Posted in September, 2008
In a letter sent to Congressional leaders on September 26, 2008, Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre, NY, chairman of the episcopal conference’s Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, urged a consideration of five key principles when considering how to bail out the nation’s failing economy. 
The first key Bishop Murphy encouraged was taking into account the “human and moral dimensions” of the crisis.
“Economic arrangements, structures and remedies should have as a fundamental purpose safeguarding human life and dignity,” he affirmed. Murphy said a “scandalous search for excessive economic rewards,” is an example of “an economic ethic that places economic gain above all other values.”
“This ignores the impact of economic decisions on the lives of real people as well as the ethical dimension of the choices we make and the moral responsibility we have for their effect on people,” Bishop Murphy wrote.
He called for responsibility and accountability.
“Clearly, effective measures are required which address and alter the behaviors, practices and misjudgements that led to this crisis…Those who directly contributed tothis crisis or have profited from it should not be rewarded or escape accountability for the harm they have done,” he said.
“There are human needs which find no place on the market,” Murphy stressed. “It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied.” In this regard, he called for a “renewal of instruments of monitoring and corection within economic institutions and the financial industry as well as effective public regulation and protection to the extent this may be clearly necessary.”
Bishop Murphy’s Diocese of Rockville Centre is based on Long Island. Many of his flock, myself included, work in New York or for people who commute there. Long Islanders have been particularly walloped by the Wall Street meltdown.
It’s stunning just how fast and how deep this collapse is, racing around the world to batter everyone’s economy.
This crisis has created a teachable moment for the bishops - what can happen in an ethics vacuum, and how we are all interconnected.
Any decline in the financial industry has ripple effects across the region, said Jesuit Fr. James Martin, associate editor of America magazine. Before his ordination, Fr. Martin worked in corporate finance with General Electric.
“It’s more a symptom of environments where people seem much more interested in making money than in making sensible decisions,” he said. Senior executives made “obscene amounts of money making bad investments,” he said, and there were no incentives not to continue.
“They were carried away by greed and that trumped rational responsibility. They should have known better.”
The notion on my daily to-do list reads: “D.O. 5:30.” That means, Divine Office, 5:30 p.m.
Most days I say the Divine Office at 5:30. I chose this as my regular time to adhere to every day. 
If I’m working at home, I shut down the computer and say the evening office (Vespers) sitting in the living room. If I spent the day in the office in New York, I read the Divine Office on the train on the way home. I have to say I haven’t gotten any weird looks, if anything, mild interest, but I am not concentrating on the reactions of people around me, but savoring each line I read.
The origin of the Divine Office goes back to the time of St. Peter, when religious Jews prayed at fixed times every day. “Seven times a day I have given praise to thee, for the judgements of thy justice.” Psalm 119:164.
The seven offices were orginally established by St. Benedict for his monks. Benedict was born in about 480 A.D. His Rule for Monasteries can to be the one which was most widely kept throughout Christendom for several centuries after his death in 547.
Like many people who pray–or try to pray–the Liturgy of the Hours, I get a little lost without a bunch of patient monks or nuns nearby to follow or learn from. I don’t get discouraged, I just do my best.
I have considered visisting the St. Thomas More House of Prayer to learn from people whose mission it is to promote the Liturgy of the Hours. I think it would also be wonderful to pray the Office with other people, and hope to do this at some point in the coming year.
Both on retreat and vacation in Tucson, Arizona I participated in the Vespers service at the monastery of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. It was always the highlight of my stay.
I know this way of prayer is for me. It calms me down, and helps me to be kinder to myself and to others. I don’t understand many things, and certainly don’t approve of all the sexist language, but as Benedict instructs, “Listen and attend with the ear of your heart.” I try.
But, I still need help, because I can’t pick up the sequence correctly. I have tried various online sources, but they didn’t work for me.
This morning, though, I may have found the guide I need: The Divine Office for Dodos (Devout, Obedient Disciples of Our Savior): A Step-by-Step Guide to Praying the Liturgy of the Hours by Madeline Pecora Nugent.
A good background to the Divine Office can be found here.
Read about The Divine Office for Dodos here. 
Miami Archbishop John C. Favalora snuffed out an attempt by the Alliance Defense Fund, a consortium of conservative Christian groups, to encourage pastors in his diocese ”to join their Pulpit Freedom Initiative by preaching a sermon ‘that addresses the candidates for government office in light of the truth of Scripture.’”
Issued on September 12 in the form of a letter, Archbishop Favalora’s statement to his flock is titled, Why we don’t take sides on candidates. His words are measured and calm.
Favalora said the group, which advocates for what it terms “Christian legal issues,” is attempting to challenge the Internal Revenue Services’s rules restricting non-profit organizations from advocating for particular political parties or candidates.
Favalora opined that scriptural truth “is not that easy to attain. What is more “true” in terms of scripture: The Old Testament passage that says ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ or Jesus’ admonition to ‘turn the other cheek’?”
He added that the Catholic church not only values Scripture, but also “2,000 years of oral and written tradition.”
He said the church cannot be compared to a “party boss” and will not tell people how to vote.
“When church leaders speak on issues such as immigration, poverty, health care, abortion, war or embryonic stem cell research, we are not telling people how to vote. We are reminding them of the moral teachings that should inform their lives, and as a result, their votes,” he wrote.
Favalora said the church “will speak in support of legislation that we consider to be morally sound and beneficial to the whole community” regardless of party or candidate. “That is our duty as teachers and successors of the apostles.” 
“Your duty as Catholics,” Favalora wrote, “is to listen to those teachings before making rational, informed, conscientious decisions regarding whom or what to vote for.”
Tony Alamo is the leader of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries in Fouke, Arkansas. The organization’s headquarters were raided by the FBI after a two-year long investigation into child pornography. Although Alamo has denied the allegations, he has been quoted as saying that puberty is the age of consent for girls.
Alamo, an evangelical preacher, built a business empire from street ministry recipients and their children, many of whom were addicted to drugs and had no where else to go.
In a phone call to The Associated Press from a friend’s house in the Los Angeles area, Alamo denied any involvement in pornography or child abuse:
“We don’t go into pornography; nobody in the church is into that,” said Alamo, 73. “Where do these allegations stem from? The anti-Christ government. The Catholics don’t like me because I have cut their congregation in half. They hate true Christianity.”
During an April 2008 radio broadcast, Alamo proclaimed that the government had no right to take 10-year-old wives away from their rightful “husbands”: “What I’m doing is fighting for these people that they, the ungodly beast, is throwing into prison for marrying someone 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11—10, if they’ve reached puberty.”
In recent broadcasts, Alamo waxed poetic about menstruation: “The Bible is filled with stories where God commanded young women to get married. When they start their periods, they are women, according to God’s word. They should be able to be married at 13, 14, 15 years old, and in cases if they’ve menstruated already, 12 years old.”
He also contends that Mary was as young as six at the time she conceived Jesus, and sarcastically asks if God could be considered a pedophile: “You want to take the Almighty God to jail, because He wanted the Son of God to be born of a young virgin? But you, Satan, you wicked people in the Vatican, and all the rest of you want people—men—to be married to old bags! You want [girls] to wait until they’re 18 years old, and them having had sex with possibly up to 100 men!”
While Alamo publicly says he’s not a polygamist, and challenges outsiders to “find marriage licenses about me being married to anybody.” Ex-members say he has unofficially “married” at least eight young girls and many others live in his house.
Tony Alamo was born Bernie LaZar Hoffman in Missouri to Romanian-Jewish parents in 1934. In the early 1960s he moved to Los Angeles, where he met aspiring actress Susan Lipowitz, a Jewish convert to evanglical Christianity. They married in a 1966 Las Vegas ceremony, and legally changed their names to Tony and Susan Alamo. Tony wanted to break into singing and managing bands, and thought an Italian-sounding last name would be more helpful to his career than a Jewish one.
Alamo and his wife were active as street preachers along Hollywood’s Sunset Strip in the ’60s. They also manufactured and sold a line of “Tony Alamo” brand sequined demim jackets, a business that would eventually land Tony in jail for tax evasion. The women and girls the Alamos recruited from their street ministry did the sewing as “volunteers.” 
These days, Alamo doesn’t seem likely to get additional young female friends.
At a recent meeting in New York, the few locals who seemed to be recent recruits were down-and-out men, including a former Nation of Islam member and two immigrant workers speaking Spanish. “You can be saved over the phone if you want,” one woman suggested, giving out the 1-800 prayer line for the ministry, when one newcomer was too shy to go up to the “altar” to be reborn.
“They’re full of conspiracy theories about Waco and Jim Jones and stuff, and they hate, I mean hate, the Catholic Church,” offers one man, a diabetic on an irregular income. “They can be a little pushy about the whole saving-your-soul thing. But they do have a really nice salad bar.” 
Baseball stadiums are like cathedrals.
Storied, full of memorable events, they are also the scene of private moments of anguish and fierce joy. The interiors–the smells, the sounds, the surroundings–are immediately recognizable and familiar. You have your favorite place to sit. 
There are as many people praying, beseeching, pleading, bargaining, smugly satisfied or silently willing a miracle as you’d find in any pew. Most of all, it is a place of community–solidarity and belonging.
One of the grandest baseball cathedrals of all–Yankee Stadium–played its last game this past Sunday. A number of New York City celebrities, some Yankee fans, some not, were asked to comment on its closing.
Pete Hamill, an author and Brooklyn Dodgers fan, had this to say:
First visit: “In 1948. When Babe Ruth died. I was 13 and like all good Brooklynites, I hated the Yankees. My younger brother Tom and I traveled all the way to El Bronx, where the Babe was being waked in the Rotunda. We had a nearly theological debate before going, since it was like visiting another church. An act of betrayal. Almost as bad as turning Episcopalian.” 
“But we convinced ourselves that since the Babe had been with the Dodgers as a coach for a season in the 1930s, we would mourn Babe the Dodger. And so we did. We kept our purity by saying a prayer at the coffin, glancing into the green patch of th imperious park, and refusing to enter.”
“The Jesuits later explained to me that I was exhibiting what purists called ‘an elastic conscience.’”
Years ago, at the height of the Chef Paul Prudhomme cooking craze, Lori and I took a long weekend trip to New Orleans to go to K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen and sightsee. Walking around town, especially at night, we thought New Orleans was the spookiest, most haunted place we had ever been in. We were warned not to go to Marie Laveau’s tomb…
If New Orleans is covered in the miasma of the occult, it is layered with Catholicism. One isn’t separate from the other. Like the city mist it envelopes you…
Two of New Orleans’ most famous daughters of the occult were devout Catholics: Marie Laveau and Ann Rice.
Marie Laveau, a renowned Voodoo priestess, went to Mass every day, was renowned for her charity and generosity, and was laid to rest with the blessing of the Church. She was famous in her lifetime as the “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans. 
Ann Rice has written a series of novels on vampires, witches, demons and humans who desire them. Her explorations of good and evil, love and alienation, darkness and light–certainly have their roots in her religious upbringing. 
Is it the “other worldliness” of Catholicsm that makes the occult so familiar; or it is the ritual, the symbols, and sexual allure?
“No, I don’t want to pretend that being an openly gay Catholic is something easy or obvious. It isn’t.
You may have faced hatred and discrimination in your own country, from family members, at school, at the hands of legislators eager for cheap votes, through shrieking newspaper headlines that sear your soul, and in the glare of which you are speechless in your own defense. As you’ve probably noticed that at the very best, the Church which calls itself and is, your Holy Mother has kept silent about the hatred and the fear. While too often its spokesmen will have lowered themselves to the level of second-rate politicians, lending voice to hate while claiming they are standing up for love. The very fact that, through and in the midst of, and despite, all these hateful voices, you should have heard the voice of the Shepherd calling you into being of his flock is already a miracle far greater than you know, preparing you for a work more subtle and delicate than those voices could conceive.”
Read all of James Allison’s letter here. 
With the beatification and probable canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman, the church is being handed an opportunity to stand behind their statements about gay people–about being loved, and welcomed, and entitled to human dignity and all that. The church states it welcomes homosexuals to be full participating members as long as they are chaste and celibate.
Cardinal Newman could be a gay saint (beautiful lips, soulful eyes) - one that followed their rules to the letter and never engaged (as far as can be surmised) in any sexual relations with men. He was a vowed virgin when it came to women. 
He lived for many years with another priest - Fr. Ambrose St. John - and when he died Newman was clear he wished to be buried in the same grave.
How many football and hunting buddies ask to be buried in the same grave? Not many - so it’s not some male bonding thing.
So, why doesn’t the church claim him as a gay Catholic? Why don’t they promote him as our role model? John Newman would be a lot more famous, glamorous, and viable role model than the sad, depressing, guilty and ashamed members of Courage.
Here’s the reason: because homosexuals need to keep it secret. The church does not welcome any *out * homosexuals, whether we are celibate or sexually active. You can be a gay Catholic–just have the grace and good taste to keep it to yourself.
Last month, the Vatican announced plans to move Newman’s remains from his small, shared gravesite to a specially built sarcophagus in the Oratory Church of Birmingham, where, officials say, they will be more accessible for veneration by the faithful.
But British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell sees ulterior motives in exhuming the Cardinal: “embarrassment” because of his relationship with Fr. St. John. 
“They were inseparable, they lived together for half a century, effectively like husband and wife,” says Tatchell. “There were repeated allegations during (Newman’s) lifetime about his circle of homosexual friends. It was uncertain whether or not their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person’s sexual orientation.”
Tatchell says the two men’s bond, and Newman’s abiding wish to have his final resting place next to St. John’s, make separating their remains “an act of dishonesty and betrayals by homophobes in the Vatican.”
In a 1990 address marking a century since Newman’s death, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke about the profound impact Newman’s views had on young German seminarians in the wake of the Nazi regime. “For us at the time, Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all into its sway,” Ratzinger said. “We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfillment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual.”
Mainline christian denominations–Catholics and Protestants alike–are bitterly divided over the question of homosexuality. But what does the New Testament really say about this controversial issue? Most people assume the New Testament expresses strong opposition to homosexuality. 
William O. Walker, Jr., a member of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, and professor emeritus of religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, developed six propositions that, considered together, lead to the conclusion the New Testament does not provide any direct guidance for understanding and making judgements about homosexuality in the modern world.
Proposition 1: Strictly speaking, the New Testament says nothing at all about homosexuality. The paucity of references to homosexuality in the New Testament suggests that it was not a matter of major concern either for Jesus or for the early Christian movement.
Proposition 2: At most, there are only three passages in the entire New Testament that refer to what we today would call homosexual activity.
Proposition 3: Two of the three passages that possibly refer to homosexuality are simply more-or-less miscellaneous cataloges of behaviors that are regarded as unacceptable, with no particular emphasis placed on any individual item in the list.
Proposition 4: It may well be that the two lists of unacceptable behaviors - 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:8-11 do not refer to homosexuality at all.
Proposition 5: Even if 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:8-11 do refer to homosexuality, what they likely have in mind is not homosexuality per se but rather one particular form of homosexuality that was regarded as especially exploitive and degrading.
Proposition 6: The one passage in the New Testament that almost certainly does refer to homosexuality is based on some highly debatable presuppositions about its nature and causes.
The Catholic group, Informed Conscience, also presents homosexuality and the New Testament in depth.
In her new book, Being Catholic Now, Kerry Kennedy interviewed famous Catholics from far left to far right; including Susan Saradon, Martin Sheen, Bill O’Reilly, speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, Gabriel Byrne, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Maher. “I was struck by their raw honesty,” Kennedy said. 
She cried when Byrne told her his story about being abused by a priest as a boy, and spotting the abuser at a football game decades later. “I called him and asked if he remembered me,” said the actor. “He said,”No’– He didn’t make the connection, but I, of course, did.” Byrne blames the vows of celibacy, “which I regard as a sin against human life.”
Susan Saradon strikes a lighter note with a story of praying with rosary beads at age seven and not knowing they were glow in the dark. “I looked down and they were glowing and I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m about to have a vision! The Blessed Virgin is about to come in the door!”
Church officials have not yet seen the book, but a spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said in response to a description of the book, “A lot of Catholics are having lovers’ quarrels with the church.”
The Deacon’s Bench has a good post on this story.
Kerry Kennedy will discuss the book during a program at the Museum of the City of New York on Wednesday, October 22nd at 6:30 pm. 
