Punditry

It must be tough to survive in the religious marketplace out there, competing with other progressive chapels for the gay Catholic demographic; and especially so when you don’t have any other clientele. The Jesuits in Boston have announced the planned closure of their city church in the South End neighborhood, the Jesuit Urban Center.

Besides a general decline in the gay-Catholic market segment, credit for the Jesuits’ downtown defeat probably has to go to the Franciscans of Holy Name Province. St. Anthony Shrine moved into the gay-friendly market a few years ago, making for a three-way competition against the Jesuits and the Paulists who have catered to dissenting Catholics downtown for over 30 years. The Shrine’s broad-based weekday Mass attendance, heavily trafficked location, and extensive service hours probably give it a stronger position than either of its two competitors, so St. Anthony’s is probably best situated to endure for years to come. In contrast, the JUC had only one Mass per week, with a congregation of 150-200 confused souls.

Jester Hat Tip:

RC at Catholic Light

Predominately the headlines I have seen on this story say "Jesuits closing Boston church that serves many gays." Which seems rather odd for a parish with one Mass a week and less than 200 parishioners and even if every one of them had same-sex attraction it still isn’t very many.

"A lot of people are still in the church because of the Jesuits," Regan said. "We do not want to abandon these people. But there’s a spirit among this group, and I think that’s going to be lost, and that’s very sad."

I guess my definition of "a lot" varies from theirs.

Here is an interesting article called "Back in the habit, young nuns on the rise" which details such orders as Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist and others who are attracting vocations at an increasing rate.

McGlynn is one part of the new blood there that includes a former lawyer and bartender, with an average age of 24. The national median age for nuns is in the 70s, according to CARA.

"There’s time every day to be with God and not having all the distractions that are in the world that keep you from God."

The new nuns say they are looking for an alternative lifestyle in troubled times.

I very much doubt that these new nuns quite phrased their vocation as an "alternative lifestyle in troubled times."

They also mention some orders that are not exactly attracting vocations.

That attitude has helped their order, the Adrian Dominican Sisters in Michigan, attract a handful of new candidates in their 20s and 30s this year.

"We’re not selling ourselves like we’re worried we’re gonna die out," Scott said. "We’re evolving into something else."

Truer words have seldom been spoken and that something else of evolving is something other than Catholic.

Sister Julie Vieira’s popular blog, A Nun’s Life, isn’t meant as a recruiting tool, though plenty of girls and young women visit the site. Vieira, of Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Monroe, Mich., blogs about politics, enjoying a beer at a bar and her favorite bands along with religious content, hoping to dispel sister stereotypes.

She says nuns have to do a better job of marketing themselves.

"It’s very hard to do that sort of thing because you are talking about a personal relationship with God," she said. "And a personal relationship with a community, so it’s a hard thing to advertise."

A Massachusetts order is hoping to appeal to the broader public by restructuring memberships to include roles for married women and those with no formal connection to the congregation.

The Sisters of St. Joseph in Springfield have extended their roles to include associates, agregees, and partners in mission, along with vowed members. Each have varying levels of commitment. Four women are working to become agregees, said Sister Natalie Cain, coordinator of membership and association for the Sisters of St. Joseph.

"We realized we could be creative in ways in how people could be part of who we are," she said.

Of course the last thing they will do is to look at the orders that are growing and why. But faithfulness to the magisterium is not a bullet point they are willing to swallow.

Sister Julie Vieira has appeared on Good Morning America and NPR so that is not exactly a ringing endorsement and she recommends dissident groups like New Ways Ministry when answering questions.

A reader this week sent me a link to a Time Magazine article from 1979 called "The New Nuns" which is quite interesting in a time warp way.

They dress in everything from miniskirts to medieval mantles. They do everything from classroom teaching to police work. One has a job with Cesar Chavez, another with Ralph Nader. There is a deputy attorney general and an Air Force lieutenant. They live in inner-city slums, in posh suburbs, on farms, even in the desert. They come singly, by the dozen and in battalions. They are the new American nuns who, in the decade since the Second Vatican Council first provided the inspiration, have streamed out of their centuries-old enclosures into the modern world.

The most radical of the new nuns have abandoned their orders to form "noncanonical" experimental communities outside the reach of church authority. But they do not consider themselves "ex-nuns." A free-form, geographically dispersed group (32 states, Canada and England) called Sisters for a Christian Community (S.F.C.C.) was founded in 1970 to "experiment and pioneer new forms of religious life for the 21st century." Essential to the undertaking, says Founding Sister Lillanna Kopp of Portland, Ore., is the elimination of the bureaucratic, authoritarian structures that have driven American nuns out of traditional religious orders by the tens of thousands since the Vatican Council closed in 1965. Since that year, the number of U.S. nuns has dropped from 180-000 to 150,000—far more than can be accounted for by normal attrition. "We must be a pilgrim people on the road, unencumbered by luggage," says Sister Kopp, a sociologist and author, who left her order in 1969. "Marble mother houses are what destroyed the old orders."

…the new nuns are confident that they are moving with a historical tide. With secessionist Sister Anita Caspary, they maintain that the church "stands to lose the whole community if it stands in the way."

A reverse prophet if there ever was on. The problem was that many religious order followed that way and whole communities were lost or greatly reduced. Like Chesterton said "only a live thing can swim upstream" and it is certainly dead things that went with the flow of the times. Rather ironically the title of the Time article "The New Nuns" lead to the religious orders chronicled where a New Nun was rarity.

You could start a competition for really dumb article of the week on Pope Benedict and the only problem would be which once to most deserving. "The Missing Pope" by Joseph Contreras for Newsweek International is surely a contender though. For proof of of the Pope’s ineptness for the role they quote a Milanese housewife and the author of a supposedly acclaimed book (that I have never heard of) on Pope Benedict XVI. The author, David Gibson a convert to the Church, in his books seems to be the typical progressive upset by the Pope not changing what they want changed (Amazon suggests that the book to go together with his is the latest by dissident theology Charles E. Curran).

Carl Olson who posts parts of the article and comments on it says "Truly pathetic, even for Newsweek."

The funny thing about all of these articles is that they always compare him unfavorably to Pope John Paul II and that his greatest sin was that he is not the world globetrotter that JPII was.

But Benedict, who turns 80 this month, has rarely left home and seems most interested in trying to revive European Catholicism.

Yet is is an amazing fact that a Pope who was elected much younger would travel much more than one elected at age 78. Egads trying to revive European Catholicism? What is he thinking? Certainly the Pope’s role it to just ignore the declining state of the Church in Europe. Feed those sheep, just not those European ones.

The pope should choose his words carefully; on one of his last trips, to his native Germany, he sparked a firestorm when he quoted in passing scathing comments about the Prophet Muhammad. Within days Benedict was being burned in effigy. He can expect a warmer greeting in South America. But there’s no denying he’s been a disappointment to many faithful there and elsewhere. Some U.S. Catholics condemn him as aloof, Europeans resent his intrusions into their affairs and he’s never been popular in Latin America. The region, home to 450 million Catholics, had hoped to see one of its own succeed John Paul. Many there have felt ignored by the man who ultimately did.

Just ignore the massive cheer that went up when Catholic who actually believe what the Church teaches sent out when he was elected. Ignore that "So many young people requested the free tickets to the liturgy that hundreds of them had to watch on television screens in the Vatican audience hall" As Amy Welborn noted last week.

Benedict’s popularity is noted, but only in terms of crowds at the General Audiences. As we’ve pointed out before, it’s odd that when trying to figure out how "popular" Benedict is, no one gives book publishers a call. 220,000 copies of Sacramentum Caritatis sold in Italy in the first week after its release. Copies of Deus Caritas Est sold quite well. 5 weeks before its release in the US, The Pope’s book on Jesus is #230 on Amazon.

So I guess what they mean is that he is not popular in the halls of the National Catholic Reporter and those of like-minded watered-down Catholic philosophies

Part of the problem is style. The last pope was a former parish priest who recast himself as an international player (he spoke eight languages, including Spanish and Portuguese). Benedict is a colorless academic who spent much of his career teaching theology and philosophy.

Pope Benedict XVI, in addition to his native German, fluently speaks Italian, French, English, Spanish and Latin, and has a knowledge of Portuguese and of course he can also read Ancient Greek and biblical Hebrew. So I guess he needs to study up to meet the requirements of Newsweek which only speaks one language (BS). Anybody who can call the Pope a colorless academic has neither read him or observed him in public.

He was nowhere to be seen in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, arguably the most Catholic city in the United States. Nor has he paid much attention to Latin America, home to nearly half the world’s Catholics and a key focus of John Paul’s papacy. "He’s ignored us completely," says Roberto Blancarte, a sociologist specializing in religious affairs at the Colegio de México in Mexico City.

The idea that the Pope goes around visiting places after natural disasters and especially if they are suppose to be very Catholic areas is rather laughable. Though I guess they see the Pope as more of a PR agent for the Church than as a Shepherd guiding the whole Church. The Latin America jibe is also pretty funny coming two weeks before he heads to Brazil. Though this is also part of the philosophy that if you are not visiting places you are not doing anything for them. That what Benedict has done so far does not affect anybody outside of Rome.

In Benedict’s absence, the influence of his church has continued to wane. In Latin America an estimated 8,000 people leave the Catholic Church every day, and according to the polling firm Latinobarómetro, the number of locals who call themselves Catholic dropped 9 percent between 1995 and 2005.

And did this drop happen in the aftermath of his election? Well the simple answer is no and the decline has been continuous and occurred during JPII’s pontificate. This has been a problem long before the Pope was elected, but hey that fact does not fit in with a hatchet job.

But left-wing politicians no longer fear the Vatican. Under John Paul, politicians "used to have a certain respect [for the church] and a belief that it wasn’t in their interests to pick a fight" with it, notes Elio Masferrer Kan, a religious historian at Mexico’s National School of Anthropology and History. Now they see it as a "paper tiger," as do judges in Argentina and Colombia, who have ruled in favor of allowing abortions in the past year.

I guess the MSM just loves to have it both ways. First he is painted at the mean-spirited enforcer forcing his ways on everyone, and then he is the paper-tiger and politicians that had a certain respect under JPII have totally lost it now. This is so laughably funny as a piece of analysis it is hard to know where to start. Secular politicians promoting gay marriage and abortion never cared one bit about the Pope whether it was JPII or B16.

And then with his visit to South America you know they are going to bring up the document critical of Father Jon Sobrino. So I guess the paper-tiger is back to biting. They of course frame the criticism of Father Sobrino’s writings in the framework of Liberation Theology when it was a condemnation of his weak-Christology.

His criticism thus struck many as mean-spirited and unnecessary; Leonardo Boff, a former Brazilian priest, wrote an open letter saying the pope’s sanctions "filled me with sadness" and "defraud[ed] the poor."

What a former priest isn’t happy with the Pope? What a shock and surprise. How could that be?

The problem, according to Gibson, is that Benedict "doesn’t seem to realize that he’s a world leader and not an academic." Indeed, the pope’s great misfortune may be his election to a job he was never suited for. With the Vatican facing an acute shortage of priests and nuns and its moral authority tarnished by child-abuse scandals, the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics could use a shepherd who would help them tackle present and future problems. What they’ve got instead is a reclusive intellectual more interested in resurrecting old rituals and disputes.

How soon they forget how unhappy they were with JPII who fulfills what they see as lacking in Pope Benedict. John Paul II saw eye to eye with his Prefect of the CDF on maters of faith and what they consider as disputes are simply parts of the Catholic faith that are not to be jettisoned for convenience sake in the Culture of Death.

The Missing Pope is an ironic title since they totally missed the Pope.

"colorless academic"

Christopher Blosser has a large roundup to the Pope’s Urbi Et Orbi Easter Message and his statement "Nothing Positive Comes from Iraq"

I woke up on Easter to find an email from a sometime reader demanding to know why I hadn’t blogged on the Pope’s statement, calling me a neocon and afraid of the truth. At the time though I hadn’t blogged since Holy Thursday and in fact hadn’t read his message yet.

Now for the record I am not a neocon, as I have said before I am a "kneel con." In the latest issue of Crisis magazine they had an article on neocons and what they are. The descriptions certainly match me to a certain extent. I was "a man of the left" like many neocons and was involved in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. I was also a bleeding heart liberal who thought the government should solve all problems and a wannabe hippie. Like many neocons I became disenchanted over the Democratic Party on the issue of national defense as my own position changed (Thank you Jimmy Carter for waking me up), especially to the anti-American rhetoric coming from the left. Nothing like being in the Navy and traveling the world to get a appreciation for being American. Like Ronald Reagan (who I once despised being a good Portland, Or leftist) I did not leave the Democratic Party, it left me – especially as I left my pro-abortion stand and became pro-life. There is the joke that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged, well I was mugged by reality.

As regards to the Iraq war will know that I seldom blog on the topic and before it started I had reservations about it. There are people I respect on both sides of the question as to whether the initial war fulfilled just war criteria. I know my own biases being both ex-military and a general supporter of President Bush and so I have tried to be very careful into taking that into account. Regardless though whether the initial Iraq war was just I think it would be totally wrong to leave now. When you try act as a midwife to birth a Democracy you don’t run away when the contractions start. The Bush Administration has certainly made major mistakes in the aftermath of the war and the transiting of the government. Though I am slightly optimistic in that the surge does seem to be slowing down some of the violence. So whether there is anything positive coming out of Iraq is certainly something open to question. I just can’t see how withdrawal of our troops will make the terrorists who are often being aided from Iran stop their violence and their search for dominance. Iran likes a destabilized Iraq and they certainly don’t want a successful democracy that would put pressure on them to change.

Right now I support both the troops and their mission. I don’t really understand those who say they support one and not the other. For example if a Democratic politician asked me if I supported them and I said yes, but I won’t give you any money, won’t vote for you, and I don’t like what your doing – I am sure they would think that regardless of what I said I was not in fact supporting them.

I do find it rather funny the new found love that progressives now have for the Pope’s words. Encyclicals, Apostolic Letters, Church Documents can all be discarded, but the Pope making a personal comment on the situation in Iraq and all of a sudden it is as if he has made a dogmatic definition. They latch on to one sentence while not giving the same weight to the Pope talking about "contempt of life" and the horrific situations in the other countries the Pope mentioned. But cherry picking is nothing new.

Mark Shea often gets a lot of heat from both sides as he dares to try to be consistently Catholic. That is decrying torture apologists on the right along with abortion advocates mostly on the left. I really don’t like prefix Catholicism. That is where you have to put some prefix to describe yourself before the world Catholic. I never describe myself as a Conservative Catholic since I think prefixes take away from and not give more meaning to the word Catholic. Exactly how does universal need a prefix? But I am only a truth hating neocon I guess. I learn something new everyday.

I saw the article Diabetics cured by stem-cell treatment on Drudge and I had to read 3/4 of the article to find that the treatment was based on stem-cells from the persons own blood. When it comes to adult stem-cell treatment they often bury the lede.

Not surprisingly in the first part of the article it said.

But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells — those acquired from human embryos — is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush.

Now since this particular treatment had nothing to do with ESCR it is a non-sequitur to the story, but if you don’t read to the last part of the article you might get that impression that it did.

Update: Diogenes notices the same thing, but also finds an AP story on the same subject manages to mention that the stem-cells were from the persons own blood and doesn’t editotorialize on ESCR.

Edwina Gateley, a Catholic laywoman and author of 10 books, got cold feet and opted out of her speaking engagement, when informed her seminar would be taped in order to review content during a retreat at a Franciscan Renewal Center. She stood to lose $4,000 from the canceled engagement, but two unidentified women who thought it best to remain anonymous covered the costs to speak at a series of alternative events during the same time frame. Since her feminist theology of a feminine god is well known, I have my suspicions about the organizers of the event and the 20 nuns who signed up to hear her.

Gateley insists that her refusal of being recorded is due to the producers of her copy written material forbidding outside tapings of her talks, but is more likely the manifestation of her fundamental rejection of authority along with the fear and insecurity that comes from being denied the total control to which she is accustomed.

	Jester Hat Tip:	CLS

I guess she didn’t want to see her "retreat" turned into a DVD called "Catholic Feminists gone theologically wild." This though is a great idea if a diocese would tape all retreats for review. For one having a video of good retreats could be very useful. The other reason of course is that like in this case many would be hesitant to have what they say taped. Often they will have the name of their speeches shrouded in terms that make it just possible that they might be orthodox for plausible deniability sake.

This is of course also the reason that when a couple years back EWTN went down with a film crew to Cardinal Mahony’s Religious Education Congress that they were not allowed to film any of the speeches.

I was listening to the Hugh Hewitt show and he was interviewing Kenneth L. Woodward about an article on Romney that had a lot of Mormon bashing in it. Woodward has been responsible for Newsweek’s Religion section since 1964 and he identified himself as a Catholic. In part of the interview Hugh was asking him the difference between some aspects of Mormonism and Catholicism and Woodward went on to explain that infallibility was something that has only been invoked once in the last 150 years and this happened in the 1950s.

Now I am not surprise to hear that people responsible for religions sections of the MSM would know so little about their faith. For one he event gets the common misunderstanding wrong. Normally people will claim that there has only been two acts of infallibility since Vatican I defined it. This would of course be the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950. So to say there is was only one case is to get even this wrong. The truth is that the Pope uses the charism of infallibility every time there is a canonization. The language used in a canonization is "we declare and define that Blessed N., is a saint" which triggers the Church’s gift of infallibility. It would be true to say that there have been only two dogmatic declarations since Vatican I, but not that these were the only case of papal infallibility.

Then of course there is the fact that infallibility was something that came into play many times in the history of the Church especially in regards to Church councils. The dogma of infallibility was only defined in 1870 and many think that it didn’t exist for then, but this would be like saying that Jesus wasn’t divine until the 1st Council of Nicea.

Mr. Woodward could not even come up with any differences between Mormon prophets and when the Church invokes its gift of infallibility. There is a large gap between development of doctrine and the defining of one and the abrupt changes that have occurred in Mormonism.

All I can say is that if Kenneth L. Woodward is as knowledgeable of other faiths as he is about his own then that explains the Newsweek coverage.

Hugh’s post on the subject

Jimmy Akin’s post on infallibility.

Update: I made a glaring error since the Immaculate Conception was defined before Vatican I and so there has only been one dogmatic declaration since Vatican I.

It is not exactly difficult to point out liberal bias in the L.A. Times, but Bill Donahue uncovers a perfect case of it. Cardinal Mahoney spoke out forcibly during Mass about Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a Catholic, for supporting a bill to allow doctor-assisted suicide in the state of California

Los Angeles Times writer George Skelton criticized the Cardinal in his April 5 column. In it, he referred to the Catholic Church as “looking like an ugly old political attack dog.” He also accused the Cardinal of violating the American separation of church and state and called for “a bill to reexamine the tax-exempt status of church property.”

Now to rewind just over a year ago the same writer praised the Cardinal.

He noted how an editorial in the Los Angeles Times on March 2, 2006, commended Cardinal Mahony for “reinforcing the right of religious leaders to speak out on the moral ramifications of political issues.” The issue that Cardinal Mahony addressed then was immigration.

We hear a lot of sturm and drang that President Bush is "anti-science" because of his opposition to human cloning and full federal funding of destroying embryos for ESCR. But these positions don’t make the President anti-science: That dispute is about ethics. People can agree or disagree about the ethics, but one can be–as I am–both pro science and anti-human cloning.

There is a bill now before the Senate that will test whether the pro-ESCR Democrats are also pro-science. S.30, the "Hope Offered through Principled and Ethical Stem Cell Research" would federally fund "alternatives" to destructive ESCR, such as "reprogramming," in which an ordinary body cell may be reverted back to its embryonic stem cell state–a feat accomplished already in mice.

This bill passed unanimously in the U.S. Senate last year and in the House, but not with a "super majority" needed to clear a procedural hurdle. Unfortunately, S. 30 is being held hostage to the ESCR bill–much like the umbilical cord blood banking bill was held up for years before finally passing. But whether or not one supports or opposes traditional ESCR, there is no substantial reason to oppose S. 30, given the dearth of ethical controversy and the great scientific potential. (Ian Wilmut, of Dolly fame, has stated he believes reprogramming will be usable for medical therapies before human cloning.) If the Democrats who control the Congress shoot down this bill, it won’t be because of ethical considerations but pure politics, and a desire to thwart one avenue of stem cell experiments in order to boost another. And that would be anti-science.

	Jester Hat Tip:	Wesley J. Smith

The anti-science meme has been used more and more at anybody who is against cloning or ESCR and of course the term fundamentalist is also being bandied about in this relation. You truth is that everybody believes ethical limits need to be put on research and what can be scientifically possible. The same people that would call Bush and others anti-science for wanting to restrict research in some area often will want restrictions placed on genetic modification of food (so called Frankenfoods), missile shield testing to totally go away, and animal testing to stop.

This is just another sign of the breakdown of debate that instead of proponents of something making their case, they instead use ridiculous labels to minimize the other side. Anti-science, anti-choice are just of few of the terms used so that they don’t have to actually debate what they disagree with.

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CNN) — Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told CNN Wednesday he supports public funding for some abortions, a position he advocated as mayor and one that will likely put the GOP presidential candidate at odds with social conservatives in his party.

"Ultimately, it’s a constitutional right, and therefore if it’s a constitutional right, ultimately, even if you do it on a state by state basis, you have to make sure people are protected," Giuliani said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash in Florida’s capital city.

A video clip of the then-mayoral candidate issuing a similar declaration in 1989 in a speech to the "Women’s Coalition" appeared recently on the Internet.

"There must be public funding for abortions for poor women," Giuliani says in the speech that is posted on the video sharing site YouTube. "We cannot deny any woman the right to make her own decisions about abortion."

When asked directly Wednesday if he still supported the use of public funding for abortions, Giuliani said "Yes."

"If it would deprive someone of a constitutional right," he explained, "If that’s the status of the law, yes."

I wonder how anybody can say that Rudy would appoint judges who are strict constructionalists when he can call abortion a constitutional right. Does he believe that a strict contructionalist sees abortion "rights" in the Constitution? It must be all those damn penumbras floating around the Constitution that make people see this.

Though at least he hasn’t had some fake conversion to the pro-life cause and while I can appreciate his honesty it certainly does not change the fact that someone so wrong on so many moral issues isn’t going to make good moral decisions as President.

	Jester Hat Tip:	Publius