January 2005

PORT EVERGLADES, Fla. – The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has started screening those celebrating Mass on cruise ships, a plan geared toward preventing former, rental and even fraudulent priests from ministering to Catholic passengers.

More than 650 priests have been approved to work on cruise lines, where some priests suspended in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse scandal have recently sought employment – and some Catholics have complained to the bishops that priests on their ships were incompetent.

Celebrity and Holland America lines are working with priests approved by the Apostleship of the Sea, while other cruise lines are still striking private deals with priests, use talent agencies or hire clergy through Rent-APriest, a group that provides former, now-married priests who are no longer authorized to conduct Mass.

Eventually, the bishops hope that all cruise lines will adopt a more thorough screening process for clergy.

"It wasn’t being regulated by the bishops’ conference and they weren’t doing background checks on these guys," said the Rev. Sinclair Oubre, president of the AOS-USA, a chaplains’ organization affiliated with the Apostleship of the Sea. "Since we started this, some of the cruise lines have become more alert."

Priests who apply for the program must have their bishops’ approval and are subject to yearly review, said Doreen Badeaux, secretary general of the Apostleship. All dioceses conduct their own background checks on priests, Badeaux said.

Lee Breyer of Manatee County left the priesthood when he married a former nun in 1969, yet has been conducting Mass on cruise ships with Rent-APriest since 2002. He doesn’t announce beforehand to Mass attendees that he’s married, and Catholic leaders believe that’s simply deceptive. [Source]

With the declining number of priests this will probably be a greater problem for cruise lines. I had wondered in the past about priests on a cruise line and had assumed that they were mainly retired priests who sail for free in exchange for their services. That cruise lines have contacted priests from rentapriest.com in the past is a sign that they have not taken this issue seriously previously. There is some demand by faithful Catholics that before they go on a cruise they ask if there will be a priest onboard for daily or at least Sunday Mass. When they answer yes I think the passenger would be surprised to find out that the Mass was being offered by either a suspended priest or one that was laicized. This is indeed false advertising since these priests do not have faculties from their Bishops to perform Mass except under very rare circumstances. Now after twenty years in the Navy there is not much chance that I would ever desire to go on a cruise. If I did I guess I would have to go farther then to just ask them if there will be a priest onboard.

The October 2004 issue of This Rock magazine contained my conversion story in the Damascus Road section.

This article is now available online here.

Catholic Answer’s This Rock magazine started making available all of their older issues going back to 1996 a couple of months ago. If you have not read this magazine take a look at the archives to find out why this is a great magazine for apologetics and other issues from the Church’s perspective.

Via Happy Catholic I was introduced to a new blog by Holly called Fired Up Catholic which so far is posting about her conversion from a Southern Baptist and about the Left Behind series. She used to work for a ministry where she witnessed to all of "the poor lost Catholics." Her conversion to the Catholic Church starts with her attempts at research to prove to her husband that the Catholic Church was not even Christian. She is not the first convert that started out by trying to disprove the Church (Jimmy Akin comes to mind) and like every convert from Protestantism I have ever read, she is grateful for her previous background as a Protestant. Another element of her conversion story I have seen before in some form of this prayer.

"Please help me find a way. Just don’t let me become a Catholic".

She has written up a storm of posts this month in which I found all of them to be enjoyable reads.

Update: Happy Catholic has now posted her coversion story.

I recently finished Hugh Hewitt’s book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World and there is nothing more natural then for a blogger to blog about Blog. Overall I found the book to be excellent and contained much to think about. This is not some dry technical book about blogging or purely just a history of the technical advances that lead to the blogosphere. Hugh’s weakness in one area is actually a strength for this book. He jokes about his inept technical abilities and is definitely not one who played the movie projector in the classroom. He has managed to write a book about blogging without even managing to mention the acronym HTML. His history of blogging starts not with who really published in the weblog format but to the priests of ancient Sumer around 3000 B.C. since the history of blogging is really the history of text.

His books is in fact about about ideas and what he calls the competition for mindspace that blogging provides. He makes a clarion call for businesses to not only make themselves aware of the blogosphere but to participate in it. To be ready when what he describes as a blog swarm might possibly criticize some product of theirs. Since his book is about understanding the information reformation and responding to it; it is good that it does not become mired in publishing systems and other minutiae which would turn off those very people who need to become aware of the blogosphere. Blogs can be a business’s friend or their enemy. Recently with the new Apple computer bargain product line I have seen many bloggers favorably mention this product. This is free publicity which they should want to encourage. Yet Apple also recently sued some blogs that published some information about this new product ahead of time. This I think reflects Apples misunderstanding of what the blogosphere can do for them good or ill and they need to have their management read Hugh’s book.

Hugh goes on to explain the difference between static web pages and blogs information wise and puts the number one characteristic as a matter of trust. This I believe is a good observation and the reason I believe that this is so is that blogs are a more human form of communication then columns and static web sites. Blogger’s personalities with their likes and dislikes bleed through more in a blog then in other forms of writing. Because often bloggers posts on other subjects then their main focus you get more of an idea of what that person is like. When I read a regular column I don’t think all that much about the person behind it. With blogs I feel that I have more idea of the person behind it and this helps me to evaluate the information presented as to it trustworthiness.

The book provides four case studies of how blogging is affecting the world. He outlines the history of Trent Lott’s comment that lead to his downfall as the Senate Majority Leader, how Howard Raines ended up stepping down over the Jayson Blair debacle, Kerry’s imaginary Christmas in Cambodia, and finally the history of Ra^therGate. He chronicles how blog storms took hold of stories that would have otherwise have been ignored and downplayed by the Main Stream Media and how they were forced to react to the writings on the stories in the blogosphere. This chapter alone would show people in positions of authority why they can not afford to ignore blogs.

He also recommends that not only corporations get involved in blogging but that they look into issues of employee blogging and setting procedures to how this could happen effectively in a company. I am a simulation engineer which is a fancy title for a programmer that writes code to develop software simulators. When I moved into using the C# programming language to develop a 3D maintenance training simulator for the Apache helicopter I started to build a collection of RSS feeds to other C# programmers that were also doing 3D programming. By reading their blog entries I gained much knowledge about good 3D coding but also where to look for needed resources. Without having this valuable resource it would have probably doubled or tripled my project time to finish the project. The way programmer wrote on their blog was much different than normal web sites with coding samples. There was a true effort by them to pass on information they had learned the hard way to save others time. I think Hugh is dead on that many organizations can benefit by employee blogging whether they have these blogs open to the general public or on a company basis only. Even Microsoft which had initially been resistant to this has embraced the concept and there is now even a feed for all Microsoft employee posts. In companies many times there are many people reinventing the same wheel everyday and employee blogging is one way for others to get ideas on new ways to do things.

He gives some good advice to organizations getting in to the blogosphere that they should start reading blogs and then contact some bloggers to hire as consultants to get their companies feet into the blogosphere. This avoids having them get bogged down in technical aspects of blogging and to let those consultants figure out for example what publishing system and other needs best fit their circumstance. Some organizations who lack this information make the mistake of hiring some web consultant to design a site and a blog for them. This leads to an expensive system that is not easily updated as blogging technology changes. For example I believe that this is the situation of NRO’s The Corner and Hugh Hewitt’s own site. That while they provide a standard blog they get left behind when improvements such as RSS feeds and technology such as trackbacks get introduced. Another blogger has already taken Hugh to task for his lack of an RSS feed so I will drop the subject.

This book was an enjoyable and informative read and made me think deeper about information and how it can be used to influence opinion. There are only a few minor quibbles I have with the book. For example he introduced the term fisking without giving a definition for it. One of the few times he talked about a technical aspect such as paying for bandwidth would leave people to believe that having a blog required having a web site and paying for bandwidth. This would be true for organizations that get into blogging but not for individuals who can start up a blog through any of the numerous free services such as blogspot. Though he does recommend Joe Carter’s excellent series on starting and maintaining a blog and anybody who read this would find out in much more detail those issues.

The last critique I have falls more in the area of apologetics then in the area of blogging. The theme of the book uses the advent of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation as a parallel to blogging. There is much in this comparison that rings true and this is an apt comparison on how access to information by the masses will change opinions and get institutions resistant to correcting their problems to change. The problem I have is that he presents it as if the Catholic Church had prevented Bibles from being translated into the vernacular and that it was only first through the efforts of Tyndale and later Martin Luther that we finally had a Bible translation that could be read by the masses. That Tyndale was supposedly martyred by the Catholic Church for daring to translate the Bible is just pure myth. There were multiple translations of the Bible before the Protestant Reformation. Obviously the Vulgate (the vulgar tongue) was one of the first translations of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into the common tongue at the time. Later translations were made in Arabic (717 A.C), Saxon, French, Slavonian, Dutch, Syrian, Ethiopian and later English and multiple translations in German. The above information should be easily accepted by Protestants since it is actually part of the translations notes included in the first printings of the King James version.

Enough apologetics though and Hugh was not intentionally bashing Catholics but only repeating what is accepted as "common knowledge" by many Protestants. He also made many very positive statements about Catholics when doing the comparison using the Reformation. It is quite accurate to equate much of the Church’s bureaucrats at the time with the Main Stream Media. Corruption had set in and relatively few people were willing to say or do anything to stop it. They did not respond to the new media at the time and in most cases the response only made matters worse.

The bottom line is buy this book and you will not be disappointed. Now I admit I am slightly biased since I Listen to all of Hugh Hewitt’s radio show daily and would highly recommend it. He takes the blogosphere seriously and also has as guests many bloggers along with others. I started listening to his radio show because of his blog and the content that include more than just political punditry kept me coming back.

La Shawn Barber who is doing some preliminary research for a project asks bloggers to answer the following questions.

1) How long have you been blogging?

Two years and five months.

2) Do you believe you’re addicted to blogging? Please explain, and be honest. It is habit-forming, I must confess. (If I decide to use your response, I may have follow-up questions.)

No I am not addicted and the fact that my family and tried held a blogging interdiction last week does not mean anything. Seriously though blogging is seriously habit-forming and the level of addiction is hard to determine. As a Christian blogger trying to determine how much you are attached to something for reasons that are not a good is something that must be constantly looked at. To determine how much you write to have people soothe your ego compared to how much you write because of the love of writing and the pursuit of truth. As someone who had never intended to spend anytime writing I was surprised to find how much writing helped me to clarify my own thinking. Writing to an audience requires some self-dicipline since tenuous arguments will easily be exposed in your comment box or by another blogger. If circumstances require that I give up blogging either because of time constraints or it interfering with my faith life; I would probably have to keep writing in some format even if no one was to ever read my thoughts.

3) Have you ever taken a hiatus? If so, for what reason and how long?

I took off one week from blogging to visit my mother just before she died of cancer. Since then there might only have been a couple of days where I did not post at all.

4) Have you ever thought of giving up your blog? Why or why not?

During that one week period of blog absence I considered giving up blogging and did initially. This was partly out of frustration with blogspot and partly out of worries for my prayer life. This did not last long as I started my current blog using Movable Type on my own server space. Since that time have not seriously thought about quitting. I worked to more fully implement prayer with blogging. That with all the reading required for punditry and parody there is really ample motives for prayer instead of just being upset at the latest scandal or continuance of the culture of death. For me blogging is a great humbling experience. Blogging has helped me to more fully understand just how much I don’t know. As a former atheist stretching his wings in the faith, blogging has helped to show me just how little I really know. Some who go through conversion experiences and become hungry for the faith will spend a period of a years devouring everything they can read on the subject. This massive input of knowledge can lead to a false view of equating pure knowledge with understanding or wisdom.