Reading Rat September 2007
Converting a newsletter into a blog by Kevin O'Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs, September 13, 2007, using law firm newsletters as an example
(via WisBlawg)
Book Festivals: Upcoming festivals and readings
How the therapeutic mentality affects the culture and Catholic worship
Therapeutic culture reduces interdicts merely to taboos, that is, to essentially irrational and neurotic compulsions arising out of fear and ignorance, and in the post-conciliar Church there were increasingly shrill polemics against “legalism”, as though interdicts have no spiritual meaning. The rare disorder of scrupulosity was treated as the root of all belief, a sickness that had to be constantly fought against.
Labels: Vatican II failure analysis
In some respects, the institute is a re-founding.
In 1985, the Capuchins founded the Benedict Institute for Urban Ministry at one of the parishes they run here, St. Benedict the Moor Parish, which is still known for its nightly meal program for the poor. That institute gave more than 200 men and women experience doing various urban ministries - including many from local Catholic and Episcopal seminaries - before times changed, participation dropped and it became inactive, Veik said.
Labels: Saturday religion ghetto
Bob Atwell, chairman of Relevant Radio and its nonprofit parent, Starboard Media Foundation, said that the FCC is aware of Relevant's circumstances. The proposed penalty is "more than one-third of our (annual) budget" of $12 million, he said, and more than the net worth of Advance Acquisitions, Starboard's for-profit arm that engaged in the auction.
"It was less than adequately explained by Catholic News Service (CNS)," said Luerck, "reporting it as if Relevant Radio had been levied these fines. But it was, in fact, Advanced Acquisitions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Starboard Media" which is also the parent company of Relevant Radio.
The choices are as Tom Friedman puts them today:
10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. ...
Given our military constraints, the message of the last election, and the inadequacy of presidential leadership, I'm compelled to say: 10 months.
--Andrew Sullivan November 29, 2006
“I will not celebrate the Liturgy in a way that makes ME uncomfortable.”
In a statement delivered September 19 at the National Press Club Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, Florida, [speaking on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)] called elected officials to “resist the voices of dissension and fear this time and vote for the DREAM Act.” ...
The DREAM Act would provide young persons who were brought by their parents to this country at an early age a way to regularize their status and obtain permanent residency. It also would allow states to give these young persons eligibility for in-state tuition.
The DREAM Act would also repeal Section 505 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which currently requires states to offer in-state tuition rates to all U.S. citizens in order to offer them to immigrant students."
The church’s sacred mission, faithful to the mandate of Jesus, to teach, serve, and sanctify, requires such ongoing, purposeful, professional planning.
This archdiocese has done so, in a very concerted way, for at least the last 15 years.
...many of the recommendations for our parishes and schools have already been implemented or are in process. Other recommendations await implementation.
Today I want to talk to you about a heightened, more energetic effort to re-commit ourselves to the process of pastoral planning.
What is this all about, anyway?
Well, for one, it’s about fidelity to the church’s primary duty of evangelization. Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI all remind us that evangelization in the third millennium calls for new, creative ways to respond to pastoral urgencies that engage us today.
People are looking to the church to be a light to the world, to be proactive,
not passive, in dealing with contemporary challenges, and to meet the spiritual needs of her people today as she has in the past.
Are we evangelizing and living our faith? Are we meeting the spiritual needs of our people? How effectively do we live Jesus’ mission in today’s world? Are we good stewards? These are the questions that pastoral planning confronts.
Simply put, we have too many parishes, priests, and buildings in areas of southeastern Wisconsin where our Catholic population has shrunk, and not enough where big numbers of Catholics now live.
Simply maintaining the buildings we have, with no energy or resources left for the mission of Christ and his church, is no way to run a railroad!
Does this pastoral planning mean some parishes and schools might merge, move or be served by creative new styles of leadership? Yes.
Does this mean that some new parishes, or re-configurations of current ones, might appear?
Does this mean that new ministries, new models of schools, catechetical programs, and fresh outreach in evangelization and charity might arise? Yes.
Can we continue the mushrooming of central office services that began 15 years ago after the archdiocesan synod?
Have we kept pace with changes in our parishes and reflected those changes in our central structure designed to support those very same parishes? Have we focused on what’s most important, most helpful, most needed?
Or, have we continued to try and be all things to all people, as our world and our culture changed around us?
All of this work is especially important as we move toward a capital campaign.
Well, have I made my point? All this planning is crucial! So crucial that it also needs to be full-time.
Thus, I have appointed a much respected pastor, Fr. James Connell, as archdiocesan vicar for planning. ... We know from experience the aggressive planning I have described will take more than one year, but I believe Fr. Connell’s full-time attention, along with the consultation and support of our priest council and pastoral council, will allow us to make great progress and set the course for future implementation.
Fr. Connell was also just elected chair of our archdiocesan priest council on a “single-issue” emphasis – you guessed it: pastoral planning!
With their election of Fr. Connell, our priest council sent a clear, resounding message – we must boldly renew our commitment to pastoral planning, to new models of administration and to new approaches to serving the people of God in southeastern Wisconsin.
We need to dream of what could be and “cast out to the deep,” ...
During his last days on earth, Jesus instructed his disciples to go and share the Good News, to advance the mission of His Church.
Since our parishes are our spiritual "homes" it makes sense to ensure that our parishes are as vibrant as can be.
That’s why "Vibrant Parish Ministry" is our first initiative. ...
Labels: Saturday religion ghetto
"Vice President [Dick] Cheney came up to see the Republicans yesterday. You can always tell when the Republicans are getting restless, because the Vice President’s motorcade pulls into the Capitol, and Darth Vader emerges," Hillary Clinton said ...
It doesn’t look like you have some kind of program carved in stone anyway–the news items say these are just starter questions getting passed around.
At the general sessionsThis was posted on September 15th, a month after the Catholic Herald article. Things might not be written in stone, but they're on a fast track.
...
Fr. James Connell, Vicar for Planning, will share his vision for planning
Living Our Faith presents Catholics in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee an invitation to engage in these three key activities:
Meeting Christ
Knowing Christ
Living Christ
As far as those experts, they're the same one's that got us into this mess.
The simple and irrefutable fact is that whether or not there will be a bloodbath after we leave, there is one now.
...the plan, as one skeptical pal of mine puts it, "to shove freedom down the throats of the entire world whether they want it or not"...
--Mark Steyn
Labels: definition
Clinton is hard to interview because her answers are often just chunks of her stump speeches, but I thought I detected real warmth when she described the way she and her staff came up with the plan.
“It was an exhilarating process!” she enthused, describing how all sorts of different people came together to talk through issues. “There were countless meetings,” she remembered fondly, “with business leaders who were surprised to find themselves sitting next to me” and a long parade of academics, nurses, experts and friends.
Even now, Benedict is reaching out to the Society of Pius X. And some would say that this Latin Mass thing is an olive branch in their direction. When will there be an olive branch for the Matthew Fox's and Rev. Alice Iaquinta's?
At our Techno Cosmic Masses people dance to techno music as well as live music; DJ's provide the musical ambience and VJ's or video jockeys provide images through slides and videos that tell the story of the theme celebrated.
IV. LITURGICAL COSTUMING: The Stole, the Alb, the Ambo, and the Vestment are all ancient costumes copied from the Romans. We don't see why we have to wear just these things and cannot wear costumes that speak to our particulary cultural norms in ways that are new and creative. We reserve the right to have a Star Trek Mass, a Clown Mass, or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Mass.
Labels: definition
“For sometime -- three, four, five years, there has been a growing concern among the priests that we are not getting the planning job to where it needs to be,” said the 64-year-old priest. “We keep working at it, we keep talking about it, we had these new initiatives these last few years.”
In July, he published and distributed to about 500 people a document titled “Energizing Our Vibrancy” in which he posed what he termed “starter questions” about the present and future of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.
When Fr. Connell, a priest of 20 years, cites the loss of vibrancy in the church, he notes it’s caused by fewer people in church and fewer participating in the life of the church; few students in Catholic schools, fewer priests and nuns, and buildings that continue to deteriorate.
“I say the more that people can be pulled together in the grouping of how they tend to live life — that’s that identifiable community.”
“The younger people aren’t around that much; they’re the ones we’ve got to be finding and bringing back and getting attracted to this again,” he said about the evangelization component of his work. “The older folks, who have been very faithful and loyal, are going to say, ‘This is mine; this is the way we built it’ and yet, it’s not about them as much as it is about the younger people.”
“We have more of an inroad to the vibrancy by being grouped in fewer yet larger organizational structures."
“We’re at the point where this is not a matter of necessarily what people want in a popularity contest, because the ones who will vote are not necessarily the ones who will need,” he said. “The voters are the ones of the older group who are in church so to speak.”
In recent years, members of parishes affected by declining membership and subject to mergers developed plans resulting in mergers or in the closure of parishes and the opening of a new one. Fr. Connell appreciates that process — as far as it goes.
“Where the people themselves, from the bottom up, have done as much as they can, but we cannot get the matters resolved, they have to be resolved,” he said.
"We will be finding that the archbishop will have to make decisions where in the past they have been waiting for the people to make the decisions."
“We close the schools that generally have financial problems, and they might actually be the schools we most need open, in terms of the mission of the church.”
In the interview with your Catholic Herald, he noted, “(Personnel) need to be pulled together in such a way that they serve the people and the mission of the church.”As opposed to figuring the Archdiocese won't collapse until after they're collecting a pension.
“As a pastor, I would be delighted to run a parish with all volunteers. We pay people simply because we have activities, functions that need to be done and we do not have competent volunteers willing to volunteer sufficiently to do that which needs to be done,” he said.
The Chad Vader saga, with eight episodes so far, was created a year ago by Aaron Yonda and Matt Sloan of Blame Society Productions. The idea came from a friend who thought it would be funny to place Darth Vader in a supermarket and film him on the job.
Many members of the cast and crew are from the Madison area, and the series was filmed during off hours at Madison’s Willy Street Co-op.
We are in need of one 7th Grade and one 10th Grade Catechists. You only teach six times!
... we MUST start raising our children right! We HAVE to teach them what to think, so the rad-trads don’t get into their brain and steal their ability to think!
--Sr.Fairah at Spirit of Vatican 2 Catholic Faith Community
Labels: Saturday religion ghetto
Rowley’s ordination—which took place at Eden Theological Seminary, a progressive institution in Webster Groves, Mo.—is approved by the Ecumenical Catholic Communion, a group of churches that decline to recognize the authority of the pope but see themselves nevertheless as Roman Catholic.
How does being married affect the way you do your job?
... Married priesthood was a reality in the Catholic Church in medieval centuries. It wasn’t until later that celibacy was mandated. ...
Mark Mitchell, the parish's director of administration, who is quoted in the later article, says the 1997 status animarium report for Sacred Hearts showed 3,455 parishioners, and the 1998 report for the merged St. Martin's parish showed 3,931.
Homer: Uh...it's like...did anyone see the movie Tron?
Hibbert: No.
Lisa: No.
Marge: No.
Wiggum: No.
Bart: No.
Patty: No.
Wiggum: No.
Ned: No.
Selma: No.
Frink: No.
Lovejoy: No.
Wiggum: Yes. I mean -- um, I mean, no. No, heh.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, brings to eight the number of allegations brought in Wisconsin against the Catholic Church under the narrow conditions permitted in a July ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The lawsuits all allege fraud, saying the church knew that these priests had histories of misconduct and allowed them to function in the state without warning congregations or others to the dangers.
Representations of fact do not have to be in writing or by word of mouth, but may be by acts of conduct ... or even by silence if there is a duty to speak. A duty to speak may arise ... where there is a relationship of trust or confidence between the parties.
Kathleen Hohl, speaking for the archdiocese, said Tuesday that church officials had not seen the lawsuit and thus had no comment.
Labels: Ich bin ein Frankliner
If all of our parish members would respond with just $2.00 a day for three years, we would be able to wipe out the entire debt.
Factually, for many reasons, some members will not respond at all to this very pressing need.
I look forward to visiting the classrooms on a regular basis.
I encourage each parish member to come and honestly, but gently, (no ax grinding or mean spiritedness’ allowed) share your insights etc. (The staff will not be present for these meetings.)
A memorial service for Professor Mermin will be held at Yale Law School on Sunday, September 9, 2007, at 11 a.m.
Much of the hostility from victims and their lawyers was focused on the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing Feb. 27, one day before the first trial was to start.
Labels: Saturday religion ghetto
Assuming the worst about Craig [Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID)], the Senate has not held a vote on outlawing homosexual impulses. It voted on gay marriage. Craig not only opposes gay marriage, he's in a heterosexual marriage with kids. Talk about walking the walk!
Did Craig propose marriage to the undercover cop? If not, I'm not seeing the "hypocrisy."
--Ann Coulter
Labels: definition
Very soon after the release of the Petraeus report, Congress will vote to authorize Iraq funding for the next 12 months. If they give the President what he wants, the occupation will in all likelihood continue until he leaves office in 2009.
Even many strongly opposed to the invasion over four years ago and highly critical of the administration's handling of the war are now showing signs of buying the administration's arguments that a "bloodbath" will result if we leave anytime soon.
...our problem, however, at least in my experience, is the wide diversity in current practice from one parish to another.
The recently created position of Liturgical Referee has been instituted to help to bring uniformity to the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Liturgical Referees will travel around the world randomly attending Masses. Liturgical Referees will stand, mostly quietly, to the side of the sanctuary during Mass and call out signals if he observes any liturgical penalties according to the GIRM and other liturgical documents. Only in the case of penalties that would make the Mass itself invalid will the Liturgical Referee blow his whistle and when necessary call for any replays to correct any mistake made. Penalty markers may be thrown during the Mass to alert the celebrant to any problems that might need immediate correction.
Labels: definition
Louis H. Bremer Jr., LRMC president and chief executive officer, said in a statement: "The interpretation many Christians are getting is that prayer is completely banned from the hospital, which couldn't be further from the truth."
"It would be very appropriate to say Jesus' name in the presence of a Christian family. That's no problem," Bremer said in the statement. "What must be understood is knowing the audience and what is appropriate for that particular situation."
The hospital was worried about "Secondhand Jesus" meaning that those who didn't intend to have Jesus had Jesus forced upon them by a third party.
Labels: definition
A million years from now, a collection of mysterious artifacts would remain to puzzle whatever alien beings might stumble upon them: the flooded tunnel under the English Channel; bank vaults full of mildewed money; obelisks warning of buried atomic waste (as current law requires) in seven long-obsolete human languages, with pictures. The faces on Mount Rushmore might provoke Ozymandian wonder for about 7.2 million more years. (Lincoln would probably fare better on the pre-1982 penny, cast in durable bronze.)
Introductory Rites
Liturgy of the Word
Liturgy of the Eucharist
Eucharistic Prayer
Communion Rite
Concluding Rites