The Archdiocese of Omaha announced Friday it is closing St. Peter Claver Cristo Rey High School at the end of the academic year due to the schools $7 million debt, large operating deficits, an ongoing need for outside financial support and a soft economy.
It’s a first, I think. Chicago area has three Cristo Rey-model schools, all doing fine. Would be a shame if that marvelous experiment failed. In fact, experiment is not right. The schools have been around long enough to be considered settled programs. But hard times lie ahead, and as profits decline, non-profits are sure to suffer.
First you sell the car, then the garage, then the house, then the wife (or husband), then the kids. It’s how you stay afloat.
The city’s reliance on one-time revenues, rather than recurring revenue streams like taxes, exploded, with such funding growing to 17.6% of revenues in the city’s main operating fund in fiscal 2011, up from 5.6% just four years earlier.
Folklore grinds out the grains of truth that are found in such notions [as]: If an Irishman is given a choice of water or whisky, the water will go untouched.
With Pope Benedict XVIs latest plans for time traveling the church back to another era, we recall another claim: If a German is offered a choice between justice and good order, hell take the good order any day.
That may not apply to all Germans, but it certainly does to the present pope who is currently devoting a lot of time to battling what he terms relativism and to bolstering his Reform of the Reform, a.k.a., turning Vatican II back into Vatican I.
He’s maybe been “listening to too much Wagner,” says K, who is having a little ethnic fun here, I would like to think. But it fails from several standpoints, one of which occurs right off.
The Rahner brothers, especially Karl, both SJ, might have found folkloric grains of truth in the above — which admittedly may not apply to all Germans (really?) — after, say, a stein or two of Bavaria’s best. But my guess is they stir uncomfortably in their graves when they hear it helps to be German if you intend to reform, i.e. reverse, reform.
There’s more. The pope is or appears “willing to turn worship into a well planned war game by deploying believers as if they were charged to march, salute, and, of course, pray and obey,” says Kennedy, warming to his task.
The pope’s heritage makes him feel more comfortable if you remove all of the doubt, mistakes, and spontaneity from life as if that would remove sin. He apparently wants to do the same with worship that, as a human activity, is bound to express the incompleteness, the ever unfinished edges, the heartbreak and the unfulfilled hopes, that, along with their simple joy and gratitude, human beings express in their prayer lives.
Heritage, shmeritage. Spend too much time in the mists of Glocca Mora, and the fairies will get you if you don’t watch out.
This pope intends to find mystery in “phrases minted like coins of Bismarck’s empire, each one perfect, each one the same, and not one of them worth anything today.”
(POSTED: 2/10/11) Like the TV detective Monk, I have a gift that is also a curse: I pay very close attention at Mass. So when the priest veers away from the approved text, I hear it and fume. Used to fume. Now I go into my free-fly zone. Frequently.
In this zone, I woolgather, daydream, write columns for Chicago Catholic News dot calm, etc. This means that one minute I’m saying “Lord hear our prayer” with the other faithful, next minute that I know about, I am rising for the Our Father. Awful, I know. Can only say I’m working on it.
The paying close attention thing is a bigger problem. The priest subs out “His” for “God’s,” “disciples” for “friends,” “Almighty God” for “Almighty Father,” etc. Two of these reduce masculine references, sparing feminist sensibilities. The other is apparently meant to de-emphasize levels of authority in favor of intimacy. Irritating, . . . . more more more at Chicago Catholic News . . .
Oprah called on President Obama’s critics on Friday to show some level of respect.
“I feel that everybody has a learning curve, and I feel that the reason why I was willing to step out for him was because I believed in his integrity and I believed in his heart,” the influential TV host said on MSNBCs Morning Joe in Chicago.
Of the negative mood of the country, Oprah added, I think everybody complaining ought to try it for once.
She said the presidency is a position that holds a sense of authority and governance over us all, and that even if youre not in support of his policies, there needs to be a certain level of respect.
Mitsubishi Montero SUV, as was driven by hitter and runner. (From M.Peinado's photostream)
Trib Breaking News lags behind home-delivery hard copy coverage of last night’s hit & run by SUV driver running red light, sending two female pedestrians, aged 53 and 71, to the hospital. In the Loop!
Comments say it:
* Mawitz at 9:40 PM February 10, 2011: chicago tribune has more information [i.e. home-delivery etc. as
above]:
A Sauk Village woman confirmed Thursday that her daughter owns the SUV, but she said the daughter had lent the vehicle to her brother since November so he could commute to work.
2nd comment presses issue further:
* kellygirl1 at 5:43 PM February 10, 2011: If they have the license number, how can they not know who the owner of the car is?
Hard copy has the #. (Separate on-line story adds missing hard-c info) Why not give the name? It would help find the reckless driver.
Being a Democrat means never having to resign because of a scandal, says The Other McCain:
Let me explain something: If you want to be a member of Congress and screw around, join the Democratic Party. You can screw around all you want and no problem, if youre a Democrat. But you cant do that and be a Republican member of Congress.
It’s for considering. Thing is, Republicans claim virtue, Dems don’t bother: it wouldn’t sell.
Another, indisputable, point:
UPDATE: Fastest scandal ever! The Internet not only makes it easier for cheaters to cheat, it makes it easier for cheaters to get caught, and the rapidity with which the damning evidence becomes public tends to accelerate the resignation.
Now you see them, now you don’t. It’s also the role of shame, a most useful reaction as regards the common good. Let there be shame! It saves us a lot of trouble.
And expediency, of course. Where would we be without that?
(HT the extremely good “Morning Jolt,” by the top-of-the-line Jim Geraghty, part of the National Review Online stable. Sign up here. You won’t regret it.)
. . . approached the clerk. One of the men pointed a black handgun at the clerk, another said give him the money or he will shoot you, according to police reports. The clerk triggered the silent alarm and fled to the back of the store.
There’s more:
While leaving the store, the three men saw a man servicing an ATM and demanded that he open it and retrieve money. When the service man said he could not open the machine, one of the robbers hit him in the back of the head with an unknown object, causing a laceration. The man was transported to the hospital.
But the whole thing worked out badly for them:
The three men left empty-handed and were not found when police arrived.
So they had to go by the clerk’s and ATM service man’s description, which was not bad as those things go. The gun was black, as above, where what one of them said is also narrated, and were “in their late-teens” and “wearing hats, black jackets and blue jeans.” Hmm, black gun and jackets, blue jeans.
But neither witness noticed if they were black, white, or other! Or they noticed but preferred not to say. Or they told the reporter and swore him to secrecy.
Anyhow, I assume they were white, because there are more white people in Oak Park than any other. It stands to reason.
