Vatican: Psychological testing for seminarians

The Vatican released today in a press conference a long-awaited document on the permissible extent of pyschological testing of seminary candidates. It's been a controversial topic in Church circles, especially because it overlaps with the question of whether homosexuals should be ordained priests. Here's the Catholic News Service story about the new document.

Is "thrifty" a compliment or an insult?

As Americans come to grips with an economic crisis that was fueled largely by overextended spending, the word "thrift" has returned to vogue. But many argue that thriftiness still connotates for most of us being "miserly, penny-pinching, no fun," as one columnist recently writes. And the fact that the federal government has sent us "economic stimulus" checks and may do so again soon reinforces the idea that spending is an almost patriotic duty.

What do you think? What should a Catholic's approach to finances be?

Is there something in the water?

Yet another Catholic politician with a stance contrary to Church teaching (in this case, embryonic stem-cell research) has justified her position by distorting what the Church actually teaches.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm stumped over the weekend for Proposal 2, which would allow scientists to perform stem-cell reserarch on donated human embryos.

"As a Catholic, I can say to be pro-cure is to be pro-life," she said.

Bishop Earl Boyea of Lansing, Mich., called Granholm's words "shocking." A "well-formed Catholic conscience would never lead a person to support Proposal 2 'as a Catholic,'" he said.

(hat tip to Rocco Palmo)

Maybe this explains some things

In reference to the previous post, here's another LA Times story about sexualized Halloween costumes for children.

Sexually-charged playgrounds

There's a troubling rise in reports of sexual aggression in elementary schools across the United States — between students.

Here's the latest example, about actions being taken by the Los Angeles public school district. But it's patently clear that staff training and resource coordination — while hopefully lowering such instances — does not address the root causes: Sexualization of youth in television? Advertisements? Video games? Internet? Societal separation of sex from marital intimacy and love?

Whatever the cause, parents today need to be more vigilant and communicative about these things with their school-aged children than they themselves were at the same age.

Clerical career paths

The governor of New York's top aide, Charles J. O'Byrne, a former Jesuit priest, has resigned after revelations that he failed to pay state or federal taxes for five years -- about $300,000 worth. His lawyer blames the failure on a pyschological condition "that causes people to not file their taxes."

O'Byrne is a Kennedy family friend and presided at the wedding -- and later funeral -- of John F. Kennedy Jr.

O'Byrne is also openly homosexual, left the Jesuits in 2001 and now is a practicing Episcopalian. He left practice in corporate law in 1988 to study for the priesthood for the Archdiocese of New York but was expelled from the seminary. He entered the Jesuits the following year. He has described being a priest as his "earliest ambition."

His now-former boss, Governor David A. Paterson, was also raised Catholic (and supports abortion and same-sex marriage), and The Times describes their "unusually close relationship" in ministerial language.

Class, time for a pop quiz

From a Wall Street Journal editorial today: Who's donated the most money to an effort in California to defeat Proposition 8, an initiative on the Nov. 4 ballot that would define marriage as between a man and a woman in the state?

A) Gay-advocacy organizations
B) Civil-rights groups
C) The California Teachers Association

The answer is "C." In a state with a highschool dropout rate of 25 percent.

More contraception = more abortion

Those who want abortion "safe, legal and rare," to quote the Clinton Administration's slogan, often cite increased contraception as one way to achieve this goal. The "contraception for all" argument is flawed, however, in that it does not take into account the failure rates of even the pill. As this article on Catholic Exchange by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse demonstrates, the pill is not foolproof. The link to abortion is this: Once contraception is seen as a right, when there is "product failure," then redress is expected. Abortion becomes that redress. Abortion rates can actually increase -- as we have seen in Sweden, for example -- when contraception is more available. More risks are taken, but the consequences of that risk are viewed as unacceptable. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, more contraception leads to more abortion.

Supreme Court poised to decide church/state ruling

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide whether to take on what could be a pivotal case in the question of church/state separation. Their previous rulings on the constitutionality of religious symbols on state property have been ambiguous, going both ways. The current case regards a cross that has been standing for 70 years on federal land in southern California's Mojave Desert to commemorate war dead. Here's the Los Angeles Times story»

Archbishop Chaput: Kmeic's 'disservice' to Church

"To suggest - as some Catholics do - that Sen. Obama is this year's "real" prolife candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse," said Denver's Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, recent author of "Render unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life," in a talk last night to ENDOW, a Catholic women's group.

The archbishop, who said he was speaking candidly as an author and private citizen, not in an official capacity, particularly singled out Doug Kmeic, a Catholic law professor and former Republican partisan who has come out strongly for Obama because his policies supposedly would do more to further Catholic social teaching despite his support for abortion rights:

"I think [Kmeic's] activism for Sen. Obama, and the work of Democratic-friendly groups like Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, have done a disservice to the Church, confused the natural priorities of Catholic social teaching, undermined the progress prolifers have made, and provided an excuse for some Catholics to abandon the abortion issue instead of fighting within their parties and at the ballot box to protect the unborn."

As the archbishop said, the speech is candid. A condensed adaptation of it is posted here.

Are you literate (biblically)?

Contrary to the fierce atheist apologetics we have been hearing about lately, religious belief and a spiritual sensibility is on the rise worldwide. The problem for the Church is that while people may be "feeling" more religious, their actual knowledge of the faith, including their contact with Scripture, is often sketchy at best. God has revealed Himself through Scripture, yet many Catholics' only encounter with the Bible is at Mass. This is not negligible, but to grow in our faith, we need to become biblical literates. A fascinating column on biblical illiteracy has just been published by one of the premier Vatican watchers, Sandro Magister.

Pro-life Catholics and Obama

Our Oct. 12 issue featured a story about the claim of pro-life Catholics who support Sen. Barack Obama that his social safety net policies will actually do more to reduce the number of abortions than a McCain presidency.

That's a bold argument to make, and one that has little support in facts, argues George Weigel in a new Newsweek article. For example, he points out that Sweden has a much more robust system of social support than we do, but has the same rate of abortions — 25 percent — per pregnancy. And he points to Guttmacher Institute data showing that only 23 percent of U.S. women getting abortions cite economic hardship as their primary reason.

Richard Doerflinger, the associate director of the U.S. bishops' pro-life office, also recently deconstructed what he called the "myth" that laws against abortion don't actually reduce them. He also addressed the "various false claims" used to support that argument.

Granting Rights to Plants, Part 2

In the latest issue of our newspaper (Oct. 19), we have a cover story about a new trend to grant rights to animals, plants and even "Mother Earth" herself.
Today's Wall Street Journal has a similar article that highlights some of the absurdities involved when such laws are put into practice. It's focus is on a Swiss constitutional amendment that has been interpreted such that vegetation is understood to have an inherent moral value and that it is immoral, say, to "[decapitate] wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason."
This has put scientists performing genetic modification in a bind; perhaps such research is humiliating for plants and tramples their dignity.
And who knows where the line should be drawn. "It ...begs an obvious, if unrelated question: For a carrot, is there a more mortifying fate than being peeled, chopped and dropped into boiling water?
'Where does it stop?"'asks Yves Poirier, a molecular biologist at the laboratory of plant biotechnology at the University of Lausanne. 'Should we now defend the dignity of microbes and viruses?'"
Other new rights granted last month in Switzerland to "social animals" require prospective dog owners to take a four-hour course on pet care, reuire prospective anglers to learn how to fish humanely, require fish hobbyists to keep fish in tanks with at least one non-transparent side (so the fish has privacy), and prohibit flushing goldfish down the toilet (they must be anesthetized first with special chemicals).
Our story has a broader look at some of the long-term ramifications of such moves.

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SF Catholic Charities cuts ties to homosexual adoptions

Our story about the decision of San Francisco’s Catholic Charities to terminate its relationship with an adoption agency that caters primarily to homosexuals has generated some buzz across the Internet (see here, here, here), including by homosexual blogs (see one here) that now would like to see SF Mayor Gavin Newsom cut off Catholic Charities’ public funding (which recently has amounted to as much as a third of its $30 million budget).
The Archdiocese of San Francisco did not provide a motive for its decision, but Catholic Charities has been under budgetary pressure.
It's no surprise that the archdiocese is playing this cautiously. There have already been serious efforts in San Francisco to cut Catholic Charities' public funding in protest over Church teaching on sexual morality. And were the archdiocese formally to attribute this move to an attempt to comply with Church teaching, you can be sure there'd be renewed calls fo Catholic Charities' blood.

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Read our cover story about a new book from Fr. Joseph Langford, Mother Teresa's Secret Fire»

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An inside job

Here's a column by Greg Erlandson, publisher and president of OSV, that appeared in the Oct. 5 issue of our newspaper. Is he right? Leave your comments.

They did it again. They distracted us with all their talk of illegal immigrants stealing our jobs and draining our resources. They told us how we had to put up barriers, distrust anyone who wasn't American. They made us suspicious of others, just the way they did in the past with blacks and Jews, Italians and Irish.
We talked about walls to keep those people out and keep us safe, and we let commentators on talk radio and cable television whip us into a frenzy over the folks they said threatened America.
And once again, the fingerprints on the knife in our back belonged not to the poor and minorities, but to the best and the brightest.
Instead of statues of a bull and bear on Wall Street, we should erect a Trojan horse, because what's pushed America to the brink of financial disaster was not all those illegals coming in and "stealing" our jobs as busboys and janitors and underage laborers in meat-processing plants.
This was an inside job. It was made in America. It was all the hotshot brainiacs, our best college grads, the brokers and bankers pulling in bonuses that weren't just in the hundreds of thousands but in the millions.
These were the people who have been most blessed by this country's abundance, and these were the people most driven by greed. They weren't minimum-wage workers trying to put food on their table and give their children an opportunity to obtain a high school diploma. They weren't the day laborers on the city streets hoping for a job or the field hands bent double from hoeing the weeds on corporate farms.
These were people who drove Manhattan delirious come bonus time, the folks who bid up the prices on luxury condos, who went to restaurants competing to serve the most expensive hamburgers in America, who vacationed at the toniest resorts and who, if they had children, sent them to only the best prep schools.
These were the people whose patterns of consumption were lauded in the Style section of The New York Times, the same paper that now excoriates them on the editorial pages.
These were the people who saw themselves as "Masters of the Universe," and the irony is that some of these same folks -- now working for the government -- are supposed to be crafting the nation's exit strategy from this financial debacle.
We don't know where this will all end. The number of people who have lost their houses and lost their jobs is already a scandal, but what the future holds, we don't know. Will other financial institutions fall to earth? Will the taxpayers have to pay even more to cover up the bad decisions of the best and the brightest?
And will our nation with its trillions of dollars worth of IOUs to countries like China and Saudi Arabia -- both made unbelievably wealthy by our voracious consumption beyond our means -- have the fortitude to stick to our promises, pay our bills and not sacrifice the poorest among us while doing so?
Greed has permeated our society. In most cases, it led us to make some dumb financial decisions based on bad assumptions, and the results will be defaults on home mortgages and car loans and credit-card debt. But the greed of those most materially blessed who were leading some of our most powerful financial companies is what is most shameful, and has done the most harm.
I know people who are in this country illegally. They pay their taxes, they work two or three jobs at minimum wage and send money back home to support impoverished family members there. Yes, they broke the law. Yes, a country has the right to enforce its laws and protect its borders.
But Americans have taken their eyes off the ball. We have not been done in by the strangers among us. We have been done in by our own.
Never has it been more true: We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Greg Erlandson is the president and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor.

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