The Church Needs Men

It’s no secret there’s a short supply of Catholic priests in the US, so when we heard that the shortage was now forcing churches to consolidate, we put our heads together to come up with some options for the Catholic Church.  While we admit that numbers 1 and 2 would almost completely solve the problem, we provide other choices for a Church leadership hell-bent on preventing Vatican III.

1.  Lift the ban on celibacy

2. Ordinate women

3. Provide US citizenship to foreigners who wish to enter the priesthood

4. Clone the (non-corrupt or closeted) priests you’ve got

5. Further subsidize theological education

6. Improve the vintage of “the blood of Christ”

7. Update the vestments.  It’s time.

8. Money.  Offer a signing bonus.  Hey, the military does it. Continue Reading →

The Bishops, Proving Me Right

I shouldn’t take any credit for predicting the actions of the most predictable institution on the globe, but I’ll take it anyway.  I made the case at The Nation last week that the USCCB’s recent statement on aid in dying would lead to broader crack-downs on end of life rights, privacy, and awareness.  I was right.  According to a new report at Crisis Magazine and a press release from the bishops today, they’ve targeted Catholic professors at four universities:  Georgetown, Marquette, Santa Clara and Boston College.  How did the bishops identify the academics they wanted to discredit?  Writes Patrick J. Reilly at Crisis:

The professors’ efforts came to light during a Cardinal Newman Society investigation in 2005, following news reports of a legal brief filed by 55 bioethicists in opposition to “Terri’s Law,” a Florida measure that empowered Gov. Jeb Bush to ensure that the comatose Terri Schiavo received water and nutrition. As reported in “Teaching Euthanasia,” an exclusive report in the June 2005 issue of Crisis, multiple professors at Catholic universities had taken positions on end-of-life issues that seemed to conflict with Vatican teaching.

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Give Us This Day Our Daily Links

A small parade was held in Philadelphia this weekend, made up of area Muslims.  Their objective was to counter media representation of Muslims as terrorists and to bring awareness to the fact that about two thirds of Muslims in American cities are black.  There are about 100 mosques in the Philly area. || A New Jersey mother and her roommate are being held for the death of an 8 year old.  The family claims that the women were under the influence of a local pastor who enforced extreme fasting on church members, encouraged them to avoid family, and to not hold jobs, even preaching that swallowing one’s own saliva is a sin. || Indian doctors have advised that Baba Ramdev, the Indian yoga guru on hunger strike to protest goverment corruption, should be force-fed. ||  Iranian journalist Hoda Saber has died in prison from a heart attack brought on by a 10-day hunger strike he began in protest of the death of a fellow journalist dissident.  Both were members of the Nationalist-Religious movement in opposition to the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. || Mark Oppenheimer writes for the NYT about a recent picnic in Utah that aims to close the door on the Mormon Church’s racism.  The picnic featured members of the Genesis Group, a social organization for black Mormons that was founded in 1971. || Meanwhile, the Mormon Church has issued a statement on immigration. ||  Despite much skepticism that conversion of Anglican’s to Catholicism will catch on en masse under guidelines recently instituted by the Vatican, an Episcopal congretation in Maryland has become the first to do so. ||  The current “Mormon Moment” is, of course, not without some push-back. || An art handling agency is looking for a miracle in Encinitas, California.  A mural of a surfing Madonna, the Virgin of Guadalupe, has caused a stir there, with some collectors offering to buy the piece as the city searches for a way to have it removed from where it suddenly appeared, on the side of a train bridge support.  Because of regulations that qualify the mural as graffiti, the city must find a way to remove it. Continue Reading →

Misinterpreting the Legacy of the 1960s

Part of The Revealer’s series on the John Jay report, The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010.

by Scott Korb

For a good part of the past four years, I met every other week with a former Ursuline nun – let’s call her “Josefa” – to talk about the life of the Church from the ’50s to early ’70s, precisely the period of time when the child sexual abuse crisis was at its worst. Josefa, approaching 80, was writing a memoir; I helped her along. Together, inch by inch and mile by mile, we paved the way for her entry, as a teenager, into the religious order known to be the first group of Catholic sisters to arrive in the new world. And together, week by week and year by year, we came to understand why exactly, at 40, she left. Continue Reading →

Failure to Deliver: Predictions that did not predict and a case-closing report that did not close the case

Part of The Revealer’s series on the John Jay report, The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010.

by Elizabeth Castelli

Last week, two things did not happen.  The Rapture did not take place on May 21, 2011, despite the fervent prognostications of a retired engineer-turned-Christian broadcaster and biblical numerologist.  Meanwhile, the sex abuse scandal that has mired the Catholic Church in litigation and shame for nearly three decades was not resolved nor even really explained, despite the earnest efforts of the number-crunching social scientists at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice, City University of New York.  The coincidence of these two non-happenings was more than a matter of the calendar.

For one thing, both efforts emerged out of a belief that interpreting numbers produces a useable narrative that has an explanatory power.  Under the logic of this belief, the truth is but a matter of simple ciphering—whether Rapture predictions predicated on a series of simple arithmetic calculations or the purported causes of the abuse scandal in the Catholic church carefully measured, calculated, and charted with a soul-numbing statistical precision.  For another, both non-events strove to package up unruly temporality with certainty and finality. In the case of Judgment Day-proclaiming Harold Camping and his Family Radio broadcasts, the focus was on the future, while the John Jay College researchers proclaimed the sexual abuse of minors by priests “a historical problem,” a thing of the past. Continue Reading →

Return of the Exorcist

Writes Daniel Burke about the increase of exorcists in the U.S. Catholic Church at U.S. Catholic, “there are more exorcists in the United States now than at any other time in modern history, according to experts. More than 100 bishops and priests met in Baltimore last November to recruit dozens more.”  He continues:

As interest in exorcism rises, the church faces a host of tricky questions. Is the rite an outdated remedy best left to history? Or can it be effective alongside modern medical and psychological treatment? And why are bishops—who are leading a church plagued by emptying schools, vanishing vocations, and a sex abuse scandal that won’t go away—investing their limited time and resources to train exorcists?

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Upgrading to Homos

The Catholic League’s president, Bill Donohue, has written all of us a long letter which features in a full page ad in today’s New York Times.  Criticism of the church is outlandishly overblown, he argues, citing Philip Jenkins, a 2004 John Jay study (funded by the USCCB), and Robert S. Bennett of the Catholic National Review Board; he laments “assaults on priests” by the likes of George Lopez and the ladies at The View. Continue Reading →

Cleaning the Catholic House of Dissent

Last week, Revealer contributor Jo Piazza sent us a press release that reminds us how the RCC conducts its discipline.  Maryknoll Superior General, Edward M. Dougherty, has focused the church’s disapproval on Father Roy Bourgeois for his “public support of women’s ordination.”  Bourgeois was given 15 days to recant that support, or face dismissal from his order and/or laicization.

According to Mary E. Hunt at Religion Dispatches, the threats to Father Bourgeois are one part of a broader effort to make the church “lean and mean” and absolutely compliant with the Pope, to clear out less conservative members.  Priests who ally themselves with women religious are one target; theologians are another. Hunt points to the recent condemnation by the U.S. Catholic Bishops Committee on Doctrine of the 2007 book by Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, Fordham Distinguished Professor of Theology, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God. Continue Reading →

God's Labor in Wisconsin

Becky Garrison (who writes for The Revealer sometimes) looks at the outspokenness of a Wisconsin Catholic Bishop regarding the rights of workers there.   She writes at The Guardian:

While the US Catholic church traditionally sides with Republican interests in promoting a pro-life agenda, the archdiocese of Milwaukee threw its support behind the unions in the ongoing Wisconsin-based protests against the erosion of workers’ bargaining rights.

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