NEWS ABOUT THE CHURCH & THE VATICAN

I have not read the whole document through yet, but here is a translation of the outline summary of the Spanish bishops' Pastoral Instruction referred to in the above post:


THEOLOGY AND SECULARIZATION IN SPAIN
Forty years after Vatican-II

Introduction
"And you, who do you say that I am?" (Mt 16, 15)

1. Jesus Christ, the fullness of Revelation
"Because neither flesh nor blood has revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven". (Mt 16, 17)

a) The Catholic concept of Revelation
b) Response to divine REvelation
c) Intelligence and the language of faith
d) Revelation and Biblical exegesis
e) Revelation and Christian prayer

2. Jesus Christ, Son of the living God
"You are Christ, son of the living God." (Mt 16, 16)

a) Christology and 'Soteriologia'
b) The whole life of Christ is a mystery
c) Jesus Christ, the only Savior of all men
d) Christology and catechesis

3. The Church - Sacrament of Christ
"You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church." (Mt 16, 18)
a) Christ and the Church: the 'total Christ'
b) Liturgy and eschatological hope
c) The ordained ministry of the Church
d) Consecrated life in the Church
e) Church Magisterium and the phenomeonon of dissent

4. Life in Christ
"If anyone wishes to follow me, then let him renounce himself, take up his Cross and follow me." (Mt 16. 24)

a) Christ, the standard of morality
b) The dignity of the human person
c) The morality of sexuality and life
d) Social morality

Conclusion
"I have told you this so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete." (Jn 15, 11)

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As it is a 26-page document, I hope there will be an online English translation soon to which we can link. Until then, I may post a translation of selected excerpts.

Sandro Magister in his 7/28/06 blog criticizes the failure of the Vatican foreign minister to address certain obvious issues in the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. Here is a translation:

LAJOLO - A TOO-SILENT OBSERVER

At the international conference on the Middle East held in Rome on July 26, a Vatican delegation took part at the invitation of the governments of Italy an the United Sattes [co-hosts of the conference.]

The delegation was headed by Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, outgoing Vatican foreign minister.

His role was that of an observer, with a right to speak only if requested by any of the full delegates. There was no such request and so Lajolo was not heard from during the conference.

He spoke the following day in an interview with Vatican Radio which was transcribed and released by the Vatican Press Office.

But in the interview, Lajolo's silences spoke louder than his words.

He dedicated a great part of his comment to the humanitarian emergency and to Lebanon "that it may return to being that 'garden' of the Middle Eats that it used to be."

But he does not say a word about disarming the Hezbollah, the condition sine qua non for a lasting truce and reconstruction of the Lebanese nation.

He doesn't say a single word about the 'stone guests' [the reference is to the stone statue of the Commendatore who is the dominant presence at the feast in Mozart's opera 'Don Giovanni'] at the conference: Syria and Iran.

He doesn't say a word about "the right of the Israelis to live in peace in their own state," a right restated by Benedict XVI at his Angelus message three days earlier.

Instead he laments that the conference had "limited itself only to asking Israel to exercise maximum moderation, an invitation which by its nature is inevitably ambiguous."

Vatican diplomacy does not show itself to advantage in this calculated alternating of spoken words and silences.

In this context, it becomes more understandable that Benedict XVI seeks to balance it off [Magister uses a term that translates literally into 'make it lighter']. He intends to stand firm with the essentials: not calculations and short-term moves but prospects with wider horizons.

Just as he expressed himself on Sunday, July 23.

[Here, Magister refers to his 7/27/06 article entitled "At the Middle East summit, Benedict XVI preaches the Cross of Jesus", which reproduces the impromptu homily delivered by the Pope after Vespers at the parish church of Rhemes-St-Georges in Val d'Aosta, a translation of which was posted in this thread earlier.
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Just incidentally, during both vacations in Les Combes so far, Pope Benedict has made the most significant news of his visits by his impromptu actions and declarations.

In 2005, it was that remarkable question-and-answer session he had with the clergy of Val d'Aosta, something no other Pope had done before him, and which he would repeat with the clergy of Rome several months later.

In 2006, it was that equally remarkable homily at Rhemes-St-Georges that was, in its way, as anguished as the Pope's cry at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May, but was also a reiteration of faith in prayer as the Church's primary instrument in the face of complex political issues.

Not to mention his off-the-cuff answers to reporters who took the occasion of the Pope's excursions to ask him questions directly.

Going on to another topic, I have posted a translation of Magister's 7/29 blog about an editorial by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in the July 15 issue of La Civilta Cattolica in ODDS AND ENDS.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/07/2006 17.00]

England and Wales Adjust Holy Days
Move 3 Feasts to Sunday

LONDON, JULY 30, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The bishops of England and Wales have made changes to the holy days of obligation to facilitate Catholics' observance of important feasts.

"We have responded to requests from diocesan councils of priests and many others, deeply concerned at the diminishing observance of these days," said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, archbishop of Westminster, in a recent statement.

"In order to foster the celebration of the rhythm of the liturgical year and to celebrate more profoundly the mysteries of the life and mission of the Lord, the bishops have decided to transfer to Sunday those holy days of obligation which are solemnities of the Lord" other than Christmas Day, he said.

"This means that the Epiphany, the Ascension of the Lord and Corpus Christi will now be celebrated on Sunday," he added.

According to the statement, the prelates commend this as an opportunity for Catholics to deepen, through catechesis and celebration, their faith and understanding of these mysteries of the life of Christ.

These changes, approved by the Holy See on July 13, will take effect in England and Wales on the First Sunday of Advent, Dec. 3.

Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor specified that "other holy days of obligation -- Christmas, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the feast of All Saints will continue to be celebrated as at present."

With the exception of Christmas Day, the discipline in England and Wales is that when these days fall on a Saturday or Monday, they are transferred to Sunday. Further details are posted at www.liturgyoffice.org.uk.

Indian Anti-conversion Law Made Tougher
Education of Christian Minorities in Peril

NEW DELHI, India, JULY 30, 2006 (Zenit.org).- An amendment to the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh's anti-conversion law makes changing religions even harder.

The new legislation passed last week amends the Freedom of Religion Act of 1968, which already made it difficult for citizens to embrace a creed of their choice, the bishops' conference of India said.

The norm introduced in Madhya Pradesh obliges individuals who intend to convert to inform authorities one month in advance, or face a fine of 1,000 rupees ($21) or a year's imprisonment.

The new law also calls for an investigation to determine if the conversion took place through allurement or coercion.

The Christian community questions the amendment's compatibility with religious freedom and human rights.

According to ICNA, the Indian episcopate's news service, the Congress Party has asked Governor Balram Jakhar to return the bill without signing, which would prevent its enforcement.

Meanwhile in the state of Kerala, priests are asking the faithful to protest against the state's new higher education act.

The Kerala Professional Colleges Bill 2006 reserves the right to decide whether a community is a minority or not, and on this basis to decide how many schools this community can run.

The state government will also be empowered to decide the proportion of minority students a school may accept in relation to other students.

In response to the bill, the episcopal conference wrote a letter, signed by leaders of all rites, that condemns the law as "unconstitutional, anti-democratic and anti-minority," reported AsiaNews.

The bishops' letter also declared a "day of prayer and fasting to protest the law," which, "excludes Christians, who comprise only 19% of the population of Kerala, from the definition of minorities. … This means we will have to run our institutions like government institutions. This move penalizes us."

The letter said Christian institutions would press ahead with legal action to fight the new act, and will take the case to the state's high court which should issue a ruling this week.

It also accused the government of distancing communities from each other: "The campaign mounted against us, claiming that we have more colleges, is intended to create a negative feeling against Christians among other communities."

Father Babu Joseph, spokesman of the bishops' conference of India, told AsiaNews that the government wants "to abdicate its responsibility to guarantee education for all."

He continued: "The Christian community pioneered in establishing education institutions in Kerala nearly 150 years ago and all the communities derived benefits from its work. These communities should be encouraged to contribute to the development of the nation rather than being punished for services rendered, which is what this law does.

"In fact, it is minorities that invest all their resources to build up institutions while the government takes the benefit from them in the name of social justice."

He continued: "It is the government that collects taxes from the public and therefore it has the duty to provide an education for the less wealthy. But it seems that now it wants to abdicate that responsibility by dumping it onto the shoulders of a minority that has worked hard to create institutions with their scarce resources."

Young people called to prepare for World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney

By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The first international World Youth Day to be held in Australia will provide an opportunity for young people to learn about and strengthen their faith and to spread that faith to those "down under" who do not put a high priority on spiritual concerns.

That was the message Auxiliary Bishop Anthony C. Fisher of Sydney brought to the United States recently in his role as coordinator of World Youth Day 2008, which will take place July 15-20, 2008, in Sydney.

Bishop Fisher said the planning team expects about 25,000 U.S. young people to attend, similar to the number of Americans who went to Germany for World Youth Day in 2005.

"But from what they're telling me now, 25,000 may be a very conservative number," the Australian bishop said in a telephone interview from Orange, Calif., after a meeting with Auxiliary Bishop Jaime Soto of Orange, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Subcommittee on Youth and Young Adults, and other U.S. planners for World Youth Day.

"So I'm going back looking for more" places to house World Youth Day pilgrims from the United States and other countries, Bishop Fisher said.

In addition to the events in Sydney, young Catholics will be able to experience the pre-World Youth Day activities known as Days in the Dioceses, in which pilgrims stay with families or parishes throughout the host country to learn more about the place they are visiting.

In 2008, however, participants in the Days in the Dioceses might stay in Australia or New Zealand. "The 24 dioceses of Australia will be joined by the six New Zealand dioceses in hosting" World Youth Day visitors, Bishop Fisher said.

The bishop said his country has much to offer American young people and is located about as far away from the U.S. as Germany is, for those on the West Coast.

"We speak more or less the same language, and it's easier culturally" than Germany was for Americans, he added.

Although it will be winter in the Southern Hemisphere in July, materials on the World Youth Day 2008 Web site list the average high temperature in Sydney in July at 66 degrees Fahrenheit and the average low at 49 degrees F -- comparable to Paris, London or Washington in May, the site says.

The Web site at www.wyd2008.org offers preparatory materials for parishes, schools and individuals planning to join in World Youth Day, as well as an opportunity for those who cannot travel to Australia to share in the preparations.

The theme for the 2008 gathering is "You Will Receive Power When the Holy Spirit Has Come Upon You; and You Will Be My Witnesses," taken from Chapter 1, Verse 8 of the Acts of the Apostles. The Pontifical Council for the Laity, which organizes the international World Youth Days, set similar themes related to the Holy Spirit and mission for 2006 and 2007 preparatory study sessions.

Through an "e-pilgrimage," participants will be alerted to a monthly pilgrim pack on the Internet, including catechesis on the World Youth Day themes, testimonies of young people who have gone to other World Youth Days and information on such topics as the lives of young saints and pilgrimage sites around the world. The e-pilgrimage is available in all four official World Youth Day languages -- English, Spanish, French and Italian.

In late July, the WYD organizers launched a 15-minute video highlighting Australia's charms and the spiritual and cultural benefits of participation in World Youth Day.

Bishop Fisher, who has already visited the Philippines and South Korea to encourage participation in World Youth Day 2008, also has stops planned in Spain, France and Ireland and is scheduled to meet in Fiji with the bishops of the Pacific Islands.

"My main message (on the U.S. stop) is that Australia might seem very far away, but it is very closely connected personally and culturally to the States," the bishop said. ""And this may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Australia."

But Bishop Fisher also is excited about the effects of World Youth Day on Australians of all ages.

"It's a great blessing to us in Australia," he said. When Australians see hundreds of thousands of young Catholics energized by their faith, he added, "it will be a real evangelizing moment."

35,000 altar boys to attend papal audience

Aug. 01 (CWNews.com) - Over 35,000 altar boys, primarily from Germany, are expected to attend the regular weekly public audience of Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on August 2.

The altar boys will be participating in a 2-day visit to Rome, sponsored by Coetus Internationalis Ministrantium, an international group that organizes pilgrimages for altar servers and choir members. They will be attending the first Wednesday audience by the Holy Father after a three-week hiatus, caused by his summer vacation. Coetus Internationalis Ministrantium was founded in Altenberg, Germany-- near Cologne-- in 1960, and dedicated to the spiritual formation of lay people involved in liturgical ministry. The group's current president is Bishop Martin Gächter, an auxiliary of the Swiss Basel diocese.

In addition to the papal audience, the altar boys-- more than 30,000 of them from Germany-- will attend a Mass celebrated in St. Peter's Basilica by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna.

Zambia: The Church is Aggrieved By Milingo's Stance On Celibacy -Bishop Lungu


Christopher Miti in Chadiza
The Post
Lusaka
August 1, 2006

CHIPATA Catholic Diocese Bishop George Lungu has said the Church is aggrieved by Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo's stance on celibacy.

During the ordination of seven priests and three deacons at Chadiza Parish last Sunday, Bishop Lungu said Archbishop Milingo had disappointed the Church by his recent utterances that celibacy among Catholic priests should be abolished.

"It's true that the Catholic Church in Chipata Diocese is aggrieved and embarrassed by Archbishop Milingo. We are not saying this story does not affect us. It does because Archbishop Milingo is our man," Bishop Lungu said.

He said the Church was proud of Archbishop Milingo because he has a lot of gifts, such as the power to heal apart from proclaiming the word of God. However, he said he was disappointed with his current stance on celibacy.

"We were proud of him because he is a child of Chipata Diocese. We were proud of his gifts, he was a model of our priesthood in terms of loving the Church. He used to strengthen us by his service to the Church, but what has prompted him to do what he did, to say what he said, what message is he going to give to us young ones?" Bishop Lungu asked. He urged Christians to pray for Archbishop Milingo for what he had done.

"To us our conclusion is to put him in prayers. We are not putting him in the hands of Maria Sung, but in the hands of Mary the mother of the Saviour. It's no laughing matter, he needs prayers, he is our son, the son of this diocese," he said.

Archbishop Milingo, whose 2001 marriage to a Korean acupuncturist caused a series of controversial actions, announced on July 12 in Washington that he wanted to change the Roman Catholic discipline on celibacy and reconcile an estimated 150,000 married priests worldwide with the Church to allow them to resume priestly ministry.

Bishop Lungu added that Catholic priests in Chipata Diocese would try to be faithful to their vow of celibacy.

"On behalf of my fellow Catholic clergy in this diocese, I would like to assure the Catholic community in Eastern Province, the Catholic community in the world, Christians from other churches and sympathisers that we the clergy in this diocese shall strive to remain faithful to our vow of celibacy, vow of chastity until death," he said.

Bishop Lungu said although it was difficult for priests to remain unmarried because they were also human beings, they should strive to maintain their vow of celibacy.

"I know some of you don't believe that one can be alone without a wife or a husband. You think these people who join priesthood are given some pills to suppress their feelings while at the seminary but that is not true," he noted.

Bishop Lungu also urged Christians to pray for priests so that they could accomplish their mission.

Bishops expect papal scolding
Pope likely to push the need to recruit families

Only 32 per cent of Canadians attend church

Aug. 2, 2006
STUART LAIDLAW
FAITH AND ETHICS REPORTER

Ontario bishops are going to Rome next month to get a lecture from the Pope about bringing more evangelism to their churches.

They're the latest of Canada's bishops to be told by Pope Benedict XVI that "pervasive" secularism is feeding "social ills and moral ambiguity" in this country.

"I can't say ahead of time what the Pope will say, but it wouldn't surprise me," says Bishop Richard Smith, who will be leading the group of bishops.

Bishop Faber MacDonald of Saint John, N.B., who attended his fifth Vatican pilgrimage in May as part of an Atlantic bishops delegation, said the Pope stressed the need for greater evangelism on the part of the Canadian church as a way to attract more families.

"That's the challenge we face," MacDonald said in a telephone interview. "The family is the domestic church."

MacDonald said the Pope was right in saying the church has declined in importance for Canadian families. "Secularism has taken care of that," he said.

About 25 Ontario bishops, including auxiliary, retired and Eastern Rites bishops, will take part in the trip, known officially as an ad limina apostolorum, or visit to the "threshold of the Apostles" Peter and Paul. They are to take place every five years.

"It's a pilgrimage," Smith says.

In meetings with bishops from Quebec and Atlantic Canada in the spring, the Pope delivered lectures calling on them to boost church attendance.

"Faced with the many social ills and moral ambiguities which follow in the wake of a secularist ideology, Canadians look to you to be men of hope, preaching and teaching with passion" he said.

Smith, the Bishop of Pembroke and president of the Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he expects the Pope to make a similar call to the Ontario bishops. "I wouldn't be surprised if he touched on that theme."

Most of the ad liminas conducted by the Pope since being elected last year have been with bishops of developing countries, where secularism is less of a concern. In a meeting with bishops from his native Germany, however, the Pope raised similar concerns.

"People do not know God, they do not know Christ. There is a new form of paganism and it is not enough for us to strive to preserve the existing flock," he told the bishops.

"We should give serious thought as to how to achieve a true evangelization in this day and age."

Smith said the Pope is right to warn of the dangers of secularism.

"It is something that is part of our reality in Ontario as well," he said. "In the church there are many people of faith who love the church and are deeply committed. But it is a society as a whole that is tending toward a secularist outlook."

A Statistics Canada report in May found that only 32 per cent of Canadians attend church at least monthly, down from 41 per cent in 1985, but up slightly from 31 per cent in 2000.

When a group of bishops from Quebec visited in early May, the Pope blamed increasing secularism for the shortage of priests in the country.

"The decline in the number of priests, which sometimes makes the celebration of Sunday Mass impossible in certain places, disconcertingly calls into question the place of sacramentality in the life of the church," he said.

"The faithful must be convinced that it is vital to take part regularly in Sunday Mass if their faith is to increase and be expressed coherently."

The Pope did say that the 2002 World Youth Day events in Toronto "have had a positive impact on many young Canadians."

Newly Appointed Bishops to Meet in Vatican In September

Indian Catholic
August 3,2006

VATICAN CITY (ICNS) –- The newly appointed bishops from mission territories of Asia and Africa will meet in Rome in September for a seminar organized by the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the Vatican’s Fides agency said.

The newly appointed Bishops will travel to Rome from 44 different mission areas in Africa, Asia, America and Oceania to take part in a Study Seminar organised by the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples (CEP).

These Seminars for newly appointed Bishop of missionary territories have become a regular feature. The last one, held in September 2004, was attended by 169 Bishops from English-speaking countries.

The Seminar to be held 10 to 23 September at the Pontifical College San Paolo Apostolo in Rome, will be opened by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples Cardinal Ivan Dias who will illustrate the origin, development and duties of the CEP and the main difficulties encountered in missionary activity today.

To follow there will be addresses by CEP secretary Archbishop Robert Sarah on the colleges and universities for which the Congregation is responsible and Archbishop Henryk Hoser, CEP secretary adjunct and president of the Pontifical Mission Societies, one the structures and duties of the Societies.

The daily programme will include two morning conferences followed by question time and discussion and in the afternoon group discussion and sharing emerging reflections. The ‘student’ Bishops will listen to talks by 13 cardinals.

Two CEP officials, Mgr Boarotto and Fr. Koonamparampil explain the activity of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples.

Conferences and reflections will focus on the three duties of the bishop ‘teach, sanctify and govern’ with attention for special situations in mission territories”.

The Seminar will treat various themes including spirituality, formation, evangelisation, social doctrine, inter-religious dialogue, liturgy, family pastoral care, health pastoral care. On Sunday 17 September the Bishops will make a pilgrimage and the Seminar will end on Saturday 23 September with a concelebrated Mass at the tomb of St Peter the Apostle followed by an audience with Pope Benedict XVI.

Where have the nuns gone? Orders thriving despite ‘double-cross’ claim


By Judy Roberts
8/3/2006
National Catholic Register (www.ncregister.com/)

ALTON, Ill. – Sister Mary Biatta Ziegler, a member of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George, sees herself as a “bride of Christ.” Sister Carole Shinnick, a School Sister of Notre Dame, does not.

Sister Mary thinks the title reflects her complete dedication to Christ and the church. Sister Carole, the executive director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, says that, although she has a deep relationship with Christ, the term no longer is used by the church to refer to women religious.

In a new book, former New York Times religion editor Kenneth Briggs suggests that women’s communities have waned because the church hierarchy quashed renewal efforts and did not give religious the freedom to reform their own communities. Writing in Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns (Doubleday), Briggs says cultural change and church politics also contributed to what happened, as did the sisters’ “ingrained loyalty” to ecclesial authority.

Since then, the number of women religious in the United States also has decreased markedly, from 179,954 in 1965 to 67,773 in 2006, and opinions about the reasons are as divergent as the views of Sister Mary and Sister Carole.

Sister Mary Biatta and Sister Carole represent contrasting attitudes about religious life that have emerged in the four decades since the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II left a legacy of 16 documents, including Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on the Renewal of Religious Life).

Although Briggs sees sisters as having been stifled in their quest for reform, he discusses major changes that did occur in religious communities – from the doffing of traditional habits to leaving convents to live in apartments.

It is those changes that many now see as having impacted the number of women entering religious life in recent years.

Mother Anne Marie Holden, superior of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a community that continues to use a habit and made only minor alterations to their life in response to Vatican II, said she believes the message of Perfectae Caritatis was for each community to return to the roots of the founder without throwing away the essentials of the vows. Instead, she said, many sisters gave up living in community, diminishing their appeal to new candidates.

“To me, that’s so sad,” she said. “So often I’ve heard women say, ‘I could do what some religious are doing [and stay] at home.’”

Women who are interested in religious life today, she said, want a solid prayer life and community, as well as an order that wears a habit.

Study under way

Sister Mary Biatta, a spokeswoman for the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, agreed. Young women considering religious life, she said, are looking for an order with a great love for the church manifested by acceptance of its teachings, a visible witness, which most often means a habit, and a life of prayer and community. Yet, she said, those are the very things that changed so drastically for many sisters after Vatican II.

Sister Mary Biatta’s community held the line on change, apart from a modification of the habit in 1969. “I believe we had a very wise superior at that time who was not going to jump on any bandwagon too quickly,” said Sister Mary Biatta, who also serves as vocation director for her community. “I think that was the greatest reason why we’re still getting vocations.” The sisters, based in Alton, Ill., have continued to grow, receiving four to six new candidates each year.

Other more traditionally minded communities have enjoyed notable success as well. The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, based in Nashville, Tenn., for example, took in 16 new postulants last August, and saw 10 profess final vows and another 15 receive the habit as novices. The community of 220 sisters has a median age of 36. The latest entrants come from across the United States, as well as from Poland and Australia. One has a doctorate in mathematics, another was a doctoral candidate in philosophy, many were teachers before entering.

In an interview with Catholic News Service in February, Cardinal Franc Rode, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, said communities of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, such as the Nashville Dominicans, have the lion’s share of new vocations, although their membership comprises only 10 percent of the women religious in the United States.

The Council of Major Superiors represents superiors of 90 communities in the United States, while the Leadership Conference represents 292 communities.

Cardinal Rode said the Leadership Conference “goes more in the direction of secularization,” compared to the more traditional Council of Major Superiors.

Neither the Council of Major Superiors nor the Leadership Conference is aware of any statistics that might back up what Cardinal Rode said. Neither has done any projection as to the future of their communities, and neither is worried about any communities going out of existence any time soon.

Immaculate Heart of Mary Sister Annmarie Sanders, director of communications for the Leadership Conference, said LCWR does not track information on the median age of its member communities. Communities belonging to the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious have a median age of 55.

But a study to determine which communities are getting vocations is getting under way, said Holy Cross Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference. Brother Bednarczyk said his conference is in talks with the Center for Applied Research Apostolate in Washington, D.C., about such a study. Once it’s done, Brother Bednarczyk said, it will be of great service to religious institutes in the United States.

“There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence of who is receiving vocations and who is not, but the fact is we do not have the hard data,” he said.

Deepening holiness

Sister Carole would not speculate on why more traditional communities seem to be attracting vocations. As a result of reform, she said, “We’ve gone from living on a very superficial level where holiness was measured by how deep your pleats and how shiny your shoes were to a place where we now understand and value that the spirituality of all the faithful is a much more real, everyday part of who we are.”

In Double Crossed, Briggs downplays the gains of communities such as the Nashville Dominicans by saying that concern with numbers is more akin to America’s obsession with sales figures and thus not apropos to religious life.

He also calls the growth of traditional communities “fleeting and illusory,” adding, “[They] might flourish, after a fashion, loyal to the directives of nostalgic bishops, but the membership of such communities would likely be skewed in the direction of Catholic conservatism rather than, as in days past, representative of a cross-section of the church.”

Joseph Varacalli, author of The Catholic Experience in America (Greenwood Press), takes another view of such communities, seeing them as part of a restorationist or “neo-orthodox” movement in the church. For restorationists, he writes, the causes of the shortage include “the lack of a fundamental commitment to recruitment, a constant disparagement of the importance of religious life, and the liberalization that has occurred within female religious orders that has made the call far less distinctive, challenging and well defined.”

Sister Carole of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious would disagree.

She does not equate declining numbers of religious women with the reforms that followed Vatican II and thinks that changes in the institutional cycle of the church combined with social trends may have as much to do with the decrease as anything.

“I entered religious life in 1960 when there were only three or four viable options for young women,” she said. “You either became a secretary, a nurse, a teacher or you married.... Most young women graduating from high school today have the whole world in front of them and have all sorts of options to choose from.”

Other factors in the drop in numbers of women religious, Sister Carole said, include Catholic parents having smaller families, making them less likely to encourage their children to pursue religious life, a culture in which heroes for young people are those who achieve celebrity or success, and the deterioration of permanent commitment in the culture.

Benedictine Sister Christine Vladimiroff, prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pa., added that in general, people today are making long-term commitments at a later age. Those who do have an interest in religious life have the option of becoming associated with a community in ways other than making a permanent commitment with vows.

Her community, for instance, has a longstanding oblate program with more than 200 members.

Sister Christine said the Benedictines of Erie, who no longer wear a habit, have retained an emphasis on prayer and community even as some members have moved away from the monastery to live in houses in small groups. The convent currently has three women in formation.

Sister Carole said she doesn’t necessarily see lower numbers of women religious as a negative.

“I think we’re going through a pruning period,” she said. “I’m not sure we should have been as large as we were in the 1950s.... Religious life was never intended to be an enormous number of people. It’s really a very small, powerful, laser-like focus of people. I don’t think we want to interpret what is happening today as diminishment or in a negative way. I think we’re being reshaped for a new age.”

However, Varacalli said those who see new life coming to the church in the form of more traditional orders would argue that there are countless women who would dedicate themselves to religious life if only the church would extend a strong invitation. Thus, he said, the shortage of sisters is artificial and caused by progressive Catholics in charge of religious life.

John Allen devotes a great part of ALL THINGS CATHOLIC for 8/4/06 on nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/
to the Church in Africa...
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As a slogan for the future of world Christianity, a paraphrase of that old tune "Age of Aquarius" by the Fifth Dimension might do the trick: "This is the dawning of the Age of Africa."

As a small, but telling, sign of the times, consider that the new mayor of Kiev in the Ukraine, Leonid Chernovetskyi, belongs to a Pentecostalist church called the "Embassy of God," founded by a charismatic Nigerian immigrant named Sunday Adelaja.

The last place one might expect an eruption of exuberant African-style Christianity is a strict Orthodox stronghold, yet the "Embassy of God" now claims more than 25,000 members across Ukraine and is growing rapidly.

Africa, whose Christian population grew by 6,708 percent in the 20th century, adding something like 16,000 converts a day, has become a big-time exporter of evangelical zeal.

If this reality has yet to fully register on the Catholic radar screen, it may be because African Catholicism does not yet have the high-profile interpreters that Latin America enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s. Figures such as Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez and ex-Franciscan Fr. Leonardo Boff enjoyed massive international success, making Latin American "liberation theology" a household word. So far, there is no similarly prominent African voice.

What's missing, in other words, is a "Gutiérrez of Africa."

One candidate for that role may be Lamin Sanneh, a distinguished Gambian theologian and descendant of the nyanchos, an ancient African royal house, who teaches at the Yale Divinity School. He's also an editor-at-large of The Christian Century.

Sanneh grew up a devout Muslim. His grandfather and uncle were both influential Muslim clerics in West Africa, and he was destined to follow in their footsteps, attending a strict Islamic school where he became well-versed in Arabic and Islamic theology.

Yet the more Sanneh studied, the more he became fascinated by the figure of Jesus in the Koran. [Jesus is mentioned roughly 100 times in the Koran, one of the reasons that Christians initially thought of Islam as a Christian heresy rather than a separate religion.]

Meditating on the deep meaning of the Cross, Sanneh came to what he describes as a decisive conclusion: Suffering is not alien to the nature of God, as his Islamic teachers had insisted, but is at the heart of God's compassion.

The precocious young Muslim then decided to convert to Christianity, well before he had ever been to a Christian liturgy or attended a Christian school. His astonished family initially thought he must have fallen in love with a Christian girl or simply wanted to drink booze, underestimating his determination by a country mile. Sanneh began a long journey, with stops in Methodism and Anglicanism before he became a Catholic in the mid-1990s.

In books such as Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Eerdmans, 2003) Sanneh has traced a compelling vision of African Christianity, which he argues only really began to take shape after Western missionaries had largely abandoned the field. Among experts, his work has a growing following.

If Sanneh is not yet a celebrity, part of the explanation may be that just when you think you have him figured out, he zigs when Western logic dictates he should have zagged.

For example, he bluntly says too many Westerners talk out of both sides of their mouths, reciting the Creed at Mass but not seeming to take it seriously in their personal belief system. Yet he's also a passionate advocate of allowing Christianity to be shaped by the cultures it encounters, a strong critic of colonialism and the injustices associated with globalization, and he believes in an inclusive Catholicism without "litmus tests."

Similarly, Sanneh understands the dangers of jihadist Islam; he largely agrees with Benedict XVI about the difficulties of reconciling Islam with pluralist democratic cultures. Yet he's no Cultural Warrior. He speaks admiringly of the religious seriousness of Muslims, and says he's working on efforts to nudge them into a more moderate direction.

Sanneh is a longtime collaborator of both Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, former President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, as well as Rome's Pontifical Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies -- both reputedly "dovish" on Islam.

Conventional labels of "left" and "right," in other words, just don't fit. On July 24, I sat down with Sanneh in his New Haven, Conn., home. Below are excerpts from our interview.

What will the rise of the South mean?
Believers in the South are less concerned with drawing borders and defending Catholicism in terms of what should be excluded. On the frontier, the borders are moving and dynamic. The Third World orientation to church is different.

In the West, "the church" means the hierarchy. On the frontier, "church" means the People of God who turn up at Mass and receive the sacraments. They're less conflicted about papal authority, papal teachings, drawing borders, and so on. They're passionate about a church that is open to the world, embracing the world, and celebrating life in the world.

As one small example, in the West it's typical for someone not to come Mass if he or she is sick. On the frontier, the typical thing is for people to come to Mass saying we are sick, and we look to God to heal us.

Catholicism talks about the People of God in mission. Frontier Catholicism will help make that a reality. For example, the fellowship groups these people organize are very impressive. Small faith communities are a natural endowment of frontier Catholicism. ... Ordinary Catholics, for example, are doing heroic work in villages. The nature of church leadership in the future will reflect this.

We're beginning to see evidence of the same phenomenon in China. We're seeing the emergence of leadership in dynamic Catholic communities in rural areas, with little formal theological education but with tremendous wisdom. This is a tremendous pastoral gift. Bishops in these communities don't come through the normal career path. Theological education will change to reflect all this. ...

How will we notice it in the United States?
For one thing, the Irish Catholic leadership of the American church will change. It already is changing, becoming more Hispanic. This kind of Catholicism is more active in mission, and it's more Third World-oriented. It will bring a Third World point of view to issues such as immigration and asylum seekers, employment and labor, and so on.

In previous eras, the Irish Catholics affected the inner cities of the United States. As the Protestant elites abandoned the inner cities, Catholic immigrants moved in. They acquired property, their children went to schools, they voted, and eventually had a political impact. Hispanics will do something similar to change American politics.

What about the argument that while the South may have the numbers, the North still has the money and the political power?
There are two forces in the church today. There's what I call "heartland Catholicism" in Europe and North America, which has great endowments, beautiful cathedrals, art, libraries, and great centers of theological study, but a declining membership.

Then there's "frontier Catholicism," which is bursting at the seams, but which has no great legacy in philosophy, theology or art, and few financial resources. Eventually the frontier will overtake the heartland in terms of setting priorities, even if for now it has little money, clout, or administrative infrastructure. For example, I expect that China will help correct the one-sidedness of Western theology.

Let me run some images of southern Catholicism by you. Many believe that southern Catholics, especially in Africa, are more conservative on sexual morality, and that as they become more prominent, it will push Catholicism in a conservative direction on issues such as homosexuality. True or false?
False, because it depends on a completely false premise. There's nowhere in Africa or Asia that I'm aware of where Catholic bishops have supported laws criminalizing homosexual behavior. It's not criminal in Catholic Africa or Catholic Asia. It's where the Muslims are the majority that it's illegal.

I was at the Lambeth Conference [of the Anglican Communion] as an advisor to bishops from the Third World when this issue came up, and they said we don't want it on the agenda. They wanted to discuss issues such as poverty, HIV/AIDS, corruption and violence. In response, the West adopts the strategy of name-calling, that the church in the developing world is primitive, backward, superstitious, and so on.

Another image: Catholic leaders from the Global South, whether bishops, theologians, or pastoral workers, are generally more interested in external issues such as those you listed above than internal Catholic debates. True or false?
Certainly true. In frontier Catholicism, the most important question is, 'What can we do to help our neighbor?' rather than 'What are my rights in the church and how can I protect them, to make sure they're not infringed upon?' That's not Catholicism for them. [Is Sanneh implying, in effect, that the second question is what most concerns those in what he calls 'heartland Catholicism'? This second question seems to me, rather, to preoccupy the 'me-first-and-always' progressives, not traditional 'heartland' Catholics who believe enough not to question the Church!]

We feel a real responsibility for the shaping of society. Our societies are new. They have to reinvent themselves, and Catholics want to be sure that their church makes a significant contribution. It would be fatal to be self-preoccupied, because others will fill the vacuum.
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Speaking of Africa, Fr. J. M. Pérez Charlin of the Missionary Society of Africa, the erstwhile "White Fathers," has recently penned an essay examining the messages of Benedict XVI to bishops from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Congo, Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Cape Verde, Cameroon and Ghana making ad limina visits during the last year. Collectively, Pérez suggests, they amount to a papal "State of the Union" assessment of Africa.

The pope's most direct appeal came in an address to the bishops of Congo: "I invite the international community not to forget Africa."

It's worth noting that over his first year and a half in office, Pope Benedict has spoken about Africa roughly four times more often than he has about sexual morality, though one wouldn't know it from disproportionate Western interest in the sexual topics.

Pérez found 10 themes in Benedict's meditations on Africa: peace and reconciliation, inculturation, formation, unity and diversity, the family, inter-religious dialogue and ecumenism, youth, social inequality, pastoral solidarity, and the upcoming anniversaries of several African churches.

Over the years, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had expressed reservations about "inculturation," worrying about a sort of relativism in which core Christian ideals or practices are set aside in the name of cultural diversity.

Indeed, Benedict picked up this concern with the African bishops, warning that despite widespread polygamy in African cultures, spouses are called to "radical fidelity to the new life" in Christ. He told bishops from Ghana that the church must strive to "purify practices opposed to the gospel."

In general, however, Benedict endorsed efforts to preserve local African cultures threatened by the onslaught of globalization. In particular, he called on Africans to defend their spiritual and moral heritage in the face of an aggressively secularizing, Western-dominated global culture.
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Hmmm..I'd probably want to read more about what Sanneh thinks directly, but something he said struck me as either too naive, too unrealistic and/or too presumptuous and ambitious:

---

Sanneh understands the dangers of jihadist Islam; he largely agrees with Benedict XVI about the difficulties of reconciling Islam with pluralist democratic cultures. Yet he's no Cultural Warrior. He speaks admiringly of the religious seriousness of Muslims, and says he's working on efforts to nudge them into a more moderate direction.

---

Who exactly is the 'them' he intends to nudge in a more moderate direction? All of Islam in general? The jihadists and other extremists? And how exactly does he propose to 'nudge' them? Through words, articles, books? C'mon!

And we always go back to the question of who does one talk to if one wants to have any actual influence on - or even just simple dialog with - the Muslim world!

And for some reason, the bit about Sanneh being buddy-buddy with Archbishop Fitzgerald makes me wonder if we really want an African "Gutierrez" as Allen terms it.

And why would Sanneh interpret Allen's question about being "conservative on homosexuality" as "criminalizing homosexuality"? Look back at the answer he gives to that question! Those who hold a conservative view of homosexuality decry its practice as incompatible with the teachings of the Church, but do not thereby say that it is a criminal act!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/12/2006 2.08]

To counter secular media, Catholic media should seek and transmit the truth, says Vatican official


Vatican City, Aug. 08, 2006 (CNA) - Archbishop Angelo Amato, Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) said in an interview, published this week, that the Catholic media needs to be different from secular news and should seek and transmit the truth of the faith.

In an interview with Polish Catholic weekly “Niedziela”, the Archbishop said that the secular media often chooses to transmit manipulations of the Church’s teaching rather than what it is truly saying. “The media do not publish the whole texts of the Magisterium. The problem is that as a rule they choose (certain) points, often secondary, that can cause polemics or scandals,” the Archbishop said. “One should admit that we very often have the impression that we are living in some artificial virtual reality that is created by media workers and various opinion-forming people.”

However, the Archbishop said, “The Gospel is not a creation of human mind but God's message concerning the reality of man and the universe.” Therefore, Catholic media has a duty to report the whole of the teaching of the Magisterium of the Church, in order to express the truth revealed through it.

Amato said a good example of the partial reporting of the secular media was the coverage of the 2003 CDF document, Dominus Iesus. Rather than focusing on the main theme of the document, which was “the salvific universality of Christ and the Church,” Amato said, “they stressed the ecumenical statements and arguments in order to polemicize against it. Instead of presenting the whole document, the headlines and first articles in international press showed it in alarming tones, stressing that it meant the end of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue and using the stereotyped statements 'closing up', 'return of pre-conciliar theology' or 'anti-ecumenism'.”

“In a word, the presentation of a church document should not be treated as a media event accompanied by sensational and scandalous elements, but as an important event in the Church, an occasion to form, evangelize and catechize people.” And it is the job of the Catholic media to strike the balance.

“We can make a conclusion that on the one hand contemporary media are characterized by certain superficiality and on the other hand they can exert powerful influence. And it is true that the more superficial the media are the more powerful their influence is,” the archbishop said.

While Catholic media should focus on current news items, Amato said, “information about the Church should be reliable, immediate, correct, convincing and positive…Catholic media should be characterized by the attitude of seeking and transmitting the truth and thus being differentiated from secular media, which give news in a polemical way, often resorting to the form of dialogue, which actually serves to make news a relative topic.”

Furthermore, the archbishop said, “Catholic press should not uncritically discuss the subjects of secular media, investigating artificially created 'religious events'.”

Catholic media should remain true to their name and report stories so as to create doubts in the minds of believers, as regards Magisterial teachings. By leaving arguments open-ended in the same way that the secular media does, “there is an impression that the commands of the Magisterium are only opinions which one can agree with or not,” Amato reasoned

In answer to the question of how the Catholic media can, “contribute to continuous formation of the faithful,” Archbishop Amato said they must rely upon the richness of the Catholic tradition as well as the documents themselves to give arguments that will aid Catholics in refuting negative and groundless judgments of the Church. “In order to contribute to the formation of the faithful, Catholic media must be creative, on a highly cultured level, and above all, sensitive to education in faith. The Christian tradition is two thousand years old, so we have at our disposal a large number of works (the Fathers of the Church, great theologians of each epoch, saints, works of various schools of spirituality and liturgical traditions, art), which should be proposed to readers.”

“The Christian civilization is not a museum to visit and admire but a continuous vivid reality, which inspires and supports and which has to be appreciated today,” Amato concluded.

Vatican Recruits African, Asian Priests as Fewer Italians Serve


Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Jess Marquina Marano is a godsend for Pope Benedict XVI.

The 41-year-old Filipino head of the parish of Nosta Signora di Fatima, in a working-class area of Rome, does a job the pope can't find an Italian to do. With a dearth of local priests, the Vatican is turning to Asian, African and Latin American clergy for churches in the shadow of St. Peter's Basilica.

The shortage reflects the faith's decline in Europe and the U.S. amid unpopular stances on issues such as contraception, abortion and women in the Church. The demographic shift among the world's 1 billion Roman Catholics raises the possibility that the next pope will be the first non-European pontiff and may threaten the Holy See's $271 million annual budget, most of which comes from Catholics in the U.S. and Europe.

''The future of the Church is clearly in the developing world,'' said Kevin F. Pecklers, theology professor at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. ''The Vatican very much looks to the U.S. for financial help. If Americans stopped giving, it would be very deeply felt by the Vatican.''

Apathy toward the Vatican, the independent papal state on the Tiber River within Rome, became a subject of debate in Italy after the release last year of the ''The Parable of the Cleric,'' a study of the country's priesthood. It showed that one of every five churches in the Rome area is led by a non-Italian.

Some bishops say easing the ban on celibacy or allowing women into the priesthood might help the vocation appeal to more Catholics in the U.S. and Europe.

Pope Benedict XVI has made it clear that those changes aren't in the cards. Just days before being named pope, he said in a Rome sermon that the Catholic Church mustn't surrender to a ''dictatorship of relativism,'' adding that a smaller, more orthodox church is favorable to compromising on Catholic rules.

Demographic Shifts

In the five years through 2002, the Catholic population increased 22 percent in Africa and 5 percent in Asia, according to Fides, a Vatican news agency. In Europe, the number of Catholics declined 1 percent during the same period.

The number of priests in Europe and North America dropped 5 percent and 6 percent, respectively, from 1999 to 2004, the Statistical Yearbook of the Church shows. Asia's priesthood grew 13 percent and Africa's 18 percent.

The decline in priests began in the 1960s, when young people began questioning institutions such as churches and pursuing social change through protest rather than prayer, said Mary Gultier, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, or CARA, at Georgetown University in Washington.

A Low-Paying Job

''The status of clergy has declined in the U.S. and around the world,'' Gultier said. ''People used to hold up the clergy as a pillar. Now it's seen as just another low-paying, white-collar job.''

The college of cardinals, once dominated by Italians, now gets more than a third of its 120 voting members from developing countries. Italian cardinals account for just 17 percent of the voters, down from 23 percent in the 1978 conclave that elected Pope John Paul II, a Pole. In the two previous elections, Italians had more than 30 percent of the vote.

The number of foreign clergy in Rome is five times the national average, in part because the region's 1,440 parishes are best positioned to tap the pool of foreign priests attending the city's 17 seminaries and Catholic educational institutes.

The higher number is also a result of the historical animosity between Romans and the Vatican. Centuries of Vatican authority created tensions, said Luca Diotallevi, a sociologist in Rome who edited the Parable study.

Tensions in Rome

Before Rome's territories were united with the rest of Italy, the Vatican was the region's biggest property holder, rulemaker, tax collector, and at times torturer and executioner. When the papal states were wrested from Pope Pius IX in 1870, many Italians turned their backs on the Church.

''Having a person so important living in your neighborhood can create a certain sufferance,'' said Marco Fibbi, spokesman for Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who fills in for the pope in administering many of his duties as the Bishop of Rome.

With Rome hostile, the Vatican finds itself turning more and more to the likes of Marano of the Philippines.

''The Church isn't getting basket loads of new priests, but on the other hand it's getting a steadily growing trickle of extremely loyal and motivated'' priests, said John Allen, author of ''The Rise of Benedict XVI: The Inside Story of How the Pope Was Elected and Where He Will Take the Catholic Church'' (Doubleday, 256 pages, $19.95).

Marano, who graduated from the Lateran University in Rome in 1996, prays in Italian and speaks the language with a slight accent. Since taking over the parish in September, Marano said he's been making home visits with the parishioners and developing community contacts.

The cleric attributes his decision to remain in Rome to a vision by his mother, who dreamed she saw him wearing black robes, surrounded by children. His mother's last words before dying were, ''I thank the Lord you came to Rome,'' he said.

Religion Today

By JAY REEVES , 08.10.2006, 12:03 PM
Associated Press
Forbes.com

Twenty-five years ago, Mother Mary Angelica had a vision for Eternal Word Television Network, a channel offering nothing but Roman Catholic programming. She had little more than faith, $200 and a garage to use as a studio.

Now EWTN Global Catholic Network is available in 127 countries and more than 118 million households, and is capping a celebration of its founding in 1981. With viewers from Illinois to India, the satellite channel has grown to include radio and the Internet, and bills itself as the largest religious media network in the world.

The network will stage the last in a series of six public celebrations held around the country this weekend in nearby Birmingham, where Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the Colombian president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, will celebrate Mass on Sunday.

Still based at its original campus in a hilly suburb, EWTN has long had the blessing of the Vatican. And while critics alternately accuse EWTN of being too conservative or too liberal, it prides itself on sticking to the leadership of both Pope John Paul II and his successor, Pope Benedict XVI.

"People need to know what the Vatican is saying, what the pope is teaching," said Sister Mary Catherine, a nun long associated with Mother Angelica and her religious order, the Poor Clare Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. "They hear so much it is hard to know the church's position. EWTN straightens that confusion out."

Sister Mary Catherine is mother vicar of the multimillion-dollar monastery where Mother Angelica lives about 45 miles north of Birmingham in the town of Hanceville. Part of a cloistered order, Sister Mary Catherine talks with visitors from behind a black steel grate that separates her from the world.

Mother Angelica, having suffered a series of strokes, is no longer able to speak at length or tape her "Mother Angelica Live" shows for EWTN. She spends her days with about 40 other nuns at the monastery and the adjoining Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, a 13th century-style church built in the middle of mostly Protestant Alabama.

But Mother Angelica is still the most visible face on the network, which replays "classic" episodes of her shows weekly. Neither her name nor bespectacled image are ever far away at EWTN, where portraits and photos of the 83-year-old sister hang everywhere.

Thousands of visitors each year make pilgrimages to the media empire she founded, snapping picture after picture of control rooms, audio booths and the main studio.

"A lot of people see this as hallowed ground. It's really kind of amazing," said MaryAnn Plastino-Charles, creative director at EWTN. Mass is televised daily worldwide from a small chapel at EWTN, which offers radio and TV programming in English and Spanish.

On Sundays, afternoon services are televised from the huge, gilded church in Hanceville. Robotic cameras are hidden in the chancel area and ceiling, so most visitors can't tell that the ornate sanctuary doubles as a television studio at times.

Accompanied by four relatives, Earlene Reed drove nine hours to Alabama from her home in Oakdale, La., for her second visit to the EWTN studios and the shrine. It left her in awe.

"It's God house," she said. "Seeing the temple gives you the same feeling as seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time."

Perhaps a sign of its influence, EWTN is under attack from both sides of the theological spectrum.

Liberal and moderate Catholics sometimes refer to the network and Mother Angelica as being mouthpieces for the church's right wing, a worldwide force for promoting conservative Vatican policies against abortion, birth control and the ordination of women as priests.

Catholic traditionalists, meanwhile, accuse EWTN of bowing to contemporary society with a mix of rock music, modern thought and overly ecumenical teachings. Catholic attorney Christopher Ferrara earlier this year published a scathing book titled "EWTN: A Network Gone Wrong," which portrays the network as a threat to true Catholicism.

"EWTN is a veritable network of apostasy that is using the medium of television to give modernism a power over Catholics that it has never had before," Ferrara, chief counsel for the American Catholic Lawyers Association, wrote in a column promoting his book.

The network, meanwhile, notes that it has its own theology department that screens everything going on the air to conform with Vatican teaching. "If there's a book we're going to mention, we read it first," said Colin B. Donovan, vice president for theology.

Admirers don't understand how anyone could criticize EWTN or Mother Angelica, a native of Canton, Ohio, who moved to Alabama in 1961 and later began taping shows for Christian networks. Convinced of the need for more Catholic programming on TV, she launched EWTN on Aug. 15, 1981.

Retired Birmingham police officer Johnny Lawrence converted to Catholicism after attending tapings of her TV show 11 years ago. After a lifetime as a Protestant, he said, he was looking for a church "that was true to the Scriptures."

The nonprofit EWTN reported $31.4 million in revenues and $32.9 million in assets on tax forms for 2004, the last year for which records are available online, and an associated catalog division reported making $3.2 million on sales of $4.8 million that year, with the profit going back to the network.

EWTN never charted a formal plan for growth. Instead, Sister Mary Catherine says, Angelica and the other nuns prayed and trusted in God to provide.

Donors paid for expansions to the television and radio headquarters - which resembles nothing if not a multilevel maze - and five families gave an undisclosed amount to build the monastery and shrine, which was consecrated in 1999.

"We struggled at first. We didn't have any money," said Sister Mary Catherine. "Everything grew and grew, and expenses got greater and greater. As we trusted more and more, everything was taken care of."

The best commentary to be made about the recent much-ballyhooed-in-the-mainstream-media 'ordination of women priests' news concerning some American women comes from canon lawyer Edward Peters who runs a canon law online site and a blog called "IN THE LIGHT OF THE LAW: A canon lawyer's blog on current issues".
www.canonlaw.info/2006/08/compounding-their-crimes.html

Compounding their crimes

The pseudo-ordinations that a number of women around the world, and lately in the United States, have attempted are, to borrow Leo XIII's phrase, "absolutely null and utterly void". (See specifically John Paul II, Ordinatio sacerdotalis, n. 4). Last summer (blog of 6 July 2005) I explained how such affronts to divine and canon law can and will result in excommunication, although, as I argued, not by the automatic process (1983 CIC 1314) that many simply assumed would apply to such cases. Here I need to make a different point.

To no one's great surprise, some of these women have gone on to attempt to celebrate the Eucharist. Canonically speaking, what they have done is to simulate the Mass, which action is a distinct crime under canon law (1983 CIC 1378 § 2, n. 1).

Moreover, the penalty for Eucharistic simulation is automatic, specifically, interdict, which differs from excommunication in a few respects (1983 CIC 1332). The differences need not detain us, though, for 1983 CIC 1378 § 3 allows the penalty of interdict to be increased to excommunication in cases of simulation "according to the gravity of the delict."

It should be obvious that the circumstances surrounding these simulated liturgies are quite sufficient to support the augmentation of the penalty.

The practical consequence is this: those women who, after undergoing pseudo-ordination, compound their canonical crimes by simulating Holy Mass, cannot be restored to full communion (basically per 1983 CIC 1347 and 1358) upon repentance from their attempted ordinations; they must also repent of their mockeries against the Mass.

Which means the rest of us have more praying and fasting to do.

----------------------------------------------------------------

But will they repent? Are they capable of repenting? They don't think they have anything to repent for. In fact, they believe they are heroes...er, heroines!, as well as 'martyrs' for their 'cause'. And don't you just suspect that much of what impels their lunacy is precisely an overweeening desire to be a 'hero' written up in the media?

Out of sheer constitutional distaste for misguided 'feminism', to begin with, and for stunts in general, I deliberately avoided posting anything about this latest instance of ego-driven defiance of the Magisterium in the travesty of ordination and Roman Catholic priesthood carried on by some women. EGO is the gorilla that so thoroughly occupies the space they call their mind that not only do they not see the gorilla, they have come to embody the gorilla.

But it's good to have an expert spell out pertinent facts like Dr. Peters does above....And we can only continue to pray that the Holy Spirit exorcises their inner gorillas and keep others from the same folly.

[An update for those who responded to a request for prayers for Cardinal George in our People in Need of Prayers thread.]


A grateful Cardinal George discharged from hospital

Chicago, Aug. 17, 2006 (CNA) - Cardinal Francis George was clearly in good spirits yesterday after being discharged from Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, three weeks after major surgery.

Cardinal George, 69, entered the hospital July 27 to remove his cancerous bladder, prostate and part of his right ureter. Doctors believe he is now cancer-free.

"I feel very good -- nice to be out on a good day like this," the cardinal told reporters while leaving the hospital on crutches. "I feel very grateful to God and especially to all those who prayed for me, who sustained me, who spoke to the Lord about me. I felt that support and I'm very grateful."

"I'm not in any pain now and I wasn't in pain then. But there was a lot of pain in between and I'm a little weaker now, obviously, but I'm on my way to recovery, hopefully, with God's help," the cardinal said.

Dr. Myles Sheehan, the cardinal's personal physician and a Jesuit priest, said the cardinal will need to use crutches until his legs, weakened by his long hospital stay, could be strengthened through physical rehabilitation.

A physical therapist will work with Cardinal George in the coming weeks. The cardinal had polio as a child and normally wears a brace on his leg and walks with a limp.

"Probably we could have let him go earlier last week if it wasn't for some of the extra physical therapy and leg strengthening that we wanted to do before he went home," Fr. Sheehan told reporters.

Cardinal George is expected to return to work on a limited schedule at his residence after Labor Day, and hopes to resume his full schedule in October.

John Paul I's Cause Expected to Advance
Diocesan Phase Might End in November

VATICAN CITY, AUG. 17, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The vice postulator of the cause for the beatification of Pope John Paul I announced that the diocesan phase of the process could end this year.

The announcement, reported on Vatican Radio, was made public on the occasion of the presentation of the celebrations for the 28th anniversary of the election to the papacy of the patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani. The celebrations will be held Aug. 26.

Speaking of John Paul I's birthplace, Canale d'Agordo, the vice postulator, Monsignor Giorgio Lise, revealed that "170 witnesses have been heard in 190 sessions; there are some missing in Rome and Vittorio Veneto. Therefore, the diocesan phase is drawing to a close and, in November, on the patronal feast of St. Martin, on the 11th of that month, it might well be concluded."

According to the vice postulator, the focus has been on the purported miracle that occurred in Puglia, in southern Italy. A man says he was cured of a tumor after praying to God for the grace through the Pontiff's intercession.

The diocesan phase of the cause began in Belluno in 2003. Once the diocesan phase is concluded, the cause will be taken up by the Vatican Congregation for Saints' Causes.

Albino Luciani, born on Oct. 17, 1912, was elected Pope on the second day of the conclave, on Aug. 26, 1978. He died a month later.

Experts hope to get derailed Catholic-Orthodox dialogue back on track

By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Theological dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox churches has been derailed for six years. In mid-September, 60 ecumenical experts will try to get it back on track.

The Catholic-Orthodox international dialogue commission is meeting in the Serbian capital of Belgrade Sept. 18-25, in what Pope Benedict XVI has optimistically described as a "new phase in dialogue."

That the encounter is taking place at all has been described as a big step forward by Vatican officials. Representatives from 10 Orthodox churches, including the Russian Orthodox Church, will attend.

But church officials also recognize that it wouldn't take much to send the whole enterprise off the rails again.

For one thing, the two main topics of the meeting are papal primacy and the role of Eastern Catholic churches -- two of the sorest points in Catholic-Orthodox relations.

In fact, it was the re-emergence of Eastern Catholic churches in post-communist Eastern Europe that so troubled the mixed commission's meetings throughout the 1990s. After an acrimonious meeting in Emmitsburg, Md., in 2000, the dialogue was suspended.

Orthodox leaders who met with Vatican officials in a planning session late last year wanted these two issues high on the agenda, according to Vatican sources. The Orthodox still feel threatened by the resurgence of Eastern Catholic churches and continue to have doubts about how papal authority would work in a reunified church.

The hope on the Vatican side is that these topics will be examined in a new theological framework, that of the church as "koinonia" or communion, and not on the emotional level that has characterized past discussions.

"No one should think this dialogue is going to be easy or will solve these two questions, or other questions, in the short term," said one Vatican official.

But although they are downplaying immediate expectations, Vatican sources pointed to several reasons for cautious optimism.

For one thing, there is a new pope -- a fact that, at least in a psychological sense, represents a new page for dialogue. While Pope John Paul II spoke often and movingly about the need to reunite the Western and Eastern churches, his insistence on visiting traditionally Orthodox countries, with or without an invitation from the Orthodox, sometimes provoked misgivings.

Vatican insiders say Pope Benedict is unlikely to make those kinds of trips. Nor is the pope pressing for a visit to Moscow, as his predecessor did. These sources also said Pope Benedict has taken a more detailed interest in the content of dialogue than his predecessor, who was weakened by illness in his later years.

Another plus is that many of the Orthodox dialogue experts know Pope Benedict, have read his works and trust him as a theologian. For Orthodox leaders who, for historical reasons, viewed Pope John Paul's Polish background as an obstacle, the German pope carries no such handicap.

Vatican officials say there's another reason the Belgrade meeting could go well: Participants will not have to start from scratch. They already have a draft text that addresses papal primacy and Eastern Catholic churches; it was worked out by experts from both sides in 1990, but never discussed by the full commission.

Finally, some experts on the Catholic side believe that Orthodox thinking on papal primacy may be changing slowly.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's chief ecumenist and the head of its delegation to Belgrade, hosted an important Catholic-Orthodox symposium in 2003 on the role of the pope. Cardinal Kasper told participants that the climate of discussion on this topic had changed considerably, with greater openness to a papal "ministry of unity" in today's fragmented world.

At the same symposium, Metropolitan John of Pergamon from the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul, Turkey, made careful arguments in favor of a "universal primacy" and said the Orthodox churches could accept it as long as it did not undermine the ecclesiological integrity of any local church.

Metropolitan John is the Orthodox co-chairman of the international theological dialogue commission, and Vatican officials will be closely following what he says in Belgrade.

One critical issue identified by the metropolitan at the 2003 symposium was whether the universal church has ecclesiological priority over the local church. That's a complex question, and it's been percolating inside the Vatican for years.

Both Orthodox and Catholics agree that sensitivity over papal primacy is largely conditioned by history. But it is not forgotten history.

One small example surfaced earlier this year, when Pope Benedict unceremoniously dropped the longstanding title "patriarch of the West." The Vatican said the title was historically obsolete and theologically imprecise and that its renunciation should benefit ecumenical dialogue.

But some Orthodox leaders saw it differently, saying the change in effect emphasized the assertion of a more universal authority by the pope.

The issue has already popped up in some local Catholic-Orthodox dialogues, and Vatican officials will not be surprised to hear it raised in Belgrade.

No one at the Vatican expects the Catholic delegation to come home from Belgrade waving a major agreement with the Orthodox. For many, if the dialogue is still going when the meeting ends, it will be marked a success.

Date: 2006-08-18

Compendium of Catechism Now Online


VATICAN CITY, AUG. 18, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is now available on the Internet in English.

In addition to English, the Compendium is available online in Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.

The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, first published in 2005, is the second best-selling Catholic book this year, after the encyclical "Deus Caritas Est."

The Compendium includes 589 questions and answers on the Catholic faith.

Link to Compendium of the Catechism


NEW YORK, AUG. 21, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The online Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church may be found at:

www.vatican.va/archive/ccc/index.htm

[Modificato da benefan 22/08/2006 4.46]