Religion Dispatches
For three months, the city of Windsor, Ontario was abuzz with the story of a Virgin Mary statue that wept tears of oil. Ensconced in a small shrine built on Fadia Ibrahim’s front lawn, the statue attracted hundreds of pilgrims, though it caused havoc for neighbors, city officials, and…
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Long’s case was not simply, as you suggest, a “wreck” or a car “accident,” but a case of DUI: Driving/Pastoring under the influence of unchecked power and accountability. This continues to be a historic problem with commercial celebrity preachers, and given your status and peer group, I’m sure you know this all too well.
Read MoreNew report causes controversy, avoids basic internal issues.
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As this article goes to press, a wrongful death claim has just been filed against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia on behalf of the family of Daniel Neill, a former altar boy who committed suicide in 2009 after reporting his sexual abuse by a priest. This is the fifth civil suit to be filed since a grand jury report issued in February.
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Today, on the eve of the 31st anniversary of Oscar Romero’s assassination, President Barack Obama visited the Archbishop’s tomb. Romero was of one of the most beloved, misunderstood, and critiqued figures in the modern Latin American Catholic Church, and Obama’s visit has sparked some surprise and controversy—especially given Romero’s public critiques of the US government in the final years of his life and his association with Latin American liberation theology.
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Beyond a growing distaste for the rancor around hot-button issues like human sexuality, gender equity, and reproductive choice, people seem to be put off church because they are able to do the kind of work—tending the sick, advocating for the oppressed, caring for the earth, comforting those in trouble or need—that was long the stock in trade of local churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, but which, through the modern corporatizing of mainstream religions, was largely outsourced to separate agencies. This is why you’ll probably find more people volunteering in any given week at Martha’s Kitchen food pantry in downtown San Jose, California than at Sunday services at the church across the street. If Facebook is killing the church, that is, it’s probably more accurate to call it an assisted suicide.
Read MoreIn his new book the pope rejects violence… but what of his statements on gays and lesbians?
Read MoreThe Catholic Church subsidizes the event so significantly they should just call it the Catholic March for Life.
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As Catholic sex abuse scandals once again dominate headlines from Boston to Belgium, and even the fast-track canonization of Pope John Paul II is marred by questions of culpability, the role of the Catholic hierarchy in enabling clergy abuse seems indisputable, admitted even by die-hard church partisans like the Catholic League. But what’s less understood is how these same patterns persist in today’s Church, where demographic shifts and a dwindling priesthood may be creating a new set of scenarios for abuse. The story of Katia Birge is a case in point.
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On numerous occasions Pope Benedict has ignored the connection between Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi racial anti-Semitism, and when posed a question about German responsibility for the Holocaust he fails to address it directly.
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