Robert suggested I send along a heads-up for CardinalRating.com for keeping abreast of the news about your favorite cardinals. (I remembered seeing it linked somewhere else before, but I can't recall where.) I also recommend Episcopal Spine Alert for inspiring (though infrequent) reports of U.S. bishops showing signs of orthodoxy. Recently I stumbled on The Pope Blog for the latest news reports featuring the Holy Father.
KALOnline Register NumberI've got one more site about the Papacy I'd like to recommend, but I can't find the link right now. When I find it, I'll add it here, and on the blogroll to the left.
I'm constantly reminded by the mainstream media of the horrific shortage of priests in America. But I have to admit I'm puzzled.
First: since 1988, I've never taken residence near a parish with less that four priests - my current parish has six (though two are retired and in residence). Do we really need four priests in my parish, or four at the next-nearest? Whose job is it to make sure some parishes aren't overloaded and others aren't understaffed? Is any recruitment conducted in dioceses with too many priests, to bring them to dioceses with not enough?
More important, how many of the stories we hear in the MSM are a self-fulfilling prophesy?
Necessity, more than desire, has dictated a similarly unconventional approach in St. Fidelis Parish in a downtrodden downtown Chicago neighborhood. For 10 years, the parish has been run without a priest by Sister Leonette Kaluzny, who is entitled to do everything a priest can do except administer the sacraments, which include hearing confessions.Sister Leonette once wished she could be ordained, but now she runs a parish and her parishoners allegedly whisper of heterodoxy while she sighs that 'Rome is far away'. Is this all mere coincidence?"I hear confessions anyway," the Polish-born Kaluzny, 69, said with a smile. "You do a lot of counseling in this ministry."
St. Fidelis was once home to eight priests, but when she arrived, Kaluzny filled a vacuum now shared by more than 3,100 U.S. parishes. Each weekend, visiting priests take turns celebrating Mass in the basement of the former parish school -- rented by the diocese to the Chicago public school district to help pay the bills.
Appointed by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin as the first layperson to head a parish in the Chicago archdiocese, Kaluzny faced resistance at first. "This was something so new to our Catholic people," she said, "because a priest was next to God."
Yet after a decade of watching her in action, some of the same people wonder why she is not ordained. The Catholic Church does not permit women's ordination.
"At one time, I wanted to be ordained," Kaluzny explained. "But right now I feel freer. I feel I can do almost more than the priest does. Rome for me, it's so far away. I push the laity to take their rightful role in the church as baptized Christians."
Lastly, and interconnecting both of the above sets of questions: what's the relationship between heterodoxy in a diocese and how many priests it enjoys the services of? The article makes the claim that what I view as heterodoxy is merely necessary reform and a natural response to a lack of priests, and that the lack of reform is what's causing people to leave the Church. I think it equally (if not more) plausible that the lack of priests is caused by the decline in Church membership, spurred on by heterodoxy and the failure to stand firm on the Truth.
This is a demography student's thesis waiting to happen. We can't know what the most effective solution to our problems will be until we know how we got into this situation in the first place. And no matter the cause, the solution to curing this disease cannot be to kill the patient: we cannot save the Catholic Church by becoming Protestant.
Dom Bettinelli reports that eBay has revised their policies to exclude the Holy Eucharist "and other sacred items" from listings. I'll consider re-opening my personal PayPal and eBay accounts when I see the revised policy, but TBR's account will stay closed - I rarely got anything from it anyway. (But thanks to both of you!)
A comment in response to a post at Catholics in the Public Square got me a little riled up, as someone tried to continue the confusion of Church doctrine on the death penalty with other life issues - while cruelly judging the intentions of another Catholic, to boot.
Too bad Jeb likes to execute people so much - compromises his culture of life, no?Actually, no.
Some of us actually believe the death penalty supports the culture of life, by unambiguously proposing to execute those who hold life so cheap as to brutally take the life of an innocent. And thanks to Church teaching, there's nothing doctrinally incorrect with that opinion.
Canon law has always forbidden clerics to shed human blood and therefore capital punishment has always been the work of the officials of the State and not of the Church. Even in the case of heresy, of which so much is made by non-Catholic controversialists, the functions of ecclesiastics were restricted invariably to ascertaining the fact of heresy. The punishment, whether capital or other, was both prescribed and inflicted by civil government. The infliction of capital punishment is not contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church, and the power of the State to visit upon culprits the penalty of death derives much authority from revelation and from the writings of theologians. The advisabilty of exercising that power is, of course, an affair to be determined upon other and various considerations.Even when the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement in opposition to the death penalty, they hedged. As Karl Keating put it:
Must Catholics adopt a particular view regarding the use (or non-use) of capital punishment? In short: no. They are free to endorse, as a political policy, the complete abolition of capital punishment, and they are free to endorse the use of capital punishment, even beyond the very narrow limits given in the prudential judgment in [the Catechism of the Catholic Church]. Contrary to what some people claim, there has been no revolution in Church teaching on the matter.If the state were to prevent a woman from killing a baby in her womb, they would be preventing someone from committing a violent act against an innocent. People who support that woman's right to murder cannot make that claim, because no one has a right to murder.
On the contrary, people who support a murderer's right to life are protecting someone who is guilty from suffering punishment at the hands of the state, which IT has every right to do - provided all laws are followed, due process is respected, and careful adjudication is taken.
Someone who asks that the people of the state protect the life of the guilty like we protect the life of the innocent are asking the people to forgive. For forgiveness to be truly Christian, one must give it freely - it cannot be forced.
Ironically, these are exactly the circumstances when "I can't impose my beliefs on others" actually applies: you cannot compel a victim's family to forgive the murderer of their loved one. You cannot force the people of a state to forgive murderers and let them walk free.
We can pray that one day we'll all be Christian enough that it would happen without asking - or better yet, so Christian as to not have any murders to prosecute. Until then, I'll remain firmly on the fence on this one.
http://bettnet.dyndns.org/blog/comments.php?id=4978_0_1_0_C
Domenico Bettinelli Jr.
I get a daily email from OpinionJournal.com, informing me of the highlights of the offerings there for that day. In the Saturday edition this week, the subtitle of one of the articles caught my eye: "The Muslim holy book isn't just a 'bible'. It's far more sacred than that." I immediately became interested, because the comment seemed like a clear sacrilege. Is not Jesus The Word? Well, Kenneth L. Woodward explains why the statement - though provocative - is not inaccurate, and why the Newsweek Koran-flushing story was so important in the Islamic world.
The Quran is not "the Bible" of Muslims. It is infinitely more sacred than that. To use a Jewish analogy, it is more like the oral Torah first revealed on Mount Sinai, which was later passed on orally through the prophets and eventually written down on scrolls for all to read. Whereas Christians regard the Bible as written by human beings inspired by God, Muslims regard the Quran--the word means "The Recitation"--as the very words of God, revealed aurally to the Prophet Muhammad in Arabic. To hear those words recited is, for Muslims, to hear Allah. If, for Christians, Jesus is the logos or eternal Word of God made flesh, the Quran is the Word of God made book, and every Arabic syllable in it lives as the breath of the divine.So perhaps rather than comparing the errors at Newsweek with those at CBS, we should say they were equal to the Catholic Church's problem with eBay. Still, I believe Muslims need to get a grip on themselves - Catholics didn't kill anyone over the eBay incident.In short, what Christ is for Christians the Quran (in Arabic) is for Muslims: the living Word of God made present in this world. Moreover, to recite the suras or verses of the Quran, as devout Muslims do, is to breathe in the very words of Allah. Thus, recitation of the Quran is for Muslims much like what receiving the Eucharist is for Catholics--a very intimate ingestion of the divine itself. This, then, according to Newsweek's story--now retracted and "regretted" by the magazine's editor--is what some interrogators flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay.