Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

The decline of the Catholic Church in the United States and in Europe is apparent to anyone who looks at the statistics. The American statistics would be comparable to the far worse European ones if it were not for the influx of Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Filipino Catholics. Catholics of European descent are a vanishing race. 
The [...]

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1982

2009

Priests

882

482

Parishes

256

220

Seminarians

89

28

Catholic school students

38,531

30,212

Catholic population

506,000

476,189

Catholic marriages

4,427

2,112

 This is the table for the Cincinnati Inquirer that shows the state of the Catholic Church in 1982 when he became the archbishop of Cincinnati and as it is today when he leaves it. 
Ohio is a declining state, and the small shrinkage in parishes and number of Catholics and Catholic school [...]

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Commonweal has a discussion of the Vatican’s decision to place Pius XII and John Paul II on the path to canonization.
 
I share the concerns. Canonization is supposed to provide a role model for Catholics to follow, but how can you imitate even a good pope? For centuries almost all saints have been priests and religious, [...]

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The inimitable Bishop Milingo (APA):
 

Zambia’s controversial Roman Catholic Church archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, who has been defrocked (dismissed) from the church’s leadership after years of controversial actions, on Friday demanded that the Vatican should pay him his pension for the years he served the church.

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Maciel molested seminarians, fathered children, and stole Legion money to support them.  
 
The spiritual writings that he gave to the Legion to form its members turn out to have been written by someone else.
 
Catholic News  Agency reports:
 

In an effort to distance itself from the wrongdoings of its founder, the Legion of Christ has recently circulated an internal [...]

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Archbishop and Mrs. Milingo
Archbishop Milingo, after years of increasingly outrageous conduct, has been defrocked, according to Catholic Word News. 
Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo—the renegade African prelate who has launched a worldwide crusade for married priests, under the influence of the Korean sect figure Sun Myung Moon—has been defrocked, the Vatican announced on December 17.
Because of Milingo’s [...]

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Augustine had to deal with scandals in the North African Church and with bishops who refused to discipline evil clerics. Irish Catholics are suffering both from abusers and stony-hearted bishops. 

But that grief which arises in the hearts of the pious, who are persecuted by the manners of bad or false Christians, is profitable to the [...]

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The liturgical wars continue over the new proposed new translation.  
I have noticed that the current translation is marked by a preference for general language which obscures the biblical references. The Roman liturgy is a tissue of quotations and allusions to the Bible, and biblical language tends to be concrete rather than abstract: how beautiful are [...]

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This pays the bills

But his heart is here
Once we were in the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal while a Bar Mitzvah of spectacular bad taste was going on. Workmen carried 12 foot models of the Oscars through the lobby. While we were waiting to talk to the concierge, we overheard the conversation between the concierge and black [...]

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