Author: Richard Chonak

Springfield (MA) Bishop Thomas Dupre’s announcement that he may retire would make it a clean sweep: all four Massachusetts dioceses will be getting new bishops. Are readers seeing turnover like this elsewhere?

I usually attend Mass at a church in Boston, but just got a letter from the local parish finance council out here in the suburbs, asking for a $200 donation to help meet a budget shortfall. Mass attendance and donations are off 25% this year in a parish hard hit by the sex-abuse scandals. The committee says that if they can’t make ends meet, the parish will have to lay off some staff in the areas of “liturgy, youth ministry, ministry formation, and education”.
As it happens, this parish is known across the diocese for its awful music: the music director can’t play, or teach, or even count the beat well. So I’m thinking of offering $500 if they lay her off! This could be the salvation of the parish!

I’m impressed with the way the writer of this story about a sloppy abortionist de-emphasizes the baby-killing angle. Normally any story involving “the procedure” is hot news, but here the headline and the first paragraph refer to mere “surgeries”. We wouldn’t want the public to get the idea that abortion providers are less than perfectly compassionate, competent, and unmercenary physicians, would we?

A song parody takes a potshot at Reformed theology — and scores!

Jesus loves me, this I think,
If I’m wrong, to hell I’ll sink,
Little ones to Him belong,
To save or damn, for He is strong!

Newsweek provides us this quote:

“I just don’t think that you should eat anything that’s Jesus. It’s OK to eat the cross as long as God is not on it.”
–Liz Samuel, a supervisor at the Gertrude Hawk Chocolates store in Langhorne, Pa., on the store’s selling chocolate statues of Jesus

A chocolate statue of Jesus? It just doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. For one thing, where would you start eating? To bite the head off a chocolate bunny and come back to finish him later is no big deal, but doing that to our Lord’s image would be a sort of profanation.
For convenience, you might press our Lord’s image into a chocolate coin so that you could receive it whole and entire — that would go over better. If you wanted, you could even put Caesar on one side and Christ on the other.
eje asks: “If they made a statue of John the Baptist, would it be appropriate to eat the head first?”
Now, he’d be bittersweet.