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All Catholic commentary from June 2008
the pastoral approach
Tablet Rome correspondent Robert Mickens has a gushing interview with Cardinal Godfried Danneels, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussel in Belgium. Danneels is one of the lions of the Euro-progressivists, with fashionably avant garde views on contraception and the democratization of doctrine. You have...
open & shut
There's a very interesting discussion with Russell Shaw at Catholic Insight regarding his new book, Nothing to Hide. Shaw is calling for greater openness and accountability among Catholic bishops -- about which he'll get no argument here -- while admitting the (vital but limited) need for...
where the boys are
Mark Steyn asks, what if the feminist "right to choose" means women are chosen for the chop? No problem. What's important is that the "Get Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries" bumper-sticker has become public policy globally, and that means women's liberation has triumphed. Sex-selective abortion...
excelsior
In the current Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein insists that today's college students aren't that much different from those of his own or any time, in the sense that most are career-minded and only "a very small number ... found passion for books and the life of the mind." The group that he did...
gone but not forgotten
The OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano is no friend of the Catholic Church, but in this instance it's hard to dismiss as bigotry the mortar shell he lobs into the lap of the local bishop. It concerns a newly published history of the California diocese now headed by Bishop Tod Brown, titled, Diocese of...
Ownership and the Simple Life
Christians are always called to put God first, and very often this means we need to have fewer possessions to simplify our lives, so that we are not distracted from our top priority. Yet while we live in the flesh, we do need to provide for the material needs and legitimate desires of both...
misleading
Remember the Gospel of Judas media sensation timed to coincide with Easter 2006? At the time the headlines blared that a newly-deciphered ancient Coptic text portrayed Judas as a good guy, with the implication that the real story had at last come to light. Thomas Bartlett's article in the...
Bardot and Free Speech in Europe
Brigitte Bardot, a French film star of the 1960’s who was arguably the world’s first sex symbol, is now 73 years old. She is back in the news because she was fined nearly $25,000 by a Paris court yesterday for hate speech against Muslims. This resulted from an open letter she wrote to French...
The Luminous Mysteries: Knowing Jesus in His Public Ministry
When Pope John Paul II proposed a new set of mysteries of the Rosary in 2002, he wished to make the Rosary even more into a compendium of the Gospel. The Pope pointed out that the traditional Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious mysteries, while commemorating signal events in salvation history, tended...
on parade
Rome was the scene of another gay pride...
seek ye first
A diplomat is a gentleman who lies for his country, says one familiar maxim. Diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your own way, says another. I was pleased to see that Pope Benedict, in addressing the priests of the Vatican's diplomatic corps, gently but unambiguously opposed...
no contest
A Diocese of Monterey priest pleaded no contest yesterday to playing pirates with a sheriff's deputy. A Nipomo priest was sentenced to three years probation this morning after he pleaded no contest to committing sex crimes near the Pirates Cove nude beach.The Rev. Geronimo Enrique Cuevas,...
Mary of Nazareth, the Musical
A new musical on the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary will debut at the Vatican in Paul VI Hall on June 17th. The musical is being jointly sponsored by a number of Italian organizations, including the Italian Senate, and also by the Pontifical Secretariat of State and the Pontifical Councils of...
them changes
The LA Times publishes a correction of a story that ran over the past weekend: An article in Saturday's Section A about a book tour by former Australian auxiliary Bishop Geoffrey Robinson of the Roman Catholic Church said that a group supporting him, Voice of the Faithful, pushes for doctrinal...
over there
Commonweal's Paul Baumann has an article discussing the Catholic experts tapped by the media to comment on Pope Benedict's recent visit to the U.S. Interesting is his suspicion -- or, if that is too strong, unease -- concerning the National Catholic Reporter's John Allen. An alarming degree of...
trust us to fix it
That's right -- go with your gut feelings! Any adult wearing an official Child Abuser® top with matching shoulderbag is likely to be up to no good. This helpful web-ad -- I peeled it off the Salon.com site -- is as you see sponsored by Childhelp, creators and marketers of the Good Touch...
for your protection
It remains open to the judgment of the authorities in the church in order to offer assurance that a translation remains truly faithful to the original inspired text of the Bible. What ultramontanist made that claim? Why, Milwaukee auxiliary Bishop Richard Sklba, that's who. And why does Sklba...
new blood! fresh ideas!
Thousands of "leading Roman Catholics," says the UK Telegraph, are petitioning the Church to allow women and married men into the priesthood. How's that for thinking outside the box? "We believe that the Holy Spirit may be telling us that we are not sufficiently open to the emergence of new...
Oops! Forgot my cloak of invisibility
And now we return to the case of Father Robert Whipkey, the Denver priest whose efforts to avoid excessive perspiration by jogging in the nude last June drew a harsh reaction from local law-enforcement officials. We later learned that Whipkey's behavior on this occasion conformed to a previous...
more important than Texas?!?
What do you call a Texan who thinks that the Vatican is more important than Texas? Ordinarily, you call him a Texan Catholic. That's what is striking about this passage from a Reuters account of today's meeting between Pope Benedict and President Bush. Marveling at the beauty of the Vatican...
The Blueprint for Heroic Family Life
Owing to the confluence of an East-coast heat wave and the failure of a home air conditioning system, my son Peter, his wife Kristina and their two daughters lived with Mom and Dad again for a few days this week. Seeing Elena (age seven) and Natalie (four) bright-eyed and cheerful at the beginning...
spliced
The UK media are reporting that two gay priests (Anglican) were married last month in England, provoking the predictable journalistic flutter, and a call from the African episcopacy that the Archbishop of Canterbury take steps. As with the last dozen final and fatal wounds to the Anglican...
excellence
In Virginia, a teenage girl cannot ordinarily obtain a legal abortion without parental consent. But the 16-year-old immigrant's parents could not be found, so employees at a non-profit agency signed the consent form and arranged transportation to the abortion clinic. They must have felt frustrated...
Defining Beauty
Looking out over Smith Mountain Lake in southwest Virginia when the humidity is low is like looking out over C. S. Lewis’ Narnia. Everything stands out in welcome relief, crisp, clear, and alive. Sky and clouds, mountains and trees, birds and branches, shoreline and water, docks and boats—it is a...
please be sterile
As the World Youth Day in Sydney approaches, Melburnian Barney Zwartz suggests the Catholic Church, of which he is not a member, should rid herself of embarrassing inessentials, such as her teaching authority. THEN she'd be a big hit with young people, such as Cher and Barney...
a reputation at risk
Get this. Some University of Chicago faculty smell heresy in the air. They're having none of it: Few names are more associated with the University of Chicago than Milton Friedman's.But that's exactly the problem, say some faculty who want to put the brakes on a plan to name a new research...
Instilling the Mind of the Church: An Unchanging Goal
Here at Trinity Communications, it seems like we are never quite ready for the Next Big Thing. But our core values haven’t changed. The relationship between the Next Big Thing and our core values came to the surface once again in a recent series of internal meetings on our plan to merge our two...
Divisions in the Body of Christ: Four Examples
Up until June 23rd, it was expected that conservative Anglican prelates meeting in Israel this week would announce a break with the Anglican communion. The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCon), convened primarily by African Anglican bishops, is being held at the same time as the traditional...
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