Elsie and Rose’s Excellent Adventure

Seeking new venues to give Holy Mother Church their irrepressible “gift” of pretend women’s ordination, Elsie McGrath and Rose Hudson strike out for Washington, D.C. This time, their desperate “hey-look-at-us-we’re-still-here-but-the-local-media-have-stopped-calling-us” gesture is an “inclusive Mass” at a Methodist outlet in the nation’s capital.

AP has the story:

Papal Visit Provokes Array of Protests

By DAVID CRARY – 1 day ago

NEW YORK (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI may not see them or hear them, but aggrieved Roman Catholic activists hope his U.S. visit this week will help them draw attention to issues ranging from the ordination of women and gay rights to sex abuse by priests and the Vatican ban on contraception.

The groups have planned vigils, demonstrations and news conferences to press their causes as the pope visits Washington and New York. On Monday evening, the eve of his arrival, supporters of women’s ordination will host what they are calling “an inclusive Mass” at a Methodist church in Washington, presided over by Catholic women — including two who were recently excommunicated.

“We cannot welcome this pope until he begins to do away with the church’s continuing violence of sexism,” said Sister Donna Quinn, coordinator of the National Coalition of American Nuns.

Participants in the service will include Rose Marie Hudson and Elsie McGrath, who were excommunicated last month by Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis because they were ordained as part of a women-priest movement condemned by the Vatican.

“In the face of one closed door after another, Catholic women have been innovative, courageous and faithful to the church,” said Aisha Taylor, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference. “They continue to make a way where is none.”

[…]


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I absolutely love the churlish attention-seeking of these people. They must draw attention to themselves. So what if their new congregation numbers so few people that they can fit in a VW Micro bus? They’ll just drive that micro bus to D.C. and hang out with the other heterodoxers. I shouldn’t have titled this post their “excellent adventure”. It’s more like the sequel: Elsie and Rose’s Bogus Journey.

Poll Finds Millennials Resemble Pre-Vatican II Catholics in Attitudes, Practices

This post comes from the New Liturgical Movement. I did download the executive summary of the 176 page study, and if I find anything interesting that wasn’t covered by NLM, I may post on it later.

"My obedience to him has nothing to do with my standing with the higher power."

Canon lawyer Thomas Doyle has a predictable response to the decree issued against him by Archbishop Burke. From the full story at STLToday:

Reached Friday by phone, Doyle accused Burke of “vindictively clubbing people with canon law.”

“He’s making a mockery of the role of the bishop, a mockery of himself, and the role of leadership in the church when it comes to resolving disputes and problems.”

St. Stanislaus, founded by Polish immigrants in the late 1800s, has been in a yearslong struggle with the archdiocese over control of its assets. Burke has excommunicated St. Stanislaus’ board and the Polish priest it hired two years ago.

Burke also has refused to allow St. Stanislaus’ pastor, the Rev. Marek Bozek, to be represented by Doyle. When pressed to explain why, Burke has said that some of Doyle’s beliefs are inconsistent with Catholic teaching. Bozek continues to seek Doyle’s counsel.

Doyle said he didn’t get Burke’s approval to represent Krauze and Rozanski because he was already representing other board members in their appeal to the Vatican.

“He exaggerated it,” he said. “It’s total nonsense.”

Doyle also objected to Burke’s contention that he has publicly taken a position contrary to the infallible teachings of the church.”My faith and what I believe, and how I believe is none of his business,” he said. “It’s personal.

“My obedience to him has nothing to do with my standing with the higher power.”

Doyle, who has a doctorate in canon law, left a career at the Vatican Embassy to become an outspoken advocate for church abuse victims.

He warned the Catholic hierarchy of the potential scope of the sex abuse scandal in 1985, 17 years before it erupted in 2002.

He said he has been working to support and defend those harmed by the church since then.

He was an Air Force major stationed in Germany, and also served as a military chaplain in Iraq.

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Obedience to lawful Church authority has nothing to do with faith? Very original.

Also, in its pastel-painting of Doyle’s background as one of heroic prophecy and public service, the Post fails to mention how Doyle’s military chaplaincy came to an end. It also fails to discuss his history of helping litigants take copious amounts of money from the Church. I think his “personal beliefs” are entirely relevant to his motivation in the Stanislaus and other cases. They are also directly relevant under Canon Law to the Archbishop’s wise and just decision to reject his credentials as advocate. As a canon lawyer, he should know this; in fact, I bet he knows this very well.

Catholic School Enrollment Dwindling

So says the USA Today— perhaps not the most in-depth, hard-hitting news source. But the Catholic parochial school system does face a huge challenge: How can schools justify the mounting and sacrificial expense of high tuition if the school does not offer a truly Catholic education to justify the sacrificial expense?

It used to be so well known as to be a truism– Catholic schools spent far less per student, compared to public schools, and provided a superior academic education. The Catholic faith was transmitted in a comprehensive way; students knew their catechism, frequented the sacraments within the context of the school day, and a vibrant Catholic identity was passed on, with support from Catholic parents at home.

Well, it has certainly been a long time since this has been the norm. The learning of the truths of the faith via the catechism, so scorned by professional educators, is gone. In its place is something that, no matter how well-meaning the design, just doesn’t work. No matter how many service projects a student can do, unless these projects spring from, and are informed by, the knowledge of the truths of the faith to which our students should adhere, this program will not form young adult Catholics. They are not taught the faith, and are ripe for whatever belief system is thrown at them in high school or college or in the world.

Without the transmission of the faith by teachers who know the faith, and clergy who love the faith and are zealous in ensuring its transmission to the students, the Catholic school of today becomes merely one private school alternative to the local public school. If that is the goal, it shouldn’t be. But even on those terms, how can the school induce a parent to spend $5,000-$15,000 for a school that does only, maybe, marginally better in the academic realm than its “free” public school counterpart and does not teach the children the Catholic faith in any meaningful way?

Catholic school enrollment dwindling

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

[…]

As Pope Benedict XVI prepares to visit the USA next week, a report released today by a Washington education think tank finds that more than 1,300 Catholic schools, most of them in big cities, have closed since 1990.

[…]

Overall, Catholic school enrollment now stands at about 2.3 million, down from the peak of 5.2 million in the early 1960s.

Karen Ristau, president of the National Catholic Education Association, says church leaders didn’t respond quickly enough to the urban exodus of Catholics to suburbs and exurbs. “We didn’t build schools fast enough.” Where churches did build schools, “those schools have waiting lists.”

But even with mounting costs and changing demographics, Petrilli notes, closure in inner cities isn’t a given. In places such as Wichita, church leaders have urged parishioners to dig deeply into their pockets. Students now attend the 39 diocese schools tuition-free.

“The trick is building stronger parishes,” says Bob Voboril, superintendent of the Wichita Diocese. “The difference is that all the people in the parish are asked to be involved … not just the parents.”

You Knew It Would Happen Sooner or Later

I remember thinking the last time I was in Notre Dame– with the ever increasing Muslim population in Paris and other European cities– just how long it would be before the great spiritual treasures of Europe would be destroyed, being left undefended by the former adherents of the faith. This cathedral isn’t exactly Notre Dame, but even in the Philippines, a largely still-Catholic country with an active radical Muslim minority, the danger is present. From the AP:

Twin Blasts Hit Philippines; Nobody Hurt

By JIM GOMEZ – 1 day ago

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Suspected al–Qaida-linked militants bombed a Roman Catholic cathedral compound and a bank in the southern Philippines, police said. No one was injured in Sunday’s blasts.

[…]

Why Do Homeschoolers Routinely Win the National Geography Bee?

The full story at STLToday isn’t that the Fort Zumwalt school district doesn’t want its students to learn geography. The district, rather, is going to drop a required course in geography and expand a U.S. government course. The district believes that students will pick up geography in other courses.

I personally think that geography is under-taught, to say the least. However, this change will merely bring the district in line with other districts, none of whom have a geography class requirement. With the putrid geographical knowledge of most American students exiting high school, as indicated by many recent studies and polls, I would have thought the district would be happy to lead the way in this area. But either way, I think that the reasoning that children will be learning again “what they already learned” in grade school is a bit laughable. And the integrated studies approach so much in vogue in schools today seems to be based more on unfounded optimism than on tangible results.

Excerpts:

Fort Zumwalt considers eliminating high school geography class
By Jessica Bock
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
04/14/2008

…But that doesn’t mean the subject won’t be taught in high school, district officials say. Students will continue to learn the major themes of geography, such as place and its relationship to society; they’ll just do it in the context of other social studies classes.

Freshmen in Fort Zumwalt are required to take one semester of world geography and one of U.S. government. Under a proposed change, the government class would become yearlong and the geography class would be eliminated.

This aligns the district’s curriculum with state standards and guidelines, which do not require that schools have a separate geography class in high school, said Janet Dauve, Fort Zumwalt’s social studies curriculum coordinator for high schools…

…The district still thinks geography is important, Dauve said. This change is better for high school students because they can learn to apply geography skills, rather than repeat what they already learned in middle school, she said.

“They need to go beyond that, and this is really a higher level of thinking we want to do at high school,” Dauve said…

A 2006 Survey of Geographic Literacy showed dismal results for those ages 18 to 24 nationwide. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed could not find Iraq on a map, and half or fewer couldn’t place the states of New York and Ohio, according to the National Geographic Society…