“We have to keep the morals and have the regular families and bring up children according to God’s law,” said Rev. Miroslaw Frankowski, pastor of St. Florian Catholic Church. “Keep it the way it was from the beginning.”

The Rev. Bogdan Milosz, pastor of Our Lady Queen of Apostles Catholic Church is also against the ordinance.

In a joint written statement, the priests said, “the proposed ordinance does not provide new protection for anyone in Hamtramck, except that it gives new rights that would protect homosexual and lesbian behavior, expression and attire.”

Supporters have said the ordinance simply ensures all residents are protected under the law and demonstrates compassionate governance.

It states that in the “City of Hamtramck that no person be denied the equal protection of the laws; nor shall any person be denied the enjoyment of his or her civil or political rights or be discriminated against because of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, height, weight, condition of pregancy, marital status, physical or mental limitation, source of income, family responsibilities or status, educational association, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or handicap.”

Simply stated, it is not lawful in Hamtramck to discriminate against any person because they’re gay, or because you think they might be.

The Hamtramck City Council passed the ordinance in June, but opponents gathered enough signatures to place it on the November 4th ballot in hopes of repealing it.

The ordinance prohibits discrimination in housing, employment and city contracting by several groups, but its inclusion of gays and transgendered people stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy in several of the Polish parishes.

“We feel that this proposal goes against the rights of straight people,” the Rev. Andrew Wesley, pastor of St. Ladislaus Catholic Church stated.

Wesley has written about the issue in the parish bulletin, and spoke with members after Mass. “Nobody’s under any obligation to vote one way or another.”

A group Fr. Wesley co-founded - Hamtramck Citizens Voting No to “Special Rights” Discrimination - will host a rally on October 12 at the Knights of Columbus Hall.

The diplomat in question is Jean-Loup Kuhn-Delforge, former ambassador to Bulgaria, head of the Consular Affairs Directorate, and an outspoken critic of the Iraq war.

According to the Italian daily La Repubblica, not only is Kuhn-Delforge out, he is “stably united with an official companion.”

I’m not *suprised* the Vatican said no.  I am also not surprised the French couldn’t resist giving the Vatican at little tweak I hope it was not at Mr. Kuhn-Delforge’s expense…

Jean-Loup Kuhn-Delforge is ostensibly qualified for this diplomatic post.  He is a cultural if not practicing Catholic. Why did the Holy See reject his appointment?  Because he’s out; or because he’s in a committed relationship with a man? Either one would probably have gotten him blackballed.

Compare his situation to the pomp accused sex abuser Fr. Marcial Marciel, founder of the Legionaires of Christ, was accustomed to receive in Rome! 

I guess the moral of the story is - be in the closet, and stick to forcing yourself on boys and young men. That’s ok.  But don’t walk into a diplomatic function with a man on your arm—if you’re a man. That presents a moral infraction the Church cannot possibly accept.

The Rev. Ron Johnson told worshippers in Crown Point, Indiana that the Democratic candidate’s position on abortion and gay partnerships are in “direct opposition to God’s truth as He has revealed it in the scriptures.”

Another protester, the Rev. Fran Pultro, also shrugged off federal laws restricting his role in partisan politics by telling 45 people at the Calvary Chapel in Philadelphia that John McCain “is the only candidate I believe a Christian can vote for.” 

“Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” was a day of protest organized by the Alliance Defense Fund, a consortium of Christian lawyers that fight for ultra conservative religious and social causes.

The ADF is hoping a crackdown by the IRS on participating preachers will spark a court fight over the tax law prohibiting political endorsements from the pulpit. They are pushing to “restore” pastors’ rights “to speak Biblical truth from the pulpit.”

The protest drew a paltry amount of even rabid social conservatives–only 33 Protestant ministers nationwide participated, and most of those from small or tiny evangelical congregations.

The ADF is known for publishing tracts like The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.

Mr. Pultro and the other ministers focused on the candidates’ positions on gay marriage and abortion, although the candidates and much of the nation and focused on the financial crisis and economic worries.

The Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United said the of the Sunday protest: “They act like this is a massive act of civil disobedience, but this is not like sitting at a lunch counter. This is trying to change the law to give certain conservative churches even more political clout.”

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.”

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. 

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.”

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.”

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.’”

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?

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.