What makes a Catholic college Catholic?
By the way, USF is University of San Francisco, a Jesuit college. Nice of them to give a plug to baby-killers.
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Recipe for a good homily
Amy Welborn asked a good question on her blog: “What makes a good homily?“ and one of the replies got me to thinking. The essence of a good homily, the question that should be written at the top of the homilist’s notepad is: “What must I do to have eternal life?“ If the homilist would start with that question, you can pretty much guarantee you’re going to have a good homily. Sure you can talk about background of the readings, and about difficult Church teachings, and issues of the day in the parish or in the world. But as long as those topics are oriented around that one question, it will remain on target.
I guess it seems kind of self-evident now that I’ve written it, but how many homilies have you heard that rambled from thing to thing, weaving in personal anecdotes, thoughts on the news of the day, and all kinds of other drivel. At a parish I visited, I once had to sit through a 10-minute presentation by the chairman of the finance council on all the monetary needs of the parish. Not helping me to have eternal life. Do that before or after Mass.
Just as I receive nourishment for eternal life in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, so too I wish to receive that nourishment in the Liturgy of the Word, not just from the Scripture readings, but from their exposition as well. Doesn’t the Word deserve at least that much? Don’t we?
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More on what Jesus would drive
I know this topic is getting old, but this column by Kathleen Parker was actually kind of funny. Here’s the punch line:
- It is unlikely that choosing a small car over an SUV would prompt Jesus, no bully, to leap from his cloud couch to congratulate us for our environmentally sound transportation choices. More likely, he’ll roll his eyes and elbow Gabriel in the ribs. “Oh cripes, here comes another one of those self-righteous tiny-car pulpit huggers. Take him over to Jim and Tammy’s, will ya? Take the Humvee.“
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Why reviews boards are no panacea
Even under the new Charter, some questionable decisions are being made. For example, in the Diocese of Paterson, NJ, a suspended priest was returned to ministry after the review board advised the bishop that the priest’s behavior was “inappropriate” but “did not meet the definition of sex abuse.“ According to the alleged victim, the priest touched his genitals in bed at the priest’s private home in the 1970’s. The accuser’s lawyer said “Granted, my client had his underwear on at the time ... but it’s incredible to me that they decided it was merely ‘inappropriate.‘“ Since the review board won’t discuss the reasons for its findings, we don’t know whether it didn’t believe the victim, that the touching was inadvertent, or that there was some other mitigating circumstance.
So much for independent review boards being the end-all and be-all. The board of five laymen and three priests voted unanimously with one priest abstaining to recommend reinstatement. If it were just laymen, it would have been the same result. And if it had sole authority and not just advisory, it would have been the same result. So where does that leave us? It means that bishops have to be trustworthy. If a bishop says there is no reason to suspend the priest, yet wants to keep the details private, it would be nice if they didn’t have a track record of deception and bad decisions. Then we could just say, “If the bishop thinks it’s OK, then it’s OK.“
But now we’re left with more questions and an uneasy feeling. Don’t you feel better now that we have a Charter?
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Wrong, yet right
Joe Gallagher, writing an opinion column in the Boston Herald gives a wrong diagnosis on the Scandal but offers an okay prescription. Gallagher represents the Coalition of Catholics and Survivors. I’m not sure he’s Catholic; my recollection is that he’s not, but I’m not sure of that.
He starts off by slamming the Church, saying that the Vatican revisions to the Dallas policy eviscerated it. He’s off base when he complains about due process for the accused and a clear definition of what constitutes sexual abuse. He says “by all accounts thus far” the Charter has been watered down. Hasn’t he read it? Then why’s he commenting on it in public?
His greatest complaint is that the Vatican changed the requirement that all cases be immediately reported to police to just requiring compliance with all local laws. The change gives local bishops flexibility in refusing to pursue frivolous cases, and in any case, it doesn’t prevent the victim from going to police himself. Yes, that flexibility has been abused in the past, but in an ideal world a better bishop (or one who has learned from his mistakes) would take better care in examining accusations.
But Gallagher is right on one thing: If people want mandatory reporting then they should get their lawmakers to pass a law. Why are they relying on the Church for everything? Why isn’t anyone asking where law enforcement has been on this for decades? Don’t tell me that police and DAs and judges didn’t know about it. We’ve seen evidence of cover-ups by secular authorities. It’s not just a clerical problem. The muck splatters many people.
At its base, however, all these proposed solutions are just secular responses. You hardly hear anything about a faith-based solution. No one asks about the spirituality of priests and bishops. All the child protection training talks about psychology and the like. There’s hardly a hint of prayer or holiness. It’s just offered as a secondary, throw-away statement: “And, oh yeah, we should pray more.“ At least Pope John Paul hasn’t missed it, because he’s been calling for prayer, repentance, and holiness. Unfortunately when he does, he’s derided by everyeon as being out of touch and ignoring the real problems. I think he’s more on target than all the so-called experts and advocates.
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In the drink
My roommate Paul and I were watching the Skins Game on TV yesterday. It’s a golf match with just four players who compete to win a cash prize on each hole. It’s very different from normal tournament play and the players are usually much more relaxed, joking and laughing with one another. But one incident goes to show much of a competitor Tiger Woods is, even in a friendly little game. ESPN has the whole story but here’s what happened.
It was the 18th hole which was worth $200,000 to the guy who won it. Even for Tiger that’s a lot of money. He had hit his approach shot long, landing on the bunker behind the green. Here’s how ESPN describes what happened:
Woods needed to get up-and-down for birdie from a back bunker on the par-5 18th to keep Phil Mickelson from capturing the final skin. A man standing directly behind Woods clicked his camera in the middle of his swing, and Woods looked back in disgust as his ball rolled 15 feet by the hole. ‘'I flinched,‘’ Woods said. ‘'I was lucky to keep the ball on the green.‘’
Caddie Steve Williams took the man’s camera and dropped it in the lake.
Priceless! For those who don’t know, Tiger has been afflicted by photographers. As the most famous golfer, more people want his picture than anyone else. So when he’s swinging sometimes a photographer gets a little too quick on the shutter and clicks during his swing. That bit of sound on an otherwise silent green can be enough to make him flinch. That same thing happened during the British Open and during the World Golf Championship.
I’m sure the guy has a new camera today, but he lost his film and was embarrassed in front of his colleagues and the whole gallery and now all ESPN Online readers. I’m sure he won’t have an itchy shutter finger again anytime soon.
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Weigel in Boston
Author George Weigel will be speaking at Boston College on this Tuesday, December 3 at 7 pm. The lecture will be in McGuin Hall, 121.
The topic of the lecture comes from his recent book: “Courage to be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church.“
Boston-area Catholics are urged to attend what will surely be an enlightening and interesting talk.
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Bankruptcy?
The Boston Globe brings up the specter of banruptcy for the Archdiocese of Boston again. The advantage for the Church:
- All current plaintiffs would be combined into a single group for settlement by a federal court.
- There would be a time limit for the filing of new claims.
- The court could limit lawyers fees.
- Cardinal Law and other bishops would have no more embarassing depositions.
- No more handing over of embarassing internal documents to lawyers for public disclosure.
Of course, for those of us hoping that the upside of the Scandal would be a housecleaning and bringing the awful secrets into the light of day, those last two “upsides” are really downsides. In other words, bankruptcy may bring the worst of the Scandal to a quick end, but it will leave much of the current problem in place.
Another downside, this one for the cardinal himself to consider, is that the only US bishop yanked from his diocese since WW2 was pulled because his diocese went bankrupt.
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Bad recordkeeping
The Archdiocese of Boston stands to get into hot water because it keeps finding documents long after it was required to turn them over to plaintiffs. In April, the archdiocese was ordered to turn over all files relating to Paul Shanley, but as late as last week it found four new boxes of documents containing records about him.
Plaintiff’s lawyers, including Roderick MacLeish, claim the archdiocese is dragging its feet and purposefully disobeying the court’s orders. He doesn’t believe that the archdiocese is that disorganized and incompetent. I can believe it.
From everyone I’ve talked to who has any knowledge of the way things are run at the chancery, this is par for the course. Remember that the people in charge are generally people who have no experience in management and administration, they have degrees in theology and philosophy. It’s not a Fortune 500 company (and even then we’ve seen bad administration in those places in recent months.) The fact is that there are thousands of documents in multiple places (including the former pool in the basement of the cardinal’s residence), almost none of it cross-referenced.
- One person involved in the process, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said the archdiocese retained records of sexual abuse by priests that in some cases date back to the 1930s. In any well-run organization with a reasonable document retention policy, this person said, most of the older documents would have been destroyed long ago.
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Lest we forget
Remember this from the April 22 edition of the Los Angeles Times?
- The cardinal, who asked to remain anonymous, said Sunday that he had been “commissioned” by other senior prelates to take their case against Law directly to Pope John Paul II’s inner circle. He said that he, as well as others, would do so today during private meetings at the Vatican. Today’s meetings come a day before two days of talks between America’s cardinals and Vatican leaders on the abuse scandal. “If the Holy See wants to send a strong signal of quality and standards of leadership,“ the cardinal told The Times, Law “will have to be replaced. This cannot be a phaseout.“ The cardinal said he did not want to undermine his efforts by publicly disclosing his name before speaking to the Vatican.
Seeing as how the article appeared in the Los Angeles newspaper and that one of the bylined writers was a guy known as the mouthpiece for a certain prelate in Los Angeles, it wouldn’t be a great stretch to guess that the unnamed cardinal is Roger Mahony.
What was most interesting about this story was that this was no leak from an anonymous source. The cardinal presumably sought out these reporters and allowed for them to publicize his office if not his name. And that cardinal suggests he would make his claim public anyway as he says he didn’t want to make his name known before making his case for Law’s removal.
And yet when the apparent hypocrisy by Mahony became clear over the intervening months—Mahony is alleged to have moved about pedophiles and allegedly conspired to hide their crimes—the journalists to whom he bared his soul have resisted the urge to label him a hypocrite and kept his name secret. What could possibly make journalists overcome the very strong cynical impulse ingrained in them in J-school? It’s not like we’re talking about loyal sons of the Church here. They’re antagonism toward orthodox Catholicism is very clear.
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The difference?
A suspended priest is asked by disaffected Catholics to celebrate Masses for them. Wait a minute—aren’t suspended priests supposed to be like modern-day lepers, isolated from the community by their sins? Oh wait, that only applies to pervert priests, not disobedient, dissident priests. Father David Kerrigan, a priest of the Worcester, Mass., Diocese who was suspended for his dissent from Church teachings and disobedience metaphorically spits on his priestly vows by holding Masses in a Marriott hotel. It’s ironic that people who abandoned the Church because of the Scandal—bishops failing to hold priests to account for their sins which make them unsuitable for ministry—are flocking to a priest who was deemed by his bishop to be unsuitable for ministry.
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This is news?
“Some in US question Vatican’s strong hand” is the headline of the Boston Globe article. Here’s the meat of itL:
- Lay Catholics and some clerics in the United States are increasingly challenging highly doctrinaire Vatican institutions like the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as archaic, out of touch, tinged with anti-Americanism, and too bureaucratic to respond to the priest sexual abuse crisis that is plaguing the Catholic Church in the United States.
This isn’t news. Heterodox American Catholics have been complaining about the Congregation for decades. Of course, there are also plenty of orthodox Catholics who think the CDF hasn’t been doing enough. That’s the nature of the game.
I love the subtle digs in the reporter’s article: “Despite the power of this and the other Vatican congregations, which help the pope govern what the Vatican calls ‘the universal church…‘“ It’s not what the Vatican call it, it is what the Church calls herself. The underlying tone is that the Church is separate and distinct—i.e. the free-wheeling, heterodox Americans,—from the Vatican, i.e. the “oppressive monarchy of old men.“
The article also shows why, despite the good he did by exposing the problem of the Scandal in the first place, I think Fr. Thomas Doyle is now doing more harm than good to the Church.
- He says church officials’ intransigence grows out of a culture in Rome that has sought to minimize the scandal, protect its own priestly power, and isolate clerical sexual abuse as an American problem. ... ‘'It feels like the last item on the agenda is the protection of children and the top of the agenda is power, power, and power.“
He complains that the Vatican “watered down” the role of lay review boards, when all it did was acknowledge that bishops are sovereign in their own dioceses. Changing that is non-trivial and fraught with far more dangers than keeping that principle is. And what exactly is wrong with giving accused priests the right of due process? The problems with the Dallas policy were not the Vatican’s but the US bishops’. It is the bishops’ conference which Doyle should be pointing at since their original charter was filled with problems and never addressed the central question which is their own role in the Scandal.
This whole article smells. It smells like someone who has an agenda to undermine the Church, and especially her teachings on moral issues, by creating and encouraging the perception that the Vatican and non-US bishops are somehow out of touch with US Catholics. Is it the first step to a call for a separate American church. It’s unthinkable and ridiculous, but I predict we’ll be seeing something like it on an editorial page in the not too distant future.
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The word you dare not speak
The problem with political correctness is that there is always somebody wanting to push things even further. In the UK, the word “homosexual” is now verboten. The government is dropping the word in favor of the phrase “orientation towards people of the same sex.“ Typically, it just takes the convenient and replaces it with the overly complicated. Welcome to Orwell’s “newspeak.“ All they did was replace the word with its definition. Henceforth, I declare we will no longer sit in “chairs,“ but in “devices which support our bottoms as we sit.“
Of course, I favor using disorientation in the definition of homosexual, as in “disorientation towards people of the same sex” and regarding a homosexual’s “sexual disorientation.“ Much more accurate in my opinion.
I love this part of the news article:
- The issue first arose when the minister asked for opinions on her plans to protect people who were discriminated at work because of their “homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual” nature. Gay lobby groups, trade unions and others objected to the word “homosexual” and called instead for a wider definition of “sexual orientation” that would encompass every group in society.
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Happy Thanksgiving
Because I’m trying to get my work done early so I can get on the roads… well, at the same time as everyone else, blogging will be light today. And as I will be in Maine at my sister’s until Saturday, there won’t be much in the way of entries unless something radical happens.
Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone, count your blessings, and rejoice in the the Lord’s promises to his Church. More than ever right now, that’s something we have to be thankful for.
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Hate crimes against Christians
A gay man approached a Christian man at his home to try to convince the Christian that he was a closeted homosexual and should embrace his “true” orientation. In a fit of rage, the Christian beat, tortured, and finally killed the homosexual. What, you haven’t seen this in the papers? That’s because it didn’t happen that way.
As Rod Dreher of National Review reports, the case is really about a 51-year-old Catholic woman who was trying to convince her 19-year-old co-worker to give up his homosexual lifestyle. Rather than tell her to take a hike, the man attacked her, beat her until he was tired, then tied a plastic bag over her head until she died. He later confessed to the whole thing.
But you won’t read about it in the major media or see it on television. I’ve seen it just once on the Associated Press wire, but nothing more after that. See, it doesn’t fit the media bias. When straights beat up gays, that’s news. When Christians “attack” non-Christians, again that’s news. When two black men assault two white men and three white women, rpae the women, and then execute all but one (that was a story I only saw recently on Fox News) that’s not news.
That’s the problem with hate crimes legislation. For one thing, it tries to prosecute based on thoughts and until there are a lot more Vulcans running around, we don’t know what people are thinking. For another, the motivation for the crime is irrelevant, only that the crime is committed. Otherwise you end up with special punishment for those who commit politically incorrect crimes as determined by the elites, but little if no outrage for those who commit “regular” crimes.
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Domenico Bettinelli, Jr.
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