Richard Chonak: September 2003 Archives

In the made-for-TV Iraq war movie,

Paul Bremer	will be played by	William Devane.

Any other suggestions?

The Catholic League points out that megainvestor Warren Buffett is one of the top donors to the organization "Catholics for a Free Choice". Get that? He's a non-Catholic, a zealot for population-control causes, and he's financing a deceitful group that attacks Catholic teaching. Nice to know who your friends aren't.

Now he's the financial advisor to candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don't want to make Arnold guilty by association, but (a) Arnold's already declared himself in favor of abortion and the gay agenda, and (b) electing a candidate does mean electing a pack of advisors too.

Is any of the prominent candidates for governor of California at all pro-life?

Here's something Catholic for the blog: how about a second collection? :-)

I suspect John Mallon's car must have been named Christine.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em? A sect of storefront churches trying to attract Hispanic Catholics to its services adopts the strategy of simply calling itself Catholic, and it's misleading enough faithful that the Archdiocese of Atlanta has sued to get them to stop. Archbishop John Donoghue wrote about it in July to Hispanic Catholics.

‘‘They give the impression that they are loyal Catholics and in communion with the Catholic church,’’ Donoghue wrote. ‘‘For months now this group, ‘Capilla de la Fe,’ has been creating confusion in the Hispanic community by pretending to be in communion with the Church and the Magisterium of the Church. ... Unfortunately, many of our good Hispanic people are confused by their pretense and they are leading many away from the Catholic Church.’’

Here's an AP article.

The sect offers healing through the use of blessed water and oil and seems to be appealing to superstition:

Some Capilla de la Fe services are unlike anything offered at Roman Catholic parishes, including one focusing on "strong prayer to destroy witchcraft, demon-possession, nightmares, curses, envy, bad luck, or spiritual problems."

Coming in the next Left Behind book: the Washington Beltway is renamed as Interstate 666. Plausible, eh?

This Sunday, St. Matthew Cathedral in Washington celebrates the completion of restoration work with a rededication Mass. The results are, a friend says, "stunning".

Pansy Moss and Peony Moss, Two Sleepy Mommies, have brought their web site to stblogs.org! Welcome, gals!

Or is it just a Rollover?

A few months ago Cardinal Law took bold and decisive action against the dissenting movement within the Archdiocese: well, no, not really. Instead, all he did was tell diocesan agencies to stop holding events at the most notorious dissenting parish, large, affluent Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Newton. After all, "Our Lady, Help Us Christians" was the launching pad of the self-important VOTF, and its pastor was vocally gay-friendly Rev. Walter Cuenin. For years, the archdiocese itself had been honoring this badly-misled parish by holding conferences and special services there. Most prominently, why on earth had they let Boston's #1 dissenter (well, maybe he's #2) have the honor of hosting Mother Teresa on her visit to Boston? That was a scandal.

It seems Cardinal Law finally got the point and ordered a stop to these affairs shortly before he resigned, but today, says the paper, Abp. O'Malley has lifted the prohibition in an arrangement worked out by Bp. Lennon, auxiliary for the western portion of the archdiocese.

God bless Johnny Cash. If there was anybody in popular culture who so well expressed both the strength and misery of man, it was he.

At a ball game the other day shortly after he died (Chicago at Boston), the Fenway showmeisters saluted Cash during a break in the action by playing the tune from his hit "Ring of Fire". Sure, it was a popular song; it's a fun song. But with those lyrics? Let's think this one over, guys.

At Caritate Dei, Rob Diaz likes a hymn spoof I sent him, and wants more. Any volunteers?

(Update: Down in the comments, Rosemarie posted a link to a smashing parody of "Gather Us In". Thanks!)

Babies are smiling.

Don't let the p*rn film crew work unsupervised.

To start with, there's probably some rule against letting a fiction film be made inside a church. But if a pastor's going to ignore that and allow it anyway, he needs to watch over the filming and make sure the church isn't profaned to the extent that it needs a re-consecration.

Anyway, Father, the thing to do is just send these people to make their movies in a suitable non-Catholic church. Some of them look more like a Catholic church than some of ours do.

I'm involved with a project at work, and maybe somebody out there can help. My employer's annual calendar is very PC and includes major holidays of various religions and cultures, because, like a lot of high-tech firms, we have a culturally diverse work force. Since last year's edition had a few mistakes in listing the Christian holidays, I volunteered to help gather info for the 2004 edition.

Apparently the editors had been using whatever info they could find on the web, and some of it was old or wrong; so I'm looking for official or at least reliable sources for the data I turn in. Documenting the Catholic holidays is not hard: the Catholic Almanac has a list. Can anybody point to some reliable source for a list of Orthodox holidays?

Also, what days would Protestant Christians consider important enough to list: just Easter and Christmas? Pentecost? Maybe Reformation Sunday? Obviously Protestant customs are going to be all over the map; but advice from our non-Catholic readers (if any) would be a boon. Thanks!

Or this, or this, and certainly not this.

It's too bad, really. Gotta say no.

My driver's license renewal form came in the mail last week, so I looked it over and started to fill it out. One of the questions is:

Do you want to have the organ donor designation printed on your driver's license?

Now, that is basically nice. The thoughtful people in our state government decided to take the opportunity to recruit all the drivers in the Commonwealth to manifest their willingness to be organ donors.

And my choice the last time around was: Sure, why not. The Church approves of organ donation; it's a charitable way to help somebody, to do a pro-life act. Fine. Happy to help.

But this LifeSite item reminds me that not everybody has the ethical details quite right. (Read the story here if you don't have access to CWN.) It's about unscrupulous doctors in Russia collecting organs from people who weren't dead yet. (They are now.)

Dr. John Shea, medical advisor to Campaign Life Coalition, said that he is not surprised: "The less dead a person is, the better," for purposes of organ harvesting. The practice now is to have the attending physician in a trauma ward make a decision against continuing life-saving efforts, shut off the respirator, and remove organs as soon as possible after even a simple head trauma, he said.

But surely it's only over there?

"Let's not blame the Russians, this is going on in Canada and the United States under new protocols for 'non-heart-beating' organ donation. The patient does not even have to be brain dead. The term 'brain death' is useless anyway. No-one ever knew what it meant; now it is being ignored," he said.

And when I can't trust the medical system to respect my wishes and wait until I'm really dead (no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain activity) before sending me to a chop-shop, it seems best that I withdraw the permission that I previously gave.

If I'm going to give anybody the OK to collect second-hand body parts from me, it's going to be in some other document that spells out the ethical conditions a little more precisely. I'm not going to leave it to the legislature.

Until then, I'll break it down for ya in the words of the Rev. M.C. Hammer: ...can't touch this.

Maggie Gallagher wonders whether the family is still declining:

How many children are living in intact families, with their own married biological or adopted parents?

At a fascinating Health and Human Services-funded conference last week in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Poverty Center, we finally got the answer. And the news is good. The analysis of the National Survey of America's Families (a survey of 40,000 nationally representative families) was done by Urban Institute scholars Gregory Acs and Sandi Nelson:

Between 1997 and 2002, the proportion of children under 6 living in intact married families actually increased. So did the proportion of all children in low-income households (the bottom quarter) by close to 4 percent.

It's encouraging evidence that the apostles of despair are wrong: The decline of marriage is not inevitable. Social recovery is possible. In fact, it is under way.

(Now, if only we could get Maggie to do something about that awful photo of herself.)

You can get anything you want these days in worship, and the suppliers of church goods are ready to make it possible. Why not have sealed individual Holy Communion packages? After all, you wouldn't want to receive from the same one cup and one bread as other people, would you? Better for everything to be perfectly sterile.

My Capuchin pal Bro. Matthew commented that a Mass using these things might not be valid, since the priest is supposed to say the words of institution over the elements, not over their packaging. And that's besides any problems about the grape juice.

I bet some evangelistic TV outfits would love these Communion Cups: they could mail 'em out to supporters and conduct the next monthly communion service through the Satellite Ministry. Would you put your Communion Cup in front of the TV set, brothers and sisters, while I pray the Prayer of Faith? What the heck: we could do it over the Internet!

Victor noticed this other product from the same company. I'm cuckoo for Eucha-Puffs!

Steven Riddle's Flos Carmeli weblog has joined us at stblogs.org, and has brought along an archive even slightly bigger than that of Catholic Light.

Salve!

Bill Cork has noticed that goofball bishop Thomas Gumbleton hasn't given up on the idea of ordaining women as priests yet, and Dale Price accordingly wonders if Cardinal Maida will give His Excellency the slapdown he deserves. One would hope so, given that His Eminence rightly stopped a parish from hosting some pro-fem-ord speakers not too long ago.

Fono spotted an article from Germany's Welt am Sonntag paper about the Pope's health.

As you've probably noticed, Pope John Paul's voice has become progressively more incomprehensible in his public speeches, and according to the article, he now regularly skips whole paragraphs of his Wednesday general audience talks.

This becomes a practical problem for the Church when there are some tasks only a Pope can fulfill: e.g., to declare one of the faithful departed a saint or a blessed, as he plans to do for Mother Teresa on October 19. For the Pope, giving up his trip to Mongolia, and the wished-for side trip to Russia means that he will probably never fulfill his dream of consecrating Russia to our Lady from its own soil.

Andreas Englisch writes:

John Paul II sees his fate head-on. He openly indicates that he believes he does not have long to live. He declines to name the overdue replacements for the two most important Vatican offices: both Secretary of State Angelo Cardinal Sodano and the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, have surpassed the age limit of 75 years and would normally have to go into retirement. Yet John Paul II does not want to fill such important offices himself. He wants to leave the choice of successors to the next Pope, who will have to work closely together with the cardinals in both key positions.

Finally, there's somebody who can tell publicity hound Mitchell Garabedian where to get off. He's a lawyer for some of the abuse plaintiffs, and he was ready to turn a Saturday meeting between ten abuse victims and Abp. O'Malley into a media circus.

The talks were to be held at a location not announced publicly, but attorney Garabedian, according to the Associated Press, invited journalists to come to the site where he would give briefings during breaks in the action.

Attorneys Carmen Durso and Roderick MacLeish Jr., on the other hand, representing two other groups of plaintiffs, didn't like the idea of having to putting their clients through a media gauntlet to get into the building, so they asked Abp. O'Malley to postpone the session, and the meeting for Saturday is off.

Fr. Sibley wants to get a handy new high-tech item to help his parish finances, and now CWN reports that Peter's Pence will accept donations by credit card over the Internet. (Subscription required for full story.)

When the queues get too long at the donation machine, will Fr. appoint extraordinary teller ministers to help out?

These news photos (which you may have missed) have been circulating on the net. Click on each thumbnail to see the full image.

A rather Evangelical Church of England parish streamed this week's Sunday service on the Internet.

"Thank you, children; thank you, Paul, for helping us with that Confession..."

Actually, the sermon is a thoughtful talk about finding God amid a confused culture.

It had to happen: when people want information on finding a religious community, they turn to... the web!

A Florida laywoman's publicity efforts are bringing interested visitors to consider the monastic life.

Jane had a strange dream, and she's onto something.

Or: Your Search String Speaks!

Here, just for fun, are a few of the curious things people were looking for when they found Catholic Light:

al franken is a liar
animals souls catholic (I like Fr. Hardon's take on the subject.)
marty haugen lyrics gather us in
catholic feng shui
bsforum (Maybe they were looking for the "Belgian Social Forum", a left-wing media group)

Comedian Jerry Lewis (a genius in France) is running his annual fund-raising telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The little spiels they present about research are mentioning possible treatments based on stem cells. Keep your expectations low.