Author: Richard Chonak

Which is pretty amazing by itself. Some of the things said there are pretty amazing too:

Law assured the clerics at the end of the session that the policy is “canonically correct” – meaning under church law it is acceptable to suspend an active priest pending an investigation into abuse.

But priests have not only been removed from public ministry, which is technically not a punishment; they have also been deprived of office (that is, removed as pastors), deprived of reputation, ordered out of their residences, and told not to wear clerical dress or identify themselves as clergy. It’s hard to believe that all of those measures can legitimately be imposed without a guilty verdict.

However, he doesn’t confirm rumors that he offered to resign.

He’s still got all these sinners hangin’ around with him.

Over in the comments at Amy Welborn’s, a news report about the arrest of some ex-seminarian (thank Heavens it’s ex-) has become the occasion for the usual misguided souls to blame the shortage of priests on celibacy. They assert such a causal linkage again and again.
However, there is reason to question it: the 2000 Catholic Almanac reports 478 ordinations in the U.S., for a church of about 60 million members. In comparison, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, a jurisdiction which of course ordains married men as standard procedure, reports only 8 ordinations in its 2002 yearbook for a church of about 1.5 million members. That is unfortunately a comparable or perhaps even lower rate than that of Catholic ordinations. (I say “perhaps” because one mustn’t put too much weight on the figures of a single year.)
Verdict: the Church’s critics have not proven their case.

Here’s one out of left field: North Korean kakistocrat Kim Jong-Il says he’ll approve the construction of a Russian Orthodox church in Pyongyang.