warsaw, but still quite a few. Mr. Wischnowsky gave word to a lot of thoughts I have when people comment about my last name (if only I had a dime for every, "Boy, I bet you had a hard time learning that in school"). He asked for other people's input on their last names and I sent this in reply:

OK, Mr. Wischnowsky, try this one on for size -- 12 letters and it has three Z's, a letter your name is completely lacking. Those Z's always throw people off.

Yes, I attribute half of my intelligence to having my last name, including my ability to spell.

After I asked my father-in-law (a Gibson) for permission to marry his one and only daughter out of nine children (which he obviously granted), he told her, "He takes your name!" He has never learned to spell it, never mind pronounce it. He did tell me that he once met a guy from Poland who had 15 letters and 4 Z's. (It must be remembered, however, that as an Irishman he is prone to exaggeration.)

Talk about school troubles -- the standardized tests never had enough space for my last name; I think I would get to around the "w" before running out of room. I guess they figured the teachers would know who it was after 9 letters. And when on the first day of class the teacher was going through the alphabetical list of students, I always knew when she got to me. "Thomas....Thomas....." "Yes, I'm here."

You got called "Wisconsin"; I got "skunk cabbage" and "three z's". When my father was in the Navy and my brother was in the Coast Guard, somehow or other they ended being called "Ski." Go figure.

My surname has given me the name of my writing business since "szyszka" means "pine cone" in Polish. With my e-mail address, some of my clients have now resorted to calling me "Polish Pine Cone."

When I get calls from people who don't know me, it's always, "Is this Thomas.....I'm sorry I don't know how to say it. Can I call you 'Tom'?" And when I'm ordering something over the phone, I don't even bother saying it. "The first name is Thomas and I'll spell the last name for you. It's 's' like 'Sam,' 'z' like 'zebra'....."

The most common mispronunciation? Siskawitz. The real pronounciation? In Polish, it's shish-KIEV-ich. That middle vowel sound is tough, though. You don't make it sound like Kiev. You kind of have to say the long 'i' and 'e' really quickly and smash the two sounds together to get the correct pronunciation. In English, I take out the "sh" and middle vowel sounds so it ends up as "sis-KEV-itch."

People have asked my why I don't shorten it. Well, it's my name. It's the name given me by my father and has been in the family for who knows how many generations. I'm told it has noble heritage. It's fairly unique (there is one in Chicago somewhere). Why give it up? Besides, it's a challenge to their minds. It expands their horizons. It makes our country more diverse.

Still, it has nothing on the name of a priest I know in Wisconsin. Przybylski -- pronounced "shibilski." Or another Polish priest I know serving at a mission parish in Peru -- Kolodziejczyk. Go Poland. Teach the rest of the world what humans can really do with their tongues.

Bishop Gumbleton's abuse

2006-01-11T20:50:00.000-06:00

Perhaps this should have been forecast as part of someone's 2006 predictions: America's most famous dissenting bishop will claim that he was molested by a priest when he was in high school and then support a bill to lift the statute of limitations.

Do I sound skeptical of his claims? I think there are reasons to be. Bishop Thomas Gumbleton was among the youngest priests to have been ordained as a bishop in the U.S. in the last 50 or so years. At 38-years-old in the heady days of 1968 immediately after Vatican II while there were anti-war riots and all kinds of free love and rock 'n roll, with Cardinal Dearden (who was responsible for promoting some of the worst ever bishops in U.S. history) in charge in Detroit from whence he came, His Excellency had little firm grounding on which to rest his feet. Hence he was able to go off on flights of fancy to press for greater lay involvement in the Church to the detriment of the priestly ministry, for dispensing with the rule of celibacy, for the ordination of women, the full embrace of homosexual activity as "normal," the acceptance of contraception (interestingly, he was ordained a bishop barely three months prior to the issuance of Humanae Vitae), and who knows where he stands on abortion.

These are positions he has held for years. Fortunately, while Rome erred in making him a bishop, she was at least wise enough not to give him his own diocese and he has remained an auxiliary in Detroit for nearly 38 years. These positions have, of course, made him the darling of the National Catholic Reporter (for which he writes a regular column) and the biggest name in Call to Action. They have also endeared him to the secular press who somehow or other forget all those dissenting positions in favor of calling him a pacifist bishop. Now I haven't seen too many other bishops take up arms since, say, the 14th or 15th century, but somehow or other they manage to escape the moniker of "pacifist."

His agenda and those of folks like Cardinals Dearden† and Mahoney, Archbishops Hunthausen†, May† and Roach†, Bishops Hubbard, Clark, Untener† and Lucker†, started to get somewhere from 1965 until about the early-1990's. But by the grace and mercy of God, it has fizzled. Since then, He has seen fit to raise up some bishops after His own heart (cf. Jer. 3.15) and they have at least declawed the beast of the USCCB. This state of affairs is certainly not pleasing to those of the Dearden school who are left alive.

But of late, Bishop Gumbleton has been out of the spotlight. Call to Action meetings generally get less attention from the MSM these days. His last bit of publicity was when he said last year that he wouldn't submit his resignation papers at age 75 because, according to him, that's such an arbitrary number. This, of course, came after the fact that he had said he would do so a couple of years earlier.

There are two ways to look at this: The conduct of his ministry can lead one to believe it may have happened and so thoroughly damaged him that it screwed up his thinking completely. However, the conduct of his ministry can also lead one to believe that he is lying through his teeth just to get attention and to get an agenda against the Church through. Given his track record, possibility #2 is quite plausible. It could be that His Excellency was at this press conference for reasons that were far less high-minded than those noble causes which he cited.

Consider what will happen if the State of Ohio passes a law that lifts the statute of limitations for a year on child sexual abuse. The Dioceses of Cleveland, Columbus, Steubenville, Toledo and Youngstown and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati will all be subject to a year of people filing lawsuits. That won't look very pretty in many places, particularly Cinti and Cleveland which have not exactly had a reputation for the most orthodox and firm bishops for quite some time. Supposing the law is passed -- is it out of the realm of possibility that, say, 500 people will file suits in Ohio? Considering that it is one of the most populous states in the nation, and a rather Catholic one to boot, I don't think so. If that were to happen and assuming a payment of $1 million per victim (that seems to be the consensus figure these days -- instant millionaires, you know), that will cost the Church in Ohio half a billion dollars in payouts, to say nothing of attorney's fees and court costs.

Supporting this action that could bring some more dioceses to bankruptcy court is unbecoming of a bishop. And it isn't necessarily in the victim's best interest, either, as this story from the AP shows.

So what else raises my suspicions?
1) Notice that he is not revealing the names of the priest or of his fellow student, even though the priest is dead. If he's so much for SNAP, why isn't he revealing the name in case there were other victims, as SNAP is always demanding? And why aren't we going to hear SNAP say, "Hey, bucko, get back out there tell all the names you know!"
2) Notice that when he became bishop, he did nothing about this guy, not even after the very public warnings of cases like Father James Porter, well before the current cycle started four years ago.
3) Notice that he said it didn't traumatize him too much. Sorry, but if I was a naive 13-year-old (which I was) and a priest put his hand down my pants (which thankfully none ever did), I would have been traumatized by it. Granted, I probably would not have said anything out of shame or fear, but it would have still traumatized me.
4) His superiors in Detroit knew nothing of his claim. Cardinal Maida was caught flat-footed, according to his press release.

Cardinal Adam Maida, archbishop of Detroit, says he is always disheartened whenever he hears of a claim of clergy sexual abuse, and is especially saddened by the report that Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a Detroit auxiliary bishop, was apparently a victim himself many years ago. "The Detroit archdiocese was never made aware of this," Cardinal Maida says. (my emphasis)

Still, His Eminence was kind enough to offer a helping hand.

As it relates to Bishop Gumbleton's remarks on how these cases are handled, Msgr. Ricardo Bass, Cardinal Maida's delegate for clergy matters, notes there is no time limit on a person bringing forward a complaint to the archdiocese. "Bishop Gumbleton's experience is indeed regrettable," says Msgr. Bass, "and, no doubt, it frames his personal opinion on this matter. As we would with any person in his situation, the archdiocese stands by its commitment to provide counseling assistance as needed." Regarding the statute of limitations, Msgr. Bass adds, "it has served our society well in protecting the rights of everyone, especially after a long passage of time." (emphasis mine)

Throw in some time of prayer and penance at a desert monastery and you've got yourself a deal. So go ahead, Excellency, take him up on his offer. You've been needing it for some time.

Who owns the Church?

2006-01-03T20:44:00.000-06:00

I've posted below a story I wrote for the October 2005 issue of Catholic World Report entitled "Who Owns the Church?" dealing with property ownership. Considering the ruling in Portland that mirrored that of the one in Spokane, I thought it might be helpful for some people. (See Ed Peters' recent posting on this issue at his canon law blog.) I can't find my article anywhere online, so here it is.

Who owns the Church?
By Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz

From Boston to Spokane, from Tucson to St. Louis, the question of who owns Church property is reverberating in the halls of justice. Do the parishes own the churches or does the bishop? Can the bishop take over parish assets if he closes a parish or do they go back to the former parishioners? Can the bishop sell the parishes in order to pay for sexual abuse lawsuits?

The question first arose in early 2004 as Archbishop Seán O’Malley of Boston announced his decision to close a number of parishes, sell their assets, and take them over in order to help the archdiocese recover from the crippling effects of the priestly sexual abuse scandal. But it became more acute later that year when the bishops of Portland, Ore., Tucson, Ariz., and Spokane, Wash., all filed bankruptcy.

Boston an intra-church matter – so far
For Boston, this has been pretty much an intra-church question, though church-state issues have been raised by some opportunistic and office-seeking politicians. Some towns where the closed churches are have considered passing taxes on those now vacant properties, but there has been no other major state or federal government intervention as of yet. (That could change, though, if a bill going through the legislature is passed that would require all churches in Massachusetts to annually file their financial reports with the attorney general’s office.)

The decision to close some parishes and take over the assets rather than merge them was to help attain a certain amount of equity, according to a press release from the archdiocese. “[M]erging parishes would keep the assets and liabilities in the local area,” the statement read, “in some cases resulting in two wealthy parishes combining to form one very wealthy parish; while if two poorer parishes are joined they could potentially only inherit liabilities to form one very poor parish.”

But that wasn’t entirely how the Congregation for the Clergy saw it. Though the Congregation was satisfied with the process Archbishop O’Malley followed in closing the churches, there was one aspect they questioned. “The Congregation has informed the Archdiocese,” the statement continued, “that in situations where the parishioners of the closed parish are directed to a new receiving parish, the Archdiocese must work with the receiving parish in order to allocate the assets and liabilities of the closed parish to the Archdiocese.”

In other words, according to an article in The Pilot, the archdiocesan newspaper, in those instances where the territory of the closed parish was divided among neighboring parishes, the archbishop has to seek permission from those neighboring parishes to take over the assets. Otherwise, the assets go to the other parishes.

This was not an official ruling, Father Mark O’Connell, a canon lawyer for the archdiocese, told CWR. Rather, “it was one bishop talking to another.” But it was how the Congregation would interpret canon law and any case that was appealed to Rome would have to go through them.
All of this goes to show that in the mind of the Church, the bishop of the diocese does not own or have ruling control over all of the Catholic property in the diocese.

But not in Washington
After the announcement was made in Boston, the Diocese of Spokane’s attorney, Shaun Cross, was hopeful. “It reaffirms the position of Bishop [William] Skylstad in that he does not own the parishes,” Cross told the Associated Press.

But Cross’s hopes were dashed. Federal bankruptcy Judge Patricia Williams ruled against the diocese saying that Bishop Skylstad owns or controls it all and so he can sell it all in order to pay the victims of sexual abuse. That ruling increases the pot of money available to victims from $25 million (an amount that includes $15 million in insurance money) to whatever the 16 schools and more than 80 parishes are worth. (Unofficial estimates put that at about $80 million, though that is most likely a low figure.)

Bishop Skylstad has appealed the decision, a process that could ultimately end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. It first goes to a federal bankruptcy appeals court, then to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a court that already has a clear bias against the Church. Estimates are that the appeals process could take anywhere from five to ten years.

Cross told CWR that he believes Judge Williams was simply wrong in her decision and ignored key questions about how the diocese holds title to the parishes (in trust, not in direct ownership), the fact that the parishes under Washington law can be considered “unincorporated associations,” and how this will effect church/state relations under the First Amendment.
Victims’ lawyers called the appeal “playing hardball” and excoriated the bishop for the appeal.
But Cross told CWR that the parties are still working on a settlement.

Corporation soul
This decision raises in earnest the question of how the Church herself looks at who owns Church property.

Church law calls parishes “juridic persons” or entities recognized in law as having a “personality.” This is kind of like corporations, according to Ed Peters, a lay canon lawyer. Juridic persons can own property, which means the parish can own property apart from the diocese, though it is always subject to the bishop.

Canon law also makes it clear that a bishop is a steward, not an owner, of all that is in his diocese. Parishes, as juridic persons, can own property outright, though they are still subject to the bishop. Yet the bishop at times needs permission of the finance council and the college of consultors in decisions regarding certain properties.

But often the way that translates into civil law is quite different from canon law. While canon law recognizes the individual parish’s ability to own things, many, if not most, dioceses operate civilly under the “corporation sole” model. This means that, for instance, the Bishop of Spokane, besides being an individual named William Skylstad, is also a corporation and owns or directs as a corporation whatever is held in title by the diocese – including the parishes.

Some history
This model came about as a quirk of history, out of a movement called trusteeism. As Catholics emigrated to the U.S. from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, they brought with them the influences of how things had been run in their own countries. Those influences then met with more Protestant and American democratic influences and that collision helped bring about the issue of trusteeism, said Dr. Patrick Carey, a professor of theology at Marquette University and the foremost expert on the phenomenon.

Laity set up the parishes as corporations under various state laws and got the deeds to the church properties as trustees. The trustees, Carey said, brought with them the concept of “jus patronatus” or right of patronage that was given when royalty or nobles erected churches or dioceses in their countries. The person who set it up then had the right to name the priest or bishop.

When that background was brought to the U.S., it united with the idea that the people were the kings, “therefore they should have the same rights,” Carey said.

This, of course, set the laity up for a collision course with the bishops who, in 1829, decreed during a provincial council in Baltimore that all Church property in a diocese would belong to the diocese. During further provincial and plenary councils in Baltimore, that position was strengthened.

Those decisions were the basis for the selection of incorporating under state laws as corporation soles. But even at that time, according to Father John Coughlin, OFM, a professor of canon and civil law at the University of Notre Dame Law School, some bishops presciently wondered what that civil model would do to the liability of bishops for priests who ran afoul of the law.

Those Baltimore decisions also raised issues in Rome, particularly after one Cincinnati archbishop nearly lost the entire archdiocese because his brother, the vicar general, came up with a bad banking scheme. In 1911, the Sacred Congregation for the Council (now the Congregation for the Clergy) told the bishops of the United States that they did not like the corporation sole model all that well and preferred the method of parish corporation, where each individual parish is separately incorporated in the state.

Among the methods which are now in use in the United States for holding and administering church property, the one known as Parish Corporation is preferable to the others, but with the conditions and safeguards which are now in use in the State of New York. The Bishops therefore should immediately take steps to introduce this method for the handling of property in their dioceses, if the civil law allows it. If the civil law does not allow it, they should exert their influence with the civil authorities that it be made legal as soon as possible. Only in those places where the civil law does not recognize Parish Corporations, and until such recognition is allowed, the method commonly called Corporation sole is allowed, but with the understanding that in the administration of ecclesiastical property the Bishop is to act with the advice, and in more important matters with the consent, of those who have an interest in the premises and of the diocesan consultors, this being a conscientious obligation for the Bishop in person.
(Quoted in New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, 2000, New York, Paulist Press, page 1457.)

The New York model the Congregation favored is one where the state has written into law recognition of Roman Catholic parishes and the authority of the bishop over them. The law there allows for two lay trustees to be named to the corporate board, but those trustees serve at the pleasure of the bishop, thus avoiding the whole trusteeism question. But that is not the case in many states.

Making the changes
Unfortunately, not many bishops listened to that directive. It’s only been in recent years that some dioceses have been making the civil changes necessary to reflect canon law. One such bishop is Bishop Robert Vasa of Baker, Ore. A canon lawyer by training, he was appointed to Baker at the end of 1999 after having just completed the project of separately incorporating all of the parishes in the Diocese of Lincoln, under the direction of Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz. So he knew the advantages of this process.

In fact, on the day he went to Oregon for the press conference announcing his appointment, he asked the diocesan attorney, Vincent Hurley, how the Baker Diocese was structured. When he found out that it was a corporation sole, he told Hurley to get ready to make the switch – and he wasn’t even a bishop yet.

As they were getting the documents ready, the diocese was slapped with sexual abuse lawsuits. In September of 2002, an injunction was granted against the diocese to prevent them from transferring any assets. The plaintiffs had charged that the transfers were being done in order to devalue the assets of the diocese. But in May of 2003, a judge agreed with Bishop Vasa and allowed the separate incorporations to go through.

Rather than being a way to devalue the diocesan assets, it was instead, “the transfer of the title to the proper owner,” Bishop Vasa said.

On one hand...but on the other
But even with that, this prelate told CWR that he could persuasively argue either side of the Spokane case before the judge. And he’s not even sure what he would do if he were in Judge Williams’ seat.

On the one hand, under canon law, a bishop is subject to consult with, and at times even have the approval of, a finance council on major financial expenditures.

But on the other hand, according to Father Coughlin, the parish holds the property, not on its own, but always in subjection to the authority of the bishop. One juridic person in a hierarchical church like the Catholic Church, is always subject to another juridic person in the Church, he pointed out. So the bishop can still be tied to the parish even if it is made a separate state corporation.

And even at the top, there is still accountability. Canon 1273 states that the Pope “is the supreme administrator and steward of all ecclesiastical goods.” Ed Peters said that in no way does that mean that the Pope owns everything in the Church. “I don’t know of any canon lawyer who would interpret it that way,” he said. So even the Pope, as Pope Benedict XVI has pointed out early in his reign, doesn’t own the Church nor reign as an absolute monarch whose every whim becomes law. He is subject to the apostolic authority that has been entrusted to him.
Peters, who is also a civil lawyer, called Judge Williams’ decision “narrowly right,” since the diocese is structured as a corporation sole.

But, he added, she “has run afoul of Catholic canon law and thus has lurched into free-exercise territory, wrongly at that.”

“Bishops do not own parishes under canon law, nor do dioceses own parishes, nor does the pope own parishes,” Peters said. “Our whole religious tradition recognizes ownership of parish assets to rest in parishes.”

The judge could plausibly think otherwise, Peters said, but even if she did, she is “still wrong on the crucial question of who owns assets that some think can be used to pay the liabilities. Bishops no more canonically own parishes in their dioceses than they canonically own a Catholic hospital located in their diocese.”

One of the difficulties that could come up in the appeals process, Peters said, is that in order to alienate (i.e. sell) any asset over the amount of $3 million, the bishop has to have the approval of Rome. And what if Rome disapproves? That’s where the real church-state clash could begin.

Tucson avoids it...
In Tucson, the whole issue has been avoided, according to diocesan communications director, Fred Allison. In fact, they will be emerging from their Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings by October. Part of the agreement has been the reorganization of the diocese to make the parishes separate corporations.

One of the reasons it has been so smooth is the lack of participation by the group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, Allison said. Twice, Barbara Blaine, the group’s president, made appeals to the judge to be named to the proceedings, and both times the judge refused her request.

Things are going so well, according to Allison, that the annual diocesan appeal they recently completed broke a record.

...but Portland trembles
But the Archdiocese of Portland is facing a situation like Spokane’s. The judge has not yet ruled, but the archdiocese has presented its arguments to the court in much the same way as the Spokane Diocese did – that even though the archbishop is the sole corporate owner of the archdiocesan assets, he holds them in trust for the individual parishes or entities.

But Portland’s situation is even more complicated. The archdiocese was presented with two lawsuits for sexual abuse – one for $130 million and another for $25 million – whose plaintiffs refused mediation. The archdiocese is claiming assets of $19 million. If the parishes and other properties were added, estimates are that they would be worth $500 million to $600 million, though no valuations have been done yet.

Archbishop John Vlazney knew that in the current climate, he faced little to no chance of winning and that amount was overwhelming to their asset pool. Besides, said Bud Bance, the archdiocesan spokesman, if the two cases went forward and they lost, that would have left the archdiocese with nothing to pay any future claimants.

Additionally, they would have to file bankruptcy at a state court level. Being that this is Oregon, the most unchurched state in the country, the prospects there did not look good.

So the archbishop took a gamble and decided to file bankruptcy at the federal level. That stopped the lawsuits from proceeding and started the look at the archdiocese’s finances.
During the proceedings, the board composed to represent those who have claims against the archdiocese, the Tort Claimant Committee, took a novel approach at getting the issue of who owns the property resolved. The committee filed a class-action lawsuit against all 390,000+ members of the archdiocese in an effort to have the court rule on a summary judgment of who owns the assets. It was something so unusual, said Bance, that the lawyers all had to scramble to find out what to do. Almost all class-action lawsuits represent a class of people against one company or person, not vice-versa.

With the class action approach, said Bance, the individuals who have contributed to their parish now have an opportunity of sorts to speak their minds on the matter. How this will all turn out is anyone’s guess.

The Episcopalians
Disputes within the Episcopalian church over the ordination of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire has caught the church up in property disputes. As individual congregations are repulsed by the hierarchy’s decisions to alienate the church from basic Christian teaching, they have taken matters into their own hands and left the hierarchy behind.

But what happens to the properties is ending up in courts. A recent decision in southern California went in favor of a local parish as holding the rights to the property.

At this point, Father Coughlin said he is unsure if this will have any impact at all on cases effecting the Catholic Church.

And in St. Louis
In St. Louis, the question of parish ownership doesn’t revolve around sexual abuse cases. It is, rather, a vestige of the days of trusteeism.

St. Stanislaus Kostka is the Polish national parish in the city with a lay board of trustees who by civil law own the parish property. The parish started during the heyday of trusteeism when the Polish National Catholic Church separated from the Roman Catholic Church over the issue of the care of Polish immigrants.

According to some experts, Archbishop Peter Kenrick allowed St. Stanislaus the liberty of trustees in order to keep it in the fold and not follow the way of the PNCC, even though the various councils of Baltimore no longer allowed trustees.

Over the years the relationship with the archdiocese has been rocky, including a lawsuit against the board by a parishioner against the trustees in the early 20th century. Recently, though, things went from bad to worse. In the late summer of 2003, then-Archbishop Justin Rigali met with the current board asking them to come into full compliance with Church law by dissolving the board and allowing the archbishop to have complete control over the parish. They refused. The archbishop was then transferred to Philadelphia, leaving the issue with his successor.

That happened to be Archbishop Raymond Burke, “one of the most formidable canon lawyers in America,” according to Peters. The Archbishop met with the board, then with the parish. Both meetings went badly, with the parish meeting descending to shouting and name-calling on the part of the parishioners.

After numerous attempts to communicate and warnings from the Archbishop, including the removal of the pastor and the transference of the Polish ministry to another parish, he finally imposed the canonical penalty of interdict on the board. There has been talk of excommunication, but nothing has materialized on that front yet.

The issue to Archbishop Burke is the pastoral submission every parish should have to the local bishop. The issue to the St. Stan’s board is that the archbishop supposedly wants to take control of the parish, sell it and get the money it has in reserve ($1.25 million, according to the board) in order to pay for sexual abuse cases.

That allegation is categorically denied by the archdiocese. In fact, the archbishop has assured the board in writing that it would not be sold so long as there is a viable parish there.

This case is not necessarily about who owns the parish, as the board of St. Stanislaus contends. It is, rather, over who controls it. In fact, the board rewrote its charter and removed from it all references to being under the authority of the pastor or the archbishop.

When the board members appealed to the Congregation for the Clergy for the return of their pastor, they were rebuffed completely. “Through careful and premeditated revisions of the By-Laws of the civil corporation,” the secretary for the Congregation wrote in a cover letter to their decision, “you have attempted to make the role of the pastor impotent, attempted to wrest control from the local Ordinary, and attempted to transform St. Stanislaus Parish into an entity which has no resemblance to a parish as envisioned by either the tradition or current law of the Roman Catholic Church.”

A balancing act
All of this leaves a question about the claims made by groups like SNAP and Voice of the Faithful. They have constantly made statements that the bishops have to pay for what they did in transferring priests who sexually abused people from parish to parish and not removing them from ministry.

“Sadly, Skylstad is choosing combativeness over compassion, delay over closure, hardball over healing, and his own selfish needs over the needs of his diocese and its child sex abuse victims,” David Clohessy told AP after Bishop Skylstad announced his decision to appeal the ruling by Judge Williams. What those “selfish needs” are, Clohessy never defined, and the “needs of the diocese” to sell off all the parish churches and schools in order to pay for lawsuits are probably lost on the average faithful Catholic in the Diocese of Spokane.

However, it does point up the fact that if sex abuse advocates like Clohessy and Barbara Blaine are followed, then the Church would be left with no assets and no way to effectively carry out her ministry.

It also points up the fact that there is a dual thought process going on in their minds. Ever since the abuse crisis began, the cry has gone up that if the laity had had more control of the parishes, then this would never have happened. But when it is shown in canon law that the parish properties are actually owned by the parishes, not by the bishops, then that’s not correct because the bishop has to pay.

But what the rest of the Church has to come to realize, according to Bishop Vasa, is that there is a real balancing act that has to happen between the bishop, the clergy and the laity.
He is not considered a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. But he is clear that, as bishop, “I have lots of authority, but little power.” He does not, for instance, have a police officer on hand to send to a parish to enforce any directives he issued. In fact, he said he had more power when he was an assistant pastor than he does now.

When he was making his first visits around the Baker Diocese, Bishop Vasa came across a parish that badly needed a new roof on the church. When he asked the pastor why it hadn’t been repaired before, the pastor replied that it was the bishop’s problem, not his. The bishop corrected the pastor’s lack of understanding on that point. “My goal was to give the pastor and parishioners a proper sense of their responsibilities.”

So a balancing act has to be struck in the Church. While the state has the power to enforce laws, the Church has to rely on the free consent of her members to be subject to the bishop. And the bishop has to realize, as Bishop Vasa said, that he is “a servant of the Code of Canon Law, of the Pope and of the Church.”

A Distant Thunder

2006-01-02T14:08:00.000-06:00

There's a fact about abortion that has been all but ignored by the secular press -- it messes with your head. So many studies have been done showing that women who have had abortions are more prone to suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse, abusing their living children, severe depression, etc., etc., that the lie has been shown of how good this procedure is for women. (See the excellent work documenting this by the Elliot Insitute.)

A new indepedently produced short from Disney DVD producer Jonathan Flora and his friend Kip Perry puts to film how much abortion messes with people's heads -- and with the lives of all of us. When I first heard about this film and learned that it was about partial-birth abortion, I was very afraid that, like all too many films before it, it was going to be pure, unvarnished, hoaky and ugly allegory. Billed as a courtroom drama and a spiritual/psychological thriller, it was just too easy for me to imagine another Christian flop like the Left Behind series. (Check out Thom Parham's article on Godspy on "Why Do Heathens Make the Best Christian Films?")

Fortunately, it is not. The use of symbolism in this very short film is so dense that you're left wondering if your head just got messed with. I was left with the questions of what just happened? Who is this lawyer? Why is her mother put on the stand when she really has nothing to do with the action in question? But the searching I was going through was not the searching one is left with after a bad film. No, this is a completely different type of searching -- the kind that one is left with after viewing a profound piece of art or reading a great piece of fiction. And I am longing for more. (There is talk of making a longer film, to which I say, "Go for it -- ASAP!)

I have told many people that a great film is a simple story well told. Films like Jean de Florette and its sequel Manon of the Spring or Babette's Feast are exceedingly well done; they're great but simple stories and they are well and beautfully told. We're left with obvious lessons for life without the obvious pitch of that lesson. Contrarily, A Distant Thunder is not a simple story because abortion is not a simple matter; the killing of the innocent is never a simple matter. But it is still a story well told -- and disturbingly so.

The producers do not fall into simple clichès. They don't portray the abortionist as an outwardly evil man. Indeed, he's a well-dressed man who is good looking and composed. The situation put on trial is not at all far-fetched and the producers and writers were brave for putting it out there. They make sure that everyday life for Ann, the main character, is shown as it typically is.

But that everyday life keeps getting interrupted with flashes of nightmares. As Ann's on an elevator, a big, bald man with empty eyes turns his gaze on her. A black and white image of a cocooned person wriggling its head uncontrollably. The grainy ultrasound image of an unborn child's spine. Blood coming out of the showerhead as she showers one morning.

But even her everyday life isn't that great. Her mother, whom she visits, is catatonicly stuck on a videotape of her daughter growing up and won't respond when Ann stops in.

There are two different versions of the film on the DVD -- a director's cut and a general audience friendly version. The main difference from what I can tell is that the director's cut has more of the shower scene; the other version simply shows her sitting in the shower crying without the blood coming out. They both last the same amount of time, so there are other differences which I didn't catch on first viewing.

While the producers go out of their way to say that this film is simply a story about partial-birth abortion and that they only wanted to get the facts of PBA out there and are not really taking sides, it's clear that they are wanting you to question all the assumptions made about PBA and abortion in general. When Ann, who is a prosecuting attorney, is questioning what the baby was thinking before she had her brains sucked out by the abortionist, this is not a question a "pro-choice" gal would even allow to enter her head. But the film makes you question -- it begins the process to get people thinking about what's going on. And that is absolutely essential for what many people think is simply an emotional and religious issue.

Abortion is a corporate nightmare shared by the entire human family and Jonathan Flora and Kip Perry have done a fantastic job of showing that nightmare to the rest of us. It's a job we wish didn't need to be done. But it did and one hopes this film will bring us one step closer to where we can all wake up from that nightmare sooner rather than later.

Where the news really is -- and was missed

2005-12-26T08:56:00.000-06:00

It was a sad Christmas in St. Louis. There are all kinds of stories this morning about the illicit Christmas Mass that Father Marek Bozek presided over at St. Stanislaus Church in St. Louis. It was illicit because Father Bozek left his assignment at the Cathedral in Springfield, Mo., without his bishop's permission, and indeed, against his bishop's will, and was "hired" by the six-member board at St. Stan's.

This action, of course, put them outside of the Catholic Church for a very simple reason -- laity do not have the authority to hire their priests. They are assigned by their bishops, as the successors of the apostles, to wherever the bishop requires them.

Anyway, the stories say that anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 people were present at this illicit Mass and that, therefore, anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 people now have gravely sinful matter to bring to Confession.

But one wonders -- how many people were at Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis? Or at the Old Cathedral? Or at St. Agatha's where Archbishop Raymond Burke transferred the Polish apostolate to? I can bet there were a lot more than 2,000 people in those three places combined. And how many were at the rest of the parishes throughout the City of St. Louis? Then, St. Stan's becomes a drop in the bucket and one then wonders what the media fuss is all about.

One also wonders what the Archbishop said in his homily. But, of course, all the reporters were at the schismatics' church and not at the Cathedral to hear the Archbishop, or at St. Agatha's to see how many Poles are being faithful to the Church. All of this tells you a lot, not about what's going on in St. Louis, but about where the affections of the media lie.

'A darker subtext'?

2005-12-17T14:49:00.000-06:00

Mr. Hetero Massachusetts 2006 I won't be. I don't live there anymore and I can't rip any magazine, never mind one of Oprah's.

But is there "a darker subtext," as a critic in The Republican story states? It depends on what you mean by "darker." In Massachusetts, the only state in the Union where there is an attempt at the oxymoronic "homosexual union" of "marriage," the clear text of Rev. Crouse's contest is a poke-in-the-eye at the homosexual and PC establishment. Nothing could be clearer or lighter.

Now perhaps there will be some who object on the grounds that Jesus would never have poked fun at His enemies. That's not so. When the Pharisees and teachers of the Law came to Him to ask Him about divorce, His reply was clear sarcasm. "Have you never read.....?" He begins asking them. These, as Dr. Scott Hahn has rightly pointed out, are the teachers of the law, the ones who know the Torah inside and out, including Genesis. So for Jesus to ask them if they've never read Genesis is also a poke-in-the-eye.

Homosexual "marriage" is a laughable concept, and Rev. Crouse is only pointing out the obvious with a bit of good humor.

I Am David

2005-12-15T21:30:00.000-06:00

No, I'm not David. But there's a little-known film out on DVD called I Am David that stars Ben Tibber, Jim Caviezel and Joan Plowright. Hristo Naumov Shopov, the Romanian who played Pilate in The Passion of the Christ, is also in it, though not credited.

It's a low-budget film and you can tell it to a certain degree in the scenery and some other aspects. But that and one choice of music are really my only complaints about this film. Otherwise, it's absolutely fantastic.

David is a boy who has been raised in a Soviet labor camp in Bulgaria and lost both of his parents to the regime. We meet him as he is escaping from the camp with help from someone, though we are not sure whom. He carries with him some papers that he is not allowed to look at or let anyone else see until he gets to Denmark. As he makes his way down to Greece to get on a ship bound for Italy and on his journey through Italy to get to Denmark, he has flashbacks of his time in the camp, especially of a man named Johannes (Caviezel).

The voice we hear telling David how to escape tells him to trust no one, something David keeps in his mind. But he's obviously torn as he meets up with all kinds of people who could help him very easily if he would but open himself to them.

As David has more flashbacks, we see more of what has happened in the labor camp with Johannes. We know at the outset of the film that Johannes has been shot in one of those infamous concentration camp line-ups, but we don't know why. As time goes on though, what we find is Caviezel in another Christ-like role and Naumov Shopov in an almost Pilate-like role.

Catholic imagery abounds in this film and one of the final scenes is nearly too rich in it to describe as we hear Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus being sung by a small-town church choir (actually it's the Westminster Choir, I believe, but the actors make it look pretty authentic).

Get this film and soak it in. Lessons about trust, love, sacrifice and redemption are all in it.

Considerations on the new document from the Vatican

2005-12-07T18:07:00.000-06:00

There are so many people who have commented on the new Instruction from the Congregation for Catholic Education that to put up the links would take up a whole blogging page. But here's the gist of what they're saying --

"This document is supposed to deal with the sex abuse scandal. It's not going to do it because homosexuals don't do pedophilia. Anyway, the Vatican doesn't understand that homosexuality isn't something that comes and goes; it's inherent and can't be changed. Besides, if a priest is supposed to be celibate, what difference does it make what his orientation is?"

First things first. The document isn't supposed to deal with the sex abuse scandal. That is a myth perpetrated by the MSM. The document was begun in 1996, six years before the Boston Globe's stories on Cardinal Law.

I'm not going to really comment on the claim that homosexuals don't do pedophilia because it's tedious -- and wrong. Suffice it to say that pedophiles come in all sizes, shapes and orientations, including homosexuals -- just ask the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Ask the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that break up child sex rings, a lot of them where boys are gotten and brought in for men from all walks of life -- from the CEOs of major companies to the janitors of those companies -- to abuse. And the fact that the vast majority of the boys abused by priests were those who were in their adolescence and in the prime of their lives speaks for itself.

Now that those two points are cleared up, what the document is supposed to deal with is a problem in many seminaries that has been there ever since the end of the Council and that is a prevelance of homosexuality. I would guess that many "gay" groups would rather not have the issue addressed at all and would rather see the priesthood riddled with priests who are "celibate but gay."

But all that does is undermine the Church's teaching ability on this and other very serious moral matters. If a priest has a homosexual orientation and is part of the "gay" culture, or even if he's not part of the culture but has sympathies towards it and friends in it, then he is not really going to be able to address firmly the issues of homosexuality, contraception, abortion and a whole host of other sexual and biological moral matters. He will be seriously compromised.

The reason for that is because homosexuality itself is intrinsically disordered. The phrase "intrinsically disordered" raises, of course, all sorts of hue and cry about how that must mean the homosexual himself is, therefore, intrinsically disordered. Not true. The person struggling with same-sex attraction (SSA) is as disordered as the adulterer, thief, murderer, wife-beater, liar, child abuser, cheat, blasphemer, tyrant, traitor -- in other words, as disordered as the rest of us.

But the nature of this intrinsic disorder is different from these other sins. St. Paul says that those who do other wrongs sin outside of themselves, while a sexual sin is a sin against our ownselves. Because of that, anyone who yields to these temptations or who has sympathies towards them can't think clearly about the nature of the sin and those sins which are close cousins to it. So a priest who has homosexual proclivities cannot teach the fullness of the faith.

The claim that SSA is permanent is nonsense. Why is it that a female basketball star is not questioned when she claims she just became homosexual? Why are those folks who were in the homosexual lifestyle, who went through therapy and are now no longer struggling with SSA ignored? One of the "gay" publications had this headline: "Vatican to gays: Grow up!" Well, yes. We all need to grow up and those in SSA situations may need it a lot more than those who are not.

What really peeves me is that many men who claim to be homosexuals are those who were abused by other men. That warped their image of themselves. In that case, it's not genetic anymore than when a tree has barbed wire placed next to it and the tree grows around the wire and eventually engulfs it, is genetic

Finally, to the last claim. The Church rightly says that a man with homosexual tendencies can’t fulfill that role because he can’t properly relate to men and women. A man who claims to love another man as a man and a woman would normally love each other is not relating properly to men and women. It is simply impossible.

Besides that, there is the fact that two men who claim to love each other as men and women normally would cannot be fathers. It is biologically impossible. Well, a priest has to be a spiritual father and the spiritual is reflected in the physical. If a man cannot bring forth biological children because he is suffering from SSA, then he has no business trying to act like an alter Christus.

Plus, if a man does not look at the vocational options (marriage, priesthood, religious life, single life) available to him and freely choose one over the others, then there is something wrong with his choice. So if a man looks at the priesthood because he cannot marry a woman because of SSA, then he has not made a free choice for the priesthood and the validity of his vows can be called into question. (Of course, the Vatican hasn't said anything like that -- this is merely my interpretation of the law, for what little it's worth.)

This reflection of the spiritual in the physical is what a sacrament is all about, isn’t it? Take a look at Baptism. We don’t baptize with Coke or beer or even dirty water. We baptize with clean water because it reflects what happens to the soul. The Holy Spirit cleanses the soul from original sin just like clean water cleanses the body from dirt.

We use physical signs that point to a greater reality, but the signs have to be an accurate reflection of the spiritual reality. This doesn’t mean, though, that other things are bad. Beer isn’t bad because it can’t be used for Baptism. Rice isn’t bad because only wheat can be used for the Eucharist. Canola oil isn’t bad because only olive oil can be used for anointing.

In exactly the same way, women or married men aren’t bad in the eyes of the Church because we can’t be ordained. It doesn’t reflect our worth, it only shows that we can’t accurately point to what the sign of ordination is supposed to be – an alter Christus, another Christ. In plain and simple terms, Jesus wasn’t married and Jesus was a man. It’s that easy. So women and married men cannot reflect that image in a sacramental way. And neither can someone who has such a serious disorder as homosexual attraction. (Neither, by the way, can someone who has a tendency to murder, to fornication, to theft, to serious selfishness, or to any of the other deadly sins.) If a man can't act in the way he was created to act, he cannot accurately reflect the truth of who God is.

What's behind the noise on the priesthood

2005-12-06T09:51:00.000-06:00

This is a superb article by a former Episcoplian now Catholic priest who teaches at Providence College. He gets to the heart of why the priesthood is so contended these days, and amazingly enough, it begins in the 16th century.

The new Narnia movie

2005-12-05T10:28:00.000-06:00

My wife and I were among the lucky ones to see a pre-screening of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this past weekend. So how was it? Well, here's a long-winded review:

I had the privilege to take a full course in C.S. Lewis when I was in college at Franciscan University of Steubenville. I learned a lot in that class from Dr. David Ard, who now teaches at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. One of the things I learned is that Lewis was steeped in the Christian faith and in mythology (or should I say that the other way around?).

That is clear from his Chronicles of Narnia. Here, not only do you meet Aslan (a Christ-like figure modeled on the messianic title, Lion of the Tribe of Judah), you also meet fauns, satyrs, Bacchus, centaurs, minotaurs and all other manner of mythical creatures. Lewis knew mythology inside and out. He studied it extensively before his conversion and he taught it at Oxford. This was no small part of his life.

But what it seems to me a lot of people are missing is that after his conversion to Christianity, Lewis subordinated this to Christ. Yes, he knew a "good yarn" when he saw 0ne and wrote one. And yes, as many commentators have pointed out, he did not start writing the Chronicles as an exercise in Christian allegory, but rather he simply started writing about a little girl going through a wardrobe into a land in winter and meeting a faun. And he liked it, as well he should have. It is a good yarn.

However, there's something more that people are missing. Lewis, for as much as he didn't like the Catholic Church (despite his close friendship with JRR Tolkien whose Catholicism permeates all of The Lord of the Rings), was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church in some of his thinking -- primarily that Christ is the fulfillment of all of the world's hopes and dreams, not simply the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. He certainly is that, but, as Michelangelo painted the Greek Sybils in his masterpiece on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, all the good that the pagan world every hoped for -- from Plato to Aristotle to Virgil to Buddha -- is found in Jesus Christ.

That is why Lewis can have characters such as Bacchus in his stories. In Prince Caspian, for instance, Susan and Lucy are with Aslan and come across a wild outdoor party with a young man and a bunch of girls, not a party as 21st century American adults think of, but a wild game and eating without manners. Here is their conversation:
"I say, Su, I know who they are."
"Who?"
"The boy with the wild face is Bacchus and the old one on the donkey is Silenus. Don't you remember Mr. Tumnus telling us about them long ago?"
"Of course. But I say, Lu--"
"What?"
"I wouldn't have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we'd met them without Aslan."
"I should think not," said Lucy.
It is Aslan who brings these mythical creatures into right order. It is his divine nature that brings them to the way they were created to be.

With that in mind, the abundant dualistic commentary on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is really off the mark. Lewis did not think in an "either/or," nor even in a "both/and" mode, but rather that the one (paganism) is subjected in truth to the other (Christianity).

So when it came to watching the film, it's easy to see that Andrew Adamson is not comfortable with the one being subjected to the other. It seems to me, rather, that he's more interested in the bottom line and does not effectively address the issue of who Aslan is and his overwhelming presence in the books.

The film is well shot and the scenery in it is stunning. The special effects are quite good, and it's clear that there is a lot of influence from The Lord of the Rings. (Of course, the film was partly shot in New Zealand, the same place as LOTR, and Adamson used WETA Workshop for a lot of the digital effets as well as things like the swords.)

***WARNING***

***PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD***

The storyline follows the book very closely -- the basics are there and I have no complaints about that. Interestingly, Adamson chose to focus a lot on the children's home life in London, something which Lewis hardly glances at. In fact, we begin with the bombing of London and the children getting out of the house as Nazi bombs fall. Edmund runs back -- against his mother's and brother's wishes -- to get a photo of their father, who is off in the war.

But when they do get to Narnia, Peter and Susan keep looking back wanting to get back to London. While in the book this does happen when they first get in, once they've gotten to the Beaver's house, that's long forgotten.

What I noticed most, though, is that there is something missing to the dynamics, a certain sense of longing, of connection to Aslan. When the Beavers first mention Aslan, there's no sense of awe and wonder on the children's faces -- they sit rather impassively, almost in a "So?" attitude -- completely opposite of what Lewis went into great detail to describe. The dynamics between Susan, Lucy and Aslan are low-key. I was left wondering what it was that was between them that they would stay with him, except for the fact that it was the plot of the story.

There is also an irritating aspect about Peter's character -- can no one in the Hollywood elite believe anymore that it is possible for a man to be single-minded in good character? Why is it that leading men are being portrayed as having so many doubts about their identity and should they do what they're supposed to do? Peter Jackson did this to the character of Aragorn in LOTR. Tolkien was clear that Aragorn knew who he was and what he was doing and where he was going. Jackson and his team of writers, though, would have none of it. Aragorn was portrayed as confused, perplexed, unsure of what he had to do and if he was willing to do it. They did an even worse job to Faramir, Boromir's brother. Tolkien was firm that Faramir was by no means tempted to take the Ring, but Jackson has Faramir not only wanting it, but kidnapping Frodo to get at it. Only later does he realize he's wrong.

Peter Pevensie is shown just the same way. He keeps wanting to go home. His mother told him to keep an eye on his three siblings and he's taking that charge seriously -- so seriously that he doesn't want to stay in Narnia, and he certainly doesn't want to lead an army against the White Witch. In the heat of the battle, he yells at Edmund to get the girls and go home, something which the Peter that Lewis portrayed would never have done.

This seems to be a misplaced feminism -- the man watching out for the home front sort of thing. While that may be OK in another story, it falls short here. That's because Lewis's Peter is concerned about honor and virtue and winning the battle for Aslan, to whom he has sworn fealty. There is no "I don't care about a prophecy" attitude at all. Aslan has won over Peter's heart and Peter will do what is needed to save Narnia from the White Witch.

What is also disappointing is that there is no clear Christian theme here. Oh, some lines come out, but it is not the overarching theme. In fact, some things get downplayed. After Aslan has been raised and the stone table split in two, Lewis has Aslan say, "It means, that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation..." In the film, that line about "a magic deeper still" is missing and he only talks about the deep magic. Which means that we have a dualistic outlook here -- two gods of equal strength who are at war with each other. And that is definitely not what Lewis had in mind.

Was there anything good about it? Oh yes -- the battle scene was terrific. Borrowing some techniques from Peter Jackson, Andrew Adamson makes an excellent battle. The creatures on the Witch's side look a lot like Orcs from LOTR, but, hey -- how many evil-looking creatures can you come up with? The battle kept you in suspense, which was quite an accomplishment considering you already know how it's going to turn out.

The character of the White Witch was played to icy and chilling effectiveness by Tilda Swinton. She personally has an enigmatic beauty about her, something which she used to great effect in playing the witch, because while you were attracted, you knew subconsciously that there was something evil about her that you could not quite put your finger on. No wonder Edmund felt the attraction.

Edmund was well-played as a brattish sort of boy who couldn't stand his family by Skandar Keynes. William Moseley's Peter would have been good, had it not been for the direction Adamson took him in. Anne Popplewell's Susan was OK, but Georgie Henley as Lucy was much better done. However, there was, as I said before, that certain spark that was missing in their relationship with Aslan, which was due to scripting and directing, more than their acting abilities.

All in all, it's a good yarn. But while it's being marketed by the same people who marketed The Passion of the Christ, this isn't something that is anything on that order. Remember that this is Disney, and Disney has one thing in mind -- the bottom line, not the truth of Jesus Christ.

The Christmas enterprise

2005-12-04T23:59:00.000-06:00

There are people clamoring now for a boycott of Target since this company supposedly refuses to allow the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. In fact, a lot of companies have decided not to use the word "Christmas" in the annual winter money grab to the end of the year, the time when most retail businesses make the most money. That's something that a lot of Christians are upset about.

I can understand that. The Christmas shopping season, which, according to the Census Bureau, gives retail about 15 percent of its annual revenue in one month, came about because of, well, Christmas.

Yes, that Christmas -- the Christian holiday celebrating the birth of the One whom we recognize as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Who, in His great mercy and compassion, took up human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary and became, first a human embryo, then a human blastocyst, then a human zygote, then a human fetus (Latin for "little one"), and then was born. (The word "Christmas" comes from the compounding of "Christ" and "Mass," the Mass celebrated for Christ's birth, much like the "Michelmas," the Mass for St. Michael the Archangel, of Jane Austen's writing.)

This is not something that is secular in nature, not something we can pass a law on or do business with. It is religious pure and simple.

Christmas was not even celebrated in the northern part of the U.S. when the Pilgrims first came here. They were Puritans who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with what the Vatican liked and since the Vatican liked Christmas, they didn't celebrate it. It wasn't until the German Catholics came that such things as Christmas trees became popular. And when the Irish and others from Catholic countries like Poland, Belgium and France came over, they too brought their Christmas traditions with them and that's when the American penchant for making a buck came into play. (Of course, the southeastern part of the country probably had something going since it was settled first by the Spaniards, who were thoroughly Catholic.)

Christmas is a time for giving gifts and when crass American entrepeneurship grasped this, they ran with it. So for American businesses now to turn this into simply a "holiday" season, when its origins are strictly religious and specifically Christian, is to turn its back dishonestly on its roots.

However, let's look at this from a different perspective. For Christians to be upset about this betrays something in their attitudes -- it betrays that they think business has the upper hand on Christianity, that the Christian faith needs business to affirm its right to exist. But that is not the case. What does it matter if Target, whose only purpose in life is to make money for its shareholders, decides to start calling it 'holiday shopping? How does that effect the Christian celebration of Christmas? It really shouldn't.

This is not unlike the attitude betrayed when minorities complain that businesses don't advertise to them. What's the big deal? It appears they don't feel worthwhile because Sears, or whomever, is ignoring Hispanics. But since when has one's worth depended on whether or not Target, Wal-Mart, Gillette, or any other company advertises to you? That seems to me to show that their sense of value comes from material things -- hence materialism has made serious inroads into people's hearts.

Christians at this current point in time should still be celebrating Advent -- Christmas is still three weeks away and we're supposed to still be preparing for it via prayer, fasting and works of mercy (St. Francis of Assisi used to call it his "little Lent"). I find nothing in the tradition -- or in the Scriptures for that matter -- that says Christians have to spend the weeks leading up to Christmas buying gifts, going to parties, gorging ourselves on food and drink for a holiday that has not yet even come, and shopping in the local mall while men in overstuffed red suits and fake white beards parade around getting wish lists from little kids setting up their expectations and setting up their parents for serious credit card debt.

I remember some saying of Jesus, something about making His Father's house into a den of thieves. Not, of course, that Christmas is the Father's house, but I think the analogy works to a certain extent.

Why are we insistent that these cultural and corporate elites tell their employees that they can say Merry Christmas to their customers? Are we Christians abandoning our duty to evangelize and saying corporate America has to do it for us? If we've haven't been preaching the Gospel to the Macy's, Dayton's and Walton's, then embarrassing them into allowing the word "Christmas" into their advertising isn't going to help them a whole lot. Nor is it going to help the general cause of evangelization too much, either, since it only makes Christians look like demanding brats.

Look for me at UPI

2005-11-23T07:57:00.000-06:00

Starting this Friday, I will have a regular weekly column at UPI's Religion and Spirituality Forum (click on the Columns dropdown menu to get to it). My column, which will be entitled Epiphany (original, isn't it?), will focus on the Sunday readings.

I will be joining quite an array of other columnists from across the religious spectrum, including a Jew who believes in the Messiah and who has AIDS, a believer in Kabbalah and someone taking a Masters in Earth literacy. I hope it proves to be interesting.

The new document

2005-11-22T18:45:00.000-06:00

Well, it was bound to happen. So many people were after this document that it was inevitable that it would be leaked to the media before the Church could officially produce it.

That document is, of course, the Instruction concerning the criteria of vocational discernment regarding persons with homosexual tendencies, considering their admission to seminary and to Holy Orders. I might have more on the document itself later on, but I wanted to look at the media coverage first.

I did a search on Google News after Phil Lawler broke the story on CWNews.com that the document had been published by an Italian news agency named Adista. Here was the first headline to AP's story: "Vatican says active homosexuals unwelcome in priesthood." The next headline read: "Vatican: Sexually active gays unwelcome." Then the Aussies came out with this one: "Gays and supporters unwelcome: Vatican." The Baltimore Sun came in with this unique headline: "Vatican disallows active gays for priesthood."

What's wrong here? The problem is that word, "unwelcome." This is not a matter of welcoming or not, as if the priesthood was some sort of club that is generally open to all. This is a matter of whether or not the man is fit to become a priest or not. There are many men who are not able to become a priest -- those who are unbaptized, those who are married, those who are mentally unstable, those who have certain physical handicaps (like no hands). These conditions do not make them "unwelcome" to the priesthood; it makes them unfit for it. (Yes, I can say unfit without a bit of difficulty as I am married and therefore unfit for the priesthood. It's simply a fact of life.)

While the Sun is to be commended for their efforts at making a better headline, it's still not correct. Active "gays" have never been allowed, at least by the rules, into the priesthood. The AP story notes that a 1961 document from the same congregation makes that perfectly clear. It was a matter that certain seminary rectors and bishops made the allowances for them to enter the seminary, contrary to all the teachings, tradition and disciplines of the Church.

Later headlines messed it up, though in a different way. CBS said, "Active gays unwanted as priests." CathNews in Australia said, "Gays in priesthood document leaked." And then starting with Philly 'Burbs, the headline became: "Vatican rejects actively gay priests." All of these headlines are inaccurate. The document was on the admission of candidates to the seminary, not on those who are already ordained.

And then it changed to, "Vatican affirms gays banned from priesthood," which, of course, is also not true since there are active homosexuals as well as those who are celibate who are in the priesthood and are not going to be kicked out. And the document is about admitting candidates to the seminary, not about priests. (Didn't I already say that?)

Of course, it's also going to be almost humorous to watch the media slaughter the document and misinterpret it to the nth degree. I say "almost" because the vast majority of Catholics are going to believe what the secular press say about it -- which is certainly not humorous, but rather very scary indeed.