Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

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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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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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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Der Spiegel interviewed Hans Küng, 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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