NOTABLES - People who make the news, not necessarily Church-related

Cardinal Scola to head Milan Archdiocese

by John Thavis
CNS
June 28, 2011

VATICAN CITY — Cardinal Angelo Scola was named this morning as the new head of the Archdiocese of Milan, Italy’s largest diocese.

The 69-year-old cardinal, a native of Milan, has been patriarch of Venice since 2002, where he made a reputation as a very active pastor and developed a type of Catholic think-tank on Middle Eastern issues.

During the last conclave, Cardinal Scola’s name was on the short list of papabili. Today’s appointment will no doubt keep him in the mix when that topic comes up again.

In 2004, I visited Venice several times to do an in-depth profile on Cardinal Scola. I found him to be as energetic as advertised on a pastoral level, and certainly one of Italy’s more intellectual church leaders. In Milan, an archdiocese of nearly 5 million Catholics, he’ll face a whole new set of challenges.


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A papal front-runner may get a boost in Milan

by John Allen
National Catholic Reporter
Jun. 24, 2011

Editor's Note: Cardinal Angelo Scola was named this morning as the new head of the Archdiocese of Milan, Italy's largest diocese. Following is a look at who Scola is and what his appointment to Milan might mean. The article was written by NCR senior correspondent John L. Allen, Jr., for the June 24 print issue of National Catholic Reporter, before Scola's appointment was announced.

ANALYSIS

Sometimes a job is important not only for what its occupant does, but what it symbolizes. In the Catholic church there’s no better example than the archbishop of Milan, Italy, whose incumbent is almost automatically considered tanto papabile, i.e., a leading candidate to become the next pope.

In the 20th century, two archbishops of Milan went on to the papacy, Pius XI and Paul VI, while two others, Cardinals Carlo Maria Martini and Dionigi Tettamanzi, spent more or less their entire tenures surrounded by speculation over their future prospects.

That background makes the current countdown toward Pope Benedict XVI’s choice for who will take over from Tettamanzi, which is expected soon, a matter of interest across the entire Catholic world. According to veteran Vatican writer Andrea Tornielli, the top candidate is an already familiar face: Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice, Italy.

If Scola does indeed go to Milan, he will likely be touted in the media as a sort of crown prince of Catholicism -- the lead item in every story or broadcast about the next conclave, from now until whenever it occurs.

Even without the cachet of the papal sweepstakes, church-watchers have long regarded the 69-year-old Scola as an intriguing figure. He’s very much in sync theologically with the current pontificate, but with a more extroverted personality, a deeply global perspective, and somewhat greater optimism about the church’s prospects in the here and now.

Born in 1941 in Malgrate, Italy, a small town in the Lombardy region, Scola comes from a humble background -- his father was a truck driver, his mother a housewife. He attended the University of the Sacred Heart in Milan in the early 1960s, where he became a friend and disciple of an Italian priest named Msgr. Luigi Giussani, founder of the “Communion and Liberation” movement.

At the time, Italians saw Communion and Liberation as a conservative alternative both to the “Catholic Action” movement and to the broadly progressive ethos of the Milan archdiocese under Cardinals Giovanni Battista Montini (who became Paul VI) and Giovanni Colombo.

Scola later studied at the prestigious University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where his area of interest was theological anthropology. He was drawn to thinkers who had been part of the reform-minded majority at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), but who later developed reservations about the direction of the postconciliar church. He was especially influenced by Cardinal Henri de Lubac and Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, and later published book-length interviews with both theologians.

Scola became a cofounder of the Italian edition of Communio, the international theological journal founded as a conservative counterpoint to Concilium, the journal of the council’s progressive wing. From 1986 to 1991, Scola served as a consultor for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was in charge. In 1995, he was named rector of the Lateran University in Rome.

In 1982 Scola was appointed to the faculty at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, created to defend Catholic teaching on issues such as divorce, artificial reproduction, cloning, homosexuality and abortion. During John Paul’s papacy, figures associated with the institute at The Catholic University of America in Washington served as architects of the struggle against what the late pope described as a “culture of death” in the secular West.

Benedict is himself a longtime admirer of both Giussani and Communion and Liberation; in 2005, shortly before his election to the papacy, he volunteered to lead Giussani’s funeral Mass. To illustrate the influence those ties afford Scola, he was the one who suggested that Benedict consider creating a Vatican department dedicated to “New Evangelization,” which the pontiff promptly did. The idea actually originated with Giussani.

In early May, Scola presided over Benedict’s brief visit to Venice, where the pontiff recalled the three patriarchs of Venice in the 20th century who went on to become popes: Pius X, John XXIII, and John Paul I. (Traditionally the archbishop of Venice carries the title of “Patriarch.”) Though Benedict didn’t connect the dots, the takeaway seemed unmistakable: It could happen again.

Given its history, Venice has always styled itself as a bridge between cultures, and Scola has embraced that legacy since taking over in January 2002. One signature cause is his “Oasis Foundation,” launched in 2004 to promote solidarity among Christians in the Middle East and dialogue with the Islamic world.

In a 2010 interview with NCR, Scola distinguished among three currents in Islam: the moderates, who he said are generally not representative of the Muslim “street”; the radicals, who are not open to dialogue; and “traditional Islam,” meaning the vast majority of observant Muslims generally not represented in official channels of conversation. One aim of Oasis, he said, is to engage traditional Islam.

As opposed to some European prelates, Scola is typically not inclined to handwringing about the “silent apostasy,” in the words of John Paul II, of the West. Instead, Scola tends to believe that Christianity still has culture-shaping capacity, if it finds the nerve to make its case effectively.

That profile has made Scola a point of reference both in the global church and in the Vatican. In 2005, for instance, he served as the relator, or chairman, for the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist.

To be sure, until an official announcement comes down, there’s no guarantee that Scola will wind up in Milan. According to Tornielli’s report, others in the running include Bishop Francesco Lambiasi of Rimini, Italy (where Communion and Liberation’s massive annual meeting takes place); Msgr. Aldo Giordano, the Vatican’s representative to the Council of Europe; and Archbishop Pietro Parolin, a respected former official of the Secretariat of State now serving as the pope’s ambassador in Venezuela.

Yet even if Scola stays put, he could still be a formidable contender heading into a conclave. Without knowing how Milan will shake out, Irish bookmaker Paddy Power already has Scola down as a 6-1 favorite to be the next pope.

No matter what his address over the next few years, therefore, Cardinal Angelo Scola is a prelate well worth tracking.

Wait till the mainstream media seize on this. This is such a shame.


Order accuses Father Corapi of sexual, financial wrongdoing, falsehoods

By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service
July 5, 2011

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Father John A. Corapi was involved in "years of cohabitation" with a former prostitute, repeated abuse of alcohol and drugs and "serious violation" of his promise of poverty, according to a fact-finding team appointed by his religious order.

Father Corapi, who recently announced he would leave the priesthood because he could not get a "fair hearing" on misconduct allegations against him, has been ordered by the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity to return to live at the order's regional headquarters in Robstown, Texas, and to dismiss a lawsuit against the woman whose accusations prompted the investigation.

"Catholics should understand that (the order) does not consider Father John Corapi as fit for ministry," said a July 5 news release from Father Gerard Sheehan, regional priest servant for the order, commonly known as SOLT.

Although Father Corapi's ministry "has inspired thousands of faithful Catholics," the news release said, he is "now misleading these individuals through his false statements and characterizations."

"It is for these Catholics that SOLT, by means of this announcement, seeks to set the record straight," it added.

There was no immediate response to the announcement from Father Corapi.

The order said its three-member fact-finding team had gathered information "from Father Corapi's emails, various witnesses and public sources" and had concluded that the priest:

-- "Did have sexual relations and years of cohabitation (in California and Montana) with a woman known to him, when the relationship began, as a prostitute."

-- "Repeatedly abused alcohol and drugs."

-- "Has recently engaged in sexting activity with one or more women in Montana."

-- "Holds legal title to over $1 million in real estate, numerous luxury vehicles, motorcycles, an ATV, a boat dock and several motor boats, which is a serious violation of his promise of poverty as a perpetually professed member of this society."

Although he did not name them, Father Sheehan said the fact-finding team was made up of a priest specializing in canon law, a psychiatrist and a lawyer, each of whom has a national reputation and "substantial experience in ecclesiastical processes related to priest disciplinary issues."

Two of the three were members of religious orders, and the third was a layperson. Two were men and one was a woman, he said.

As the team was carrying out its work, Father Corapi filed a civil suit against his principal accuser and then offered $100,000 for her silence, the news release said. Other key witnesses who "may have negotiated contracts ... that precluded them from speaking" with the team declined to answer its questions or provide documents, it said.

When the fact-finding team asked Father Corapi to dismiss the lawsuit and release individuals from their contractual obligations to remain silent, "he refused to do so and, through his canonical advocate, stated, 'It is not possible for Father Corapi to answer the commission's questions at this time,'" the news release added.

Father Corapi, 64, announced June 17 -- two days before the 20th anniversary of his priestly ordination -- in a YouTube video and blog posting that he would leave the priesthood.

"For 20 years I did my best to guard and feed the sheep," he said in the blog posting. "Now, based on a totally unsubstantiated, undocumented allegation from a demonstrably troubled person I was thrown out like yesterday's garbage. I accept that. Perhaps I deserve that."

Father Corapi had been highly visible for several years as a speaker and preacher, including a program on the Eternal Word Television Network. EWTN took his show off its schedule shortly after his suspension, saying it would not knowingly put on the air a priest whose faculties had been suspended.

The SOLT news release said Father Sheehan would not be available for further comment because of the order's general chapter July 5-23.

Hi, I heard that the Patriarch of Venice is going to be the Archbishop of Milan too.
Who will be his successor in Venice?

This is sad news and hasn't even been reported in the US yet. Cardinal Foley was very well known and liked.


US Cardinal John Patrick Foley dies

Vatican Radio
Dec. 11, 2011

Cardinal John Patrick Foley, Grand Master Emeritus of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem died today. He was 76. The Cardinal had been suffering from Leukaemia and had returned to Philadelphia in the US.


In his comments to Vatican Radios Italian service, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, Father Federico Lombardi said “everyone who had ever met Cardinal Foley admired and loved him for his kindness and for his spirituality.”

Father Lombardi also recalled the Cardinal’s work in the field of communication as President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications saying, he was always well prepared and very competent.

He added, that he had just received in the last few days a letter from Cardinal Foley thanking him for a copy of the newly published book on the History of Vatican Radio.


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Here is more detail about the cardinal.


Cardinal Foley dies; was Vatican communications chief, Mideast advocate

By Catholic News Service
Dec. 11, 2011

DARBY, Pa. (CNS) -- U.S. Cardinal John P. Foley, who spent more than two decades leading the church's social communications council and later worked for the church in the Middle East, died Dec. 11 after a battle with leukemia. The cardinal, who had been residing at Villa St. Joseph, the home for retired Philadelphia archdiocesan priests, was 76.

Cardinal Foley's media-friendly style and quick sense of humor shone in person and throughout the numerous speeches and homilies he delivered around the world. He often spoke of the joys of working for the church, telling his audiences that while the pay often is not great "the benefits are out of this world."

Last February he retired from his post as grand master of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, a chivalric organization dedicated to supporting the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and to responding to the needs of Catholics in the Holy Land.

Addressing the 2010 Synod of Bishops on the Middle East, he said he was convinced that "the continued tension between the Israelis and the Palestinians has contributed greatly to the turmoil in all of the Middle East and also to the growth of Islamic fundamentalism."

"While many, including the Holy See, have suggested a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the more time passes, the more difficult such a solution becomes, as the building of Israeli settlements and Israeli-controlled infrastructure in East Jerusalem and in other parts of the West Bank make increasingly difficult the development of a viable and integral Palestinian state," the cardinal said.

He told participants in a U.S.-based conference on the Holy Land in 2009, "The most tragic thing I have seen is the miles-long wall that separates Jerusalem from Bethlehem and separates families and keeps farmers from the land that has been in their families for generations. It is humiliating and distressing."

The cardinal said he understood Israel's need for security but added, "many of these measures raise serious human rights issues that they refuse to acknowledge and address."

To many, the cardinal was the voice they heard giving commentary during the pope's Christmas midnight Mass. For 25 years, beginning in 1984, his voice was heard not only in North America, but also Asia, Africa, Europe and, for many years, Australia.

The longtime journalist told Catholic News Service in 2007 that he always tried to take "a positive approach toward the means of communication and toward the people who run them." For decades he helped media gain access to cover or rebroadcast Vatican events.

As head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications from 1984 to 2009, the cardinal took the lead in articulating Catholic policy with regard to the media. Under his leadership, the council issued separate documents on ethical standards in advertising, communications and the Internet. It also produced a document denouncing pornography.

He helped launch the first Catholic program bank for Catholic broadcasters and encouraged efforts to narrow the "digital divide" separating countries where there is widespread access to the Internet and where there is almost none either because of poverty or government efforts to restrict citizens' access to information.

His time at the council coincided with the unfolding of the clergy sex abuse scandal -- first in North America, then in other parts of the world. He said the sexual abuse of children by priests was only "the tip of an iceberg" of the wider scope of abuse perpetrated against the world's children.

"A much wider and even more tragic story of child abuse that takes place, first of all, in the family and then, in many ways, throughout society," he said.

However, the cardinal also said church officials must be honest about the situation. In dealing with the sex abuse scandal, he said, the church's reaction must be "to exercise virtue and, in the absence of virtue, exercise candor, which is a virtue itself. We have to be honest. We cannot deny what happened."

He said Catholic journalists sometimes have "encountered the situation of those who did not want others to learn about what they did ... because it was bad news."

"We know, as journalists, that the more some people try to cover up bad news, the more likely it is to be known," he said.

Born in the Philadelphia suburb of Darby on Nov. 11, 1935, he was ordained a priest in Philadelphia when he was 26.

The graduate of the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York said his media experience dated back to the seventh grade, when he started writing radio plays on the lives of saints. Not only were his plays aired but, at age 14, he was asked to be an announcer for Sunday morning programming for what was then WJMJ in Philadelphia.

Between stints as assistant editor of Philadelphia's archdiocesan paper, The Catholic Standard & Times, in the 1960s, he completed his graduate studies in philosophy in Rome, where he also worked as a news reporter. His beat included covering the Second Vatican Council from 1963 to 1965.

In 1970, he was appointed editor of the archdiocesan paper, a position he held until Pope John Paul II named him an archbishop and appointed him head of the social communications council in 1984.

Cardinal Foley has received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Catholic Press Association's highest prize, the St. Francis de Sales Award.

Noted atheist and recent advocate to have the Pope arrested during his trip to England dies from cancer.


Author, pundit Christopher Hitchens dies at 62

By Hillel Italie,
Associated Press
Dec. 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens, the author, essayist and polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of causes on the left and right and wrote the provocative best-seller "God is Not Great," died Thursday night after a long battle with cancer. He was 62.

Hitchens' death was announced in a statement from Conde Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair magazine. The statement says he died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer.

"There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was atthe bar," said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. "Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."

A most-engaged, prolific and public intellectual who enjoyed his drink (enough to "to kill or stun the average mule") and cigarettes, he announced in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer of the esophagus and canceled a tour for his memoir "Hitch-22."

Hitchens, a frequent television commentator and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other publications, had become a popular author in 2007 thanks to "God is Not Great," a manifesto for atheists that defied a recent trend of religious works. Cancer humbled, but did not mellow him. Even after his diagnosis, his columns appeared weekly, savaging the royal family or reveling in the death of Osama bin Laden.

"I love the imagery of struggle," he wrote about his illness in an August 2010 essay in Vanity Fair. "I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."

Eloquent and intemperate, bawdy and urbane, he was an acknowledged contrarian and contradiction -- half-Christian, half-Jewish and fully non-believing; a native of England who settled in America; a former Trotskyite who backed the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush. But his passions remained constant and enemies of his youth, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa, remained hated.

I thought this was kind of inspirational.


Special Father's Day for newly ordained Macomb native, 70

By Tom Dermody
The Catholic Post
Feb. 5, 2012

MACOMB -- As a NASA engineer involved in the Apollo and shuttle projects, Roy Runkle formerly launched rockets into space.

Now, as a newly ordained priest at age 70, the Macomb native says with a smile that he is “launching souls to heaven.”

This Father’s Day weekend had special meaning for Father Roy Runkle --- a widower, father, and grandfather who entered the seminary in 2005 after the death of his wife of 37 years, Mary. Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Birmingham in Alabama on June 6, Father Runkle was the principal celebrant and homilist of all three Masses June 19-20 at the church of his childhood, St. Paul’s Parish.

He is the first native son of St. Paul’s to be ordained a priest, according to Msgr. Richard Pricco, pastor.

“There were a lot of familiar faces, even back from when I was in grade school,” Father Runkle, the farm-raised son of Mildred and the late Harold Runkle, told The Catholic Post Sunday afternoon.

In his preaching last weekend, Father Runkle spoke of his own father’s influence, including that he “taught us how to pray.” Father Runkle recalled nightly family rosaries, and how he would sometimes accompany his father to his weekly adoration hour at St. Paul’s Church. Harold Runkle volunteered for the midnight to 1 a.m. prayer shift.

“We’d go back home and, as a farmer, he would get up at 4 a.m. or so. That made a real impression on me,” said Father Runkle.

FROM SPACE TO SEMINARY

Young Roy Runkle would go on to make a real impression on the U.S. space program. After obtaining a degree in physics from Western Illinois University, he landed a job at NASA in Huntsville. He eventually helped design a deployment mechanism for the lunar rover --- the dune-buggy like vehicle used to transport astronauts further around the moon’s surface during the last three Apollo missions.

When the Apollo program gave way to space shuttle missions, Roy Runkle engineered the “world’s largest parachutes” -- three chutes weighing 2,200-pounds each -- to float the massive solid rocket boosters safely back to an ocean splashdown after lift-off.

While as a boy he had felt God’s “nudge” toward the priesthood, it “was never the right time.” He even considered it early in his career, “but then I met Mary.” He called his wife “the closest thing to a saint I’ll ever know.”

They had a daughter, Desiree, who is now married and has two children.

The Runkles were active members of Good Shepherd Parish in Huntsville. Roy served two terms as president of the parish council. He helped start a parish tithe program in which 10 percent of parish income is donated to outside causes, and led the parish’s Habitat for Humanity effort to construct a home each year for a needy community member. Both Roy and Mary made a Cursillo retreat in 1984, and Mary was active in bell choir and painted the image of the Good Shepherd that hangs in the church.

In 2003, Mary was diagnosed with liver cancer and given three months to live. She battled for two years, long enough to see her grandson born.

Early on the morning of the Fourth of July, 2005, it was evident Mary would soon die. At 5 a.m., Roy called his parish pastor, who came and administered the sacramental anointing of the sick.

Father Roy Runkle will never forget what happened at that moment.

“For me, the room lit up with bright lights -- and I knew angels were present,” he recalls. “No one else saw them.” But he knew he wanted to be an instrument of such grace as well.

After the funeral, he told the pastor of his experience and desire to pursue the priesthood.

“He told me ‘I’m not surprised, but let’s give it another two months.’” Two months later, the desire remained.

While her father was certain of his new direction, his daughter wasn’t. “She’d just lost her mother and was worried she would now be ‘losing’ her father and the grandfather of her children, too,” said Father Runkle. “I said I would always be those things, but that God was asking her to share me. And she saw that.”

He enrolled at Blessed John XXII Seminary in Massachussetts, which specializes in older vocations. “It was great,” he said. “I never doubted for a moment I was in the right place.”

Father Runkle was ordained on June 6, and in July begins his first assignment as associate pastor of St. John the Baptist Parish in Madison, Ala., which is very near Huntsville.

“God is good,” he said of the appointment near his family -- including his mother, now 92 and a resident of a nursing home in Huntsville.

The former NASA official is grateful for how God has engineered his life.

“God has blessed me with great parents, a wonderful job, a wonderful marriage and family,” he said. Now he hopes to bring joy and hope to others as a priest.

“I’m not worthy, but God uses us as his hands and feet,” he said, adding he hopes to be “a loving, caring priest.”

He expressed gratitude to Msgr. Pricco for his graciousness last week, and said “without exception” he has been welcomed by the priests of his new diocese.

I stumbled upon this article from 3 1/2 years ago about one of the two princesses who are great fans of Benedict and who seem to have reformed their lives in part because of him. I remember when Alessandra's book about Benedict's Bavaria was published but I have never read it. I think it would be quite interesting as would the other one mentioned in the article about her experiences as a volunteer at Lourdes.


Alessandra Borghese: the prodigal daughter

The Telegraph
13 Jun 2008


European aristocrat, Princess Alessandra Borghese, talks to Peter Stanford about her well-documented return to Catholicism


The reformed rake is a familiar figure in the religious canon from the parable of the prodigal son onwards.

Princess Alessandra Borghese, 44-year-old scion of one of the grandest of Italian noble families, famous for its popes, cardinals and glorious villa and park in the centre of Rome, may never quite have been a rake, but otherwise neatly fits the mould.

In the 1990s, she was one of those European aristocrats whose names we came to know only because they were forever appearing in glossy magazines, attending all the right grand weddings and openings. She even published an A-to-Z guide to good manners with her great friend, the German Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, better known in the society pages as the 'punk princess' or 'Princess TNT'.

Alessandra Borghese's personal wealth - her mother, Countess Fabrizia Citterio, was one of the heirs to the San Pellegrino water fortune- funded her very own cultural centre in Rome, and she married into more money in the form Greek shipping tycoon, Constantine Niarcose. All of which feels a million miles away from the slight, guarded woman sitting opposite me, sipping an espresso in a London café, her clothes simple, her face without a hint of make-up, and her conversation all about God.

In 1999, she recalls, looking me straight in the eye, she had a meeting. 'Catholicism is not a philosophy, neither is it a theology, but it is a meeting with a person. So the moment you meet Jesus Christ, your life can change radically. That is when I started to look at everything differently.' Borghese has since that meeting, become Italy's best-known born-again Catholic.

Her 2004 book, With New Eyes, the story of her return to the fold, was a bestseller in her home country and over much of Catholic Europe. She has followed it with four other equally successful, equally personal, devotional works, including In The Footsteps of Joseph Ratzinger, her first outing in English, published this month.

As we talk, I find myself more than once referring to her conversion, but, as she points out, that is not the right word for she was raised Catholic. "I was brought up to know that my family had given a very important pope to the church, Paul V [at the start of the seventeenth century], so important that his name is written on the façade of Saint Peter's Basilica itself, along with our coat of arms.'

As she quotes the Latin inscription, she raises the little finger of her left hand to show me the same crest on the small ring she is wearing. 'But for me growing up, that was all history. I didn't participate in it.' She was, she says, 'very conformist' as a young woman. 'I couldn't care less about praying, about the Church, I had to be emancipated.'

Her distaste for such a notion is immediately apparent but is revealed in full later, when the question of women priests -banned by Catholicism - comes up. 'If you're Catholic and want to be a woman priest,' she protests, 'join the Anglicans or the Protestants. Why do you want to change the Catholic tradition according to your point of view? If you look at Holy Mary, you see that her grandeur was not because she did anything, but because she was able to stand behind something bigger.' It is not a position that sits easily with contemporary secular norms, but Borghese has a rather aristocratic disdain for conventional wisdom.

Her attachment to traditional Catholic values is as fierce as it is unapologetic. On the evening of our meeting, she is due to address an audience at the Brompton Oratory, bastion of the unreformed approach to the faith in London.

Her own successful career, as an author, has nothing to do with female emancipation, she insists. 'Sometimes you should try to make a step back, not forward, and you can be very useful to a bigger scheme. I know its difficult because we live in a society where we are all pushed to be in front, to be visible. If you don't appear, you don't exist. You have to be seen, be successful, be good looking, be cool. But it just isn't true.'

There is, arguably, an autobiographical reference to her own younger days in there. Was there a particular trigger for her return to Catholicism? The same date she quotes for it was also, I point out, the year when her husband died, reportedly of a cocaine overdose. 'No, it was not because of that. I wouldn't relate it to that.'

Up to now fluent, she suddenly gets flustered. 'No, no'. She pauses. 'My reasons were more banal. That is why I wanted to write it. Because it can happen to anyone.'

When With New Eyes first appeared, she recalls, she was overwhelmed by letters from people who had had similar experiences of drawing closer to God. Or who wanted that to happen. 'I think they felt encouraged because I was such an inappropriate person for this to happen to. But that is what made me so appropriate.'

It is a telling point, and, in making it, her confidence returns quickly. But what gives Borghese's new book its particular charm is that, for all her protestations of being ordinary, she clearly retains a privileged entrée in church circles. As In The Footsteps of Joseph Ratzinger demonstrates.

It is a kind of voyage around the Holy Father. Or, to be more particular, a voyage around his native Bavaria, in the company of Gloria von Thurn und Taxis whose 500-room Schloss St Emmeram is located there. 'To call it a house,' Borghese admits, 'might provoke a smile'.

The two princesses travel to various sites associated with the young Pope Benedict, meet his brother, also a priest, and end up, as the book's climax, being summoned for a private audience with the Pontiff as he makes his first visit to his homeland since his election in 2005.'Gloria and I,' Borghese writes, 'had intended to mix with the crowds and wait for the Pope anonymously. However, Providence arranged things otherwise.

The mayor, whom we had met only a few weeks previously, invited us to sit in seats that had been reserved for him…Entirely unexpectedly, [the Pope] also paused to greet us. I enthusiastically told him how much I had been struck by the beauty of his land. Kind as always, he nodded and thanked me'.

Sometimes, we have a tendency to see rulers - be they kings, presidents, prime ministers or popes - in terms of their policies rather than simply as individuals. With her unique access to man who, since his election, has not given interviews, how, I wonder, would Borghese describe the private Benedict XVI? 'He's very polite. He makes me feel immediately comfortable and important to him.

He looks into my eyes and asks me how I feel, how things are going, with a sweet politeness. And then he is a simple and straightforward person. Maybe a little bit shy.' Her focus on his roots in Bavaria inevitably raises the question about Benedict's attitude, as a young man, to the Nazi party. For, as she points out, Markel am Inn, where he was born in 1927, lies just across the river from Braunau am Inn where, 38 years earlier, Adolf Hitler, had entered this world.

'There is nothing to defend the Pope's reputation about,' she protests. 'People have tried to find hidden things, relationships with Nazis, but there is nothing. He was a young boy. He was a soldier. He did his job. He did what every other young boy would have done then. And then he became a priest. There is nothing to be discovered. No scandal.' Her expression makes plain there nothing more to discuss.

What, I can't help asking, do her old friends, from her pre-1999 days, think of her now in her role as arch-Catholic? 'Of course, they think I am strange. People look at me in a weird way, but others respect me. It is life. It doesn't worry me. Because the great thing when you rediscover faith is that you don't feel alone anymore. And so you are stronger.' The inference is that she felt alone before that rediscovery. 'No, its not that I felt alone, rather that, even though I had everything, something was missing.'

In the Borghese family tree there is a line that leads back, some say, to Saint Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth century mystic. She was, like many saints of the church, someone who turned her back on worldly goods in order to follow God. Is such a renunciation something Borghese has contemplated? She laughs at the comparison. 'I am a million kilometers away from being such a saint. But everybody has his or her own big or little mission.'

Hers, she makes clear, is simply to write, to be, as she puts it, 'a witness to the possibility in our age of rediscovering faith'. In her quieter moments, she works as a volunteer helper at the French Marian shrine of Lourdes - an experience that she has made into a book, just out in Italy and already, she tells me, another bestseller. And, recently, she stood as a candidate for the Italian Senate, on the list of the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats.

'But there was no hope of being elected,' she stresses. ' It is a tiny party, though if the electoral rules had been different. I could have won a seat.'

We are just moving on to her political ambitions - she is charmingly but firmly refusing to be drawn on what she thinks of Silvio Berlusconi - when we are joined by Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and her daughter. They are in London too and there are plans to visit Christie's.

'I think we have finished,' Borghese says. Her voice goes up at the end, as if asking a question, but her intention is clear.

I slip in a final question. When she looks back to her 'other life' in the 1990s, does she have any regrets? 'No,' she fires back immediately, 'because I haven't lost anything. I am a much freer person. Much more open to the world, so I see that time as a sort of preparation. I don't want to change what has happened. I want to change what I am living now.'

I hate to see this guy go. I liked him and Papa seemed to like him too but he certainly has been unsuccessful holding his flock together.


Head of Anglican church to step down

By the CNN Wire Staff
CNN.com
2012-03-16

London (CNN) -- Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the 85 million-strong worldwide Anglican Communion, announced Friday he will step down from his post at the end of the year.

Williams has been Archbishop of Canterbury, the top role in the Church of England, for 10 years.

He has accepted the position of master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University, starting in January, a statement on his website said.

Williams said: "It has been an immense privilege to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury over the past decade, and moving on has not been an easy decision."

He thanked those who had "brought vision, hope and excitement" to his ministry.

He has informed Queen Elizabeth II of his decision, the archbishop's office said. As supreme governor of the Church of England, the queen will formally appoint his successor.

The Crown Nominations Commission will consider who will follow Williams in the role "in due course," his office said.

The secretary-general of the Anglican Communion, Canon Kenneth Kearon, wrote to senior church leaders to announce Williams' resignation, the Anglican Communion News Service reports on its website.

Williams' time in office had "coincided with a period of turmoil, change and development in the Anglican Communion, and his careful leadership, deeply rooted in spirituality and theology, has strengthened and inspired us all in the Communion during this time," Kearon is quoted as saying.

The issues of homosexuality and women bishops have caused public tensions and division within the Communion during Williams' tenure.

Millions around the world also watched him celebrate the marriage of Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, in April.

Born in Wales in 1950, Williams studied theology at Cambridge and was an academic before going into the church. He became bishop of Monmouth in 1991 and was appointed the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002.

Fr. Robert Barron to head Mundelein Seminary

Chicago, Ill., May 11, 2012 / 06:18 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has named Catholic communicator and evangelist Father Robert L. Barron as the rector and president of the University of St. Mary of the Lake and Mundelein Seminary.

“As a priest of Jesus Christ I accept this responsibility with joy,” Fr. Barron said May 10. “The appointment brings together many of the elements that have long been of great importance to me, namely, the priesthood, theological scholarship, pastoral care and evangelization.”

Fr. Barron is founding director of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, a nonprofit media organization to support Catholic evangelism through the lives of the saints and through the Catholic traditions of art, architecture, poetry, philosophy and theology.

In 2011 Fr. Barron created the television series “Catholicism” to explain the history and the self-understanding of the Catholic faith. The series, which was well-received, aired on public television and on EWTN.

The priest was ordained in 1986. He received a masters of arts in philosophy from the Catholic University of America before attending the University of St. Mary and Mundelein Seminary. He has a master’s degree in divinity and a licentiate in sacred theology from the university. He received a doctorate in sacred theology at the Institute Catholique de Paris.

He is a Chicago native with family at St. John of the Cross Parish in the suburb of Western Springs. After his ordination, he served as associate pastor at St. Paul of the Cross Parish in the Park Ridge suburb.

He has been a full-time faculty member of Mundelein Seminary since 1992. Fr. Barron has served as a visiting professor at the Unviersity of Notre Dame and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. He has been scholar in residence at the Pontifical North American College at the Vatican twice.

Fr. Barron said that he will continue to “set the ethos” for Word on Fire and will provide new media content to “enhance the Church’s outreach to the culture.”

“The mission of evangelization will continue to be a priority for me, and Word on Fire is essential to this mission,” he said.

Mundelein is the major seminary of the Archdiocese of Chicago, with national and international reach. It has an enrollment of 250 students, 165 of whom are seminarians preparing to become diocesan priests in 25 dioceses.

Its institutes of diaconal studies and lay formation help prepare over 400 men and women for service to the Church. Its ongoing formation program held courses for 1,200 participants in the last year.

Fr. Barron’s appointment will take effect July 1. He will succeed Msgr. Dennis J. Lyle, who has served as rector for six years.

Cardinal Schonborn: A faithful Catholic minority can re-convert Europe

By David Kerr

Rome, Italy, May 26, 2012 / 06:03 am (CNA).- Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna believes the small but growing number of faithful Catholic families in Europe can win the continent back to the Christian faith.

“I see our young, believing families with four or five or six or more children and how they live in the midst of this society – they are really the New Evangelization not through words, but through the fact of living the happiness of a believing family,” he told CNA May 14 in Rome.

“We are now a minority – the baptized Christians in Austria are 70 percent but practicing Catholics are 10 percent -- but if these 10 percent are convincing and convinced, they can change the country, just as happened in the Roman Empire.”

One key to the success of the New Evangelization, he asserted, is the lifework of his former tutor and lifelong friend Pope Benedict XVI, whose primary legacy, he believes, will eventually be summed up in three words – “fides et ratio” (faith and reason).

“From the very beginning of his ministry, the Pope has stressed that Christian faith, Christian life is not first of all a series of doctrines, not first of all as a series of rules, but a deepening friendship with Jesus. He (the Pope) is convinced that without faith you cannot understand Christian morals. Without faith you cannot understand Christian life. And therefore, I think the big challenge is really to deepen our faith. Call it new evangelization, call it mission – I think it has very much to do with conversion,” the cardinal explained.

“I would say he has this tremendous capacity to show, to make perceptible the coherence of our faith,” said the cardinal, who studied in the early 1970s under then-Professor Ratzinger at Regensburg University in Germany.

This ability, he suggested, allows Pope Benedict to present the teachings of the Catholic faith not “like bricks you have to carry on your shoulders” but instead “as a life, that it is coherent, that it corresponds to the desires of the heart, the real desires of the heart, that it corresponds to reality, that it is true in life, that is true in illness, true in situations of pain, and even it is true when you die.”

Cardinal Schönborn actually credits one particular homily preached by Cardinal Ratzinger in December 1979 with shaping his understanding of the role of a theologian in the Church.

“I was then 34 years old and teaching dogmatics in Switzerland, and he spoke about the ‘faith of the little ones’ and how the Magisterium of the Church has to defend the ‘faith of the little ones.’”

Since then the two men have often cooperated in their work, including, most notably, on the creation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992. Cardinal Schönborn is also a regular participant in the “Ratzinger Schülerkreis” (Ratzinger student circle), a group of former students that still meets every summer with their old academic mentor.

The cardinal explained how his greatest joy as a bishop has always been to “meet the deep faith of the little ones,” even if they are “really great ones like Pope Benedict or John Paul II, but before God they were little ones.”

A persistent optimist, Cardinal Schönborn also believes that there is still “deep faith in the world,” including in Europe, “where exteriorly speaking faith seems to vanish but there are still many deep believers, and we have to nourish their faith.”

He is currently in Rome for a quarterly meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which he is a member. Interestingly, one of the department’s more persistent problems comes from ongoing protests by Austrian priests and laity who are demanding a liberalization of Church teaching. About 7.5 percent of Austria’s 4,000 clergy belong to an initiative that last June published a “Call for disobedience.”

“I do not depreciate the elder generation; I myself am now 67, so I belong to the elder generation,” the cardinal remarked, “but it is fascinating to see that in these movements, be in that lay initiative ‘We are the Church,’ be it the priests protesting, there are practically no young priests. ”

He thinks that the root of the problem is “a certain nostalgia” among older clergymen who “seriously think, ‘if the Church would be a little bit more liberal, finally we could breath, and the Church would be filled again and the acceptance of the Church would be as it was in the 50s and 60s.’”

But Cardinal Schönborn described this thinking as “a dream” and “an illusion.”

The issue reached global prominence on Holy Thursday this year when Pope Benedict XVI used his Chrism Mass homily at St. Peter’s Basilica to publicly rebuke the actions of the dissenters.

“When the Call to Disobedience was published,” Cardinal Schönborn explained, “we said the word disobedience cannot stand because you cannot build up a Church life on the basis of disobedience. We have not yet taken sanctions because we still believe in the possibility of personal dialogue but we also clearly said: you will have to decide yourself.

Some observers have criticized the cardinal for not moving swiftly against those seeking to change the Church’s teaching.

When he asked if the time for action was near, Cardinal Schönborn replied, “God is immensely patient, but the danger is it provokes confusion for the faithful, and therefore I think it is time to come to a decision.”

Another issue that has put the Vienna cardinal in global headlines was his decision last month not to veto the already completed election of an openly homosexual man in a registered domestic partnership to a parish council within the archdiocese.

“I decided for very precise reasons, which I am not ready to expose to everybody, (that) this election was done. I do not overturn it. I let it stand,” the cardinal said.

He also strongly rejected any suggestion that his decision has undermined the Church’s teaching on homosexuality.

Initially Cardinal Schönborn was intending to intervene with the supervisory body that oversees the elections to veto the selection of 26-year-old Florian Stangl in the northern Austrian village of Stützenhofen.

But after a week of consultations and a meeting with the young man, Cardinal Schönborn decided not to interfere.

The episode should “certainly, absolutely not be understood as a change to the Church's teaching on homosexuality,” he stressed. “You may believe me, I was the General Editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the teaching of the Catechism, especially in this respect.”

He said he regretted that in “our blog and internet society” everybody thinks they can “judge the situation without knowing all the precise details, but that’s our world.”

“Without entering into details, you can believe me that as a pastor I have had very clear words with this young man, and I am convinced that he is on a way as a young faithful in a difficult situation.”

He said his experience over many years is that “if a person with same-sex attraction discovers true, chaste friendship, this can be a real way out, a real way out of a situation that is very often a dramatic destruction of the person.”

“To live in promiscuity is really inhuman and destructive for the person,” the Austrian cardinal observed.

And he sees that there is a need for “good communities where people are not judged immediately, but also not just taken for granted. To find the right way between accepting the person as the Catechism says, but being clear on homosexuality as practice. To make the person aware that he is really esteemed, loved, and nevertheless, at the right moment, we say that his is not the true way.

“So, guiding a person in a difficult situation is always a real art. We should be very clear on the principles and very human on the steps to these principles,” the cardinal said. “As Pope Benedict always reminds us: one will not understand the teaching of the Church unless one has a true relation with Jesus Christ.”

A proud patriot, Cardinal Schönborn seemed somewhat frustrated by the external media image of Catholic Austria being one of dissent and protest. For him, this stereotype “is not the life of the Church.”

“Go to Mariazell, the national shrine, and this is also the shrine for the Hungarian and the Slavic peoples, and you will find what is the heart of the Austrian people – their love for Our Lady,” he said.