News Briefs

Restoring the devastated infrastructure of the church in Haiti will take years, said Archbishop José H. Gómez of San Antonio, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Church in Latin America. • Ralph M. McInerny, University of Notre Dame professor and author of the Father Dowling mystery novels, died Jan. 29 at age 80; Mary Daniel Turner, of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the order’s former superior general and former executive director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, died on Jan. 27; and Charles M. Whelan, S.J., America’s longest-serving associate editor, died on Feb. 2 at the age of 83. • A Kansas jury found Scott Roeder, 51, guilty of first-degree murder in the shooting of the late-term abortion doctor George Tiller. • After decades of conciliar reform, the church is “experiencing the cold chill of winter” driven by “contrasting ideas of what the liturgy is and how it should be celebrated,” said Anscar Chupungco, O.S.B., former president of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute, at a lecture in Australia on Jan. 21 during which he criticized an “agenda” to “put the clock back a half-century.”