Tag: Religion

Fired U. of Ill. prof a natural

Major point made here inadvertently by a student complaining about Kenneth Howell at U. of Illinois:

Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing. Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another.

But that’s Catholic teaching to its fingertips: everything is discussed in light of human nature, even the action of grace and the spiritual works of the church, which are supernatural.  The distinction is crucial.  A teacher of Catholic thought will inevitably talk about what’s natural and what isn’t.

With all respect to evangelicals and fundamentalists, the words of Scripture are not the last word for Catholics.  They are not the clincher, as it were, before which reason must slink away defeated.  Catholics defend the nature of things, the natural, while holding also for the supernatural.

The quote is from Huffington Post, which excerpts it from the News-Gazette of Champaign-Urbana, which also has a disturbing item which I hadn’t see elsewhere, namely that Howell has been fired by the local bishop, Daniel Jenky, C.S.C., once a dorm rector at the U. of Notre Dame.

He was also director of the Institute of Catholic Thought, part of St. John’s Catholic Newman Center on campus and the Catholic Diocese of Peoria. After losing his teaching position with the UI, Howell was told by the Newman Center that he would no longer be employed there either.

This man Howell can’t win for losing.

Later:  An astute reader thinks Howell will regain his Newman Center job.  The bishop is re-thinking the matter as public support grows for Howell.  He and the Newman people reacted blindly but are “getting stronger” on the issue, “mostly because of pressure from lay people.”  Vive la laïcs.

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A priest prosecution case with wrinkles

His diocese paid, lips were sealed, he considers it all behind him, but the homosexual-rape victim wants him off the street, wherever he is.

Eck was drunk when he brought the car back that night, he said, and Ericksen told him that rather than go home and face his parents, he could sleep it off in his spare bedroom.

That night, Eck said, Ericksen raped him.

He is Paul Eck, age 17 when he says the rape happened. The man he says did it is the Rev. Tom Ericksen, then of the Superior Wis. diocese. It happened in 1983.  Eck’s complaint, together with that of his nephew, James Eck, age 8 or 9 when he says Ericksen began touching him sexually, was settled in 1989 for $3 million.

It was the standard handling of an abuse case. But this one has arisen again. The Ecks want Ericksen, long since out of the priesthood and living outside Wisconsin, including in Minnesota — where he worked for 20 years as an AT&T customer service specialist and was a member of AT&T’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employee association — brought to criminal trial.

“He needs to be taken off the streets because he’s a pedophile,” Paul Eck said of Ericksen. “I guarantee you that there are people before and after me that have been molested. This is not all of a sudden something you do in a short amount of time.”

The present bishop is prohibited from discussing the case. The local prosecutor is not responding to the Ecks’ request to arrest Ericksen, whose move out of the state “stops the clock” on expiration of arrestability, according to Ecks’ lawyer.

However, the Duluth News-Tribune notes that the Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering an appeal by a Jesuit priest — Donald McGuire, of Chicago — who was convicted in 2006 of assaulting two teenagers in the late 1960s.

Men Astutely Trained

This “history of the Jesuits in the American century” is worth spending time with and on. McDonough is cogent and interesting. Rewarding stuff.

For instance, the sociologist John L. Thomas SJ, on p. 439, according to McDonough:

The family [is] the crucial unit of social morality . . .  The church, then, [should] specialize in bolstering the ethical order.

This was Thomas’s view in the 50s and 60s.  His The American Catholic Family was published in 1956 by Prentice-Hall.

This view vied with the vision of socio-political change that eventually overtook and took over Jesuit thinking, with its concentration on “social problems” and emphasis on direct action, usually governmental, to solve them.

A big mistake in my view, having been there and done that as a fire-breathing young Jesuit in the 50s and 60s.  Problem is, this focus on the problems — poverty, racial discrimination, etc. — is essentially defeatist, encouraging as it does the short-term fix to the exclusion of later consequences.

For instance, how has society profited from massive welfare fixes that helped undermine black family structure — paying women to have babies in the absence of resident father, etc.?  Not very much, it seems.

Her pagan roots

Let’s hear it for Stonehenge in our post-Christian age (common era, you know):

“It means a lot to us … being British and following our pagan roots,” said Victoria Campbell, who sported a pair of white angel’s wings and had a mass of multicolored flowers in her hair.

The 29-year-old Londoner, who works in the finance industry, also said that “getting away from the city” was a major draw.

She was celebrating the solstice in an all-night party.  With her and others was

Gina Pratt, a 43-year-old housewife and a self-described witch, [who] said being inside the circle as the sun came up gave her “a kind of a grounding feeling (of) being in touch with the earth again, and the air we breathe.”

Is this what Browning meant when he wrote

Oh, to be in England

Now that April’s there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England – now!

I doubt it, but probably not

Pratt, who wore a cape of crushed red velvet and wielded an amethyst-tipped wand [and] said the event gave rise to conflicting emotions.

“It makes you feel small and insignificant … but it makes you feel like you’re here for a reason.”

For more of Browning, go here.

For more about Stonehenge, scroll down in this same Christian Science Monitor article.

For more about the summer solstice, look out the window.

Sex abuse discussed in Chi suburban parish

My debut column for Chicago Catholic News is up. 

(POSTED: 6/14/10) Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish in Glenview (OLPH) hosted a discussion of clergy sex abuse on June 7. Featured speakers were Michael Bland, a therapist and himself an abuse survivor and former priest, and Rev. Larry McBrady, a former vicar for priests in the archdiocese.

Bland had delivered a stemwinder of a speech about his own experience, an “impact statement,” in 2002 at the bishops’ meeting in Dallas, where he said movingly of his abuse experience:

My life was changed in ways I could never have imagined. I continue to be victimized because the perpetrating priest has something that was stolen from me — my youthful innocence and my priesthood. At times I am still plagued with questions starting with “what if . . .” — questions that can never be answered . . . .

Read the rest at Chicago Catholic News.

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Tough sell in Phoenix

What a tough sell Bishop Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix AZ has to convince people it was not OK to abort an unborn to save a mother’s life.

Just this one time, say his critics.  For a good reason.  We won’t bother you after that.

It’s a bad thing in itself, he says.

What the heck are you talking about? they say.  What’s this bad-in-itself stuff?  Look, Bishop, with all respect, we decide things as we go along.  Why can’t you understand that?

That’s the issue, he said or could say.  If we decide as we go, it’s paddy-bar-the-door for all sorts of things. 

I’m not in the business of legislating or making executive orders or even of judging, he might continue — except in the court of conscience, mine first of all, in fact most of all, even exclusively in this case. 

I cannot say the hell with it in this one case, this one time, for this good reason.  Once I do, why not the next time, for the next good reason? 

I become Solomon dividing the disputed baby or — God save the mark — the Warren Court setting rules for the states: Thou shalt not . . .   Etc.  Etc.

You get my drift? he might conclude.

Later: He being Olmsted, not Olmstead, by the way, as Olmstead points out in his comment below.  So instead of Olmstead when you mean the bishop of Phoenix, write Olmsted.  I may have Olmstead take my stead next time I write about the Phoenix Olmsted.  His experience will stand him in good stead.  (sic)

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