A Jesuit's Jottings

Catholic Bishops against the Death Penalty

2012-02-15T23:14:00.004-05:00

Catholic Bishops Ask Gov Scott in Florida to Stay Execution of Waterhouse

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/features-the-religion-world/2012/02/15/catholic-bishops-ask-gov-scott-to-stay-execution-of-waterhouse/

The Catholic Bishops of Florida issued a plea to Gov. Rick Scott to stay the execution scheduled for today of Robert Waterhouse. The request for mercy was signed by Archbishop Thomas Wenski, Orlando Bishop John G. Noonan, Palm Beach Bishop Gerald M. Barbarito, St. Petersburg Bishop Robert N. Lynch, Venice Bishop Frank J. Dewane, and St. Augustine Bishop Felipe J. Estévez.

Waterhouse, 65, was convicted more than 30 years ago of killing Deborah Kammerer and throwing her nude body into Tampa Bay.

The bishops’ statememnt reads:

“We are aware of the long and solemn process that you undergo in making the decision to sign death warrants. At the same time, we are concerned with the increased pace of one scheduled every three months as has been the pattern since August, 2011.

“We have sympathy for victims who lose their lives to violence as did Deborah Kammerer and pray for the family and friends who suffer the pain of losing their loved one. Anger destroys while forgiveness frees one to live again in peace, blotting out the desire for revenge.

“We ask that the sentence for Robert Waterhouse be commuted to life in prison without possibility of parole. Such action would manifest belief in the unique dignity of every individual and the sacredness of human life. It would acknowledge God as the Lord of life and it would be more consonant with the spirit of the Gospel.

“Though you are authorized, Governor, to sign death warrants, we ask you to not exercise this authority and to refrain from signing warrants. Please investigate the actions of other states where options other than death of an inmate accomplish the goal of protecting society and punishing the offender.”

Great Little Song "Goodnight Moon"

2012-02-15T15:13:00.003-05:00

A great little song, featured in a great little movie, Saint Ralph

What they think Jesuits do. This is funny!

2012-02-15T15:11:00.002-05:00

Ian Brit sings "In the Shape of us"

2012-02-14T23:01:00.003-05:00

Nice song from tonight's episode of Parenthood. "In the Shape of Us." A good song for St. Valentine's day. Peace Fr. Rick

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://ianbritt.bandcamp.com/track/the-shape-of-us"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;The Shape of Us by Ian Britt&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

John Dear on Douglass' new book on Gandhi

2012-02-14T22:22:00.005-05:00

Jim Douglass new book, Gandhi and the Unspeakable

http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/jim-douglass-new-book-gandhi-and-unspeakable

by John Dear SJ on Feb. 14, 2012

Jim Douglass is one of the world's great teachers, theologians and practitioners of Christian nonviolence. I regularly return for inspiration to his classic works The Nonviolent Cross, Resistance and Contemplation and Lightning East to West, which have been recently republished by wipfandstock.com. Based at Mary's House Catholic Worker in Birmingham, Ala., Jim spent the last two decades completing his groundbreaking work, JFK and the Unspeakable, which detailed the forces which aligned to kill President John F. Kennedy in order to stop his work for peace and disarmament.

Douglass has planned other books on the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy. In the process, he began to study the widespread conspiracy to kill Mahatma Gandhi and the latent support for his assassination within the new Indian state. That study has resulted in another powerful book, Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment With Truth, a shocking exposé and inspiring meditation published this week by Orbis Books. I urge all those interested in Gandhi and nonviolence to read this profound work.

As we all know, Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi by a Hindu fundamentalist on Jan. 30, 1948, as he walked to his public evening prayer service. Since the previous summer, more than a million people had been killed in the civil war between Hindus and Muslims as Pakistan split off from the new India. Right-wing Hindu extremists such as the assassin were enraged by Gandhi's nonviolent campaign to reconcile Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi spent his last months walking, campaigning, praying and fasting for an end to the violence, and at the time of his death, was planning to go to Pakistan on a mission of peace.

Just as Douglass investigated the reasons why JFK was assassinated by myriad forces, including members of the U.S. government, he explores the reasons why Gandhi was killed and why the Indian state might have benefited from his death. Douglass' journey took him to the Library of Congress, where he read the sole "Printed Record of Mahatma Gandhi Murder Case, Vols. 1-8," the court record that once belonged to Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's assassin. Douglass used this massive material and other original sources to explore Gandhi's mythic struggle of nonviolence against the forces of what Thomas Merton called "the Unspeakable."

http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/jim-douglass-new-book-gandhi-and-unspeakable

Dorothy Stang SND. Witness for the Gospel

2012-02-13T23:49:00.004-05:00

Jim Martin, S.J., over at America Magazine's Blog calls, our attention to this anniversary

Jim Martin writes: "Seven years ago today, Dorothy Stang, an American Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, was martyred in the Amazon as a result of her work with the landless poor there. When two hired gunmen met her on a muddy path they asked if she was carrying a weapon. In reply, she took out a Bible and began to recite the Beatitudes. "Blessed are the poor in spirit...blessed are the peacemakers." Then she was shot. This video shows some of her generous spirit and the love that the people had for her. The first few minutes are particularly affecting, and will remind you of so many of the women religious who have a passion for the Gospel and for the poor. "

Social Sin and Social Grace

2012-02-11T00:22:00.004-05:00

Social sin can be countered and struggled against in millions of ways and in a myriad of manners. May Social Grace have its sway. Here the Olgala Sioux Tribe struggles to free their people from those who would enslave them by selling products inimical to their health. Although the damage done by alcohol to college students isn't as bad as the destruction ravaged on reservations, maybe colleges and universities should sue the alcohol companies for all it costs to deal with intoxicated and out of control students. - Fr. Rick.

February 10, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/us/south-dakota-oglala-sioux-tribe-sues-beer-makers.html?_r=1&src=recg

South Dakota: Oglala Sioux Tribe Sues Beer Makers

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota sued some of the world’s largest beer makers on Thursday, saying they knowingly contributed to devastating alcohol-related problems on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The tribe said it wanted $500 million in damages for the cost of health care, social services and child rehabilitation caused by chronic alcoholism on the reservation. The suit filed in United States District Court of Nebraska also names four beer stores in Whiteclay, a Nebraska town near the reservation that, despite having only about a dozen residents, sold nearly five million cans of beer in 2010. The suit names Anheuser-Busch InBev Worldwide, SABMiller, Molson Coors Brewing Company, MillerCoors LLC and Pabst Brewing Company.

Jesuits: The Men Behind the Collar

2012-02-09T16:54:00.004-05:00

Loyola Chicago's student paper has a good article on Jesuits. Click Here - Fr. Rick

The Phoenix/Dan Rogers

Jesuits at Jesuit Jam

A number of Loyola’s Jesuits, including the ones above, participated in the annual Jesuit Jam last weekend that was held in the Gentile Arena.

Posted: Wednesday, February 8, 2012 4:52 am | Updated: 5:05 am, Wed Feb 8, 2012.

by Lauren Bogacz lbogacz@luc.edu | 0 comments

Last summer, theology student Ben Anderson was in northeastern India, traveling and visiting tea plantations where tribal groups still live in what he called slave-like conditions. A Catholic labor organizer traveling with him has spent his life working to improve the conditions of these plantations. He turned to Anderson and asked: “Why did God make the tea workers so poor and you in your country so rich?”

It was at this moment that Anderson felt like a Jesuit.

“I was standing at the foot of the cross with the forgotten of the world and trying to articulate with them God’s invitation for life,” said Anderson, 27, who is working toward a master’s degree in philosophy at Loyola.

With the upcoming celebration of Ignatian Heritage Week from Feb. 12-19, students should take the opportunity to learn more about the Jesuit lifestyle, said junior Sean Barry.

“I think Jesuit Heritage Week is important, because it reminds us all of the Jesuit institution and why we go to the university,” said Barry, who hopes to someday become a Jesuit himself. “This is time set aside for us all explicitly to understand the Jesuit charisms.”

St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, underwent a spiritual conversion in 1522 and was inspired to devote his life to God. When the Society of Jesus was approved by Pope Paul III in 1540, the first Jesuits (including Ignatius) were officially ordained into the Catholic priesthood. Together, these men established the foundational values the Jesuits still practice today.

Those pursuing life as a Jesuit often have distinct inspirations and experiences that motivate them to devote their lives to God.

“I wanted to commit myself to something much larger than myself,” said Fr. Brendan Horan, S.J., who is a professor of political science and a special assistant to the Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, S.J. “The opportunity to live and work in a number of other countries and experience their diverse cultures has been a particular blessing.”

The steps to becoming a Jesuit are the same for every man interested in becoming one, and the process takes from nine to 12 years.

There are three stages that a man goes through in the process of becoming a Jesuit priest: the novitiate, the regency and theological studies. During this period, they are known as a scholastic.

The novitiate is a two-year period that emphasizes spiritual growth. It consists of a 30-day pilgrimage and a month-long silent retreat, part of the Spiritual Exercises written by St. Ignatius.

After novitiate, Jesuits take their perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The next three years are typically spent obtaining a master’s degree in philosophy.

The regency phase follows, which is usually spent teaching in a Jesuit high school. When this is finished, a person generally earns a master’s degree in divinity, which fulfills the requirements for priesthood. Many Jesuits later pursue a Ph.D. in a subject they’d like to teach.

For Fr. Michael Agliardo, S.J., the entire process includes an opportunity to increase awareness about the world.

“The formation process involves gaining an understanding of the world through exposure to other cultures and learning to look critically at your own,” said Agliardo, a sociology professor who spent time working with the poor in the Dominican Republic.

Fr. Charles Jurgensmeier, S.J., director of Loyola’s music program, remembers his own experience of becoming a Jesuit, which included many interviews, a physical and an appointment with a psychiatrist to make sure that he was “mentally fit” for the lifestyle.

The interview process is thorough, Jurgensmeier said, because the Jesuits want a complete picture of the applicant before he is admitted.

“They really get to know you, asking questions about your prayer life, how often you go to mass, about the faith itself and your relationship with Jesus,” he said. “They also asked about my family, schooling, health and background.”

Jesuits can do a variety of jobs, including but not limited to the fields of social work, education and helping at parishes and retreat houses, according to Agliardo, a sociology professor.

Many Jesuits work at Loyola, teaching and helping out at events on both the Lake Shore and Water Tower campuses. Not to mention, Loyola’s President the Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, S.J., is also a Jesuit. And because Loyola is a Jesuit Catholic university, its mission coincides with the five characteristics of a Jesuit education: commitment to excellence, faith in God, service that promotes justice, values-based leadership and global awareness.

Jurgensmeier said that part of his responsibility as a Jesuit is to help others seek the truth he said he has found.

“Cura personalis, or ‘care for the person,’ is the mission of the university, regardless of who the person is,” he said. “We challenge students’ points of view by having them take classes in disciplines that they normally wouldn’t.”

The question he asks is: “Where do I find God in all of this?”

Go to luc.edu/ignatianheritageweek for more information on the events taking place during Ignatian Heritage Week.

Malloy's "You Are Worthy" in America Magazine

2012-02-07T15:08:00.008-05:00

My article "You Are Worthy" appears in this week's issue of America Magazine. Happy reading. Peace - Fr. Rick
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You Are Worthy: by Fr. Richard G. Malloy, S.J.

Many campus ministers and others who work with young adults ponder why 20-somethings often seem estranged from church and religious practices. Why does Charlie Sheen’s way of life appeal more to the average undergraduate male than Jesus? Why do the ways of the Kardashians touch the souls of some young women more than Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa? In a world where Snooki and the Situation rule, how can we get the millennial generation interested in God and the practices of...

To view the rest of the article, click here.

This time for Africa: Loyola may help create the first Jesuit university in Africa - The Loyola Phoenix: News: jesuit, nairobi, kenya, university, africa

2012-02-05T23:59:00.001-05:00

This time for Africa: Loyola may help create the first Jesuit university in Africa - The Loyola Phoenix: News: jesuit, nairobi, kenya, university, africa:

More than 8,000 miles away, Jesuits in Africa are working to develop the continent's first Jesuit university, and Loyola Chicago might play a key role…

How economic inequality harms societies: Richard Wilkinson on TED.com

2012-02-04T22:11:00.003-05:00

Here's a great 15 mins. on income inequality. - Fr. Rick

Don't Believe Charles Murray on Inequality

2012-02-03T09:06:00.003-05:00

Murray of The Bell Curve infamous "fame" often finds a way to blame the poor for their condition while ignoring structural causes. The game is fixed in the top 1%'s favor. Let's pay attention to those like Chait who point this out. - Fr. Rick
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Inequality and the Charles Murray Dodge

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/inequality-and-the-charles-murray-dodge.html

1/31/12 at 3:11 PM By Jonathan Chait

Why are the very rich doing so well? Family values.

The appearance of income inequality on the political agenda has left conservatives casting about for a response, and after several months of floundering, it has increasingly narrowed down to two words: Charles Murray. Murray is the author of a new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, which attributes the decline of the middle class to deteriorating social norms. Non-elite whites, he argues, are failing to sustain healthy marriages or strong child-rearing and work habits, leading to economic decline.

I haven’t read Murray’s book, so I can’t evaluate the argument. I have many reasons for skepticism that it actually explains what it purports to explain. There’s Murray’s non-confidence-inspiring history, the intuitive possibility that deteriorating social norms are at least partially the result and not the cause of economic stagnation (it’s no longer easy for a blue-collar earner to support a family), and the simple fact that, you know, many Americans are not white, which limits the value of a book about white people as a totalistic social explanation. But even if we grant, for the sake of argument, all the claims being made on Murray’s behalf, the basic point is that it is not a plausible response to the problem of income inequality. It’s an attempt to change the subject.

Rising income inequality is a phenomenon of the top one percent pulling away from everybody else. Conservatives want to redefine the question as concerning the top 20 percent against everybody else. If you redefine the question as being about the top quintile against the bottom four-fifths, then you can start talking about marriage and Charles Murray and safely steer the debate back onto comfortable conservative terrain. David Brooks tries that sleight of hand in his column today:

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

But these are two completely separate issues. Yes, the top 20 percent has done better than the bottom 80 percent, and it’s very worth exploring the role of social norms in this divergence. But income inequality has occurred between the top one percent and everybody else:

A more blunt version of this technique was previewed a couple months ago by the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, perhaps the right’s most enthusiastic inequality denier. Pethokoukis cited a chart, compiled by Political Calculations, purporting to show that the only change in inequality results from changed family status. Pethokoukis triumphantly presented this as the “The one chart that explodes the myth of U.S. income inequality,” and used it to segue, as Brooks does today, to Murray’s arguments about family values:

So what we have here, as always in America it seems, is culture trumping economics (though the data don’t take into account how different income groups have different inflation rates, another equalizer). AEI’s Charles Murray has a new book coming out that will expand on how values and culture influence inequality.

But the chart is completely wrong. Reader Jacques Distler pointed out to me that it relies on census data, which only asks households if they earn more than $100,000 a year. Since all the change in income inequality has come within households earning well over that mark, the census data is not going to capture the rise in income inequality. (Think of it this way. Imagine you want to show that basketball centers get taller as you move from high school to college to the NBA. If your tallest category is "six foot two and over,” you’re not going to show much of an effect.)

I e-mailed Lane Kenworthy, an inequality expert, who confirmed this for me. Inequality between the top one percent and everybody else has increased dramatically.

The growing gap between the top one percent and everybody else has a lot of important implications, the most immediate being a simple fight over resource allocation. Democrats insist that any fiscal adjustment require the richest one percent to make a meaningful contribution, while Republicans insist that it must not. That’s an important debate. The root causes of the gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 80 percent is also interesting and important. But “hey, look – Charles Murray!” isn’t a very salient response to the problem of inequality.

The Times They Have Been a' Changing: Married Roman Catholic Priests

2012-02-02T19:47:00.008-05:00

Roman Catholic priest Martin Carter, 63, poses with his wife Annie
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2011/03/04/17491151.html

It is surprising to me how few Roman Catholics realize there are married priests and some have been around for several decades. - Fr. Rick
*************************************************

HOUSES OF WORSHIP
FEBRUARY 3, 2012

Being a Catholic Priest—and Married

The pope has created a new diocese for bringing Episcopalians into the church.

By RICHARD CIPOLLA

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203889904577199012244720988.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Last month, Pope Benedict announced the formation of an American "ordinariate," or special diocese for Episcopal congregations that want to move to Roman Catholicism (driven largely by Episcopalianism's liberal drift). These congregations, the pope ruled, could keep some of their Anglican liturgy. More significantly, a small but sizable number of married Episcopal priests will now become married Catholic priests.

As a married Catholic priest ordained in 1984 under a special provision set forth by Pope John Paul II (for individual priests, judged on an individual basis), I have closely followed Pope Benedict's announcement. I rejoice in this catholic and generous gesture by the pope and am overjoyed that these priests and their families will be welcomed into the Catholic Church. But that is not to say it won't bring its own share of challenges.

My experience as a married Catholic priest for 28 years brings to mind several thoughts, both practical and spiritual. First, the church must support new priests' families financially. During my first years as a married Catholic priest, there were times when we could not pay the heating bill. When I was ordained, it was made quite clear to me that I should not look to the church as my main source of income but rather to a full-time job outside of the church. My parish duties have thus always been secondary.

Getty Images

Secondly, the new priests must be prepared for the spiritual struggles that come with the territory of being a married priest in the Catholic Church. It is difficult for children of priests to hear everyone call their father, "Father." It is one of my regrets that I could never be a "normal Dad" who was able to attend school functions and sporting events. Priests' wives often bear the brunt of this special status, for they must allow their husbands to be "priest" at a real cost to themselves and their children.

Through the years, I have been the object of a few snide remarks by clergy. There have been uncomfortable confrontations with some who are more traditional than the Tradition. But for the most part, my priesthood and ministry in the Catholic Church have been a source of great joy and grace.

The married priest is not spared the sacrifice that is at the heart of the priesthood. That sacrifice comes not from the vow of celibacy. It comes from what is given up as husband and father for the sake of Christ's church. Sacrifice is at the heart not only of the priestly life but also of the life of every Catholic. How could it not be so when the primary symbol of our faith is the love of God displayed on the cross of Jesus Christ?

Despite my situation—which is similar to that of other married clergy who have entered the Catholic ranks since the 1980s—I am a firm supporter of the celibacy of the Catholic clergy. Its basis is not found in councils or popes but rather in the person of Jesus Christ. The heart of the Catholic priesthood is sacrifice, and celibacy, in imitation of Christ, frees the priest to give himself totally to the church and its people.

Though many priests do live this life of sacrifice, it is also obvious that celibacy is used by all too many priests to live a life that is selfish and closed off. The sexual scandals of the past decade are a glaring example of the perversion of celibacy.

And the very structures of a parish priest's life often prevent him from achieving the freedom that should be the fruit of celibacy. The lack of deep spiritual friendship between priests; the unreal world they inhabit, at least from the viewpoint of a typical American family; the careerism that is the noxious fruit of the bureaucratic world of the chancery—all this works against the priest using his celibacy to be free for his people.

Reform of the priesthood is sorely needed today. The answer is not married priests. The answer is priests who understand the sacrifice that is at the center of their lives—whether they are married or not.

Father Cipolla is the chair of the classics department at Brunswick School in Greenwich, Conn., and a parochial vicar at St. Mary's Church in Norwalk, Conn.

Cardinal Mahony Calls on Catholic Colleges to Take Up Immigration Reform

2012-02-02T00:56:00.004-05:00

Cardinal Mahony lays down the challenge. Let's take him up on it - Fr. Rick
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http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1200415.htm

Cardinal urges Catholic college leaders to embrace immigration reform

Cardinal Mahony (CNS file)

By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, retired archbishop of Los Angeles and longtime advocate of comprehensive immigration reform, is frustrated with the lack of action from Congress on the issue and hopes that today's young people will bring about a change.

"They get it. They're the ones who will make this happen," he told a group of Catholic college and university leaders Jan. 30 in Washington in a presentation during the three-day conference of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

The cardinal lamented the failed passage of federal legislation in 2010 that would have helped children of undocumented immigrants work toward legal status and get a college education.

When asked about the status of these efforts in Congress, he said it was going "terribly," which is why he is focusing on the work of college students who are educating their peers and advocating for immigration reform.

He said Catholic higher education is getting involved in this issue by participating in regional workshops across the country and gearing up to use curriculum on their campuses that outlines the role of the church in helping immigrant populations.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM Act, has been introduced in Congress in various forms since 2001. The bills have had bipartisan congressional backing and broad faith group and higher education support. Local, state and national Catholic organizations have been in the forefront of campaigns to pass the bills. The most recent version passed the House in 2010, but the Senate version fell five votes short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster threat.

The measure would have regularized the legal status of those who came to the United States before age 16, lived here at least five years, graduated from a U.S. high school and were pursuing higher education or military service.

If the legislation had passed, approximately 114,000 young people who had already obtained at least an associate's degree would have been immediately eligible for conditional lawful permanent resident status and 612,000 high school graduates would have been eligible if they graduated from college or completed two years of military service, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Dominican Sister Diane Kennedy, vice president of mission and ministry at Dominican University in Chicago, said a number of students at the university are undocumented immigrants.

She said the university simply responded to a "landslide of need" and was "not motivated by charity or politics but by its sense of mission" in accepting these students.

The school has helped many of the students with merit-based aid, she said, but school officials also know they will not get jobs in the U.S. when they graduate because of their illegal status.

Sister Diane similarly sees a "transforming movement" growing on college campuses as students speak out in support of immigration reform, particularly for the DREAM Act.

When a participant asked if schools were doing such students a disservice by accepting them while knowing they were not likely to get a job after graduating, Cardinal Mahony stressed that it was still the right thing to do.

He said the students will "still have a college degree and at some point they will be legal citizens." He said undocumented immigrants should not delay pursuing their education until they became citizens, because that might not happen for another 20 years.

In the closing session, conference speakers reminded the Catholic college and university leaders of their mission and broad challenges from working to engage the modern culture and promote respectful dialogue about differing viewpoints on their campuses to how to use, or even tame, ubiquitous technology.

In response to a question about use of social media, Father Tom Curran, a member of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales and president of Jesuit-run Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo., said he has no formula.

He said he advises students to be prudent, reminding them: "What you send (online) in a millisecond is out there forever."

END

Copyright (c) 2012 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
CNS · 3211 Fourth St NE · Washington DC 20017 · 202.541.3250

Bishop says reduce poverty; bring about God's Kingdom. See U.S. Catholic Magazine

2012-01-31T23:30:00.007-05:00

Reducing poverty will help bring about the kingdom of God, bishop says

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

By Catholic News Service

http://www.uscatholic.org/news/2012/01/reducing-poverty-will-help-bring-about-kingdom-god-bishop-says

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (CNS) -- While Jesus said we will "always have the poor" with us, "if each of us stops on his or her own journey to help a neighbor in need, the kingdom of God will come closer to realization each day," said Bishop George V. Murry of Youngstown, Ohio, in a pastoral letter on poverty.

Click here for pdf. of full pastoral letter

With his words, Jesus "provides a sad reminder that due to the way we think about and react with each other, we will 'always have the poor' with us," added Bishop Murry.

But Jesus also called upon his followers, he said, "to see and love our neighbors as ourselves."

"There is a sense that we have lost our historic concern for the poor among us. Sometimes we hear language and share attitudes that deride persons living in poverty," said the bishop, who also is secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The pastoral, "Who Is My Neighbor?" was dated January 2012 to coincide with National Poverty Awareness Month.

Poverty "is not a simple problem" because it "involves family dynamics, minimal material resources, missed opportunities, personal fears, complex relationships, cultural norms, geographic locations, isolation and lack of understanding," Bishop Murry said.

"Some who are poor are embarrassed to admit they have lost their jobs, their homes, and sometimes even their identity. Feeling hopeless and abandoned adds to the fear that their lives will never be what they were because they are too old for the job market and possess skills that are out of date," he added.

"Despite all of that complexity and regardless of the causes, the church continues to respond in numerous ways," he said.

"The church alone, however, cannot solve the problem of poverty. To succeed at first reducing and eventually eliminating poverty, everyone must be involved including the private and governmental sectors, along with religious and community agencies, and each one of us individually."

Bishop Murry added, "The church has no specific technical plan of action tailored to this present economic downturn. But what it does have is two thousand years of experience of hat policies and programs offer the best hope and practical means to help families move beyond poverty. That experience is rooted in the Scriptures."

One instance Bishop Murry used was the parable of the good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke, who took a risk and helped a man abandoned on the side of the road. The story, he said, "reminds us of our dual obligation to love God and neighbor."

Poverty in Ohio, lower than that of the United States in 2000, grew at a faster rate than the nation as a whole by 2010. And in almost every instance, the counties and major cities within the Youngstown Diocese have higher poverty rates than Ohio overall, topped by the cities of Youngstown, Canton and Warren, each with poverty rates of 30 percent and up.

"Trade-offs are made each day by families living in poverty: Do they eat, pay rent, buy gas for the car, purchase prescriptions, or buy clothes? Trying to plan and manage a budget on a very limited income is a process that few can master," Bishop Murry said.

"We as the church in northeastern Ohio must remain committed to respond both in charity and in justice to the needs and hopes of those who struggle while living in poverty."

He praised the work of the U.S. bishops' Catholic Campaign for Human Development, saying it has "helped large numbers of low-income and middle/upper-income persons work in solidarity to find common and just solutions to economic problems and better their lives. The campaign deserves our support."

Bishop Murry also pointed to the seven corporal works of mercy -- feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit those in prison, bury the dead -- as touchstones for dealing with their neighbor.

"We, the church, are given many resources to care for each other. We, therefore, must act with works of charity and works of justice deeply rooted in our faith and life of prayer."

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FULL DISCLOSURE. Bishop Murray is/was a Jesuit of the Maryland Province. I too am a Jesuit of the Maryland Province. When a Jesuit is asked to be a Bishop, he technically "leaves" his religious order so he can 1) control property, and 2) not be under a vow of obedience to a Jesuit Superior. Many Bishops "re-enter" their religious communities on retiring from their episcopal responsibilities. - Fr. Rick

PARENTHOOD. Great TV

2012-01-31T22:01:00.001-05:00

This is an excellent show. We should pray for parents at every Mass the way we pray for bishops and clergy... - Fr. Rick

INSIDE HIGHER ED: Social Justice on College Campuses

2012-01-31T21:47:00.003-05:00

January 31, 2012 - 3:00am

By Mitch Smith

There are still no fair trade shops on the Kalamazoo College campus.

After returning from study abroad trips in Thailand and Kenya and Botswana, a group of Kalamazoo students wanted to open a store that would showcase goods that artisans in those countries made for a living wage.

But before leasing a storefront, the students conducted a study to see whether a fair trade shop would be viable. Their findings suggested it wouldn’t. Instead, they helped convince local businesses to carry fair trade goods.

President Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran considers the project part of the pragmatic approach to social justice taught at her campus’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership.

The Kalamazoo center is part of a growing trend, particularly at liberal arts colleges, to expand social justice education. While many colleges have for years housed social justice groups and boasted about the commitment of their students and faculty members to social justice, the new programs are more formal and more closely tied to academic missions than most earlier efforts. Often seeking to encourage student leadership and reconnect with an institutional history of activism, at least a half-dozen new or expanded programs have started in recent months and years.

The Arcus Center’s focus, Wilson-Oyelaran said, is in giving all students an idea of how to impact the world. The goal isn't to teach students what to believe, but instead to give them the business and technology savvy for them to turn their passion into a viable social justice enterprise through classes and financial support.

Founded in 2009, the Arcus Center also seeks to integrate social justice topics into courses across campus. A recent $23 million grant, the largest in the history of the Michigan liberal arts college, will expand the center by offering two endowed faculty chairs, scholarships, internships, annual lectures and other programs.

Elsewhere, similar projects are taking root. Whitman College in Washington and Philander Smith College in Arkansas both have new programs on social justice. Brandeis University offers a minor in social justice and social policy. Grinnell College offers an award to young social justice leaders. Lake Forest College in Illinois also offers a minor. Saint Mary’s College of California just announced a new master’s degree concentration in social justice leadership. And the movement isn’t limited to private institutions: Arizona State University introduced a master’s degree in social justice and human rights last fall.

The reason the programs are so common at liberal arts colleges can often be traced back to their founding, Grinnell President Raynard Kington said. Abolitionists founded his college in Iowa, and early civil rights leaders like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth spoke on campus in the early days of Kalamazoo College.

The social justice program at Philander Smith also has roots in the drive for racial equality. In 1957, faculty members at the historically black college tutored nine students barred from attending Little Rock Central High School because of their race. The Little Rock Nine helped integrate the nation’s schools at a time when skin color still dictated which water fountains one could drink out of in the South.

Joseph Jones, director of the college’s new social justice program, said the lessons from the civil rights movement are still relevant today when discussing the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake or food availability in Little Rock. Instead of creating a separate academic program, Jones said the goal of Philander Smith's new center is to promote service learning and inject social justice concepts into different classes.

And with that history, he said, a new generation of Philander Smith students is uniquely positioned to take a look at social justice issues in Arkansas that are often ignored. “It’s meaningful,” he said, “especially for a city like Little Rock that has a lot of issues there that haven’t really been dealt with in a serious way.

“If we can provide a framework, we can get students to think about some of these problems and thinking about doing something to solve them.”

Like Philander Smith's, Grinnell’s social justice emphasis has grown stronger in recent months. The college awarded its first three awards last fall to young people working for social change, with $50,000 going to each winner and another $50,000 to a charity of their choice. Grinnell received 1,200 applications.

The winners –a rabbi connecting Palestinians with American Jews, an activist in Ghana and a pair of young men who helped install a social justice component in Uganda’s national curriculum – spent a week on campus meeting with students and speaking in classes with social justice themes. Two have agreed to come back to teach short courses at Grinnell and two have taken on Grinnell interns at their organizations. Back in Iowa, students are helping with a growing prison education program and managing a local microlending program.

That renewed interest in social justice both at Grinnell and elsewhere, Kington said, might be partially due to the economic downturn. He sees students evaluating whether fortune or good works are more important and looking for concrete ways to improve the world.

“Students are having serious discussions about what they want out of life,” he said. “They may very well die with fewer toys and richer lives and that would be O.K.”

Wilson-Oyelaran, the Kalamazoo leader, attributes the growth of social justice programs in part to the new skill set needed to have an impact. Enthusiasm isn't always enough to create change as an activist or organizer, something her students found out first-hand when trying to open that fair trade store.

"I think it’s very important to link the practicalities with the passion and ideals," she said. "The skills which are needed now are slightly different than the current leaders."

Sit Back and Enjoy a Beautiful Song.

2012-01-30T17:03:00.003-05:00

Thanks Cara Dillion!

Sometimes, I think music is the best "proof" we have of God's existence.

NY Times Douthat sounds the alarm

2012-01-29T20:16:00.006-05:00

Douthat is always worth listening to. I don't agree with all he says here. I don't think what's happening is, "... an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together." But I do agree with a lot of what he says in this op-ed piece. - Fr. Rick
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January 28, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-government-and-its-rivals.html?hp

WHEN liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of “The Fountainhead.” Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.

In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions — hospitals, schools and charities — in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. A number of religious groups, led by the American Catholic bishops, had requested an exemption for plans purchased by their institutions. Instead, the White House has settled on an exemption that only covers religious institutions that primarily serve members of their own faith. A parish would be exempt from the mandate, in other words, but a Catholic hospital would not.

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”

The regulations are a particularly cruel betrayal of Catholic Democrats, many of whom had defended the health care law as an admirable fulfillment of Catholicism’s emphasis on social justice. Now they find that their government’s communitarianism leaves no room for their church’s communitarianism, and threatens to regulate it out of existence.

Critics of the administration’s policy are framing this as a religious liberty issue, and rightly so. But what’s at stake here is bigger even than religious freedom. The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.

The Catholic Church’s position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly, and many liberals are inclined to see the White House’s decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.

The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends. It is Catholics hospitals today; it will be someone else tomorrow.

The White House attack on conscience is a vindication of health care reform’s critics, who saw exactly this kind of overreach coming. But it’s also an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.

Bus Parking at the March for Life by Tom Gibbons.

2012-01-27T21:10:00.004-05:00

This from Busted Halo. Great article.

January 23rd, 2012

Bus Parking at the March For Life

by Tom Gibbons

You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, but on this Pro Life weekend, I really didn’t know what to say today. Every time I started to write one thing about the March For Life, two other concerns came to the fore. This was an issue that I used to look at in very black and white terms when I was younger. Then I got to a point where I could only see it in terms in gray. Now I guess I am at a point where I look at it in terms of black and white…and gray.

At first glance it’s a black and white issue, an open and shut case, there’s really not much more to discuss. And I have to say that this past October, I was given the amazing gift of two nieces — each from my two sisters — and I even got to be in the room for the birth of one of them. During Christmas I got to hold each one of them in my arms and during that moment, the sacredness and holiness of each life could not have been more clear.

But then I was on Facebook yesterday…procrastinating from my studies a little bit…and I saw someone make the comment that the Church cares about the unborn but not about the concerns of women. At first I was a little taken aback. The Catholic Church is one of the largest — if not the largest — provided of services to those in need. Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, and endless stream of hospitals and homeless shelters…those things that often get overlooked when the media discusses the Church. But then I thought about…traffic.

Buses at the National Shrine in Washington, D.C.

As some of you might know, I live over in the Northwest part of DC right by Catholic University and the Shrine of the National Basilica on 4^th Street Northeast. And every year in late January the street is lined with buses as Catholics come from all over the country in order to mark the anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision Row vs. Wade. Seminarians, high school students, priests, concerned parents, politicians — young and old — all descend on our nation’s capitol in order to protest and renew the call to outlaw the practice of abortion in the annual March For Life. As you can imagine, the traffic in the streets during those few days can be pretty terrific.

But I cannot ignore that January 22 is the ONLY time of the year when the streets outside of the National Basilica are jammed with buses. I cannot ignore that the streets around the Basilica are clear when bishops try to raise the issue of immigration. I cannot ignore that the streets are clear when bishops try to raise the issue of day care for mothers and families. I cannot ignore that the streets around the Basilica are clear when bishops try to raise the issue of poverty. In other words, the streets outside of the Basilica are empty on the other days of the year when bishops challenge us all to speak out against so many of the reasons many women see abortion as the only viable answer when they are facing crisis. It was then that I began to wonder if that Facebook poster — while I don’t agree entirely with the sentiment—may have also had a point. I began to wonder how many of us in the church are more concerned with proclaiming a moral high ground but not as concerned with bringing about the conditions that actually would support life.

...

Click here to read the rest of the article http://bustedhalo.com/blogs/bus-parking-in-the-march-for-life

Jennifer Fulwiler: A Sexual Revolution

2012-01-24T19:43:00.005-05:00

A Sexual Revolution

One woman's journey from pro-choice atheist to pro-life Catholic

Jennifer Fulwiler | JULY 7, 2008

http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=10904

B ack in my pro-choice days, I read that in certain ancient societies it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them to die of exposure. I found these stories to be as perplexing as they were horrifying. How could this happen? I could never understand how entire cultures could buy into something so obviously terrible, how something that modern society understands to be an unthinkable evil could be widely accepted among large groups of people.

Because of my deep distress at hearing of such crimes against humanity, I found it irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as “killing babies.” Obviously, nobody was in favor of killing babies, and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate as much was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their “insane” societies. We were not in favor of killing anything. We simply felt that a woman had a right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced a crisis pregnancy. It was unfortunate, but that was the sacrifice that had to be made to prevent women from becoming victims of unwanted pregnancies.

At that time I was an atheist and had little exposure to religious social circles. As I began to search for God and open my mind to Christianity, however, I could not help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often, and I was put on the defensive about my views. One night I was discussing the topic with my husband, who was re-examining his own pro-choice stance. He made a passing remark that startled me into reconsidering this issue: “It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other-people’s-life,” he quipped. “Everyone is pro-their-own-life.”

Growing Discomfort

His remark made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints had put me in the position of deciding whose lives were worth living, and even who was human. Along with doctors, the government and other abortion advocates, I decided where to draw this crucial line. When I would come across Catholic Web sites or books that asserted “Life begins at conception,” I would scoff, as was my habit, yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense. I realized that my criteria for determining when human life begins were distressingly vague. I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human, and I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard about things like the 3-D ultrasounds that showed fetuses touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion acceptable. As modern technology revealed more and more evidence that fetuses were humans too, I would simply move the bar for what I considered human.

At some point I started to feel I was more determined to remain pro-choice than to analyze honestly who was and was not human. I started to see this phenomenon in others in the pro-choice community as well. As I researched issues like partial-birth abortion, I frequently became stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon witnessing the level of evil that normal people can support. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read of reasonable, educated professionals calmly justifying infanticide by calling the victims fetuses instead of babies. It was then that I took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be pro-choice, I was not pro-choice.

Yet I still could not quite label myself pro-life.

I recognized that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was some tremendous pressure that kept me from objectively looking at the issue. Something deep within me screamed that not to allow women to have abortions, at least in the first trimester, would be unfair in the direst sense of the word. Even as I became religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect. It became too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being “at conception,” as opposed to some arbitrary point during gestation. It was not until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group that I was able to release that internal pressure I felt and take an unflinching look at abortion.

Sex and Creating Life

Growing up in secular middle-class America, I understood sex as something disconnected from the idea of creating life. During my entire childhood I did not know anyone who had a baby sibling; and to the extent that neighborhood parents ever talked about pregnancy, it was to say they were glad they were “done.” In high school sex education class, we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. Even recently, before our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church, my husband and I took a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and the segment called “Good Sex” did not mention children once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest the videos came to connecting sex to the creation of life was a brief note that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.

All my life, the message I had heard loud and clear was that sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten. This mind-set became the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being by default closed to the possibility of life, I thought of unplanned pregnancies as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street—something totally unpredictable and undeserved that happened to people living normal lives.

My pro-choice views (and I imagine those of many others) were motivated by loving concern: I just did not want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Since it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with “hang-ups” eventually has sex, and that sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I was lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: the enemy is not human. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendency to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize their fellow human beings on the other side of the line in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized what we saw as the enemy of sex.

As I was reading up on the Catholic Church’s understanding of sex, marriage and contraception, everything changed. I had always assumed that Catholic teachings against birth control were outdated notions, even a thinly disguised attempt to oppress the faithful. What I found, however, was that these teachings expressed a fundamentally different understanding of sex. And once I discovered this, I never saw the world the same way again.

Burdens or Blessings?

The way I had always seen it, the generally accepted view was that babies were burdens, except for a few times in life when everything might be perfect enough for a couple to see new life as a good thing. The Catholic view, I discovered, is that babies are blessings and that while it is fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a “contraceptive mentality”—feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties—we not only fail to respect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.

I came to see that our culture’s widespread use and acceptance of contraception meant that the “contraceptive mentality” toward sex was now the default attitude. As a society, we had come to take it for granted that we are entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we are opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we see children as a burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon. Even if it would be a huge crisis to become pregnant, we had a right to have sex anyway. If this were true—if it were morally acceptable for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives—then abortion, as I saw things, had to be O.K.

Ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone, but the lie was just too tempting. I did not want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity. Terminating pregnancies simply had to be acceptable, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal, and society had made it very clear that sex was not a huge deal. As long as I accepted the premise that engaging in sex with a contraceptive mentality was morally acceptable, I could not bring myself to consider that abortion might not be acceptable. It seemed inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.

Given my background, the Catholic idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we are opposed to its life-giving potential, was a revolutionary message. Being able to consider honestly when life begins, to open my heart and mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible for me until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I became officially, unapologetically pro-life. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering how normal people could do something like that, and I felt a chill rush through me as I thought: I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people—people like me—can support gravely evil things because of the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state where they could leave a newborn child to die. The very real pressures of life—“we can’t afford another baby,” “we can’t have any more girls,” “he wouldn’t have had a good life”—left them susceptible to the temptation to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, the same process had happened with me, with the pro-choice movement and with anyone else who has ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.

I suspect that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they couldn’t talk, the couldn’t sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles were just involuntary reactions. I bet they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them something like “fetuses.”

Jennifer Fulwiler is a Web developer who lives in Austin, Tex., with her husband and three children. She converted to Catholicism from atheism in 2007 and writes about her conversion at http://www.conversiondiary.com/.

When you're Right you're Right. And When you're Wrong, you're Wrong

2012-01-23T22:36:00.006-05:00

President Obama is wrong on this one. He's going to lose a lot of the Catholic vote on this issue. Forcing Catholic institutions to pay for contraception, etc., that we, in principle, cannot pay for.... not good politics. Nor is it right and just.
- Peace, Fr. Rick
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Obama Offends the Catholic Left

A contraceptive mandate provokes an unnecessary war.

By WILLIAM MCGURN

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203718504577179110264196498.html

When Barack Obama secured his party's nomination for president in 2008, one group of Democrats had special reason to cheer.

These were Democrats who were reliably liberal on policy but horrified by the party's sometimes knee-jerk animosity to faith. The low point may have been the 1992 Democratic convention. There the liberal but pro-life governor of Pennsylvania, Bob Casey Sr., was humiliated when he was denied a speaking slot while a pro-choice Republican activist from his home state was allowed.

With Mr. Obama, all this looked to be in the past. In 2006, the Illinois senator delivered a speech declaring that "secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square." He followed up by appearing at fund-raisers for the anti-abortion Bob Casey Jr. during Mr. Casey's successful run for Sen. Rick Santorum's senate seat.

Sen. Casey went on to co-chair Mr. Obama's National Catholic Advisory Council. Sixteen years after the snub to his dad, he was given a prime-time speaking slot at the 2008 Democratic convention. And Mr. Obama would go on to capture a majority of the Catholic vote.

Now, suddenly, we have headlines about the president's "war on the Catholic Church." Mostly they stem from a Health and Human Services mandate that forces every employer to provide employees with health coverage that not only covers birth control and sterilization, but makes them free. Predictably, the move has drawn fire from the Catholic bishops.

Getty Images

An HHS mandate requires employers to provide health coverage that covers birth control.

Less predictable—and far more interesting—has been the heat from the Catholic left, including many who have in the past given the president vital cover. In a post for the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winter minces few words. Under the headline "J'ACCUSE," he rightly takes the president to the woodshed for the politics of the decision, for the substance, and for how "shamefully" it treats "those Catholics who went out on a limb" for him.

The message Mr. Obama is sending, says Mr. Winters, is "that there is no room in this great country of ours for the institutions our Church has built over the years to be Catholic in ways that are important to us."

Mr. Winters is not alone. The liberal Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, blogged that he "cannot imagine a more direct and frontal attack on freedom of conscience"—and he urged people to fight it. Another liberal favorite, Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla., has raised the specter of "civil disobedience" and vowed that he will drop coverage for diocesan workers rather than comply. They are joined in their expressions of discontent by the leaders of Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities, which alone employs 70,000 people.

In the run-up to the ruling, the president of Notre Dame, the Rev. John Jenkins, suggested a modest compromise by which the president could have avoided most of this strife. That would have been by allowing the traditional exemption for religious organizations. That's the same understanding two of the president's own appointees to the Supreme Court just reaffirmed in a 9-0 ruling that recognized a faith-based school's First Amendment right to choose its own ministers without government interference, regardless of antidiscrimination law.

A few years ago Father Jenkins took enormous grief when he invited President Obama to speak at a Notre Dame commencement; now Father Jenkins finds himself publicly disapproving of an "unnecessary government intervention" that puts many organizations such as his in an "untenable position."

Here's just part of what he means by "untenable": Were Notre Dame to drop coverage for its 5,229 employees, the HHS penalty alone would amount to $10 million each year.

The irony, of course, is that the ruling is being imposed by a Catholic Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, working in an administration with a Catholic vice president, Joe Biden. A few years back the voluble Mr. Biden famously threatened to "shove my rosary beads" down the throat of those who dared suggest that his party's positions on social issues put it at odds with people of faith. Does he now mean to include Mr. Winters, Cardinal Mahony and Father Jenkins?

Catholic liberals appreciate that this HHS decision is more than a return to the hostility that sent so many Catholic Democrats fleeing to the Republican Party these past few decades. They understand that if left to stand, this ruling threatens the religious institutions closest to their hearts—those serving Americans in need, such as hospitals, soup kitchens and immigrant services.

Conservatives may enjoy the problems this creates for Mr. Obama this election year. Still, for those who care about issues such as life and marriage and religious liberty that so roil our body politic, we ought to wish Catholic progressives well in their intra-liberal fight. For we shall never arrive at the consensus we hope for if we allow our politics to be divided between a party of faith and a party of animosity to faith.

Write to MainStreet@wsj.com

Really Hard to Believe: PA Kicks 88,000 Kids Off Health Insurance Rolls

2012-01-22T23:19:00.014-05:00

Lots of talk these days from some politicians who want to put kids to work. In previous eras, kids worked. Here's a picture of Pennsylvania Breaker Boys, the little boys who worked in the coal mines in NE Pennsylvania, providing the nation's energy in the early 20th century.

Chris Kelly at the Scranton Times Tribune reveals the ugly truth of our times:

"Despite his serial attacks on the state's most vulnerable citizens, Gov. Tom Corbett's recent call for $160 million in new budget cuts and an asset test for food stamp recipients was breathtaking in its cowardice. Once again, he "stood up" to Pennsylvania's poorest while lying down for out-of-state corporations getting filthy rich at our expense."

"The reaction of Monsignor Joseph P. Kelly, executive director of Catholic Social Services for the Diocese of Scranton, was universal among observers possessed of even an ounce of Christian charity: 'My immediate reaction was, 'Who is advising the governor on this?' " he said. "I mean, this is terrible public policy. Do we really not want to feed people in the United States of America?" ...

"Well, since August, 88,000 kids whose only sin was being born poor in Pennsylvania lost their health insurance while scores of corporations hauled billions in profits out of this state while giving next to nothing in return."

[It's crazier than you can imagine. [ click to read full article] Published: January 22, 2012

Ex-Welfare Department adviser published controversial views on women, sex and Medicaid.

**************************

God help the Outcasts. God help us all.

Who creates Jobs?

2012-01-21T22:23:00.004-05:00

Cartoon from Time Magazine

http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/13/cartoons-of-the-week/#jobs

Can someone explain how all these "one percenters" and other mega rich folks are "job creators" but the lack of jobs (e.g., unemployment rate) is the government's fault? How can all those who want "government out of our lives" (but not out of medicare) demand that government do something about the unemployment rate? Isn't high unemployment the fault of all those "job creators" who aren't creating jobs? Just asking....

Shame-Less and Grace-Full. Karen McClintock

2012-01-20T15:15:00.006-05:00

A beautiful, challenging and thought inspiring reflection. My spiritual director in the novitiate, wise and gruff old Henry, told us. "Comparisons are odious." So true. Don't worry about measuring up to someone else's expectation. Be free and love and follow your deepest truest desires - Peace Fr. Rick

************************************************************

Shame-Less and Grace-Full

by Karen A. McClintock

http://www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=9869

My parents were graceful dancers. They often went to dance clubs and then returned home to dance a little longer around the living room. I come from a line of elegant people. So I wasn’t surprised when my parents made clear to my older sister and me that we would attend the Jeanne Borsky School of Dance. My parents believed dance was one of my callings. They said that I walked around the living room on the tips of my toes at the age of two, so we all hoped for my future stardom. As soon as my feet were strong enough to be crammed into little satin toe shoes, my mother took me to enroll in class.

In our pink tights and black leotards, fifteen delicate, bouncy girls lined up along the bar to practice our turnout. In walked Jeanne Borsky. She glided along the floor. Her hair was pinned up high on her head, and she wore thick pancake makeup, as if she were still in the spotlight on stage. She was old, yet ageless. I wanted to be graceful like Mrs. Borsky. She was perfectly balanced, flexible, and strong. This must be grace.

This moment quickly faded as we got down to the work of being graceful. The music had a beat that I found I couldn’t keep, Mrs. Borsky’s smile began to fade, and before long I felt as awkward as a young giraffe taking his first steps. I forced my body into stretches and movements that felt more like contortions than beautiful extensions.

I learned that comparison is a form of shame. In ballet training you have to look exactly like the others. We were all mercilessly compared to the best students in the class. We were shamed for not properly executing the steps, for not conveying the right feelings, for not having the right body shape, for anything short of perfection. We soon learned to do each move correctly or else.

Here is what I learned about grace (and shame) at Mrs. Borsky’s. I learned that grace can be achieved only through hard work. I learned that grace is not free: either your parents pay for the lessons or you do. I learned that grace doesn’t come naturally. I learned that I couldn’t become graceful out of my desire to dance; I had to overcome my unworthiness by righteous hard work. Only when I had achieved the perfect line, the perfect form, the perfect leap into the air, then, maybe, I could enjoy the riches of grace.

Forty years later, I am still shaking off the ill effects of the shame I learned at Jeanne Borsky’s School of Dance. And maybe you haven’t shaken off the cultural and churchtaught idea that grace must be earned through hard work and selfincrimination.

After years of studying shame and overcoming no small amount of my own, I have come to see shame and grace differently. I also see my old ballet teacher differently. Jeanne Borsky knew a lot about ballet and a lot about shame, but she didn’t really know a thing about grace. Even though her body was flexible, strong, and well-shaped, as a teacher, she was mean spirited and her behaviors were ugly. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking of myself as misshapen and inadequate. This was not the experience I had hoped for or the one my parents had wanted for me.

Jeanne was a shame-driven leader. I now wonder what experiences led her to such a place of negativity. I wonder if her dreams of stardom had fallen apart at some point in her career. Without greater self-worth, she didn’t know how to build our selfesteem along with strong and competent physiques. She couldn’t make genuine grace happen. What a shame that was!

I can only speculate on the causes of my dance teacher’s pain, but I know she is not unique in carrying and passing along shame. Shame begins in childhood and sneaks up on us during adolescence, and we hear it in the voices of our parents and peers. Sometimes we internalize those voices, and they become our own self-shaming messengers. You must learn that what you say to yourself about yourself matters. You must identify the source or sources of your shame and heal them. Once you’ve done that, you can move beyond cycles of shame that feed strongly into addictive behaviors, codependency, noxious secrets, and problematic relationships. You must also help in liberating others from their shame, be they friends, colleagues, or people in a congregation where you worship and serve.

While readers of this article come from many different theological backgrounds, I ask you to explore the shame-laden messages within your own religious teachings and practices. What we learn in Sunday school or Sabbath school and what we hear from preachers and rabbis shape our core self-esteem. Were you taught that you are a child of God, created in God’s image? Have you been repeatedly told that you have committed unpardonable sins? How you see yourself may be directly connected to religious teachings about your goodness and your shamefulness.

Many faith communities teach the doctrine of shame, often without knowing it. You may have been raised in such a congregation. For example, a core shame message in many Christian congregations is that you must be like Jesus at all times; anything less than that and you have failed. You just don’t measure up. You will never be good enough. These are the messages that people with shame are used to hearing. They feel at home with messages sent out from the pulpit, the newsletter, and worship that reinforce shame. They experience the familiarity of family within such a congregation if their own families of origin perpetuated shame. People with shame find shame-based congregations, because they are accustomed to being preached to, having fingers pointed in their direction, and the judgment of not measuring up.

You are hereby invited to become a shameless leader in order to assist others in your congregational system to find a life of grace. You can heal the shame you have likely been carrying around for far too long. This shame may be rooted in childhood when you experienced parental disapproval or abuse. It may have come into your life as a result of sexual experimentation in your teens or young adulthood. It may have followed a marriage that ended or a relationship in which you carried secrets. It may be that you have taken responsibility for someone else’s shame and made it your own.

The faith community you participate in needs your help in creating a place of joy and grace. To do this, you must learn to recognize and heal the shame of your own upbringing, to recognize shame in the behavior of other leaders and clergy around you, to reduce shame-reinforcing theology, and to provide alternative messages of hope and healing.

According to the apostle Paul, we have inherited the immeasurable riches of grace. Jesus has pleasurably lavished grace on us (Eph. 1:5–10). While many church growth experts have been trying to fix the problems of declining congregations, weary leaders who spend time and money examining their inadequacies may increase debilitating shame. The longer our list of failures grows, the more we get locked into a core belief that we are incapable of doing anything differently. Very few people have taken the step of looking underneath the rocks for the affect of shame.

In worship one morning, members of the choir, dressed in their beautiful robes, processed into the chancel area, shuffled into place so that everyone could see the director, and after hearing their pitch, began to sing. The women in the front row started singing the melody and the men in the back row came in, but they were obviously not in sync. As they plowed ahead for a few bars, their faces became flushed and distorted, their shoulders drooped, and their breathing grew shallow. The choir director waved her hands to stop the pianist and looked up at them. The choir members all held their breaths like children about to be scolded. What would she say? This could have been a moment for shame. She might have sighed and said, “Let’s try again,” exposing her frustration and their failure. Instead she said, “I want to start over, because I have heard you sing this song beautifully.” They stood up taller, they breathed more deeply, and when they began again, it went off without a hitch. They were singing from a place of grace. They were led by a grace-based leader. You can become one too.
***************************************************

In Shame-less Lives, Grace-full Congregations, author Karen McClintock invites readers to become shame-less, so they can assist others in a congregational system to find a life of joy and grace. With skilled storytelling and gentle humor, McClintock takes readers on a journey in which we learn to recognize the many forms shame takes and explore and heal the shame of our own upbringing, particularly the shame-laden messages within our own religious teachings and practices.

Newsweek lays out the case for class warfare. The rich are winning

2012-01-20T00:18:00.006-05:00

Read it and weep. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/niall-ferguson-a-conservative-take-on-america-s-economic-divide.html

Rich America, Poor America. Newsweek Jan 23, 2012.

"Adjusted for inflation, the income of the average American male has essentially flatlined since the 1970s, according to figures from the Census Bureau. The income of the bottom quarter of U.S. families has actually fallen. It’s been a different story for the rich."

Median compensation for CEOs of 500 largest corporation
1970 $1 million
2010 $13 million (1200% increase)

Median income in USA
1975 $12,000
2010 $49,000 (308% increase)

Percentage of income going to the top 1%
1933 24%
1973 09%
2007 24%

What/Who Will Make You Happy? From National catholic Reporter

2012-01-19T00:00:00.006-05:00

http://ncronline.org/print/28322

The subjectivity of happiness:

on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 'Flow'

By Chase Nordengren

Created Jan 05, 2012

by Chase Nordengren [1] on Jan. 05, 2012

The pursuit of happiness, one of the most popular subjects of contemporary spiritual writing, is also among the most superficially addressed themes in the church's homiletics. From Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) to Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006), seekers of the last 60 years have demonstrated an unquenchable interest in the power of spiritual technologies to better their well-being or cure anxieties and depression. ... Click above to read the rest...

King Had a Dream. Do we?

2012-01-16T19:20:00.012-05:00

Freedom and Economic Justice: Rev. Martin Luther King's Unfinished Agenda

Richard G. Malloy, S.J., Ph.D.

In October of 1967, Rev. Martin Luther King spoke at St. Joe's in Philadelphia. In that speech, given just six months before he was assassinated, King stated, "Our goal is freedom. And I still have faith that we are going to get to that goal." The freedom King was speaking of that day was not simply racial equality. He was also speaking about economic justice. In his address, King spoke of the relative ease with which lunch counters had been desegregated, while he noted that it was proving much more difficult to eradicate the ghettos of the large Northern cities.

Earlier that year (August 1967) at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, his home church, King delivered a sermon entitled "Where Do We Go from Here?," in which he directly articulates many of the themes of economic justice he would touch upon later in October in his talk. King argued:

"When the constitution was written, a strange formula … declared that the Negro was sixty percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare that he is fifty percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. …half the income… twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population."

Note in the above quote, Rev. King putting to good use the methods of analyzing society he learned as an undergraduate Sociology major! What he was talking about near the end of his life was the simple truth that freedom and economic opportunity and equality were more than linked. You cannot have one without the other. Freedom and economic equality mutually condition one another.

Today, almost fifty years since the iconic "I Have a Dream Speech", some progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go. The median net worth of whites is ten times greater than that of African Americans.

Source: Prof. G. William Domhoff’s websitee. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html (accessed Jan 16, 2012)

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that median household income in the USA is $49,445. Median household income of whites ($54,620) is almost one third greater than that of Blacks ($32,068). And despite sincere efforts on so many levels, overt, vile racism is still evident in our society. Go to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website ( http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map) and see the virulent racism that still exists among us.

What would have happened if King's ideas were heeded? In his 1967 Atlanta speech, Rev. King called for the eradication of poverty in our midst. He proposed a Guaranteed National Income, an idea articulated at that time by John Kenneth Gailbraith and even championed by Richard Nixon a few years later. In 1967, it would have cost $20 billion for a Guaranteed National Income, about what we spent to put a man on the moon, and $15 billion less than the $35 billion we were wasting on the War in Vietnam. What would our country and the world look like today if poverty has been systematically eradicated thirty-five years ago?

In Martin Luther King, Jr., God sent us a prophet. The prophet spoke in our midst. And we have not yet heeded his message. The shortest verse in the Gospels is "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). There, Jesus is crying over the death of his friend Lazarus. I wonder what Jesus' reaction is to our society's inability/refusal to enflesh in law the principles of freedom and economic Justice, the principles for which Martin Luther King died at the young age of 39 years? Is Jesus weeping again? Maybe. Or maybe Jesus is calling us to Keep the Dream Alive, and bring to fruition the Dream of Rev. King. On that hot sweltering day in August 1963, King spoke of hope and healing, justice and joy.

“In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note…. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice” (MLK, “I Have a Dream” Speech, 1963)

King had a dream. Do we?

How much do the top 1% get?

2012-01-16T00:00:00.011-05:00

Source: Congressional Budget Office, Average Federal Taxes by Income Group, “Average After-Tax Household Income,” June, 2010. (This graph found at http://inequality.org/income-inequality/)

Today's New York Times article on inequality has numbers much lower than Mother Jones or Inequality.org.

NY Times says family income of $338,001 puts a family in top 1%.

Mother Jones and Inequality.org put the top 1% at well over a $1,000,000 average annual family income. The CBO agrees with Mother Jones and Inequality.org.

Maybe the NYTimes only counts earned income? Many of the Superrich receive little income but live off inheritance and investment income.

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Charles Blow Nails Romney and Paul K Nails the "Greed is Good" insanity

2012-01-14T00:10:00.006-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/opinion/krugman-america-isnt-a-corporation.html?pagewanted=print

America Isn’t a Corporation

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”

That’s how the fictional Gordon Gekko finished his famous “Greed is good” speech in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” In the movie, Gekko got his comeuppance. But in real life, Gekkoism triumphed, and policy based on the notion that greed is good is a major reason why income has grown so much more rapidly for the richest 1 percent than for the middle class.

Today, however, let’s focus on the rest of that sentence, which compares America to a corporation. This, too, is an idea that has been widely accepted. And it’s the main plank of Mitt Romney’s case that he should be president: In effect, he is asserting that what we need to fix our ailing economy is someone who has been successful in business.

In so doing, he has, of course, invited close scrutiny of his business career. And it turns out that there is at least a whiff of Gordon Gekko in his time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm; he was a buyer and seller of businesses, often to the detriment of their employees, rather than someone who ran companies for the long haul. (Also, when will he release his tax returns?) Nor has he helped his credibility by making untenable claims about his role as a “job creator.”

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.

Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Yes, there’s a global economy. But six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries, which are largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market.

And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.

But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed.

Now, to be fair, being a career politician isn’t necessarily a better preparation for managing economic policy than being a businessman. But Mr. Romney is the one claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency. Did I mention that the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover? (Unless you count former President George W. Bush.)

And there’s also the question of whether Mr. Romney understands the difference between running a business and managing an economy.

Like many observers, I was somewhat startled by his latest defense of his record at Bain — namely, that he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time.

But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama’s actions: “He did it to try to save the business.” No, he didn’t; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America’s slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction?

America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now — and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.

***************************************************

Here's a photo of Mitt Romney and his money buddies.
Charles Blow blows the whistle on this insanity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/opinion/blow-bitter-politics-of-envy.html?hp

Mitt "Gordon Gekko" Romney Runs for President

2012-01-12T23:16:00.009-05:00

Check out this 28 min video. Gordon Gekko is running for President.

http://www.webcasts.com/kingofbain/

Paid for by http://www.winningourfuture.com/

******************************

Chait on Republican Class Warfare in the USA

2012-01-12T22:20:00.004-05:00

Interesting take on Class realities in the USA today.

‘Quiet Rooms’ and Republican Class War

By Jonathan Chait

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/quiet-rooms-and-republican-class-war.html

During the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain opened up a brief violent fissure by assailing George W. Bush’s plan to cut taxes. McCain began by arguing that it was more prudent to use the temporary budget surplus to reduce the national debt, but he soon began making the case in moral terms, citing the widening gap between rich and poor and insisting it was wrong to cut taxes for the rich. Right-wingers were apoplectic, and even McCain’s GOP allies were shaken. Before that moment, McCain had been a largely conventional conservative with a handful of apostasies, and his campaign little more than an irritant. His populist opposition to the Bush tax cuts marked him as a full-fledged heretic and united the party Establishment against him in full fury.

There is an echo of this episode in the current fight over Bain Capital, the heart of which is this highly effective and even moving half-hour propaganda film detailing the victims and costs of Romney’s business career. It is not exactly the same thing. The fight is over biography, not policy, and, in this case, the Establishment candidate actually has less right-wing policies than the insurgent. (Though Romney’s program is more right-wing than Bush’s was.) But the dynamic is that the underdog insurgents are exploiting a rift between the Republican elite, which is worshipful of the rich, and the Party’s voters, who view the rich far more suspiciously.

Romney’s official line is that a huge debate over the human impact of his tenure at Bain Capital is a wonderful thing — a debate over free enterprise that he wants to have with Obama and is sure to win. But Republican behavior suggests it’s all a bluff. Even perpetual Republican Pollyanna Fred Barnes expresses his fear today that Gingrich has opened up a deep wound in Romney’s public image. Romney allies are applying intense pressure on Gingrich to ix-nay the ain-Bay.

The GOP Establishment’s deepest and most recurrent fear is an open debate over economic class. This is not a debate they feel they can win even among Republican voters, a majority of whom actually favor higher taxes on the rich. Romney’s assertion yesterday that economic inequality should not be discussed, or should only be mentioned in “quiet rooms,” is a too-frank expression of the GOP elite’s actual belief that the issue must be kept out of political debate.

President Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleischer, who saw class warfare under every rock, was asked at a 2001 press conference if it inherently constituted class warfare to question any aspect of the distribution of Bush’s tax cuts:

Q: Does he believe that those who don't like the mix of the different tax brackets that he is proposing are engaging in class warfare?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, there is a — there is always an endeavor in this town to deny tax relief to people, because they accuse some people of being rich or successful, and therefore they're not entitled to tax relief. And that's just not a view that President Bush holds.

We shouldn't split people by class. We shouldn't split people on the basis of success or not success. All income taxpayers deserve tax relief, and that's why the President's proposal addresses it for one and all.

Q: Well, let's say that one of the opponents believes, okay, the size of the tax cut's about right, but I just think — and I'm for the idea of having four brackets as opposed to five, it's fine — but I just don't think the particular levels he's chosen for those four — is he still engaged in class warfare?

MR. FLEISCHER: I think if someone were to make a rather economic, esoteric, scholarly argument like you just did, that wouldn't be class warfare.

“Esoteric, scholarly” captures the same idea Romney is attempting to invoke with “quiet rooms.” Republicans believe any discussion of the disparate class impact of regressive policies constitutes an impermissible attack on the rich. If the matter is to be discussed at all, it must be under conditions that insulate it completely from the political debate, so as to avoid waking up the populist demons.

The irony is that, unlike the Democrats’ line on taxes (rich people are swell but the fiscal trade-off of keeping their taxes low is not worth it), Gingrich’s assault on Romney actually comes pretty close to a plausible definition of class warfare. If you try to define even mild objections to regressive policies as vicious class warfare, you have little room to object when the real thing arrives.

Kaveny Challenges Allowing Torture

2012-01-09T23:35:00.009-05:00

This from Commonweal's Blog. Well Done Ms. Kaveny!

Regret Is Not Enough

Why the president should read Paul Ramsey

Cathleen Kaveny

http://commonwealmagazine.org/regret-not-enough

In late December, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, despite having “serious reservations” about provisions allowing those suspected of terrorist connections to be detained indefinitely without trial—including U.S. citizens arrested on American soil.

Obama expressed a similarly ambivalent attitude toward the darker side of statecraft in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, where he asserted that war is both “necessary” and an “expression of human folly.” Such am- bivalence is a hallmark of the political theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose influence Obama first acknowledged in an interview with David Brooks in 2007.

I find Obama’s decision to sign NDAA despite his well-founded reservations deeply troubling. So, as we move toward the 2012 election, I hope that he adds another great twentieth-century Protestant political moralist to his reading list: Paul Ramsey. Ramsey once said that his goal in writing was to “propose an extension within the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr.” And by “extension,” Ramsey meant “necessary theological correction.”

If Martin Luther’s motto is “sin boldly,” Niebuhr’s would be “sin humbly—but effectively.” As a “Christian realist,” Niebuhr insisted that statesmen don’t have the moral luxury of refusing to get their hands dirty. At the same time, he held that leaders ought to resist the delusion that the comparative justice of their cause whitewashes their methods—or their hearts, for that matter. By critiquing American self-righteousness, Niebuhr presented himself as a strong critic of American exceptionalism.

What Ramsey allows us to see, however, is that Niebuhr’s framework ultimately provided American exceptionalism with its best defense mechanism yet. It encourages us to deceive ourselves into believing that the regret and doubt we experience over the use of morally questionable means only proves our morally superior status. Ultimately, American exceptionalism and moral consequentialism go together hand in glove—the moral self-examination and self-recrimination only make the glove fit like a second skin.

How, then, to curb the pride and self-righteousness that Niebuhr perceived to be at the heart of American exceptionalism? Ramsey rightly saw that it is necessary not only to be appropriately measured about the political goals we set, but also to be appropriately limited in the means we use to achieve them. We escape the snare of excessive self-regard by honoring absolute moral norms that respect the humanity of our enemies, who are equally beloved by God, not by wringing our hands before we violate these norms.

Ramsey argued, for example, that the justification for waging war and the limits restricting how we wage it arise from the same source—Christian love of neighbor. Following Augustine, he maintained that when we are unjustly attacked as individuals, we ought to turn the other cheek. When our in- nocent neighbors are attacked, however, love requires that we take up arms and defend them. But this justification immediately generates its own limit: Ramsey insisted we cannot consistently claim to be motivated by Christian love and a concern to protect the weak and vulnerable if we target our weapons at just such groups of people. And so he defended the principle of discrimina- tion as part of the just-war criteria: the absolute immunity of noncombatants from direct attack.

I also think there is a strong Ramseyan argument against indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without trial. Not only does indefinite detention violate American constitutional norms, particularly the norm of due process, it also violates the norms of Christian neighbor love, because the idea of personal moral accountability and just judgment is at the heart of Christianity. We recite in the creed that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead; we know that if we are consigned to hell, it will be on the basis of our own actions for which we are fairly judged.

The Christian belief in the possibility of just judgment in the end times undergirds our efforts to hold ourselves and one another morally accountable in these times—including in times of war. To detain prisoners indefinitely without a fair trial doesn’t merely consign them to an earthly hell without first hearing their case. Perhaps more troubling, it treats them as animals to be contained and controlled, rather than moral agents to be judged and held accountable for their actions—and only for their actions.

Does it matter that Obama promised not to authorize indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens? On this question I think both Niebuhr and Ramsey would agree that the answer is “not much.” It is not merely a matter of what Obama himself will do if he is presented with circumstances he perceives as sufficiently exigent; it is also a question of what his successors in office will do. Both Ramsey and Niebuhr would say that the human capacity for self-deception and self-justification is nearly boundless—especially among the powerful

NOT Movin' on Up. Social Mobility in the USA

2012-01-05T10:31:00.004-05:00

“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.”

January 4, 2012

Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

By JASON DePARLE

WASHINGTON — Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. “Movin’ on up,” George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion.

READ MORE http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html?_r=1&hp

"Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes."

" Now the evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile."

Pico Iyer on the Benefits of Quiet

2012-01-02T11:26:00.001-05:00

The Joy of Quiet By PICO IYER December 29, 2011

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently of “The Man Within My Head.”

Wernersville praised by New York Writer

2011-12-30T23:44:00.009-05:00

A beautiful tribute to a place I've been lucky enough to spend a great deal of time, two years as a novice and, over the years, hundreds of days on retreat. Peace, Fr. Rick

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http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/travel/in-pennsylvania-a-quick-shot-of-peace-on-a-budget.html?emc=eta1

In Pennsylvania, a Quick Shot of Peace, on a Budget

By SUSAN GREGORY THOMAS December 29, 2011

LATE in November I arrived at the Jesuit Center in the reclusive hills of Wernersville, Pa., on a blindingly dark and stormy night to begin a silent five-day retreat. Such a scenario might have compelled someone more compos mentis to turn around. But that was the point. As a 43-year-old mother of three wrung out from three years of panic attacks triggered by the specter of financial ruin, I needed a solid period of quiet to recombobulate. Cheaply.

I am neither Catholic nor anything in particular, but I yearned for a snippet of the no-frills spiritual solitude. The Jesuits, I’d read, were the guys to go to concerning such matters. Indeed, to engage in periods of quiet contemplation with a full-stop break from everyday life was central to the philosophy of the Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556). It still is. Today, some 200 Jesuits are engaged full time in directing spiritual retreats at more than 20 centers in the United States.

But there were other reasons I’d opted for the Jesuit Center in Wernserville over, say, a spa vacation, yoga retreat or vision quest. For one thing, the center advertised an Arcadian setting and drivable proximity from my home in Brooklyn. For another, the cost was $560 for five days, including room, board and a daily hourlong conversation with a spiritual director, who would escort me through Scripture-based prayer and meditation.

Moreover, the more luxe-sounding excursions I’d considered often seemed to involve a time commitment of a week or more, along with New Age locution that somehow did not sit right. A solo quest during which animal “spirit guides” could conceivably rip out my pancreas after the sweat lodge? No.

But while I’d had the notion that it would be tough to keep quiet for five days, I realized, on arrival, that I had not developed a textured sense of what I was getting into. The facility itself, an English Renaissance-style building constructed in the late 1920s, was gigantic and dark — attributes intensified by the resident Jesuits’ ubiquitously posted wish to keep the light bills low. Fantasies of sequestered holy men tending to herb gardens and homemade beer stills were combusted by industrial platters of green beans and pigs-in-blankets provided by Sodexo, the integrated food and facilities management services behemoth.

But there was also an ineffable sphinxiness about the place. For example, I got there an hour and a half late the first night, and there was no one to tell me where to go or what I should be doing. The only signpost was a list of names and room numbers tacked to a corkboard, so I found mine and rollerbagged down the building’s spooky, caliginous hallways until I tracked down my assigned spot. I creaked open the lockless door and found a jumbo crucifix resting on the bed pillow. If Stanley Kubrick had found this place, he’d never have shot a movie anywhere else.

And there were crucifixes everywhere. It’s a Jesuit center. But as someone not only dimwitted enough not to have anticipated a lot of crucifixes at a Jesuit center, but one also whose main visual encounter with crucifixes was watching “The Exorcist,” I found it surprisingly tricky at first to suppress the feeling that blood was going to start gushing down the walls. This was not an apprehension my fellow retreatants appeared to share. Mostly women my mother’s age or older, and to my eye, clearly devout and knowledgeable, they were not talk spoilers. In fact virtually no one made eye contact.

But by the end of my five days, I’d come to see my room as my sanctum sanctorum. I would regard crucifixes as heralds of human suffering and spiritual light. And I’d come to feel a strange closeness with my silent companions. All this was chaperoned by my spiritual director, Sister Barbara Singer.

I met Sister Barbara at 1:15 p.m. my first full day in a tiny, sunlit office on the building’s third floor. An upbeat grandmotherly woman with a plumose crown of lovely white hair, Sister Barbara calmly invited me to sit down across from her and asked me to tell her what had brought me there.

I told her about my stress-related illnesses, which had hospitalized me twice earlier that year; about my sparkly-minded children; about watching my Lear-like father die in front of me; about my divorce, subsequent remarriage and unexpected conception of my son; about my dip into poverty; my husband’s unemployment; my darkest fears; of aloneness.

Sister Barbara listened closely and then said, “What I hear you saying, Susan, is that you feel forsaken.”

Not dealing with abandonment issues: forsaken. Sister Barbara did not then press me to process my relationship with, say, my mother or to consider that I should “own” my feelings.

Rather, she opened her Bible and turned to Matthew 3:17. This is the verse in which Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, and God opens the heavens and says, “This is my son, the beloved; my favor rests on him.” Sister Barbara read the passage and closed the book. How would it be, she asked, to personalize this passage — to pray with the words, “You are my beloved daughter, Susie; my favor rests on you”? How would it feel to know that God loves you as you love your own children? And then I wept and, finally, cleared my throat. It would feel pretty good. Sister Barbara advised me to go outside, walk, and pray with this. “See you tomorrow at 1:15, and we’ll see what God says,” she said and then chortled.

I followed her suggestion. I brought a pack of cigarettes, Thomas Merton’s “Book of Hours,” and a paper cup of coffee with hazelnut nondairy creamer, and I walked. The grounds of the Jesuit Center in Wernersville number some 250 acres of Wyeth-esque country, replete with undulating hills; groves of shy trees; a pond that’s home to monster koi; a cemetery. Benches positioned perfectly for quiet contemplation appeared providentially every so often.

I sat on one of these at the top of a hill, closed my eyes and sat. I don’t know how long I was there, not meditating “on the breath” or deliberately clearing my mind, but simply internally rolling over the words of my custom-tailored Matthew 3:17. Slowly, though, I grew to feel still and happy.

Later that night, I peeked into the center’s adytum, a dark and lovely stone chapel whose altar glowed with candlelight. I approached a pew and knelt. I thought about my closest family and friends and how Matthew 3:17 might be custom-fit for them, too. Again, time evaporated. That night, I slept 12 hours straight. I hadn’t slept half that much in more than a decade.

But by the third day, I was antsy. How were my children doing? What e-mails was I missing about that cable show and screenplay I was supposed to be working on? I was in the midst of selling my house in Brooklyn and closing on a place in Philadelphia. Were real estate agents going ballistic trying to track me down? How was any of this going to get done?

It had been a bitter morning, so instead of walking outside, I ducked into the center’s craftsy Art Room and busied myself with assembling a collage from magazine cutouts like a psych ward patient, I scoffed. I arrived at my appointed meeting time with my handiwork. “Oh, you made a collage!” Sister Barbara chirped, before turning to Exodus 36:4-7. It was a description of Moses and crew building the sanctuary, as instructed by God. All the volunteers were stuffing the place silly with offerings, causing the construction workers to complain to Moses: “The people are bringing way too much material for doing the work that the LORD has commanded us to do.” Moses agreed. “So the people were restrained from bringing, for the material they had was sufficient to do all the work, and more.”

HAD I considered, Sister Barbara wondered aloud, that perhaps I already had enough to do all my work? I doubted it. “Ah, that’s the whole ball of wax, isn’t it?” Sister Barbara said. “To believe, with all your heart: to know.” Then, she asked the startling: Did I believe in Jesus? Sure, I did; in fact, as a punky, truant teenager, I had believed that Jesus was the greatest anti-establishment radical of all time. Sister Barbara laughed and clapped her hands: “Great — so you can relate!” she said. She exhorted me to talk, pray to Jesus directly, with the Scripture from Exodus in mind. “Just see what comes to you.”

That afternoon, I ventured into the chapel again and stayed a long time. It would be awkward to report on what I experienced there; possibly, implausible. Suffice it to say, I left with the strong feeling that I did, indeed, have everything I needed — if only I would stay quiet long enough to remember.

I left the Jesuit Center on a clear, icy night, turning on my cellphone just in time to receive a call from my husband hollering that he and a fellow he’d hired needed to be picked up at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, followed by a call from my daughters’ father saying that financial aid applications needed to be completed by the next day, latest. Seven voice mails and 108 e-mails left. O.K. For now, at least, I had more than enough to do all the work, and more.

Bells have rung. Now to the Work of Christmas

2011-12-29T22:44:00.002-05:00

Then the Work of Christmas Begins

"When the song of the angels is stilled,

when the star in the sky is gone,

when the kings and princes are home,

when the shepherds are back with the flocks,

the work of Christmas begins:

to find the lost,

to heal those broken in spirit,

to feed the hungry,

to release the oppressed,

to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among all peoples,

to make music with the heart…”

- Howard Thurman, Morehouse University

Two of the best 45 Pix of 2011

2011-12-28T19:32:00.003-05:00

More pretty amazing photos here. click here

Beautiful Child, Wonderful Dad

2011-12-26T13:02:00.006-05:00

In my Christmas homilies yesterday, I suggested that the meanings of Christmas are multiple. And one answer to Charlie Brown's question is that Christmas is all about parents: Elizabeth and Zechariah; Joseph and Mary; God and us.

I read this essay by Bruce Lawrie. I've been reading it all through Advent, over and over. I preached that God is like this Father of Matty who so wants the best for his child. Reading of Bruce and Matty made me reflect on my relationship with my Uncle Kevin, 10 years older than I. Kevin had Down Syndrome which made him a perfect, big playmate for us when we were little. Kevin died when I was 10 years old. I hope to sit and color coloring books with Kevin someday. Or maybe Kevin will be given all he missed in this life. That's the hope of Christmas. A God who like a loving parent wants the best for his/her children.

Peace, Fr. Rick

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Who Am I Lord, That You Should Know My Name?

by Bruce Lawrie

Portland Magazine Summer 2009 http://www.up.edu/portlandmag/2009_summer/whoami.htm

My six-year-old son and I share a nightly ritual, just the two of us alone in the fading light of his bedroom. Matty, who is severely mentally retarded, loves routine because life comes at him as if blasted from a water cannon, the millions of sights and sounds we all unconsciously assimilate every second of every day an undecipherable roar. Even more than most children, Matthew craves the safety that comes from learning the rhythms of his life, thrives on repetition. And of all his daily routines, winding down to bedtime might be the best. For a few minutes every night, I can turn down the white noise for him and help him ease into the peaceful joy of drifting off to sleep. We start out sitting on the floor with his favorite board book about monkeys drumming on drums, dumditty, dumditty, dum, dum, dum…The book is worn with love, all four corners gnawed off — Matthew chews up books the way other kids do grilled-cheese sandwiches, starting at the corners and working his way to the center. As we reach the last dumditty on the last page, he lets out a sigh that tells me everything’s right in his world and he’s looking forward to climbing into bed.

I rise to my feet and begin singing, Lord, I lift your name on high...as I reach down to help him into bed. He’s unable to walk on his own but he can aim himself in the general direction of the bed. He knows where this is heading and he’s ready for it. He pauses at the bedside to feel the blankets and pillow for a moment as if to make sure the bed is still stationary. Legally blind in one eye, he’s learned that things have a disturbing way of disappearing right when you’re ready to lean on them. But, as always, he finds the cool sheets safe, slings a skinny leg over the bed, and hauls himself up on top, moving rapidly before the bed can escape. He lies on his back rocking back and forth in bed, body rigid, a crease-eyed smile lighting his face, letting out an ecstatic aaahh.

I turn out the light and kneel beside his bed in the dark room, still singing, you came from heaven to earth...

Matty holds his arm out in my direction, a tentative groping for me in the sudden blackness. I wrap his hand in mine and press it to my face. I start singing the next song in our nightly rotation as I brush his hand against my whiskers, first his palm and then the back of his hand. He explores my face with his fingertips and then he covers my mouth gently. I sing into his palm, imagining the reverberations vibrating down into his little soul. How does he experience me? What am I in his world? I don’t know. I may never know.

I keep singing. Only you can look inside me...

Who will care for Matty when I am gone? Who will keep him safe? Or maybe I’ll outlive him. Many children like Matthew don’t live out a normal life span. Would it be better if he went first? As is often the case with Matty, I don’t have the answers. What I do have, though, is this moment in the dark with him, his soft hand gently brushing my lips, the source of the soothing song, the same song he’s heard nearly every night of his six years on the planet. Those hazel eyes of his which so seldom look into mine are easing shut.

Who am I, Lord, that you should know my name?

I finish the song and stand up and wonder what heaven will be for my son. Maybe it’ll be a place a lot like here, a place where his own son will run from him across a wide open field of green, every nerve-end in his little body singing, where afterwards, Matty and I can tip back a beer together at a pub. Where he has a healthy body and a lovely wife and our family can linger long over pasta and homemade bread and salad and red wine. Where his son, my grandson, will fall asleep in my lap, a sweaty load of spent boy pinning me to my chair on the deck, the night sounds stirring around us, the stars rioting in the dark sky.

I look down on Matty’s peaceful sleeping face. So often peace has eluded him: the operations, the I.V.s, the straps tying his hands to the hospital bed rails so he wouldn’t pull the needles out, the countless blood draws when they couldn’t find the vein, all the insults descending out of the blue onto my little boy who couldn’t understand why the people around him had suddenly begun torturing him. But he is at peace right now. And a time is coming when he will have peace and have it to the full. And all the other things he’s been robbed of. Meeting a girl. Playing catch with his father and his son. Making love. Calling his mother’s name aloud. Talking with his twin sister. Eating a pizza. Drinking a beer. Running. And I’ll get to be there with him. God will carve out a little slice of eternity for us, our own private do-over where the breeze carries the smell of fresh-cut grass, where the sky is bluer than you ever thought it could be, where the air feels newborn.

Soon, Matty. Soon.

Bruce Lawrie (lawriescruz@yahoo.com) is a writer in Scotts Valley, California. See beautiful-catastrophe.com.

Christmas on the Block in Philly!

2011-12-25T10:42:00.003-05:00

Chris Gibbons had a great piece in the Inquirer Yesterday. Merry Christmas! Peace, Fr. Rick
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Seeing what matters most at Christmas

http://articles.philly.com/2011-12-24/news/30554837_1_christmas-lights-christmas-songs-decorating

December 24, 2011

In the darkest corner of the night,

Only dreams illuminate their eyes,

And they see all the colors that we cannot,

And theirs' is the most beautiful Christmas on the block.

By Chris Gibbons

Our good friends host an annual Christmas Eve gathering in our Lafayette Hill neighborhood where, with an assortment of family, friends, and neighbors, we'll sit around an outdoor fire, reminisce about Christmases past, and sing along to Christmas songs playing on a boom box. Traditional songs by Nat King Cole, Brenda Lee, and Bing Crosby are perennial favorites, as well as classic originals by Elvis, the Carpenters, and the Beach Boys, and even more recent recordings by U2, Wham, and Mariah Carey.

Inevitably, though, as the music is playing and the fire is roaring, I'll gaze out into the street to admire the Christmas lights decorating our neighborhood, and the words to one of the most beautiful Christmas songs will echo in my mind.

Alan Mann's "Christmas on the Block" is relatively unknown outside the Philadelphia region, but many in the area consider it their favorite Christmas song, not only because it evokes pleasant childhood memories of Christmas lights illuminating the neighborhood blocks of their youth, but also for its message of selflessness.

In the mid-1980s, the rising Philadelphia rock star Alan Mann heard of a group house for the blind on a street in Upper Darby. Every Christmas, its residents would decorate a tree in front of their house, and neighbors would often say that it was the most beautifully decorated tree on the block. Although they could not see, the residents wanted to give an annual gift to those who could. The story inspired Mann to visit the house and write the song, which features a moving chorus sung by second-grade students.

The video for the song got extensive airplay on MTV during the 1986 Christmas season, and Mann seemed poised to follow the Hooters and Robert Hazard by breaking out of the local scene. Unfortunately, it was not to be. In 1987, Mann died when he jumped or fell from his burning South Philly apartment building.

Over the last 25 years, the WMMR DJ Pierre Robert has kept the memory of Mann and his song alive by regularly playing it during the season. Robert gets numerous requests for it, and, partly because it's hard to get a copy of the song, the video gets numerous hits on YouTube around the holidays.

For me, "Christmas on the Block" embodies the spirit of Christmas. Despite their handicap, its subjects showed Christmas is a time when we should focus on what we can give, rather than what we don't have. One passage in the song prompts the listener to wonder if the rest of us are blind: "They cannot see the lightning, and they cannot see the thunder./ They know what no one understands."

Last Christmas Eve, as we sat around the fire, I thought about "Christmas on the Block" and momentarily closed my eyes. Oddly enough, the music seemed livelier, the fire seemed warmer, and the voices and laughter of everyone around me seemed heartier. Although my eyes were closed, I was able to see what really mattered.

Chris Gibbons is a Philadelphia writer. He can be reached at gibbonscg@aol.com

Yo! You Gotta Love Scranton

2011-12-22T11:35:00.011-05:00

Two-foot trout proves elusive but Scranton hooks fisherman

RICHARD G. MALLOY, S.J. (GUEST COLUMNIST) Published: December 22, 2011

http://thetimes-tribune.com/opinion/editorials-columns/guest-columnists/two-foot-trout-proves-elusive-but-scranton-hooks-fisherman-1.1248025#axzz1hGxFqzBC

When I was in the first grade, the nuns must have been pulling their hair out under their habits trying to figure out how to keep classes of 65 to 100 baby boomers occupied during the days before Christmas. So they sent Liz Betzler and me around to all the grades to sing "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth." I am sure we were adorable, both of us missing the requisite incisors.

Liz went on to become an actress. I became a Jesuit, lucky enough to land in Scranton.

In September 2010, I arrived at the University of Scranton after spending more than two decades south of the Electric City, living and working at Holy Name Parish in Camden, N.J., and teaching at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Whenever I could get a day or two away, I'd boogie up the turnpike's Northeast Extension and fish at Chapman Lake. Surprisingly, the Jesuits at the university, like Fr. Ron McKinney, S.J., who seem to know everything, never told me about Scranton's best-kept secret: the huge brown trout in the Lackawana River.

This past year, I have wandered this brawny, blustery brute of a river, battling brush and slipping on stones. From the urban fishing areas behind the ballfield in South Side and the weeds below Redner's, to the beauty of Archbald and above, I kept trying to find these tremendous trout that local fishermen kept telling me were in the lovely Lackawana. Yet, besides a few, fat, foot-long trout, I wasn't having any real luck. The trout proved largely exotic, elegant and elusive.

Summer and fall this year saw the river unusually high, too rough to fish. I was frustrated. Trophy trout live less than a mile from where I sleep and I wasn't catching any of them.

Then my luck turned, along with the weather over Thanksgiving. Fifty, even 60-degree days. Beautiful blue skies. Pleasant light breezes. Last year I drove to Philly in a snowstorm on Thanksgiving. This year I hit Scranton's stream over Thanksgiving weekend.

Friday I got a couple. Saturday and Sunday, a few more. Of course none of my skeptical Jesuit brothers believed without photo evidence. (They forget Jesus said to Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.") I produced the photo proof of a beauty that was caught .. well, I'd tell you where, but then I'd have to swear you to secrecy. [See photo above of the 16" brown trout next to my Scranton baseball cap].

It seems I keep finding more secrets of this magic town. The people are friendly. You can find a parking spot (try doing that in Philly). You've got Gertrude Hawk chocolate, fireworks and lights on Courthouse Square, a revitalized downtown, great food from Italian to Thai, a bishop who can mesmerize a high school audience with his preaching, great basketball, fantastic parks 20 minutes in any direction, wonderful music, great small towns up and down the valley. Coney Island hot dogs and Catalano's hoagies. Cosmo's even grills up a cheesesteak as good as you get in Philly.

For a 6 a.m. flight, I leave the university at 5, get there, park in seconds, just a few minutes to get through security, and I'm at the gate at 5:30. And the TSA people at the airport are kind and helpful. And, I haven't even really gotten to know Wilkes-Barre yet.

Last week I had to drive to Washington, D.C. The traffic, the congestion, the noise. I wanted to come home to Scranton. Who needs a big city when all you could want is here? The Scranton/ Wilkes-Barre area's population is 563,641, but you can drive without fear of losing life and limb. With all these folks, it's amazing there aren't more people who know of the many attractions of this area.

Look, no one has told the fishermen in New York or Philly there are big trout in the river. Don't let them know. More fish for us. The last time Jesus was here he appeared to a bunch of guys on a fishing trip. John: 21; you can look it up. When I'm out fishing, I'm just looking for Jesus and that miracle 24-inch trout. That's all I want for Christmas.

Pope Benedict's Challenge to Redistribute Wealth and Bring Justice and Peace

2011-12-21T14:44:00.008-05:00

Pope Benedict's profound five page letter, "Educating Young People in Justice and Peace" (click here for full document) (Jan 2012) is well worth reading and praying over these last days of Advent. Peace - Fr. Rick
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Educating in peace

5. “Peace is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries. Peace cannot be attained on earth without safeguarding the goods of persons, free communication among men, respect for the dignity of persons and peoples, and the assiduous practice of fraternity.”8 We Christians believe that Christ is our true peace: in him, by his Cross, God has reconciled the world to himself and has broken down the walls of division that separated us from one another (cf. Eph 2:14-18); in him, there is but one family, reconciled in love.

Peace, however, is not merely a gift to be received: it is also a task to be undertaken. In order to be true peacemakers, we must educate ourselves in compassion, solidarity, working together, fraternity, in being active within the community and concerned to raise awareness about national and international issues and the importance of seeking adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth, the promotion of growth, cooperation for development and conflict resolution. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God”, as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:9).

Peace for all is the fruit of justice for all, and no one can shirk this essential task of promoting justice, according to one’s particular areas of competence and responsibility. To the young, who have such a strong attachment to ideals, I extend a particular invitation to be patient and persevering in seeking justice and peace, in cultivating the taste for what is just and true, even when it involves sacrifice and swimming against the tide.

Jean Brebeuf, S.J. The Huron Carol 1643

2011-12-20T22:40:00.003-05:00

Of all we Jesuits have written and said in four centuries in North America, this Christmas hymn, by French Jesuit Jean Brebeuf, may be the most beautiful and long lasting. Check out the fascinating movie Black Robe about French Jesuits in North America in the 1600s.

"Even Darkness Must pass, A New Day Will Come"

2011-12-18T23:08:00.004-05:00

" 'What are we holding onto Sam?' 'That there's some good in this world Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for' "

Sam's Speech in The Lord of the Rings reminds me of the Christmas story, the tale of our God born all baby bald to be the savior of the world. Mary and Joseph kept on despite Roman oppression and Herod's insanity. Elizabeth and Zechariah, the angels and the shepherds proclaim the Good News. The wise man venture to lands they know not. And we, we are called to do in our times what they did in theirs: welcome and protect the child and all the children.

Jesus comes to bring justice and peace to our bruised and battered world. O Come Let Us Adore.... Peace, Fr. Rick

Greatest Christmas Song Ever: Christmas in the Trenches

2011-12-16T00:05:00.003-05:00

Greatest Christmas song ever. True History can lead us to chose peace and abolish war.

Today the War in Iraq was ended. 4,487 American soldiers dead. 32,226 wounded. Estimates of Iraqi dead begin at 150,000. The war cost $800 billion to $1 trillion dollars. (source: NBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#45690326).

Peace, Fr. Rick

What I Want For Christmas - Orba Squara

2011-12-15T21:52:00.005-05:00

Great Little song. Peace, Fr. Rick Malloy, S.J.
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NPR notes Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

2011-12-13T01:09:00.003-05:00

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/12/143579900/catholics-honor-virgin-of-guadalupe-for-feast-day

NPR's MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Switching to another part of the world now, this is an important religious day for some Catholics, especially those from Mexico and other parts of Central and Latin America. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. That's when the faithful celebrate the appearance of an apparition of the Virgin Mary known as the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City back in 1531.

Since then, the image of Guadalupe has become an icon throughout Latin America as a symbol, not just of faith, but also of native pride and resistance against oppression.

Here to tell us more about the Virgin of Guadalupe and her feast day is Friar Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez. He is a Franciscan scholar and an associate professor of spirituality at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

...

MARTIN: And the meaning is?

CAVAZOS-GONZALEZ: The meaning is, first, the skin tone. She's neither European nor Native American. She's a combination of the two. You know, she basically was the skin tone of the new children that were being born of Mexican women who had, unfortunately, been either violated or seduced by European men. She has the skin tone of the unwanted children of the violent conquests of Mexico, symbolizing that these children are human. They are worthy of being children of God as well. Mexicans take pride in that, in that we are those children of the violent conquest who have been adopted by God.

Her hands in prayer and her face tilted, she's telling the Indians, I'm not a goddess. I am the servant of a god. And at her neck she wears a cross, so thereby basically proclaiming to God, I serve is(ph) to God, Jesus Christ.

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/12/143579900/catholics-honor-virgin-of-guadalupe-for-feast-day

Where's the line to see Jesus?

2011-12-12T00:26:00.000-05:00

Guess who said this!

2011-12-08T23:15:00.008-05:00

Guess Who Said This!

More than 2,000 years ago, a child was born to two faithful travelers who could find rest only in a stable, among the cattle and the sheep. But this was not just any child. Christ’s birth made the angels rejoice and attracted shepherds and kings from afar. He was a manifestation of God’s love for us. And He grew up to become a leader with a servant’s heart who taught us a message as simple as it is powerful: that we should love God, and love our neighbor as ourselves

That teaching has come to encircle the globe. It has endured for generations. And today, it lies at the heart of my Christian faith and that of millions of Americans. No matter who we are, or where we come from, or how we worship, it’s a message that can unite all of us on this holiday season.

So long as the gifts and the parties are happening, it’s important for us to keep in mind the central message of this season, and keep Christ’s words not only in our thoughts, but also in our deeds. In this season of hope, let’s help those who need it most –- the homeless, the hungry, the sick and shut in. In this season of plenty, let’s reach out to those who struggle to find work or provide for their families. In this season of generosity, let’s give thanks and honor to our troops and our veterans, and their families who've sacrificed so much for us. And let’s welcome all those who are happily coming home. (Applause.)

And this holiday season, let us reaffirm our commitment
to each other, as family members, as neighbors, as Americans, regardless of our color or creed or faith. Let us remember that we are one, and we are a family.

Scroll Down

Answer: President Obama. Dec 1, 2011 remarks lighting the National Christmas Tree

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/01/remarks-president-lighting-national-christmas-tree

http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=4794

Advent Conspiracy. Step back, reflect, act differently

2011-12-07T20:19:00.003-05:00

This is very thought provoking. Watch it twice! Have a blessed and challenging Advent. Peace Fr. Rick.

Jesuit Social Research Institute connects the dots!

2011-11-30T19:20:00.005-05:00

A Revolution of Hope: Occupy Advent and the Vatican

by Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.

http://www.loyno.edu/jsri/revolution-hope-occupy-advent-and-vatican

We live in a moment of economic, social, moral, and spiritual impasse. Wondrous technological achievements fail to assuage our possessive individualism, fail to end extreme poverty, fail to cultivate life-giving connections between the rich and poor peoples of the earth, and fail to nurture our universal rootedness in the earth’s ecosystems.

Scandals in nearly every major societal institution erode public trust and any sense of our shared responsibility for each other. Technological prowess advanced through wars and multiple capitalist practices fail to care for the most vulnerable among us as they wreak ecological devastation and threaten the very existence of our planet.

Left to our own idolatry, the result is more of the same—insatiable consumer desire, increasing cynicism, politics and economics driven by the self-interest of the powerful against the common good, and the “presumptive” resort to violence as the solution to conflict.

In this time of global and national decline, economically, socially, and morally, how do we take up the spiritual task of waiting this Advent? For what or whom do we hope in this season of longing?

As I prepare for Advent in this time of impasse, I suggest reflection upon the unlikely congruence of two divergent resources: the Occupy movement and the Vatican’s recent statement on global financial reform, “Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority” which is available online here.

In the words of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, the authoritative office within the Vatican with the highest responsibility for Catholic social teaching, “the gap between ethical training and technical preparation needs to be filled by highlighting in a particular way the perpetual synergy between the two levels of practical doing (praxis) and of boundless human striving (poiesis).”[1]

That is a theologically sophisticated way of emphasizing the need both to integrate spirituality and ethics, individually and collectively, and restore the primacy of spirituality and ethics over capitalism and finance.

How do we begin this work in Advent?

The Occupy movement practices a way of waiting and listening I find instructive for this Advent in this moment of societal breakdown. Each word and phrase spoken by every speaker is repeated, chorus-like, by the group. It is a way Occupiers slow down the pace of conversation to attend and listen to each other’s voices. It is also a way that Occupiers give priority to voices of those previously unheard or marginalized. As they listen to each other, Occupiers seek to hear the voices of those who have not spoken or have not been heard. An example of this practice may be found on YouTube here (“Angela Davis addresses the Occupy Movement,” October 30, 2011).

I am struck by the wisdom of this Occupy practice for Advent in the way that it calls us to wait and listen, wait and attend, wait and be with one another in the midst of societal breakdown. It is a way of attending to what the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace calls the depths of “human striving” for enduring goods of love, peace, and justice.

In the Occupy movement, if we listen and attend to the voices of the people, we hear diverse voices crying out for a different way of living, a different way of being in the world that values every voice, liberates every voice, and joins every voice in the common work of mutual uplift, healing, and new life.

Both the Occupy movement through this practice and the Vatican through its recent statement on global financial reform compel us to reflect on the need for a contemplative orientation that listens and embodies the cries of the oppressed, and their cries for freedom, for work, for liberation, and for new life in God.

Advent calls us to the spiritual labor of waiting and listening to each other, to those who are in any way oppressed, and to our deepest longings for love, connection, new life, and God.

Yet such waiting as re-orientation to the truly good is no easy task, for it demands “anguish and suffering,” as the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace puts it, as we struggle for love and justice in the midst of societal sinfulness and decline.[2]

This spiritual labor of waiting and listening, I suggest, invites people of faith to open ourselves to our shared vulnerability with all people and to our loss of meaning and empty imagination in the midst of societal moral and spiritual decline.

Precisely at this seeming “deadendness,” abandonment, and emptiness, I wonder if God might be calling us to experience transformed desire, personally and collectively, for new vision, love, courage, and hope that renews life across the face of the earth. Might there be a miracle of transformation in the midst of emptiness and poverty?

As the contemplative Constance FitzGerald suggests, the miracle is that contemplative cries from people and the earth are “no longer silent and invisible, but rather prophetic and revolutionary.”[3]

This is where the Occupy movement and the Vatican most closely converge. Both call us to wait and listen. If we attend and listen to the groans within ourselves, from peoples everywhere, and the from the earth, we may yet hear the cry of new life and a new creation. When will we groan with all peoples and the earth for God? In waiting and listening to these groans, may we find the Spirit yearning within us for the manger where the revolution of hope and love is born.

[1] Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, “Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority,” in Origins: Catholic Documentary Service (Vol 41, Number 22, November 3, 2011), p. 349.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Constance FitzGerald, OCD, “The Desire for God and the Transformative Power of Contemplation,” in Mary Heather MacKinnon, Moni McIntyre, and Mary Ellen Sheehan, ed., Light Burdens Heavy Blessings: Challenges of Church and Culture in a Post Vatican II Era. Quincy, Illinois: Franciscan Press, (2000): 203-222, here 208.

Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, on Advent and Teilhard de Chardin

2011-11-25T21:51:00.003-05:00

Advent: Gestating Hope into Reality

2000-12-10

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as even his critics admit, was a man of hope. Indeed his whole vision of things is generally criticized for being too hopeful. So, in trying to explain hope and advent, allow me a Teilhard story:

Teilhard was a scientist, and a good one, but he was also a Christian, a priest, and a man whose ultimate vision of things was formed by the gospels. Central to his whole system of thought was his rock-bottom belief that ultimately all of history, cosmic and human, would come together, in Christ, into one community of life and love (as promised by Jesus and as summarized in the early Christian hymn, Ephesians 1, 3-10). This vision was the wide framework within which he ultimately set his scientific theories. But he was surrounded by colleagues, both Christian and secular, who had a far-less hopeful view of things. One day he was challenged this way: "You have an enchanted view of history, believing that everything will one day culminate in a wonderful `kingdom' of peace and love, but suppose we blow up the world in a nuclear war, what happens to your schema of things then?"

His response to that question is a textbook definition of hope: "If we blow up the world it would be a great tragedy because it would set things back millions of years. But history will still one day culminate in a kingdom of peace and love, not because my theory says so, but because God promised it and in the resurrection has shown the power to bring this about, despite the things we do." That's hope, to be able to say: "It might take a million years or so longer, but it will happen because God promised it."

By what is this characterized? Let's begin with a certain via negativa. Hope is not wishful thinking, natural optimism, or an educated theory based upon CNN.

Indeed, hope is not wishful thinking, the simple longing for something wonderful to happen to us. I can wish to win a lottery, marry the most beautiful person in the world, or score the winning goal in the world cup, but that isn't hope. It's pure wish. Similarly, hope is not optimism; a natural temperament, however pleasant, which is perennially upbeat and always sees the positive side of things. Finally, hope is also not a positive diagnosis based upon a shrewd assessment of the facts. Jim Wallis once quipped: "Put not your faith in CNN!" The same holds true for BBC, CBC, NBC, ABC, ITV, SKY NEWS, and WORLD NEWS. One does not ultimately ground hope on whether the world situation seems to be improving or worsening. Hope does not go up and down like the stock market because, in the end, it is not based upon the empirical facts as these are reported on the news.

Hope is believing in the promise of God and believing that God has the power to fulfil that promise.

What is that promise? God has promised that history (our private histories, our communal history, and cosmic history) will one day come together in an ecstatic oneness, a heaven, a paradise, a community of life around Christ and in God within which there will be no tears and no death. This will not be a community of life focused on "food and drink" but one that takes it very breath from love, justice, peace, friendship, affection, and shared delight in a common spirit, the Holy Spirit.

And what power will bring this about? The power that God showed in the resurrection of Jesus, the power to bring a dead body back to life, to redeem what's been lost, to write straight with crooked lines, and to bring people together, despite and beyond hatred, sin, selfishness, mistakes, tragedy, resistance, death, and all that will ever be seen on CNN.

To live in hope is to live in the face of that promise and that power and, in that light, to fundamentally shape both our memories and our future. As regards memory, to hope is to look back on our lives and see no need to count the losses, underline the hurts, play the victim, or stew in bitterness because all our wounds and losses can be redeemed as part of a greater promise. The same holds true for our future. All our plans and schemes must reflect the wider plan of God and we, like Teilhard, should be prepared to live in great patience as we wait for the finished symphony.

Mary, Jesus' Mother, is the pre-eminent figure of this. She shows us hope: Not only did she believe the promise, she became pregnant with it, gestated it, gave it her own flesh, went through the pains of childbirth to give it reality, and then nursed a fragile new life into a powerful adulthood that saved the world. In that, she needs imitation, not admiration.

Advent is the season for us to imitate Mary's hope by, like her, gestating faith, God's promise, into real flesh.

Ronald Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.

Funny Thanksgiving video

2011-11-24T18:38:00.001-05:00

Happy Turkey Day!

Aliens in Peru? ET call home!

2011-11-22T21:57:00.003-05:00

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Aliens in Peru? Call home ET!

Did anthropologists really discover an alien mummy in Peru?

Strangely-shaped skull could be (but probably isn't) extraterrestrial in origin

http://www.tecca.com/news/2011/11/21/alien-mummy-peru/

by Katherine Gray | Last updated 2:14PM EST on November 21, 2011

Filed under: News | Computers
Scientists have posited that we might be able to spot alien civilizations on other planets by the light of their cities, but did aliens find their way to Peru, centuries ago? That's the question being asked by scientists and ET enthusiasts around the world after photographs have come to light of a mummy with a huge, strangely-shaped head.

An anthropology team led by Renato Davila Riquelme from the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco, Peru, discovered the remains, and initially reported that they were those of a human child, given that they were only 20 inches long. However, an unspecified group of Spanish and Russian doctors apparently examined the remains and have declared them extraterrestrial in origin. Their main reasoning seems to be the triangular shape of the head, oversized eye sockets, and the fact that the head itself is almost the same size as the rest of the body.

Of course, there could be a perfectly rational, Earth-based explanation for the oddly-shaped creature. Many cultures have performed artificial cranial distortion for various religious or cultural reasons, and medical conditions such as hydrocephalus, if left untreated, can also cause deformities in the skulls of young children. Four out of five unnamed scientists agree, though: aliens are much more interesting!

Mick McCarthy SJ preaches at Fr. Quinn's Inauguration

2011-11-18T15:34:00.003-05:00

Fr. Mick McCarthy, S.J., delivered a stunningly stirring homily at the Mass of Inauguration at the University of Scranton.

Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., wows The University of Scranton

2011-11-18T00:17:00.004-05:00

Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., wowed a crowd of 250, the vast majority students, at The University of Scranton Thurs night Nov 17 2011. His provocative and entertaining talk about his work as an astronomer for the Vatican Observatory helped students understand the wonders of creation and the wonders of God. Here's a clip he played of his appearance on Colbert.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/257718/december-01-2009/gold--frankincense-and-mars---guy-consolmagno

Save the Altar Girls

2011-11-13T21:08:00.003-05:00

You may have missed this in the media blizzard in which we all live. Well worth reading. In her forties, my sister told me how mad she had been as a little girl when she was not allowed to be an altar server.

We will learn to listen to women, or we will see the church wither even more than it already has in the past decades in Europe and the USA. Latin America, Africa and the rest of the world are seeing the revolution of women in all roles in society. Check out the "half the sky" website http://www.halftheskymovement.org/

The following post got 222 comments on America's blog.

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http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13056

Save the Altar Girls

The Editors | OCTOBER 10, 2011

T his is not a local story, but one that represents larger trends in the church—in the priesthood, the liturgy and in the role of the people of God. Recently Sts. Simon and Jude Cathedral in Phoenix, Ariz., changed its policy on altar servers. From now on only boys may serve; girls may apply for jobs as sacristans. Why? The rector of the cathedral told The Catholic Sun that the cathedral is not alone in making this regulation. A parish in Ann Arbor, Mich., and the Diocese of Lincoln, Neb., he argues, have found that replacing girls with boys as servers leads to more vocations to the priesthood.

These moves to limit laywomen’s access to the altar threaten to drag the church back into the pre-Vatican II world. One wonders if next the altar rail will return, another barrier between the priests and the people.

According to the rector, people who are upset about this decision concerning Mass servers make a mistake in considering it “a question of rights,” as if someone’s rights were being denied. But, he says, no one has a “right” to be a server or even more a priest. One must be “called” to any church office. When the secular world comments on who should be an altar server, he says, it has only an emotional view, unguided by the light of reason.

The key issue is the status of the baptized: that the laity may be called by the Spirit to offer their talents in various roles. The rejection of altar girls disregards the counsel of the Second Vatican Council that the charisms of the baptized “are to be received with thanksgiving and consolation.” By virtue of baptism, the council reminds us, “there is neither male nor female. For you are all ‘one’ in Christ Jesus.” There is “a true equality between all with regard to the dignity and activity which is common to all the faithful in building up the Body of Christ” (“Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” Nos. 12, 32).

That this call should be fully welcomed does not appear to be a priority in Phoenix. Yes, the Vatican instruction “Sacrament of Redemption” (2004) allows women servers, but it leaves the decision to local bishops. In Phoenix the bishop leaves it to the pastors. This pastor did not consult the parish council, he says, because its members are not theologically trained.

Another issue is the image of the priesthood today. Is it wise to re-enforce the sense of the priesthood as a clerical caste? Is the acolyte supposed to be like the page who serves Sir Galahad until King Arthur dubs him a knight? In a culture where parents want their daughters to have the same opportunities as their sons—in co-ed Catholic colleges, in the armed services, in athletics, in employment—the church can look irrelevant, even foolish, in shunting them aside. The more the priesthood is presented as an exclusive club, the smaller and more remote it will become. Those who put up barriers between themselves and the people should, using modern parlance, recall Jesus’ words to his disciples: “Look, how many times do I have to tell you? You are here to serve.”

Inevitably the issue of women’s roles in the church raises the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood. Recently a cardinal in Lisbon and some bishops in Brazil, among others, also raised the question; but since Pope Benedict XVI, despite continued agitation, has reaffirmed the policy of John Paul II to allow no discussion of the topic, the matter of altar servers must be considered a separate and independent issue.

In no way should policies imply that women are second-class citizens—welcome to tidy up the sacristy, arrange flowers and clean linens but not to set the gifts at the altar or hold the sacramentary or censer. Rather, they must be welcomed into every service and leadership role, including catechists, lectors, chancellors and general secretaries of bishops’ conferences. (The diaconate for women remains an open question and ought to be explored.) Churches that invite all their people to bring all their talents to the welfare of the congregation will thrive. To tell a young woman that she may no longer pour the water on the priest’s fingers at the Lavabo looks like sexism. If the ban in these dioceses continues and spreads, perhaps women and girls will consider withholding their other services to the parishes, and men and boys, in solidarity with their sisters, will decline the honor of acolyte.

Having girls share serving opportunities with boys is an expression of their equality in Christ. Parishes must create a variety of social and service activities. A distinguishing characteristic of today’s young men and women, even when they are not “devout” in the usual sense, is their rejection of discrimination in any form. They are highly sensitive to any hint of exclusionary policies in organizations. Perhaps if more young people believed they could continue that commitment to equality as priests, more would be ready to follow a priestly vocation.

Joe Nocera's The Institutional Pass

2011-11-13T01:39:00.008-05:00

There is much to ponder in the wake of the recent Penn State scandal. Across the board, all institutions (and that certainly includes the church) need to improve, radically, the way things are done in order to safeguard children and insure that young adults are treated justly. As the Church has needed to improve, radically, the way children's safety is guarded, so schools have to look at the many ways, on multiple levels, that institutions profit off athletes' work. Joe Nocera's article in The New York Times is very thought provoking. - Fr. Rick
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November 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/opinion/nocera-the-institutional-pass.html

The Institutional Pass

By JOE NOCERA

“Joe is a devout Catholic,” a retired football coach named Vince McAneney told a reporter the other day. He was referring, of course, to Joe Paterno.

McAneney, 82, a high school coaching legend in Pennsauken, N.J., had known the 84-year-old Paterno for some 50 years, he told Randy Miller of The Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., and was “heartbroken” to see his friend fired as the Penn State football coach for his involvement in the sexual abuse scandal that has so soiled the university. Describing Paterno as a devout Catholic was McAneney’s way of saying that his friend was still a good and decent man.

But to someone like me, who grew up in a Catholic household, the fact that Paterno was a regular churchgoer is part of what makes his actions — or, more accurately, his inaction — so inexplicable. By March 1, 2002 — the date, according to a grand jury report, that Jerry Sandusky, the former Paterno assistant, was spotted in the locker-room shower raping a boy believed to be about 10 years old — every Catholic was sadly familiar with the sex abuse scandal that had engulfed the Roman Catholic Church. They knew that predatory priests had taken advantage of their proximity and positions of trust to sexually abuse young boys, just as Sandusky appears to have done. They knew that church leaders had covered it up. And they knew the devastating consequences of the abuse.

Two months before Sandusky’s alleged rape, The Boston Globe had begun publishing its powerful series on clergy sexual abuse. Dioceses were being sued by lawyers for the victims, who, in turn, were coming forward to describe how the abuse they suffered as children had shattered their lives. Alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression were common themes.

More shocking yet, Catholics in Paterno’s own diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, Pa., understood these consequences long before the rest of the country. In 1987, Richard Serbin, an Altoona lawyer representing abuse victims, had sued the diocese. The suit was widely publicized in the local media — publicity that did not diminish much even after he won in 1994 because the diocese kept appealing. (It finally agreed to pay $3.7 million in 2004.) One of the victims Serbin represented was a former altar boy in State College — Penn State’s hometown.

Given that foreknowledge, how could Paterno, upon learning that one of his graduate assistants allegedly had seen Sandusky having anal sex with a preteen boy, content himself with mentioning it to his superior and then looking the other way? How could he have allowed Sandusky to maintain access to Penn State’s football facilities? How could the university have let him continue to run his youth camps on Penn State property — camps where he no doubt scouted potential targets? Everyone at Penn State who averted their eyes had to know they were doing something abhorrent. They knew from the experience of their own community.

Big-time college football requires grown men to avert their eyes from the essential hypocrisy of the enterprise. Coaches take home multimillion-dollar salaries, while the players who make them rich don’t even get “scholarships” that cover the full cost of attending college. They push their “student-athletes” to take silly courses that won’t get in the way of football. When players are seriously injured and can no longer play, their coaches often yank their scholarships, forcing them to drop out of school.

“College football and men’s basketball has drifted so far away from the educational purpose of the university,” James Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan, told me recently. “They exploit young people and prevent them from getting a legitimate college education. They place the athlete’s health at enormous risk, which becomes apparent later in life. We are supposed to be developing human potential, not making money on their backs. Football strikes at the core values of a university.”

It is true that Joe Paterno ran a better program than most, and that no university outside of Notre Dame has benefited more from having a football team than Penn State. Its football renown helped turn a small-time state school into an important research university. But it is also true that, in 2009, Penn State football generated a staggering $50 million in profit on $70 million in revenue, according to figures compiled by the Department of Education. Protecting those profits is the real core value of college football — at Penn State and everywhere else.

What goes on in the typical big-time college football program constitutes abuse of the athletes who play the game. It’s not sexual abuse, to be sure, but it’s wrong just the same. For 46 years, Joe Paterno averted his eyes to the daily injustices, large and small, that his players suffered — just like Nick Saban does at Alabama and Steve Spurrier at South Carolina, and all the rest of them. When Paterno averted his eyes from Jerry Sandusky, he was just doing what came naturally as a college football coach.

What Would Jesus Do and Say About Occupy Wall St?

2011-11-06T20:12:00.005-05:00

Fr. Malloy asks, ‘What would Jesus do and say about Occupy Wall Street?’

Posted by aquinas on 11/02/11 • Categorized as Faith

http://aquinas.jlcclients.com/fr-malloy-asks-%E2%80%98what-would-jesus-do-and-say-about-occupy-wall-street%E2%80%99/

What does Jesus say about Occupy Wall Street? In the final chapters of Matthew’s Gospel we hear Jesus’ ringing calls for justice in our economic relationships.
“The greatest among you must be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted,” according to Matt 23:11-12.
“And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me.’ ” according to Matt 25: 40.

On Oct. 16, 2011, Nick Kristof reported the following in The New York Times:
• The top one percent of Americans possesses more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
• In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest one percent.

Here are some more facts to get us thinking.
• 22 percent of children in America live in poverty.
• 15.1 percent of Americans live in poverty. That’s 46.2 million people.
• Globally, 80 percent of Earth lives on less than $10 a day.
• Across our planet, 21,000 children die each day from preventable causes.

“The Pew Research Center said its recent polling shows that a majority of Americans — for the first time in 15 years of being surveyed on the question — oppose more government spending to help the poor. The deep budget cuts by the U.S. House earlier this year included programs that helped the poor,” Business Week noted.

This concern about the common good and justice for our seven billion brothers and sisters across the planet is not some Jesuit spin on Catholic morality. For years, Catholic social teaching has said much of what many in the Occupy Wall Street movement are saying today.

“There also exist sinful inequalities that affect millions of men and women. These are in open contradiction of the Gospel,” the Catechism states.

The Catechism also discusses the dignity of human beings. “The equal dignity of human persons requires the effort to reduce excessive social and economic inequalities,” the Catechism states.

Economic Justice for All, a publication by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops also weighs in on Catholic social teaching.

“The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich; the rights of workers over the maximization of profits; the preservation of the environment over uncontrolled industrial expansion; the production to meet social needs over production for military purposes,” “Economic Justice for All” reads.

“The way society responds to the needs of the poor through its public policies is the litmus test of its justice or injustice.”

The Vatican recently called for the reform of the international financial system. Oct. 24, 2011, a division of the Vatican, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, released a document on the
“Reform of the international financial system with a view toward a general public Authority.”
The church is calling for more sane and loving controls and organization of our ever-increasing and accelerating processes of globalization. The processes that result in horrific inequities and the destabilization of peace.

“In its annual Report of in 2007, the International Monetary Fund recognized the close connection between an inadequately managed process of globalization on the one hand, and the world’s great inequalities on the other. Today the modern means of communication make these great economic, social and cultural inequalities obvious to everyone, rich and poor alike, giving rise to tensions and to massive migratory movements.

“Nonetheless, it should be reiterated that the process of globalisation with its positive aspects is at the root of the world economy’s great development in the twentieth century. It is worth recalling that between 1900 and 2000 the world population increased almost fourfold and the wealth produced worldwide grew much more rapidly, resulting in a significant rise of average per capita income. At the same time, however, the distribution of wealth did not become fairer but in many cases worsened.

“What has driven the world in such a problematic direction for its economy and also for peace?
“First and foremost, an economic liberalism that spurns rules and controls. Economic liberalism is a theoretical system of thought, a form of economic apriorism that purports to derive laws for how markets function from theory, these being laws of capitalistic development, while exaggerating certain aspects of markets. An economic system of thought that sets down a priori the laws of market functioning and economic development, without measuring them against reality, runs the risk of becoming an instrument subordinated to the interests of the countries that effectively enjoy a position of economic and financial advantage,” according to the Vatican’s article.

The Vatican is calling people of good will (and institutions of higher education?) to “get smart” and figure out how to organize the global economic system in ways that recognize the inherent dignity of the person and the rights all enjoy as human beings.

One of the more controversial aspects of this document is the call to create and inaugurate “a true world political authority,” an idea first promulgated by Pope John XXIII in his 1963 encylical “Pacem en Terris”, or “Peace on Earth”.

Those who are engaged in the Occupy Wall St. movement, like the Vatican, realize the global economy is operating in ways that leave billions out in the cold, hungry and hurting. The goal of Occupy Wall Street is justice, the righting of relationships between various players in our global economic system. Jesus would support that, too. Would you?

Commentary By
Richard G. Malloy, S.J., Ph. D.
Vice President University Ministries

First glance at the new Roman Missal

2011-11-03T15:54:00.010-04:00

Okay. The New Roman Missal has some good features, e.g "Take this all of you and eat of it" (no longer "eat it").

But the elimination of the three Eucharistic Prayers for children is, IMHO, a big mistake.

And take a look at the drawing of the Last Supper on the other side of the title page. Notice the person whose head is shown leaning on Jesus' left shoulder at the Last Supper. Does that person look decidedly like a woman? Just asking. Some will welcome the image of a woman at the Last Supper (remember the old question, "Who did the dishes?"). Others will be scandalized by the idea a woman was present. Remember, I'm just asking... don't shoot the messenger.

And when I first picked it up, I thought the "chapel" edition was the Big Book. It's twice as thick and heavy as the old small Sacramentary. This new missal comes in volumes with real heft. I feel sorry for small altar servers....

David Brooks on the Wrong Inequality

2011-11-02T20:24:00.008-04:00

IMHO, Brooks makes too light of the connection between the 1% and their taking so much of the pie, and the deplorable conditions of those on the bottom end of the scale, but his point is worth pondering. Even if we get (or force) the top 1% and the other fat cats to share more of their unjust share of the wealth, how will those at the bottom benefit if we do not provide education and other opportunities? Have we fallen so far that, even if we reduce inequality, the bottom 20% or 50% will not know how to reap the benefits? - Rick
*********************

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/opinion/brooks-the-wrong-inequality.html?_r=1&ref=davidbrooks

We live in a polarizing society, so perhaps it’s inevitable that our experience of inequality should be polarized, too.

In the first place, there is what you might call Blue Inequality. This is the kind experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia. In these places, you see the top 1 percent of earners zooming upward, amassing more income and wealth. The economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley Heim have done the most authoritative research on who these top 1 percenters are.

Roughly 31 percent started or manage nonfinancial businesses. About 16 percent are doctors, 14 percent are in finance, 8 percent are lawyers, 5 percent are engineers and about 2 percent are in sports, entertainment or the media.

If you live in or around these big cities, you see stores and entire neighborhoods catering to the top 1 percent. You see a shift in social norms. Up until 1970 or so, a chief executive would have been embarrassed to take home more than $20 million. But now there is no shame, and top compensation zooms upward.

You also see the superstar effect that economists have noticed in the income data. Within each profession, the top performers are now paid much better than the merely good or average performers.

If you live in these big cities, you see people similar to yourself, who may have gone to the same college, who are earning much more while benefiting from low tax rates, wielding disproportionate political power, gaining in prestige and contributing seemingly little to the social good. That is the experience of Blue Inequality.

Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

Moreover, college graduates have become good at passing down advantages to their children. If you are born with parents who are college graduates, your odds of getting through college are excellent. If you are born to high school grads, your odds are terrible.

In fact, the income differentials understate the chasm between college and high school grads. In the 1970s, high school and college grads had very similar family structures. Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock.

Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home.

Some research suggests that college grads have much bigger friendship networks than high school grads. The social divide is even starker than the income divide.

These two forms of inequality exist in modern America. They are related but different. Over the past few months, attention has shifted almost exclusively to Blue Inequality.

That’s because the protesters and media people who cover them tend to live in or near the big cities, where the top 1 percent is so evident. That’s because the liberal arts majors like to express their disdain for the shallow business and finance majors who make all the money. That’s because it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. That’s because many people are wedded to the notion that our problems are caused by an oppressive privileged class that perpetually keeps its boot stomped on the neck of the common man.

But the fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

If your ultimate goal is to reduce inequality, then you should be furious at the doctors, bankers and C.E.O.’s. If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda.