a review of religion and media
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.
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.
The UK’s Daily Mail reports that a Catholic publisher has put out a new book on how to convert Wiccans to Catholocism: The guide, published yesterday by the Catholic Truth Continue Reading →
Jo Piazza: This was a bad week to be a small survey on women religious, what with prime news real estate being filled with Egyptian unrest, Hollywood rehab and a snowpocalypse of epic proportions blanketing the Midwest.
But a small survey on women religious was indeed released this week, on Groundhog Day (better known in some circles as Church’s World Day for Consecrated Life), by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Georgetown-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
The survey gave a general overview of the women who professed their perpetual vows in religious life (became full-fledged sisters) in 2010 and was the first of its kind to evaluate a single year’s class of entering nuns. Of the 63% of orders who responded to the survey only 79 women took their final vows in the past year. Continue Reading →
by Elissa Lerner
After so much fanfare surrounding the surprise election of Archbishop Timothy Dolan to the presidency of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) this past fall, or even the Pope’s recent blessing of Facebook, perhaps the greatest shock in the Catholic world is the near silence regarding the three bishops, seven priests, and three hundred members of six congregations that have become ordained and opted into new Ordinariates – subsections of the Catholic Church for disaffected Anglicans. These conversions, all occurring in England in the past few weeks, are directly in response to the Anglican Church’s move to ordain women priests.
Sound familiar?
That’s because a little more than a year ago, the Catholic Church specifically invited disaffected Anglicans to move, causing shockwaves at least through the Internet, if not the world. At the time, few could decipher what the invitation entailed. The October 20, 2009 move was generally thought to address the concerns of conservative Anglicans who oppose the increasing acceptance of the ordination of women and open homosexuals to the priesthood and episcopate. Both issues have caused splintering within the Anglican Communion and debates within the Catholic Church. Continue Reading →
From Kathryn Joyce’s recent article at Religion Dispatches:
Adult victims could comprise up to 25% of all clergy abuse cases, estimates David Clohessy, National Director of SNAP, but often face considerable skepticism about their stories. “In the eyes of the law, victims like Birge are adults. But that doesn’t mean that emotionally, psychologically, in the presence of a trusted, powerful, charismatic clergy person, that in fact they can function like adults.” Considering the abundant ethical and legal prohibitions against doctors or therapists having even consensual sex with patients, in recognition of coercive power imbalances in play, Clohessy notes, “none of us have been raised from birth to think that a therapist is God’s representative or that a doctor can get me into heaven.”
Chris Armstrong writes at his blog, Grateful to the Dead:
Any headline involving the words “Oxford professor” (turns out it’s a church history professor, too!) and “hissy fit” has me intrigued, to say the least. Add the fact that I had no idea what an “Ordinariate” is, and I jumped right on this article from the London Telegraph’s blogsite. But first, to understand that oddball (to me) term, I had to read another article, about Church of England bishops jumping ship to become Roman Catholic: Continue Reading →
Spanish gays lined the streets Pope Benedict passed along during his visit there. Sarah Seltzer points us to video of the kissers, gathered to protest discrimination of homosexuals by the Catholic church. Continue Reading →
Ashley Baxstrom: The Simpsons are now officially a little holier-than-thou. Last Sunday’s L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, claimed the characters Homer and Bart Simpson for its flock. The article’s main source, however, has since retreated from the claim (and from the web! only the Italian version can yet be found online). “Few people know it, and he does everything to hide it. But it’s true: Homer J. Simpson is Catholic,” author Luca Possati said in the article headlined “Homer and Bart are Catholics.”
The show – which in its 22nd season is the longest running prime-time TV show in the United States – regularly presents humorous or satirical depictions of religion and the afterlife. Possati’s article cited a recent study by the Rev. Francesco Occhetta, a Jesuit priest. Occhetta focused on a 2005 episode, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star,” in which Bart has to go to Catholic school and converts briefly, followed by his father Homer, who likes the idea of forgiveness via confession. In the end they decide against it, but that didn’t deter the Holy See. Continue Reading →
Democracy? Meh. We gave it a shot and look what we got: legalized abortion, gay marriage and welfare. Time to return the government to a Catholic monarchy, says Michael Voris in a video for RealCatholicTV, posted at Richard Dawkins’ site. But don’t watch the video for its call to “limit the vote to faithful Catholics” or its claim that a Catholic monarchy “caused Europe to emerge from the morass of marauding barbarians and create Western civilization.” Watch it to find out why the internets can’t decide whether it’s parody or not.