David F. Pierre: Kicking the Dead and Collecting Cash?
. . . Shortly after the announcement of the Boston settlement, hundreds of parishioners from St. Brendan’s Parish in Dorchester, Massachusetts, gathered for a Mass in memory of the beloved Rev. Lane. A 2007 obituary recounted a priest who touched countless lives during nearly four decades in ministry.As the Boston Globe reported, the April 19 Mass was a “quiet, intensely felt service,” but there was an underlying anger among the gathering. At the end of the Mass, a longtime parishioner and friend of Rev. Lane, apparently unable to contain himself, rose and exclaimed, “I don’t care what anybody says. Father Lane never abused a child.’’ With those words, the gathering broke into a thundering and cathartic applause that lasted over a minute. . . .
Fr. James Valladares: May Truth and Justice Prevail!
. . . With this in view, I am pleased to present Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast – Procedural Justice for Priests, Diocesan and Religious. It has truly been a labour of love and is the end result of intensive research, hours of candid conversations with scores of well-informed and honest persons, innumerable sessions of ardent prayer and a resolute determination that priests and religious will be accorded the procedural justice to which they are legitimately due as is every other human being. May truth and justice prevail! . . .
Msgr. Michael: The Red Blood of the Martyr St Thomas Becket and Father Gordon MacRae
. . . I am just an ordinary priest, I work in the missions (have been in “the missions” for nearly 20 years) and I am contemplating a change of course in my life…toward, perhaps, a monastic vocation. Please make a little prayer for this poor priest from the plains of Canada, who, after working in the mountains of Italy (whilst studying Canon Law), left Rome for a missionary life in the Islands. I am humbled that Fr. Gordon asked me to write a guest post. . . .
Fr. George David Byers: When Jesus Was in Prison
. . . Many TSW readers know of Anna Katharina Emmerick, who died in 1824, and was beatified on 3 October, 2004, by Blessed John Paul II, only some months after the screening of The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson partially based that film on The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, dictated by Anna Katharina to Clemens Brentano, whose secretarial skills seem to have left something to be desired. Nevertheless, The Holy See praises her accounts. She speaks of the Lord’s imprisonment. Although we don’t read of this in the Gospels, there is a space of time that is entirely conspicuous for its lack of description, the hours between the initial questioning and mocking of Jesus that first Holy Thursday evening and the following morning. It is a period of time in which, all things being equal, anybody in Jesus’ position would have been imprisoned for safe keeping until the next day. . . .
Empty Chairs at Empty Tables
. . . And I was. In the dream, my anxiety turned to desperation as I walked into the retreat center hoping beyond hope to see Father Moe sitting there waiting for me. Instead, what I found was a room full of empty chairs at empty tables in a place where there had been no signs of life for many years. Dust and cobwebs covered everything, and death was all around me. I came face to face with the stark reality that the life I knew before prison is gone. There was no place for me anywhere. I didn't understand what Father Moe had done. I may never understand it. . . .
At the Twilight's Last Gleaming: The Fate of Religion in America
. . . It's time for a revolution, and it should be a revolution of real faith in a modern world that values it not. It isn't going to be easy. But before we all sign up for remedial CCD classes, the bad news was offset just a bit by the reality that the United States as a whole flunked the test, and Catholics came out just three percentage points behind the national score of 50% - a solid "F." Other Christian denominations fared just slightly better than Catholics - but still flunked. Jews and Mormons both passed, though just barely, with scores slightly under the atheists. Weighing everything, my own conclusion is that the problem with religion in America isn't religion - it's America. Catholics should remember the value of being counter-cultural. . . .
These Stone Walls: More Loose Ends and Dangling Participles
. . . Somehow, at some point when I wasn’t looking, These Stone Walls became noticed, and it seemed to happen suddenly. In the last few weeks, some friends who keep track of such things have told me something astonishing. TSW is showing up on the first page in a number of Google searches. As a prisoner with zero access to the Internet, I can be forgiven for not having noticed. Google didn’t even exist when I was sent to prison, and the Internet was in its virtual toddlerhood. . . .