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The Word
Six years ago I was privileged to be a delegate at the 34th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus which met in Rome The main work of the congregation was to revise the laws that direct Jesuit life as well as to respond to questions raised throughout the Jesuit provinces about our life and
News
Debate Expected on Exception for One-Time Priest-AbusersArchbishop Harry J. Flynn of St. Paul-Minneapolis told journalists on June 4 that a proposal to allow possible return to limited ministry for some priests who have sexually abused a minor only once in the past “is going to be hotly debate
Television
It would be difficult to discuss the past year of television without first addressing the effects of Sept. 11 on the medium. Initially, pundits foresaw a dramatically altered post-9/11 TV landscape. After all, the first days after the terrorist attacks saw television at its near-best: solid coverage
After Sept. 11, what is there left to say? As pastor emeritus of a New York City parish, I settle for an embrace, a hug. There is a deep personal quality to our losses on mid-Manhattan’s East Side and throughout our city. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, lovers, sons and daughters, relations
Of Many Things
Revelations over these past few months are enough to dizzy one’s mind. Even more dizzying, though, are the perhaps millions of words that have been penned in the media worldwide. Have we heard enough? Have we heard more than enough? What’s to be done? Shocking...scandalous...disgraceful.
Books
Edward Sorin arrived in the United States from France in 1841 27 years old three years ordained and the religious superior of a band of six brothers in the recently founded 1837 Congregation of Holy Cross When he died in 1893 he was celebrated as the founder of four institutions of higher lear
Editorials
When the U.S. bishops meet in Dallas, Tex., on June 13-15, the sexual abuse crisis will be at the top of their agenda. The media, the laity and the nation will be watching, ready to pass judgment on the bishops if they do not meet expectations. Two issues have become litmus tests to measure how well
The Word
The Lectionary returns to Ordinary Time under the guidance of Matthew From now until the 24th Sunday of the year Sept 15 the second reading consists of excerpts from major sections of Paul 8217 s Letter to the Romans This is rather ironic since Matthew 8217 s Gospel according to some scho
As revelations of new victims of clerical sexual abuse spill into the news daily, we must face one mare discomforting truth: this scandal has sobering generational overtones. Many, if not most, of the victims are Gen-Xers, born in the 1960’s and 70’s. To be sure, those coming forward ran
Clericalism in the Catholic Church is something like the pattern in the wallpaper: it’s been there so long you don’t see it anymore. That may be why, amid all the demands for change in response to the scandal of clergy sex abuse, more has not been heard about clericalism and the need to
Columns
My working life is not all that hectic or stressful, but that hasn’t stopped me from fantasizing about retirement. I have never golfed and don’t especially want to, but I nevertheless enjoy imagining the feeling of strolling idly through verdant fairways and over footbridges that span gl
Arts & CultureBooks
Andrew Delbanco has persuasively argued in his book The Death of Satan How Americans Lost Their Sense of Evil that the word evil has all but vanished from the American vocabulary and with it the symbols once used to articulate our experience of evil In the wake of the tragic events of last Septemb
FaithFaith in Focus
I learned a lot about being from my cat Goose; I learned also something about how God regards our being, delighting in the work of his hands and the extraordinary beauty of our ordinary lives.
The Word
While last Sunday rsquo s readings stress the gifts of God that guide Christian life the readings today stress the need to reach out to others The passage from Exodus introduces the whole sojourn of the wandering people at Sinai where God announces that they are to remember God rsquo s saving dee
Disclosures about sexual abuse among priests and coverups by the hierarchy have elicited, at least in Boston, levels of lay dissatisfaction and anger that rival the response to Humanae Vitae, the birth control encyclical issued in the summer of 1968. An interesting question now is whether lay reacti
The clerical sexual abuse scandals in Boston and elsewhere have brought home how far the Catholic Church still has to go in receiving into its life the Second Vatican Council, nearly 40 years after that council’s close. The council devoted itself, quite deliberately, to the nature and mission
Letters
In Remembrance
I had to chuckle while reading Elizabeth Ficocelli’s Avoiding Mass Hysteria: Teaching Children to Behave in Church (5/6). She and her young ones would be as discomfited as I was by the children wandering loose at Sunday Mass in the Catholic chapel of the state penitentiary in Tijuana. Some are visiting their fathers; others are in residence with their mothers. None of their motion or commotion, however, seems to distract the prisoners from close attention to the Eucharist or the word, God bless them. As to my own reactions as a priest, I have this poetic meditation, called Suffer the Little Children:
the benches crowded and solemn
Books
As a failed coup attempt in December 2001 delivered yet another wound to Haiti conventional wisdom again declared the Caribbean nation to be almost an economic and political wastelandracked by violence and devoid of all hope and promise But in Beverly Bell rsquo s new collection of 38 spoken-word e
Film
That delightful lull between the end of classes and the beginning of exams provided the perfect opportunity to catch up on movies missed during the last several months. As it turns out, Iand thus regular readers of this columnhave missed little. Two walls of the neighborhood video shop feature new r
News
Vatican Reservations Emerging Over U.S. Direction on Sex AbuseRecent statements by two Vatican officials have underscored reservations in Rome over the direction U.S. bishops are taking as they formulate a national policy on clerical sex abuse. In particular, the officials believe it would be wrong