CLIPS

Little Notes
Letters

Confessions
Talk About Movies
Follow Me




Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

November 1999

* Daily Mass attendance by students is up;

* Round-the-clock adoration of the Eucharist is available again;

* A large crowd of students participated in an outdoor procession last Holy Week, praying the stations of the cross;

* Membership in student groups voluntarily studying the Catechism of the Catholic Church is up 600 percent in two years.

--W.R. Coulson, "Minding Students' Minds and Hearts," Be , October, 1999

IT'S ROME OR CALIFORNIA. At least that's the way the late Walker Percy put it some years ago in a letter to the editors of Commonweal recently sent me by an alert reader in Virginia. Percy objected to the editors' "obligatory hostility to 'Rome.'" Complaining about interference from Rome and especially about John Paul II, said Percy, "has apparently come to be the new Commonweal line." (Remember this was 1990.) Percy wrote: "These issues could be debated, as indeed they often are, but here's how it appears to one novelist. If such attacks continue and are successful, the result will be pleasing mainly to the secular liberal establishment, who are in fact calling the shots, and destructive and divisive to the Catholic people. This novelist can only observe that if the magisterium and the sacramental orthodoxy of the Church are compromised in the name of 'creative pluralism' or suchlike, there may be a lot of hugging and kissing and good feeling going on, but there won't be any Catholic novelists around. For these odd fellows are turned on precisely by these claims of the Church, breathtaking in their singularity and exclusivity, i.e., the magisterium and the Eucharist, and how these have endured with the people of God through these kinds of thicks and thins for two thousand years. And they will endure despite these chic brush-offs of 'Rome.' Get rid of 'Rome' and what will be left in the end is California" The last line is, I think, worthy of being emblazoned over the desks of editors and theologians.

"The Public Square," First Things , October, 1999

ONE EXAMPLE OF THIS KIND of unfortunate writing is an article published by the Associated Press (AP) in mid-August which decried the fact that India has become the second country, after China, to attain the billion population mark (Tom Rachman, "India's Population Moves Toward 1 Billion -- Unhappily " AP, 18 Aug 1999).

The AP story presented India's population milestone, typically, as a shameful event. The writer said that while India's population has tripled since 1947, the "ravages of poverty, ignorance and malnutrition have grown harder to tackle." The facts, however, do not bear
this out.

Consider, for example, that in 1977, with a population of less than three quarters of a billion people, India's per capita income was about $150 ( The World Almanac Book of Facts , 1998). Today it is $1600 (World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency), more than ten times higher. This means that even though there about 250 million more people in India today than 20 years ago, the average person is making 10 times more than he did then.

--Chet Lewandowski, "India's Prosperity is a Good Measure of the World's Population," Population Research Institute Review, August/September 1999

THE PONTIFICAL COUNCIL DRAWS a distinction, however, between two different types of penitents who have used contraceptives: on one hand those who show a sincere desire to amend their behavior, and on the other hand those who show neither repentance nor any inclination to change. In the latter case, the document suggests, it might be proper for the priest to refuse absolution.

--The Catholic World Report , October, 1999

ALREADY ANGRY OVER THE CLOSING of St. Isidore Catholic Church, some parishioners are furious after a meeting with diocesan officials who offered the services of a psychologist to help them get over their loss.

According to Rebecca Cagle, one of seven parishioners who attended the Thursday night meeting, Bishop Tod D. Brown told the parishioners of the 77-year-old Los Alamitos church that it would remain closed but that psychological counseling would be available for "those of us who will not accept it."

"How dare he think that we need it?" said Cagle, who received her First Communion and was married at St. Isidore. "We're not crazy."

But Msgr. Lawrence J. Baird, spokesman for the Diocese of Orange, said Brown did not offer church members psychological counseling. Rather, he offered the services of a psychologist acting as a "professional facilitator to help them with the transition.

--Maria Elena Fernandez, "Anger Anew Over Church Closure," Los Angeles Times , October 9, 1999