Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Andrew Sullivan links to a feline blog by Chris Dierkes. Dierkes studied for the Jesuits before becoming an Anglican. Commenting on Benedict’s overture to Anglicans, Dierkes has this to say:

And, if personal experience and lifelong immersion in a sub-culture is any form of persuasive evidence, I can tell you that conservative Anglo-Catholicism–at the clerical [...]

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I am happy to report that Father Fessio acted on my advice and has republished Daypring, a novel by Harry Sylvester about the encounter of a secular Easterner with the Penitentes of New Mexico. 
In December 2007 I commented on the original edition. 
Every time I visit the Southwest something extraordinary happens – I try not to [...]

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Although the Nazis did harvest the gold from Holocaust victims’ teeth, I believe the stories of lampshades made from human skin were Allied propaganda (not that such exaggerations were necessary – reality was bad enough). 
However the Nazi “waste not, want not” philosophy is being applied to aborted children: 
Aborted Fetal Material Used in Anti-Wrinkle Creams

 Children of [...]

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The Pope’s decision to allow the setting up of an ordinariate for Anglicans who wish to become Catholic is a generous experiment. It would not be a separate “church” like the Eastern Churches, which are self-governing churches of apostolic origin in communion with Rome. As far as I kow, no pope has ever claimed the [...]

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Roman Polanski promised and crossed his heart and hoped to die that he would not leave Switzerland if he were let out of jail. He would wait patiently to see whether he would be extradited to the U.S. where he would be put in prison in uncomfortable circumstances. He would under no circumstances consider crossing [...]

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Nightmares are a hazard of those who investigate child abuse, and one of the most potent sources of the nightmares is the explicit sacrilege that is sometimes, perhaps often, involved in the abuse. Some abusive priests have dressed boys as Jesus and then assaulted them.
 
Bishop Lahey not only had child porn on his computer (bad [...]

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Patrick Welsh, who teaches in the Washington D.C, school system, has diagnosed the problem of poor academic achievement among black students: Making the Grade Isn’t about Race. It’s About Parents.

“Why don’t you guys study like the kids from Africa?”
In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class [...]

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Bishop R. Nickless of Sioux City has written a letter to his diocese: Ecclesia Semper Reformanda.
 
In it he denounces the false method of interpreting the Second Vatican Council: 

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the [...]

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Deo volente, I will do the Camino de Santiago, or at least as much of it as an aging body will take, in the fall of 2010. 
In preparation I have been reading accounts of other pelegrinos, some likely, like Father Kevin Codd , the rector of the American seminary at Louvain (To the Field of [...]

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A comment below raises the excellent question as to how the abusers can live with themselves.  How can they lead outward lives of piety and inwardly be sacrilegious criminals. 
Their spiritual ancestors the Pharisees had a similar ability to impress men by outward shows of piety but inwardly were full of rapine and evil: they were [...]

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Anti-Semitism has the ability to flourish in the absence of Jews. Reality had never troubled anti-Semites. I remember reading about the world system of a primitive tribe in Central America. Their mental map placed themselves (naturally) at the center, then neighboring tribes, then Spaniards, then Americans and in the outermost fringes and darkness witches and Jews (Not that [...]

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In Honduras it is not just leftists (I will post that when my computer lets me) who like to blame the Jews for everything. After American papers starting in 2002 printed stories about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga realized who was behind these attacks (guess):
     “It certainly makes me [...]

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My computer is under some sort of attack

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The fully justified anger about Bishop Lahey should not blind us to the failings in other forms of Christianity. There have been crimes and cover-ups in other denominations. 
Abuse in independent churches is almost impossible to track. Even denominations like the Southern Baptists have a polity that makes it impossible to screen out abusers. 
When hierarchical churches have [...]

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