CLIPS

Little Notes
Letters

Confessions
Talk About Movies
Follow Me




Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

February 1998

But Fr. Paul Dinter, a radical who later left the Church to marry, heard about the appointment and tipped off a reporter at the New York Times. At a press conference after his Sunday Mass, O'Connor was asked by the reporter whether it was a good idea to put a conservative Opus Dei priest in such an influential post. (Father Rutler was an auxiliary member of the Society of the Holy Cross, Opus Dei's priestly association.)

Between external and internal pressure, within a matter of days the Cardinal had caved in, utterly. Rutler's appointment was revoked.

-- "John Cardinal O'Connor: The Man and the Myth," by Thomas E. Woods, The Latin Mass, Winter 1998


TAKING A BREAK from their national convention late in November, over 100 of the priests and religious who head youth-evangelization programs for India's 133 dioceses took to the streets in New Delhi. Wearing their cassocks and habits, they marched through the city on November 26, shouting, "We want security." The youth ministers ended their protest march only after submitting a letter to Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral, pointing out in a remarkable understatement that "recent atrocities disturb us." They added that they "feel threatened about our security in a secular country."

Catholic religious workers felt that they had ample reason to stage such an unusual public protest, following several recent brutal assaults on Catholic priests. The latest victim was 35-year-old Salesian Father Jose Nedumattathil, who was shot dead by an unidentified gunman on November 22 at his residence in Maram, in the northeastern Manipur state.

Earlier, the Indian church had been shocked in the first week of September when Father Christudas, of the Dumka diocese in the eastern Bihar state, was paraded naked for several miles through the streets of the town, with the apparent connivance of police officials, who stood by and watched the unfortunate procession. This was followed by the killing of Jesuit Father A. T. Thomas whose headless body was found October 27 in a jungle three days after he had been kidnapped near Hazaribag, which is also in Bihar....

The murder of Clarist Sister Rani Maria in Indore, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, in 1995 can now be seen as a precursor to the beheading in Hazaribag. The nun was stabbed over 40 times as she sat on a crowded public bus, while on her way to visit her relatives in the southern Kerala state. The nun had to pay with her life for challenging local money lenders who kept the impoverished tribal people under their bondage.

-- "Suffering for the Church," by Anto Akkara, Catholic World Report, January 1998


RATZINGER: THERE IS A LOT of talk today about the Church's prophetic task. The word is sometimes misused. But it is true that the Church may never simply align herself with the Zeitgeist. The Church must address the vices and perils of the time; she must appeal to the consciences of the powerful and of the intellectuals, not to mention of those who want to live narrow-minded, comfortable lives while ignoring the needs of the time, and so forth. As a bishop I felt obliged to this task. Moreover, the deficits were too obvious; the exhaustion of faith, decline in vocations, lowering of moral standards even among men of the Church, an increasing tendency toward violence, and much else. The words of the Bible and of the Church Fathers rang in my ears, those sharp condemnations of shepherds who are like mute dogs; in order to avoid conflicts, they let the poison spread. Peace is not the first civic duty, and a bishop whose only concern is not to have any problems and to gloss over as many conflicts as possible is an image I find repulsive.

-- Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, from Salt of the Earth, Ignatius Press, 1997


ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1997 -- the same day the document was approved by the bishops' administrative committee -- a reporter for the Los Angeles Catholic Lay Mission, an independent, lay-run newspaper in Los Angeles, attended a seminar called "Voices of Hope" in Orange, California, sponsored by The Catholic Parents Network, co-founded by Father Robert Nugent with Sister Jeannine Gramick....

[A]ccording to the Lay Catholic Mission, "Nugent and Gramick stated that the theology of the Cross is an outdated concept. Instead, they advocated membership in ACT-UP, the activist homosexual group with its 'theology of social action.'' Nugent responded to Inside the Vatican on this by saying, "Courage was discussed as one model of ministry which assumes that hormsexuality is an emotional or psychological illness.... We did not 'advocate' membership in ACT-UP, but said that some homosexual Catholics might find that group's stress on changing social injustice might be an appealing form of contemporary spirituality."

-- "A Brewing Revolt?" by John Mallon, Inside the Vatican, January 1998


RE: "THE BREAST-FEEDING recommendations fall short" (Opinion, Jan. 1):...

[Jennifer] Coburn rightly chastises pediatricians for verbally promoting breast-feeding to mothers of newborns, while at the same time offering them armloads of formula samples "just in case." She argues, "The medical community cannot claim it promotes breast-feeding and, at the same time, promote practices known to discourage it."

While I completely agree with her logic, I'd like her to explain how it is any different for an organization like, say, Planned Parenthood (Coburn's former employer) to verbally promote teen-age abstinence, while at the same time distributing condoms in high schools "just in case."

-- "The pros and cons of breast-feeding," by Stephanie Craig, Letters to the Editor, San Diego Union-Tribune, January 11


ROME -- 19 NOVEMBER 1997 -- At the Holy Father's Wednesday audience, a delegation of students from the United States and Canada presented petitions with signatures from more than 90,000 Catholics signifying their strong support for the Magisterium and loyalty to Pope John Paul II....

The petition drive, known as the "We Are Catholics" campaign, was initiated just ten months ago by students from Seton High School in Manassas, Virginia, as a response to the liberal petition campaign orchestrated by the "We Are Church" referendum, which calls for a series of extensive reforms in direct opposition to the teachings of the Church....

[T]he students' presentation... came on the heels of the seventh annual conference of the liberal group Call to Action, held 14-16 November in Detroit, where a featured speaker...was Maureen Fiedler, a Sister of Loreto, who launched the "We Are Church" referendum in April of 1996. Fiedler announced the petition had garnered only 37,000 signatures and expressed dismay that the group fell so far [short] of its goal of one million signatures in the U.S.

-- December news release from Human Life International

TOP