Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Mitteleuropa has the tradition of the New Year’s Eve Dust Up. It involves, as always, young men, and their motives are the same the world over.
 
Der Standard reports:

Bucharest: The Romanian police on Monday morning ended the traditional Sylvester Fight in the village of Ruginoasa with a tear gas attack. In the settlement near the northeast [...]

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The newspapers in southern Florida, amid the sheafs of inceasingly despondent real estate ads, have stories that capture the essence of life that has spent too much time in the sun. The Naples Daily News reports in its year-end summary:
Hearing cries of “shark” doesn’t usually prompt people to whip out a gun and blast away [...]

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 No, Benedict didn’t congratulate and reward Bishop Gerhard Müller of Regenburg for transferring an abuser, but it didn’t seem to make any difference to Benedict that Müller had done so.

 
Contrary to the promises of the German Bishops Conference, Müller reassigned a pedophile priest: Deutsche Welle reports:
The Bishop of Fulda, Heinz Josef Algermissen, said his colleague Bishop Gerhard [...]

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Austria is nervous about its future, because Austrians have stopped having children in sufficient numbers to maintain the population. The government has proclaimed 2008 as Year of the Family.
 
The new Family Minister Andra Kodolsky, reports Der Standard, is proposing  that parents have a choice of how long and how much money they would receive from [...]

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Phil Jenkins in First Things had an article on the forgotten Catholic novelist Harry Sylvester. I found Sylvester’s novel Dayspring. It is remarkable, and I am trying to see if it can be republished.

Sylvester wrote two political novels, Dearly Beloved and Moon Gaffney.  As Jenkins wrote,
Both these novels reflect Sylvester’s immersion in the political causes [...]

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My wife was telling her garden club friends about our fall trip to Rome. She told them how moving it was to be under the Arch of Titus, and to see the relief that shows the Menorah and the only altar of the true God being carried in a pagan triumph,

 
and to see the [...]

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Violence among Christians or among supposedly civilized states makes some wonder what the Prince of Peace is up to. How can the mass slaughters of the twentieth century, or of more Christian eras such as the Thirty Years War be reconciled with the peace that Christ brings? 
Information overload is part of the problem. Since 1945, [...]

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Gerald at The Cafeteria is Closed has made some comments on my book. He thinks that having some married clergy would help remedy the situation.I am less certain. Certainly celibacy creates a culture in which many or most clerics have sexual secrets: affairs with men or women, abuse of boys or children (rarely teenage girls, [...]

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The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York has the distinction of becoming a ruin before it is even finished. I hadn’t been there in decades, and I had not known there was a serious fire in 2001.
 
The metal scaffolding that surrounded the tower in this picture has come down in an admission [...]

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During our annual Christmas trip, we heard the choir of St. Thomas Episcopal Church (Fifth Ave) sing The Messiah, as arranged by Mozart.

  I had never heard it with treble voices before. The voices were delicate but clear. It was possible to hear all the lines of music distinctly. Because boys voices do not have [...]

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