Author: John Schultz

This part of the article is pretty straight forward.
Female Episcopal bishop could strain Catholic ties

A potentially historic speech about women that received little media fanfare was made two weeks before America’s Episcopal Church elected Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as its leader in June.
The speaker was Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s top liaison with non-Catholic Christians. He addressed the Church of England’s bishops and certain female priests.
Catholic and Anglican officials have spent four decades working toward shared Communion.
Mincing no words, Kasper said that goal of restoring full relations “would realistically no longer exist” if Anglicanism’s mother church in England were to consecrate female bishops.

And this must be quoted out of context:

The cardinal said female bishops should be elevated only after “overwhelming consensus” is reached with Catholicism and like-minded Eastern Orthodoxy.

Mainly because it doesn’t make sense in the context of the next quote from the Cardinal:

Anglicans cannot assume Catholicism will someday drop objections to female priests and bishops, Kasper said. “The Catholic Church is convinced that she has no right to do so.”

…full piece here

Congrats to the World Cup Champions!
The one-quarter of me that’s Italian is thinking about drinking too much wine and burning something down. The rest – English, German and Irish, is thinking about being polite and organized about my drinking.

Remember when Nihil Obstat was driving everyone crazy?
Well – here’s “A Day in the Life of N. Obstat…” from September 2002.
5:07am My dream about being the Editor of the Concord Monitor interrupted by the scratching of my 4 Siamese Cats.
5:09am I rise from bed to spoon heaping helpings of Fancy Feast out into individual cermanic food bowls.
5:17am Proceed to the laundry room to quickly remove cat elimination from the litter boxes.
5:56am Tolstoi, the youngest cat, is the last cat to arrive for his morning evacuation.
5:58am Litter boxes clean, I proceed to my study boot up my computer.
5:59am Morning Earl Grey tea is brewed extra strong.
6:10am I step out into the cool NH air and witness a neighbor allowing their dog to tramp through the yard
6:10:23am I yell “Get off my lawn!” at the neighbor while shaking a clentched fist
6:12am Proceed back to the computer to begin important work
The rest of the day is here.

I’m holding up six fingers.
Go visit – there some great stuff over there. Especially “Free Piglet”
CL is 4 years old as of last May – an anniversary that passed us by. Might be time for some “best of” entries.

…before the articles lamenting the untimely death of Enron founder and recent convict Ken Lay appeared.
Apparently death and divine judgment wasn’t good enough for him.

But now that he’s died of a heart attack in the luxury of his Colorado getaway while awaiting sentencing for his crimes, none of his victims will be able to contemplate that he’s locked away in a place that makes the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel look like Hawaii; that he might be spending long nights locked in a cell with a panting tattooed monster named Sumo, a man of strange and constant demands; and long days in the prison laundry or jute mill or license plate factory, gibbering with anguish as fire-eyed psychopaths stare at him for unblinking hours while they sharpen spoons into jailhouse stilettos.
He will not be ground into gray jailhouse paste by listening to the eardrum-scarring symphony of 131-decibel despair that is the Muzak of penitentiaries, by gagging on the dead prison air, by choking on the deader food, by watching the blue sky taunt him with freedom over the exercise yard, and by feeling his nervous system rent by the cruel grenades of memories — explosions of nostalgia for the days when he knew he’d be swanning forever through the comfy laps and cool lawns of luxury and infinite possibility. Sweet Gulfstreams through sweet skies, the pools, the jewels, the Maybach limousines, a life in which he didn’t just pimp his ride, he pimped the entire world as he knew it.

You can read the rest of the story in the Washington Post. The author makes the point that human “savagery” makes us want to see Lay suffer in prison.
Which would be typical, if one doesn’t believe in God, judgment, and the afterlife.