Eight-minute delay of game at John Carrol U.
Hat tip to Joe. My. God.
Tag: Churches
Religion in church, temple, mosque, public life
New man — I mean woman — at Wheeling Jesuit
A utility player is taking over the “interim president” job at Wheeling Jesuit U.
Sister Francis Marie Thrailkill has been named as interim president of Wheeling Jesuit University.
Thrailkill replaces J. Davitt McAteer, who has served as interim president since former President Julio Giulietti was fired on Aug. 6.
Wheeling Jesuit said Thursday that Thrailkill will serve as interim president for about 18 months. She will be the university’s first female leader.
Meanwhile, the U. apparently remains in a state of suspension as to a replacement for the (who knows?) irreplaceable Giulietti:
The school suspended its search for a permanent president in October, saying it needed more time to find the right leader.
No disrespect intended to say “utility,” as above.
Thrailkill had served as president of the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati from 1987 to 2008, and as interim president of Chatfield College in Cincinnati from 2008 to 2009.
Nor journeyman (or woman), for that matter. Did Nick Swisher drive in 82 last year for the World champion Yankees? Yes, hitting .249 in 150 games. Had a bad Series but got a key hit in the last game, as I recall. His third time in six MLB seasons (his second in two). Don’t diss the traveler.
As for Thralkill, she took over at Mt. St. Joseph a year after it went coed, admitting male students, and put in a very good 20 years:
Under her leadership, the Mount has almost doubled the size of its campus to 92 acres and steadily increased its student population to 2,300. On her watch, the college kept its track record of balancing the budget for 29 consecutive years.
The endowment grew from $3 million in 1987 to over $22 million in 2007. Sister Thrailkill oversaw two capital campaigns, the “Vision 2000” Campaign and the “Building Excitement” Campaign, which combined raised over $24 million for new academic programs, student scholarships and facilities.
In fact, in 2008 she was declared a Great Living Cincinnatian by the Chamber of Commerce.
If she can (figuratively) take Wheeling Jesuit to the World Series, it would go a long way to helping people forget the exceedingly strange goings-on over the past five months.
Trouble in paradise
The bishops have been had? May be a case of culpable ignorance?
“The closer we look at the Bishops Conference [staff and programs], the more we find a systemic pattern of cooperation with evil,” said Michael Hichborn, American Life League’s lead researcher into the USCCB scandal. “The CCC has lodged itself into the highest places of power in the USCCB while working to promote abortion and homosexuality.”
It’s partly about:
John Carr . .. USCCB executive director of the Department of Justice Peace and Human Development which oversees the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) . . . employed by the USCCB since 1987,
who since 1983 has been in deep with the Center for Community Change, “serving in leadership roles from 1999 to 2006 – including as chairman of the board,” reports Reform CCHD Now, a
lay Catholic watchdog group comprised of some of the top Catholic pro-life organizations in the country including American Life League, Human Life International and Bellarmine Veritas Ministry.
The Center for Community you-know-what has among its core causes abortion, “reproductive rights” and homosexuality, says Reform etc. as reported by Life Site News.
The Center describes its mission:
to build the power and capacity of low-income people, especially low-income people of color, to change their communities and public policies for the better.
Further, it
strengthens, connects and mobilizes grassroots groups to enhance their leadership, voice and power.
And believes
that vibrant community-based organizations, led by the people most affected by social and economic injustice, are key to putting an end to the failed “on your own” mentality of the right and building a new politics based on community values.
Hear ye, hear ye. (We hear ya.) Not only:
Founded in 1968 to honor the life and values of Robert F. Kennedy, the Center is one of the longest-standing champions for low-income people and communities of color. Together, our expert staff and dynamic partners confront the vital issues of today and build the social movements of tomorrow.
Yes! We believe!
They target the “’on your own’ mentality of the right.” As for abortion, it turns up once on its site, in a reprint of a 12/13/08 National Journal article by Corine Hegland “on the new role of grassroots community organizers under Obama.”
For nearly 30 years, Republicans have kept their multifaceted campaign networks alive through churches, religious groups, the National Rifle Association, and anti-abortion groups. Democrats have had no comparable infrastructure, except perhaps the shrinking labor movement.
Hegland won the
2006 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism . . . granted by Hunter College . . . [for her] series of articles on the captives held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.
Etc. More to the point for Life Site News et al. is this in its “resource library” about a “Reproductive Justice Briefing Book”:
Need a one-stop shop for information on reproductive justice? Well, SisterSong has got the right tool for you. This series of articles documents the struggle for reproductive justice and bridges this struggle with other issues within the social justice movement such as immigration and queer rights. Additionally, the series touches upon the future of the women’s movement in relation to reproductive justice.
SisterSong (colorful title) bills itself as a “women of color reproductive health collective,” which is quite a mouthful. Their statement:
We mobilize women of color around our lived experiences by:
*
bringing women of color together
*
encouraging our collective sustainability through mentoring and self-help
*
providing a framework that resonates with our lived experience
*
organizing and mobilizing to affect change
One could go on for a long time, but the strands are typical. Where is Dorothy Day when we need her? In heaven, of course; but where the disciples? Someone to cut through this highly inexact terminology and get us to the heart of the matter?
Anti-abortionism at Ascension
My guess is 50 showed at Ascension’s pro-life talk tonight, by Ill. Right to Life exec director Bill Beckman. He’s a true wonk and delivered a lot of solid stuff, but I bailed out after an hour-fifteen or so: Ask him the time and he tells you how to make a watch, a la Ronald Reagan, per his son a long time ago.
Some arresting stuff:
* Sen. Durbin “lies” when he keeps saying abortion is not mentioned in the now probably moribund health care legislation: doesn’t have to be named. point is, it’s not excluded. It wasn’t in Medicaid legislation in the mid-70s when the late Henry Hyde wrote his amendment that forbade federal funding of abortion for Medicaid recipients. Deceitful of Durbin, says Beckman. I agree.
* National inconsistency bordering on schizophrenia (my designation) lies in how inheritance and murder laws in many if not most states (I forget) that say the child in the womb has rights — kill a pregnant woman and you do double homicide.
* Early feminists (suffragists) were pro-life. Only in the early ‘60s did feminism become identical with pro-abortionism. I remember asking a feminist in a 1970s press conference if feminists were all pro-abortion, and the woman said yes, looking at me as if I were not quite with it.
* It was a lie foisted on us by pro-aborts that five to ten thou women a year were dying of illegal, botched abortions: 39 died that way in the U.S. in one year under consideration at the time.
* Nothing surprising here: pro-life Dems don’t get anywhere. They can’t advance. Remember Gov. Casey of PA, who couldn’t get a spot at the podium at the 1992 Dem convention?
On the other hand, five of six current Republican gubernatorial candidates for Illinois are pro-life, most of the senatorial hopefuls, all of the lt. gov. candidates. As I say, we know which is the abortion party.
* Illinois is the only state w/o a parental-involvement law, requiring notification or consent for a minor’s abortion. It got one in 1995, but the Ill. supremes wouldn’t write the rules for the “judicial bypass” it required — an escape clause whereby the abortion-seeker could plead her case for non-notification to a judge.
In 2006 the Illinois supremes wrote rules and sent AG Lisa Madigan (D.-Mike), who so badly presented the Illinois case to the federal judge that he said come back when you know what you have or don’t have.
Last year the Illinois supremes, all seven of them, wrote Lisa M. ordering her to go back and do it right. She did, and for a few hours last year, the bill was in force. Enter ACLU with some sleight of hand and the original injunction was restored.
Beckman estimates 5,000 abortions a year on non-Illinoisans drawn by its lack of a parental law — too much business for relevant docs et al. to go easily into the dark night, as they see it, of pro-life-ism.
Wheeling Jesuit refund
I received a check for $75 from Wheeling Jesuit, a university I’ve never attended. All it says is ‘refund from fundraiser’. I e-mailed them but have not heard back yet. What would you do?
First, I’d blog about it. Then I’d make a call, say to
Advancement Office 304-243-8141 or
1-800-888-2586
and ask to what do you owe this favor?
Or do like Kristie in a comment:
I would send the check back with a cover letter that a mistake has been made because you never contributed to a Wheeling Jesuit fundraiser.
There is so much fraud today and so many clever ways to commit it. I would hate for them to get access to your personal information for a mere $75 endeavor.
As you wish.
Wheeling Jesuit, NASA, whistleblower suit
More trouble in Wheeling Jesuit city:
A woman who says she lost her job at Wheeling Jesuit University after questioning the way the school billed administrative expenses for government grants has filed a whistleblower lawsuit in Ohio County Circuit Court.
The lawsuit filed by Catherine Smith, at one time the manager of finance for Wheeling Jesuit’s sponsored programs, alleges she was subjected to a hostile work environment, threatened with demotion and eventually fired after reporting problems in the way [NASA] grant funds were being used to her superiors.
Her superiors being the folks we have come to know and mistrust because of their firing of Rev. Julio Giulietti SJ as president last August.
Smith:
Rather than correct the deficiencies . . . she was harassed by her supervisor, [now acting President] Davitt McAteer, and threatened with demotion, and when she complained to higher-ups the school’s legal counsel concluded her claims were groundless.
Subsequently, she found fault with a male employee, discussed it with him one-on-one, and got fired, using her fault-finding “as a pretext.” She also
accuses the school of creating a hostile work environment, slander, intentionally inflicting emotional distress and retaliation.
NASA got wind of it, investigated,
and in an August memorandum concluded NASA had “inappropriately” reimbursed Wheeling Jesuit for more than $4 million in incorrectly billed and sometimes “duplicative” charges.
But NASA blamed no one, except in effect those who trained and oversaw grant officers. An earlier investigation, in January 2006, had concluded that nothing could be proven about “improper” firings by program managers or awarding of sweetheart sub-contracts.
Unnamed university officials said the same thing:
“Contrary to suggestions in the suit, NASA did not investigate the university. It reviewed the agency’s own internal controls related to the oversight of grants and cooperative agreements with the university. NASA made no findings that anyone at the university engaged in any irregularities or misused any federal funds, whatsoever. . . . [Its] cost allocation methodologies have been fully disclosed and received long-standing approval from NASA.”
Announcement of the August ‘09 memo preceded the Giulietti ouster-cum-McAteer- elevation by one day, leading some to think G. was booted because of it. Inside Higher Ed questioned that, noting that it was McAteer who “had oversight of the NASA projects.”
It also noted that Fr. Ed Glynn, both a director and a trustee, had wondered who appointed McAteer, he knowing nothing of it before reading a press release.
Jesuits for a free market
Free-market thinking seems to have got its start not with Adam Smith and his fellow Scots but with Dominicans and Jesuits at the U. of Salamanca in the 15th century.
Just price? The market decides that, etc. Such stuff does the social justice mantra in, or defines it in ways the world doth not dream of in these post-Marxist days . . .
Jesus Huerta de Soto has good material at Mises.com:
“We believe in free markets and free people,” he says, addressing a Mises Institute conference.
We stand for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the oppression of collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.
“So does this have anything to do with the Jesuit Luis de Molina?” asked Penny Ziemer Ford in reply to my Facebook posting.
Yes indeed. Consider this from the Acton Institute:
” . . . in Molina’s writings on economics . . . he affirms the importance of individual liberty in free-market exchanges, opposes government regulation of prices and markets, condemns the slave trade as immoral, and upholds private-property rights theory.”
One of our parishes is missing! Still!
Who’s in charge here? Official archdiocesan report on the life of Fr. Bill Kelly still says St. Catherine of Siena parish is closed:
For nine years beginning in 1954, Fr. Kelly was the assistant pastor at St. Edmund Parish in Oak Park. In 1963, he was named assistant pastor of St. Charles Borromeo Parish, on W. Roosevelt and Hoyne, where he served for five years before assuming the same duties at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Oak Park from 1968 to 1975. All of these parishes, with the exception of St. Edmund, are now closed.
Wrong-o, of course, as Chi Trib has neatly corrected itself.
An obituary for the Rev. William J. Kelly on Monday stated that the St. Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Parish had closed. To clarify, the church merged with another and exists today as St. Catherine of Siena-St. Lucy Roman Catholic Parish at 38 N. Austin Blvd., Oak Park.
Thus recovering from its understandable boo-boo in trusting the gang downtown. We should start with its Director of the Department of Communications and Public Relations, Colleen Dolan, on the job since ‘04,
responsible for the strategic direction and development of all institutional archdiocesan communications including media relations, public information, archdiocesan publications, school marketing, electronic media and communications technology, and employee communications throughout the Archdiocese.
Denying the continued existence of a parish fits into no strategy I can imagine. Either the job is too big for Dolan, or she’s too big for it.
Later, from the archdiocese:
Both St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Oak Park and St. Lucy on Mayfield [sic] in Chicago were closed in 1974. By canonical decree, and in accordance with Canon 121, the new, consolidated parish of St. Catherine of Siena/St. Lucy was created.
Ah. The parish is dead, long live the parish. If only newspaper reporters knew canon law.
Vanished Oak Park parish, recalling Bill Kelly
Go Trib! With some boots on the ground in Oak Park! As in obit for Fr. Bill Kelly, pastor emeritus of St. Edmund:
He [earlier] served at St. Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Parish, which has since closed.
This is very big news to parishioners of St. Catherine-St. Lucy, as they go to mass in the huge Gothic structure at Austin and Washington, as recently as yesterday. [See below: Trib corrects itself.]
But let’s not pick exclusively on Chi Trib. Oak Leaves, whose “Oak” is the one in “Oak Park,” also has it:
He was assistant pastor at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Oak Park from 1968 to 1975. The parish is now closed.
Have I missed something? The parish of my youth closed?
I have my own memories of Fr. Kelly, the most genial of men, faithful to his calling and full of common sense.
I spent an evening for dinner in a parishioner’s house with him and his boorish St. Charles Borromeo pastor. Bill was stuck with the guy, but never gave any sign of bitterness or complaint.
Later, as St. Edmund pastor he had an over-enthusiastic ex-priest parishioner who at a parish meeting flashed his “celebret” — written permission to say mass and hear confession in a given diocese — which had clearly expired, in a moment of 1970s church-style point-making.
I forget what the issue was as Bill explained it, but I remember Bill’s wise unwillingness to react after the fact with more than an implied “Can you believe this guy?”
In the wars big and small that even now, though far less than in those heady days, exercise Catholics, he demonstrated an enviable aplomb.
More: This is wild. The horse’s mouth has the ridiculous characterization of Bill Kelly’s parishes as all closed but St. Edmund! That would be your smart, media-savvy, heads-up Archdiocese of Chicago, recipient of millions annually from pew-sitters of every stripe, calling St. Catherine of Siena closed!
Did I say horse’s mouth, or horse’s something else, and in the plural?
This I did say — with regard to St. Catherine-St. Lucy being in the Catherine of Siena building — to the reader who alerted me:
Lucy was merged in 1974 — while Kelly was still at St. Catherine — with Cath of S., moving into its big church, the Lucy building becoming a Baptist church. Lucy had covered Austin neighborhood and Oak Park north of Lake. Yes, Virginia, there still is a St. C. of S., tho not in the bureaucratic minds of chancery officials, for whom tidy designations are everything.
Let it be a lesson to us all, including city rooms doing clerical obits.
Yet more from Chi Trib:
–An obituary for the Rev. William J. Kelly on Monday stated that the St. Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Parish had closed. To clarify, the church merged with another and exists today as St. Catherine of Siena-St. Lucy Roman Catholic Parish at 38 N. Austin Blvd., Oak Park.
Good.
He clings to God
Does this sound like a guy whose family has been slaughtered by his own rampaging countrymen?
“People think God is far away from us. He’s not! Jesus is one of us, not just among us — connected to you and to me. We have a saying: ‘God is watching us through the roof.’
“When they used to build houses with grass roofs they used to leave a little hole on top of the house so God could keep watching us. They did this even before they knew Christianity.”
You think you got troubles.
He’s Father Pascal Bigirimana, administrator of Saints Peter and Paul RC Parish on Chicago’s South Side, who lost his parents and three brothers and two of his three sisters and their spouses and children in genocidal killing in Rwanda in the ‘90s.
He hid under floorboards for a week while Hutus searched for him, a Tutsi. A Hutu nun said he had fled and was probably dead, and they left.
“Eventually the bishop came with some soldiers and took me to his residence. That’s how I escaped. It was a miracle. I thought I was already dead.”
The rest is at the excellent “5 Mins. with Father” Catholic New World feature, where the talk, crisply delivered, is more often about growing up in big families and being ordained and being a pastor. This time it’s about war and death and faith.
Blithe Spirit 