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January 13, 2012
VATICAN CITY - In 2011, for the first time, the number of visitors to the Vatican Museums topped 5 million. Antonio Paolucci, director of the museums, said breaking the 5-million threshold poses serious problems as well as challenges in the areas of access and education. "Five million visitors means 10 million hands that touch or can touch and 10 million feet that, day after day, wear out the multicolored stone (floors) and the most famous archaeological mosaics in the world," he said.
January 14, 2012
TORONTO - Musician Susan HooKong-Taylor is doing everything she can in her music ministry to build up the body of Christ. One way is through a Catholic arts initiative called The Beads. “The Beads is an initiative that allows people to connect and then to express, to experience and to share a culture of life through the arts,” HooKong-Taylor told The Catholic Register.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Climate change-induced drought that has afflicted the Horn of Africa presents the opportunity for the Catholic Church in Ethiopia to work more closely with the government to address food shortages and development concerns, said an official of the country's bishops' conference. Recalling when Ethiopian regimes in the 1970s and 1980s either did not have the capacity or the political will to face a series of famines, Father Hailegebriel Meleku, deputy secretary general of the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat, said the country is now better poised to address its humanitarian problems, in part because church bodies have been mobilized during recent crises.
January 15, 2012
Canadian religious leaders and interfaith coalitions banded together before the Nov. 28 to Dec. 9 United Nations climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, to urge Ottawa to take substantial steps toward a new international agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocols. Almost alone among Canada’s major church and faith bodies, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops refused to sign the “Canadian Interfaith Call for Leadership and Action on Climate Change.” The Congregation of St. Joseph signed, along with many other Catholic religious orders and a broad swath of Canada’s Christian bodies. Major Muslim, Hindu and interfaith coalitions also signed onto the two-page statement.
January 16, 2012
WASHINGTON - Picking up from efforts to stem sex trafficking at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, 11 women's religious orders from Indiana and Michigan are working to stop sex trafficking at this year's Super Bowl. The orders are members of the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility for Indiana and Michigan, established in the early 1990s. The coalition is a member of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, which spearheaded the anti-sex trafficking efforts two years ago in South Africa. The nuns aren't always the biggest football fans, but they've picked up some of the terminology.
OXFORD, England - Belgium's Catholic bishops pledged a "culture of vigilance" against future sexual abuse by priests and said guilty clergy must compensate their victims even if their crimes are no longer punishable by law. "We cannot repair the past, but we can take moral responsibility by recognizing sufferings and helping victims recover," Bishops Guy Harpigny of Torunai and Johan Bonny of Antwerp, the church's delegates for abuse, told a Brussels news conference Jan. 12. "Above all, we ask forgiveness for the suffering we weren't able to prevent, and we commit to treat this problem differently in future."
January 17, 2012
OTTAWA - Dan McTeague, one of about a dozen staunchly pro-life Liberals who lost their seats in the May 2011 federal election, looks forward to the revitalization of the once powerful Liberal Party. As one of more than 3,100 delegates at the Liberal Biennial Convention here Jan. 13-15, McTeague said he hoped the party will be able to reach out to all Canadians, including the Catholic and ethnic voters who were the former pillars of party support. Political scientists have credited the Liberal defeats in 2006 and 2008 to a growing collapse of Catholic and ethnic voter support. Last May, the Liberals were demoted to third party status behind the NDP and the governing Conservatives. The Liberals elected only 34 MPs, though their numbers have grown by one with the recent defection of a Quebec NDP MP to the Liberal ranks.
VATICAN CITY - Bishops make their "ad limina" visits to the Vatican to report on how well they have cared for their faithful, but also to give thanks to God for their bonds with the Pope, the successor of the Apostle Peter, said Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl of Washington. Presiding at Mass Jan. 16 at the tomb of St. Peter, the cardinal led his fellow bishops in singing the creed in Latin and thanking God for the gift of apostolic faith that lives through the ministry of the Pope. "Our celebration is a visible sign of the communion of faith spread throughout the whole world and how it is anchored here in Rome, where Peter lives now, bearing the name Benedict XVI," the cardinal said.
While official, political debate over plans to put an outdoor recycling yard across from Canada’s national shrine has been delayed until Feb. 1, ongoing discussions among lawyers may lead to a new home for the industrial facility before the end of this month. Midland, Ont., Mayor Gord McKay told The Catholic Register he believed lawyers for the Jesuits, Recycling Specialties Inc. and the Town of Midland may be able to find an agreement on how to get out of plans to recycle metal, wood, cardboard, plastics and other materials on the banks of the Wye River within sight and earshot of pilgrims to Martyrs’ Shrine. “All three parties are talking to one another through their lawyers. There’s something happening there,” said McKay. “It’s one of those things where if we’re not coming to meetings I think good things are happening.”
VATICAN CITY - The millions of refugees and migrants in the world are not numbers but people in search of a better life for themselves and their families, Pope Benedict XVI said. "They are men and women, young and old, who are looking for a place they can live in peace," the Pope said Jan. 15, which the Vatican marked as the World Day for Migrants and Refugees.
VATICAN CITY - The Vatican's highest-ranking Chinese official called on Beijing to release nine arrested Catholic bishops and priests, saying their continued detention "damages China's international image." Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-fai, secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, made his remarks in an interview published Jan. 17 by AsiaNews, a Rome-based missionary news agency.
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) Jan. 29 (Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 95; 1 Corinthians 7:32-35; Mark 1:21-28) So many people claim to speak for God. There are voices that clearly communicate the divine will, while others reflect more selfish or even evil motives. Through the babble of voices it is surprising that God ever manages to be heard.
One thing the “great gay divorce crisis of January 2012” has shown is that our government can move fast when it feels a need to get something important done. The same-sex marriage debacle lasted all of about three days and ended with the government assuring all gay couples who married here, but do not reside here, that not only is their marriage valid but they can come here any time to enjoy the weather, curling and get a divorce. Meantime, the government’s office of religious freedom, promised almost a year ago during the federal election campaign, still sits in limbo with no details being released to the public about what such an office would look like or when it might open.
QUEBEC CITY - It used to be that Quebecers who wanted to hear good preaching or be instructed on right and wrong went to Mass on Sunday and listened to their priest. The clergy were the principle arbiters of public and private morality in all spheres of life in Quebec. They preached on everything from how to dress, who to consort with (or not) and what to read, think vote and so on. One famous saying from this era — “heaven is blue and hell is red” — was a not-so-veiled reference to vote Conservative in elections. The Church believed the “red” Liberals stood for secular reform and social change that would lead people away from their faith. And that’s what happened, people eventually voted red in order to hasten improvements in material living standards and, as predicted, what eventually followed was a widespread abandonment of faith in Quebec.
In her novel Final Payments, Mary Gordon articulates an equation that has long influenced Christian spirituality, for both good and bad. Her heroine, Isabel, is a young woman within whom a strong Catholic background, an overly strict father and a natural depth of soul conspire to leave her overly reticent and overly reflective, looking at life from the outside, too self-aware and too reflective in general to enter spontaneously into a dance or trust any kind of gaiety
Decades of failed policies and broken treaties have created an appalling level of social and economic misery that affect every layer of aboriginal life. So the first thing needed to fix the problem is a decision about where to start. To that end, First Nations leaders will meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and key government members on Jan. 24 in an Ottawa summit to address what Archbishop James Weisgerber of Winnipeg ranks as the most important issue facing Canadian society today — forging a new relationship between the First Nations, Metis and Inuit people and the rest of Canada.
One of the more baffling events since last May’s federal election has been the emergence of grouchy opposition to the Harper government’s Office of Religious Freedom. Curiosity dates back to the election campaign itself when the Conservative pledge to create an Office of Religious Freedom within the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade attracted surprisingly little notice, much less alarm.
Is it over? Yes and no. It was 10 years ago this month that the sexual abuse crisis exploded in the archdiocese of Boston, with reverberations across the world. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, sent to Boston in 2003 as archbishop to right the reeling ship, has written at length on the 10th anniversary. He is quick to argue that the sexual abuse crisis is not over. It’s not over principally because sexual abuse is not something a victim simply gets over. It’s also not over because the process of purification and penance is a path the Church cannot abandon.
January 18, 2012
CALGARY - Young pro-lifers from Calgary are petitioning the Alberta government to bring a halt to provincial funding for abortions. The campaign to Defund Abortion in Alberta is a grassroots initiative started by university and college students, mostly from Calgary, seeking to eliminate public funding for abortion and to support conscience rights for taxpayers. “A defunding campaign will also focus on uniting Albertans who often disagree about tactics in the abortion debate, but who would generally agree that tax dollars should not fund abortions,” said Amanda Achtman, a University of Calgary student active in the group.
Edmonton - In the eyes of Fr. Jack Gallagher, sociologists have proven Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage right. “Study after study” shows that the ideal place for children to be raised is with their two birth parents, said Gallagher. “It’s astounding to me that the empirical evidence is so clear,” he said. “I thought there would be general evidence in favour of the Catholic teaching. On point after point, the sociologists have simply proven it true.”