Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

A Discussion on Faith and Culture

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Entries Tagged as 'Catholic Church'

The Dudes of the Beatitudes

November 20th, 2011 · No Comments

Croissant
Madre
Albert

The background story for the history of abuse in the Community of the Beatitudes might give us some sympathy for the church and police investigators who are trying to entangle what really happened. Religion en Libertad summarized it.
Gerard Croissant (Aka Ephraim) was the founder of the Community. He was born in 1949 of a Protestant [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · clergy sex abuse scandal

A Priest Who Was a Man

November 13th, 2011 · 2 Comments

After the disgusting displays of pusillanimity in the football program at Penn State, it is refreshing to turn to a real man, the Austrian priest Carl Lampert.
The German Resistance Memorial Center gives this biography:

Born in Vorarlberg in Austria, Carl Lampert was ordained as a priest in Brixen in 1918. After studying [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · Masculinity

The Authority of the Ordinary Magisterium of the Catholic Church

October 27th, 2011 · 9 Comments

Catholic progressives often criticize “creeping infallibility” and discount the authority of Church’s ordinary magisterium when it comes to sexual morality. Galileo is often cited. This approach has been used for other purposes.
Pius XI repeatedly condemned Nazi and Fascist racism, culminating in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge.
The Italian fascist official Robert Farinacci went to the Nuremberg [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · Jesuits · Medical ethics · Moral Theology

Lost in the Past

September 24th, 2011 · 13 Comments

Der Spiegel interviewed Hans KĂĽng, who continued his criticism of the way the Church is being governed and what he thinks is the resulting decline of the Church in Germany.. He thinks it is being recentralized in the Curia at the expense of the bishops, but Der Spiegel pointed out

You don’t just want to reduce [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church

Ave atque Vale, sisters

August 25th, 2011 · 9 Comments

The New York Times has an article, Nuns, a Dying Breed, on the disappearance of Catholic sister from the Catholic Health system
The history of religious women has had its ups and downs, There was an order if widows in the early church, but it gave Paul headaches, and he advised the younger widows to [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church

A Disquisition on the Spanish Inquisition

August 10th, 2011 · 7 Comments

Most people’s knowledge of the Spanish Inquisition is limited to the Monty Python sketch “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” etc
But there were other Inquisitions in Spain. In the northeast corner of Spain lies Catalonia, with its own culture and language and laws. It was ruled by the Spanish king, but was independent of Castile and [...]

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Tags: Catalonia · Catholic Church

Christianity and Churchianity

July 30th, 2011 · 29 Comments

I just read Pierre Hagy’s Wake Up Lazarus! On Catholic Renewal. In the first part of the book he documents the decline of the Catholic Church in the United States and the comparative success of evangelical Protestant churches. The Catholic Church, like the Episcopal Church, has lost a third of its members in the past [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · Protestantism

The Decline and Fall of Catholic Marriage

June 22nd, 2011 · 21 Comments

Commonweal has a discussion of the decline in the number of Catholic marriages; they have declined 60% since 1972, even as the Catholic population has grown by 17 million. Our Sunday Visitor has the data and some speculation about the causes.
There are parallel declines in mass attendance and reception of the sacraments.
Everyone has his favorite [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church

Two Religions in One Church?

June 15th, 2011 · 17 Comments

Maureen Fiedler reports in the NCR about the American Catholic Council that just met in Detroit: 

1.     The issue of women’s ordination, and gender equality generally, has risen to a new level of prominence on the roster of reform. It is at the top of many reformers’ lists — men as well as women. It’s clear [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · demography

The Priests We Deserve?

April 23rd, 2011 · 16 Comments

Maciel was recommended by John Paul not such much because of the money he raised, but because of the number of vocations to the priesthood he cultivated in the Legion of Christ. 
Similarly, Karadima in Chile was almost universally honored because his group of young male friends produced four bishops and fifty priests. 
And this in a [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church

Thumos

March 12th, 2011 · 6 Comments

 
In watching Al Jeezera, I have noticed that the protests always began with young men, who have given an extraordinary example of what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness. The Arabs peoples feel themselves oppressed, and the spark that set everything off was the self-immolation of a young man whose fruit stand was confiscated by the [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · anger · clergy sex abuse scandal

German Reform Catholicism and Nazism

February 25th, 2011 · 30 Comments

As I mentioned in a previous post, the historian Derek Hastings has investigated the religious roots of Nazism, not in a broad civilizational sense, but specifically the Catholic groups in Munich from which the early Nazis came. Hastings is the only historian to have done this. I have just read his Catholicism and the Roots [...]

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Tags: Anti-Semitism · Catholic Church · Vatican

Confession and the Dangers of Intimacy

February 18th, 2011 · 8 Comments

Spiritual direction, therapy, and counseling all can be dangerous even to well-intentioned people. Emotional intimacy itself can be problematic, and can lead to physical intimacy.
 
A friend of mine who was an Episcopal minister said that always remembered that both his and the women’s guardian angel were in the room when he talked to the parishioners [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · Confession · clergy sex abuse scandal

Ex-Prostitute-Priest Sues Pro-Life Group

February 17th, 2011 · 10 Comments

Raymond Gravel is in the news again.
 
He is a colorful figure.
 
Back in 2006 the Globe and Mail (article no longer available on line) reported
Rev. Raymond Gravel had to get permission from the Vatican to run in a federal by-election. Now, the former prostitute who used to work in gay leather bars has to convince [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · abortion

The Courage of Women – “I leave for heaven”

February 11th, 2011 · 5 Comments

As Chesterton said, the existence of every human being is a testimony to the courage of women. There is so much bad news about the failings of Catholic priests and religious, it is good to remember the examples that shed a light of divine light on our troubled existence.
 
Women and women religious in France during [...]

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Tags: Catholic Church · France · Women in Church