Dismas House

Very nice story about a Catholic halfway house and related business for ex-prisoners in the Catholic News.

An excerpt.

“NASHVILLE, Tenn. (CNS) — Last fall, Dwain Adkins was about to be released from prison after serving a six-year sentence for aggravated assault. He had no family to return to on the outside and had not been accepted into a halfway house.

“My biggest fear was being homeless,” he said. “It was hard for me to fathom that. It tore me up.”

“Finally, one week before his release, Adkins got word from Dismas House in Nashville that he would have a place to stay.

“Dismas gives guys like me an opportunity and for that I’m grateful,” he told the Tennessee Register, newspaper of the Nashville Diocese.

“Not only did Adkins find a safe place to land after prison, but he also found immediate employment through Dismas’ social enterprise — a custom screen-printing business called Triple Thread Apparel that helps ex-offenders like Adkins reintegrate back into society through employment and job training.

“Today, Adkins spends his days in the Triple Thread workshop, unpacking boxes of shirts, prepping and cleaning screens for printing, and ensuring orders are properly completed and ready for shipping. He does all this under the watchful eye of the founder of Dismas House — the late Dominican Father Jack Hickey, who smiles down on all who enter the workshop from a poster on the wall.

“A quote from Father Hickey reads: “In the courage of those who suffer and the compassion of those who stand with them, people will see God at work and join in.” Those words still guide Dismas and Triple Thread today.

“Father Hickey, a chaplain at Vanderbilt University in the 1970s, was inspired to start Dismas House to minister to former prisoners; Triple Thread was founded to take that ministry a step further.”

Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought

An excellent review from Catholic Culture about that most excellent set.

An excerpt.

“And if we will put our collective powers of imagination to work, harness them to our deepest desires, squeeze our eyes tightly shut, cross our fingers, and whisper the incantation Society-of-Catholic-Social-Scientists, then trust me, the very work will appear in three large, well-crafted hardback volumes. I’m referring to the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy edited by Michael Coulter, Stephen Krason, Richard Myers, and Joseph Varacalli. The publisher is Scarecrow Press.

“In addition, you will have to go to a good library or pay $234.10. But it is worth either the trip or the dollars, or both.

“The Encyclopedia was originally published in two volumes in 2007 totaling about 1200 oversize pages, but a third “Supplement” volume of about 400 pages was just published in 2012. Now, holding the first volume in my hands and flipping open to a random page, I find myself in the section devoted to the letter “F”. Early in this section there are so many entries on different aspects of the family that I need to scan ahead a little to give you an idea of the variety. Besides, it would be unbecoming to linger over the entry on “Faith & Reason” which was, after all, an academic journal I founded in 1975. (I can say that the entry is accurate. It even brought things to mind that I had forgotten.) So let us skip forward a few pages.

“Starting with an entry on Feminism, we find another on Feminism in the Church. Then we learn of William Frederick Joseph Ferree, SM (an influential social justice scholar of the mid-twentieth century), followed by Fides et Ratio (John Paul II’s encyclical from 1998), which in turn is followed by St. Lucy FIlippini (a social reformer and foundress who lived from 1672 to 1732). Then we can linger over an entry on Film (starting in the 1890s) before going on to John Mitchell Finnis, the outstanding Australian legal and ethical philosopher born in 1940. The next entry focuses on Thomas Fitzsimmons, the merchant-statesman and friend of George Washington at the time of the American Revolution. And Fitzsimmons, as you might imagine, brings us to the very brink of Foreign Policy.”

Catholic Women’s Halfway House

This article from the National Catholic Register profiles such a program—which sounds very good, especially using transformed criminals in leadership, and with good future results, hopefully, we will see more and perhaps also for men—in San Francisco.

An excerpt.

“SAN FRANCISCO — January is the time to make good on New Year’s resolutions, but that fresh start can prove elusive when you’re a job-seeker with a felony on your record.

“Monique, 28, is a personable young woman who says she plans “to finish college and find work helping troubled teens.” The problem is that 10 months ago, she was doing time for a drug charge, and she’s still worried about staying out of trouble.

“The predicament of finding a job, following incarceration for a felony, is all too familiar for Monique: her parents were both drug addicts and she witnessed their struggle to get clean, earn the right to get their kids back, and begin again.

“But she isn’t facing a forbidding future on her own. She can count on support from her fellow residents at Catherine Center, a Catholic halfway house for parolees, and a team of expert advisors who are helping her build new relationships and patterns of behavior that foster self-respect and independence.

“Based in South San Francisco, Catherine Center was established in 2003, after Sister of Mercy Marguerite Buchanan  and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul of San Mateo County determined that parolee rehabilitation programs were failing to achieve their mission.”

Art Glorifying God & the Virgin Mary

That is the essential mission of the American Academy of the Sacred Arts, and its founder, Sr. Mary Paula Beierschmitt, wrote a beautiful letter published in this month’s issue of New Oxford Review.

An excerpt.

“Words and images convey the thoughts and sentiments of their author. Since we are made in the image and likeness of God, we also express our thoughts and sentiments in words and images. Lucy E. Carroll addresses the alteration of an author’s thoughts and sentiments. Authors fall into various categories. Writers, musicians, poets, painters, sculptors, and architects have accomplishments that deserve protection from unscrupulous intrusion.

“Consider the authors of the Divine Office. This continual unbroken prayer of praise is sung or recited in cadenced phrases composed with poetic imagery. Unauthorized changes seriously impair not only the poetic beauty and metered rhyme but reflect disunity in the very prayer that is supposed to be said with one voice. Even the transcendental element of mystery can be denied by pragmatists.

“Visual artists are also vulnerable to alterations and misrepresentations. Michelangelo, for example, found it necessary to sign the Pietà when he learned that another sculptor was credited with the masterpiece. His work on the Sistine Chapel was also altered over the years until Pope John Paul II had it restored to its original state. Integrity is needed for the preservation of an author’s work.

“Visual images in a worship space are essential for creating the proper environment for prayer. Dr. Carroll recalls her joy as a child in watching the icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa appear when the curtain covering it was drawn before Mass. Her experience reminds me of a visit I made to Our Lady of Guada­lupe National Shrine in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 2005. An excellent reproduction of St. Juan Diego’s tilma had been exposed to sunlight from nearby windows, and its delicate colors were fading. Had the image been protected with a drawn curtain, this unfortunate damage could have been avoided.”

Vatican Review of US Sisters

A subject much in the news lately and this article from the current issue of New Oxford Review is a good catch-up.

An excerpt.

“Everyone is entitled to his opinion” — so goes the old adage. And there’s more than a germ of truth in that. What that adage is too pithy to include, however, is that before we form an opinion, we need to make an honest effort to understand the issue at hand. That means — ideally — that we seek out facts, analyze them with a critical eye, and evaluate and interpret them in light of some objective criteria. Failing this preliminary legwork, we’re prone to knee-jerk reactions, to forming opinions that are meaningless and misleading.

“The Vatican’s recent call for a deep reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) has lit up opinion pages in major newspapers and magazines across the country. The mainstream media love a Vatican controversy. It’s an easy target, especially since most American newsmen, editorialists, and talking heads understand precious little about religion in general, and internal Church matters in particular. It comes as no surprise, then, that countless pundits have taken this as another opportunity to slam the Vatican, not with honest criticism of some wayward decision or action, but with knee-jerk reactions grounded in scant facts. One wonders: Does anyone read primary source material anymore? How many, for instance, actually read the text of the Vatican’s document on the LCWR before lighting the cannon or cocking the pistol?

“This April, after a three-year investigation into the state of non-cloistered women’s religious life in the U.S., the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released an eight-page report on the doctrinal health of the LCWR and its affiliated congregations. [Also this one-page intro by Cardinal Levada] The LCWR represents about 55,000 sisters in eighty percent of the women’s religious congregations in the U.S. The CDF’s report, titled “Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious,” is based on the findings of apostolic visitator Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, and cites a number of egregious theological and doctrinal errors advanced by the LCWR, including dissenting positions on ministry to homosexual persons and the “prevalence of certain radical feminist themes” that are incompatible with Church teaching, including the ordination of women to the priesthood. The document announced the Vatican’s call for a significant overhaul and reform of the LCWR and named Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle as its archbishop delegate for the initiative.

“The outcome of the investigation has been welcomed — and was, in fact, anticipated — by orthodox Catholics, who have been sounding the alarm for decades now over the theological rubbish that has issued from the LCWR. “Better late than never,” has been the typical refrain.

“But what’s interesting in this case is the LCWR’s pre-emptive media strike: The LCWR, a kind of trade association that represents the majority of American orders of sisters, was quick to respond to the Vatican’s corrective. The organization’s response allowed it to cast reportage of the issue according to its own storyline: Remote male Vatican bureaucrats fault dedicated religious sisters for helping the poor and for working for peace and justice in the world. Consequently, news accounts of the story gave voice to the nun’s perspective, seemingly without any attempt to understand the Vatican’s stance in the matter. Newspapers reported on what the nuns say they see as the controversy, rather than the controversy itself. Why bother with the facts when they just get in the way?”

Society of St. Pius X

This is very good news for the Universal Church, to bring about the ending of the long separation, as reported by the Catholic News Agency.

An excerpt.

“Vatican City, Jun 14, 2012 / 10:26 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Vatican has confirmed that the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X is being offered the status of a personal prelature as part of a deal to heal the group’s 24-year rift with the Catholic Church.

“Clearly the ball is now in the court of the Society,”Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said on June 14.

“Yesterday afternoon the Society’s superior general, Bishop Bernard Fellay, spent over two hours in talks with representatives of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led by Prefect Cardinal William J. Levada.

“A June 14 communique from the Vatican Press Office confirmed that during those discussions “a draft document was submitted proposing a Personal Prelature as the most appropriate instrument for any future canonical recognition of the Society.”

“A personal prelature is a Church jurisdiction without geographical boundaries designed to carry out particular pastoral initiatives. At present, the only personal prelature in the Church is Opus Dei.”

Suing Catholic Colleges to Be Catholic

I would sign on quickly if any of the alumni at my alma mater, the University of San Francisco, also wanted to follow suit with the effort begun against Georgetown, as reported by the Catholic News Agency.

An excerpt.

“Washington D.C., May 19, 2012 / 05:03 pm (CNA).- The author of the best-selling book and award-winning screenplay “The Exorcist” has announced that he is leading an effort to file a canon lawsuit against Georgetown University for failures to live up to the demands of the school’s Catholic identity. 

“William P. Blatty, who graduated from Georgetown in 1950, told CNA on May 18 that he believes there is a need for disciplinary action against the university.

“As I recall it, the Lord knocked over a few tables,” he said.   

“Blatty, who has been honored by Georgetown with the John Carroll Medal for alumni achievement, will lead other alumni, students and members of the university community in the newly-formed Father King Society to Make Georgetown Honest, Catholic, and Better.

“The society is named for the late Jesuit Fr. Thomas M. King, a former theology professor at Georgetown who was rumored to be the inspiration for the priestly character in “The Exorcist.”

“Its website encourages members of the Georgetown community to join the canon lawsuit and share their grievances against the university with Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, D.C. and Pope Benedict XVI.

“It also asks them to withhold their donations from the school for one year.

“Blatty believes that Georgetown has given scandal to the faithful on numerous occasions and has refused to comply with “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” the document issued by Pope John Paul II in 1990 to outline the functions of Catholic universities.”

Catholic Liberals & Presidential Politics

George Weigel explains the trajectory—which, unfortunately, is away from the dogma of the Church.

An excerpt.

“In a February 14 note to his people, Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., the archbishop of Chicago, commented on the question of “who speaks for the Catholic Church,” which had become a subject of public controversy thanks to the Obama administration’s “contraceptive mandate” — which is, of course, an abortifacient and sterilization mandate as well. The cardinal noted the administration’s crude attempt to play divide-and-conquer with the Catholic Church in the United States, a ploy in which some nominally Catholic groups quickly acquiesced. Yet something important in all of this was being missed, the cardinal suggested: “…the bishops of the Church make no attempt to speak for all Catholics; they never have. The bishops speak for the Catholic and apostolic faith, and those that hold that faith gather around them. Other disperse.”

“The diaspora, in this case, was entirely predictable: columnists and politicians who had questioned the administration’s mandate, and organizations and associations that had raised serious questions about it when it was first announced, quickly fell back into line when the administration, on February 10, announced an “accommodation” that was an obvious shell game, a ruse that didn’t change the moral issue involved one whit.

“Others, however, continued to gather around the bishops, who rejected the “accommodation.” And they will prevail….

“That liberal Catholics of the 2012 diaspora refuse to concede the grave threat to religious freedom posed by the administration’s mandate, and that they have given political cover to a gross infringement on religious freedom by a federal government that looks ever more like Hobbes’ Leviathan, is a grave breach of ecclesial communion in itself. It also represents a tragic betrayal of the best in the liberal Catholic heritage in the U.S., even as it illustrates the utter incoherence into which post-conciliar liberal Catholicism in America has tragically fallen.”

Social Justice, CCHD, & Saul Alinsky

The continuing criticism of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) continues in this article from First Things, which is answered by a consultant to CCHD, and the comments responding to the consutant are worth a read.

An excerpt from the First Things article.

“In dioceses across America, bishops send out lists of collections that are to be taken up in individual parishes throughout the year. Some are local, but many are promoted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. There are, for example, Peter’s Pence, Missionary Sunday, and the Retirement Fund for Religious. One of these, the lesser-known Campaign for Human Development, has been such a cause for concern that in 2008 the American bishops began to question how it works and even suggested phasing it out. At the 2010 national meeting of U.S.bishops, Roger Morin of Biloxi publicly apologized for the program’s past mistakes. So what, precisely, does the CHD do? To answer that question, it might help to examine how the CHD got started, what its original purposes were, and how have things changed.

“As Lawrence J. Engel relates in “The Influence of Saul Alinsky on the Campaign for Human Development” (Theological Studies, December 1998), to which this article owes a large debt, the CHD began in 1969 as American cities were burning down: Newark, Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles. It was the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War protests. Some scholars believed the nation was on the road to anarchy. The patriotism of the young during the Kennedy era was gone, replaced with: “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?”

“According to Engel, Bishop James Malone, former President of NCCB, identified two pivotal forces of the times that moved the bishops to inaugurate this campaign: “The crisis of human needs and aspirations with a particular urgency in American society and the impact of the Second Vatican Council.”

“First, what Bishop Malone politely described as the “crisis of human needs and aspirations” was actually (if you lived through it) an America that was at enmity with itself. And the second force behind the CHD, “the impact of Vatican II,” became nothing less than a call for lay Catholics to assume a new Church role (no longer “pray, pay and obey”) and a new concept of priestly ministry, described in Gaudium et Spes as identifying with the “poor and afflicted in any way.”

“But there is another part of the story of the CHD’s origins that is often left out of official narratives. It centers in opaque respects around Saul Alinsky, who developed community organizing in a way that met the spirit of the age: strident, threatening, and prone to shakedown. Thoroughly anti-authoritarian, he ostensibly promised to show priests and laity how to follow the call of Vatican II. His pitch: “With your (Catholic) money and my ideas, we can go a long way.”…

“It needs to be acknowledged that, at the time, many very good Catholics, filled with more enthusiasm than information, supported, and still do, giving grants to organizations that promote “a systematic way out of poverty.” Yet so many hard liners have, since then, worked very hard to make sure that the words “social justice” are synonymous with “community organizing” in the Alinskyite mode and not charity in the traditional sense.”

Evangelization in the Marxist Desert

Europe, once the very soul of Christendom, has become largely atheist, but the Church has not given up on her, nor will she ever, as this story from Chiesa reports.

An excerpt.

“ROME, September 21, 2011 – “Where God is, there is the future”: this is the title that Benedict XVI wanted to give to his third visit to Germany, which begins tomorrow.

“Pope Benedict has stated repeatedly that the “priority” of this pontificate is to bring men closer to God. But the case of Germany makes this urgency of his all the more compelling.

“The former East Germany, together with Estonia and the Czech Republic, is the area of Europe where atheists are most numerous, and the non-baptized are in the majority…

“A book was recently released in Germany, published by GerthMedien, that analyzes the decline of Christianity in this country in very straightforward terms….

“The theater of the report is Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt, one of the cities most barren of faith in the already vastly dechristianized former East Germany.

“The protagonists of the renewed evangelization are a few families of Neocatechumenal Catholics, who have gone there as missionaries from other European countries.

“ON MISSION IN THE DEPTHS OF THE EAST

by Marina Corradi

“Outside the sun is still high in the sky, in summertime, but at eight o’clock in the evening the streets are already semi-deserted. We are in Chemnitz, at 29 Theater Strasse, in an old building that has just been remodeled and still smells like fresh plaster. What strikes you the most about the Neocatechumenal families, when you see them together as they are this evening, is the children: six couples, each with nine or twelve or even fourteen kids. There are about seventy of them in all, teenagers or recently married. And you look at their faces, at their twinkling eyes, and think: how amazing, and what richness we have lost, we Europeans with just the one child, while from the room next door comes the demanding cry of one of the first grandchildren.

“It is moving, the little crowd of young Christians this evening in Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt. Because in this corner of the former German Democratic Republic, civilization was born, in the year 1136, from a handful of Benedictine monks who founded an abbey, bringing in their wake Christian families who lived around the convent and cleared the forests for farmland, and those families also had about a dozen children apiece.

“Can the story begin again, when it seems finished? You ask yourself this in this silent and spent city, where one out of every four inhabitants is elderly, and the only children of broken families are alone. Here the people turn around and look if a Neocatechumenal family goes out with even half of its children. And if a classmate happens to come over for lunch, he takes a picture of the crowded table with his cellphone, in disbelief.”