Tag: Churches

Religion in church, temple, mosque, public life

Helping Japan? Go Salvation Army

Help Japan
Help Japan?

The Sallies have her vote.

Catherina Wojtowicz “couldn’t keep [her] mouth shut on this” (not that she’s known for keeping her mouth shut):

BEWARE of the RED CROSS! Donate to the Salvation Army!

Folks!

Many are talking about donating to the good people in Japan. I just want to add my two cents about all this boasting about the Red Cross.

They are a horrible, thieving organization! [!!]

I don’t care who suggested to donate to them, including Glenn Beck. The Red Cross is NOT a place where one wants their money to go, if they want it to be used for those in need.

I say this because of years of personal and professional experience in working emergency relief efforts and as a military family member.

The Red Cross will spend your money as wisely as the federal government does. [!]

However, the Salvation Army are a wonderful organization and they do great work. Here is the Salvation Army – Japan site for anyone interested in donating.

If not the Salvation Army, consider a church who works with the people. If you have questions about the validity of what I say, ask a [military] veteran.

Thanks for listening. I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut on this.

Catherina Wojtowicz
Chicago Tea Patriots, organizer
312-662-8666

Jonah, Jesus, and persuading God

Simplified plan of ancient Nineveh showing cit...
Diagram of saved city

Jonah 3 tells how God changed his mind (!) about Nineveh, thanks to Jonah’s pleading.  Luke 11.29-32 builds on this.  It took a Jonah, but a greater God-mover was among Jesus’ listeners, he told them, meaning himself.

More on this Jonah-Jesus comparison: Jonah was (a) thrown overboard at his request (b) to save his shipmates in the dreadful storm, (c) sacrificing himself for others.

Jesus also sacrificed himself, as we know, but achieved more, ransoming us all from perdition, not just a city.  He is the hero of any day’s re-enactment of that self-sacrifice, namely the mass — a truly cosmic event.

Anglicans bring Anglican style to Rome

In England and Wales (as elsewhere), Anglicans are coming to Rome:

The ordinariate allows Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church while retaining “a love and gratitude for the Anglican forms of faith and worship.”

The ordinariate website explains that an interim governing council is meeting regularly to oversee the development of the organization. An official governing council will be formed after Easter 2011.

The governing council will have at least six priests, presided over by the ordinary. Half of the membership is elected by the priests of the ordinariate. It will have a pastoral council for consultation with the laity and a finance council.

The council will have the same rights and responsibilities in canon law that the college of consultors and the council of priests have in the governance of a diocese. Out of respect for the synodal tradition of Anglicanism, the ordinary will need the consent of the governing council to admit a candidate to Holy Orders and to erect or suppress a personal parish or a house of formation.

The council will also have a vote in choosing a list of names of a new ordinary to submit to the Holy See.  [Italics added]

These last two items demonstrate a distinctly reformist trend in Roman Catholicism.  Stay tuned.

More: This England and Wales ordinariate “would probably be a model for what we would do here in the U.S.,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Wash DC a few weeks.  He has been named point man for ordinariate-organizing in the U.S.

Don’t touch that steeple!

Map of the Catholic Diocese of Allentown in th...
Allentown diocese here.

The Vatican has a position on closing churches:

Three years [after her parish church in Minersville PA
was shuttered], [Marie] Lutkus and parishioners at eight other shuttered churches in Pennsylvania‘s Allentown diocese have persuaded a Vatican panel to overturn the bishop’s decision to close them down an exceedingly rare reversal that experts say may signal a policy shift on U.S. church closures.

“This is a thunderclap. I am absolutely floored,” said Charles Wilson, executive director of the Saint Joseph Foundation, a San Antonio, Texas-based group that helps Catholic laity navigate church law.

What else?

In a series of decisions that parishioner groups began receiving in January, the Congregation for the Clergy the Vatican office in charge of the world’s 400,000 Catholic priests said the bishop had failed to come up with a “grave reason” for shuttering the churches as required by Catholic law. The panel ruled that parishioners must be allowed to use the padlocked buildings for worship.

“It does not bring the parish back to life, but it puts on the table what could be a workable compromise: to physically re-open the locked-up church as a Catholic place of worship,” said prominent Catholic activist Peter Borre of the Council of Parishes, which has spent years appealing church closures in the Boston area.

They can start with Bible services and maybe persuade a priest to come and offer the holy sacrifice. Who knows?

They also need a finance committee. volunteer maintenance, money, etc. Can it be done?

When abusers were not sent to another parish

Basil of Caesarea
St. Basil of Caesarea

Once upon a time, long ago, clergy sex abusers were made short work of:

St. Basil (330-379) stated: A cleric or monk who seduces youths or young boys is to be publicly flogged . For six months he will languish in prison-like confinement he shall never again associate with youths neither in private conversation nor in counseling them.

That’s not the half of what Basil had in mind. Here’s a fuller version:

“The cleric or monk who molests youths or boys or is caught kissing or committing some turpitude, let him be whipped in public, deprived of his crown [tonsure] and, after having his head shaved, let his face be covered with spittle; and [let him be] bound in iron chains, condemned to six months in prison, reduced to eating rye bread once a day in the evening three times per week. After these six months living in a separate cell under the custody of a wise elder with great spiritual experience, let him be subjected to prayers, vigils and manual work, always under the guard of two spiritual brothers, without being allowed to have any relationship . . . with young people.”

Nailing this down in Basil’s writings has been a challenge, however. Best near-ancient source seems to be St. Peter Damian (1007-1071), in his ever-popular Liber Gomorrhianus, or Book of Gomorrha — a primary source book for protesters of ecclesiastical indifference to abuse.

Aux armes!

Latin mass afficionados should know about The Remnant. Its history includes this call to arms:

We plan to go forward with enthusiasm for the one, true Faith, and not to succumb to the Modernist onslaught against the traditions of the Catholic Church— come what may.

Join the Resistance!

Latest issue has tough, tough comments in interview of newly acquired Rome stringer Hilary White, whose work can be viewed here at her LifeSiteNews home roost. Smart, pungent, someone to keep up with, if you can.

For instance, this:

ROME, April 12, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) Quite honestly, when I saw that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens had told the British media they plan to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested and charged with crimes against humanity, during his visit to Britain in September, my first reaction was somewhat different from those of most of my friends and colleagues here in Rome. Whereas most of them burst out laughing, I felt like cringing in embarrassment on behalf of these two men, particularly for Professor Dawkins.

The fact that Dawkins, and his henchman Hitchens, believe, apparently with utter seriousness, that they can arrest Pope Benedict during his visit, indicates a disconnection from reality that ought to prompt the sympathetic attention of a competent physician.

And more more more where that came from . . .

Wheeling Jesuit trustee leaving national post

[Drastically corrected version] Fr. Charles Currie, [not] the sole Wheeling Jesuit U. trustee [this was Fr. Edward Glynn] who did not collaborate in the firing of fellow Jesuit Fr. Julio Giulietti from the WJU presidency a year ago, is stepping down as president of the Assn. of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. Colleagues heap praise on him in comments at The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s “The Ticker” blog.

Tom Ingram, president-emeritus, Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB):

The 28 Jesuit colleges and universities will be losing an extraordinary leader next year, and so will the rest of higher education. Father Charlie Currie has inspired his colleague presidents to be sure, but he has also shepherded his Church and Catholic higher education across the board through some very very, very challenging issues ranging from threats to academic freedom in classrooms and institutional self-determination, as well as to their adequately preparing for their inevitable transition to lay Catholic leadership.

I’m certain that what he has done to help Catholic colleges and universities to begin addressing their futures while honoring the values, traditions, and teachings of the various religious communities that founded each of them will prove to be one of his true legacies.

David Baime, American Association of Community Colleges:

I know Father Currie less as a professional colleague than as a fellow tenant of the fourth floor of 1 Dupont Circle [DC]. To put it succinctly, to know him is to love him, and to chuckle with him as well. Father Currie’s moral authority within the higher education community, stemming as it does from a unique combination of intelligence, geniality, and learning, will be missed. But I will miss him more as a friend.

And an otherwise anonymous “raslowski”:

Charlie has served the Society of Jesus and the Jesuit Colleges and Universities with distinction. His has been a clear and consistent voice for an education in which the promotion of justice is a critical component. His efforts have shaped the world of higher education for the better.

Currie had the job 14 years. His stepping down is set for next June. He previously served as president of Wheeling (WV) Jesuit and Xavier University, in Ohio. Succeeding him will be the Rev. Greg Lucey, a former president of Spring Hill College, in Alabama.

In the course of post-firing controversy, [not] his email exchanges [but Fr. Ed Glynn’s] with the WJU board of directors chairman and the Jesuit president of the all-Jesuit trustees, appearing on a pro-Giulietti web site, shed much light on the firing itself, which happened after Giulietti, now at Loyola U.-Chicago, had been president two years. Glynn and Giulietti were trustees. The three others held a brief telephone meeting on Aug. 5, 2009, without either, agreeing to fire Giulietti after the directors had come close to doing so but failed to muster the required 2/3 vote. The trustees required a unanimous vote for the decision, from which Glynn was absent.

[Indeed, Currie from the start papered over the unexplained aspects of Giulietti’s firing, and indeed the firing itself, apparently going along with the whole business.]

Courage came to Mundelein

Column appeared 08/16/2010 at online, now defunct Chicago Catholic News:

The Rev. Jeffrey Keefe’s first encounter with a same-sex-attracted (SSA) client had a “profound effect” on him, he told priests and other pastoral workers at Mundelein Seminary July 30.

The man had confessed to another priest and then heard a “grunt of disgust” from the other side of the confessional screen. Father Keefe, a Syracuse, NY, Franciscan ordained in 1952 and a Ph.D. psychological counselor since 1965 with decades of experience with same-sex-attracted clients, was the first person he discussed his SSA condition with who didn’t make him feel like “a barrel of shit.” He “needed someone he could trust,” Father Keefe said.

He spoke at the 22nd annual conference of Courage, the national Catholic ministry to the same-sex-attracted, held July 29 to Aug. 1 at the seminary (U. of St. Mary of the Lake). Three hundred people were registered for the conference, including 70 priests and seminarians and three bishops, among the latter Bishop Thomas Paprocki, formerly of Chicago now of Springfield, IL. . . . .

The head reads, aptly: “Church Reporter: At Mundelein, man tells of “spiritual journey” from “practicing homosexual to practicing Catholic” [No longer linked] Aptly, because this is the grabber: the St. Augustine-like story of a Courage member.